“Oh, my God,” Claire Lee says despairingly, “what am I going to do?”
“Right now? Nothing. This is just the opening move. A blackmailer wants the victim to sweat a little first, lose sleep, think of nothing but what it’s going to cost to keep the secret hidden. Have you been sleeping since you got the letter?”
“With pills.”
“There you are. You’re getting nervous already, anxious enough to tell me about it, and you don’t even know what the blackmailer’s got and what he wants for it. You’ll get another letter, Mrs. Lee, with maybe a sample photograph attached. Then you’ll get more letters, spelling out exactly what you’ll have to pay. You have any idea who might be pulling this?”
“No. Not the slightest. Isn’t there anything you can do to stop it?”
“Nope. This first letter is completely innocent. Take it to the cops and they’ll laugh. You haven’t been threatened-yet. This is only the opening move in a dirty game. You’ll just have to play it out. Mrs. Lee, why don’t you let me keep this letter.”
“Why do you want it if you can’t do anything?”
“So you don’t keep reading it and driving yourself nuts. How many times have you looked at it already? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand times?”
“At least,” she says with a wan smile. “All right, you take it.”
“Let me know when the second letter arrives,” Cone says. “Because you’re going to get another; I guarantee it.”
She finishes her drink. “You know, Mr. Cone,” she says, “I feel better just telling you about it. I guess confession really is good for the soul.”
“Is it?” he says. “I wouldn’t know.”
He drains his vodka and stands up. “Keep in touch,” he says, trying to keep it light. “And thanks for the drink.”
He walks slowly toward the outside door and pauses to pull on his cap. He glances back. Carlos, the waiter, is already at her side. The two are talking earnestly, their heads so close together that the guy is practically standing under her broad-brimmed hat.
He’s back in the loft before five o’clock, nods at Cleo, and immediately gets on the horn to Johnnie Wong at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.
“Hey, old buddy,” Wong says, “that’s the best bribe I’ve had all day. Where?”
“How about my place?”
“Sounds good. How do I find it?”
Cone laughs. “If you’ve got my unlisted phone number, you’ve got to have my address. If you can get here before six, the downstairs door will be open and the elevator will be working. I’m on the top floor, a loft.”
“I’ll find you.”
Cone gives Cleo fresh water, half a can of human-type tuna, and sits back to review that wacky conversation with Claire Lee.
He can’t for the life of him think of any reason why she would make up a history like that. And after all, it wasn’t so unusual that it couldn’t be true. But what was her motive for telling Cone, practically a stranger, all the squalid details of her past when, according to her, she hadn’t even told her husband?
Cone decides he’ll buy her story. The lady is terrified-or at least badly spooked. She can’t ask help from Chin or Edward Lee, and apparently has no close friends she can consult. So she picks the only guy in the law enforcement business she knows. Looking at it from that angle, her confession makes a crazy kind of sense.
He pulls the letter from his pocket and reads it again. “Remember the Pleasure Dome? We have the photographs.” That tells him exactly nothing, unless Claire’s horror was feigned when he told her about a camera clicking away through a two-way mirror. Maybe she had willingly posed for centerfolds with men, women, donkeys, and dalmatians. That would account for her fear of a letter that apparently said zip.
He is still trying to puzzle out what’s going on in that beautiful head, and wondering about the extent of her chicanery or absence thereof, when there’s a sharp rapping on the door. He moves to one side of the jamb.
“Yeah?” he calls. “Who is it?”
“Johnnie Wong.”
Cone unchains, unbolts, unlocks the door. The FBI man comes in, flashing his toothy grin. He takes a look around the place.
“Holy Christ!” he says. “You live here? If I were you, I’d sleep in the office. What’s that thing under the bathtub?”
“Cleo, my cat,” Cone says. “Listen, this joint’s not so bad. It was neat and clean when I moved in, but I grunged it up a little to make it livable.”
“You call this livable? It’s the biggest Roach Motel I’ve ever seen. Where’s that drink you promised me?”
They sit on opposite sides of the table. Wong has a beer. “No, thanks,” he says when Cone offers a jelly jar. “I’ll drink it right out of the can. That way the worst thing that can happen to me is a cut lip.” He takes a gulp, then looks at the Wall Street dick thoughtfully. “Okay, you didn’t ask me up to admire the interior decoration. What do you want?”
“I told you Haldering was hired to investigate the run-up in the price of White Lotus stock. I’ve got a list of the shareholders here. There’re more than two thousand names, so I don’t expect you to study the whole printout. But would you take a quick look and see if you recognize any of the names.”
“Oh, God,” Johnnie Wong says, sighing. “This I’ve got to do for a free beer? All right, let me see the damned thing.”
He flips through the pages swiftly, then goes back to the first and starts again, slower this time. Cone sits silently until Wong tosses the list aside.
“Interesting,” the FBI man says. “The second time I went through it, I looked for people with big holdings, a thousand shares or more.”
“You recognize any of the names?”
“About a half-dozen. They’re all members of the Giant Panda gang.”
The two men stare at each other a moment.
“What does that mean?” Cone asks.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Johnnie says. “I guess it means that Giant Panda is assembling a heavy position in White Lotus stock. But for what reason, the deponent knoweth not. Got any ideas?”
“Not a one,” Cone says fretfully. “They’re a long way from having control of the corporation. And the stock pays five percent. That’s a nice return for legitimate equity investors, but it’s bupkes for a criminal gang.”
“Well,” Wong says, “it’s your problem. Now do you figure I’ve paid for my brew, or have you got something for me?”
Cone admires the guy. He’s a no-horseshit operator, cards on the table, everything up front. Timothy figures he better give him something if he wants the agent on his side.
“I’ve got a weirdie for you,” he says. “It may be a bone or there may be some meat to it. Ever hear of a cathouse in San Francisco called the Pleasure Dome?”
Wong is about to take a swallow of his beer, but he stops and puts the can back on the table.
“The Pleasure Dome,” he repeats. “How in God’s name did you come up with that one? Have I ever heard of it? You bet your sweet patootie I have. I was stationed in Frisco when we busted the joint. What a palace that was! White girls, blacks, Chinese, Koreans, Hispanics, Japanese. It was a House of All Nations. Very exclusive. Very expensive. No sailors allowed. How do you know about the Pleasure Dome?”
“It just came up in conversation,” Cone says. “Who owned the joint?”
The FBI man shoves his beer away and stands up. “Okay,” he says, “you wanna play hard to get, so be it. Don’t call me again.”
“Wait a minute,” Cone says. “Let me think.”
“Yeah,” Wong says, sitting down again, “you do that.”
He is quiet then, sipping his suds slowly, his eyes on Cone.
The Wall Street dick knows that he needs this guy. He’s got a pipeline into the Asian underworld that Cone could never match. Secretiveness is Cone’s nature, but here’s a case where it could work against him, make his job twice as hard, if not impossible. He ponders a long time, trying to decide where his loyalties belong. How much does he owe the client? And the client’s wife?