The Big Killing (14 page)
Authors: Annette Meyers
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Financial, #Crime Fiction
“Is Smith coming back?”
“Don’t know. I doubt it.” She walked to Smith’s desk and looked at her appointment book. Next to two-thirty were the distinct initials G.T.
G.T.
Wetzon frowned. Mark’s teacher? No. Mark’s teacher had a funny name—they had laughed about it—what was it? Oh yes, Alice Littlejohn. Who was G.T.? She waved to Harold and walked out into the gentle afternoon sun.
She stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of their office and then walked briskly toward Second Avenue. She stopped dead in her tracks.
G.T.
Georgie Travers.
What would Smith be doing with Georgie Travers, whom she loathed? And who said G.T. had to be Georgie Travers?
Wetzon hesitated on the corner of Second Avenue. Which way should she walk? She decided to take the scenic route up Fifth Avenue to Central Park South.
If you think too much, you’ll get crazy
, she told herself.
Look at the people on the street
,
look in the store windows
. She looked at a leggy young woman with a disarray of long, dark hair held up in places with plastic combs and clips, and dangling, mismatched earrings—contrived SoHo-ian havoc—who was leaning against a big blue mailbox on the west side of Forty-ninth Street, lacing high white boots. She wore a short black tunic, mid-thigh length, over black tights. She straightened up and stared back at Wetzon, who had not realized she was staring. Abashed, Wetzon moved hurriedly toward Fifth Avenue.
You are forgetting your manners, old dear
, she thought. Which reminded her of Carlos. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if his career was born again. He missed the gypsy life more than she did. He missed the excitement and the gossip and the camaraderie. It seemed not to have worn him down as much as it had her.
She eyed the display of short metallic evening dresses in Saks’s Forty-ninth Street window skeptically. Who would ever wear anything like that? Certainly no one she knew.
A cool breeze came out of the sun-drenched clouds and caught her unexpectedly. She felt a chill and then the sudden, odd sensation of being watched. She swung around, remembering the previous day’s terror of the hand shoving her into the traffic.
Shoppers, gawking tourists hung with cameras, messengers, Senegalese peddlers with their knockoffs of designer watches, the usual Fifth Avenue mix of people and costumes. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the girl in the Robin Hood costume—boots, tights, tunic—staring into another Saks window nearby. But she was paying no attention to Wetzon. There was no sense of recognition, or menace, for that matter.
Wetzon shook her head. She was getting jumpy. She continued on her way, but this time she moved faster.
I. Miller on Fifty-seventh and Fifth was having a sale on Ferragamo shoes. She marched herself right in and tried on a pair of black patent leather pumps with her usual two-inch heels. They were wonderful. She bought them in patent, white, and navy and arranged to have them delivered. As she waited for her American Express Card to be returned, she looked out past the display window onto Fifty-seventh Street and saw, once again, the girl with the tousled dark hair. She seemed to be waiting for someone.
When Wetzon left I. Miller, the girl was gone. She crossed Fifty-seventh Street and walked toward The Plaza and Central Park South.
“Do you want to go Trumping?” she heard a woman carrying a Bergdorf’s shopping bag say to another with a Bonwit’s bag. Trumping. That was a new one. They were referring to the shops in the Trump Tower across Fifth Avenue from I. Miller. Tiny, expensive shops and boutiques clustered amid pink marble. It was a beautiful, if slightly voluptuous, place, with its tall waterfall, the expensive noshery nearby, and the grand piano with a cocktail pianist in the lobby.
Whenever she passed The Plaza she thought of the scene in
The Way We Were
where Robert Redford comes out of The Plaza with a very white-bread-looking woman, and Barbra Streisand, very ethnic, is across the street asking people to sign “ban the bomb” petitions. It made her feel very sad, as if she really knew those people. She was thinking about Katie and Hubbell, the Redford and Streisand characters, as she walked up Central Park South. She paused at the St. Moritz’s Café de la Paix, where tourists were having iced drinks outside, and caught another glimpse of the girl in the tunic and tights, who, seeing Wetzon, scurried into the St. Moritz lobby.
This was too coincidental. For some peculiar reason, the girl was following her. Was she angry because Wetzon had stared at her when she had first seen her leaning against the mailbox?
As Wetzon stood mulling this over, she watched a man pedal by in the barrel seat of a sports car—just the seat, not the car. He was steering with a rod that came up like a joystick between his feet. Momentarily, the strange contraption almost made her forget her bizarre shadow.
As soon as the light changed, Wetzon plunged into Central Park. Her briefcase seemed to be getting heavier and heavier, a sure sign that she was tired. From behind the stone wall she watched the girl come out of the St. Moritz and look around.
