Tender Death (4 page)
Authors: Annette Meyers
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Financial, #Contemporary Fiction, #Crime Fiction
W
ETZON WAS FORAGING
in the pantry closet. There wasn’t much. Since Carlos had become a choreographer, his visits were erratic, and she fended for herself with groceries. Years ago, when Carlos’s dance career had begun to fade, he had started a housekeeping business. It became so successful that he soon had an army of out-of-work dancers working for him, cleaning and cooking in houses and apartments all over the city.
She closed the door and then reopened it and took out a can of waterpacked tuna fish, setting it on the counter.
“When in doubt, bagel it,” she said aloud, and cut a sesame bagel in half.
She went into the dining room and put her answering machine on.
“Hello there, joy of my life, this is the boy choreographer, calling to let you know all is well on the firing line, and I’ll be there tomorrow sometime. Tried you at the office and got the barracuda, so I’m sure she didn’t relay the message.”
Carlos. And he was right. The barracuda, commonly known as Smith, hadn’t told her. Smith and Carlos hated each other.
“Hi, buddy,” Wetzon said to the answering machine. “Talk to you later.”
The machine beeped. The next call was a hang-up. Another beep. Then the strains of Ethel Merman belting out, “There’s no business like show business,” with full orchestra on the answering tape. A Carlos special. He always did that when he cleaned her tape of old messages, something she never bothered to do.
The apartment was cold. She trailed into the bedroom, shivering, and changed into sweats and heavy socks. The heat was slow in coming up tonight because the thermostat had not caught up with the sudden temperature drop that morning. Outside, the north wind whapped against her windows.
Through the wooden blinds she could see the small trees around the penthouse of the building behind hers, bobbing and bending. As she watched, the stem of a giant sunflower broke off and slammed into her window. She jumped back. The dead sunflower clutched at the glass with tiny dried tendrils, as if it were human, trying to hold on, and failing, finally got whipped away.
Something danced and clutched similarly in the back of Wetzon’s mind, teasing her. Peepsie Cunningham in her dark blue silk dress, tossed like a rag doll in the lashing wind amid assorted debris that the wind had churned up.
The tiny dark blue Gucci walking shoe with the gold stirrups. It was still in her carryall, which was leaning against her bed. She took it out and stared at it. It was a real Gucci, monogram and all, not an imitation, and it was hardly worn. There were only a few scratches on the sole. She held it up and matched the sole to the black suede boots she had removed earlier.
“You’ve got big feet, kid,” she said, imitating Silvestri, imitating Bogart.
Silvestri. Thinking of him, she smiled. She had met him last year when she had gotten involved in Barry Stark’s murder. He had substance, and it was a real relationship. As real as two people could have with two careers and totally different working hours.
She put Peepsie Cunningham’s shoe down on the rug next to her boots, sat up, and called Silvestri at the Seventeenth Precinct.
“Metzger.”
“Hi, Artie. Is he there, by any chance?”
“No, he’s downtown.” Silvestri’s partner’s voice was raw with fatigue. “Something just came up, and we’re in for a long night, I think.” She could picture Metzger, with that long, hang-dog face and the pouches under his eyes, slumped at his cluttered desk in the tiny office he shared with Silvestri.
“Okay, I hear you,” she said. She hadn’t seen Silvestri in three days, hadn’t talked with him in two. She missed him. “Just say I called.”
“Want me to tell him anything in particular?” Metzger asked halfheartedly.
“No, Artie, thanks.” She paused and frowned. “Yes. Not to call me tonight. I have a seven-thirty breakfast and I’m going to bed early. I’ll talk with him tomorrow.”
The Peepsie Cunningham story could wait. Mrs. Cunningham was, after all, a suicide, not a murder.
Wetzon lay down on her bed again and unfolded the red, white, and blue afghan she and Carlos had crocheted as a backstage project in honor of the bicentennial when they danced for Bob Fosse in
Chicago
in 1976. They had agreed to share it, each taking it for a year, and this was her year—at least until July Fourth. She thought about the choreographers she and Carlos had worked with who were gone. Gower Champion first. And then Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse had both died in 1987. It made her sad and nostalgic.
