Tender Death Read online

  “Yes,” Arleen Grossman said modestly. “We are very proud of our record. In fact, we have just received an award from the City—”

  “Arleen, I think we ought to be going.” A stocky man with very black hair combed straight back on his bullet-shaped head stood on the other side of the coffee table.

  “John dear, this is Leslie Wetzon, Xenia’s partner,” Arleen said. “Wetzon, that’s what everyone calls you, no?” She didn’t wait for Wetzon to respond. “This is my brother, Johnny.”

  Wetzon reached over and shook Johnny Grossman’s hand.

  “Excuse me for a minute, please.” Arleen Grossman struggled to her feet, a shapely, if plump, woman in a tight black silk evening suit. She spoke quietly with her brother for a moment while he nodded, then, smiling, she came back to Wetzon. Johnny Grossman was swallowed up by the crowd in the living room.

  “A buffet dinner is being served in the dining room,” the maid said, moving around the room.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t pay to sit down again,” Arleen said. “Come, Wetzon, let’s you and I fill our plates and chat. I feel we’re going to be great friends, don’t you?”

  She held her hand out to Wetzon, who took it and stood up, dizzy. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. Arleen held onto her hand, drawing her forward. As the crowd in the living room began to thin, Wetzon caught a glimpse of the bulky figure of John Grossman, wearing a hat and overcoat, leaving Smith’s apartment.

  “I want to hear all about you,” Arleen persisted. “Xenia is so fond of you, and we’re so fond of Xenia. She’s been like a daughter to me.” She locked arms with Wetzon.

  How odd, Wetzon thought, that Smith hadn’t mentioned Arleen Grossman to her, but maybe not so odd. Smith was very proprietary about her friends. She didn’t like sharing.

  “Oh, there you are.” Smith bore down on them. “Well, I see you two have met.” She eyed their locked arms with a faint air of resentment. “I’d forgotten what a fast worker you are, Wetzon.”

  “Dear, dear Xenia.” Arleen Grossman smiled benevolently up at Smith. “I’m so pleased circumstances have brought us together. I feel it is so right, don’t you?” Her voice and her words seemed to have a soothing effect on Smith, who, as Wetzon watched in total amazement, almost began to purr.

  Smith took Arleen’s hand and touched it to her cheek. “Arleen, you are such a love,” Smith said, beaming. “I am honored by your friendship.”

  “Mom,” Mark said, breaking the spell. “Don’t you want them to put the chicken out too?”

  “What?” Smith looked startled. “Oh yes, sweetie, we’ll go tell them together.”

  “Such a wonderful person, a wonderful mother, too,” Arleen Grossman said. “I do so admire what she’s made of her life.”

  She turned to Wetzon. At that moment, one of Smith’s sloshed guests, a large white-haired gentleman in a dark blue suit, slipped on a spot of spilled drink on the highly polished floor near the entrance to the dining room and, spinning out of control, fell toward Arleen and Wetzon.

  “Look out,” Wetzon shouted, but she needn’t have, because Arleen Grossman sprang with great agility and actually caught the man before he hit the floor and was helping him regain his balance. It all happened in seconds, and no one seemed to think much about it, except for Wetzon, who looked at the motherly woman beside her with a little awe.

  “Now then,” Arleen Grossman said, brushing her hands together. “Let’s fill our plates and talk.”

  15.

  SHE MIGHT NEVER have gotten home if Arleen Grossman hadn’t insisted on driving her in the Grossmans’ snow-covered limousine. Arleen had elicited a promise that Wetzon would call her on Monday and schedule a dinner. She hadn’t wanted to because of Smith’s reaction, but Arleen had persisted.

  They had no chauffeur for some reason—perhaps the weather—and it was John Grossman, whose whole demeanor gave off surly overtones, who was driving the limousine. Grunting, it seemed, was his primary means of communication. A very strange man, Wetzon decided. Totally unlike his sister. Something ugly about him. And thugly.

