The Deadliest Option (13 page)

Ellie’s desk was an organized chaos of papers. The machines were shut down. Wetzon sat down at the desk and opened one drawer after another. Stationery, envelopes, notepads. Nail polish—a nice pink Estée Lauder—and a top coat. Nail-polish remover. A bottle of oyster-shell calcium pills. A prescription container of Valium. Ten milligrams. Heavy stuff. She closed that drawer.

The bottom drawer contained the blue makeup bag and the standing mirror. She unzipped the bag. Three lipsticks, a compact, shadow, mascara, an eye pencil. Brushes. She turned one of the lipsticks over to see the color label on the bottom, and a little square of white paper fluttered off and to the floor. She picked it up; there was some writing on it. It looked like the fragment of a letter. Wetzon dug into the bottom of the makeup bag, and found other little squares of paper, most with writing on them.

She was taking too long, she knew. She had to get back or they would be suspicious. Gathering up all the scraps, including the one from the floor, she dropped them into her change purse with her tokens and loose coins.

Probably nothing. Certainly none of her business. God, she was getting like Smith. Betray a friend. No conscience whatever. No. Wrong. Wasn’t she working for Luwisher Brothers? Whatever, she’d talked herself into a good case of the guilts. Ellie was a nice woman.
So put the scraps back where you found them
,
Wetzon
, she said to herself. Fat chance.

She made sure the drawers were closed and slipped out of the room.

“Wetzon?” Neil Munchen was walking toward her from the direction of the men’s room. “How’s Ellie doing?’’

Oops
, she thought,
caught in the act.
She smiled at him. “I think she’s okay. She’s being debriefed. I just rinsed out her mug for her.”

He seemed to accept her dopey explanation, as if his mind were elsewhere, and her exit from Ellie’s office was not a surprise. “Are you last?”

“I guess so. How did it go?”

“They just want to know who saw what and when. Alibis et cetera. All this bureaucratic crap about an accident.”

Wetzon walked back into the boardroom with him. “What was the report about, Neil—the one Ash was writing for the firm?”

“I can’t tell you that.” He was going from one desk to another, checking that everything was locked up and put away.

“Do you know?” She followed him.

“He hadn’t completed it. He was going to present it on Monday at the managing directors’ meeting. It was being finalized this weekend.”

“This weekend?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he working with anybody? A secretary?”

“I don’t know.” He turned on her. “Get outta my face, will you, Wetzon?”

“No, Neil, I won’t. You have to have an idea of what that report was about. You’re a director here.”

His dark eyes flicked over her wearily. “All right, I do. We hired Ash to do a feasibility study, but we don’t know what his conclusions were.”

“A feasibility study of what?”

“It wasn’t my idea, and Goldie was against it.”

“What?
Dammit
, Neil.”

“I can’t tell you, Wetzon.”

“Okay, don’t tell me, but you’ll have to tell the police. Jesus, Neil, Goldie is dead. Now Ash is dead. What if it’s connected? What if it’s murder?”

He brushed his hands over his eyes.

“It
was
murder, smart old Wetzon.” Neither had noticed Ellie until she spoke. They spun around. Her face was ghastly in the fluorescent light. “The medical examiner just told Weiss that the fat fuck was dead before he cracked his head open on the marble stairs.”

W
EISS WAS HOLED
up in the conference room, which was so dense with floating smoke and acrid fumes from his cigarettes that Wetzon’s eyes began to burn and tears seeped down her cheeks. She dabbed them away with a tissue, coughing, while Weiss conferred with an athletic-looking light-skinned black man who was chewing vigorously on a reeking cigar.

“Oh, shit, cigar,” she said faintly. That and the increasingly evident death odors from the body of Carlton Ash, which had yet to be removed from the staircase, were playing havoc with Wetzon’s digestion. The tablecloth Neil had thrown over Ash’s remains was gone, and they were chalking the site when she squeezed past. While a cop in uniform took lengthy notes, two technicians were making precise measurements with compasses and rulers as if they were architects. A photographer snapped away. All were seemingly oblivious to the person who lay exposed, vulnerable, and dead.

She pressed the tissue over her mouth. She was going to be sick. They had sat her in the end chair, nearest the door, but she’d never make it to the bathroom.