Drawing the afghan up around her ears, she thought about Silvestri.
The truth was, she was crazy about him, but she didn’t find it easy to admit. Not to herself. And certainly not to him. If she admitted it, wouldn’t she begin to depend on him more and more and less on herself? She had been by herself for a long time, and except for a few short—very short—affairs there had been no one since Bud Silverberg, whom she had met in college. He had been with the Air Force in exotic Morocco. He had just stopped writing, and she had found out not long afterward from a mutual friend that he had fallen in love with and married a Moroccan girl.
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell you,” the friend had said.
Neither can I
, she had thought. Well, this was one relationship she intended to handle very carefully.
She wriggled under the afghan. Silvestri. Smith had no inkling, at least Wetzon devoutly hoped she didn’t. Only Carlos guessed, and that was because he knew her so well. “He’s good for you,” Carlos said. They had been doing basic barre exercises. “And you know I wouldn’t just say that. I don’t like cops.”
“He’s a detective,” she corrected automatically, bending her leg slightly and straightening it, raising it slowly to the barre.
“Shit, he’s a cop,” Carlos said, his back to her, doing the same movement. “But I like him anyway, and I like how he treats you.” He came back into first position. “And look at you—you’ve got this glow on all the time now. Come on, let me show you.” He turned her reluctant body to the mirror, his handsome face for once very serious. “Look. All the points are softening. It’s a by-product of good sex,” he added with a lascivious grin.
She had felt herself flush, but it was true. When she was with Silvestri, she could feel all her spikes, as Carlos called them, softening. Chin, nose, elbows, knees. She could feel herself turning to mush, and only half of her liked it. She didn’t like not having complete control.
“Damn you, Carlos,” she had said, whacking him with her towel. “Get out of my head.”
“Listen, dear heart,” he said, tenderly, ducking too late. “I’m your best friend, and I love you like a mother, like a brother. And I know you love me. But it’s safe to love me, because you know I’m never going to do anything but love you.”
She turned her back on him, hunching over the barre, and Carlos came up behind her, placing his hand on her hunched shoulders. She stared at him in the mirror.
“Take a chance,” he said softly. “For your sake. I don’t want you to be alone.” Her image looked at his image in the mirror, stricken. It was the time of the Plague and too many people they knew had died and were dying, would die of AIDS. “No, I’m all right, but I mean I’m not going to be around forever,” he said sadly. “None of us can think long term anymore.” She had turned away from their images and they had held each other and cried.
So she was trying, but she was frightened by all the emotion of her feelings about Silvestri.
She threw off the afghan and sat up and dialed information for Lenox Hill Hospital, then called to see how Hazel was doing.
“We’re not putting calls through to Ms. Osborn tonight,” the operator said, “but she is in satisfactory condition.”
“All right, then, please tell her that Ms. Wetzon called and will talk to her tomorrow.”
“Ms. Weston.”
“Wetzon. W-e-t-z-o-n.”
“Weston.”
Wetzon laughed as she put down the phone. She picked up the dark blue Gucci walking shoe and turned on the television, parking the shoe on top of the set.
The picture came on clear and sharp, and suddenly she was looking at her friend, Teddy Lanzman, solemn-faced, doing a promo for a special coming up on the plight of the elderly in the city. He had come a long way from his days as the token black at Channel 8. It had been ages since she’d last seen him. She remembered he’d been dating someone, a production secretary, or something like that, in David Merrick’s office when Wetzon was in
42nd Street.
He had risen from community relations to feature writer and producer. She stood staring down at the screen, her mind elsewhere, then she turned off the news in bright living color and went back to the kitchen.
The kettle was filled, the Zabar’s ground decaf measured into the Melitta filter, the tuna fish drained and mixed with Marie’s garlic Italian dressing. She put the bagel halves in the toaster oven and sat at the counter in her kitchen.
