1.
“OVER MY DEAD body!”
This verbal explosion was followed by a thump of such force that the gold-leafed mirror shook, as if someone were being shoved into the wall behind it. Wetzon’s eyes widened as her reflected image undulated in the glass; her body jerked back, for it seemed as if the argument would burst into the ladies’ room where she had come to fix her face. The scuffle—or whatever it was—was coming from the men’s room next door. Another loud thud and angry voices. Then an ominous quiet.
The mirror covered the wall almost completely so that there was not one bare space to which she could put her curious ear. Frustrated, she watched her reflection wrinkle into a frown. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she told it.
The door opened and a woman in a red, off-the-shoulder taffeta gown came in. Janet Barnes. Wife of Goldie Barnes, the Lion of Wall Street, chairman of Luwisher Brothers, and honoree of this evening’s dinner. A huge red bow covered Janet’s ample right bosom and most of her right arm. She swept past Wetzon to the stalls.
The loud voices and the scuffling started up again suddenly, subsiding into a low rumble from a new voice.
Hastily, Wetzon picked up her tiny silk clutch purse and escaped.
Dead cat or not, she had to see who they were. She knew almost everyone here tonight; the argument had to be between people she knew.
She parked herself unobtrusively behind a wide, pink marble column and watched the door to the men’s room, hoping she hadn’t missed whoever they were. Nosy, Wetzon, she said to herself, grinning. She was rewarded almost immediately by the appearance of the old man himself, Goldie Barnes, emerging from the men’s room, his face florid with anger, chest heaving under his pleated white dress shirt. At his heels was Neil Munchen, Goldie’s protégé, who ran the telemarketing—the fancy name for cold calling—floor for Luwisher Brothers. Neil had what looked like a faint reddish welt on his cheekbone. They walked off in the opposite direction from Wetzon’s column, toward the grand ballroom.
She was trying to decide whether to move up behind them, when out of the men’s room came Christopher Gorham, manager of the other retail floor at Luwisher Brothers and Wetzon’s date for the evening; John Hoffritz, managing director, to whom Chris and Neil reported, known to the brokers as “Search”; and Destry Bird, third in line, not so affectionately known as “Destroy.”
How infinitely curious. There had been some kind of pow-wow in the men’s room and whatever had ensued was not very nice. The three men, like three penguins in dinner jackets, paused in front of the door. Wetzon inched around the column, dying to know what was being said. Then, as if it were one of those circus cars with all the clowns, the men’s room door opened and yet one figure more emerged—a man like a walrus, fat and waddly, his black bow tie askew. Someone she didn’t know. As if they’d been waiting for him, the penguins opened their huddle to include the walrus. Curiouser and curiouser.
“Sweetie pie, there you are!”
Damnation. Depend on Smith to barge in, interrupt her eavesdropping, and even call attention to it.
“What are you doing hiding behind that column?”
The three penguins snapped to attention, guarded eyes in frozen faces, and the walrus faded into gray as Smith captured Wetzon’s hand and pulled her from behind the pink marble column into full view.