Murder: The Musical

by Meyers, Annette

“I happened to see the royalty list on Hotshot, and I saw your name was on it.”

  Susan didn’t seem surprised. “Lord, it’s going to get out. I told Dilla it would.”

  “What is?”

  “Sam needed help with the lyrics. I’ve been a published poet for years.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Susan nodded. “Under the name S. C. Orkin. Sam was in trouble, so I was helping him out with the lyrics, sending them in with Dilla. He’s become so weird.”

  “I noticed.”

  “He didn’t want anyone to know he needed help.”

  “But there are never any secrets in the Theatre, at least not for very long. I’m surprised it’s not out already.”

  Susan shrugged. “I didn’t care. I don’t have that kind of ego.” She squelched a sob. “I can’t believe Dilla’s never coming home again.”

  She walked Wetzon to the door, so forlorn that Wetzon put her arms around her.

  The doorbell rang.

  Susan looked angry. “He sent her up.” She pulled away from Wetzon and yanked the door open. Standing in front of them was a bald man in tan slacks and a bright red cardigan sweater. His eyes were apoplectic in a fiery red face. Hands clenched at his sides, he screeched, “This has gone far enough! I’ve got a sick wife!” His accent was essence of Vienna, but the schlag was missing.

  Behind him the elevator door was open and the elevator man’s mouth was agape.

  Wetzon stepped around the enraged man carefully. “Bye, Susan.”

  “What are you doing up here, killing each other?” the man demanded of Susan, ignoring Wetzon entirely.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Nadelman. It’s over now. They’re—”

  Mr. Nadelman interrupted, his voice taut with anger. “First Friday, now today. Next time I call the police!”

  17.

  The cold was crinkly, so dry that Wetzon felt the skin on her face pull taut. Good. She needed the cold to clear her mind. Susan was so sure Mort had killed Dilla, yet Susan and Dilla had had a dreadful fight on Friday, or someone in that apartment had, according to their downstairs neighbor.

  On Fifth Avenue, car and bus traffic swept steadily downtown, a trail of headlights all rolling in one direction. Cabs still disgorged passengers, but rush hour was over, and except for a few isolated stragglers heading homeward, pedestrians were scarce. Only the dog walkers came out consistently day or night, summer or winter.

  A woman in a black cloth coat was getting into a cab in front of the building. The street light reflected off her glasses as the doorman closed the cab door. Over his shoulder he called to Wetzon, “Cab, miss?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Across the street, Central Park was an oasis between the east and west sides of Manhattan. Mercury vapor lights bathed the park the pinkish hue of a magical kingdom within the nighttime of the city.

  The indomitable Metropolitan Museum, closed on Mondays, was lit up like the White House. Wetzon plucked at the collar of her raccoon coat and loosened the gray cashmere scarf around her throat, drawing it upward to cover her mouth and chin. Monday evenings were always quiet in New York, as if everyone was recovering from the shock of returning to work after the weekend.

  Just as she reached the shelter, the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus pulled up. She put her token in the slot, and having a rare choice of seats, chose one next to a window. Four teenage girls in an array of coats—down, suede, and wool—but with matching jumpers, were sitting across the back seat of the bus, howling with laughter. They would grow quiet for a second, then one would start and the others joined in.

  The years were passing so swiftly, Wetzon thought. In another year she’d be forty, and ...

  When the light changed, the bus crossed into the park. But Wetzon had tuned out of her surroundings.

  There was really a simple explanation for Joel Kidde and the corporate jet going to Boston. Joel must be Mort’s agent. He might even represent every one of the creators on the show. It happened; small agencies had merged into big agencies, just the same as Wall Street firms had. That was it.

  When Carlos had said corporate jet, she’d somehow assumed it would be the record company’s. Don’t assume, Wetzon. Never assume.

  All right, that took care of Joel Kidde. On to the next curiosity. Why was Susan so upset about Wetzon seeing the little bag of jewelry? And why did she then put it under the sink? Had safe deposit boxes gone out of style? And who was Lenny? Who was Celia? The only show biz Lenny Wetzon knew was Leonard Bernstein, whom everyone called Lenny, and while he probably knew Dilla, there would be no reason for her, or Susan for that matter, to have jewelry that belonged to him. Besides, he was dead. And Lenny Bernstein’s wife had been Felicia. And she, too, was dead.

