The Big Killing

by Annette Meyers

  “Can I get stock options at Hallgarden?”

  “You can ask for them now and you can accumulate them when you’re there.”

  Switzer paused. “I’ll keep the meeting tomorrow.”

  “Andy wants to talk to you, so give him a call.” She paused. “And by the way, Kingston is very corporate. That means pinstripes, white shirt.”

  “Wetzon, come on, you know who you’re talking to? I always look great. I just bought a new suit. Cost me a thou.”

  She hung up and called Andy Garfeld, who listened to her report on Switzer’s reaction to Bache, taking audible, impatient drags on his cigarette. “Doesn’t he know that Bache is the wrong place for him?”

  “Andy, brokers are suckers for other good salesmen.”

  A long moment of silence, then: “Unfortunately, you’re right.”

  Harold came back with her sandwich. “No calls.” She was emphatic. “I want to have my lunch in peace.”

  She went out to the garden and ate her lunch sitting on their new garden furniture.

  Her thoughts drifted magnetically back to Barry Stark. Barry the sleaze, to Smith. Hyper, money-crazy Barry, who characterized himself as a poor kid from the Bronx. Barry, who had sent her a list of brokers, with phone numbers and background notes, without asking for a kickback on a placement. Opportunistic Barry, looking for the big killing, going to marry a girl he grew up with, but having an affair with someone he worked with.

  Warm and drowsy, she nestled into the hard seat of the chair, remembering that Georgie had made fun of Barry as an organ donor. Organ donor. Maybe that was why Wetzon had liked him. There was something about Barry ... something soft ... something boyish. Bad boyish sometimes, but definitely boyish. He’d had a kind of rough charm. And he had chosen to be an organ donor. An oddly humanitarian thing for him to do. She shook her head. Georgie, on the other hand, had little charm that she could see. She shuddered. Georgie frightened her.

  “Wetzon?”

  “Harold.”

  “Steve Switzer.”

  Wetzon sighed and reluctantly left the sweet solitude. When she picked up the phone to take Switzer’s call, she was back in the marketplace.

  “I spoke with Andy,” Switzer said. “He offered me seventy percent payout for a year.”

  “Incredible.” It was incredible.

  “And they’ll make a market for me in any stock they can do diligence on.”

  “Fantastic.” It was.

  “Senior vice president title, private office, sales assistant, cold caller.”

  “Good, good.”

  “What else should I ask for at the meeting tomorrow, besides some upfront—”

  “Steve, I don’t think you should ask for the world. They’re a small firm. You’ll put them off.”

  “Wetzon, I know what I’m doing. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Tell me what else I can ask for.”

  Wetzon rubbed the itchy area around the scab on her forehead. What the hell, maybe he was right. Maybe that’s what her trouble was—she tended to accept, not demand. “You could ask for an expense account. At your production level, it could be one percent of your gross. And stock options.”

  “That’s what I want. That’ll do it.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, after the meeting. Good luck.”

  If Steve Switzer made a deal with Hallgarden, Smith and Wetzon would have to take a fee-forward deal, one weighted heavily on Switzer’s production for the coming months, two to thirteen, against a small down payment. It was like rolling dice. Sometimes it paid off dramatically, and sometimes it was what the traders called a dead cat bounce. Nothing.

  The phone rang. She hoped it was for Smith because she’d had it for the day. She cleaned off her desk and with her fingertip rubbed a whitish spot from the rough surface of the marble peach paperweight.

  “Wetzon, that was Howie Minton’s sales assistant confirming your appointment tomorrow at five o’clock at the Vista Bar.”

  She nodded. Howie was getting carried away with himself, too. Trusting a sales assistant to confirm an appointment with a headhunter. Had he forgotten who paid the sales assistant’s salary? Not very smart. Unless, of course, he wanted his firm to know he was talking to Wetzon. Now that was diabolical, but knowing Howie, a definite possibility. She laughed out loud.

  The sun had moved around to the south and was brightly beckoning her outdoors.

