Blood on the Street (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #4)

1.
    F OLLOWING S MITH’S HAPHAZARD instructions, Wetzon walked along Barrow Street in the West Village, crossed Hudson, walking west toward Greenwich. She passed a gated park and checked the house numbers. It had to be around here somewhere, because a black limousine was parked in front of a fire hydrant across the street.
    Almost as if she’d willed it, a short, compact man with razored brown hair, dressed in a Paul Stuart navy pinstripe and carrying an attaché case, came out from between two ivy-shrouded brownstones. He nimbly forded the century-old cobblestones on his shiny black wing tips and got into the limo. The door closed with that dead sound perfectly fitted doors make. Motor purring, the limo pulled away in the direction of Washington Street and points unknown, its windows anonymously dark. Ominously dark. There was something creepy about—
    A brown squirrel popped out of the flower bed surrounding an ancient city oak, and Wetzon jumped, almost stumbling.
    “They do that all the time. They wait for someone to come along.” The man wore tight jeans, an even tighter cut-down T-shirt, and a small gold hoop in his right earlobe; a ring of keys dangled from his belt hook. His amused eyes followed the frisky squirrel up the oak tree.
    Wetzon laughed. “New York squirrels.” But no doubt about it, she was jumpy. She looked up at the squirrel, who chattered at her boldly. The leaves of the tree were beginning to turn a ruddy gold. She’d always loved the changing seasons in New York, but this time the coming of fall made her sad. She walked a few paces. Now, where had the man in the business suit come from? The sidewalk was uneven, bulging slightly, because the root of the tree had stretched out, demanding space under the cement. A true New Yorker, she thought.
    “If you’re looking for Judith,” the man with the earring said, “she’s behind the next house. Turn down the alley. You’ll see it.”
    Startled—she’d quite forgotten him—she felt her face go hot. “Thanks,” she said, avoiding his eyes. This was too embarrassing. How had she let Smith talk her into this? There it was. An alley not big enough for a car, about the size of a bike path, paved in flagstones.
    No sun here except at midday, and it was long after midday now. She shivered in her black-and-white-checked suit and pulled the leopard silk scarf up around her neck, glad she’d switched her closets to fall-winter.
    The alley had a dank, mossy essence. Her heels sounded extra loud on the flagstone as she hurried down the narrow walkway, then emerged into a clearing filled with late-afternoon sunlight. The backyard of the brownstone held a cottage of two floors, shaded by a giant elm. White paint clung unevenly to weathered wood. The window trim and door had once been green. Herbs grew in small, cared-for clumps, protected by chicken wire, and the air smelled of sage and thyme.
    Looking at the shabby cottage, Wetzon wondered if the fire department knew about it. It had to be a firetrap, all wood. She’d heard about these outbuildings around the city before, but she’d never seen one. They didn’t appear on rent rolls or tax rolls. They just didn’t exist. And yet she was sure Con Edison provided electricity, and New York Telephone, phone service. One giant hand in this tremendous bureaucracy never informed the other.
    A small, tacked-on-later Victorian cupola guarded the front door, its wooden lace almost bare of paint but cluttered with ivy. There was a modern metal doorbell with an intercom to speak into, under a taped-up note in red crayon that read: “Ring Once, Then Announce Yourself.”
    She stopped, her finger poised near the bell. She still had time to turn around and hotfoot it out of there. But no, she’d been promising Smith for months and ducking it. And it was, after all, a birthday present.
    Smith had wanted to come along—to make sure she got there, no doubt. It had taken all of Wetzon’s incredible powers of persuasion to keep her away. They’d agreed to meet later for dinner at Quatorze on Fourteenth Street at seven o’clock.
    Oh, what the hell , she thought, and pressed the bell. The intercom crackled. “Leslie Wetzon,” she announced crisply. She put her hand on the door handle and pressed as a buzzer sounded. The door opened and she stepped into a tiny, low-ceilinged living room with a cracked and scarred marble mantelpiece over a blackened fireplace. A gigantic TV on a rolling cart was the most