by Janet Dawson
“What about that trademark infringement lawsuit?” Alex asked him.
“We’re in settlement negotiations,” Hank said. “I expect some action when I get back from Texas.”
Alex nodded. “Ah, yes. Project Rio.”
Hank compressed his lips. Was I the only one who caught the slight downturn of his lips? It was as though he didn’t want to mention the name of the project, let alone talk about it.
All the more reason I needed to find out just what Project Rio was.
Twenty
“HOW ARE THINGS WORKING OUT?” NANCY ASKED when we returned to Cube City. Despite the look I’d caught on her face at the staff meeting, her words were friendly, as though she was genuinely interested. “Are you feeling overwhelmed?”
“No, I think I’m getting up to speed.” I smiled at her. Now it was Nancy’s turn to get some office gossip, courtesy of what I’d heard this weekend from Leon Gomes. “Say, hearing Alex talk about the contract negotiations reminds me of something I heard this weekend. Someone told me there’s a possibility of a strike at the Bates plants. But Alex seemed confident there wasn’t a problem.”
“Oh, I don’t think there is,” Nancy said, her voice cooling a bit. “The union always threatens a strike when they’re negotiating.”
“Sounds like you’ve been through a few cycles.”
“I’ve worked here a long time.” She stepped over to the fax machine, where a couple of sheets of paper rested in the paper tray. She picked it up, glanced at it, and then stapled the pages together. “This one’s for Hank.” She handed it to me.
“What’s the sticking point in the negotiations this time?”
“Health and retirement benefits.” Nancy returned to her workstation, pulled out her chair, and sat down, reaching for the earpieces of her transcriber. “That’s always a bone of contention lately. The company pays into one of those multiemployer pension funds for the union, which is different from the retirement plan the rest of us have. I’ve heard the company wants to cut back on the number of medical plans the union members can choose from, and have them pay more of the premium costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something like that here, with the nonunion personnel. If they do, of course, we don’t have the option to strike, like the union.”
She stopped suddenly, looking as though she thought she’d said too much. The expression on her face made me wonder if Nancy was just as discontented as Gladys seemed to be, and as Martha had been.
She fitted the rubber-tipped earpieces into her ears and started another transcription job. Gladys had detoured to the women’s room after the staff meeting, and now returned to her cubicle, humming tunelessly.
I glanced through the just-arrived fax in my hand, the one addressed to Hank. On the cover sheet I saw the name Berkshire and Gentry, and the firm’s address at Embarcadero West, a high-rise on Battery near Sacramento Street in San Francisco. The sender was an attorney named Stephen Cookson. The fax itself was a one-page letter with a subject line that read “Project Rio.” The only information the letter contained was that someone named Art Walton would pick Hank up at the El Paso airport this evening.
I read through the words again, trying to read between the maddeningly uninformative lines. Okay, Hank was going to El Paso. Texas was a very large state, and I was glad to have his destination narrowed to a specific city. Project Rio and El Paso together brought the Rio Grande immediately to mind. If Art Walton was an attorney, Cassie could look him up in her Martindale-Hubbell directory and find out where he worked and what sort of law his firm practiced. I was betting on real estate. If Bates was acquiring land or an existing plant in Texas, that could mean that the guess Gladys and I made earlier about company expansion was correct. But why that look on Hank’s face at the staff meeting?
I carried the fax across the hall to Hank’s office. He wasn’t there, but the lower file drawer in his desk, the one that had been locked, was open. I moved toward it, hoping for a glimpse of the contents. I’d just spotted an accordion folder labeled “Project Rio” when I heard the door open behind me.
I turned and saw Hank. “This fax came for you.”
“Thanks,” he said. He took it and glanced through it. Then he took some papers from the accordion file and put them into his briefcase. Then he closed and locked the file drawer.
As I stepped out of Hank’s office, I saw Buck Tarcher, the corporate security chief, open the door to Rob’s office. He acted as though he hadn’t seen me. I walked to the door, where the interior light was visible through the pebbly opaque glass. The sound was unmistakable, just like what I’d heard this morning when Hank had been inside. Tarcher was going through the drawers in Rob’s desk.
