Beg Me (2 page)

“I’d like that,” he said.

I stole back under the covers and hugged his girlfriend, and she stirred and held me tight. I felt him spoon into me and her delicate fingers touching my mound, her breath on my face and his on my shoulder. We slept like that until the early-morning hours.

They told me that they had been booked only for the night but that they could stay awhile. We ordered breakfast in bed, made love twice more, and when I woke again around twelve there was a paper on the night table with their address and phone number. Busaba’s dainty handwriting told me,
You are SO beautiful!!!

Sweet.

My client, Jeff Lee, wasn’t Thai. He was Chinese. Here they called him “Ah Jo,” but that was apparently just Chinese for Jeff. (Anna is Cloy Hen. Oh, God,
was
Cloy Hen. Her parents had picked Anna because they liked the sound of the name.) He and his sister grew up in London, where their father was a rice importer. Jeff used to say, “I fucking hate Chinese people”—which was a rather peculiar thing for a Chinese guy to say.

But he would tell you all about how he and Anna were considered
juk-sing
—without culture—as second-generation kids and not the alleged real deal from the Mainland or Hong Kong. I’ve seen enough nonsense in my own race that I could kind of relate—African versus Caribbean, what they say people are supposed to be like from Jamaica or the Bahamas or wherever, and then you get into mixed-race kids, Somali attitudes versus blah, blah, blah. Tiresome business.

I’ve had my own issues at times with Asian men. In my experience, they don’t take too well to female authority, but I know that’s a culture thing, and well…you sure don’t see too many of them with black girls, now, do you? And I doubt they enjoy the fact that many Asian girls, on the other hand, have no problem hooking up with our brothers.

I’m happy to say that Jeff Lee wasn’t like that. He always said he wanted his sister to be happy, and she showed me last year a holiday shot of the three of them—Anna, her brother, and her boyfriend of a few months, I think his name was Craig. Ah Jo Lee had a cigarette dangling from his smiling lips, and his arm was in a macho half embrace around the grinning boyfriend. Good-looking guy with funky dreads.

Lee had started out in rice-buying like Dad, but he made his fortune in Bangkok in all kinds of shady stuff. Surprisingly, not in what you’d expect. I’d be a hypocrite if I knocked him, since I’ve been known to shell out five quid for a pirate DVD now and then in Shepherd’s Bush. He lived well—very well.

An hour before our appointment, he had a car sent around to pick me up from my latest tourist stop after I checked in with the Narai by phone. I was eternally grateful for the ride, since Bangkok is so bloody huge and it would have been hopeless for me to direct a taxi driver around.

Then we switched to a riverboat, and I found myself being led back onto dry land into Sampeng, Bangkok’s Chinatown district, past the Art Deco splendor of Hualamphong Station, through these tiny narrow alleys where I got jostled and had to move to get out of the way of pushcarts with mangoes and stuff I couldn’t even identify. There was a steady chatter of both Thai and Chinese, and I got a couple of stares of curiosity. I didn’t have a clue where we were going. We doubled back at one point, and Lee told me later this was “a regular precaution for business.” When I stopped to gawk at the multiple classic terraces of the Tang To Gung gold shop, my escort got impatient and snapped staccato Thai at me to come on.

I couldn’t have found Lee’s office building again if I tried.

As I was shown into his study, I was surprised to see a Buddha that looked more Thai than Chinese, and all the furniture was in tasteful muted browns and yellows. They sure liked their Art Deco in this neighborhood. I don’t know if I could have lived with red walls, but I guess it worked for him. Ah Jo “Jeff” Lee came out from behind a desk to give me a hug.

Thanking his assistant in fluent Thai, he switched to English: “Hello, Teresa, how are you?”

I heard the remnants of his Thames Estuary accent. Jeff Lee had always been something. He had a degree from the London School of Economics and could have done anything, but I suppose he found some doors closed for him “back home,” and judging from his surroundings, he had made the right choice.

“I liked the welcoming committee,” I said.

It took him a second. He laughed and replied, “Oh! Good, good. Hey, if you can’t get properly laid in Bangkok, I think the civic pride is wounded.”

“You have anybody serious these days?” I asked politely.

He rolled his eyes. “Teresa, I have no time for all that. Yeah, yeah, Anna used to give me that same look.”

Anna. It was time to get down to business.

“I’m so sorry, Jeff. Tell me what happened. And what you need.”

He looked at me a moment, then pulled out a drawer of his desk. “You’ll want to see these.”

He tossed a manila envelope across the blotter, then turned his back on me, facing the window. “I don’t want to look at them. Once was enough. I threw up.”

I could see why. Contained inside were photos of Anna, and my own stomach churned. Sweet Jesus. It wasn’t that she was dead in the shots; she looked very much alive—a lovely Chinese girl with short bangs, my good friend. My friend, nude, with her arms bound behind her back, her small golden breasts exposed and her body shiny with perspiration. Someone had arranged a warped, ingenious way of spreading her legs, bound by cords leading in different directions. A rather rude, long, and vividly red dildo was half out of her vagina.

In one shot, she was blindfolded (it said something, though I don’t know
what,
that her captor had chosen the blindfold to be the same scarlet as the phallus). What disturbed me more was that I could see the red in her cheeks from being slapped. A welt was rising on the corner of her mouth. It must have been just the beginning—

“Was there a ransom demand?” I asked, my voice soft.

He turned and looked perplexed for an instant. “No, no, she wasn’t kidnapped—as far as I’ve been able to learn anything myself.”

I was confused. “But…?” I ended my question with a gesture to the photos, their white backing facing out to spare him the ghastly sight.

“Some sick fuck sent me these!” he snapped.