  A bronchial cough close by jolted Wetzon back to the real world. Flu was rampant this winter. Sitting beside her was a distinguished woman in a ranch mink coat and matching hat. She was coughing into a tissue. “Oh, dear,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry.” She snapped the book she was reading shut—Female Sexual Perversions—and rose. The bus ground its winding course through the park and came out on Eighty-first Street and Central Park West, where the coughing woman, the four teenage girls, and most of the other riders got off.

  The Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium, also closed on Mondays, stood like dark sentinels guarding the entrance to the West Side.

  Wetzon took the bus to Seventy-ninth and Broadway. Then she got off and walked toward Seventy-third Street, where Sonya had her office in a shabby brownstone near West End Avenue.

  Unlike Fifth Avenue, Broadway was crowded with people. It was the main thoroughfare of the open-twenty-four-hours-a-day Upper West Side. People were en route to and from aerobics classes, step classes—the latest craze of the exercise obsessed—dinner. Shoppers carried heaping bags from the Fairway Market, which had the best-priced quality selection of produce on the Upper West Side, or perhaps anywhere in the city, with the possible exception of the farmers’ market on Union Square.

  Wetzon spun into the Fairway, dodged a white-haired lady with a speeding shopping cart, and managed to get stepped on and pushed by an ancient woman wielding a walker like a battering ram. The stack of Granny Smith apples was at least six feet high. Although the temptation to try to slip out one at eye level was overwhelming, the vision of a landslide of apples in this crowded market was too much for her. Instead she stood on the tips of her toes—after all, she was a dancer—and took one from the top. Her next stop was the dairy case, where she reached over for a Dannon coffee yogurt. The tiny amount of caffeine in the yogurt would give her the extra buzz to get through the session with Sonya. When she straightened, yogurt in hand, she was poked sharply in the calf by a cane in the gnarled hands of a tiny old man with patchy white whiskers, who was trying to take Wetzon’s place at the dairy case.

  “I’m very sorry,” Wetzon told him. “Can I help you get something?”

  “Just get out of my way, girlie,” the man snarled.

  Shocked, Wetzon stepped aside. She’d forgotten how aggressive the elderly were in Fairway. She walked to the checkout lines, keeping a wary eye out for any other aging marauders, and was about to get on line when she was rudely butted aside by a shopping cart propelled by a little old lady in a storm coat and dirty white Reeboks. “Wait a minute,” Wetzon protested.

  “I saw that,” the old lady yelled. “You tried to push me out of line! Did everybody see that? Miss Piss Elegant here tried to push me!”

  “I didn’t do anything of the kind,” Wetzon said indignantly. “You pushed me.”

  “Who cares? You’re holding up the line,” someone shouted. Stretched out behind Wetzon was a stream of impatient shoppers.

  “It’s not you.” A woman in a hot pink coat carrying a plastic shopping basket full of groceries stood behind Wetzon. “I shop here all the time and I never fail to get run down or told off by one of these crazy seniors.”

  “Thanks.” Wetzon breathed a fervent prayer
that she would never become an elderly curmudgeon. She paid for the apple and the yogurt and walked the short distance to Sonya’s building, climbing the chipped and cracked stone steps to the front door. In the tiny vestibule she rang the bell marked 4 and waited, looking out at Seventy-third Street through the glass panel. Two women coming from different directions stopped to talk in front of the brownstone while their dogs, a leashed dachshund and an unleashed Weimaraner, sniffed each other.

  Wetzon pressed 4 again. Finally, the intercom crackled, “Yes?”

  “Leslie.” Wetzon put her hand on the door and waited for the buzzer, then pushed the door open.

