The Deadliest Option, page 14
part #3 of Smith and Wetzon Mystery Series
“They ... please don’t give me away on this....”
Silvestri made a noise in his throat.
The Deputy Chief waited.
“This was before Carlton Ash was murdered. They hired my partner and me to investigate the murder—that is, Goldie’s murder.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Les!” Silvestri jet-propelled out of his seat.
“Sit down, Silvestri. I want to hear this. You said they.”
“Hoffritz, Bird, Culver, Munchen. All of them. But Hoffritz, really.”
“Now we’re talking!” McMann thumped his desk with his fist, and the intercom spat static. He turned it off without glancing at the box, as if this happened frequently. “I want your cooperation on this, Ms. Wetzon. I’m leaving it as a request. I want to remind you that you and your partner have already exposed yourselves to some danger by agreeing to do an internal investigation. I might add, this was a very foolish thing to do, Ms. Wetzon.”
“Hoffritz wanted us to find who did it before you did,” Wetzon blurted, suddenly realizing how dangerous that was.
“These people are all prime suspects. And, I repeat, they all know you’re investigating the homicide. Think about it.”
Damnation, Wetzon thought. He’s right. No outsider committed these murders and Hoffritz knew it. What had Smith gotten them into?
“I’ll do what I can,” Wetzon said, softly.
“Silvestri and Weiss are going to handle it between them from Midtown North,” the D.P. said. “I’m going to leave you here now to work out the details. Ms. Wetzon, don’t pursue any lead without clearing it with Silvestri or Weiss. Or me. I’d like your word on that.”
“Good luck,” Silvestri muttered without moving his lips, so only Wetzon and Weiss heard him.
A frisson of excitement ran up her spine. “Of course,” she said, after taking a moment to wonder if she ought to cross her fingers. This is not fun and games, Wetzon, she chided herself. She smiled at the Chief, who looked at his watch and rose.
Wetzon stood, too. “May I ask—” Silvestri clamped a hand on her shoulder, and she shook it off. She came around the conference table and held her hand out to McMann, who took it. “May I ask what the murder weapon was?”
“Don’t you know?” He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’m late for lunch with the Mayor. Tell her, Silvestri. Good to have you on board, Ms. Wetzon.”
23.
“THOSE ARE VERY nice numbers, Bert,” Smith said. “You must be doing something right over there.” She laughed seductively. “Mmmm, I’ll bet.” She made some notes on the suspect sheet in front of her. “I’ll put the bill in the mail. I hope this time we don’t have to wait till Christmas to get paid.” She turned and winked at Wetzon, who was talking to Sharon Murphy on the other phone.
“Sharon, I set up two appointments for you this week after the close. One tomorrow with Marty Rosen at Loeb Dawkins and the other on Thursday, with Carl Fisher at Dayne Becker. Both are good managers. Marty is a little more unstructured. Both firms have a decent muni bond inventory for these days.”
“And they’re both in midtown, right? I don’t want to go downtown.”
“I know. Both are midtown.”
“I’m really nervous about this, Wetzon. If they find out here I’m interviewing, they’ll fire me.”
“They’ll never find out if you don’t tell anyone, Sharon. And besides, if they fire you, it’s their loss. Your trailing twelve come to over three hundred and fifty thou. Any firm would be thrilled to have you. Just make sure you have copies of all your statements.” Wetzon hung up the phone.
“You spend altogether too much time propping up these sleazebags’ egos,” Smith scolded.
“I like Sharon, and I meant what I said to her. I wish you wouldn’t be so cynical, Smith. You’d have a lot more fun.”
“But would I make more money, sweetie pie? That’s what counts.” She pulled the calculator to her and put in some numbers. “You know what I always say, Wetzon, the secret of success is—”
“Getting the money out of their pockets into ours,” Wetzon finished for her.
“Humpf.”
“Were those Jordan Shapiro’s year-end figures you were getting from Bert?”
“They were.” Smith had a beatific smile on her face. “Would you care to hear?”
“Tell.”
“Four hundred thou.”