I opened the door. “Hi,” I said brightly. “Are you looking for something? Maybe I can help you find it.”
The corporate security chief looked up, startled, then he gave me a penetrating gaze, as if to ask why I was standing here rather than going about my business. The way he’d examined me made me wonder if he’d noticed the brief look that passed between Sid and me on Friday.
“No, thank you. I can find it myself.” His voice was clipped, full of dismissal, and the look in his eyes left no doubt that I was supposed to disappear. So I did.
It was nearly one when I went to lunch, just as Patricia was heading downstairs to production for her meeting with Nolan Ward. I walked over to Jack London Village and bought a chicken salad sandwich and a root beer at the deli where Gladys and I had eaten Friday. Then I walked along the waterfront until I reached the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Pier at the foot of Clay Street. I sat on one of the benches near the estuary, enjoying the September sunshine and the slight breeze coming off the water, and fending off cheeky seagulls and pigeons who wanted to share my sandwich.
It would be so easy, I thought, to stretch out on this bench and take a nap. I wasn’t used to this regularly scheduled office worker stuff anymore. One of the joys of being self-employed is that if I oversleep or take a long lunch, the only boss I have to deal with is me. And I can go home early anytime I feel like it.
A glance at my watch told me my lunch hour was nearly over. I finished my root beer, balled up my sandwich wrappings, and deposited both in a nearby trash receptacle. I was crossing the Embarcadero at Broadway when I heard a voice call my name. I turned. A slender young woman with shoulder-length brown hair ran toward me, bouncing across the Embarcadero tracks on a pair of thick-soled white athletic shoes. She wore powder blue leggings and an oversized T-shirt in the same color. A pair of sunglasses with glittery frames obscured half her face. It wasn’t until she hopped up onto the sidewalk that I recognized her.
“Darcy?”
Darcy Stefano flung her arms around me, giving me a big hug. I hadn’t seen her since the close of a particularly difficult case that began in April with my following Darcy to Paris and wound up in July in Bakersfield.
“Jeri, what are you doing down here?” She released me, removed the sunglasses, and hooked one of the earpieces over the neck of her T-shirt as she looked me up and down. “What is it with that suit? It’s way big for you, and it makes you look like an office drone.”
“It is a tad roomy,” I admitted. The brown suit was one I’d borrowed from Ruby, and let’s face it, she had a bigger butt than I did. “And I am an office drone, sometimes.”
“First time I’ve seen you looking like one.” Darcy’s brown eyes sparkled and her voice dropped. “Are you, like, undercover?”
“Keep your voice down,” I told her. I’d just spotted two people I recognized. After reading through Ed Decker’s separation agreement, I had made a point of putting a face to the name. The large bulky man in the blue suit who was walking toward us was indeed the senior vice president of human resources, at least until some Bates higher-up dropped that agreement on him. The woman with him was the new HR director, Tonya Russell, a tall big-boned blonde in a lilac-colored suit. I’d made sure I knew what she looked like, too, after I’d heard she came from Ri
ttlestone and Weper’s Chicago office.
Neither Decker nor Russell paid any attention to Darcy and me. Instead, they jaywalked across the Embarcadero, heading toward the complex of restaurants and shops that bordered the estuary.
“You are undercover,” Darcy said, delight in her voice.
“Try to keep your exuberance under control, and don’t say anything. To anyone.”
“Hey, your secret’s safe with me.” She raised her hand as though taking an oath. “Zipped lips and all that. Which way are you going? I’ll walk with you.”
I resumed my original course in the direction of Bates. Darcy told me she’d finished her interrupted senior year of high school by taking an accelerated program in Berkeley. But she’d decided to wait awhile before going to college.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m doing it,” she crowed. “I’ve got a job. I just started last week. It doesn’t pay very much, but I really enjoy it.”
