The Groaning Board

recognized. When she unfolded the notes, the note-paper bore the name
of a money manager: Wetzon’s friend Laura Lee Day.

Chapter Six

     
     
     
    “Did you
hear the news?” Darlene said, for the second time. The mask over her nose and mouth and the
screeching of an electric drill made it hard to understand her.
    The skeletal slats of the new
staircase led up to nowhere, it seemed at the moment. Eventually it would lead
to the parlor floor of their brownstone on East Forty-ninth Street. Wetzon
stood on the third slat and surveyed the rubble. Her black patent Ferragamos
wore a bridal veil of plaster dust.
    Smith had gotten her wish. Adding
Darlene Ford to their staff had proven a windfall of monumental proportions. An
architect had arrived while Wetzon was still saying, “Don’t you think we ought
to wait and see what the climate on the Street will be?”
    “Really, sweetie pie,” Smith had said
as if she were talking to a simpleton. “It doesn’t matter what the climate on
the Street is. We can write off expanding the office, and we’ll have added
value to our property.”
    She was probably right. Immediately
after they’d formed their company, they’d rented the ground floor of the
brown-stone. When the original owner put the building on the market during the
recession three years before, they’d bought it at a bargain price. At the time,
real estate in the City was at its lowest. And not long after, as it always
did, it had come roaring back.
    Ruth Abramson, their accountant, had
agreed with Smith. So here they were in the throes of a massive renovation.
    Wetzon had insisted on using her
friend Louise Armstrong to do the construction, only to find that Louie, an
artist who supported herself through contracting jobs, was in the midst of
preparing for her first gallery exhibition. Smith had found Noonan Brothers,
and Noonan Brothers, three of them, had filed renovation plans with the City,
come in and broken through the floor with only minor damage to a riser, built
the frame of the staircase, then departed to do another job. At least that’s
what Wetzon thought, because they only returned every three or four days to do
one day’s work. Undoubtedly somewhere else in the City another client of Noonan
Brothers was grinding his teeth as Wetzon was.
    Wetzon looked down at their associate
with mixed feelings. In addition to the surgical mask, Darlene wore a green
surgeon’s scrub over her dress and a clear plastic shower cap over thick blond
hair. The look, whatever she’d intended, was not Darlene Ford, surgeon, but
Darlene Ford, bag lady.
    Darlene’s arrival last fall had been
serendipitous. Smith had stolen her away from Tom Keegen, their major and most
virulent competitor in headhunting stockbrokers on Wall Street.
    Business had been in the doldrums, as
client after client merged themselves out of existence. There was no question,
odd as she was, that Darlene had a gift. She could talk the most reluctant
broker into meeting with another firm. And a first meeting was like kicking the
tires; once you kicked the tires, you were halfway to buying the car, or in
this case, making a move to another firm. “Our chubby little diamond mine,”
Smith called her, but never to her face. Smith had been jubilant, but Wetzon
had rather liked the intimacy of their neat little firm. Darlene had changed
the vibes, that was for sure.
    “I said, did you hear the news?”
Darlene said again, a soupçon of irritation in her tone.
    “What news?” Attitude was always just
below the surface with Darlene. Nothing you could put your finger on, just a
scent of something else, which Darlene—so far—was sensational at covering up.
    “Watch it! Watch it!” The whine of
the drill ceased; a thundering crash followed, then the brutal sound of metal
meeting metal. Plaster dust showered down on them.
    Wetzon looked at her suit, it had
been a medium gray pinstripe when she’d put in on that morning. Cupping her
hand around her mouth, she called, “Everyone all right up there?”
    “Shit!” someone said. “Whaddayacrazy
or somethin’, Herbie?”
    Wetzon came back down the stairs,
dusting herself off. “Somebody is crazy or something,” she muttered. She picked
her way across the plastic-drop-cloths toward her desk, then lifted the dusty
plastic that covered her datebook and suspect i sheets. Debris slid to the
floor, only to be lost among other debris already there. She should have played
hooky today, like Smith. But