Murder: The Musical (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #5) by Annette Meyers Page A

phone number. She might as well try it while she was still here and get Thursday squared away. She picked out the number and listened to the phone ring, once, twice, three, four, and was about to hang up when a voice said: “Joel Kidde’s office.”

15.
    The cab she’d just gotten out of was captured by the doorman of Susan Orkin’s building for an older couple in evening clothes. The woman had a mink cape loosely over her shoulders, revealing her skeletal frame. Her face had the frozen look of one too many lifts. Her companion was one of those androgynously handsome white-haired men of the flashy tans and fine gold jewelry who often escorted rich widows and divorcees about town.
    This was so typical of the East Side that Wetzon had to smile. Her Upper West Side with its actor-musician-dancer-writer and young upwardly mobile professional Zabar-dependent inhabitants was more to her taste.
    She paused for a moment listening to the wind snap-slap at the awning overhead, then she pushed hard on the heavy lobby door and crossed a marbled vestibule bigger than the office she and Smith shared. Down two steps was another lobby the size of her whole apartment. The decor was chocolate brown leather sofas and good reproduction walnut tables. Waxy leaved plants filled fat, pebbled brass pots. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall looked out into a winter-blighted garden of brown manicured hedges and walkways.
    A second, older, doorman, his face a treasury of broken blood vessels, stood at a telephone board. He waited for her to approach him, blinking faded brown eyes.
    “Mrs. Orkin,” she told him.
    “Your name, Miss?” His Irish brogue was downright plush.
    “Ms. Wetzon.”
    He plugged a cord into his tenant intercom box and announced her, actually pronouncing her name properly but giving it a romantic lilt. “Ms. Wetzon here for you, Mrs. Orkin.” He disconnected and nodded to Wetzon. “Go right up. Eighteen C. Elevator’s to your right.”
    This building on Fifth Avenue was a full square block, half facing Madison, half facing Fifth. It was legendary for the size and layouts of its apartments. You couldn’t buy in without being connected, and its co-op board was notoriously rigid. Even with the recession, which had severely hurt highflying New York real estate prices, Wetzon knew prices here had not dropped. People were willing to wait for years for apartments in this building to come on the market.
    The elevator was wood-paneled, its brass trim polished to the nth degree. The elevator man was young and rolled curious eyes over Wetzon when she told him the eighteenth floor. Whose apartment had it been, she wondered. Dilla’s or Susan’s? The reactionary board of this building would not look kindly on a lesbian couple, that was for sure. They consistently refused to accept entertainers, even classical musicians.
    There were only two apartments on the eighteenth floor, C and D. The little foyer was embellished by rust ceramic floor tiles and taupe-striped wallpaper with tiny rust flowers. Four old floral prints in plain black frames were lined up on the wall opposite the elevator. A photocopied letter to all tenants was taped to each door informing that negotiations with the Building Employees Union had broken off and that there would be a strike. She had seen a similar notice taped to the inside wall of the elevator in her own building that morning.
    Wetzon rang C’s bell and, fully expecting soft chimes, heard instead a rasping ring followed hard on by barking, the kind made by a small dog.
    The woman who opened the door was not someone Wetzon would have recognized as the Susan Cohen she’d known in college. This woman’s hair was spun-sugar white, absolutely devoid of color, parted on the side and puffed around her small face, making it look even smaller. All that hair made Susan’s head seem too big for her body, which was as tiny as it had been almost twenty years ago. Susan was actually a woman in miniature,