  The city was at a standstill. Snow had drifted to boulder level in some spots, just plain high elsewhere. She remembered only one other blizzard since she had lived in New York. Broadway had been whited out. The show had not gone on—transportation had been crippled. Good thing this was a weekend. One could take the time to see the beauty. By Monday, the city would have dug itself out and be back in the business of making money; the beautiful white fairyland landscape would turn into a gray, soot-splattered arena.

  On the other hand, this looked like the real thing. A blizzard of blizzards. It was still snowing. Sanitation trucks moved slowly, lights glazing through the screen of white, sanding the roadways. They were apparently not stemming the tide because the snow was piling up in horrific amounts. Here and there was slight evidence of sidewalk shoveling, but fresh snow covered those areas with dispatch.

  The outside door to her building was locked, which meant the night doorman had not gotten there. At least the super had made sure it was locked. Some of the tenants always complained because they didn’t like to carry the extra keys. And sometimes someone would just leave the door unlocked. She wondered as she fumbled for her key if Silvestri had been able to get in, or if he had just gone home in disgust to his own bed.

  She dusted herself off on her doormat, pulled her boots off, and opened her door. There was an envelope on the threshold. She picked it up. Her chandelier was on, dimmed. She heard voices arguing in the bedroom—gunshots. The television. Her skin tingled. She tiptoed into her bedroom. Silvestri was asleep on her bed and the television was blaring.

  She hung up her coat on the shower rod and scrubbed her face clean of makeup, brushed out her hair and braided it into one long braid. Methodically, she laid out her clothes in the living room and slipped into a flannel nightgown. Where had she put that envelope? Probably some communication from the co-op board.

  They were shooting at each other again in the bedroom. She could tell by the music it was almost over. Her face, flushed and happy, stared back at her from her bathroom mirror. What are you dawdling for, she asked the pink face with the glowing gray eyes.

  Turning off the television, she saw his gun and holster on the floor half under the bed. Her father had owned a rifle and a shotgun and she had even used the rifle once....

  She went around to the other side of the bed; something crunched under her bare feet. The envelope. She picked it up and tilted it to the pale light coming through the window. Nothing was written on it. She opened it up and took out an index card. On the card, printed in crooked, childish letters, were the words: KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF WHAT DOES NOT CONCERN YOU.

  The card slipped from her hand. What was that about? It had to be a crank message from someone in her building. Maybe the woman who swam at the health club next door and dripped water all over the elevator floor when she came back. Wetzon had complained about it. She wouldn’t think about it tonight. It was too stupid. Sometimes living in a co-op was a nuisance.

  She lay down beside Silvestri. It was cold. She would have to wake him to get under the quilt. The room was imbued with that pale light, a reflection from the whiteness of the snow and the low clouds. She hadn’t bothered to close the blinds. The snow continued to fall.

  Silvestri looked young and innocent in sleep. She touched his face. He had shaved. She rolled over and hugged him, putting her face into the hollow between his chest and shoulder, breathing him.

  He tensed, waking, then relaxed and held her. “Les ... about time.”

  “We’re having a blizzard. Almost didn’t make it home. City will be shut down tomorrow.”

  “Good,” he mumbled, pulling her closer.

  “You have to go anywhere tomorrow?” she asked, folding herself against him.

  “We’re going to talk to O’Melvany, that’s all—”

  “Mmmm,” she murmured into his ear. “Get under the covers, Sergeant, please, sir
.” She rolled away and slipped under the covers. The sheets were icy cold. He stood and pulled off his sweater and jeans and socks and came back to her as she held the covers open.

  She touched the soft hair on his arms and ran her hands over the bulge of his biceps. “Thanks for taking care of Hazel.” She loved him. Should she tell him about the note?

  “Nice lady.” He wrapped his arms around her.

  “Silvestri—”

  “Les.” His voice breathed warm in her ear.

  “What?”

  “Shut up.”

  16.

  EDDIE O’MELVANY WAS a chain-smoker. The long fingers on his right hand were stained yellow. His narrow mustache was also stained an orange-yellow, or was that its natural color? A glass ashtray on his desk was a forest of butts. He was well over six feet tall and lanky, like a basketball player—St. Johns as it turned out. Silvestri told her he had played center for the mid-sixties championship team.

