Authors: Annette Meyers
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Financial, #Crime Fiction
“What’s the matter, Barry?” Wetzon was suddenly concerned that he might pass out. “Barry?” She looked over the balcony where Barry was staring but she saw nothing unusual. No one was on the stairs, no one was looking up at them.
“I have to make a phone call.” Barry rose abruptly, jarring the table, spilling what was left of his Bloody Mary. The red liquid swelled on the shiny walnut tabletop. “I’m sorry—I’ll be right back.” He moved away in high gear.
Wetzon was left speechless with the red-stained table and the rest of her Perrier, which had not spilled. Still holding the uneaten piece of steak tartare, she watched Barry rush headlong down the stairs, half-expecting him to fall. Then he stopped, glanced toward the bar, looked back up at her, and sped on until she could no longer see him.
Martin checked her from the floor, a question in his eyes. She shook her head and mouthed, “It’s all right.”
Wetzon polished off what was left of the spicy tartare and stretched her legs under the table. Her right foot thumped against something solid. Easing her chair back, she ducked her head to find the source. It was Barry’s big attaché case.
“Now we know he’ll be back,” she murmured, wondering what kind of trouble he was in. She had never seen him so unsure.
Again she recalled her first meeting with Barry, at the Four Seasons. He had been so full of his own success.
“After all,” she had said, beginning her approach, “not every firm is right for every broker. It’s very much a chemistry thing between you and the firm, between you and your manager. A lot depends on the kind of business you do, whether it’s diverse, full product, or just stocks and bonds. Are you heavy into bonds? Or private placements?”
“Naa,” he had said. “Mostly stocks now. Stocks and options.”
“So you wouldn’t need a firm that was special in limited partnerships or bonds?”
“Listen,” he said, drumming his fingers impatiently on the table. “You’re a nice lady, that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you, but when I move, the only chemistry I’m interested in is the big green, get what I mean?”
“Even if it’s with a weak firm?”
“Who cares about the firm? What do I care? I’ll get the money up front, then if anything happens, I have the money.”
“But what about your clients?”
“They’ll come with me wherever I go because they know I make money for them, and if they don’t want to come, who needs them. I got them easy enough, I can get others. The bottom line for me is the money.”
“What kind of money are you talking about?” Wetzon asked, her voice cool, her gray eyes narrowing.
“Forty, fifty percent up front. I got the offer already.”
She drew in her breath, felt a flush clear up to her hairline. “That’s hard to believe. It’s the highest deal I’ve heard.”
“Do you know any other kind of business where a poor kid from the Bronx can clean up legally?”
“That’s more than any of our clients are prepared to offer. In fact, that deal is so good, what are you waiting for? Why haven’t you taken it?”
“I’m waiting to build more—when my gross hits four hundred fifty thou, for my trailing twelve, I’m taking off. Then it’s bye-bye Mother. I want a check in my pocket for two and a quarter.”
Wetzon nodded. The up-front deals were based on a broker’s trailing twelve months’ gross production. And in this bull market, each month Barry stayed where he was brought him closer to his goal. “How were you introduced to this company?”
“They called me. I have connections.” He took a small, flat, foreign-looking box from his inside pocket, removed a brown cigarillo, and replaced the box. “Listen, I’ll tell you the company, but you have to promise me you won’t spill it. I know the guy who runs the company. Real smart guy. Did all right for himself. No one can get around Jake. He’s the best. I can make a lot of money there, besides the up front. It’s the way they handle the new issues. I’ll make the big killing and retire. I’m not going to do this the rest of my life.”
“That’s some connection,” she said. Wetzon knew without asking that Barry was talking about the financial wunderkind Jake Donahue, who had parlayed a fortunate marriage and a smart plunge into the lower echelon underwriting business into a fortune.
“But look,” Barry went on magnanimously, “you really are a nice lady, and you’ve listened to me bitch and moan for months and you haven’t pushed me or hustled me. I appreciate that. So if you can come up with something else that’s in the ballpark, I’ll listen. What do I have to lose?”
