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

told her to lighten up?
    “You alone?” Martens asked.
    “What does it look like?” The words came out short and curt. She had nothing against Martens. “Oh, hell, I’m sorry. I’m just a little tense.” She set the box of cold pizza in the middle of the table. There were two slices left.
    But Martens was making his tour of the loft and probably didn’t hear her. Ferrante did, raising a smug eyebrow at her.
    “If you’re interested in renting it, I’ll tell the owner.” No one picked up on her sarcasm.
    “Ms. Wetzon,” Peiser said, then stopped and waited for Martens.
    Wetzon poured coffee into mugs, set the mugs on the table with spoons, sugar, and Sweet’n Low, leaving her mug on the counter. She boosted herself up on the counter next to the coffee maker and faced the three of them, feeling infinitely better. Now they were all looking up at her.
    “Were you able to trace the twenty thousand dollars?” she asked.
    “Maglia had it.” Peiser ignored Ferrante’s frown. “He didn’t deposit it because it was a third-party check. There would have to have been a lot of explanations. And he was still convinced he’d talked Middleton out of the move.”
    “Oh, give me a break. Brian gave him the check, so he must have been leaving. Well, at least that’s something. Now Simon Loveman won’t have his ass in a sling. Have you noticed that everyone’s behavior in this is questionable ethically?”
    “Including yours?” Ferrante looked pleased with himself.
    “Fuck you, Ferrante,” she said, and she liked the sound of it.
    He laughed, and Martens smiled.
    Peiser ignored the exchange. “You’ve got to help us out here. If someone is trying to kill you, you must know why. Do you have anything else to tell us?” Peiser seemed to be taking the lead in the questioning.
    “Not really.” She swung her legs back against the cabinet, holding the mug with both hands, sipping her coffee. “I’ve been racking my brain for possibilities. One really off-the-wall idea occurred to me because Dr. Jerry Gordon is always dropping his credentials into conversations. This may be plain old insecurity, or, conceivably, something else.”
    “Do you want to say that in English?” Ferrante took out his notebook and flipped over pages. He was really being a prick tonight.
    “I think there’s something weird about the two of them. Barbara and Jerry. She acts like a psycho, complete with mood swings and paranoia, and he’s Big Daddy for everybody. Just a big, warm, sweet teddy bear.”
    “So?” Ferrante felt in his pockets for a pen, found it, pulled it out, and clicked the point out and in and out and in.
    “So I heard that Barbara has violent episodes and attacks him, but I don’t know how true it is.” Not wanting to get either Sheila or herself in hot water, Wetzon didn’t mention the computer information. And she didn’t mention Mrs. Leonora Foley and her grandson, for reasons she couldn’t have articulated.
    “Any other detective work you want to tell us about?” Ferrante put his pen away and picked up a slice of cold pizza, folded it up like a package, and made it disappear into his mouth.
    “Is Rona off the hook?”
    Peiser shrugged.
    “You let her go.” Wetzon looked at them, one after the other. “She’s still a suspect? You mean, you think she planted the gun herself?”
    “You met her at the Drake Hotel yesterday afternoon.” It was a statement from Peiser, not a question.
    “How do you know that?” She smacked the counter with a fist, rattling the mug. “Are you following me, or her? What’s this about?”
    “Why did you have a meeting?” Peiser asked.
    “She had something to tell me.”
    “What?”
    “That she was going back to Bliss Norderman and Maglia.”
    “Why tell you?” Martens asked.
    “Because I had the most to lose if she did. My fee. My firm placed her at Rosenkind, Luwisher. If she turns up dead, you’ll know I or my partner did it.” They were all staring at her. “That was a joke, in case you didn’t recognize it. It was actually very nice of her to tell me. Most of the people I work with wouldn’t bother. I’d just find out by accident that the broker had skipped.”
    “Sounds like the job,” Martens said.
    “Is that what you’re here about?”
    “We’ve been over everything back and forth, and we wanted to go through it one more time,” Peiser said. “Just in case we missed something.”
    Wetzon groaned and took them through everything, only