7.

“I CAN’T GIVE him a thirty-five-hundred-dollar guarantee for three months. Not with the figures he gave me. I need his runs.”

“Did you ask him for them?” Wetzon expertly kept the exasperation she felt out of her voice.

“Well, no. I thought you could do that.”

“Okay, I will, but let me make a suggestion. Let’s be creative. If you can’t offer him thirty-five hundred, and he loves the higher payout on the back end as an incentive bonus, which he tells me he does, why not make it all incentive? What if he can keep a hundred percent of his gross for the first two months, then eighty percent for the next two months, then sixty percent for the rest of the year? It’s a guarantee that he’ll work his butt off.”

“Say, Wetzon, that’s really good. I never thought of that. I’ll try it.”

Wetzon hung up the phone and screamed. “What’s worse than a broker who won’t move?”

“A manager who can’t close,” B.B. and Harold chanted dutifully, this being Wetzon’s big bugaboo.

Smith turned a baleful face to them. “Close the door behind you, please.” She flipped her hand in a dismissing motion.

“Hold on,” Wetzon said. “Just remember we’re looking for the new Luwisher profile, whatever that is. Let’s start putting a file together of people who fit. We’ll prepare a spiel and start pitching them tomorrow.”

“What’s the matter with today?” Smith’s tone was borderline belligerent. She stamped across the space of the office they shared, which had been the dining room of the nineteenth-century brownstone, gave Harold an extra little push across the saddle, and firmly shut the door. The front room, where once there had been a large kitchen and pantry, as well as entrance hall, was their modest reception area. It held B.B.’s desk, a small loveseat, and three narrow chairs. A cubicle of privacy had been created for Harold.

The southern wall of Smith and Wetzon’s office was all windows and French doors leading to a garden, where they lunched in fair and middling weather from the first sign of spring to the first nip of autumn. The white iron furniture had been resprayed that spring and looked regal amid the reds and pinks of the tulips and the thick vines of purple wisteria that climbed the brick walls separating their garden from the houses to the right and left.

“What’s the matter with starting the calls today, may I ask?” Smith said again, coming to stand beside Wetzon who was enjoying the garden.

Wetzon narrowed her eyes at her partner. “God, you’re grouchy. That’s what happens when you load up on caffeine and don’t eat. Let’s sit outside and talk.” She took her straw hat with the tall daisy decoration from the shelf over her desk and opened the multi-windowed door. “I’m hungry and our sandwiches have to be getting soggy.” They had stopped on their way back to the office at their favorite sandwich shop, What’s Cooking, and picked up chicken salad with broccoli and dill on pita bread. “If we don’t eat, I’m going to be as bad-tempered as you.”

“You are absolutely right, sweetie pie.” Smith’s mood turned suddenly sunny. “Here, I’ll take everything out and you get the plates.” She gathered up the various paper bags efficiently, including her Diet Coke and Wetzon’s Perrier, and was out the door before Wetzon could close her astonished mouth.

“Shit!” Wetzon said to the empty room, to the Andy Warhol drawing of the roll of dollar bills that they had bought when they first went into business together, to Smith’s desk with its clutter of papers and personal items. She took two plastic plates and two plastic cups from the utility cabinet in their bathroom and joined Smith in the warm benevolence of their garden.

“Now, isn’t this nice?” Smith said, as if it were all her idea. She’d pulled one of the iron chairs out into full sunlight and was using her reflector. Already her lovely olive tones were shading to a luminous bronze.

Wetzon looked at her enviously. The sun was an anathema to her own pale skin, and she used sun block creams all year round, wearing a hat as soon as the first glimmer of spring sunshine appeared. Her friend Carlos said she had a hat fetish, which she did, having at least twenty-five or thirty hats in boxes, on hooks, and piled high on the old wooden hat block in her apartment.

Smith opened the Diet Coke and the Perrier with a snap and poured with a champagne flourish. She smiled at Wetzon. “Pull your chair out and get some sun, for godsakes. You look all washed out, sugar.”

Wetzon left her chair where it was, in partial shade, and sat down, feeling all at once angry and disgruntled. Somehow Smith had reversed moods with her.

“Smith, I think we should talk about this mess you’ve gotten us into.”

“What mess? Wetzon, please. After all this time, you still don’t understand this business the way I do. By investigating the murder—”

“We have no credentials to do a murder investigation, Smith.” She shifted in her chair, beginning to sweat. It had gotten hot, just on the edge of downright uncomfortable.