“Jake Donahue.” She wrapped her napkin around the swizzle stick, bemused. “I’m surprised. Donahue’s a single-play shop, isn’t it? They just do new issues. Their new issues.”
“Yeah, and I’ll be able to get my hands on as many shares as I want—ten thou, fifty thou even—not like at Merrill, where there are too many mouths to feed and you have to kiss ass to get anything. And at Jake’s we can mark them up before we sell them.”
“But won’t you be taking yourself out of the mainstream? What if the new-issues market dries up? It’s done that before, and meanwhile your clients are buying their Big Board, bonds, and mutual funds elsewhere—”
“Right now, new issues are where the big dollars are, and that’s for me. But Jake’s expanding, getting into other things, and I’ll be part of it. I’ll be there.”
“Barry,” she had said, unwrapping the swizzle stick, “I’d love to work with you. You’re really good, but how could I tell you not to take a deal like that? You’d be crazy not to. Maybe down the road someday we will work together.”
“Listen, Wetzon, maybe I can do something for you.” He had leaned back in the big leather chair, lighting the thin cigarillo, confidently eyeing her over a thin curl of smoke. “On the day I leave Merrill, I’ll send you the directory of the brokers in my office, and I’ll mark them off as to what they do and what each guy’s button is. How’s that?”
Remembering it, Wetzon laughed out loud. That other Barry, so arrogant, so very sure of himself, was very different from the agitated young man who’d left her ten minutes ago. What had happened to change him?
She reached into her purse and took out her Filofax schedule book, opening it but not really looking at the week’s appointments. She was tired and longed to be home in a hot bath.
The small beads that made up the curtains on the tall windows moved, swayed, shimmered, as if they were silk draperies. All in all, it was a miraculous place. At once elegant, intelligent, and supremely masculine. Like a hunting lodge without the old evidence of the hunter—and the hunted. And she knew the game of the hunter was played very well here.
She sipped her Perrier from the long-stemmed wineglass, swooshing the ice shards. Then she poured the remainder of the bottle into the glass, giving the slice of lime a stab with the tip of her swizzle stick. She blotted the spilled Bloody Mary with the napkins. She studied the salted nuts, what was left of them.
The balcony was filling up now. Martin was expertly supervising the joining of two tables near her, and a group of Japanese businessmen with two token Caucasians were seated. Laughter gusted up from the bar.
“Can we get you anything else, Ms. Wetzon?” the waiter asked.
“No, thank you,” she said, beginning to feel fidgety. Damn Barry! Did he think he could keep her sitting here forever?
People climbed the steps continuously now, some pausing at the maître d’ station to check in for the dining room, others standing at the Grill Room entrance, waiting to be seated. She looked at her watch. No Barry, and it was getting late. He’d been gone over half an hour. What could be keeping him? He was so crazy. He’d probably come back his old self, as if nothing were wrong.
I’ll bet he does. Okay, if he does, we treat ourselves to tekamaki for dinner.
She gave him another ten minutes.
She sighed, looked around for the waiter, and signaled with her fingertip for the check. What a waste of time this was.
People continued to come and go.
She offered her American Express Gold Card and signed the back of the bill. And waited for the waiter to return.
Stretching both legs purposefully under the table, she surrounded Barry’s attaché case and pulled it toward her. The credit card material arrived on a plate with a pen for her to sign, which she did, adding the tip and total, then automatically pulling off the back copy and the two carbons. She tore them into bits, deposited them in the ashtray, and rose, reaching down for the case.
She carried the attaché naturally, as she usually carried her own, but it was a heavy one. Full of gold bricks, no doubt. It was inconceivable that Barry was still on the phone and just as inconceivable that he had left without his case, without saying anything to her, after all those dramatics about how he needed her.
She went down the stairs, moving left as two couples came up. The phone booths were across the lobby in a rather private cubbyhole. There were two enclosed mahogany booths, very solid and conservative, on the far wall, and a marble ledge with phone books beneath on the near wall.
And there was Barry huddled on the telephone, still talking. His back was toward her. She felt a surge of anger. These guys were all selfish, all they thought about was themselves. What did it matter that she was sitting up there waiting for him? Her time wasn’t as valuable as his. Smith was right about them. Thoughtless, thoughtless, thoughtless.
