Hedging (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery)

regarding Max Orchard. “Max, sweetie, you are such a fashion plate today. You quite outshine Wetzon and me.”
    Max gave Smith an indulgent smile. “Xenia, you do go on.” His short neck, concave chest, and pot belly were exaggerated by suspenders that brought his trousers almost to his armpits. He looked like Tweedledum, in gumsoles. “Wetzon, it hasn’t been the same without you. And no one has missed you more than Xenia.”
    “Max!” A ruddy flush stained Smith’s cheeks.
    Wetzon laughed, free out, relaxed. It was so good to be back. “Do tell.”
    “Now don’t deny it, dear,” Max said, shaking his finger at Smith.
    Smith, for once, had nothing to say. She watched the little lights on the phone flash and blink. The activity meant money in the bank for Smith and Wetzon. Smith maintained that the secret to success was to get the money out of “their” pockets and into “our” pockets. And if you kept your eye on that goal, it was sure to happen.
    “Max,” Wetzon said, “I’m going to work on the hots you’ve qualified. Cheryl—I can see she’s a love—” Smith rolled her eyes. “Cheryl can feed Sean.”
    “I saw you rolling your eyes,” Wetzon told Smith after Max left.
    “For pity sakes, Cherry a love?”
    “As are you, my dear partner.”
    “Humpf.” Still, Smith looked pleased. She gathered up the Tarot cards, slipped them into their silk case, the case into her purse.
    Wetzon’s intercom line buzzed. “Yes?”
    Sean said, “I’ve got the skinny on Bobby Baglia.”
    “Come right upstairs and tell us. It will make Smith’s day.” She grinned at Smith and filled her in on the earlier conversation. “I have a feeling it’s the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to scrub down after I spoke with him.”
    “Dirtbag.” Smith plopped into her chair. “Isn’t he the one that kept leaving Xeroxes of his penis for his manager’s secretary?”
    “The very one. He got fired for that, but let’s face it, the firms are to blame for people like him,” Wetzon said. “One firm fires him, another hires him.”
    “Not this time, I have a feeling,” Sean said.
    “Pull up a chair,” Wetzon told him.
    “What firm was he with?” Smith searched her purse for her bulging makeup bag, put it on her desk, and unfolded a little mirror.
    Sean took a seat in front of Wetzon’s desk. “First Franchise.”
    “Never heard of it.” Using a lip pencil, Smith outlined her lips, switched to a lip brush and reapplied her lipstick.
    Hypnotized by the procedure, Sean was silent.
    “It’s one of those obscure, shlocky firms that keep opening, playing for a while, then folding,” Wetzon said. “Right, Sean?”
    “Uh, oh, yes, right.”
    “So, go on,” Smith said, applying blush to her cheeks with an oversized brush.
    “But this all started when he was with Broad Wall Partners.”
    “Another new one on me,” Smith said. “Obscure and Schlocky Incorporated, no doubt.”
    “Yes,” Sean said. “Bobby was hyping this little biotech stock, telling clients that Merck was going to buy them. He said he’d done the research for free instead of the big bucks the hotshot research analysts charged. He got Broad Wall Partners to push it, and this whole group of doctors and dentists in Minnesota buying.”
    “What did the biotech company have that would make Merck buy them?” Wetzon asked.
    “Nothing,” Sean said. “It was all hype.”
    “Doctors are the dumbest investors,” Smith said.
    “One of the doctors called The Wall Street Journal . Bobby kept talking about six figure profits and the stock kept dropping. Broad Wall Partners got smart and dumped him.”
    “And First whatever hired this pond scum?”
    “Yes, a few days later. And took one of those tombstone ads saying they proudly announce the appointment of Bob Baglia as a Managing Director.”
    “That’s why this business gets a bad name,” Wetzon said.
    “There’s more.”
    “For pity sakes. I’m going to have to take a shower.”
    “Go on, Sean,” Wetzon said.
    “Well, Bobby was hot, got everybody at First Franchise fired up pitching stocks, which was good, but then he started doing crazy stuff like sleeping in the office at night and breaking into brokers’ desks with a tire iron, searching their stuff. When they confronted him, he said he had the boss’s permission to look for irregularities.”
    “Lying dirtbag,” Smith said.
    “One of the brokers confronted him and there was a fist fight. Bobby got axed. He came