“Wowee! That means sixteen lovely little thou for us on the back end, plus the twelve we got last year on the front end. We did all right. I knew he’d do it. All he needed was the right environment.” Wetzon was thrilled for Jordan. On the fifty percent payout he got as part of his deal, he’d made himself two hundred thousand dollars.
Harold knocked on their door and came right in without waiting. “Hi.” His eyes blinked nervously behind his glasses.
“Insufferable,” Smith said, eyes to the ceiling. They had asked him again and again to wait for a response before opening their door.
“Don’t make a big deal,” Wetzon said, out of the corner of her mouth.
Smith brought her eyes back to Harold’s rolled-up shirtsleeves and pants riding low on his hips, dragging over the heels of his shoes. “What is it, baby pie?” Her tone was saccharine.
Harold looked uncertainly from Smith to Wetzon.
“Go on, please, Harold,” Wetzon said.
“We have five candidates for Luwisher Brothers ready to be set up.” He held a stack of suspect sheets.
“Excellent. Give them to me and I’ll introduce them,” Smith said, holding out her hand.
“Er ... ah, I thought I could do it.” He did not turn over the suspect sheets.
Smith snapped her fingers at him. “Think again.”
Harold’s face fell as he gave her the sheets. “We’re still talking to people.”
“Fine. Close the door behind you.” She turned her back on him. The door closed. “Is he gone?”
“Smith, you are being dreadful to him.”
“I don’t trust him. Don’t you notice how he doesn’t look you in the eye? How do we know he isn’t going to go out and join a competitor or open his own company? You said yourself he thinks he knows everything.”
“Oh, come on. He wouldn’t do that. He’s kind of attached to you, don’t you think?”
“Humpf.” Smith opened the bathroom door and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. “I think we ought to go over the questions we’re going to ask Janet Barnes today over lunch.”
“Okay.”
Smith patted her slim hips and turned and looked over her shoulder at her rear view. “I think I’m putting on weight.” She was wearing a snug white linen dress that only the tallest, thinnest woman in the world could get away with.
“You’re not. But if you think you are, why don’t you try some exercise?”
“Exercise?”
“You know—dancing, aerobics, jogging.”
“Sex?”
“I won’t touch that.” Wetzon grinned. “Do you want me to call Chris with our candidates?”
“Oh, would you, sweetie? I thought I might run over to Vicki’s and get my polish changed. It’s only ten o’clock; lunch isn’t till twelve-thirty.” She dumped the suspect sheets on Wetzon’s desk.
“Go ahead.” Wetzon flipped through the sheets. “These are pretty good people. If they don’t work for Luwisher Brothers, we can remarket them to the Bear.” Smith didn’t respond. Wetzon was talking to an empty room. Sighing, she picked up the phone and punched out Chris’s direct number.
“Hi, what’ve you got?” His tone was always so intimate, almost as if he was coming on to her over the phone. This was the style of the brokers trained in a cold-calling boutique. Chris talked to everyone that way.
She talked bullets to him, running quickly down the candidates and setting up appointments. She was about to hang up when he said, “How’re things?” He hadn’t said a word yet about Carlton Ash.
“You missed a little excitement on Saturday.”
“So I heard.”
“I don’t suppose you ran into Dr. Ash up there before I saw you?”
“Don’t suppose, Wetzon. It might be bad for your health.”
“Hey! What kind of thing is that to say?”
“No, I didn’t see Ash. I was there to pick up some papers I had to read over the weekend. The place was empty.” He laughed harshly. “Trying to earn your fee as a detective, I see.”
“Oh, come on, Chris. I thought we were friends. What is this about?”
“You’re so serious about everything, Wetzon.” He laughed again. “Can you meet me for an early dinner on Thursday? I’ll pick you up at the office.”
“Oh? Care to give me a clue what this is about?”
“Didn’t you just say to me you thought we were friends?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have some business to discuss with my friend. What else?”
She found the whispered intimacy in his voice suddenly disquieting, but her schedule was clear for Thursday dinner. “Thursday is fine,” she said.
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic, Wetzon,” Chris said.
