Blood on the Street (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #4)

show, let her deal with the bullet in Smith’s shingle. Now she was sweating.
    She reached Peiser’s answering machine—it must be her home— and left a message that she was in her apartment. Maybe Peiser was in her office. Where was that card? She searched through every suit pocket and finally found it in her trench coat.
    Peiser was not in her office, but someone took a message.
    She was being thwarted every which way. Muttering, back at the barre she conducted a ferocious, high-speed run-through of all the positions, left the barre, and did some Fosse combinations her body still remembered. Well, her head remembered, but she was tight, and worse, getting no joy from it.
    Where had Barbie said that station was located? What was wrong with her mind that she couldn’t remember? Stamford? No. Not Westport, no Wetzon, not Weston. Very funny, brain, she thought. Norwalk! The brain had to make a joke before it gave her what she was looking for. Okay. She called Connecticut information.
    “What city?”
    “Norwalk. I’m looking for the number of the radio station.”
    “I don’t have a listing by subject. Do you have the name?” Wonder of wonders, the operator spoke like a real person.
    “I don’t know it.”
    “I’ll put in ‘radio’ and see what we come up with.” And accommodating, too.
    “Okay, there’s a listing in Norwalk for radio—AM 1260, but it’s a Westport address.”
    She wrote the numbers down and then punched them into the phone.
    “WMMM.”
    “WMMM?” She put on an ingenuous voice. “Hi, I’m looking for the local station that ‘Ask Dr. Jerry’ is on. Would that be you, by any chance?”
    “Huh?” The voice belonged to an adolescent boy—or maybe an adolescent girl.
    “‘Ask Dr. Jerry,’ the radio show.” She spoke slowly, forced a smile to keep the impatience away.
    “Huh?”
    “Listen, do you know what I’m talking about? A local radio show called ‘Ask Dr. Jerry.’”
    The voice got huffy. “I’m the only one here right now. Can you call back later?”
    “Can’t you just answer my question?”
    “Call back later.” He hung up.
    Wetzon held the receiver for a moment, then cradled it. Sundays. Someone’s kid probably manned the phones on weekends and pretended to know what he was doing. Oh, well, everyone pretended to be something else. She and Smith even pretended to be detectives. She’d be lucky if ... The tiny tip of an idea began to nudge its way from her subconscious.
    Pretended ...
    The woman who owned the apartment next door to Wetzon on West Eighty-sixth Street was a computer something-or-other at Columbia. Sheila Reitman, a wacky Australian woman who’d come to the U.S. with her husband, Pappy Reitman, the travel writer, in the ’50s and stayed in New York after he moved on to L.A. They’d never bothered divorcing, and once in a while he’d turn up, a puffed-up, beefy little man, with his battered Hunter’s World shoulder bag, cameras, and laptop. The cigarette smoke would seep cartoonlike from the door seams into the shared hallway. This was how Wetzon would know he was there. The screaming and yelling would commence, and then several days later, absolute quiet. He’d be gone. A very peculiar relationship. Sheila had this huge white Persian cat named Sean who sneaked out and sat outside her door on the doormat in protest whenever the Smokestack was in residence.
    Wetzon flipped open her Filofax to the R’s and called Sheila’s number. Sheila answered immediately in her breathy voice.
    “Is this a bad time?”
    “I’m on my way to a rehearsal.” Sheila was an amateur flutist and belonged to a music group. “I saw the mess. My heart goes out to you, Leslie.”
    “Thanks, Sheila. I just wanted to tell you that my contractor is a woman named Louise Armstrong, and she and her crew will be starting tomorrow. I hope it won’t disturb you.”
    “Me? I’m sure it’ll be fine, but thanks for letting me know.”
    “Ah, Sheila. There’s one other thing. I know you’re in a hurry, so I’ll talk fast.”
    “I have a few minutes. What is it?”
    Wetzon took a quick breath and forgave herself. She was about to lie. “Well, you know I’m a recruiter.... ” Sheila didn’t interrupt. “... And I want to check someone’s credentials at Columbia, but I don’t want to go through normal channels.”
    “And you’d like me to find out grades and ranking information?”
    “No, nothing that involved. All I want to know is are his degrees