Weiss looked up. “Get some water for the lady, Drake. And see if you can find a paper bag.”

Drake had one of those carved-out-of-oak faces, with a heavy sprinkling of freckles across his prominent nose, cheekbones, and forehead. He rolled the cigar stub in his mouth and chewed some, staring at her skeptically.

“And dump the cigar,” Weiss said, putting some papers aside and sitting down opposite Wetzon.

Wetzon put her head on the conference table, miserable, past caring that she felt foolish, and gasped for air.

Drake opened the door and left the room without closing the door behind him. Some of the smoke drifted out with him.

“Take deep, slow breaths.” Weiss looked down at his notes and frowned. “... Ms. Wetzon ... Through the mouth. Why do I know your name?”

Somewhere Drake found a paper bag, and they had her hold it to her mouth and breathe into it. Her nausea subsided. Drake, sans cigar, closed the door to the conference room and sat down beside Weiss. He exuded the rankness of the cigar. Wetzon’s throat tightened.

“Do you want to wash up, Ms. Wetzon?” Weiss shuffled through pages of his notepad and didn’t look up.

Do I look that bad?
she thought. But she shook her head.

“Well?” he asked, impatiently, putting his notepad aside and fixing his eyes on her.

“No.” She was annoyed. Some detective. He might notice more if he looked at the person he was talking to.

“You are—”

“Leslie Wetzon. My company is Smith and Wetzon. We’re recruiters and management consultants to Wall Street firms. Luwisher Brothers is a client.”

Weiss picked up a fresh pack of Camels, tore the cellophane and slipped a cigarette out. He was about to light it from the butt of his old one.

“Please don’t do that,” Wetzon said.

“Do what?” He raised a hairy black brow at her and lit the cigarette. The fingers of his right hand were stained yellow-brown.

“That. The cigarette.” She felt he knew what she meant and had lit the cigarette anyway. “It’ll make me sick.” She didn’t bother keeping the anger out of her voice.

Weiss heaved an exaggerated sigh. He put the cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray to his right, spilling ashes and stubs onto the already ash-dusted conference table.

“Ashtray!” she said out loud.

“What do you
think
I’m doing, Ms. Wetzon?” His tone was faintly contemptuous.

“No, not that. I just remembered that the ashtrays were full when I got here this morning, which meant there had probably been an early meeting, since I’m sure everything was cleaned last night. Did you smoke all over what was already in those ashtrays?”

“Ms. Wetzon, what do you take us for?” He spoke sonorously, with a patronizing edge.

She didn’t answer. Where were all the Styrofoam coffee containers? “What about the coffee cups?”

“What coffee cups?” Weiss looked at Drake, who shrugged.

“There were at least two on the table. And an empty plastic plate with crumbs. The coffee was still warm.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Weiss said, smacking the table with the palms of his hands. “Start from the beginning.”

Drake took a notebook from the inside pocket of his tan jacket, opened it on the table and made a note with a ballpoint pen.

“Dr. Ash asked me to meet him here at seven-thirty this morning. He was going to give me a copy of the study he did. He more or less told me that there was something in it that led to Goldie Barnes’s death. He said he knew why Goldie was murdered.”

“Tell me, Ms. ... Wetzon”—Weiss seemed to have trouble with her name—”if Luwisher Brothers is your client—and we haven’t established that for certain yet—why would you have to sneak around to get a copy of this study?”

Wetzon did a slow burn. Maybe he had a point, which made her even angrier. She sat poker-straight, summoning up as much dignity as she could. “Clients keep secrets from consultants; consultants keep secrets from clients. This is a business of secrets and it runs on confidentiality. I felt—and Ash led me to believe—that there was something in his study that would shake up the whole industry. I had to know what it was.”

“Tell me what you know about this Goldie Barnes’s death.” Weiss shifted his eyes to Drake without moving his head. “See what you can get from the computer on that. And check Arditti on the forensics. I want every scrap of material bagged.” Drake got up and left the room. His gun bulged through his jacket from the back waistband of his pants.

Normally, she would have smiled and tried to charm Weiss, considering him a challenge, but she didn’t like his attitude. He probably hated women, particularly successful businesswomen.

“Well?” he said. His snide tone confirmed her assessment.

