The Deadliest Option (9 page)

Metzger was on the phone in his office next to Silvestri’s and he waved to her. She blew him a kiss and walked into Silvestri’s office. A tall woman in tight pants showing off a nicely rounded ass, taut muscles flowing out of a short-sleeved white shirt, its collar stylishly up, stood talking to Silvestri. Wetzon cleared her throat.

“Detective Mo Ryan, Les Wetzon,” Silvestri said, offhandedly. “Mo’s working with me and Metzger.”

Mo Ryan turned her cornflower-blue eyes on Wetzon and unabashedly gave her the once-over. Wetzon returned the compliment, seeing red curly hair and a peachy complexion, pink freckles and big boobs. Mo towered over Wetzon, offered her a firm hand and said, “Pleasure,” without much enthusiasm.

Wetzon bristled.
Am I being ranked or what
, she thought. Mo Ryan and she were figuratively circling each other. “Nice to meet you,” Wetzon lied and caught Silvestri’s turquoise look. He was laughing at her and maybe even engaging in a little idle torture.

“Let’s get Metzger in here, Mo, and coffee all around. Decaf for Les.” He waited for Mo to leave the room and then said, “Come down off your high horse, Les.” He came around his desk and stood between her and the glass and ran his finger down her side from under her arm to her waist. She could feel the heat between them through the thin silk of her blouse.

“Is she new?”

“Who, Mo?”

“No, Barbara Bush.”

He grinned at her. She loved the woodsy-smoky smell of him.

“She’s been around.”

“I’ll bet.”

He made a
tsk
ing sound with his tongue. “I’m going to let that go by. Mo just made detective. It’s her first case. She’ll pick up some good experience.”

“I hope that’s all she’ll pick up.”

Silvestri grinned again and sat down. In spite of the air-conditioning the room was sultry. A tall fan in the corner languidly blew hot air at them.

Wetzon slipped her jacket over the back of an ugly, scarred wooden armchair and sat, catching her pantihose on a splinter. “Damn!” She looked at the gaping hole on the side of her knee and tugged her skirt down over it. “I don’t even know why I’m here,” she grumbled.

“You’re here to help us with background on people at Luwisher Brothers who knew Goldie Barnes well enough to have a motive to put him away.”

“Why do
I
have to do it? Someone else could, I’m sure. This puts me in an awkward position. They’re a client. And some of these people have told me things about themselves in confidence.”

“Look, Les, I’m not asking you to break a confidence”—He paused—”yet.”

“Yet.”

“But it will make my life that much easier because your observations are reliable.”

“I think I heard a compliment.” She smiled at him. “But what you don’t seem to understand is what I know may be deeply personal, told to me in confidence over a drink. That I keep a confidence is the touchstone of my business. I’ll damage my credibility irreparably if I break a confidence.” She remembered having had a drink once with Destry Bird when he first came to New York. They had both ordered Perrier and he’d confided that he had just become a member of AA. “Too personal to reveal to anyone,” she said, shaking her head.

“I’ll be the judge of that—”

“No, you won’t. You can’t. I have a business I take very seriously, even if you don’t.” She felt hurt, as if he was negating what she did. “I have to be the judge of what I tell you. I just can’t surrender my ethics—”

The air crackled between them, and she looked away, plucking at the hole in her hose, straightening the hem of her skirt. When she looked up, his eyes were slate and his jaw with its dark shadow was grim.

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” Mo Ryan said. She’d opened another button on her shirt and her cleavage was very much in evidence. She plunked herself down in a chair she’d pulled in from the squad room, and Metzger positioned himself against the door frame where he could get the best view of her cleavage.

Silvestri took a sip of coffee, looked pained, and set the cardboard cup down. “Jeeesus, this is hot—”

“Do you want me to get an ice cube?” Mo Ryan asked eagerly, jumping up.

Wetzon gave Silvestri a hard stare as he pointed his finger at Mo and lowered it slowly. Mo followed his finger, sinking back to the seat of her chair, somewhat deflated.

“Talk to us about Luwisher Brothers, Les.” Silvestri reached behind him and pulled the worksheets from the corkboard. He took his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and flipped through pages until he found a blank one. “Give us a picture of the company.”

