THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (12 page)

I spent my days loafing around the office tidying up the cases I had going. I also reread the MGM cash reports and currency inventories looking for anything I might have missed the first time through. I found nothing. In spite of my optimism that something would come to me that could explain the extra money flowing through the casino other than it being smurfed by the triads, not a single penetrating insight put in an appearance.

I wanted to help Pansy if I could. And not because she was an attractive woman worth several billion dollars who appeared to like me.

Or maybe that was it.

BY THE THIRD DAY
the rain slowed to an on-and-off drizzle. I had a bad case of cabin fever from being penned up in the office and was thinking about going out somewhere interesting for lunch. Before I could decide where to go, someone knocked at the office door.

The sound was so alien to me that at first I didn’t even know what it was. Almost no one ever came to the office. And I certainly wasn’t expecting anyone then. Still half convinced there had to be some other explanation for the knocking sound, I walked over and opened the door.

A small Chinese woman was standing there. She was no more than five feet tall and looked to be not more than thirty, but I had long since given up trying to guess the age of any Asian woman. This one could be anything between twenty-five and fifty-five. She wore heavy black glasses with wide, rectangular lenses that gave her face a quizzical air, and she was dressed in a plain grey jacket and matching trousers.

“Are you Mr. Jack Shepherd?”

When I nodded, she thrust a business card at me and I accepted it with two hands in the gesture of courtesy expected in Asia when somebody hands you a business card.

I glanced down at the little white card printed in some elaborate typeface.

Cynthia Cheung
Assistant Business Editor
South China Morning Post

A reporter?

Uh-oh
, I thought
, this can’t be good…

“MAY I TALK TO
you for a moment, Mr. Shepherd?”

“Look, Miss Cheung, I really—”

“Call me Cindy. I won’t keep you for long, I promise.”

Before I could say anything else, the woman walked past me into the office and seated herself in one of the two guest chairs in front of my library table. They were battered captain’s chairs that I had found in yet another used furniture shop, and their uncushioned wooden seats were profoundly uncomfortable. Which was exactly how I thought the guest chairs in any office where I was working ought to be.

I closed the door and sat down behind the table. Cindy looked harmless enough, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

This
really
couldn’t be good…

IT WASN’T.

“I understand you are investigating money laundering at the MGM Macau, Mr. Shepherd.”

I tried for a chuckle, but the noise that came out sounded more like I was being strangled. Which, more or less, I was.

“I can’t imagine where you heard that, Cindy.”

“I have a very reliable source.”

Yes, you fucking well do,
I thought.

But of course that wasn’t what I said.

“I’m a lawyer, Cindy. I don’t investigate anything. I advise clients.”

“Are you advising the MGM Macau about money laundering at their casino?”

I cleared my throat and shifted my weight in the chair and I immediately regretted doing it. I had made it obvious to the woman that she was making me uncomfortable. Which, of course, meant that she had me dead to rights.

“You’re putting me in a difficult position, Cindy. You must already know that a lawyer can’t talk about his clients at all, let alone tell anyone exactly what he’s doing for them. But if I say that to you, you’re going to take it as a confirmation that you’re right, even if you’re completely wrong.”

A pretty good piece of double-talk if I do say so myself.

“We are running a story tomorrow saying that the MGM Macau and some other casinos have recently experienced unusual spikes in their gambling revenue. It also says that the MGM suspects they have a significant money laundering problem and that they have hired you to determine the source of the unidentified funds. Would you like to comment?”

“No.”

“You do understand we are running the story regardless of whether you comment or not?”

“You may well be, Cindy, but that doesn’t change the fact that I won’t talk about my clients.”

“That sounds to me like a confirmation that the MGM Macau is your client.”

It does indeed,
I thought,
even to me.

“It is well known that you represented Plato Karsarkis when he was a fugitive from the United States,” the woman continued. “Will you talk about him?”

