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

door almost as if he’d been watching for her. He seemed all hyped up about something. “Good evening, Ms. Wetzon.” He was standing in her way, not letting her by. “There’s a cop here to see you,” he whispered. “He showed me his badge.”
    Oh, how nice, Silvestri was surprising her. He had come for the weekend. But why hadn’t he gone right up?
    Harry stood aside then, and Wetzon walked into the lobby. A man, his bulk crammed into a brown suit, rose. He was somewhere in his late thirties with a neat black mustache, a yellow oxford cloth button-down, and red foulard tie. His hair was dark, his sideburns a fraction too long. Certainly not Silvestri.
    She came toward him, puzzled and slightly disappointed. “I’m Leslie Wetzon. You were looking for me?”
    “Detective Robert Ferrante, Central Park Precinct.” He flipped his ID and she read his credentials.
    Now Harry was paying more attention to her and her conversation with Detective Ferrante than he was to the other tenants as they came home.
    “What is this about?” She’d like to get their conversation away from nosy Harry. “Do you want to come up?” she asked, wishing Ferrante would say no.
    “Excuse me,” Ferrante said. He touched her elbow lightly and they escaped from the doorman by going out to the street. “We’d like to see if you can identify someone, if you could—” His eyes flicked a fraction, and she turned and saw a second detective leaning against the door of a double-parked car, arms folded. He was young, his skin a dull charcoal.
    She looked back at Ferrante. “I’m confused. Where do you want me to go?”
    “The medical examiner’s office.”
    Her stomach flip-flopped. “Who?” She shook her head. “What a stupid question. I’m sorry. Give me some background.”
    “Two nurses from Mt. Sinai went out to eat their lunch in the Conservatory Garden on 104th Street and found a dead man on a park bench. Maybe six feet, reddish hair. Looked like a mugging victim.”
    “How was he killed? What time?”
    He raised an eyebrow at her, and moved aside to let a woman come out on the street from the private entrance of a dentist’s office.
    “I’m not stupid, Detective. A good friend of mine is an NYPD detective, too—Silvestri—he’s with the Seventeenth. And I worked for the department as a consultant last year. You can check me out with the Chief’s office.”
    Ferrante didn’t even blink. “We have the vic on ice. There’ll be an autopsy, but before that we want a solid ID.”
    “What do I have to do with it? Why me?”
    “I called your office, and the guy there gave me your number.”
    “Detective Ferrante—”
    “Ms. Wetzon, the victim had nothing on him, no wallet, papers, or ID. Just your business card.”

6.
    “H OW WAS HE dressed?” Wetzon asked, but her mind was swinging back and forth in great arcs. Don’t presume. It didn’t have to be Brian. It could be anyone. She passed her card out indiscriminately, hoping to get referrals, and it had always worked well for her.
    Ferrante gave her the eye again. He was resting his big arm over the back of the car seat. “Expensive suit, white shirt, yellow paisley silk tie, good shoes ... suspenders.”
    Emile Martens, the black detective who was driving, snorted.
    “What time do you think it happened?”
    “He was cold and stiff. Somewhere between five A.M. and nine, maybe.”
    It couldn’t be Brian, she thought. He lived on the West Side. Both his old firm—Bliss Norderman—and his new firm, Loeb Dawkins, were in midtown, one on Sixth Avenue and the other on Park. So the Conservatory Garden at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue was hardly on the way to anywhere.
    Friday night, and rush-hour traffic down Second Avenue was clogged. Cars were creeping toward the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and the Queens Midtown Tunnel for the commute home to Long Island or the weekend house in the Hamptons. They were having a glorious Indian summer, and New Yorkers streamed out of their pueblos toward the sea. Like so many lemmings, she thought, closing her eyes and leaning back. Her stomach alternated between sudden leaps and hunger pangs. She’d seen enough dead bodies.
    A thud on the roof made her eyes open. A revolving red light radiated from the top of the car onto everything around them. Crawl space began to appear in front of them. A siren burped on and off and Emile moved the car forward and began to weave in and out of traffic lanes, circling over to First