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

lovely,” Smith purred.
    They were interrupted by a preppy young man in a crew cut. Their assistant, B.B., short for Bailey Balaban, opened the door and said, “Twoey for you, Smith.”
    “That’s Mr. Barnes to you,” Smith snapped. “Show some respect.”
    “But he told me to call him Twoey.”
    The look Smith gave him was scathing, and he escaped into the office as if afraid to turn his back to her.
    “Gawd, Smith, do you want to drive B.B. to Tom Keegen, too?”
    Tom Keegen, their major competitor, had stolen away their previous associate, Harold Alpert, and Wetzon was certain that Harold wouldn’t have gone if Smith had treated him better.
    Smith ignored her and took a final gulp of water. She rose languidly, running her fingers through her short dark curls. She had a model’s figure, long and lean, olive skin and high cheekbones that set off almond-shaped eyes, and a great metabolism, which was a stroke of luck because she didn’t believe in exercise.
    What Smith and Wetzon did was mysterious, in the best sense of the word, and therefore, it was glamorous. They saw themselves as detectives, searching out the best candidates for the positions their clients had to fill. It seemed appropriate that even the biographical profiles they filled out for each prospect were known as “suspect sheets.”
    The Street called them, and those like them, headhunters, and they didn’t mind. Away from the Street, recruiting professionals were executive recruiters or search consultants, and “headhunter” was a derogatory term. But the Street admired toughness and rewarded piracy. Anyone who could “get away with it” was respected.
    And their clients were not ordinary businesspeople; they were the movers and shakers of the all-powerful financial community. The Street, with a capital S.
    While Smith and Wetzon were not truly insiders, they were not outsiders either. Thus, they were in a perfect position to see every problem objectively and give the client an overview.
    They were truly an odd couple. Smith had come out of personnel, and Wetzon had been a Broadway chorus dancer. That together their names were memorably similar to the gunsmiths’ served only to amuse them, but they used it to enhance their singularity. They were women in a man’s world.
    They worked out of a small office in what had been a one-bedroom apartment in a converted brownstone, between Second and First Avenues, on Forty-ninth Street. It was ground-floor space, the back door opening onto a modest garden.
    They’d been together almost eight years and had done extraordinarily well, through feast and famine on the Street. Smith concentrated on business development—bringing in clients—and Wetzon recruited brokers, the division of duties coming mainly because Smith loathed brokers. “Scum” and “dirtbags” were her kindest terms for them.
    At the time of the stock-market crash in October of 1987, and for almost two years thereafter, business had been incredible. Then the real impact of the loss of the retail investor began to be felt on the Street, and in the downward slide of capital base, bankruptcies, mergers, and buyouts ensued. The refrain “the check is in the mail” was heard throughout the land.
    The shape of Smith and Wetzon’s business had changed gradually. They found they were in demand for a fair amount of management consulting, fees paid with a sight more regularity than were those for headhunting, thank you very much.
    Wetzon sighed and looked out at their garden. It had been completely replanted and repaved with bricks, and like the phoenix, had risen resplendent from the explosion that had destroyed it the previous summer. She gathered up the detritus of their lunches and disposed of everything in the plastic garbage bag in their bathroom.
    “Of course, Abe,” Smith was saying into the phone in the professional voice she saved for only the choicest clients. “I’ll get our proposal off to you by the end of the week.” She winked at Wetzon and gave her a thumbs-up sign.
    Abe could only be Abe Bloom, chairman of Cooperman Bloom Securities. Was this the big new client?
    Wetzon looked at her watch and then at the Andy Warhol pencil drawing of a bankroll of dollar bills, which she and Smith had paid for with their first fee. She saluted it. Time to start dialing for dollars. She picked up the phone and called Brian Middleton at Bliss Norderman.
    “Mr. Middleton’s office.”
    “Mr. Middleton,