Mask Market

“No, you’re not,” she said, sadness thick in her voice. “That’s not the kind of stuff Charlie Jones deals in.”

“Do you want me to tell you about—?”

“No. I don’t want you to tell me anything. I came here to tell you something, and I want you to listen. Listen good, Burke. This is the last time you put my people in harm’s way, understand? You think I don’t know what you brought Mick into last time you went off the rails? From now on, it’s like this: You want information, you can buy it from us, like anyone else. But no side deals, or you’re cut off. Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it. No matter how careful I wipe my feet, I’ll never be good enough to walk on your carpet.”

“You want to feel sorry for yourself, go for it, Burke. You can’t be a mercenary and expect to be treated like a patriot.”

I stared straight ahead as she got out. I felt the door close behind her.

I was back at Mama’s by a quarter of. At one, Pepper walked through the front door, Mick looming behind her right shoulder. She came over to my booth, studied my face for a second, then said, “You didn’t expect her to come herself, did you?”

“No.”

She sat down across from me. Max was having an animated conversation with Mick, using playing cards to make some kind of point.

Mama brought Pepper a plate of assorted dim sum, and a pot of tea. They spent a few minutes trying to out-polite each other. Then Pepper slid a dark-brown nine-by-twelve envelope over to me.

I thumbed open my sleeve knife.

“It’s not original,” Pepper said. Meaning, don’t worry about opening the envelope delicately.

Inside was a sheaf of photocopied court documents. Mrs. Daniel Parks—nee Lois Treanor—charged her husband with separate counts of adultery and “cruel and inhuman treatment.” The meat of the complaint was the wife’s affidavit. “Upon information and belief,” Parks had been maintaining a “long-term illicit relationship” with a woman “whose specific identity is not, at this time, known.”

The key word was “maintaining”…and as I read through the affidavit I could see why the cops were sitting on this one. According to his wife, Parks had been systematically looting the assets of the private hedge fund he managed, “with estimated diversion of no less than seven million dollars.”

That didn’t sound like a lot—hedge funds charge a percentage of assets under management as their fee, so Parks wouldn’t have come close to emptying the vault with those numbers. But then came the kicker: The complaint charged that Parks had stolen the money to “artificially inflate the management results for his paramour.” Like a Ponzi scheme, where you pay dividends to old investors with new investors’ money, syphoning off the cream until the pyramid collapses. Only this one wasn’t set up to benefit the manager; according to the complaint, it was set up to “impress and fascinate” one of the investors.

“Ms. X” was a siren, all right.

I read it over a couple of times. Most of it was lawyerese: lots of heavy adjectives bracketing slender facts. Whoever drew it up was careful not to accuse “Ms. X” of being in on the scam with Parks. Stripped to its core, it came down to this: Some guys will use presents for seduction, trading a piece of jewelry for a piece of ass. But this guy’s idea of a present was way off the charts; he was pumping himself up as a financial-management genius by pumping cash into the mystery woman’s account.

I went over the chronology. Parks had been served with the papers on Valentine’s Day—the kind of touch lawyers who keep press agents on staff think is very, very special. By the time Parks had gotten desperate enough to ask Charlie Jones for a referral, over a month had passed.

There was no indication that Peta Bellingham had been subpoenaed as a witness. And neither she nor Parks had been charged with a crime. Not yet, anyway—the forensic accountants would have to pick through the paper first.

And it wasn’t the cops who’d been looking for Peta; it was Parks.

I read through the papers again, but it was like trying to buy a Big Mac in a health-food store. Whatever I needed, I wasn’t going to find it in there.

Why would Peta Bellingham get in the wind? Even if Parks had diverted funds to her, she could always claim she was just an investor who thought her money manager was doing a great job… especially if she paid taxes on the gains, and had her own CPA do the returns. Plus, even if all the skimmed money really went to her, she had walked away from damn near that same amount in assets she left behind.

Or had she? Anyone with the contacts and connections to set up banking in Nauru might have been getting ready to vanish for years. Co-ops can be sold through agents, money can leave one account and appear in another without any human hands touching the cash.

And who had the hunter-killer team been working for when they X-ed out Daniel Parks?

Wolfe’s package was full of info, but it was a mutant hydra, birthing five new questions for every answer it disgorged.

“Thanks, Pepper,” I said, looking up.

She was nowhere in sight. I must have gone somewhere in my head—that happens when I hyperfocus.

I looked at my watch. Damn. Almost three in the morning.

“Where’s Max?” I called over to Mama.

“He go back home. Friend go with him.”

Friend? “Mick? The big guy who was here with—?”

“Sure, sure.”

I knew Max trusted Mick—the big man had been on the scene when we canceled the ticket of the guy who had made up the case against Wolfe—and I knew Mick was a kung-fu guy, but I never imagined the two of them working out together, especially in Max’s temple.

“Did Pepper go with them?”

“Little girl, big smile?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, patiently. “You know who Pepper is.”

“No. She stay with me, we have tea.”

“So where is she now?”

Mama pointed instead of speaking. She doesn’t like the way the word “bathroom” sounds in English.

When Pepper came back out, she glistened as if she’d just bounced out of a shower.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked her.

“Well, you may find this hard to believe, Burke, but Mick doesn’t make friends easily.”

“A charmer like him?”

“He’s very charming when he wants to be. He just doesn’t like…”

“People?” I filled in, helpfully.

“Oh, stop that! You know what I mean. Anyway, he and Max are, like, real pals now. I told them I’d just wait here until they were done working out, or whatever it is they do. You know, the karate?”

“Yeah.”

“And I had a great time talking with Mama! Did you know her husband was an architect?”

I answered her with a noncommittal facial gesture—I didn’t know Mama even had a husband.

Max floated in behind me, Mick at his side.

“Did you have fun?” Pepper asked, brightly.

Mick and Max exchanged looks. “Yes,” Mick said. Yeah, I could see where all the charm came from, all right.

“We have to go,” Pepper told me, holding out her hand, palm up.

“How much?” I said.

“She said there was no charge,” Pepper said, lifting my heart a little. “But I have to take everything back with me,” she finished, putting it back where it belonged.

By the time I got up the next morning, every channel had some