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

in the cab, was beginning to sink westward. She was truly exhausted, had no business keeping this appointment. Date. It was a date. Face it, Wetzon. Why hadn’t she just canceled and gone home to bed? She could still do it, make a call, get out of it. But she got out of the cab and walked past the pay phone.
    There were several entrances on Madison Avenue between Ninety-eighth and 100th Street to the huge hospital complex, but Alton had been very specific. He had even left her name with security. The elevators jammed with visitors and medical personnel crept slowly, and the smells and activity of the hospital were oppressive.
    She found the administrative offices eventually after straying down the wrong corridor and receiving directions from an orderly wheeling an empty gurney.
    A small woman, blond streaks on gray hair, wearing earphones, was clicking away on a word processor, working from a dictaphone. She stopped when she saw Wetzon and tilted the earphones away from one ear. The sign on her desk said “June,” and since it was October, June must be her name.
    “I’m supposed to meet Mr. Pinkus here.”
    “Oh yes, Ms. Wetzon, right? His meeting is running late, and he’ll be another half hour. You can wait here.”
    Wetzon looked around the room. It was windowless, spare, somewhat scruffy, and much too hot. Medicine intruded, seeped through everything here. “I think I’ll take a walk. It’s gotten nice out.”
    “I wouldn’t go too far. This area can be dangerous, particularly after the sun goes down.”
    “What about Fifth Avenue? There are museums there.” Wait a minute , she thought. She knew just how to entertain herself for the next half hour.
    “Well,” the woman said doubtfully, “I suppose—”
    “I’ll be back.” She was on the move then, with quick steps, knowing her destination. Like a bird dog with one thought on her mind, Wetzon made her way through doctors and hospital personnel and visitors.
    Once on the street she walked over to Fifth Avenue, crossed to the park. The day suddenly seemed elastic for her, stretching out its last hour of light.
    She quickened her steps till she came to a tall Victorian Gate. The Conservatory Garden.

38.
    T HE C ONSERVATORY G ARDEN was a scooped-out, defined part of Central Park, an oversized and serious garden with plantings created in two distinct styles. North of Vanderbilt Gate it was French, parterres of gray-leafed santolina and thousands of chrysanthemums around a working fountain sculpture of gamboling maidens. South was an English garden of flower beds and yew hedges and topiary. Flagstone paths looped their way through both sections, surrounded by ivy-layered yew trees sprung from ivy carpets. Asters, snapdragons, and ornamental grasses grew in clusters; clumps of tiny yellow daisies on tall, narrow stalks fought for space among stiff-stemmed, fragile blues, like baby’s breath. She’d been invited to a wedding here once, years ago, but she’d had a Sunday matinee performance and had to send regrets. Regrets. Rosemary was for remembrance. What was for regrets?
    Although it wasn’t raining, a lone woman strolled on the path that skimmed the circumference of the gardens, holding an open umbrella, and Wetzon followed her. In the hills beyond the garden, Central Park looked like an uninhabited wilderness. If one listened carefully, she wondered, would one hear a wolf howl?
    But here in this peaceful place, where the silence was only broken by the extravagance of songbirds, there was no sign that a murder had been committed.
    Passing through the French garden, Wetzon came upon a broad walkway flanked by antique-style iron and wood slat benches. Somewhere she remembered reading that these benches had been designed for the 1939 World’s Fair. Old crabapple trees sent their limbs reaching across the flagstones to each other, the ruddy foliage serving as a tent above.
    Two women in white pants sat talking quietly, drinking coffee from cardboard containers. One was knitting something red and bulky while her coffee cooled on the flagstone at her feet. Three teenagers, their jeans frayed in just the right places, knees showing, were staring at one of the benches, and Wetzon joined them. It was conspicuously marked with yellow crime-scene tape.
    “That’s where the dude bought it,” one said. As ragged as they looked, it was a contrived poverty. Two were white, one black, and all three were not street by any stretch of the