She hung up. He wanted to move out of Luwisher Brothers. Or were they pushing him out, as they were Ellie? She grimaced. This was such a puzzle. And she was a mole. She wondered if she should tell Silvestri she was having dinner with Chris on Thursday. She had to admit to herself, she liked being on the inside of an investigation. It was exciting, and the tiny element of danger was a turn-on.
Pacing, she opened the door to the outer office and left it open. She wanted to hear noise, people talking. She moved the blinds aside and stared out the French doors to the garden, unseeing. She saw Goldie’s blue head on the platter of arugula.
She thought again about how she had confronted Silvestri after the D.P. left. “So now, Silvestri, you’ve got what you wanted. Give me my quid pro quo.” She’d been angry that he’d trapped her into agreeing to work with them. Now there was no doubt she would be betraying a client.
Weiss’s face wore an amused smile. He’d lit a cigarette, tilted his head back, and blown perfect smoke rings.
“Come on, Silvestri,” she’d said. “Give. What was it? Arsenic? Strychnine? Cyanide? Lye? Rat poison?” Her feet had punctuated each poison with a tap step.
“Cut it out, Les.” Silvestri’s eyes were slate cold. “They were both killed with a massive dose of sulfite powder. “
That had stopped her dead. “Sulfite powder?”
“Yeah,” he’d grunted. “Now are you any smarter than you were before?”
Silvestri was right—knowing what the poison was didn’t make any difference one way or the other, except to satisfy her curiosity.
The phone rang.
“Smith and Wetzon,” B.B. said. “Hold on.” He looked up. “Len Bernhardt for you.”
“Good. That’ll be about Tony Weinstein, if you want to listen, B.B. Come on in.” B.B. had cold-called Tony Weinstein and turned him over to Wetzon as a very viable candidate. Tony was a million-dollar producer who was unhappy with the merger of Hutton and Shearson. “Hi, Len.”
“He didn’t show up again, Wetzon. I’ve had it. You call him and tell him if he doesn’t get his statements over here and give me a start date, it’s finished. Over.” She held the phone away from her ear. Len was so angry, B.B. could hear every word.
“Oh, dear, I’m sorry. I’ll see what happened.” She hung up.
B.B. was upset. His bonus was based on the candidates he’d cold-called who were placed. “That’s terrible. Where else can we send him?”
“Tony does well over a million in production, B.B. Len will forgive him. Everyone will lie a little, and Tony will eventually go there because it’s the best deal on the Street.”
By the time Smith got back, Wetzon had made most of her calls and had smoothed things over between Weinstein and Bernhardt.
“It’s ghastly out there,” Smith said. She fanned herself with The Journal “What did I miss?” She held her long fingers out for Wetzon to admire the white-tipped French manicure.
“Very nice.”
“Goes great with my tan. Anything I should know about? Have you talked with Ellie Kaplan?” She frowned. “Fix your hair, it’s slipping.”
“No, I haven’t talked with Ellie yet, but I will. We’ve had the usual cancellations, reschedules, and Tony Weinstein stood Len Bernhardt up again.” She’d forgotten about Ellie. Or maybe she was avoiding dealing with her.
“A day like any other day.” She flipped through her pink message slips. “I have a couple of possible new clients to talk to.”
“Good ones, I hope. No more small firms with cash flow problems, please,” Wetzon said, checking her makeup in the bathroom mirror and repinning her hair, although there was nothing wrong with it.
“Why, Wetzon, sweetie pie. You’re beginning to sound like me.”
Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, Wetzon thought, as they sat in the cab on their way to Janet Barnes’s apartment on Park Avenue. God, that was awful, she admonished herself. How could she think such a thing? She was definitely losing it.
Wrightman House, an apartment building with the look of an armory, stretched the whole block between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets. It had been built in the twenties and had a huge drive-in courtyard, similar to only about five or six other buildings in Manhattan, including the Apthorp on Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street and the Dakota on Central Park West.
A doorman dressed like an English bobby took their names, writing them on a card. The card was then delivered into the hands of another bobby, who took it into a sideroom and phoned upstairs.
Smith and Wetzon were invited to wait in a plush reception room just like the lobby of a grand hotel, complete with oil paintings of medieval scenes and a Max Ernst sculpture.
“Jesus,” Wetzon said. “Is this the palace?”