She was burning. She dropped his attaché case and flexed her hand, then tapped on the glass of the closed door and forced a smile, so that when he turned around he would not see how angry she was. He didn’t even bother to look up. This was really ridiculous.
“Barry,” she said, tapping more sharply.
This was too much. She pushed the door open slightly, and finally he turned toward her. Only, as he moved, he slumped oddly, and slid down in the booth, which was too narrow to hold his bulk, forcing the door open.
She stepped back involuntarily, gasping, as Barry Stark slumped sideways to the floor. She tripped over the attaché case in her frightened effort to get out of the way, and it slammed to the floor on its side with a loud smack. Barry’s head came to rest at her feet, the dark glasses grotesquely half-off.
Frozen, she watched the trickle of blood threading from the side of his mouth.
Get a grip on yourself
, she thought.
He’s passed out or had an attack of some sort.
She stooped, touching his shoulder. “Barry ...” she said. And then she saw his eyes, the bruised one closed, the other staring up at her vacantly. His face was strangely twisted, the lower jaw contorted in a spasm of fear or agony.
As she stared, she saw the small handle of the knife, almost obscured by blood, that protruded from his chest. She had never seen death by violence before, but she knew. Barry was dead.
“Oh, my God, my God,” Wetzon murmured, backing away. Her foot nudged the attaché case, and without thinking, she picked it up. There was a lot of blood, on Barry, on the floor.
A few feet to the right of the phone cubby was the checkroom. It was deserted because the day had been so warm. She edged out of the cubby and walked as calmly as she could to the checkroom.
“J.P.,” she said to the young man behind the counter. Her face felt stiff. “Someone’s been hurt in the phone booth. Get Martin quickly, please.”
Martin, with the assurance under duress which was part of what made him such a good maître d’, took charge immediately. J.P. was dispatched upstairs on an errand which Wetzon was unable to hear because Martin’s voice began to recede into the babble of people coming and going. At first, Wetzon had felt very levelheaded, but now came the realization of the magnitude of what had just happened. Everything began to sound as if it were coming from the end of a long tunnel. Seemingly forgotten, she sank gratefully into one of the Barcelona chairs that graced the lobby area.
It was hard to believe that a very much alive Barry Stark had been with her less than an hour ago, full of his craziness and yet real, a flesh-and-blood—blood—a flesh-and-blood, breathing Barry, almost desperate to tell her his story. His story.
Her eyes rested blindly on the attaché case, which was in the middle of the lobby between her and the entrance to the phone cubby, where Martin now stood with his back to her.
A security guard of some sort appeared out of nowhere, very official-looking, very burly, closely cut dark hair, pitted skin, and thick features. Irish, muscles bursting in a dark blue suit. He and Martin spoke briefly, and then Martin picked up the attaché case and came toward her. He held out his hand to her, sympathy and concern on his face, and helped her to her feet. Tucking her arm under his, he walked her the few steps to the staircase and up, and soon she was sitting at a corner table on the balcony over the crowded Grill Room. Someone, she didn’t notice who, put a drink in front of her. She didn’t look up.
“Leslie, my dear ...” It was Martin, speaking very gently. “Drink some of this. It will help. I promise.” She looked at him, questioning. “It’s all right, it’s vodka.” As always, he knew precisely the right thing to do. “We’ve closed the restaurant, and we’re going to make an announcement about an accident,” he continued. “And I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep everyone here until the police arrive.”
As if on cue, Tom Margittai, co-owner with Paul Kovi of the Four Seasons, was speaking, asking for quiet. The crowd at first paid no attention, but at that moment several blue uniforms appeared on the stairs, followed by a few men in nondescript clothing.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Margittai repeated, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to stay where you are. There’s been an accident downstairs, and the police will want to ask you some questions. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you, and we will pick up the checks on all outstanding bills, and the bar will be open for all soft drinks until you are able to leave.”
Cries of “What happened?” And “I’m late for ...” “I must make a phone call ...” “What about Lucy, she’s meeting me here ...”
