The Deadliest Option (44 page)

Authors: Annette Meyers

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: The Deadliest Option

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“Twenty-ninth and Madison.” She slammed the door closed.

“What a storm,” the driver said. “Yeh, yeh. We sure need it.” Abe Kravitz. A heavy man in his sixties, a crown of gray, kinky hair. Over his radio a voice crackled and faded out, came back and gave an address in Greenwich Village. Kravitz picked up his speaker and said, “I’ll be at Twenty-ninth and Madison in ten minutes. I can get down to Tenth Street from there, if they’ll wait.”

A moment later, the radio sputtered, “Mrs. Goldsmith, six ten West Tenth. She’s all yours, Abie-lla.”

They sped on the transverse through the Park to Sixty-fifth Street, to Park Avenue, then a right and downtown.

“Didja hear, they got the Jap?”

Wetzon looked up, confused. “I’m sorry?”

“You know, the Jap that killed the Wall Street people.”

“He isn’t Japanese, he’s Korean.”

“Same thing.”

Wetzon grunted.
Just shut up and drive
, she thought.

“Sit back, lady, or you’ll get hurt.”

She sighed and had just sat back when the cab was side-swiped by another cab making a turn from the wrong lane in the blinding rain. She fell over on the seat, sat up slowly, listening to her body. She wasn’t hurt, but dammit, she had to get to Chris before he did it. Both drivers jumped out and screamed at each other, shaking fists.

Wetzon rolled down her window. “Are we going or not?”

Kravitz got back in his seat and said to the front window, “Sorry, lady.” He turned off his meter. “You can pay me and go or you can wait till the cops come.” Horns began to honk all around them. The noise was deafening. Wetzon wiped the steam from the window and saw they were blocking the turn on Thirty-fourth Street. It wasn’t that far, then.

“I can’t wait.” She gave him seven dollars and got out into the downpour, put up her umbrella and squinted to get her bearings. Then she began a steady jog down Park Avenue. Only five blocks. She heard a siren in the distance above the car horns—either for the accident, or just possibly Smith had done her job and gotten through to Silvestri.

In fact, why did she think she had to be there at all? Because Chris had directed the call to her. It was a spiteful, hostile act. Blame the victim.
And you’re letting yourself be victimized again. Don’t get involved. Turn around and go home. You’ve done enough.

Leave me be
, she told herself.
Let me do it my way.

Drenched, she jogged west on Twenty-ninth Street one block to Madison. Around her, everywhere, fragments of umbrellas, mangled skeletons, lay on the sidewalk and in crosswalks, sticking out of trashbaskets, blown to shreds. A New York ritual. How many umbrellas did she go through in a year—five, six, more?

The rain had eased, and steam was coming from manhole covers, drifting skyward like lazy smoke.

She ducked under the awning of Chris’s building and shook the water out of the umbrella, folding it up under the Velcro tape. What was she going to say to the doorman, she was thinking, as he opened the door for her.

“Yes, miss?” He recognized her, she thought.

“Um, I’m here to see Mr. Gorham. He’s not feeling well....”

“Your name?”

She felt uncomfortable, fidgeted in her wet Keds, pulled her damp tee shirt away from her breasts, looked around. A woman carrying a briefcase and a D’Agostino’s bag passed her en route to the elevator. She had to get into the building, had to get to Chris before—

“Good evening, Mrs. Steinkoller,” the doorman said. He looked back at Wetzon and repeated, “Your name?”

“Ms. Wetzon.” She shivered. The lobby air-conditioning was cold against her damp clothes.

“Go right up. He’s expecting you. Twenty-four L.” He handed her an envelope and she saw her name was written on it in longhand. Was this a setup? Was it going to happen again? No. She was a little wiser now. Besides, Silvestri would come, the EMS people would ... she got on the elevator with the woman and squeezed the envelope. He was expecting her? Yeah. The envelope held a key.

Her heart hammered against her ribcage, making her tee shirt flutter; she squeezed the wet nylon of the umbrella until it was a club.

“Well, at least the heat broke,” the woman said. She shifted her briefcase to the other hand and picked up the shopping bag. “Good night.” She got off on the fifteenth floor.

“Yes, good night,” Wetzon said. It seemed as if everyone wanted to talk ... and she didn’t want to talk to anyone. She got off on the twenty-fourth floor and ran down the hall clutching the umbrella as a weapon. The door to his apartment was closed. What had she expected? She turned the knob. Locked. So maybe he wasn’t expecting her.
Ring the bell, dummy.
What if she was too late and he’d done it?

She went back to the elevator and pressed the down button.
Get out of here,
she thought. Wait, what was she doing? She had the key. She tore open the envelope. Yes, it was a key. She walked down the hall to the door again, determined. Heavy rock music came from one of the apartments. She heard a woman yell for someone to turn down the TV. Cooking smells permeated the hall. No sound came from Chris’s apartment. She put the key into the lock and opened the door. Back down the hall behind her the elevator door opened and two EMS people were getting off, followed by a uniformed policeman.

