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

her, trying to avoid her other hand. Now the doorman rose and dropped his newspaper on the chair.
    As Wetzon left the building, she saw Smith getting into a cab on Columbus. She quickened her steps, but the cab took off. Oh, well. Smith would get over it. And so would she.
    Damnation. She’d kill Brian if he’d gone to another firm. But nothing could be done till he surfaced somewhere. No sense in jumping to conclusions yet.
    She saw the fee slipping from her grasp. Money was tight. The maintenance on her apartment had gone up twice in the last eighteen months, and now there was an assessment for the new elevator.
    She crossed Columbus and walked, balancing carefully in her narrow heels, on the cobblestoned sidewalk behind the Museum of Natural History. A thin, black iron fence closed in the small park, known here as Theodore Roosevelt Park and running up to Eighty-first Street where it became Margaret Mead Green, named for the anthropologist who’d had an office for much of her career at the museum.
    To her left, cars were parked in front of meters; to her right stretched the park grounds. On benches along the outside fence was a colorful mixture of residents, tourists, and the homeless. She had come to know that there were several categories of homeless in the city. One was the truly homeless. People burned out or destitute because of job loss. Then there were the derelict homeless: the disturbed, the addicted. And last, the professional homeless, who made a career out of begging and hanging out, who would not take a job if it were offered, preferring the nomadic and often lucrative life of the streets. The parks and benches and subways had become home to all categories.
    She passed a woman, made rotund by myriad layers of clothing, who had set herself up on one whole bench, with seven or eight swollen shopping bags around her. She was eating a burrito and drinking Evian water from the bottle.
    Huge sycamores, their leaves burnished gold and red and rust, hid much of the rear of the museum so that only the circular turret and empty windows could be seen from where she walked. Across Columbus Avenue were three big white trailers parked one after the other. In all likelihood, a movie was being shot somewhere nearby.
    As she came toward Eighty-first Street, she saw several people moving into the Green at a fairly fast clip through the two stacks of massive gray stone that marked the entrance to the Green.
    “Help!” someone shrieked.
    “Get an ambulance—”
    Wetzon stopped. In the park, people and dogs were congregating around a tree. On Columbus Avenue, bus and car traffic moved steadily downtown. They were probably playing a scene around that tree. She had never been a New Yorker who gawked at movie stars; she never hung around accidents or arrests. She never followed fire engines. She would, in fact, rather not be involved. So why was she heading through the entrance toward the crowd around the tree?
    The pathway was a three-way fork with one path going off sharply to the right, benches on both sides, each territorially occupied by a homeless person. Two dogs chased each other, making circles around the grass. A huge, gnarled oak tree stood in the center of the two-way fork just ahead, its leaves rustling in the light breeze.
    People were milling around a man in running shorts and T-shirt sitting under the tree. She saw someone with a bullhorn. This had to be a movie. The man appeared to be ill or dead. Wetzon slowed her pace. A woman leaned over him, seemed to be talking to him. Somewhere in the distance came the pulsing sound of a siren. A man in jeans was taking pictures with a hand-held camera.
    Two actors in police uniforms, a man and a woman, made the turn into the Green and passed her, going right up to the man under the tree. The other woman stood back as the policewoman spoke to the man under the tree, but he didn’t move. The policewoman took his wrist, obviously searching for a pulse.
    Wetzon came closer, standing on tiptoe to see over the crowd. The man’s face was beautifully made up to show a mottle of swelling and bruises.
    The actress playing the policewoman dropped the man’s wrist, and the movement unbalanced him. He tipped over on his face. There was a collective gasp from the crowd. The back of his head had been crushed like an eggshell.
    Wetzon stood frozen in place. She had caught just a glimpse of the man’s face, just enough, before he fell over.
    Brian Middleton.
    The body