She loved her little kitchen with the blue-and-white French country tiles on the wall and the white counters. She turned on the tiny television and listened to the business news at six-thirty while she sliced a tomato. Nose to the plate, she inhaled the wonderful smell of a summer-ripe hydroponic tomato, almost as good as the Jersey beefs she had grown up on.
Damn, someone else had been arrested for trading on insider information. Would they never learn? Did no one remember Ivan Boesky? It was really disturbing because almost every one of these men was young, younger than she, graduates of the best schools, and they were already making big dollars. It was another kind of plague. One didn’t die from it, but it was corrupting the entire financial community. She listened to the stock quotes and then switched to the national news.
When the coffee had stopped dripping, she threw the paper filter with the grounds away and poured herself a mug of coffee. She piled tuna fish and slices of tomato on each half of the bagel and ate them one at a time as she read her notes on Peter Tormenkov.
The hunger was still with her, but it wasn’t real. She needed a chocolate fix. The chunks of dark chocolate from Li-Lac on Christopher Street that Silvestri had brought her last week. They were in the pantry closet. She took a small chunk and put the rest back on the shelf.
Teddy Lanzman came on the TV screen again with another promo for his special report on the elderly, starting next week. “ ... which help and which defraud,” Teddy said. “Please join me and tell your friends. You may not be part of the aged population in this city now, but you will be. And right now, we all know people who are.”
“Are and were,” Wetzon said, thinking about Peepsie Cunningham and her friend Hazel Osborn.
The rich bittersweet chocolate melted in her mouth and wrapped her in a warm cloak of well-being. She was safe, she thought guiltily. She was healthy. She was young.
“I’
M JUST GOING
out for a short walk,” Hazel said, opening a dark blue ruffled parasol, and she brushed aside the enormous sunflowers and stepped off the parapet of the terrace they were standing on.
“Wait ... no, you can’t,” Wetzon shrieked, reaching for her, catching Hazel’s beautiful white hair, which came off in her hand. Terrified, holding the white curly wig, she watched Hazel float calmly away like Mary Poppins and disappear beyond the gleaming gold tower of the Chrysler Building.
Wetzon awoke panicked, drenched in sweat, her hand clutching the fuzzy blue mohair throw that she used as an extra blanket. She was trembling. It was still dark. And cold. The little white digital box that was her radio alarm said five-fifteen.
She lay there, eyes closed again, thinking about Hazel, gradually untensing. The radiator in the kitchen coughed. She turned off the alarm and put on the light.
The red cover of
A Perfect Spy,
at the top of a huge stack of books on the painted American country washstand she used as a night table, caught her eye. She was about a third of the way through it, and it was hard work. John le Carré was not Danielle Steel, Smith’s current favorite writer. But Wetzon was a snob about literature and preferred the intellectual rewards that came from meeting a good writer halfway.
It was funny about what people read. Silvestri read biographies, autobiographies, war stories—any war—and Westerns. Carlos read show business biographies and autobiographies and mysteries.
She read about ten pages in
A Perfect Spy,
moving with Magnus and Rick and Mary and Jack, full of respect for how le Carré was peeling away the layers. Then, reluctantly, she marked the page.
Nothing is what it appears,
she thought, inhaling the steam of the hot shower, not in le Carré, not in this world.
She towel-dried her long hair, leaving it loose, slipped on her sweats, and checked the time. Six o’clock. She had an hour or maybe a bit more if she could be sure of getting a cab to Rockefeller Center.
After getting the coffee started, she did a simple workout at the barre, running slowly through the positions, and ended feeling tall and lean. Lean was real, but tall was the impossible dream. Smith always laughed at her, but Wetzon’s self-image was tall until she got caught in an elevator surrounded by men, who towered over her, stepped on her as if she weren’t there.
She unlocked her door and bent to get the morning papers from the doormat. Next to the
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
was a yellow rose wrapped loosely in cellophane, tied with a yellow ribbon. She picked it up. It was probably just a promotion from the newspaper delivery service, but it made her feel good, so it succeeded in whatever they were trying to do.