“Down here,” she called, pushing the door open with the umbrella. The apartment was dim and silent. She walked in tentatively. “Chris?” She walked into the living room toward the terrace. The sky was streaked with pink and blue hues. A blanket, probably blown by the wind from another terrace, hung limply from the terrace above onto Chris’s. It swung and turned in the wind.

The EMS men came into the apartment. She turned to look at them and then looked back at the blanket. It was wearing shoes, toes pointed downward.

63.

W
ETZON LEANED HER
forehead against the cool refrigerator door; she was burning up. The door was studded with notes under Hershey bar magnets: a recipe for chicken pot pie from a magazine, a child’s crayon drawing of a mother, father, and two children. The father was gigantic in size.

She could hear them working in the living room, on the terrace, trying to get Chris down. Someone had gone upstairs to cut the rope he’d attached to the terrace rail directly above his.

Her stomach heaved. A two-way radio crackled, breaking voices in midsentence. She heard grunts and a shout, then, “Okay, lay him down.”

There was nothing to do, nothing to keep her here anymore. She wandered out of the kitchen, stopped briefly to look at the silhouettes of the men working over Chris, and walked out the open door into the corridor. Nothing. Nothing to do. People were standing in the doors to their apartments. Someone called, “Who’s sick?” But she couldn’t see clearly.
No one is sick
, she answered in her head. They all looked as if they were under thick glass, bulging and shimmying. What were they saying? She couldn’t understand.

She stood a little to the side and saw herself press the down button and then get on the elevator. So she followed, staying close to herself, so no one would notice two of them. A woman in shorts with Minnie Mouse legs ending in huge running shoes was stretching her hamstrings against the side of the elevator. The instant the door opened, the woman jogged out of the elevator, and Wetzon followed her out the front entrance past two uniformed policemen coming in.

Sirens, like beads on a string, whined, paused, whined, paused, and lights whirled on the white EMS van, blending blue and yellow with the bands on top of the two police cars in front parked against the traffic.

She let her Keds lead her and they took her across Twenty-ninth Street and toward Fifth Avenue.

The sky was a watercolor wash, and the wet earth of the garden smelled sweet and rich. Huge trees shook their leaves at her in the soft breeze and sprayed her with raindrops. She walked through the gate and under the stone arch, up the curving path to the Little Church Around the Corner.

She opened the heavy oak door and walked past the vestibule and into the church. Ahead, candles flickered in a small altar. To her right was the church itself, with stained-glass windows on the north and south walls, narrowing in perspective to the burnished, gleaming altar. It glowed with light, but was closed.

Veering left, she entered the dimly lit chapel. A woman knelt in the second row of pews, her head down. Otherwise, the chapel was empty.

The gentle calm drew her in, and she let it wrap itself around her. The pews were so narrow her knees almost touched the back of the next pew. Kneeling cushions hung nearby.

He had killed himself and laid the blame on her. Her other self spoke up and said, “It’s not your fault.” He’d wanted her to find him like that. To get even. To punish her. It was so ugly. She looked up at the mosaic of the ceiling and thought, if she hadn’t agreed to have dinner with him, if she hadn’t gone to his apartment, he might still be alive. Her judgment was flawed. Hubris. She had too much pride. Would she ever be able to trust herself again?

She closed her eyes and felt the presence of all the people dear to her that she’d lost ... her mother’s sweet face, her father, friends who had died ... and she cried. For her parents, for missing friends, for poor Ellie, for people who had no one to care about them, for David, even for Chris.

The oak door opened and footsteps thudded behind her as someone came into the chapel, paused, then came and sat down next to her.

“How did I know I’d find you here?” Silvestri said, taking her hand.

“You’re a good detective. The best.” Tears seeped from under her closed lids.

Silvestri squeezed her hand. “You’re pretty good yourself.”

“Why did Chris do it?”

“He was sick. Listen to me, Les. It’s not your fault.” Silvestri put his arm around her and pulled her to him.

“Is David going to live?”

“Yeah, he’ll live. If the schmuck hadn’t been waiting around for the last check to clear, he would have gotten away clean. Ninety-seven thousand dollars.”

“Does being born here do it, do you think? Is it something endemic to this country? Look what he set in motion. Look how many lives—” She stopped. “Ripple on ripple on ripple. Angelo, Goldie, Ash, Ellie—and now Chris. Why do things like this happen? What kind of mean, vicious world is this?”

He blotted up her tears with his handkerchief. “I’d like to protect you from all the crap in the world, but I can’t.”

She opened her eyes and saw him, steady as a rock, and smiled. “I wouldn’t let you anyway,” she said.

“No, you wouldn’t.” He rose and held his hand out to her. They left the church and stood for a moment on the garden path. Silvestri looked down at her. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? You said okay?”

“Yes.”

His eyes laughed at her. “Then, take off your clothes.”

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Tender Death

The Deadliest Option

Murder: The Musical

Blood on the Street

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