  She pulled on cotton socks over her pantyhose and laced up her pink Reeboks. It was such a beautiful day, she would walk home, window shop, get some exercise, think about clothes, food ... Silvestri. Damn him. Damn Smith. Spend a nice quiet evening ... Oh lord, she had forgotten about her date with the good doctor, Rick Pulasky. What a brain.

  She flipped through her old phone messages—reporters—nothing urgent, dropped them on her desk, and put her black pumps in her briefcase, along with the suspect sheets on Howie Minton and Steve Switzer.

  “You’re leaving early.” Harold was accusing. He always took being left alone personally.

  Wetzon ignored his displeasure. “I’m working from home tomorrow morning. I have appointments downtown in the afternoon. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Is Smith coming back?”

  “Don’t know. I doubt it.” She walked to Smith’s desk and looked at her appointment book. Next to two-thirty were the distinct initials G.T.

  G.T. Wetzon frowned. Mark’s teacher? No. Mark’s teacher had a funny name—they had laughed about it—what was it? Oh yes, Alice Littlejohn. Who was G.T.? She waved to Harold and walked out into the gentle afternoon sun.

  She stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of their office and then walked briskly toward Second Avenue. She stopped dead in her tracks.

  G.T.

  Georgie Travers.

  27

  What would Smith be doing with Georgie Travers, whom she loathed? And who said G.T. had to be Georgie Travers?

  Wetzon hesitated on the corner of Second Avenue. Which way should she walk? She decided to take the scenic route up Fifth Avenue to Central Park South.

  If you think too much, you’ll get crazy, she told herself. Look at the people on the street, look in the store windows. She looked at a leggy young woman with a disarray of long, dark hair held up in places with plastic combs and clips, and dangling, mismatched earrings—contrived SoHo-ian havoc—who was leaning against a big blue mailbox on the west side of Forty-ninth Street, lacing high white boots. She wore a short black tunic, mid-thigh length, over black tights. She straightened up and stared back at Wetzon, who had not realized she was staring. Abashed, Wetzon moved hurriedly toward Fifth Avenue.

  You are forgetting your manners, old dear, she thought. Which reminded her of Carlos. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if his career was born again. He missed the gypsy life more than she did. He missed the excitement and the gossip and the camaraderie. It seemed not to have worn him down as much as it had her.

  She eyed the display of short metallic evening dresses in Saks’s Forty-ninth Street window skeptically. Who would ever wear anything like that? Certainly no one she knew.

  A cool breeze came out of the sun-drenched clouds and caught her unexpectedly. She felt a chill and then the sudden, odd sensation of being watched. She swung around, remembering the previous day’s terror of the hand shoving her into the traffic.

  Shoppers, gawking tourists hung with cameras, messengers, Senegalese peddlers with their knockoffs of designer watches, the usual Fifth Avenue mix of people and costumes. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the girl in the Robin Hood costume—boots, tights, tunic—staring into another Saks window nearby. But she was paying no attention to Wetzon. There was no sense of recognition, or menace, for that matter.

  Wetzon shook her head. She was getting jumpy. She continued on her way, but this time she moved faster.

  I. Miller on Fifty-seventh and Fifth was having a sale on Ferragamo shoes. She marched herself right in and tried on a pair of black patent leather pumps with her usual
two-inch heels. They were wonderful. She bought them in patent, white, and navy and arranged to have them delivered. As she waited for her American Express Card to be returned, she looked out past the display window onto Fifty-seventh Street and saw, once again, the girl with the tousled dark hair. She seemed to be waiting for someone.

  When Wetzon left I. Miller, the girl was gone. She crossed Fifty-seventh Street and walked toward The Plaza and Central Park South.

  “Do you want to go Trumping?” she heard a woman carrying a Bergdorf’s shopping bag say to another with a Bonwit’s bag. Trumping. That was a new one. They were referring to the shops in the Trump Tower across Fifth Avenue from I. Miller. Tiny, expensive shops and boutiques clustered amid pink marble. It was a beautiful, if slightly voluptuous, place, with its tall waterfall, the expensive noshery nearby, and the grand piano with a cocktail pianist in the lobby.