“If it’s so well known, I don’t see why you need me to talk about him.”

“I’m only trying to get some personal material, Mr. Shepherd. Something I can use to give my story a little color. Can you tell me something about your background?”

“Cindy, if you really are going to run that story, you’re on your own. You’re not going to get any help from me.”

I smiled and kept my voice low and even. That was something all good lawyers learned to do. To appear totally unconcerned while the building burned down around you. To keep smiling and to keep murmuring all the while,
Fire? What fire? I don’t see any fire.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?” Cindy said with the kind of smile that suggested she hadn’t really expected it to.

“Doesn’t bother me,” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to go anywhere.”

A little silence fell after that and I used it to think as fast as I could.

There was a leak somewhere and that scared me. I did not want to be publicly fingered as a guy hired by MGM to investigate money laundering at their casino. If the triads were responsible for whatever was going on there and I was identified as the guy who was supposed to prove it…well, I didn’t even want to think about that. The last guy who tried to investigate the triads in Macau had his car blown up.

So, okay, let’s start with who could possibly have leaked it. Who knew about what I was doing in Macau? The MGM people knew, of course. Pansy and Gerald Brady and probably a few others. And the FBI knew. Pete and whoever he was working with. Was there anyone else? Whoever was muling the money into the MGM knew what they were doing, of course, but I didn’t think they knew anyone was onto them or that I was involved. And even if they did know, they would hardly announce it to a newspaper reporter about. Who else might know? Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anyone.

I was going around in circles. Surely neither MGM nor the FBI could be the source of the Cindy’s information since it would hardly be in either of their best interests for all of this to become public, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who knew what I was doing.

“Has it occurred to you, Cindy, that by running a story like that you’re putting me in danger?”

“How am I putting you in danger?”

“Whether your story is true or not, if you cause people out there to think I’m trying to prove they’re guilty of money laundering—”

“You think the triads are behind this, don’t you?”

Gotcha!
I could almost hear her screaming.

I was digging myself in deeper and deeper by continuing to chat politely with this woman. She wasn’t going to tell me her source – I wasn’t even going to bother to ask – and she was running that story regardless of what I said.

“Would it make any difference if I told you that your story is wrong?” I asked, mostly for form.

“Of course. I would include your denial in it.”

“But you would run it anyway.”

“Yes. I trust my source.”

I sighed. Screwed was screwed, wasn’t it?

So I stood up and offered her my hand.

“Okay, Cindy. It’s been real.”

She didn’t reply. She just stood and shook my hand and smiled the sort of smile that said the conversation had gone exactly the way she had thought it would. Then she turned and left the office.

Well, fuck a goddamned duck
, I sat there thinking when she was gone.
I’m toast.

“CALM DOWN, JACK,” PETE
Logan kept saying when I finally got him on the telephone. “Just calm down.”

“This
is
calm!”

“Well, man, I got to say you really don’t sound calm to me.”

“I don’t? Then, fuck you, Pete. It’s not your name that’s going to be in the South China Morning Post tomorrow. This is calm for knowing that every triad gangster in Hong Kong and Macau is going to learn over their morning coffee that I’m being paid to nail their skinny butts.”

“In my experience, Jack, most triad gangsters don’t drink coffee, so it seems to me you’ve really got nothing at all to worry about.”

“Very fucking funny. Go ahead, joke about it. There’s a leak somewhere, Pete, and all the shit that’s squirting out is going to land on my head, not on yours.”

“The leak isn’t here, Jack.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I’m the only guy here who knows what you’re doing.”

“And it wasn’t you?”

“And it wasn’t me.”

I thought about that for a moment but it got me nowhere.

“But why would anyone at MGM leak it?” I asked Pete. “They certainly wouldn’t want something like this to get out.”

“Beats me.”

Something suddenly occurred to me. “You said you were going to talk to Wynn and Adelson. Maybe one of them put the word out to mess with Pansy.”

