The Deadliest Option (6 page)

“Now I take it you’re an expert in forensic medicine?”

“Humpf. You know I have good instincts. Besides, the cards say—”

“The cards say we should investigate a murder?”

“Well, no, not exactly.” She smiled at Wetzon. “Admit it, sweetie pie, you’re just a wee bit mad that I’m involved in this, and you don’t have it all to yourself.”

“That’s not true, and you know it.” Wetzon found herself sputtering.
Was Smith right? No, she couldn’t be.

“Wetzon.” B.B. was at the door. “Howie Minton for you.”

“Howie Minton?” Smith groaned. “Not again. How many years is this?”

“He called last week. “ Wetzon laughed. She stood up and brushed the crumbs off her skirt. “Tell him I’ll be right there, B.B.” To Smith, she said, “He wants to try again. I think I’ve been working with him for over five years now, right?”

“At least.” Smith tucked her chin back in the reflector.

“This is it, he says.”

“Humpf.”

“This time may be for real. L.L. Rosenkind has stopped doing principal business. I told Howie to think it over and call me only if he was really serious.”

“Give me a break.”

“He’s grossing over a million for his trailing twelve months.”

Smith dropped the reflector with a thump. “Jeeezus!”

“Smith.” B.B. appeared at the door again. “Jake.”

“Oh, good.” Smith followed Wetzon into their office. “Clean up out here, B.B., will you? There’s a good fellow.”

They separated, went to their respective corners and reached for their phones.

“Jake, precious,” Smith breathed.

“Hi, Howie,” Wetzon said.

B.B. came back into the room with the remains of their lunch and a stricken look on his face. “Wetzon,” he whispered. “I forgot to tell you. A letter came for you by messenger. It’s on your desk.”

“I’ve thought it over, Wetzon, my friend,” Howie’s unctuous voice spilled out of the receiver. “I want to go forward. I’m going to take a vacation for a week and then we can get started.”

Wetzon picked up the letter on her desk. It was addressed to her in violet ink. The paper was heavy rag of the Tiffany type.

“You’re such a darling—” Smith was saying.

“Great, Howie,” Wetzon said, turning the letter over and tearing it open with her finger. “I’m going to make up a list of firms for you and then we can talk again when you get back.”

She hung up the phone in time to hear Smith say, “She’s jealous that I’m stealing her thunder on this one.”

Furious, she swiveled around in her chair, ready to do battle with Smith, automatically pulling the notecard from the envelope. The signature caught her eye and stopped her. It was from Janet Barnes.

The grieving widow was inviting them to lunch on Monday.

W
ETZON CAME OUT
on Fifty-seventh Street after her ballet class feeling euphoric, as she always did after class, so alive her skin tingled with antennae, decidedly an extrasensory sensation. Her long, ash-blonde hair, which she had taken down out of its usual topknot, swung back and forth in a loose ponytail, drying the damp wisps around her scalp. As she headed toward Broadway, she was thinking she might walk home. It was still light and she would be just another suit walking home in her Reeboks—the ubiquitous Manhattan professional woman’s outfit.

“Yoo hoo, Birdie!” Carlos was standing on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-seventh, or rather, he was doing jetés, his slender, lithe body as limber as it was when they were both chorus dancers—gypsies—on Broadway.

“You’re making a scene, you gorgeous creature.” She captured him by putting her hands on his shoulders and holding him down and planting a kiss on his lips. They were exactly the same height.

“As if I cared.” He tossed his dark head. The large diamond stud in his left earlobe sparkled. In fact, everything about Carlos sparkled. “I’m not the one in the business suit and the ugly shoes. Are you ashamed of your old friends?” He gave her a stern look, but he was smiling broadly, and there was that devilish glint in his jet eyes.

“What a terrible thing to say, but just what I’d expect from you.” Carlos hated her business, felt it was heartless and sleazy. It was a bone of contention between them, so they tried not to talk about it. Or at least, Wetzon tried and he brought it up all the time. “Where are you heading?”

“Up to Arthur’s.” He slipped his arm around her and grabbed her briefcase.

“How is Arthur?” She made a halfhearted attempt to get her case back, then gave up.