  He wore a very well cut dark brown suit with an argyle cashmere vest. Standing with one long leg on the seat of his chair, he was complaining to someone on the phone, all the while taking short drags on a cigarette.

  “Half, for crissakes. Half didn’t show. So who gets the shit? Yeah well, a lot of good it does me—” He hung up. “Goddamn snow,” he said, picking at a thread on his trousers before putting his foot back on the floor. “Jeezus.” He groaned and rubbed the small of his back.

  In the squad room phones rang incessantly, and one lone detective ran from desk to desk, answering them.

  The room was a cubicle similar to Silvestri’s but even smaller. There was only one desk. The area had been painted recently. Same old standard gray. Someone had neglected to remove the Wet Paint sign from the ledge near Wetzon’s chair.

  “So what else you got for me, Silvestri?”

  “Leslie Wetzon, Eddie O’Melvany.” Silvestri was leaning against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets, face impassive.

  O’Melvany put two fingers to his brow and saluted her politely. The action made him grimace and he kneaded his back again. “Sorry. Tough day. My back’s out.” He walked to the door, limping, and leaned past Silvestri. “Kaplan?” There was no response. “Christalmighty,” he said, “who’s here to take a statement?” Still no response. “Hey, Alvaro, will you help me out here?”

  Alvaro, a swarthy woman with the build of a weight lifter compacted in blue denim overalls, yelled, “Can’t, Sarge. We have a possible ten-thirty-one at the Guggenheim. There’s nobody else, so I’m on it.” She grabbed an overcoat and left, bumping a uniformed officer as he entered the squad room and dived for one of the ringing phones.

  “Shit,” O’Melvany said. He came back to his desk and rolled some paper into his typewriter. “Shit,” he said again, trying to straighten the paper.

  Wetzon heard a small, strangling noise and looked around in time to catch Silvestri making no effort to hide a smirk.

  O’Melvany, using the hunt-and-peck system of typing, took a brief statement from Wetzon. He stopped typing. “That matches up with what Miss Osborn told us.” He lit a cigarette while tamping out another. “Don’t see any reason to think we have a homicide here.”

  “Oh, did you find Ida?” Wetzon asked, exasperated. “And what about the Gucci shoe?” She looked around at Silvestri, who was studying the nails on his left hand intently.

  “No.” O’Melvany yanked the paper out of the typewriter without releasing the rollers. Wetzon winced. “We have not found this Ida—”

  “But it’s so simple.” She looked at Silvestri. He was smirking again, damn him. She turned back to O’Melvany, who had a tortured look on his face. “Just contact the agency she worked for.”

  “From what the lawyer told us, there was no agency. She was an independent contractor. A check was mailed to her every week—”

  “I don’t understand.” Wetzon was trying hard not to get angry. She looked at Silvestri again. He was studying something on the ceiling. There was nothing on the ceiling. He was going to be no help. “If a check was mailed to her, then there’s an address—”

  O’Melvany looked daggers at Silvestri. “Let me explain something, Miss Wetzon. We’re dealing with Brighton Beach here. You heard of Brighton Beach?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “It’s a nest of Russian immigrants, some legal, some not. Real old-fashioned professionals, murderers, thieves, chiselers, and cons, black marketeers, from Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, and Odessa live there among the rest of the Russians. It’s called Little Odessa. There are thousands of them there. When someone wants to get lost there, they get lost. You get my meaning?”

  Wetzon nodded. “But what about the address?”

  “Mail drop. Candy store. Tsminsky’s Ice Cream Shoppe. Owner does it for a fee for a lot of people. Conveniently can’t remember anything helpful. Brick wall. They may be Jews, but they’re still Russians. Built-in paranoia. Being Russian Jews, double paranoia.”

  “What about the shoe?”

  “Would be something if there was another one like it in the old lady’s closet, but there wasn’t.”

  “But—”

  “Come on, Les.” Silvestri’s hand was on her shoulder.

  “Look, Miss Wetzon. We did our job.” O’Melvany looked and sounded bored. She felt frustrated and angry. Talk about a brick wall. “We went over the place thoroughly.” He leaned across the desk at her. His breath was rank from cigarettes. “Did it myself. If there was another one like it, we would have found it, believe me. The old girl was in bad shape. Her lawyer even says so. She didn’t know what she was doing. She probably didn’t even know it was winter and went out on the terrace and bam.”

