Blood on the Street (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #4)
screamed.
Pull yourself together, Wetzon. Somewhere she had leftover plastic drop sheets she’d bought when they’d chopped up her bedroom ceiling to install the fan.
She stripped her bed and covered the mattress with plastic, then right-sided the old single-drawer sewing table that was on Silvestri’s side of the bed. Good thing Silvestri wasn’t here. Half the contents were on the floor. She picked up a stack of wet papers, newspaper clippings, and a soggy notebook. Two paperbacks fell apart in her hands. There was a drenched box containing a tiepin, a snapshot of the two of them taken last summer on the carousel in Central Park. Two handkerchiefs, neatly folded. She sniveled into one.
A leather box was wedged into the back of the drawer. She pulled it out and unzipped the cover. Nestled in a black velvet cutout frame was a small gun.
10.
T HE NIGHT WAS spent ranging from room to room collecting what she would need or wanted to protect, preserve. Water had seeped through the ceiling of her wall of closets in the bedroom, but the upper shelves where she stored extra pillows and blankets had absorbed most of the moisture, and her good clothing wore plastic dry cleaner’s covers.
Sitting on the floor of her foyer, she read the incomprehensible directions translated from Japanese to English by way of Korea, and assembled, after three false starts, the portable metal coat rack that she usually kept in its box in the hall closet. She’d bought it when her bedroom closets were being built and had never used it again.
With her clothes hanging safely on the rack, she began on her shoes, which were stored each pair in its own box. Almost every box was soaked. She stuffed each shoe with towel paper and threw the boxes into a humongous garbage bag that Albert had brought up.
At four o’clock in the morning she stopped and inspected the wreckage. The copper-stock pots she used as wastebaskets were in various places where the dripping continued. Towels covered her floors, soaking up moisture. The ceiling over her tub had come down, into the tub.
She put on white leggings and a bulky red cotton sweater and lay on her sofa under her old baby blanket with the cowboys on it she’d found on a shelf in the hall closet. Her bookshelves were safe, because they were on the wall farthest from the bathroom. She stared at the clutter on the floor-to-ceiling shelves, her eyes swimming. If she closed her eyes, she might just make everything disappear. It could all have been a hideous nightmare. She closed her eyes.
Water splashed across the raked deck, and everyone stopped dancing, just like that, and looked at one another. They were doing No, No Nanette at Jones Beach. There wasn’t supposed to be water on the dance floor. A mighty swell, and the floor heaved under them and the deck tipped over and spilled them into the ocean.
“I’m too old for this,” Wetzon screamed, getting a mouthful of salt water, struggling with the sea.
“Stop fighting and float,” Alton Pinkus suggested in an amused voice. He was treading water beside her. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
“Listen to him, Les,” Silvestri called from a great distance. “You can’t control everything.”
Oh, yes I can , she thought, but she thrust her legs out and let the water buoy her. The sun shone warm on her face, and it came to her that if she only had sunblock, she could stay like this forever. No responsibilities, no decisions. She turned her head slightly to thank Alton, but he wasn’t there. A body lay floating facedown next to her.
Dead man’s float.
The dead man lifted his head. It was Brian Middleton with a death grimace on his face and water spilling out of a hole where his eye had been. His extended hand touched hers. He was giving her something, pressing it into her hand. A gun.
“No, no!” She flung it as far away from her as she could, but the effort disturbed her balance and she began to sink ... thrashing.... Her ears were buzzing, buzzing. What was buzzing?
She opened her eyes. She was lying on her sofa. Her doorbell was buzzing. The sun was coming through her living-room blinds warming her face, and water was dripping on her from her living-room ceiling.
“All right, I’m coming.” She rolled off the sofa, stuck her feet into her Keds, and let Albert, Bob, the handyman, and Mike DeVota, the representative of the building’s managing agent, in to survey the damage. Albert handed her the Times from her
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