The protests rose to a crescendo. People stood up at their tables, perhaps thinking to leave anyway. The waiters all ranged close to the captain’s stand, watching for a signal from Martin.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a dark, stocky man in a rumpled suit spoke just loud enough to be heard over the hubbub. “We have no intention of keeping you later than we absolutely have to, so please give us your cooperation.”
Wetzon noticed two uniformed policemen guarding the entrance to the corridor to the Pool Room, the more elegant dining area.
“Everyone, please be seated,” Mr. Margittai said. He spoke quietly to the man in the rumpled suit, then added, “Our waiters will be available to you for soft drinks and hors d’oeuvres.”
“My name is Sergeant Silvestri, and I’m with the Seventeenth Precinct,” the man in the rumpled suit said, stepping forward. “My men are going to take your names and addresses and will want to see some identification. If these check out, we won’t be keeping you, but we may want to get back in touch with you again. We’ll try to make this as easy as possible,” he finished, looking around at the uneasy crowd.
“What happened?” a woman cried. “Aren’t you even going to tell us what this is about?” Voices rose again, becoming increasingly irritated as more detectives, in their casual mix of street clothes, fanned out in the Grill Room and bar area. They were glaring among the expensively dressed regulars.
“There’s been a murder,” Silvestri said, and again protests threatened to drown out his voice. He was leaning on the captain’s stand, and he waited patiently, his eyes skimming over the tables, until the noise subsided.
A murder, Wetzon thought. Barry had become “a murder.” And she had been angry because he had left her and not come back. He was self-involved and maybe not a good broker, and probably he wasn’t very honest, unquestionably sold people things they didn’t need, and he may even have been a drug dealer as Smith said, but he didn’t deserve to die, and not like that. Her hands trembled. She clutched the edge of the table to calm herself, her fingers white against the polished dark wood. Then, seeing the drink, which she had forgotten, she took a hearty swallow from the small shot glass. Stolichnaya.
Bless you, Martin
. She felt a shock of burning warmth and then she relaxed, closed her eyes, and waited. They would get to her eventually, but she knew instinctively she would be here for a while. She opened her eyes again. On the chair beside her was the attaché case. Barry’s attaché case. She tried to remember what Barry had said. It was as if she were drugged. She couldn’t think clearly.
She watched the detectives work through the bar crowd, and soon the area was empty and quiet. The hum of voices softened from the Grill Room, and two detectives came up to the balcony, but not to Wetzon. Her lids grew heavy. She was having trouble staying awake. Her head slipped down and she caught herself, snapping it back.
A man came and sat in the chair across the table from her. She stared at him. It was the detective who had just introduced himself as Sergeant Silvestri. She took another swallow of her drink.
“You doing all right, Ms. Wetzon?” he asked politely. She nodded. He had a nice face, dark hair, thinning at the top of a high forehead. “Now then, I want you to think carefully and tell me everything that happened here. You found the body?”
“I found him,” she said, moving her lips, but her voice wasn’t working. No sound came out. She began to shiver.
Silvestri put his thick hand over hers and said, “All right now. Take deep breaths,” in a calm, authoritative tone. There was something reassuring about him, and Wetzon started breathing again, deeply, as a dancer breathes. The shaking began to subside. There were fine dark hairs on the back of his hand.
Silvestri withdrew his hand from hers and took something out of his inner coat pocket. It was a black leather billfold. He took some identification cards from the billfold, and she saw it was Barry’s billfold because there were his securities registration, a driver’s license, and some credit cards—a Visa and a MasterCard, American Express, and others. Silvestri placed them on the table in front of him and appeared to study them.
“He called me this afternoon,” Wetzon said. “It was urgent, he said, and he had to see me. Some problem he was having, I think, in the office or ...” Her voice trailed off as she looked across at Silvestri.
He was looking back at her, surprise on his face. “Let me understand this,” he said slowly. “You
knew
him? You knew Barry Stark?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I thought you understood that. I’ve known Barry for at least three years.”
Silvestri settled back. “Okay, Ms. Leslie Wetzon.” His tone of voice changed perceptibly; his manner was less friendly. “Tell me about Barry Stark,” he said.