“I can’t tell you too much about the company itself except that it was started by the three sons of a German Jewish immigrant named Nathaniel Luwisher, who made a killing in cotton during the Civil War.” She looked over her shoulder at Metzger, who seemed to have tuned out, more interested in the scenic view of Mo Ryan’s bosom. “The actual operation of the company passed out of family hands, I think, after World War II. The only one of the descendants interested in running Luwisher Brothers was killed in the war. The others went into the arts, politics, and medicine. I think there’s a Luwisher who is active in environmental issues, organic food or something like that.”

Metzger yawned without covering his mouth.

Silvestri’s phone rang. He picked it up. “Yeah?” Listened intently. “Okay.” He hung up and nodded at Metzger almost imperceptibly. “Go on.”

Wetzon crossed one leg over the other, feeling sweat accumulating behind her knees, and took a swallow of the cooled-down coffee. “I don’t know where you want me to go with this. There may be a Luwisher descendant with the firm who doesn’t have the name anymore. I wouldn’t know about that. Interestingly enough, I think the first generation and the second produced nothing but sons and only one or two daughters. After that, there were scads of daughters and very few sons.”

“So who owns the stock?” Metzger asked.

“I don’t know. It’s a private company. The employees who became partners do—certain of them. Luwisher descendants, possibly. Goldie Barnes did, of course. They don’t have to make anything public, neither their stock ownership breakdown nor their financial statements. But it’s easy enough, I would think, for you guys to find out who is who.”

Silvestri made a note in his black notebook. “How exactly do you get to be a partner there?”

“Again, I don’t know. I can give you an idea. To make partner, you’d have to be a top producer, say over a million dollars in gross production, in other words, the broker’s annual total of commission charges to clients.” She thought for a minute. “And the broker would have to have a squeaky-clean record, I’m sure, which means no compliance problems.”

“Run that by us again, Les.”

“You mean compliance?” He nodded. “Every brokerage firm has a compliance department, which works with the New York Stock Exchange to oversee market activity and to make sure trading complies with the SEC and Exchange regulations. Get it?”

“Got it.” Silvestri waved his hand. “Go on.”

“Partnerships get awarded to the big deal makers like John Hoffritz, who bring business into the firm through M and A, mergers and acquisitions. “ She caught herself wondering if Twoey inherited stock or whether the partnership had to buy Goldie’s back from Twoey and Janet.

“Was Goldie Barnes related to the Luwishers?” Mo asked. She took a battered pack of Kents from her shirt pocket, rustling cellophane, and shook out a cigarette.

“Not that I know of.” She watched Mo jot a note in her little book. They would check that out, but Wetzon was fairly certain they wouldn’t find a connection. Goldie had come to Luwisher Brothers bare-ass naked, as he used to say, right after leaving the army. “Anything else?” The room was stifling. She got up and reached for her jacket. Mo snapped her yellow lighter and lit up, splaying cigarette fumes into the turgid air.

“Not so fast, Les. You can give us a quick thumbnail on the players here.” Silvestri sorted through the worksheets and spread them out on the desk.

Sighing, she sat down. “I’d like to know how Goldie was killed, if I may?”

“I’ve already told you. He was poisoned.”

“I know that. I meant, what kind of poison? How was it done?”

“That is confidential information.”

“In other words, only you and the murderer know?”

He gave her what could only be described as a snide look. “You got it.”

“Okay.” She accepted that. “Fire away.” She settled back in her chair. That meant it had probably happened at the banquet with everyone watching. No. She was guessing. That didn’t necessarily hold up. It could have been something slow-acting, something administered at home, if he went home or—

“Hoffritz.”

“He’s probably going to run Luwisher Brothers. He is already. He’s been a partner for a long time. Has to have accumulated a lot of stock. Very smart and very Southern—Alabama, I think.” She smiled brightly at Silvestri and thought,
actually, he’s a devious, lying Southern snake and would have done absolutely anything to get rid of Goldie so that he could run the company.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mo was writing volumes and was having trouble keeping up. Good.

“Destry Bird.”

“Smooth. Probably number two now that Goldie is gone. Very upper-class Virginia. V.M.I., I think. He and Hoffritz are a formidable team. The brokers refer to them as Search and Destroy.”
And don’t turn your back on either one
, she thought.

“What, Les?” Had he read her thoughts?

She masked her sentiments and remembered how the two men had surrounded Goldie at the head table just before Goldie got up to speak—and to die. “Was it in his Jack Daniel’s?”

