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Wetzon called, and the door closed.
    “There’s no accounting anymore.” The disapproving woman spoke to her dog. “You’d better press your floor,” she said to Wetzon, “or you’ll come up to the penthouse with us.” Meaning, and I don’t want you near my penthouse . The poodle sneered, showing teeth.
    Wetzon pressed 5, and when they came to a stop, she started off.
    “You’re forgetting your attaché case,” the woman said disdainfully.
    I’m always forgetting my case , Wetzon thought with a surge of irritation. Maybe because it isn’t my goddam case . She reached down and yanked the case out of the elevator and lugged it down the hall to 5G, Smith’s apartment. How stupidly heavy the damn thing was. Sighing, she pressed the doorbell.
    The peephole clicked. She stuck out her tongue. In seconds the locks were flipped and the door opened.
    “Hey, Ma,” Mark yelled. “It’s okay. I told you she was okay. Wetzon’s here.” Tony obviously had not announced her. So much for these fancy East Side buildings.

10
    So Smith had been expecting her. How could she have known?
    “Mom said you’d be here tonight,” Mark said proudly. “Isn’t she wonderful?”
    “It can’t have ... it’s too soon ... did it come over the news already?” Wetzon stammered, struggling to understand. “Did anyone call and tell her?”
    “No one told me anything,” Smith replied, a disembodied voice coming from somewhere within the apartment. “I read it in the cards. I knew something evil had happened and you were involved. The cards never lie.” She stood dramatically in the arched doorway to the living room. She wore a full robe, an “at home” of vivid reds and blacks, from Marimekko, and the towel turban around her head meant she had washed her hair, but it made her look like an exotic fortune-teller. She had been reading her Tarot cards again.
    Smith swept Wetzon into her arms and gave her an Obsession-scented hug. Then she pulled back. “You look terrible,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me everything. I’m so happy you’re all right. You kept coming up in danger with death around you.”
    “I was,” Wetzon said. “And I’ve got to lie down right now before I fall down.” She felt limp, light-headed. She had not eaten anything since lunch, except for the small hors d’oeuvres at the Four Seasons.
    She staggered, leaning on Smith, into Smith’s bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and fell on the bed, which in typical Smith fashion was still unmade from the morning and had the accumulated disarray of several days on it. Wetzon found herself resting amid the clothes Smith had worn, the papers she’d been reading, books, a hairbrush thick with hair, blankets and bedclothes, candy wrappers, and a hair dryer.
    Normally Wetzon was put off by the chaos of Smith’s home base, but now it was welcome. She was just too tired to care. Probably somewhere on the bed were those damn cards, but let Smith worry about them. She lay back and closed her eyes, then opened them, startled. Looking up at the ceiling, she saw herself looking back. Smith had mirrored the ceiling over her bed.
    “Hey, Smith,” she began.
    Smith had the grace to blush. “Mark, honey,” she said.
    “Mom?”
    “Tea and toast for our tired friend here.”
    Mark was a nest-making twelve-year-old, precocious in school, nurturing at home. Smith had been divorced from his father since he was two, and his father was with American intelligence, some kind of CIA position, which Smith never wanted to talk about. Wetzon had never met him. There was no contact between Mark and his father, and Mark didn’t seem to care.
    “Okay,” Smith commanded, once Mark left the room. “Let’s hear it.” She pulled the low-backed chair from her dressing table over to the bed, sat down facing Wetzon, and added her bare feet to the confusion on the bed.
    Wetzon took a deep breath, laboring to assimilate the reality of what she was about to say. “Barry Stark was