The job, she told me, was computer related. Not surprising. Darcy’s father was an entrepreneur whose firm designed and produced computer games, and her younger brother Darren had his own eclectic Web site. Some of the Stefano family Silicon Valley fairy dust had evidently rubbed off on Darcy, as well. She was working for an on-line magazine, much like one I’d encountered in cyberspace and Los Angeles while working on the previous case. It was called CyberMag, Darcy told me, and the office she worked in was located in one of the Produce District warehouses that had been converted into live-work lofts, on Third Street a few blocks from the Bates building.
“I’m just a gofer right now, but I do get to play with HTML and put in some Net time. I’m having fun. And I’m hoping to save up enough money to get my own place. And a car. I take the bus and BART to work.”
“Both of those will be hard to do if you’re not making much money,” I said. “Rents just keep going up.”
“I know. But living at home is just not making it. As you can imagine, Mom and I are like oil and water. We just don’t mix.”
“I hoped you and your mother might be getting along better.”
“It is better than it was before,” Darcy said as we rounded the corner and headed toward the Bates building. “But I don’t think we’ll ever be friends.”
“Give it a few years,” I said, thinking of my own rocky relationship with my mother. I glanced at my watch. “I’ve got to go.”
“This is where you’re working?” She wrinkled her nose and glanced at the Bates building.
“Yes. And remember—”
“I know, I know. My lips are sealed.” She looked over my shoulder and whistled softly. “Who’s the hunk?”
I turned and glanced at two men who’d just come out the door and were standing on the steps, talking. One of them was David Vanitzky. While he was interesting to look at, I’d never call him a hunk. She must be referring to the other man. Not that he wasn’t physically attractive, but he didn’t ring my chimes, either. I felt a jolt as I recognized him from the photograph on the cover of Forbes. It was Yale Rittlestone.
“They’re both too old for you,” I told Darcy.
“Why are you so interested in them?” she asked, in a stage whisper accompanied by a wicked smile. “Do they have something to do with your latest case?”
Leave it to Darcy to pick up on my curiosity about both men.
She giggled. “It’s the blond guy, right?” I shook my head and raised a cautionary finger to my lips. “He looks like he could be an industrial spy.”
Robber baron was more like it. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work, and so do you.”
She laughed again, then walked briskly across Webster and headed down Third Street. I moved up the steps of the Bates building, glancing to my left as I passed Rittlestone and Vanitzky. Rittlestone’s back was to me, but I had a clear view of Vanitzky’s face. He met my eyes and smiled briefly, then turned his attention back to whatever Rittlestone was saying.
Just as I passed them, Yale Rittlestone turned abruptly and started to move away from Vanitzky. He bumped hard into my left side. I stumbled on the steps, and Vanitzky’s hand grabbed my arm, steadying me. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
My eyes moved from him to Rittlestone, who inclined his head politely and said, “Sorry.” But he looked annoyed, as though he thought our encounter had been my fault. I guessed I was just one of those inconvenient little people, always underfoot.
“It’s Jeri, isn’t it.” Vanitzky’s hand was still on my arm. He smiled. I had the disconcerting feeling he knew exactly what was going through my mind. “Jeri works in the legal department, with Hank Irvin. This is Yale Rittlestone, one of our board members.”
Rittlestone’s face segued from polite to bored. I was quite sure that secretaries were a small blip on his radar screen. “I’ll call you later,” he told Vanitzky. Then he headed down the steps, toward a big gold Mercedes that had just pulled up to the curb.
“Not long on personality, is he?” I probably shouldn’t have said it, but the words were out of my mouth before that tempering thought entered my head.
Vanitzky chuckled and let go of my arm. “No, he isn’t.”
As I walked up the steps toward the front door, I could have sworn he winked at me. Or maybe it was a trick of the eye.
I hadn’t missed my workstation in Cube City. In fact, I was already weary of the place. I checked my voice mail and found a terse message from Cassie, telling me to call her as soon as possible. My adrenaline surged immediately as I picked up the phone and punched in Cassie’s number.
“I’ve located Lauren Musso,” Cassie told me. “She works in San Francisco, in one of those high-rises on Market Street. She can meet you after work tonight. Look for her at five-thirty, at Java City in Embarcadero Four.”