Unexpectedly, the girl crossed the street and headed in Wetzon’s direction. Wetzon, feeling a stab of fear she knew was irrational, took off, aiming for Central Park West, dodging nannies with babies in carriages, screaming children with dripping ice cream cones, joggers, the elderly who sat sunning on park benches. A big black dog braced his massive paws and began barking furiously at her as she came out on Sixty-fifth Street.
She had literally raced through the Park, not breaking pace until she made the turn onto Columbus Avenue and was back on her home turf, the West Side. Panting and sticky, she stopped to catch her breath in front of Trocadero, with its wonderful window of French-style sportswear, when, to her consternation, she saw the girl she was running from, now loitering in front of Furla’s, acting for all the world as if she were casually looking at the handbags in the shop window.
Damnation, Wetzon thought, more angry than frightened. She’d put a stop to this. When the girl looked away for a moment, Wetzon tucked her briefcase under her arm and bolted up the street to Sedutto’s, the ice cream shop. She went through the back of Sedutto’s into Diane’s, the burger house attached to it, and around to the front doorway of Diane’s. The girl came up the street after her, looking right and left; when she reached the entrance to Diane’s, Wetzon jumped out, grabbing her arm.
“I’ve got you now,” Wetzon said indignantly, shaking her, as the girl tried to pull away. “Who are you and why have you been following me?”
The girl stared at her and, to Wetzon’s horror, her face crumpled and she began to cry.
“Oh, shit,” Wetzon said, instantly feeling like an ogre.
“Oh, God.” The girl sobbed, tears gushing down her thin cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how.” Her accent was basic Bronx.
“Come on now,” Wetzon said, distressed. Everyone was looking at them curiously, sliding past, warily. She put her arm around the surprisingly muscular shoulders of the sobbing girl. “Cafe La Fortuna’s around the corner. Why don’t we just sit down and you can talk to me there.”
The girl sniffed noisily, drew a yellow Kleenex out of a tiny, hot pink shoulder bag, and blew her nose. They sat at an outside table. Wetzon was embarrassed by the mountain of fear she had built out of nothing. And now she felt mean, even a bully. “How about a cappuccino?” the mean bully asked.
The girl nodded. Tears had streaked her mascara and black eyeliner, which ran unevenly down her face. She looked like a little girl who had put on her mother’s makeup and made a mess of it.
Wetzon ordered two cappuccinos and said to the girl, “Do you know me?”
The girl snuffled. “You’re Wetzon.”
“Okay. Do I know you?”
The girl groped in her pink bag for another Kleenex and gulped and hiccupped as the tears returned. She shook her head. A purple comb slipped from her hair and landed at her booted feet.
Wetzon took a small pack of tissues from her handbag and gave it to the girl.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the girl mumbled, mopping up her face.
“Who are you?”
The waiter put two cinnamon-dusted frothy cappuccinos in front of them and discreetly departed.
“My name is Ann Buffolino.”
“Ann Buffolino?” The name meant nothing to Wetzon. Then a little glimmer of light flickered in her mind. “Wait a minute. Are you Buffie?” she asked, knowing the answer before it came.
“Barry and I were going to get married.” Ann Buffolino’s pale brown eyes watered up and tears dribbled down over rouged cheeks.
“I know.” In response to the question on Buffie’s wan face, Wetzon added, “Georgie told me.”
“Oh, you know Georgie.” It was more a statement than a question.
“Very slightly.” Better than she wanted to know him.
“We all went to school together.” Buffie looked down at the wads of damp Kleenex next to her untouched cappuccino. An immense teardrop rolled slowly down her nose and teetered on the tip, ignored. “We were a team. All for one, one for all. Like
The Three Musketeers
—we love those old movies.”
“Without D’Artagnan?” Wetzon asked. Buffie probably wouldn’t know the reference.
But Buffie surprised her. “Barry was D’Artagnan.” She swiped the tear from her nose with the back of her hand. “He’s so handsome. I mean, he was, wasn’t he? I can’t believe he’s dead.” She pressed her palms to her face and rubbed her swollen eyes. She looked like a hurt child.
Wetzon, commiserating, patted her shoulder, noting at the same time how large Buffie’s hands were for such a small girl. Her fingers were ringless; chipped, bright pink polish covered long oval nails. “I’m so sorry. Do you have family? You really shouldn’t be alone now.”
Buffie gulped and made a small burp. She licked the cappuccino foam from her lips. “I have my work,” she said. Her dangling earrings swung back and forth as she moved her head. “This is good. And the boys have been wonderful to me—especially Georgie.”
