Beg Me

by Lisa Lawrence

  “It’s fascinating stuff,” he said defensively. “Paris Commune and revolutionaries with early English Socialism and—all right, all right, don’t look like that, I know you don’t give a toss. Here—”

  He dug into his leather satchel and handed me the file on the murder of Anna’s boyfriend. There were grisly photos of the crime scene. Craig Padmore had been shot dead in his own apartment in Brixton, two bullets to his head.

  “Nine-millimeter Glock,” I whispered.

  I knew who was at the other end of that gun, but that got me nowhere. Padmore’s murder had happened only four nights ago. Call it a couple of nights for our mystery assassin, Mr. Bad Suit, to reach Bangkok, get his bearings, and hunt down Lee, and it was clear someone was moving things fast. I told Carl he should put in a call to the Bangkok police.

  “Any leads on why Padmore?”

  “Not a one. As far as everyone is concerned, Craig Padmore was a nice guy, no outstanding debts, paid his credit cards every month on the same date, cranked up his stereo once in a blue moon. He was an accountant. Went to New York this summer on a contract with one of those big health-care providers the Americans have. Most of the time he did accounting work for a dental surgeon in Brixton. How do you make enemies out of that?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I hate going to the dentist,” I said.

  I turned to a blow-up shot of the body. Written in blue ink on Padmore’s arm was a strange little cartoon. “Is that what I think it is?” And Carl nodded. It was a ballpoint-pen sketch of a chessboard bishop.

  “What’s the significance? Was Padmore a chess freak?”

  “Not that we know of. There were no board games found in his apartment. We know our killer drew it, because the strokes show right-handedness. You can see it’s on Padmore’s right arm so it was impossible for him to do it himself. Cleanness of the line impressions and skin samples pretty much confirm it was drawn at time of death.”

  “Weird,” I mumbled.

  Padmore was killed execution style, with a symbol obviously intended as a message. But if he was a clean, upstanding citizen, who was it a message for?

  Stranger still when you considered that Anna had no such drawing on her body, just the gang tattoo. Another red herring?

  “What’s your interest in Padmore?” asked Carl. “And how do you know his killer’s dead in Bangkok?”

  I thought I could charm my way out. “Carl, do you really want to know this stuff?”

  It was no sale. I should have known better.

  “You never cease to amaze me, Teresa. You can be time zones away and still wind up in my case load. Who’s your client this time?”

  “Ah Jo Lee.”

  He didn’t reply for a second, frowning at me.

  “You’re frowning at me,” I said.

  “That was too easy.”

  “He’s in Thailand—wants me to investigate the murder of his sister in America. Cloy Hen Lee. Anna.”

  He stared at me. “And Anna Lee was Craig Padmore’s ex-girlfriend. Oh, that’s bloody marvelous. That’s just…Christ, Teresa!” He started rubbing his eyes, still swearing behind his hands as I went through a quick summary of the facts I knew and showed him the pics of Anna and clips about her death from news sites. He looked and went back to covering his face in his hands wearily. “Shit, shit, shit, shit…”

  Because usually when I was involved, folks with peerages or at least a lot of money got into compromising sexual scandals, intelligence agencies wound up playing bang-bang in the West End, and there were plenty of unanswered questions left that made things untidy.

  “Carl, I need to see Padmore’s apartment.”

  “No. It’s a crime scene, Teresa.”

  “Carl—”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Carl, there’s an excellent study of correspondence between the fighters of the Paris Commune and—Well, I guess you wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Teresa…”

  “You know they have some of the original letters kept in the archives at—but, oh, that’s right, you can’t help me.”

  “Teresa.”

  Padmore had kept his apartment in Brixton neat and tidy. No dust on the TV, no ashes in the fireplace. Even the fridge was nice and clean. He had been in his mid-twenties; his CD rack was full of the latest hip-hop album releases, and a stack of PlayStation games sat on a bookshelf next to a small but impressive collection of volumes about Trinidad and West Indian history. The secrets we keep so very private…You would never think this guy was into a BDSM cult. Why would you? Not like there was any paraphernalia lying around or even hidden in a bottom drawer. And if he ever had any, perhaps he chucked it all after suffering the guilt that he was the one who introduced Anna to the group, who had helped start her spiral down.