  Whenever she passed The Plaza she thought of the scene in The Way We Were where Robert Redford comes out of The Plaza with a very white-bread-looking woman, and Barbra Streisand, very ethnic, is across the street asking people to sign “ban the bomb” petitions. It made her feel very sad, as if she really knew those people. She was thinking about Katie and Hubbell, the Redford and Streisand characters, as she walked up Central Park South. She paused at the St. Moritz’s Café de la Paix, where tourists were having iced drinks outside, and caught another glimpse of the girl in the tunic and tights, who, seeing Wetzon, scurried into the St. Moritz lobby.

  This was too coincidental. For some peculiar reason, the girl was following her. Was she angry because Wetzon had stared at her when she had first seen her leaning against the mailbox?

  As Wetzon stood mulling this over, she watched a man pedal by in the barrel seat of a sports car—just the seat, not the car. He was steering with a rod that came up like a joystick between his feet. Momentarily, the strange contraption almost made her forget her bizarre shadow.

  As soon as the light changed, Wetzon plunged into Central Park. Her briefcase seemed to be getting heavier and heavier, a sure sign that she was tired. From behind the stone wall she watched the girl come out of the St. Moritz and look around.

  Unexpectedly, the girl crossed the street and headed in Wetzon’s direction. Wetzon, feeling a stab of fear she knew was irrational, took off, aiming for Central Park West, dodging nannies with babies in carriages, screaming children with dripping ice cream cones, joggers, the elderly who sat sunning on park benches. A big black dog braced his massive paws and began barking furiously at her as she came out on Sixty-fifth Street.

  She had literally raced through the Park, not breaking pace until she made the turn onto Columbus Avenue and was back on her home turf, the West Side. Panting and sticky, she stopped to catch her breath in front of Trocadero, with its wonderful window of French-style sportswear, when, to her consternation, she saw the girl she was running from, now loitering in front of Furla’s, acting for all the world as if she were casually looking at the handbags in the shop window.

  Damnation, Wetzon thought, more angry than frightened. She’d put a stop to this. When the girl looked away for a moment, Wetzon tucked her briefcase under her arm and bolted up the street to Sedutto’s, the ice cream shop. She went through the back of Sedutto’s into Diane’s, the burger house attached to it, and around to the front doorway of Diane’s. The girl came up the street after her, looking right and left; when she reached the entrance to Diane’s, Wetzon jumped out, grabbing her arm.

  “I’ve got you now,” Wetzon said indignantly, shaking her, as the girl tried to pull away. “Who are you and why have you been following me?”

  The girl stared at her and, to Wetzon’s horror, her face crumpled and she began to cry.

  “Oh, shit,” Wetzon said, instantly feeling like an ogre.

  “Oh, God.” The girl sobbed, tears gushing down her thin cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how.” Her accent was basic Bronx.

  “Come on now,” Wetzon said, distressed. Everyone was looking at them curiously, sliding past, warily. She put her arm around the surprisingly muscular shoulders of the sobbing girl. “Cafe La Fortuna’s around the corner. Why don’t we just sit down and you can talk to me there.”

  The girl sniffed noisily, drew a yellow Kleenex out of a tiny, hot pink shoulder bag, and blew her nose. They sat at an outside table. Wetzon was embarrassed by the mountain of fear she had built out of nothing. And now she felt mean, even a bully. “How about a cappuccino?” the mean bully asked.

  The girl nodded. Tears had streaked her mascara and black eyeliner, which ran unevenly down her face. She looked like a little girl who had put on her mother’s makeup and made a mess of it.

  Wetzon ordered two cappuccinos and said to the girl, “Do you know me?”

  The girl snuffled. “You’re Wetzon.”

  “Okay. Do I know you?”

  The girl groped in her pink bag for another Kleenex and gulped and hiccupped as the tears returned. She shook her head. A purple comb slipped from her hair and landed at her booted feet.

  Wetzon took a small pack of tissues from her handbag and gave it to the girl.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the girl mumbled, mopping up her face.

