Day Two
July 22, 1952
Tuesday Morning
Tom Bristol passed by Waverly three or four times and didn’t once emit a glimmer of a reaction to indicate that he recognized her from the little fiasco at the houseboat last night. Every time Waverly saw him she pictured his hand slapping down on an ass.
She needed to find the owner of that ass and warn her.
Bristol was dirty.
Waverly could feel it.
At 9:30 Su-Moon called with some unexpected news. “I’m down the street from the marina. I’m going back to the houseboat.”
“Are you nuts?”
“He’s at the office right now, right?”
Yes.
He was.
“Write this number down,” Su-Moon said. Waverly picked up a pencil and wrote numbers on the top sheet of a scratch pad. “That’s Bristol’s home phone number. If he leaves the office, call that number and let it ring twice. That will be my cue he’s loose.”
“What are you trying to find?”
“Whatever it was we missed last night.”
Waverly exhaled.
“Don’t do it.”
“Talk to you later.”
“I’m serious. I have a bad feeling.”
“You always have a bad feeling.”
An hour passed then another. Bristol didn’t wander from the office haunts and Su-Moon would have been long done by now. Still, when Sean Waterfield swung by and asked Waverly if she wanted to go to lunch, she dialed Bristol’s number and let the phone ring twice before leaving, just to be safe.
They ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf with takeout plates of shrimp and rice, which they ate on the edge of a dock.
Their legs dangled over the water.
The boats were out to sea.
Mooring posts were wrapped in tires.
Seagulls filled the air.
The street buzzed with vendors.
The sky was clear but the temperature wasn’t more than seventy.
“That Hong Kong deal was weird from the get-go,” Waterfield said. “We were big in Europe but hadn’t done anything in Asia yet. This would be our first. Tom Bristol went there to personally meet with the owners and go over the specs. He came back as excited as I’ve ever seen him. He worked up all the drawings and bid documents himself, working until who-knows-when every night after the rest of us left. The bid got submitted and then he crossed his fingers and waited. In the end, another firm got the project.”
“Which firm?”
“I can’t remember,” Waterfield said. “It doesn’t really matter. It wasn’t ours.”
Suddenly a figure appeared in Waverly’s peripheral vision and sat down next to her.
It was the last person in the world she expected.
Tom Bristol.
He looked at Waterfield and said, “Sean, are you putting the moves on our new temp?”
Waterfield nodded.
“Got to,” he said. “Look at her.”