  According to Carl, Padmore’s murderer had made no attempt to even disguise the killing with a fake struggle or burglary. The assassin had somehow talked his way in and shot the poor guy down then and there.

  But that didn’t mean things hadn’t been removed. Craig Padmore’s e-mails had all been efficiently erased, said Carl. The killer had gone through his desk drawers—this was obvious because they had been carefully wiped down. But since the Met hadn’t a clue as to what would even prompt someone to want to kill Padmore, they couldn’t speculate on what was taken.

  “Boot up the computer,” I suggested.

  Carl shrugged. “Don’t know what that’ll get you. Our blokes had a pretty thorough go.”

  “I know, I know. But you were working blind. Just humor me, please?”

  While we waited for the hard drive to go through all its paces and the annoying Microsoft Windows to finish its entrance on the screen, I looked around, bored.

  “Carl?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You notice a couple of strange things?”

  “Such as?”

  Padmore naturally had photos of what looked to be friends and family up on the walls of his living room—some alone, some two-or three-shots arranged in a frame. I stood close and discovered that a few were digital prints while others were older, made from conventional camera negatives.

  What first caught my eye was that one pic—a shot of Craig Padmore with what seemed to be his mother and brothers—had fallen out of place and sat at the bottom of the glass. I pulled it down and removed the backing.

  “Check it out,” I told Carl. “The glue’s recent, but our killer didn’t put enough of it on for the picture to stick to the backing.”

  Carl understood. “The original that was there was a threat somehow.” He went over to the computer and clicked the mouse on a desktop folder labeled Photos. “He printed out a replacement. But we can’t be sure what was there in the first place.”

  “Anna.”

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t think so. This is her, right? There are plenty of shots of this girl in the folder. He could have wiped them all. You break up with a girl, and you naturally take her photos down and move ’em off your desktop. No one would suspect a thing.”

  “Jeez, Carl, don’t you have one sentimental bone in your body?”

  He laughed at me and answered, “I’m married, Teresa. First rule is, you are not allowed any photos of past girlfriends.” He adopted an angry falsetto. “Why do you keep these? Why do you want them? Don’t you love me—”

  “I get the idea,” I said.

  He pulled up each and every photo Craig Padmore had kept of his ex-girlfriend. There were shots of her in Bangkok, shots of her with Craig, a few shots of Anna in what appeared to be New York. Maybe the killer had erased the incriminating picture, but as Carl had asked, why not erase them all?

  I had a theory. The logic might have been that trying to erase Anna from Craig’s life completely would have had the opposite effect—calling attention to her importance. Anna had been his girlfriend long enough that neighbors here, friends and family, would remember her. No, something else had been in the photo with her.

  But if
it had been erased from the hard drive…We might never know.

  I noticed a book left open on Padmore’s coffee table. It was used, the pages slightly yellow with age. “Look at this, Carl.”

  He shrugged. “So what?”

  “Carl, think about where you are,” I said. “Look at the other books on his shelf. You’re in the house of a West Indian male. All those books over there are about Trinidad, Jamaica, and so on. Look at his album collection. You’re a scholar, Carl, but you said yourself, this guy crunched numbers for a living. So what is he doing with this?”

  I listened to Carl softly whisper the words of the title. “…Indochine.” It was an obscure volume about the history of the Vietnam War.

  “The killer didn’t take it because the killer couldn’t read French,” I argued. “He didn’t know it was significant.”

  “Teresa! Who says it’s significant? You don’t know what the guy could be reading it for. Come on, I thought you said his ex-girlfriend was Thai—”

  “Chinese. Her brother lives in Thailand.”

  “Whatever, mate. You said they used a Vietnamese gang motto written in Thai for her tattoo, right? That’s the most you’ve got for a connection. To a history book?” He handed the book back to me. “You’re reaching, love.”