“What kind of work do you do?” Something warm and living brushed Wetzon’s leg. Startled, she looked down and saw a huge, orange-striped cat, purring loudly, rubbing against her. Wetzon sneezed. She was allergic to cats.
“Oh, there’s a sweet thing,” Buffie said, picking up the cat, stroking it. “I teach aerobics at Body Beauty by Rita on Seventy-ninth Street.” She fell silent, her eyes expectantly on Wetzon.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” Wetzon wouldn’t have matched Barry with Ann Buffolino—not in a million years. The girl was strange, flaky, but maybe it was because she was still in shock. She wondered if Barry would really have married her. The orange cat undulated luxuriantly against Buffie’s black tunic, leaving a trail of short orange hairs, and then curled up contentedly in her meager lap and went to sleep.
Buffie, hands folded neatly over the orange pillow that was the cat, became clear-eyed. “Barry said he was going to take care of me if something happened to him. He told me he wrote his life story and that I was to call this lady— Mildred Gleason—and she would pay me the insurance money.”
Wetzon closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Buffie had just, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps deliberately, disclosed a whole new facet of Barry’s murder. “Haven’t you talked to the police?”
Buffie looked at Wetzon as if Wetzon were crazy. “Oh, yes, yesterday, but I wouldn’t tell them anything about this.”
“Why not? It might help find out who murdered Barry.”
“Then I wouldn’t have anything,” the girl said plaintively. “And he meant for me to have it. I loved Barry, but there’s no way I can bring him back. Georgie told me you had to know where he hid it because you were the last person he talked to.”
“I told Georgie that Barry didn’t say anything to me about anything. I didn’t even know about you until Georgie told me. You have to tell the police what you know.” Wetzon was beginning to suspect that Georgie had set her up.
“I don’t know what to do.” Without warning, Buffie put her head in her hands and started weeping again. The cat awoke and jumped off her lap, tail twitching.
The shadows on the brownstones around them had lengthened. They were now sitting in the shade, and the air began to cool.
“Buffie, please don’t cry.” Wetzon looked at her watch. It was almost four. “Tell me what Barry said about this life story of his. Maybe I can help you find it.”
Buffie dried her eyes with the remnants of her Kleenex, not using the pack Wetzon had offered. She sniffled and coughed. “It was after his boss started hassling him.”
“Jake Donahue?”
“Yeah. Jake said to him, ‘I’ve been known to put bullets in people’s heads.’ Once he even got a gun out of his desk and pointed it at Barry. Barry went crazy.”
“Why would Jake say something like that to Barry?” No wonder Barry had a gun in his attaché case.
“I don’t know, but Barry said Jake would be sorry when he and Mildred Gleason got through with him.”
“What else did he say about Mildred Gleason? Georgie told me Barry was doing a deal with her.” The light was dawning. Mildred Gleason would have to get on line behind Georgie and Buffie and everyone else who was determined to find out Barry’s last words to Wetzon.
“I guess.” Buffie dipped her head and began to pick at her chipped nail polish. “He didn’t talk much about business when he came up.”
“You didn’t live together?”
“Oh, off and on.” Tears welled up in the puffy eyes. “I don’t understand how it could have happened, and why he didn’t tell me where it was.”
“It must be in your apartment—or his.”
“It’s not in his.” She was very matter-of-fact.
“How do you know?”
What are you doing
? she thought.
You are interviewing her like a
detective.
On the other hand, she had noticed that lately people were telling her things that they might not have told the police. Maybe she could put all the information together and help Silvestri—
“Because Georgie and I went down and looked.”
“I’m really sorry, Buffie, but I don’t know anything that could help you.” Wetzon looked around for the waiter. “Maybe Barry changed his mind about writing it.” Somehow she couldn’t see Barry sitting down and writing his autobiography. “Or maybe he left it with someone else.”
Buffie became agitated. “No! No! He wouldn’t have given it to her. He couldn’t. It was mine, my insurance. He promised!”
“Her? I’m sorry.” Did Buffie know about the other woman, the one from Donahue’s, whom Georgie had said Barry was seeing?
“I saw him with her—”
“Who was she?”
“How would I know?” Buffie seemed annoyed that she’d been interrupted.
“I’m so sorry,” Wetzon said for the umpteenth time, not knowing what else to say. “When was this?”
“It was last fall, October, around Halloween because I remember the jack-o’-lanterns....” Buffie dabbed at her eyes. “He used to meet me at my place.... My last class didn’t end till nine o’clock. He was always on the phone—you know Barry—but this one time he sort of turned his back when I came in. He was acting kind of funny.” Her lower lip pursed querulously.