  “Who are you?”

  The waiter put two cinnamon-dusted frothy cappuccinos in front of them and discreetly departed.

  “My name is Ann Buffolino.”

  “Ann Buffolino?” The name meant nothing to Wetzon. Then a little glimmer of light flickered in her mind. “Wait a minute. Are you Buffie?” she asked, knowing the answer before it came.

  28

  “Barry and I were going to get married.” Ann Buffolino’s pale brown eyes watered up and tears dribbled down over rouged cheeks.

  “I know.” In response to the question on Buffie’s wan face, Wetzon added, “Georgie told me.”

  “Oh, you know Georgie.” It was more a statement than a question.

  “Very slightly.” Better than she wanted to know him.

  “We all went to school together.” Buffie looked down at the wads of damp Kleenex next to her untouched cappuccino. An immense teardrop rolled slowly down her nose and teetered on the tip, ignored. “We were a team. All for one, one for all. Like The Three Musketeers—we love those old movies.”

  “Without D’Artagnan?” Wetzon asked. Buffie probably wouldn’t know the reference.

  But Buffie surprised her. “Barry was D’Artagnan.” She swiped the tear from her nose with the back of her hand. “He’s so handsome. I mean, he was, wasn’t he? I can’t believe he’s dead.” She pressed her palms to her face and rubbed her swollen eyes. She looked like a hurt child.

  Wetzon, commiserating, patted her shoulder, noting at the same time how large Buffie’s hands were for such a small girl. Her fingers were ringless; chipped, bright pink polish covered long oval nails. “I’m so sorry. Do you have family? You really shouldn’t be alone now.”

  Buffie gulped and made a small burp. She licked the cappuccino foam from her lips. “I have my work,” she said. Her dangling earrings swung back and forth as she moved her head. “This is good. And the boys have been wonderful to me—especially Georgie.”

  “What kind of work do you do?” Something warm and living brushed Wetzon’s leg. Startled, she looked down and saw a huge, orange-striped cat, purring loudly, rubbing against her. Wetzon sneezed. She was allergic to cats.

  “Oh, there’s a sweet thing,” Buffie said, picking up the cat, stroking it. “I teach aerobics at Body Beauty by Rita on Seventy-ninth Street.” She fell silent, her eyes expectantly on Wetzon.

  “Why did you want to talk to me?” Wetzon wouldn’t have matched Barry with Ann Buffolino—not in a million years. The girl was strange, flaky, but maybe it was because she was still in shock. She wondered if Barry would really have married her. The orange cat undulated luxuriantly against Buffie’s black tunic, leaving a trail of short orange hairs, and then curled up contentedly in her meager lap a
nd went to sleep.

  Buffie, hands folded neatly over the orange pillow that was the cat, became clear-eyed. “Barry said he was going to take care of me if something happened to him. He told me he wrote his life story and that I was to call this lady— Mildred Gleason—and she would pay me the insurance money.”

  Wetzon closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Buffie had just, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps deliberately, disclosed a whole new facet of Barry’s murder. “Haven’t you talked to the police?”

  Buffie looked at Wetzon as if Wetzon were crazy. “Oh, yes, yesterday, but I wouldn’t tell them anything about this.”

  “Why not? It might help find out who murdered Barry.”

  “Then I wouldn’t have anything,” the girl said plaintively. “And he meant for me to have it. I loved Barry, but there’s no way I can bring him back. Georgie told me you had to know where he hid it because you were the last person he talked to.”

  “I told Georgie that Barry didn’t say anything to me about anything. I didn’t even know about you until Georgie told me. You have to tell the police what you know.” Wetzon was beginning to suspect that Georgie had set her up.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Without warning, Buffie put her head in her hands and started weeping again. The cat awoke and jumped off her lap, tail twitching.

  The shadows on the brownstones around them had lengthened. They were now sitting in the shade, and the air began to cool.

  “Buffie, please don’t cry.” Wetzon looked at her watch. It was almost four. “Tell me what Barry said about this life story of his. Maybe I can help you find it.”