Hedging (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery)

associate by that name. Had he brought someone new into the firm? “Have they been back?”
    “Yesterday. With a warrant.”
    “Did Mr. Farber come back?”
    “No, he was out of the office. Mr. Veeder’s secretary came.”
    “Carolyn—”
    He shook his head. “Not her, the new one.”
    Another shocker. Carolyn had been with Bill for years. She would never have left him.
    “I left my keys in L.A.,” she said.
    “Oscar will let you in.” Fredric went behind the concierge desk and pressed a button. “Mr. Veeder called a couple of weeks ago and said he was coming in for a few days, but he must have changed his mind.”
    The contradictions played with her head. Could it be this was a hoax, an FBI sting? Could it be that Bill Veeder wasn’t really dead?

38
    O SCAR HAD evasive eyes; he never quite looked at her, yet she always felt the man was a watcher. He gave her the creeps. She’d mentioned it to Bill, who’d brushed her discomfort away, saying, “Oscar’s a Muslim. They’re not supposed to look at women, the poor slobs. Consider it a compliment. He knows you’re something special.”
    A compliment she could do without.
    He was standing outside Bill’s door, key in hand, when she got off the elevator. Eyes averted, he unlocked the door and pushed it open.
    “Thank you.” She stepped around him as he showed no inclination to move out of the way. Inside, she turned to close the door and caught his direct stare of such pure venom that she slammed the door on it, shaken.
    “Did you ever consider, Bill Veeder, that you might once in a while be wrong—?” She broke off her one-sided conversation. “Damnation!”
    The luxurious apartment was skinned. That’s the only description she could put on it. What remained was bare bones. Anything that moved had been removed. Though the sofa looked okay on first glance, closer examination showed the underside of the cushions had been sliced open, then replaced so the damage wasn’t immediately visible.
    Luck didn’t hold for the bedroom. Although the bed was made up with its Porthault sheets and quilt, that there was something off kilter was obvious. She pulled back the sheets. The mattress had been shredded, its horse hair fill pushing upward.
    Under her feet the Berber carpet lumped, sliced and diced, ruined. At first, the assault seemed mindless, knocked her breath away. They’d made love on that mattress, on the Berber carpet. For a time their affair had been tromp l’oeil and taken on an air of permanence.
    Had the FBI done this? What the hell were they looking for? My God, it had to be the diamonds. Did they think she’d hidden them here? Well, they’d left no possible hiding place to the imagination, and what had they come up with?
    The closets in the dressing room were emptied, all of Bill’s elegant wardrobe, gone, carted away in those big plastic bags the FBI used to collect evidence. Evidence of what?
    All those beautiful English, hand-tailored suits he loved. He was going to be pissed.
    The kitchen, more deception. Everything seemed okay except someone had cleaned up. The cleansers tickled her nose. Bill’s housekeeper Carmen had been here. The refrigerator was barren, sparkling. A note lay under a crystal salt shaker on the glass and chrome table in Carmen’s large, round letters: Mr. Bill—I did the best I could.
    She returned to the living room. “Oh, Bill, where the hell are you?” Her voice was flat and hung in the air as if he were still a presence here. She looked out the window at the dazzling lights of the city, as she’d stood here so often in the past. Dazzling. That was the word for Bill Veeder. That was the word for their time together. And ephemeral.
    Like a Fourth of July sparkler, they had blazed briefly and then faded. It was not a hoax or a sting. She knew Bill Veeder was dead.
    Finally she let the tears come.
    Wetzon unlocked her own door with trepidation, needing no surprises, nothing new, no evidence of an FBI invasion. Rewarded, her nest was the same old welcoming home she couldn’t live without. “I’m home,” she shouted to the drunkard’s path quilt. “Yes!” Dancing from room to room, she turned on the lights. “Yes!” She paused at her barre to do a grand battement, a very sloppy one at that, but such a release.
    In the bedroom, she threw herself on her bed. “Yes.”
    Soon, she got up and wandered through her apartment. How clean everything was. Carlos. The blinds were drawn, the towels in the