“It was at a dinner in Goldie’s honor, Wednesday night. He was sort of retiring.”

“Sort of?”

“Supposedly he didn’t want to. They were pushing him out.”

“He told you this?”

“No, Jesus, everyone knew—”

“Who’s
they?
”

“They? Oh, Hoffritz, Bird, maybe Culver, maybe others.”

“That was Silvestri’s homicide,” Weiss mumbled, more to himself than to her.

“Yes,” she said, wondering if she should tell him she’d called Silvestri.

“What were you doing here so early on a Saturday morning?”

“I told you. Dr. Ash called me. He asked me to come here.”

“Why you?”

“I have no idea. Were there coffee cups here on the table when you got here?”

Drake returned with a sheet of paper. Weiss took a cursory look at it and handed it back to Drake. “Were there coffee cups here when we got here?” Weiss asked Drake. “I want to be sure they went over this room with a fine-toothed comb.”

“I’ll check.” Drake left the room again.

Weiss moved to light another cigarette, stopped, and put it away. Wetzon’s heart sank. Without his nicotine fix, he would get meaner and meaner. “Go on,” he said.

How did she get herself into these messes? “I was supposed to come up here—I mean, meet him at the elevator bank on the sixty-seventh floor at seven-thirty, but he wasn’t there. No one was. So I came up here thinking maybe he’d meant the conference room. Someone slammed the door and locked me in.”
How was Chris involved?
she thought suddenly. Had he come back, locked her in, and murdered Carlton Ash? No. Chris was long gone. She’d seen him leave. But what had he been doing here, and why had he made such a point of telling her not to go up?

“That’s when you saw the coffee cups?”

“I thought I was locked in for the weekend.” She smiled in spite of herself. “Without anything to eat. Some of the cups still had coffee in them. And the coffee was still warm. That’s when I found the inhalator.” She dropped that on him, trying to keep the glee out of her voice.

“Wait a minute. Stop.” Weiss held up his hand. Now she had his full attention. For the first time, he was looking directly at her. “What inhalator?”

Drake returned and sat down.

“Well?” Weiss said, keeping his eyes on Wetzon.

“No coffee cups, no cups or plates or anything,” Drake said.

“Swell.” He stared at Wetzon without speaking, then said finally, “You want to tell us about the inhalator?”

“I think it was Dr. Ash’s.”

“Why would you think that?”

“He had a breathing problem, maybe because of his weight—or asthma, I don’t know. But I saw him using one at the dinner and also at the meeting we had here yesterday.”

“Where was it?”

“The dinner or the inhalator?”

“You know damn well I meant the inhalator.” He glared at her.

“It was at the bottom of one of the coffee cups.”

“You drank the coffee?”

“No.” God, what if she had? “Do you think there might have been poison in the coffee?”

He shrugged. “Without the cups, it’s all conjecture, and we don’t work on conjecture.”

“I poured off some of the coffee to the other cup, which was empty, and the inhalator was on the bottom.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Nothing. I didn’t touch it. Someone came and let me out and I was so relieved I forgot about it.”

“Who let you out?”

“Doug Culver.”

“Let’s get back to this report. No one mentioned a report until now.”

They were covering up,
she thought. “I don’t know anything about it except that Dr. Ash claimed it would change the face of the retail brokerage industry.”

“Get a seal on his office,” Weiss mumbled to Drake.

“It’s too late,” Wetzon said.

“What do you mean? Goodspeed is at Rockefeller Center. How would you know—”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know about that office. He had an office here.”

“No one told me.”

“Maybe they forgot.”

“Conveniently. How do you know it’s too late?”

“Because”—she felt her face flushing—”because I went down to look for the report.”

“And tampered with evidence. Give me a break, lady!”

Wetzon hard-eyed him right back. “I’d like you to know I don’t tamper with evidence. The drawers were already open. I used a pen to sift through the papers.”

“What the f—what difference does that make?” Weiss stood up, disgust in his every movement. “Where is the office?”

“I’m trying to tell you something important,” Wetzon said, matching his disgust with her own. “His office is downstairs in the boardroom, on the other side of Ellie Kaplan’s. It’s a mess, it’s been trashed.” What was keeping Silvestri?