“Up to his
pupick
in trusts and estates. How is it with the sergeant?” They began walking up Broadway.

“He made lieutenant.”

“Nice. Now he can afford a wife.”

She stopped and shook her finger at him. “Look at me, monster. Do you see me as wifey?”

He stared at her, tilted his head back and around, and closed one dark, mischief-making eye, fluttering its eyelid. “Oh, I don’t know. You might look good in an apron.”

“Don’t you dare say another word.” They began walking again, in time. “I just took a class—”

“I could tell.”

“How? And if this is another humorous remark at my expense you can forget about getting the afghan back in July.” They co-owned a red, white, and blue afghan they had crocheted together in honor of the bicentennial while they were dancing in
Chicago
for Bob Fosse in 1976. They had agreed to share it, each taking it for a year, and this was her year—at least until July 4th.

“No, honestly, Birdie. You’ve totally lost your sense of humor since you went into business with the Barracuda.”

“Don’t start.” Carlos and Smith loathed each other, and Wetzon made sure to keep them apart because together there were always dangerous fireworks.

“Darling, it makes me crazy that you don’t see what a manipulating liar that woman is.” They were walking arm in arm, lefts together, rights together.

“What’s new in your life?”

“Changing the subject?”

“Trying to.”

“Okay. I quit—for now. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Let’s see, what’s new? Oh, well, la-di-da. I’m talking to Mort Hornberg about choreographing his new musical.”

Wetzon pulled them to a stop. “La-di-da? That’s absolutely sensational!”

Wetzon and Carlos had known each other since Wetzon’s first week in New York, where she had come to be a dancer. They’d met in a class, partnered each other in Broadway musicals, road tours, summer stock. They’d worked with Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, and Ron Field, all gone now. As chorus dancers they’d moved from show to show, opening to closing, until Wetzon had met Smith. The meeting came at a time in Wetzon’s life when, having entered her thirties, she’d felt she didn’t want to be an aging gypsy. She was tired of scrimping and saving, tired of unemployment insurance and living in a tiny, dark apartment five flights up.

Smith had proposed they go into business together and Wetzon had listened. That all seemed a hundred years ago. Now they were the most respected, possibly the best, of the headhunters that worked the Street. Wetzon had been able to move out of her five-flight walk-up and had bought her four and a half rooms on West Eighty-sixth Street.

Carlos, too, had seen the handwriting of time on the wall. He knew there were few parts for aging male dancers, but he’d started a business while they were still doing twinkle toes over Broadway in the chorus of
42nd Street.
Princely—for Carlos Prince—Service. Princely Service employed out-of-work gypsies and was so incredibly successful that soon enough Carlos was able to run the business from his Greenwich Village apartment, sending dancers out all over the city to clean homes, shop, get dinner started for Yuppies. Then, four years ago, Marshall Bart, who had started with them in the chorus and had become a choreographer, offered Carlos an opportunity to co-choreograph a new musical with him because Marshall was handling the director’s chores as well. The rest was history. Carlos was back in the theater, now as a full-time choreographer, and he’d hired another aging gypsy to run Princely Service for him.

On Seventy-fourth Street, the Fairway market lured them with the smell of ripe strawberries for ninety-nine cents a box. Wetzon bought two boxes and found Carlos inside at the cheese department, discussing a Vermont cheesemaker with the counterman.

She put her finger in his sleek side under his ribcage. “Hand over that briefcase and keep your mouth shut.”

He handed over her briefcase, deadpan, and raised his hands. “You can put your gat away now.”

“The Amsterdam Festival is on Sunday. Do you want to do it?”

“Sure. After twelve. I need my beauty sleep.”

“I’ll call you.” She kissed the back of his neck, and grinned at his elaborate shudder. He was her best friend. He made her laugh. They had shared a lot of laughter and a lot of sorrow together—sorrow particularly lately when every day someone they’d worked with came down with some form of AIDS.

“Ta ta, little one.” Carlos blew her a kiss.