Smith giggled. “Don’t be gauche, Wetzon.”
“Ms. Smith and Ms. Wetzon?” The phone bobby came to the entrance. “You may go up now. Mrs. Barnes is in apartment nine. That’s the elevator to your left.”
Smith rolled her eyes at Wetzon and stood up.
“Don’t be gauche, Smith.”
They walked in the direction the bobby had pointed. “What floor did he say?” Smith asked.
“I don’t remember. You distracted me. Did he say nine?”
“I don’t know. Be a sweetie and run back and ask him.” Smith pressed the up button on the elevator.
Oh, well, what the hell, Wetzon thought, walking across the thickly carpeted floor to the phone room, from which the sound of buzzing could be heard.
“Yes, Mrs. Barnes.”
Wetzon stopped outside the door.
“I will, Mrs. Barnes. Yes.” Then, “Patrick, have a cab ready for Mr. Culver. He’s coming down in the service elevator.”
24.
MISS SMITH AND Miss Wetzon, madam,” the butler announced in a formal English accent.
Janet Barnes looked remarkably well for a woman who had just lost her husband of forty years. Her hair was the same glinty auburn it had been when she was the spokeswoman for a washing machine company decades earlier. She broke off her conversation with the two men in the room and rose to meet them. “Thank you so much for coming.” She was gushy, and dishonest, and seemed to be performing for the men, who didn’t take their eyes off her.
Like the entrance gallery, the room they stood in had a high ceiling. Sheer white organdy covered the tall windows along one wall, and the furniture was slipcovered in a green-and-white lily pattern. An elaborately inlaid parquet floor peeked out from under Turkish rugs that lay one on the other in an ostensibly careless configuration.
“Do you know Alton?” Janet Barnes waved her hand casually at Alton Pinkus, whom Wetzon recognized from the disastrous dinner for Goldie. Pinkus had stood when they came into the room, and now he shook hands with first Smith and then Wetzon. Although an effort had been made to comb his iron-gray hair straight back, it hadn’t worked, and in fact, gave him a shaggy appearance. Humor and intelligence radiated from his warm brown eyes. He was wearing a navy blazer and navy pants, but with a white LaCoste tee shirt and scuffed loafers with white socks.
“And this is Twoey,” Janet said.
The other man, who had also risen, came forward. His auburn hair was a natural version of his mother’s. “Ms. Wetzon,” he said, speaking with a slight and not unattractive lisp. Goldie’s son had hazel eyes with dark brown flecks that looked out from behind gold-rimmed glasses, and a multitude of freckles covered his cheeks, chin, and forehead. He looked to be in his late thirties and was a big man, with his late father’s build.
“Mr. Barnes,” Wetzon said. Twoey had a firm, slightly damp handshake and freckles under the orange hair on the back of his hand.
“Ms. Smith.” Twoey turned to Smith and was gone. Wetzon, watching, couldn’t believe it.
“Mr. Barnes,” Smith said, in her little-girl voice, out-gushing Janet. She put her hand in his as if she were offering herself to him.
“Please call me Twoey. Everybody does.” He was still holding her hand, almost leaning into her.
Smith smiled, enveloping everyone in her aura. “If that’s what you want ... actually, Goldman is a very nice name.”
“It is now, Ms. Smith,” Twoey said. He kept trying to tear his eyes from Smith, but it wasn’t working.
“Oh, dear, please call me Xenia. And everyone just calls Wetzon, Wetzon.” Smith smiled into Twoey’s eyes.
He’s a total goner, Wetzon thought, revolted by Smith’s performance. What a wuss. And then she remembered how Smith had done much the same thing to Silvestri when she’d first met him, and he’d recovered. Wetzon mentally forgave Twoey. Smith was the most seductive person Wetzon had ever known, and she should be used to Smith’s effect on men by this time. The mark of a real man, for Wetzon, was how long the spell lasted.
“Luncheon is served, madam,” the butler said. He looked like a comic-opera butler, a gangly, cadaverous man with a face so narrow it looked as if it had been squeezed in a vise and set that way. When he bowed, Wetzon saw that his hair barely covered his pink scalp.