  I flipped through the book, looked at the front for an inscription. There was none. But there was a stamp from the used bookstore, a place called Bindings, and a receipt dated weeks ago.

  “He didn’t buy this here,” I pointed out. “This was purchased in New York City.”

  “Again: so what?”

  “Hear me out, hear me out,” I said quickly, and I sat down at the computer and launched the browser. Luckily the cable company hadn’t disconnected Craig Padmore’s Internet yet.

  Hooray. There was a website for the Bindings bookshop in NYC, Crown Heights to be specific.

  “What do you think you’re going to find?” asked Carl.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  And I didn’t. But London is a city of bookshops. You can get practically anything here—you certainly don’t need to go across the pond unless you’re after something very obscure. And if Craig Padmore could read French, couldn’t he have got this book from dealers in Paris? A hint was the fact that Bindings specializes in African and Afro-Caribbean history, African-American and Third World literature, African novels in Heinemann paperback editions. Not the place you first think of for a French history of the Vietnam War. And believe me, that volume didn’t look like an impulse buy.

  Peculiar, yes, but I still didn’t know what Craig Padmore was after.

  It was your usual bookseller’s Web page: new releases, promotions for small-press stuff, sales on selected items, where to find us. Then I spotted it. I selected the photo on the Web page, copied it, and then zoomed in for a closer view.

  “What do you see?” I asked Carl.

  “Bookshelves.”

  I minimized the shot and left the desktop with all the photos of Anna Lee he had opened a couple of minutes ago.

  “Sharp eyes!” he said, astonished.

  Because when I clicked and maximized one shot of Anna, we could both clearly see the familiar bookshelves behind her. The books on one shelf looked like they hadn’t even changed order.

  She had been there.

  And the killer didn’t want the police to know that. But he hadn’t paid enough attention—or maybe any attention at all—to the photos in the computer folder. It must not have occurred to him that it was a digital print.

  Lack of attention to details. Or plain sloppiness. It had made the would-be assassin fail in Bangkok and forced him to kill himself.

  He was no professional. Professionals don’t make those kinds of stupid mistakes, and no professional would have needed a regular mob punk for a backup partner. Mr. Bad Suit—whoever he would turn out to be when Interpol identified him—had murdered Padmore, had perhaps murdered Anna, and had tried to kill us. All to please someone else. He had committed his crimes out of a perverted sense of duty.

  “So this bookshop is a front for something,” said Carl. “Maybe.” I shut down the computer, and we both moved to leave.

  Carl paused at the threshold, wearing this peculiar look of euphoric satisfaction. I didn’t like it. It was as if he was about to laugh at me.

  “Right, then. Very good.”

  “What is it?” I asked as we hit the street.

  “I just realized you’re not my headache.” He was positively beaming at me. “You’ll be off to America to dig into all this, right? You’ll be their problem, and I’ll be free! Free! It’s wonderful. Try not to cause a diplomatic incident.”

  “That’s not very nice,” I said. “And there’s still Craig Padmore’s murder.”

  “Planned, no doubt, by the same fellows shaking things up in Bangkok. We can check the latent prints and the wound patterns against what turned up in Asia. You said yourself—the guy who probably did it offed himself right in front of you.”

  “True.”

  “Okay, then, safe flight and have a wonderful time!” he said cheerfully.

  “Carl—”

  “Teresa, we have no leads. I was told to move on only yesterday, and you’ve just provided us with information making it an international case. Duly noted. Bravo! It’s great out in America—you’ll love it there. Dozens and dozens of law-enforcement agencies you can drive crazy with interfering, compromising evidence, talking to witnesses out of turn—oh, the havoc you can cause! Think of it, love. Let me give you the number of the British Consulate in New York. Now, they’re on Third Avenue, and when you get yourself arrested, as you most assuredly will, hopefully it will be at the nearest precinct to them and be more convenient when they bail you—”

  “Carl. You’re mean.”

  “Teresa. You are a walking war zone.”

