The Deadliest Option (18 page)

“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.”

M
ISS 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.

“Oh, thank you, Sheldon. Come this way, everyone.” Janet was wearing flowing green silk pants and a matching blouse with, unlike Barbara Bush, a triple strand of the real thing around her neck. She carried a bowl of white roses with her into the dining room and set it down in the center of the graciously set table.

Her walk and slightly disjointed motions triggered a memory for Wetzon, but it wasn’t until they were seated that she recognized the dancing girl in her dream who carried Goldie’s head on a platter—only the girl was really a woman, and the woman was Janet Barnes.

“You sit here, dear, and Ms. Smith—”

“Xenia
, please.”

“Xenia, then, you sit next to Twoey. Ms. Wetzon—er, Wetzon— my, you’re such a petite little thing—on my right next to Alton.”

Petite little thing
, Wetzon repeated to herself. She loathed people who said that. It was grounds for murder. The woman was practically chirping. There was not one sign that she was in mourning.

The table was set with white linen placemats and cut-crystal glasses and silver place settings. They were served a thick, piquant gazpacho and then sliced chicken and bacon sandwiches in wedges of warm pita bread. A pitcher of iced tea was on the sideboard, along with a chilled bottle of a California chardonnay.

Wetzon passed on the wine, but Smith and the others were drinking. The conversation hovered innocuously around the problems of being a mayor of the City of New York, and a gas explosion that had taken place on Roosevelt Island.

Macerated berries and fragile sugar cookies arrived for dessert, and Janet said, “That will be all, Sheldon.”

Sheldon pulled the sliding mahogany-paneled doors to the dining room toward him from either side, backed out, and closed them.

At last,
Wetzon thought
. Now we’re going to get to the nitty-gritty.

“Shall I speak for all of us, Mother?”

“Oh, yes, please, Twoey. I’ll stop you if I want to add anything.” She smiled at Smith and Wetzon. “Alton is here as a close personal friend as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Luwisher Brothers.”

“Before we proceed,” Twoey said, still looking at Smith, “we’d like you to give us your word that everything you hear today is confidential.”

Again? This time Wetzon crossed her fingers under the table. Everybody seemed to demand her word that she wouldn’t tell. This time she knew she wasn’t going to keep it.

“Of course,” Smith said, a little too rapidly. Wetzon looked at her. Smith wasn’t going to keep her word either.

“Luwisher Brothers is part of our family history,” Twoey began. He looked at Wetzon, who nodded, she hoped encouragingly, and then at Smith, who gave him one of her most dazzling smiles. “Er ...” He looked dazed.

Wetzon choked back a giggle with a light cough, covering her mouth with her hand, and was caught in the act by Alton Pinkus, whose eyes crinkled, acknowledging he was reading her mind.

“What Twoey is saying—” Janet said impatiently.

“I’m doing all right, Mother.” Twoey’s freckled skin colored. “We now own, between Mother and me, forty-five percent of the stock in Luwisher Brothers.”

“I thought the retirement or death of any partner meant that stock had to be sold back to the company,” Wetzon said. She put her dessert spoon down on the white placemat and immediately some of the remnants of the deep red macerade spread into the white fabric ... like wet blood.

“It’s been tradition since Nathan and Jeremiah Luwisher started the firm at the turn of the century, but there is nothing to say we have to do it. My father put his life into that firm.”

My father
, Wetzon thought. At last, Goldie had entered the equation.

“We believe,” Janet said emphatically, “that we will get enough shares on our side to put Twoey into the Chairman’s seat.”

“Hoffritz is not going to like that,” Wetzon said.

“John Hoffritz is a nonentity.” Twoey’s temper flared.

Smith smiled, a slow, lazy smile like a cat stretching in the sun.

“Alton has the board lined up and ready to call for a vote of the shareholders as soon as we give the go-ahead.”

Alton nodded. He was a bulky man, not as tall as Twoey, built like an athlete who’d let himself go a little. His hand holding the tall slim wine glass was tanned copper, the nails impeccably manicured. He looked at Wetzon, and she felt a faint palpitation of intrigue in her breast.
Oh
,
no you don’t
, she thought, and pushed it away.

“I don’t understand,” Wetzon said carefully, “where we fit in.”

“I’m getting to that,” Twoey said. “We know you do good work for the firm and we want to continue the relationship. In other words, we want you on our side in this.”