Day One
July 21, 1952
Monday Morning
Shelby Tilt didn’t remember much about the San Francisco case other than the red dress. He didn’t even remember the dead woman’s name. His file, if you could even call it that, was long gone.
“If you’re serious about breaking this story,” Waverly said, “then I’m going to say something that you’re not going to want to hear.”
“Like what?”
“Like I think I need to go to San Francisco.”
Tilt frowned.
“Go there?”
“Right.”
“That costs money,” he said.
“I’ll take the bus,” she said.
Tilt shook his head.
“Stay here and work the Denver angle,” he said. “The Denver stuff’s fresh.”
“Let the cops work the Denver angle,” she said. “I’ll get Johnnie Pants to feed it to me.”
Tilt knew the name.
Pants was one of the homicide detectives.
“How are you going to get him to do that?”
“I’ll give him a blowjob or something,” Waverly said. “The point I’m trying to make is that if we’re going to find a common denominator, we need to run down the San Francisco case. There’s no way to do that except to go there.”
Tilt puffed the cigar and blew a ring.
“If I get totally stupid and say okay, you’d need to do it on a shoestring,” he said. “You’d need to stay at the cheapest flophouse in town and not even think about eating anything more fancy than peanut butter and jelly. No cabs when you get there either. Take the trolley or the bus. Or better yet, walk.” A pause then, “There’s a Chinese girl I know there named Su-Moon. Maybe you could stay with her. I’ll give her a call.”
“Who is she, an old girlfriend?”
“Sort of,” he said. “She gives massages.”
“She’s a massage girl?”
“Don’t say it like that,” he said. “It’s a legitimate profession.”
“Does she give happy endings?”
He smiled.
“I’m taking the fifth on that.” He got serious and added, “I’m going to go ahead with your plan partly because you’re right that we need to run down the San Francisco connection and we can’t do that from Denver. That’s only 10 percent of it though. The other 90 is because you’ll be safer there. I’m still deciding whether I really have the right to put you at risk.”
“The world’s a risky place,” she said. “We should be glad. Otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to report.”
Two hours later Waverly was sitting in the window seat of a shaky airliner as it left Denver in the rearview mirror and headed west over the mountains.
A small hastily-packed suitcase was in the overhead bin.
In her purse was all the money Tilt could spare, a banana and the phone number of a Chinese woman who gave happy endings.