  “You going to tell your lovely wife to call me before I fly out?”

  “Yes, and she says thank you for the silk. She’s using it for cushions.”

  I turned to head for the Tube station. Carl called me back.

  “Teresa. Be careful.”

  I tried to keep things light. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Teresa, we never talked about it,” he said with a soft note of apology in his voice. “That whole ‘strip poker’ thing…I figured it was none of my business whatever you had to do. But these people. This BDSM cult you’re talking about? They tie people up, Teresa. They like hurting people and getting hurt.”

  “I don’t,” I said flatly.

  “Fine, but the way this stuff is always talked about, lots of people let themselves get tied up. They…they must know a fair deal about how to mess with someone’s head.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, and waved good-bye.

  “Teresa?”

  I turned back.

  “When you’re done with that Vietnam book, will you drop it off for me at Met headquarters? I’ll need it back before you fly out. It’s evidence.”

  Shit. Must have seen me slip it into my handbag.

  New York, New York. ‘Muhrrican with a capital M, which also stands for, Mothuhfucka, get off me, this is my street, mine! Honks, homeless, gridlock, and grittiness, if you can see past Mickey Mouse and the bright lights of Times Square. New York. Big. Shiny. Loud and lewd if you know where to look. One of my favorite cities. I treated myself to a generous lunch on Jeff Lee’s tab in a good restaurant on Sixth Avenue and tried to figure out a strategy for the bookshop Bindings.

  If our killer didn’t want us to know Anna had been there, I couldn’t just breeze in and start asking questions. Carl could be right—it might be a front. I also had the minor puzzle of why her ex-boyfriend, Craig Padmore, should need a history of the Vietnam War (in French, no less) and from that particular bookshop. All of this was pretty tenuous, but since Anna had died in this city, I was obliged to take Manhattan.

  I thought I could maybe just stroll in and be a regular customer, but on reflection I knew that wa
sn’t going to get me much. Do you have Histories of the Hanged? Oh, good. You take Visa? Wonderful, and I’m out the door, having learned nothing.

  Then I thought of a third option, which was a bit lame but better than ten minutes’ worth of staring at shelves.

  I walked across the bridge into Brooklyn, which—okay, I’ll admit—like so many other people, I usually just looked at on my personal jaunts. And, yes, I knew it was unfair to the borough. After all, you’ve got Prospect Park, Coney Island, and the Children’s Museum, which I was sincerely interested in (I’m that single female eccentric who also walks into Hamleys toy store without a child chaperone just to go check out the new dolls and the plush toys—mothers give me the dirtiest looks). I couldn’t see any of those sights today. I needed to jump on a train and make a beeline for Crown Heights.

  The guidebook told me that this is the largest Afro-Caribbean community outside the Caribbean itself, and the shops and the energy of the district testified to that. Here and there, Latinos and Russians had staked a claim, and this is where black Americans lived in an uneasy truce with a substantial number of Hasidic Jews.

  Only fifteen years back there were ugly riots here after a Jewish guy hit a little Guyanese boy and his cousin with his car. When the private Hasidic ambulance showed up, a cop ordered the ambulance to take the driver away and leave behind the kids, if you can believe that; the boy died, and the guy fled to Israel before he could be charged. The neighborhood nearly tore itself apart.

  I found Bindings easily. It was refreshing to find a bookshop in America that wasn’t part of a chain. A few things that betrayed an individual owner’s touch, little idiot-syncrasies as I call them. Personal picks of staff that weren’t prompted by sales drives. Man, this place, you could scoop it up and plunk it down in Charing Cross Road, and it would have fit right in next to Zwemmer’s or Murder One.

  The wood paneling was dark, the shelves overflowing, and you smelled dust even though the place looked clean. Instead of the ugly ’50s retro couches you get at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly or the nicer, plusher ones here in NYC at Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue, Bindings had these pew-like wooden diner booths. Browsing, it seemed, was tolerated, but you did it at your own risk on purgatorial furniture. I loved the place.