“What do you mean, funny?”
“Well, you know, kind of secretive, like he was hiding something.”
The waiter drifted in their direction. He moved like a dancer, which he probably was. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked. He had a nice voice. Wetzon shook her head.
“Anyway,” Buffie continued, wound up, “I asked him if something was going on I should know about.” There was a faint suggestion of anger in the swollen brown eyes. Her large hands clenched and unclenched on the table. “And he said it had nothing to do with me, that he was doing a special deal and it was secret, that it was the thing he’d been waiting all his life for. He would tell me about it when it was done.”
“I still don’t understand how you know there was someone else.” Damnation. She was getting more deeply involved, felt herself being dragged into the maelstrom that had led to Barry Stark’s death.
“Because he got up real early the next morning and told me he had to meet someone before work.” The small face hardened. “So I followed him.” She smirked, singularly unwaiflike, almost cunning.
“So you saw what the woman looked like?”
“Not really. He left my place real early, around eight. I waited a few minutes, then I went after him. It was cold, colder than I thought, and I only had a sweater on over my leotards, but I had to see. He was walking fast down Central Park West and then he went into the Park at Seventy-second Street. There were some people around, you know, so I just pretended to be a jogger and kept out of his sight.” She laughed, all involved in the drama of her story. Color crept back in her face. “He was cold, too. I could tell because he kept clapping his hands together.”
Across the street, the car alarm on a white Porsche went off. Two teenagers, leaning on the car, dropped their beer cans and took off, yelling curses in Spanish. A gaunt black man came out of the brownstone closest to the car and walked around it, patted the gleaming hood lovingly, then turned off the alarm and went back inside.
Buffie leaned forward, sat back, pulled at her tunic, and crossed her legs. “When he got to the Tavern on the Green, he cut downtown, and I don’t ever remember being in that section of the Park. We went down this steep hill, and he stopped to look at, you know, some statue of a dog. I began to smell something funny and then I remembered about the zoo being there. He went right in, but I couldn’t follow him—it was too open. The only person around was this fat old lady with a supermarket cart stuffed with bundles and bags. She smelled worse than the animals.” Buffie’s nose wrinkled. “I sort of hid behind her. Barry kept looking at his watch and walking back and forth like he was trying to keep warm. Once I thought I lost him but then I saw him with a container of coffee.” She twitched nervously in her chair. “He didn’t see her coming, but I did—”
“How did you know—”
The waiter brought the check, and Wetzon put five dollars on the table, anchoring it under her mug. The late afternoon shadows had lengthened almost grotesquely. Wetzon shivered.
“I don’t know ... she didn’t fit there, I guess. They walked a little while. At first I thought they were arguing. Then he put his arm around her, and they went into one of the animal houses. There was nobody around and I thought they were going to do it right there. I hid near the entrance—and I saw them talking real close, but I couldn’t hear anything except the monkeys screaming. And all the time he was holding her hand.” Again, decidedly unwaiflike, Buffie glared at Wetzon. “I could have killed him.”
Wetzon stiffened. In spite of everything, she was shocked by the confession and by the sudden change in Buffie’s personality.
“But I didn’t—I couldn’t,” Buffie said hastily.
“I know you didn’t.” But Wetzon couldn’t help wondering just how upset Buffie had been. She reached for her briefcase. She wanted to run away, get home, hide. “I have an appointment,” she murmured.
Buffie was staring down at her hands, rubbing the protruding knuckles of her thumbs. “Barry always said he could trust you. He
must
have told you where he put his stuff.”
Wetzon sighed. Why was everyone continually carping at her about this? “But he didn’t. If it’s not in his apartment and it wasn’t in his locker, as Georgie claims, where else could it be?”
Buffie stood. “Please, Wetzon, it won’t take long—I live near here—could you come up and help me look again? Barry always said you were real smart. Maybe you’ll see something we didn’t see.”
Why did she always have such a tough time saying no? Wetzon mused as she walked with Buffie up Columbus to Seventy-fourth Street. If she had said no to Barry in the first place, she would never have gotten involved in this mess. But as Carlos said,
no
wasn’t in her lexicon.
“Buffie, how do you know Barry was still seeing this woman? That was at least six months ago. Maybe it was just a—”
“Because he was still talking to her on the phone and making dates with her last week, that’s how,” Buffie responded belligerently.
“What did she look like? Could you see her from where you were standing?”
Buffie played with the strap of her pink shoulder bag, swinging it as she walked. “I could tell she was tall, almost as tall as Barry. And she was wearing this long, black leather trench coat. I couldn’t see her face because she had big, dark glasses and a scarf on her head, tied under her chin.”
