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

like that, was it? All right. She was game. She locked eyeballs with him and said, “Brian Middleton.”
    “Poor Brian. We’ll miss him.” He took a nail clipper out of a drawer and began clipping his nails. Snap. Snap. “What about Brian?” He didn’t even look up.
    Snap.
    She wanted to say, Listen, you dirtbag, you sleaze bucket, I don’t have to put up with this from the likes of you, but she wanted information, and the only way she was going to get it was by not letting him get to her. So she smiled.
    Snap. Snap. Snap.
    “I’m doing a favor for one of his clients, a Penny Ann Boyd.”
    Snap. Snap . He didn’t look up, but she watched his jaw tighten. “That lying bitch. She made Brian and me crazy, and it cost us money. But we got her. Did she tell you? The whole idea was hers, the strategy, everything. Then she blames it on Brian. She got better than she deserved. And only because we never found the correspondence.”
    Snap. Snap. Slightly louder.
    Wetzon leaned forward again. “What correspondence? I don’t know anything about that, Tony.”
    Snap. Snap. “And you don’t know anything about me, Wetzon. You cross me and I don’t forget. I’m a good friend to my friends. I don’t make a good enemy.” Snap. Snap.
    A sliver of nail sailed up over the desk and landed on Wetzon’s lap. Smith was a hell of a lot faster in the nasty-retort department. Wetzon’s style was slow burn. Smith would have put this scumbag in his place. And fast. “I don’t follow you.” She rose, and the nail clipping fell on the carpet.
    Snap. Snap.
    “I know you took Rona out of here, and I know you were working on Brian.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Brian told me. He told me everything. I was his adviser. We had a real good working relationship.”
    “Oh, and did he tell you he was going to start at Loeb Dawkins last Friday?”
    Maglia laughed and put his clippers away. “Did he tell you that he changed his mind and was staying put?”
    “No,” she said. Was that true? Shock made her sit down.
    He swung his feet to the floor, opened a drawer, and flung a document at her. “Go on, read it.”
    She ran her eyes over the paper. It was a contract in the form of a letter agreement. It offered a sixty-five-percent payout to Brian Middleton for one year, and it had been signed by both Brian and Maglia. The date was the previous Thursday.
    She read it again and handed it back to Maglia.
    “Close your mouth, Wetzon. You headhunters think you’re so fucking smart, you can’t stand it when you’re outmaneuvered.” He laughed a thin, snaky laugh, like a B-movie villain.
    So Brian wasn’t going to Loeb Dawkins after all. He’d been using that offer as leverage, screwing Simon Loveman and Smith and Wetzon. “Who’s going to get his book, Tony? Surprise me.”
    “The manager, of course.”
    “Of course.”
    “You can fucking tell Rona not to count on getting anything out of this. I’m offering the clients free trades for six months.”
    “You’re a class act, Tony.”
    “It’s a small business, Wetzon. Someday we could be working together.” He was laughing at her.
    “I certainly look forward to it,” she said, hoping her words were filled with venom. “You play a nice dirty game.”
    “Tsk, tsk,” Maglia sneered. “You girls just don’t make it in this business. You never will. We can out-think you every time.”
    Wetzon clenched her fist. She wanted to smash him one in his insolent face, but she hadn’t asked the question she’d come to ask, and he was right. As the Street shrank, she really might have to work with him one day, or maybe Smith would, over Wetzon’s dead body. “Tabitha Ann Boyd is missing. Do you know where she is?”
    Maglia’s eyes glinted at her. He suddenly got serious. “Why should I tell you?”
    “Her mother is worried about her.”
    “Her mother!” It was an explosion. “What a joke! The woman is an alcoholic child abuser. My wife and I took Tabby Ann in after her mother threw her out.”
    “Her mother threw her out? I can’t believe that.” She couldn’t believe the alcoholic and the child abuser labels either.
    “Believe it, Wetzon. In the arbitration, Tabby Ann testified for Brian and against her mother.”

22.
    T HE SUSSEX HOUSE was not really the Sussex House anymore. It had been renamed the Park Royale. Out-of-towners and recent arrivals called it by its new name, but true-blue New Yorkers still called it the Sussex House, much as they