Bless him and keep him well
, she thought. Cutting over to Amsterdam Avenue, she walked up past Baci, where Jerome Robbins sat facing the street, reading and eating a pasta dinner. No one bothered him, yet everyone must have known who he was.
The glorious West Side
, she was thinking, as Jimmy Breslin strolled toward her. She loved the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There was a casual neighborliness—a live-and-let-live attitude toward the fairly well known, even the famous. The Upper West Side did not have the ostentation of the East Side or the self-consciousness of the Village, but its own definite personality created in large part by the people in the arts—actors, dancers, musicians, and writers—who had settled in during the sixties and seventies because the rents were so reasonable. Now, almost every building was a co-op and gentrification had taken hold, with expensive condos shooting up all over Broadway. Why, even a Conran’s had opened across from Zabar’s. Still, the area had the same old, scuffed intellectual flavor, even if it was a lot more affluent.

Wetzon’s apartment was in one of the pre-World War II buildings that were known for their high ceilings and immense closets. With its location, about halfway between the elegance of Central Park West and the equal elegance of Riverside Drive, her building did not even try to keep up. The doormen were not snappy and military, and there was something comforting in the threadbare aura the old marble lobby gave off. Its ceiling was Adam, painted in Wedgwood colors of bisque and beige. The automatic elevator was ancient and in need of replacement soon, she thought, as it lurched to a stop on her floor. That would mean an assessment. Good thing she was well able to afford it.

She unlocked her door and opened it to the wonderful aroma of tomato sauce. Facing her on the wall was the old pink-and-white drunkard’s-path quilt she had found at a flea market. She dropped her briefcase and purse on the white park bench in her foyer, shrugged out of her jacket, and leaned against the arched doorway to her kitchen. The MacNeil-Lehrer report was providing background from the small black-and-white television set on the kitchen counter.

“Hi, Les.” Silvestri, in jeans and the sleeveless tee shirt he referred to as his Italian wedding shirt, didn’t look up. He was standing over her Creusetware stockpot stirring the magnificent sauce with a wooden spoon.

“Hi,” she said, mushy as the tomatoes. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his chunky middle and lay her cheek on his back. Sometimes she thought she would wake up and he’d be gone, never having been.

“Something smells good,” she said.

“Just the old family recipe.” The Abruzzi special, he called it, for his grandparents who had come from that section of Italy. He pulled her around him and looked down at her. He had the most incredible turquoise eyes that changed to slate when he was angry or on the job. Right now they were turquoise. She and Silvestri had been together for three years and she still tingled when he touched her.

“Just the old family undershirt, too?” she asked, trying to shake off her sentiment.

“Is that a bigoted remark against Italians?”

“Me? Hell, no. I love Italians.”

He held out a spoon of sauce to her for tasting. “What do you think?” He was splattered with red and there was a line of red dotting his shirt across his middle.

“I think the chef is very sexy.” She touched the thick sauce with the tip of her tongue. “Wonderful. Audition is over. You’re hired.” She giggled. “Take off your clothes.” It was a joke both of them used since they’d seen a particularly boring, much touted movie called
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Its hero was motivated solely by sex and “take off your clothes” was the sum total of serious conversation he had with women.

Silvestri turned down the flame under the sauce. “We’re having sauteed veal chops and a salad and pasta. Okay?”

“Okay? How can I complain? I got me a macho man who can hold his own at the stove. My, my. I am just so lucky.” She patted his tush and scampered out of the kitchen and down the hall to her bedroom. He was only seconds behind her.

They made love a second time in the shower and finally sat down to eat Silvestri’s sumptuous meal at nine o’clock.

“Ah,” Wetzon said, “this is wonderful. I’m feeling so mellow I think I’ll ask you—”

Silvestri leaned back in his chair and smirked at her. “I’ve been waiting for this. What took you so long?” He poured the remnants from the wine bottle into his glass.

“The truth is ... I know you hate it when I get involved in a murder investigation ...” She paused, hoping he would help her out, but he folded his arms and waited. The color of his eyes gave him away. They were turquoise. “You are really a prick,” she said, smiling sweetly.

He laughed. “So?”

“Oh, hell! Was Goldie Barnes murdered?”

“I can t—”

“Oh, forget it.” She started to get up.

Silvestri reached over and put a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to tell me what you were doing at Luwisher Brothers this morning?”

“Is this for the record, sir? Are you going to take out your little black notebook?” She kissed the back of his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we just trade information?”