The yellow rose went into a bud vase, which Wetzon carried into the bedroom and put on the painted chest of drawers, where she could see it while she dressed in her pin-striped uniform of the day. It was too early to call Hazel. That would have to wait until after her breakfast interview with Tormenkov.
At her kitchen counter, a mug of hot coffee in front of her, she scanned the newspaper headlines. Nothing unusual. The latest insider-trading scandal, the dollar had fallen against the yen and the deutsche mark, the trade protectionists were insisting on more sanctions against the Japanese, Texaco was rumored to have received a buy-out offer, and another Wall Street guru was predicting doom and gloom and advising the purchase of gold. She moved quickly from page to page, scanning.
In the “Obituaries” section of the
Times
she found what she had been looking for:
EVELYN M. CUNNINGHAM
, 72,
DIES IN TWENTY-STORY FALL
Evelyn Morton Cunningham, socialite and widow of the late S. Alden Cunningham, attorney and presidential adviser, died in a fall Thursday from the terrace of her twentieth-floor apartment at 999 Fifth Avenue. She was 72 years old and had been in poor health.
Authorities say they believe Mrs. Cunningham’s fall was an accident or suicide. She had been under a doctor’s care for depression and Alzheimer’s disease. She was fully clothed in a dark blue dress and high-heeled bedroom slippers and may have lost her balance while trying to close the doors to her terrace.
Sgt. E. D. O’Melvany of Manhattan North said that the French doors leading from Mrs. Cunningham’s bedroom to her terrace had been open and the railing of the parapet was low. He said it was possible that a gust of wind could have knocked her over the edge.
Investigators are seeking to question a woman named Ida, described as Russian, about five feet five inches tall, blonde hair, about 35-40 years old, who was acting as a nurse or nurse’s aide for the deceased. They are also seeking information about two women who visited Mrs. Cunningham shortly before her death, a Ms. Osborn and a Ms. Whitman.
Wetzon put the paper down. Her hands left wet patches on the paper. She stared at the coffee mug. “High-heeled bedroom slippers?”
“Hazel,” she said out loud, putting the mug down hard. Hot coffee sloshed over on the counter and her hand. Abstractedly, she put her hand under cold water and wiped up the spilled coffee from the counter. What to do? It was quarter to seven. She had to get going.
In the bathroom she rolled her hair up into a dancer’s knot on top of her head and put gray shadow on her eyelids. A touch of lipstick and her diamond stud earrings. Her movements picked up speed.
After folding the newspaper into her carryall, she wrapped herself in the long black coat and the leopard-patterned scarf, pulled the lavender beret down over her ears, and was set to brave the elements.
Frowning, she stopped at the door, thought for a minute, then turned and went back to her bedroom. She took the small dark blue Gucci walking shoe off the television set and put it in her carryall, slipping it into the fold of her newspaper.
“Morning, Ms. Wetzon.” Larry, her doorman, was sitting near the radiator, smoking. Ashes flecked his uniform jacket. “Your ride is waiting.”
“Ride? What ride?” Wetzon squinted into the dim morning. Everything outside, in fact, looked deeply gray. Bits of snow floated and flurried in the small gusts of wind.
Silvestri, wearing a red down jacket and a wool watch cap, leaned against his car, which was double-parked in front of her building. He was blowing into his gloved hands.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” she said, staggering toward him as a sudden gust of wind caught her.
“You told me not to call.” He was grinning at her boyishly. “But I left you a message anyway.”
“I didn’t get a message” she said, checking him out. He looked tired and had a dark stubble of beard. But his eyes, which were slate when he was impersonal and on the job, and turquoise when he let his feelings show, were now the deepest of turquoise. “You never write notes, you never call. You just show up.”
“Oh stop grumbling,” he said, opening the door for her. “What was on your doormat besides the goddam newspapers this morning?”
The yellow rose. Of course.
“You constantly surprise me, Silvestri,” she said truthfully.
He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the familiar little shock she always felt when he touched her, even through all the masses of clothing she was wearing. She pressed her face against the soft cold of his jacket and hugged him.
“Good morning, Les,” he said.