Mo looked up quickly, but Silvestri was impassive. Too late. Whatever had killed Goldie had been found; it
was
in Goldie’s drink.

In her mind she heard Goldie’s voice—for it had been his voice, she was certain now—from the men’s room, saying, “Over my dead body.”

“Did you remember something, Les?” Silvestri leaned across the desk, his question an accusation, his eyes intent on hers.

She closed her eyes to keep him out and saw the head table again. “Only that everyone was crowding around Goldie. People came over to pay respects.”

“Some respect,” Metzger said.

She shook her head. “I really didn’t see anything unusual.” She saw Chris gesturing vigorously and spilling Goldie’s drink. Someone had replaced it.... She looked up and found Silvestri reading her. She shrugged and gave him wide-eyed innocence.

“Douglas Culver,” he said, reading from a worksheet.

“He’s head of financial services. A really nice guy. Another Southerner. Atlanta this time, I think. The easiest guy there to talk to.” She remembered Dougie’s look of distaste when Ellie had collapsed on him. Either he didn’t like women or he didn’t like Ellie.

“Neil Munchen.”

“Neil runs the telemarketing program.” She uncrossed her leg and recrossed in the other direction. She felt she was sitting in a pool of perspiration.

“Telemarketing?” Mo asked, looking up from her notebook. She took a last acrid puff of her cigarette and ground the butt out on Silvestri’s floor. She was wearing red pumps.

“Cold calling. They have cold callers and leads from Dun and Bradstreet and elsewhere from all over the country. The callers place the calls, qualify the banking and background on the lead and then the broker gets back and pitches the stock of the day, usually something the firm is pushing.”

“Sounds like a bucket shop operation,” Mo said. “What smart, rich dude would tell an absolute stranger private financial information over the phone?”

Wetzon smiled, glad to find someone who was more naive than she was. “They do, and they buy stock like that. Heads of corporations, wealthy people, smart people. It’s a very successful program—that is, the firm makes a lot of money from it and so do the brokers. Really intelligent people get conned, too.”

“I just don’t get it,” Mo said, looking at Silvestri. “We put these creeps out of business whenever we find them. “

“Don’t get me wrong. This is no con. It’s perfectly legal, and some investors even make money.”

“What about Munchen?” Silvestri interrupted. “What do you know about him?”

“Neil was Goldie’s protégé. He learned telemarketing at Lehman and Goldie brought him over to Luwisher Brothers to set up a unit to compete with Lehman’s because Goldie was feuding with Sheldon Amble at Lehman.”

“Sheldon Amble.” Silvestri wrote the name in his book. “Was this Sheldon Amble at the dinner?”

Wetzon laughed. “In spirit only. Sheldon shuffled off this mortal coil a few years ago.”
Wait a minute
, she thought,
wait a minute.
Sheldon Amble.

“Yes, Les?”

She blinked, guilty. She needed time to sort it out, try to remember. He’d read her face and knew she’d thought of something, and knew further that she wasn’t going to share.

“Nothing. Honestly, Silvestri.” She looked down at her hands.

“Where’s this Munchen from?” Metzger asked. “Is he another redneck?”

“No, Artie, Great Neck.” She laughed. “Believe it or not, none of these guys is a redneck. At least not on the surface. They’re good ole boys deep down.”

“So Munchen is not a Southerner?” Silvestri barely acknowledged her joke.

“Neil? No way. He’s definitely Long Island.” She said it the New York way with the hard
g
so that it became all one word,
longisland.
“Jewish. Too dark and ethnic for them. An outsider in this crowd. Check his suntan. A closet gold-chain wearer, if ever I saw one.” She recalled the bruise on his cheekbone when he left the men’s room. “Are we almost finished? I have to make a phone call.”

“Really, Les?” Now he was being sarcastic.

“Oh, come on, Silvestri. I have to call Laura Lee about the tea we’re planning.”

“Christopher Gorham.”

She made a face at him and recrossed her leg. “I was there with Chris that night because his wife—Abby—walked out on him. He was upset about that.”
Was he,
she thought. He was upset about something, but she’d bet it had more to do with Goldie than Abby. “He manages the large boardroom. I’ve known him since he was a rookie. He is not a murderer.” She couldn’t imagine Chris working up passion enough to murder someone.