  It was immediately obvious to Wetzon that the old brownstone had a new owner. The place had been so run down last time Wetzon had been there that Sonya had told her that the only reason she stayed was because the rent was so cheap. Now the hallway looked almost elegant with new cabbage rose carpeting and an upholstered Victorian sofa. In the corner near the staircase was an old maple rocker. Antique costume prints in beautiful frames hung on the walls. The cabbage rose runner went right up the stairs under rubber tread guards on each step.

  Sonya’s two-room office was on the second floor in the rear. The place was still seedy, but it was now a good-quality seedy compared with what it had been.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, Sonya Mosholu wore a black leotard, slim black pants, a long, loosely cut red blazer, and low snakeskin cowboy boots. Her short dark hair was in a side flip, her dark eyes accented with mascara and a taupey shadow. Artwear earrings framed her face.

  “God, Sonya,” Wetzon said, “instead of aging like the rest of us, you look younger every time I see you. Now you have the nerve to look girlish.”

  “Girlish? Me?” Sonya laughed. She had one of those rare throaty laughs that made you want to join in.

  The room had twenty-foot ceilings, a ceiling fan, and wonderful old moldings. Small exercise equipment—balls and weights—lay in every corner and on the mantle of a Wetzon-high fireplace. Two exercise mats were rolled and set upright in one corner.

  Wetzon hung her coat and hat on the standing coatrack next to Sonya’s black shearling, sat down on the low, striped sofa with metal legs. She took the apple and the yogurt from the paper bag. Setting the apple aside on the bamboo table, she opened the yogurt. “Oops, I forgot a spoon.”

  Sonya went into the next room and returned with a plastic spoon, handed it to her, then sat in one of the two Bauhaus-style metal-and-leather chairs facing Wetzon. She studied Wetzon for a moment. “You’ve cut your hair.”

  Wetzon’s fingers went involuntarily to the tiny line in her scalp. She tore her fingers away and got busy with the yogurt.

  “So ...” Sonya smiled, after a while. “Do you want to tell me?”

  “It’s stupid.” Her hands were squeezing the empty yogurt container out of shape.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, isn’t it stupid to know why you’re scared, but also know you’re okay, now that the danger has passed? You have to get on with your life, don’t you?”

  “Leslie.” Sonya’s voice was soft, almost hypnotic. Wetzon had to strain to hear her. Or might it be that she didn’t want to hear her? “Tell me about the danger,” she urged. “Why are you scared?”

  Wetzon sighed. She dropped the savaged yogurt container on the table. “Last year. It happened last year.” Her fingers touched the tiny scar. She started to speak again and couldn’t for the lump in her throat.

  Sonya waited. Wetzon kept her eyes on the bamboo table and the yellow box of tissues for patients who cried. She was certainly not going to be one of them. “I got shot. Here.” She inclined her head to show Sonya. “It was hardly anything.”

  “Being shot is hardly hardly anything, Leslie. How did it happen? Was it an accident?”

  “Someone was trying to kill me.” She saw the flicker of a reaction push through Sonya’s enormous self-control. “I was okay, though, Sonya. I was lucky. I got over it. Then I started having these dreams. Before this happened I used to have the most wonderful dreams. Smith said they were psychic.”

  “You’re still in the headhunting business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, Leslie.”

  “Well, at first I had no dreams at all, and then I started waking up every hour or so, and then the dream started coming.”

  “Tell me about them. Are they always the same?”

  “Yes. First there’s a flash of fire and I’m terrified but I can’t move, then the smell of gunpowder, then a burning pain in my head and I wake up soaked to the skin, shaking. I hear it even has a name: post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

  Sonya’s expression didn’t change. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Four months.”

  “Oh, Leslie—”

  “But Sonya, I was handling it fine until Saturday night.”

  “What changed?”

  “I went to the gypsy run-through of Hotshot—Carlos’s new musical.They’re setting up in Boston as we speak. Anyway, when we got to the theatre we found Dilla Crosby. She’d been beaten to death.” She told Sonya about finding Dilla and the events immediately following.

  “Most of these people are familiar to me,” Sonya said, when Wetzon had finished.

  “Did you know Dilla?”

  “Slightly. We had a jazz class together a long time ago. How did finding Dilla affect you?”