“Look at it this way. Whatever we find out, we can turn over to your precious police. But more important, we can insinuate ourselves into Luwisher Brothers. We’ll discover where all the bodies are buried and dig up so much dirt ...” She licked her lips suggestively. “It will lock us into the company for life.”

“Smith! Goddammit, that’s blackmail.”

“Wetzon, stop being so naive. This is business.” She took another big bite out of her sandwich. “Mmmm. Delish,” she mumbled, leaving considerable doubt in Wetzon’s mind whether she was talking about the situation or the sandwich. “Come on, you negative old drip, this’ll be fun—not to say lucrative.”

“But we’ll be interfering in a murder investigation.”

“How? Just tell me how. By asking a few questions, fishing around a little? How?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Wetzon gripped her sandwich and chicken salad oozed out of a torn space in the pita pocket.

“So, we’re doing it. Okay?”

“You’re too much for me. I don’t want to argue.” She found herself nibbling around the edges of her sandwich as if she were eating a melting Popsicle. “But I want you to promise me that if we get in the way, if the police tell us to back off, we will.” Silvestri would be furious with her—and this wasn’t even her fault. She had tried to stay out of it.

Smith beamed. “Well, that’s easy to promise. Sweetie, I would never want us to—”

“Oh, shut up, Smith.” Wetzon ate the rest of her sandwich feeling that in spite of herself, she’d been manipulated by Smith yet one more time. On the other hand, she was forced to admit, to herself only, that she found the situation they were in intriguing.

Smith put down the reflector and looked hurt. “You don’t have to be so ungracious. I know you. If this had been your idea, you would be flaunting it. Besides, it sure didn’t look like murder to me. It was obviously a stroke.”

“Now I take it you’re an expert in forensic medicine?”

“Humpf. You know I have good instincts. Besides, the cards say—”

“The cards say we should investigate a murder?”

“Well, no, not exactly.” She smiled at Wetzon. “Admit it, sweetie pie, you’re just a wee bit mad that I’m involved in this, and you don’t have it all to yourself.”

“That’s not true, and you know it.” Wetzon found herself sputtering. Was Smith right? No, she couldn’t be.

“Wetzon.” B.B. was at the door. “Howie Minton for you.”

“Howie Minton?” Smith groaned. “Not again. How many years is this?”

“He called last week. “ Wetzon laughed. She stood up and brushed the crumbs off her skirt. “Tell him I’ll be right there, B.B.” To Smith, she said, “He wants to try again. I think I’ve been working with him for over five years now, right?”

“At least.” Smith tucked her chin back in the reflector.

“This is it, he says.”

“Humpf.”

“This time may be for real. L.L. Rosenkind has stopped doing principal business. I told Howie to think it over and call me only if he was really serious.”

“Give me a break.”

“He’s grossing over a million for his trailing twelve months.”

Smith dropped the reflector with a thump. “Jeeezus!”

“Smith.” B.B. appeared at the door again. “Jake.”

“Oh, good.” Smith followed Wetzon into their office. “Clean up out here, B.B., will you? There’s a good fellow.”

They separated, went to their respective corners and reached for their phones.

“Jake, precious,” Smith breathed.

“Hi, Howie,” Wetzon said.

B.B. came back into the room with the remains of their lunch and a stricken look on his face. “Wetzon,” he whispered. “I forgot to tell you. A letter came for you by messenger. It’s on your desk.”

“I’ve thought it over, Wetzon, my friend,” Howie’s unctuous voice spilled out of the receiver. “I want to go forward. I’m going to take a vacation for a week and then we can get started.”

Wetzon picked up the letter on her desk. It was addressed to her in violet ink. The paper was heavy rag of the Tiffany type.

“You’re such a darling—” Smith was saying.

“Great, Howie,” Wetzon said, turning the letter over and tearing it open with her finger. “I’m going to make up a list of firms for you and then we can talk again when you get back.”

She hung up the phone in time to hear Smith say, “She’s jealous that I’m stealing her thunder on this one.”

Furious, she swiveled around in her chair, ready to do battle with Smith, automatically pulling the notecard from the envelope. The signature caught her eye and stopped her. It was from Janet Barnes.

The grieving widow was inviting them to lunch on Monday.