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

police,” Wetzon added.
    “You don’t understand how vicious this all got. Tony was furious when I left Bliss Norderman. He tried to destroy my reputation. They’ve been really good to me at Rosenkind. Brian wrecked Penny Ann’s life, not just with the mishandling of her money, but with Tabby Ann. The arbitration was awful for her.”
    “So terribly sad,” Smith intoned. “We’ll do everything we can to help. Won’t we, Wetzon?”
    “We’ll certainly try—”
    “Trust us,” Smith interrupted, putting an end to the conversation.
    “You’ll keep me informed.” It was a throwaway. Rona caught up with Penny Ann at the entrance to the bar.
    When Rona and Penny Ann were out of sight, Smith and Wetzon shook hands.
    “That’s the easiest money we’re ever going to earn,” Smith said.
    “We’re such hotshots, I hope we’re right.”
    “Who else could it have been? That was no maid at Brian’s apartment, of that you can be certain. I knew that accent was phony.”
    “You’re just miffed because you couldn’t get her to work for you.”
    “Very funny, I’m sure.” Smith fluttered her fingers at a passing waiter. “Check, please.”
    “Could she have been living with Brian, Smith? He knew how old she was. Of course, it might not have been sexual....”
    Smith’s left eyebrow rose an inch. “Oh, for pitysakes.” She pulled the check from the waiter’s hand and thrust it at Wetzon. “I hope you’re keeping track of your expenses.”
    “Which I am incurring for both of us.” Wetzon returned the bill to the waiter with her American Express card. She looked at her watch. “God, it’s after five. I’ve got to go down to the Village and change for dinner.”
    “I’ll drive you,” Smith said when they came out on Seventy-seventh Street. “You might feel so grateful that you’ll tell me who you’re having dinner with.”
    “Whom. What we really should be doing is checking out Brian’s apartment.”
    “Ummm,” Smith said, negotiating a turn onto Tenth Street by cutting off a yellow cab. Brakes squealed and the cabdriver, a wiry Pakistani, leaped from his cab and screamed incomprehensible insults, all the time waving his arms at Smith, who gave him the finger through the open sunroof of her sable Jaguar.
    “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Wetzon said wearily when they came to a stop in front of Carlos’s building. “Someday someone’s going to take out a gun and shoot you. And me.”
    Smith grinned at her. “This country is altogether too open to the Third World. They should go back to where they came from.”
    “Of course you’d say that, you bigot.”
    “Why should I disappoint you, sugarplum?” She pulled Barbara Gordon’s check from her pocket. “Look at this. Barbara Orlofsky Gordon.”
    “So?”
    “If she’s one of the liquor-dynasty Orlafskys, she’s an heiress.”
    “Meaning?”
    “There’s a lot more where this came from.” Smith was chortling.
    Wetzon eyed Smith with suspicion. “And you are altogether too good-humored. What are you up to?”
    “Mmmm, well, I thought I might take a quick tour of Brian’s apartment and see if I can catch our missing little pussycat.”

16.
    W ETZON STOOD ON the park side of West Sixty-seventh Street and watched the little red taillight of Smith’s Jaguar slide smoothly through the moderate Sunday-evening traffic and disappear. Smith was absolutely thrilled with herself, Wetzon knew for certain, because she was getting up to her elbows in a murder and was going off on her own to do some “detecting.” The Pussycat Caper. Ha!
    And when Smith came up with Tabby Ann Boyd, Wetzon knew who would take all the credit for it. Truth was, she should have gone with Smith. She had no business having dinner with Alton Pinkus.
    Behind her, Central Park smelled lushly damp and mossy, the fallen leaves degenerating into compost. The lights strung on the trees around Tavern on the Green made this setting a fairyland at evening. Joggers passed her, singly and in twos, entering the park, heading uptown for the track around the reservoir.
    Wetzon sighed. When the light flashed green, she crossed Central Park West. The vanishing sun cast Lincoln Center in gold leaf, in ONE, before a curtain of dark-blue sky. The specific, almost spicy, odor of wood fires, dried logs burning in real fireplaces, filled the air. A sure harbinger of winter.
    Halfway down the block in a wonderful old turn-of-the-century apartment building known as Hotel des