  “I was upset, but the way anybody would be if they’d found a body, and I didn’t like Dilla and hadn’t seen her in years. But God, Sonya, I had the dream that night and I woke up with terrible chest pains. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even stand up. And sweats and chills and absolute terror. I thought I was going to die. I thought people were coming to kill me. It was crazy. If Silvestri hadn’t called when he did ...” Wetzon shrugged. “But I guess I would have been all right. It would have gone away without him.”

  The carillon in the old Rutgers Dutch Reform Church behind Sonya’s brownstone began to play a hymn that Wetzon recognized but couldn’t name. A Thanksgiving hymn. Something about gathering together to ask the Lord’s blessing. For no reason at all, her eyes got teary. She pressed her lips together and shook her head at Sonya.

  Sonya waited patiently. After several minutes, she prompted, “But Silvestri came and helped you?”

  “Yes.” Wetzon’s hands wouldn’t stop fretting. “I’m not seeing him anymore, Sonya. It’s over. At least, I’m trying for it to be over. I’m seeing someone else. It’s a much better relationship.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Alton is nice and doesn’t fight with me about everything I do.”

  “You like that?”

  “Well, of course.” Wetzon couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. “Isn’t it easier to be around people who—oh, never mind. I don’t want to get into the differences between Alton Pinkus and Silvestri and why one is better for me than the other.”

  “Alton Pinkus? The labor leader?”

  “Yes. And don’t say it, please. I know. He’s twenty years older than I am.”

  “All right. What happened Saturday night, or was it Sunday morning by that time?”

  “Silvestri eased me down and then made me promise I would talk to someone.... Which is why I’m here.”

  “Well, chalk one up for him.” Sonya smiled. “Is there anything else that’s bothering you?”

  Wetzon sent Sonya a suspicious look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Think about it. Don’t be in such a hurry. We still have some time. How are you and your partner getting along?”

  “As well as we ever will, I guess. Smith’s shallow and drives me to distraction, but we have some history together. And we work well in business. From my point of view, except for her son, Mark, her personal life is a disaster, but she would say the same about me, minus the child.”

  “Her personal life?”

  “She dumped a wonderful man for that sleaze lawyer, Richard Hartmann.”

/>   “Oh?” For a fraction of a second Sonya gave herself away. Feminists hated Richard Hartmann. When he defended a rapist or murderer, he always tried the victim, who couldn’t speak for herself, and got his client off. And Sonya was a feminist.

  “Yes. I’ve always wondered what kind of woman would be attracted to a creep like that—” Wetzon remembered his body against hers, his hands on her throat, his threat. Her hands curled into fists.

  “Leslie.” Sonya’s soothing voice penetrated the intense memory. “Did something happen between you and Richard Hartmann?”

  “How could you think that?” Wetzon glared at Sonya, then lowered her eyes to her lap, clasping her hands together.

  Sonya didn’t react. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Minutes went by. Someone began moving furniture in the upstairs apartment. The floorboards protested with a humanlike groan.

  Wetzon cleared her throat. “I found some papers that could prove Richard Hartmann is laundering money. Smith was just getting involved with him, so I warned her not to. I was going to take what I found to an assistant D.A. I’d gotten to know. But Smith told him—”

  “She told him?” Sonya’s voice crackled and Wetzon looked up.

  “I know how that sounds, but Smith’s in love with him. I couldn’t go to the D.A. with it while she was part of his life.”

  “Why not, Leslie?”

  “Sonya, she has so little and, believe it or not, she’s fragile. I care about her.” She bit her lip. “And I’m afraid of Hartmann. He threatened me—physically—and coward that I am, I have done nothing about it. So the evidence against him sits in my safe deposit box, aging. How’s that for your highly ethical friend, Leslie Wetzon?”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Leslie. You’re not Superwoman.”

  “I’m not? Here all this time I’ve been thinking I was.” Wetzon sighed.

  “Do you want to come back and talk to me next week at this time?”

  “Oh. You want to see me again? I thought once was enough.”

  “Leslie, this is serious. None of this is going to go away overnight simply because you told a therapist about it. Do you want to help yourself or not?”