“That might make sense,” Pete said, “except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t talked to either one of them yet.”

“So you’re saying that nobody but the two of us and the MGM people know about the money spike at the MGM?”

“Nobody I’m aware of.”

“And that nobody but the two of us and the MGM people know anything about me being hired to find out about it?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So you didn’t tell anybody?”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Well…shit.”

That almost certainly meant somebody at MGM had been Cindy’s source, but…why? Did somebody on the inside there have it in for Pansy? Was that what the leak was all about? Company politics? Strange…

My mind suddenly leaped to another strange occurrence in Macau.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Harry Pine?” I asked Pete.

“Harry Pine?” Pete either thought about it, or made a show of thinking about it. “No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

“He’s a guy who introduced himself to me in Macau for no particular reason. It seemed to me there was something a little off about him.”

“Did you tell him why you were there?”

“I’m not even going to bother to answer that, Pete.”

“Well…if you didn’t, I don’t see how he has anything to do with your problem.”

“My problem? My problem? Well, fuck you very much, Pete. Maybe I’ll catch the next plane for Monte Carlo and it can be your problem.”

“Don’t be so touchy, Jack. You know what I meant.”

“Yeah, I know exactly what you meant. Tomorrow a whole army of violent gangsters is going to be told I’m trying to put them in the frame for a big-time money laundering scheme, and you’re going to be sitting in some Bangkok go-go bar watching the girls and having a good chuckle about it. I could always call Cindy and tell her about your involvement here and we can both go out together. Put a sort of a Butch and Sundance finish to this whole fiasco? What do you think?”

“Who’s Cindy?”

“The South China Morning Post reporter who has the story.”

“You screwing her?”

“Pete, I only met her a half hour ago.”

“Doesn’t rule it out.”

“This conversation is falling apart.”

“Good-bye, Jack. Let me know when you come up with something useful.”

“I’ll call you from the hospital,” I said, “assuming I make it that far.”

I HAD TWO MORE
calls to make.

My first was to Pansy. She needed to prepare herself before somebody told her about that story in the SCMP or, worse, she stumbled over it herself. It wasn’t going to go down well with her. Her worst fear was that the money laundering MGM was experiencing would have triad links, and that the mud would stick to her even though she had nothing to do with it.

Now the whole story was going public, and before we knew what the real source of the activity was or even if it really was a money laundering operation. Pansy was going to get a bucket of mud right in the face and I doubted she would ever be able to wash it off, no matter what we eventually found out.

I called her office rather than her cell phone because I didn’t want to dump all this on her at an awkward moment. It was going to go down hard enough and I didn’t want her to have to deal with it at an awkward time. I had seen too many men answering cell phones while peeing into a urinal to be comfortable delivering difficult news over one. I wasn’t actually concerned that Pansy would answer her phone while sitting on the toilet, of course, but the principle there was still pretty much the same.

I wanted Pansy’s full attention when I broke the news to her and I wanted it at a time when she wasn’t distracted by other things. So I called her office and left a message that it was urgent and she should call me back when she was able to talk. That was about as much hint as I could give her that this wasn’t going to be a fun phone call without saying something like,
Yo, baby, you are about to become the triad’s babe of the day on the front page of the South China Morning Post.

Pansy called back in less than ten minutes and I told her about Cindy Cheung and the story that the SCMP was running tomorrow without trying to soften the blow. She took it better than I thought she would. She made some listening noises while I talked, but when I finished she said nothing at all.

When the silence had stretched out to the point of embarrassment, she suddenly spoke up.

“Do you ever wonder if it’s all worth it, Jack?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Pansy.”

I knew exactly what she meant, of course, but I didn’t think admitting it right away was the thing to do. I really didn’t want Pansy to feel as lousy as she obviously did so I tried to end the conversation on a comforting and cheery note. That’s what I tried to do, but I felt like what I actually did was murmur a lot of stupid platitudes and make an ass out of myself.