“One of his dogs?”
“He knows you’ll be watching for him,” Su-Moon said. “He’ll hire someone.”
Waverly tilted her head.
“How do you come up with this stuff?”
“It’s called growing up on the streets.” She patted Waverly’s knee and said, “It’s time for you to get outside and start playing rabbit.”
Waverly used the facilities.
Then she hid the envelope in a box of cereal and headed out.
Less than an hour later they had their answer. “You were being followed by two Chinese guys,” Su-Moon said.
Waverly wrinkled her forehead in shock.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
“Two?”
Su-Moon nodded.
“I didn’t recognize either of them. They had tattoos. One of them had a long braided ponytail and was wearing a blue bandana. The other one-the muscular one-had short hair and was wearing a white muscle shirt.” A pause then, “The fact that they knew you were here goes back to my prior comments about your little lover-boy. He knew you were here, Bristol didn’t.”
Right.
Damn.
“What we need to do is get back into Bristol’s houseboat,” Su-Moon said.
Waverly looked for a trick but didn’t see it.
“You’re serious.”
Su-Moon nodded.
“Dead,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to find out who the women are in those photos, right? To see if any of them mysteriously disappeared?”
“Right.”
“To do that we need to get names. That means we need to get a hold of Bristol’s little black book. That’s either in his pocket or at his office or at his houseboat. He’ll be out hunting for you tonight. While he’s doing that we’ll pay a visit to the boat.”
“We already checked it.”
Su-Moon considered it.
“Okay fine,” she said. “We’ll do his office.”
57
Day Two
July 22, 1952
Tuesday Afternoon
With his gun in the hands of Alexa Blank, River was naked. From the graveyard he headed to Mile High Guns amp; Ammo on Colfax to fix that little problem. Luckily they had a duplicate of the one he already had-a Colt 45-meaning he wouldn’t have to get familiar with a different action and kick. A copy of the Beat was sitting on the counter. River flipped through it as the clerk wrapped everything up.
“Woman Falls to Death” caught his eye.
According to the article, a woman named Charley-Anna Blackridge fell to her death from the roof of a building on Curtis Street late Friday night. Police were investigating.
He closed the paper.
His head spun.
This wasn’t good.
It wasn’t good at all.
From the store he headed to the first phone book he could find and looked up Charley-Anna Blackridge. She was listed at 1331 Clayton.
He headed over and knocked on the door.
No one answered.
The structure was a small brick bungalow with no driveway or garage, slightly elevated from the street. A twist of the knob showed the door was locked. He looked around for nosy neighbors and found none. What he was about to do was stupid. He tried to talk himself out of it but it didn’t work.
His feet took him around the side of the structure to the back. An alley ran behind the houses. That’s where the owners parked.
Two houses down a German Shepherd tugged at a chain and barked.
The noise was for River.
He’d been warned.
“Screw you.”
He tried the back door, expecting it to be locked.
It wasn’t.
The knob turned.
He opened the door a foot, shouted, “Anyone home,” and got no answer.
He looked at the neighboring houses, saw no prying eyes and stepped inside
He was in a kitchen.
A yellow refrigerator vibrated with a soft hum that rose slightly above the absolute quietness surrounding it.
On the Formica counter was a bowl of fruit-apples, oranges and bananas. Everything was fresh, purchased within the last day or so.
Dishes were piled in the sink.
A frying pan sat on a cold burner. Next to it was pizza box. River opened the top to find two slices inside. He picked one up to see if it was stiff. It wasn’t, it was flexible. He closed the top and took a deep breath.
“Anyone home?”
No one answered.
He headed upstairs.
The steps bent slightly under his weight.
The third one creaked.
58
Day Two
July 22, 1952
Tuesday Afternoon
Late afternoon Wilde got an unexpected call from Michelle Day, the bartender from the El Ray Club, and pulled up an image of her wiggling on the bed with her hand between her legs. Halfway through the conversation he wrote Gina Sophia on a notepad and underlined it twice, then once more even bigger. Two heartbeats later he was bounding down the stairs two at a time with his hat in hand and the paper in his shirt pocket.
At street level he dipped the hat over his left eye and tried to figure out where he parked Blondie.
He couldn’t remember.
It wasn’t in sight, either direction.
He tapped a Camel out of a pack, lit up and walked west towards 14th. Thirty steps later Blondie’s back end came into sight, parked on the opposite side of the street, peeking out from behind a delivery truck. As soon as he saw it he remembered where he parked-right there.
The top was up, mostly to keep the riffraff from using it as a waste can for butts and candy wrappers and RC bottles. The sky above was a tasty crystal blue. He briefly played with the thought of taking it down before deciding that he was too cramped for time.
Instead he removed the window curtains and took off, almost clipping some drunk zigzagging on a bicycle with a beer in his left hand and a battered White Sox cap up top.
He drove into the financial district, found a parking spot on 17th Street near the Brown Palace, and killed the engine. Three minutes later he walked into the offices of Jackson amp; Reacher, Denver’s second-largest law firm.
A bun-haired receptionist with a wrinkled face looked up.
“I’m here to see Gina Sophia,” Wilde said.
“Is she expecting you?”
“I doubt it.”
Two minutes later he was in the office of the law firm’s only female attorney, about twenty-eight. Her face had minimal makeup and her attire was gray and conservative. That didn’t stop Wilde from seeing the beauty underneath. She looked at him without saying anything, then closed the door and sat on the desk, dangling nylon legs.
“I’ve seen you around,” she said. “You play drums down at the Bokaray.”
Wilde nodded.
“Guilty.”
“You tried to pick me up once,” she said.
Wilde didn’t remember.
“Did it work?”
“No.”
“My loss.”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck next time,” she said.
“One can only hope.” A beat then, “How come it didn’t work the last time? Did I use a corny line or something?”
“Actually you did,” she said. “If I remember right it was something like, How do you like me so far?”
Wilde smiled.
That was one of his staples.
“That is pretty bad by the light of day.”
She nodded.
“Blame it on the alcohol,” he said. “So, what line would have worked better?”
She pondered it.
“I don’t know. I don’t pick up girls.”
Wilde shifted his feet and explained that he was a private investigator working on the murder of Charley-Anna Blackridge, who got dropped to her death from the roof of a building after leaving the El Ray Club last weekend.