“Yes, I got that part, that’s ob—”

“Teresa, they’re saying she died in a drug buy! That she died with a gun in her hand, trying to shake down some bloody dealer! No way! She wasn’t an addict or anything like that.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I cut in. “Back up. You show me these and now you’re saying…Look, take me through it slowly.”

I sat down and listened patiently as he reconstructed what he knew, telling me part of it and showing me news clippings to fill in the blanks. His eyes glistened with tears, but he wasn’t parading his grief to impress me. I knew he was barely holding on, a young man normally so proud and in control, rendered helpless.

He didn’t have much. Anna had died in Brooklyn. She was found with an armor-piercing round making a huge hole in her belly, a stomach wound that would have been excruciatingly painful before she bled to death in a filthy alley. The guy she supposedly tried to shake down was an ex-con, twenty-five, Hispanic, in and out of psychiatric institutions as well as prison, with a black gym bag full of crystal meth. He had died as well that night. One of the tabloids had made much out of how Anna was provocatively dressed: black leather jacket over a short black half-T, black mini, and thigh-high black boots,
no
underwear.

Lee passed me a Polaroid shot, a close-up of what looked like a tattoo. There were symbols I didn’t recognize, not that I knew anything about tats. My girlfriends who have them usually go for more conservative choices like a rose or, if they’re white, those Celtic designs. Never liked them myself, never ever wanted one.

“They found this on her inner thigh,” he said. “I paid for the laser treatment to have it removed. We had Anna cremated, but still…I didn’t want that mark on her before…you know, we…”

I looked at him questioningly.

“It’s
Thai
characters,” he explained. “It means, ‘I live for death,’ but that’s not what Thai gangs use over here—it’s borrowed from a Vietnamese gang. Don’t you see? Some clown must have
assumed
she was Thai because she mentioned that I lived here, so he went and cooked that up. The needlework is
fresh,
days old if even that! This was all staged.”

I couldn’t reach that conclusion yet. And I didn’t understand those photos of her trussed up and hurt yet Anna winding up dead in a dark alley.

“Anna was a massage therapist, for God’s sake!” I said. “What could she have been into that would make someone want to kill her? Who was she running with and what was she doing in America?”

“I don’t know! She was getting into some weird scenes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember Craig, her boyfriend for a while?”

“Never got to meet him,” I said.

“He got her into this black BDSM group—leather, cuffs, and chains. It was when she started hanging around with those people that—”

“Hold it,”
I snapped. “Be careful where you go with this.”

“Teresa, they like edgy shit that’s—”

I tried to stay calm. “Who’s ‘they,’ Jeff? Who are ‘those people’? If you’re going to pull out this whole ‘blacks and Africans are more promiscuous’ shit, you’d better remember where we are, right?”

“I’m not saying that—”

“I hope not,” I went on, “because we are in one of the top cities for buying
children
for sex play, and how twisted is
that
?”

“It is a mostly black group, Teresa,” he insisted gently.

“Well, it certainly isn’t all black if she got to join.”

“No,” he relented.

“So why even mention it?”

“Sorry.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, trying to cut him a bit of slack. Sometimes people used identifiers in the most unconscious but stupidly careless ways, the force of bad habits. Maybe I was being oversensitive too, when he meant “those people”—as in “those into kink.”

So the photos of her nude and bound didn’t suggest a kidnapping.

Then presumably she had
voluntarily
let herself be photographed like this.

Poor Lee. His sister was dead, and someone had psychologically assaulted him by sending these pictures, forcing him to think even for the briefest second about the private sexuality of his own sister—to confront certain truths about her he didn’t want to know or shouldn’t have to know. That she could have actually
liked
being slapped around a little or might have got off being photographed in the most lewd fashion.

Yeah, that would disturb the hell out of me too.

“What do you know about this group?” I finally asked. “How could you even know whether there are a lot of black people in it or not?”

He looked embarrassed. “I sent a couple of guys I know back home to talk to Craig about it.”

“You
what
?”

He put his hands up, saying quickly, “They didn’t hurt him. Honestly!”

“But I’m sure your guys were persuasive,” I said sarcastically. “Now tell me how you’re any different from any other organized-crime thug, Jeff!”

“This is my sister, Teresa! I didn’t know what else to do. You were off on a job somewhere, and he was the last guy who was close to her. Anna mentioned this group once to a cousin of ours in an e-mail, said
he
got her into it. Her boyfriend, Craig. He was working in America for a while on a contract, and she flew over to visit him there. That’s when it started.”

“So if your guys spoke to him in London…?”

“Craig says he finished his job for the Americans and flew home. He dropped out of the group, but she stayed with it. He says she needed more and more thrills. Called her sick.”

“And?”

Lee frowned. “Craig says it’s more like a cult than a club—that my guys would never find it. Very exclusive. No white guys, no Asian guys, but girls of every color of the rainbow—only dudes who are black. There’s supposed to be this big philosophy behind it that it ‘empowers’ black men. The group thinks black men are the sexual supreme, and they have to learn how to dominate women as the first step to taking back family power and financial power. Whatever! He also said they’ve got money—lots of it.”

“So this group is into something else,” I said. “But they don’t like all the attention on their sexual games.”

I saw his face cloud, not understanding what I meant.

“They staged a gunfight to offer the cops the furthest thing from sex play.” I flipped to one of the photos to make sure and then slid it back into the envelope. “Anna is wearing a choker in this shot, red silk with a diamond. When you claimed the body, you found ligature bruises on her neck, didn’t you?”

“Y-yes.”

“I’m sorry, Jeff,” I offered. “She was into autoerotic asphyxiation too. Had these bad guys given it a thought, they could have made it look like she died accidentally while doing this to herself. But it’s natural they try to come up with something a hundred eighty degrees away from kink—because
that’s
where they feel vulnerable.”