  “I just know it was Peepsie’s shoe,” Wetzon said, more to herself than anyone else.

  Silvestri’s beeper went off.

  O’Melvany shrugged and stood up, handing her the typed statement. “You know how much junk was on the streets that day because of the wind? Could have come from anywhere. Every woman in this neighborhood wears Gucci shoes. And you ought to see what the sanitation guys pick up on a normal day in this part of town. It would blow your mind.”

  Silvestri went into the squad room and made a phone call while Wetzon read the statement. It was full of cross-outs and typos, but it was accurate. She signed it.

  “Look, Miss Wetzon.” O’Melvany rubbed his back gingerly. “Let’s wait till autopsy results come in before we make a final assessment. How’s that?”

  “Okay.” She reached into her bag and pulled out her card case. “This is where you can reach me.” Under her business card was Sonya Mosholu’s card. “Sergeant, maybe this lady can help your back. I use her when my back goes out. She’s a psychomotor therapist.” O’Melvany was working hard at being polite. She could see that. He did not take the second card, so Wetzon dropped it on his desk.

  “Let me tell you, we haven’t given up on finding this Ida. I’ve talked to one of the detectives from the Six-O, they cover Brighton Beach, and he’s keeping his eyes open for her.”

  Silvestri reappeared. She could see he had something on his mind that he wasn’t going to share. “We finished? Good.” He shook hands with O’Melvany, slapped his shoulder. “You want in on the game, call me.”

  “Count on it.” O’Melvany smiled. He had a nice smile. It changed his face entirely. Lines like spiderwebs framed his eyes.

  “I know she was murdered,” Wetzon declared, kicking a big clump of snow on the street.

  “Except for the Russian woman, you’ve got nothing, Les.” The snow, which had stopped before their meeting with O’Melvany, now was drifting down in thick fine powder in such slow motion it seemed to be standing still. Silvestri’s red parka was white with snow. Snowflakes stuck to his dark lashes and brows. Metal shovels scraped on sidewalks, hitting concrete or firmly packed snow.

  Silvestri was brushing the snow from the windshield of his precious black Toyota. Wetzon picked some snow from a waist-high drift. She formed one ball, and then another and another, crad
ling them in her arm.

  “You coming?” He turned, blinking the snow from his eyes and she pelted him with snowballs. They stared at each other for a second, and she screamed and took off slipping and sliding down the treacherous streets, dodging drifts and snow-covered garbage cans and two little snowmen with sleds. She was laughing so hard at the shock on his face when she hit him with the snowballs that she had to slow her pace.

  She had almost made it to the corner of Second Avenue when he tackled her, bringing her down. They rolled into a drift.

  “Mock me, will you?” he said, straddling her, washing her face with snow as she struggled.

  “Do you need help, young lady?” An elderly man in a tweed overcoat and tan muffler, wearing an Irish knit rain hat, loomed over them. He nudged Silvestri with his cane.

  “Oh, sir, how kind—” Wetzon began.

  Silvestri labored to his feet and balanced one foot on Wetzon’s stomach. He pulled out his badge and I.D. “Sergeant Silvestri,” he said. “Seventeenth Precinct. Just apprehending a culprit.”

  “Dear me.” The old man shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, she looks like such a nice girl.” He backed away.

  “Yes, doesn’t she. You can never tell these days,” Silvestri said, pressing down as she squirmed.

  “Silvestri, you bastard, let me up. Don’t believe him, sir.”

  The old man gave Silvestri an approving nod and toddled on his way.

  “Come on up, culprit.” Silvestri pulled her to her feet, exploding with laughter.

  “I suppose you think you’re funny,” she said, trying to brush herself off. “It’s downright humiliating the way you cops treat innocent people.”

  “Come on,” he said, still laughing. “I have to report in.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll drop you.”

  “You just did.” Her foot touched ice under snow and she slipped, clutching at his arm. Her mind was already clicking away in gear. She would call Teddy Lanzman and—