34.

IT HAD BEEN a long, dull day. At five o’clock Wetzon called it quits and declared she was going home. She’d meet Smith at seven at Baci.

The heat glanced off concrete, glass, stone, and steel. It had to be one hundred and ten in the shade, and there was not one cab in sight. Eyes burning, Wetzon walked over to First Avenue and took a bus uptown, transferring for the crosstown at Eighty-sixth Street, where, wonder of wonders, she got a seat. It was then she noticed that the air-conditioning had broken down, and the open windows let in more hot, unbreathable air. As more and more people crowded on, weary and rank with sweat, the bus took on the aspect of a cattle car. An elderly woman fainted somewhere up front, and people were so jammed together that no one noticed until the Central Park West stop, when everyone began to push out.

The driver radio’d for an EMS truck, and two men picked up the poor woman and laid her across the front seats, fanning her with hot air as they waited for the paramedics. An athletic young woman in Reeboks took a bottle of Evian water from her backpack, poured a little into the cap and pressed it to the woman’s lips.

Wetzon got off the back exit of the bus and walked the block and a half to her apartment, finding it more and more difficult just to pick up one foot and then the other, counting in her head, left then right then left then right.

She took a cold shower and lay on her bed letting the air-conditioner revive her body, get her brain functioning again.

Smith had done a colossally stupid thing. If we know who the murderer is, and the murderer is among us, then Smith has put us both in imminent danger. Wetzon plucked her phone from the painted washstand next to her bed, balanced it on her stomach, and picked out Silvestri’s office number.

A strange voice answered his phone. “Brafman.”

“Hi, this is Leslie Wetzon.” She vaguely remembered him. Short, blondish, thin.

“Oh, yeah.” He seemed to know who she was. “He’s not here. Try Midtown North.”

“Is Metzger around?”

“They’re all at Midtown North. Silvestri, Metzger, and Mo.”

Silvestri, Metzger & Mo. It sounded like a law firm. “Do you have the number there?”

“Hold on.” Brafman came back on the line and gave it to her.

“Thanks.” She hung up and called Midtown North, asked for Silvestri, then Metzger, and finally Weiss, got passed around for ten minutes, gave up and left her number. She probably should have asked for Mo, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She put the phone back in its place. He’d taken Mo with him. Get a grip on yourself, dummy, she commanded. The heat is definitely affecting your brain.

In the dining room, which alternated as a workout studio, she rolled a mat out on the floor and did some slow yoga stretches, the bridge, then rolled into a shoulder stand. The blood rushed to her brain as she did deep, measured breathing.

The cast of characters with the opportunity in both murders could be narrowed down to Hoffritz, Bird, Dougie Culver, Neil Munchen, Chris Gorham, Ellie Kaplan, and possibly David Kim, if he had attended the dinner. Still in the shoulder stand, she swung her legs apart and then behind her. Earlier, she had mentally eliminated both Ellie and Neil because of their obvious affection for Goldie, but if Goldie’s death had been an accident, they had to go back on the list. All told, seven. The not-so-magnificent seven.

She stretched her legs up in the air, holding hands on hips, and continued deep breathing. She felt a pink glow, a brilliance surge through her. Oh, dear God, she thought. What if all this business about Carlton Ash’s report had nothing at all to do with the murders? The study was a distraction, a wrong turn, all unfortunately her own creation.

Slowly, she came out of the shoulder stand into a backbend and lowered herself, vertebra by vertebra, into the sponge position and lay there. Better than a massage because the brain was not left out.

Carlton Ash had stumbled on something when he was nosing around Luwisher Brothers working on his study. Something that had made him quit his job. As a consultant with Goodspeed, Ash had to have had an income of upwards of six figures. So unless he had a trust fund, he couldn’t afford to just quit a job like that.

If he’d had an independent income, he probably wouldn’t have been breaking his ass working at Goodspeed, because they were notorious for working their people into burn-out. He had to have felt that whatever he’d discovered was going to fix him for life. Except it had fixed him for death.

Damn Smith. Damn every last one of the magnificent seven. It had to be one of them. She was fairly certain that neither Ellie nor David would be privy to Smith’s report for Luwisher Brothers. Ergo, if someone tried to kill Smith and Wetzon, they could narrow the suspects down to five. Very funny, Wetzon, she thought.

Regretfully, she rolled herself up into a standing position and did a few pliés. Her skin tingled. Where was Silvestri? She didn’t want to go out without talking to him, telling him how Smith had set them up as decoys.

“Well, quack, quack, sweetie pie,” she said, mimicking Smith, and danced into the bedroom. She dressed in a long white Bis skirt and short-sleeved, V-neck cotton shirt, slipped sandals on her bare feet. Tying her hair back in a ponytail, she covered the band with a violet-and-white cotton scarf.

How brave you are, Wetzon, she thought, mocking herself. She was not frightened, just a bit hyper. Was she being stupid? Her watch said quarter to seven. She went into the kitchen and pulled a Post-it off the pack next to the phone, and stuck it to the outside of her door under the peephole. Then she wrote on it: S—Meeting Smith at Baci’s at 7. Urgent news. Please come. L.

It all seemed melodramatic, and he would probably return her call and not get this message until he came home, which he might not even do. Merde. She went back inside, grabbed her handbag, went out, closed the door, double-locked it.

A phone rang. She put her ear to the door. Her phone. Damnation. She fumbled with the lock, got it open, lunged for the phone before the fifth ring when the answering machine would activate. “Hello,” she gasped.

“Wetzon?”

“This is Wetzon. I can hardly hear you. Please speak louder. Who is this?”

“Wetzon,” the voice whispered. “You said you’d be my friend. I need a friend right now.”

“Ellie? Is that you? What’s wrong?”

“Wetzon ... help me ... please. Everything went wrong somehow ... I ...” A clattering noise, as if Ellie had dropped the phone.

“Ellie, speak clearly. I can’t follow you.”

There was no response.

“Ellie? Ellie!”

She heard a soft cry like the mew of a cat and then the line went dead.