Twenty-one
I CONSULTED THE POCKET-SIZED FERRY SCHEDULE I carried in my purse. If I left Bates at exactly 4:30 P.M., I could make the 4:45 P.M. ferry from Oakland to San Francisco.
The rest of the afternoon dragged. Hank had gone to catch his plane to El Paso, and I didn’t see Patricia again. Her meeting with Nolan Ward in production must have gone into extra innings. Instead I concentrated on filing, my least favorite activity.
I managed to leave a few minutes early. Once out the front door of the Bates building, I hurried across the Embarcadero and cut across Jack London Square to the foot of Broadway and followed the shoreline path around the Waterfront Plaza Hotel, formerly the old Boatel.
I arrived at the dock at the end of Clay Street just in time to board the Blue and Gold Fleet catamaran called the Bay Breeze. At the lower level bar, I bought a round-trip ticket and went upstairs to sit on one of the outside benches.
Once the boat cast off its mooring, it chugged up the estuary, the narrow channel that separates Oakland and Alameda. On my left was the now-closed Alameda Naval Air Station. To my right was the Port of Oakland, where huge metal cranes towered hundreds of feet over massive container ships that dwarfed the ferry. Containers, each the size of a boxcar, were stacked high along the shore, waiting to be loaded onto the ships.
A sailboat glided past the ferry, heading in the opposite direction. Then a couple of Jet Skis, piloted by figures in black wet suits, played tag in the ferry’s wake. Now the Bay Breeze moved out of the estuary and onto San Francisco Bay, where the breeze blew my hair off my forehead. The afternoon sun glinted off the water as the boat moved steadily toward its destination. Here and there the bay was dotted with other vessels, a container ship riding low in the water, a sturdy tugboat, sailboats, and another ferry heading into San Francisco from Marin County. The Bay Breeze crossed under the Bay Bridge, clogged with rush-hour traffic high over our heads.
At a quarter after five the ferry docked at the commuter terminal just north of the Ferry Building. The boat rocked in the waves that greeted the shore. I rocked a little, too, as I stepped off the gangway of the boat and onto the motionless wooden pier that jutted out into th
e bay. I walked toward the city, passing a line of commuters waiting to board the ferry for its return journey to Alameda and Oakland.
I crossed the Embarcadero to Justin Herman Plaza, past the boxy concrete abstraction that was the Vaillancourt Fountain. At lunchtime the plaza was crowded with office workers enjoying meals purchased at the numerous quick lunch establishments on the lower levels of the four tall buildings that made up Embarcadero Center. There was also a food court in the walkway separating Embarcadero Four from the nearby Hyatt Regency. But it was past five now, and the walk-up and take-away joints were closed, the plaza nearly deserted. The office buildings around me were emptying of their workers, some heading for the ferry terminals, some for BART, and some for the San Francisco Municipal Railway, known as Muni.
Some were stopping at Java City, on the ground level of Embarcadero Four, to get an espresso to fuel their homeward journey. This is where I was supposed to meet Lauren Musso. I stepped up to the counter and ordered an iced latte, glancing around the shop as the young man behind the counter filled my order. I didn’t see anyone matching the description Cassie had given me. Then a dark-haired woman in a dark blue suit and sneakers strode quickly into the shop. She looked around as though espresso wasn’t her first objective.
I examined her. She was shorter than me, maybe five three, thin and vibrating with energy. About my age, I guessed, middle thirties, with just a strand of gray here and there in her short black curls. “Are you Lauren Musso?” I asked.
She appraised me with a pair of eyes so dark they looked like black olives in her tanned face. “You’re Jeri Howard?”
I stuck out my hand. “The same. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. What’ll you have? It’s on me.”
Lauren Musso eyed the latte the counterman had just set on the glass. “One of those. Only make it decaf. If I have caffeine, I’ll be bouncing off the walls all night.”
It looked as though she didn’t need caffeine for that. I nodded at the counterman, and he set to work concocting another iced latte.