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her tape of old messages, something she never bothered to do.
    The apartment was cold. She trailed into the bedroom, shivering, and changed into sweats and heavy socks. The heat was slow in coming up tonight because the thermostat had not caught up with the sudden temperature drop that morning. Outside, the north wind whapped against her windows.
    Through the wooden blinds she could see the small trees around the penthouse of the building behind hers, bobbing and bending. As she watched, the stem of a giant sunflower broke off and slammed into her window. She jumped back. The dead sunflower clutched at the glass with tiny dried tendrils, as if it were human, trying to hold on, and failing, finally got whipped away.
    Something danced and clutched similarly in the back of Wetzon’s mind, teasing her. Peepsie Cunningham in her dark blue silk dress, tossed like a rag doll in the lashing wind amid assorted debris that the wind had churned up.
    The tiny dark blue Gucci walking shoe with the gold stirrups. It was still in her carryall, which was leaning against her bed. She took it out and stared at it. It was a real Gucci, monogram and all, not an imitation, and it was hardly worn. There were only a few scratches on the sole. She held it up and matched the sole to the black suede boots she had removed earlier.
    “You’ve got big feet, kid,” she said, imitating Silvestri, imitating Bogart.
    Silvestri. Thinking of him, she smiled. She had met him last year when she had gotten involved in Barry Stark’s murder. He had substance, and it was a real relationship. As real as two people could have with two careers and totally different working hours.
    She put Peepsie Cunningham’s shoe down on the rug next to her boots, sat up, and called Silvestri at the Seventeenth Precinct.
    “Metzger.”
    “Hi, Artie. Is he there, by any chance?”
    “No, he’s downtown.” Silvestri’s partner’s voice was raw with fatigue. “Something just came up, and we’re in for a long night, I think.” She could picture Metzger, with that long, hang-dog face and the pouches under his eyes, slumped at his cluttered desk in the tiny office he shared with Silvestri.
    “Okay, I hear you,” she said. She hadn’t seen Silvestri in three days, hadn’t talked with him in two. She missed him. “Just say I called.”
    “Want me to tell him anything in particular?” Metzger asked halfheartedly.
    “No, Artie, thanks.” She paused and frowned. “Yes. Not to call me tonight. I have a seven-thirty breakfast and I’m going to bed early. I’ll talk with him tomorrow.”
    The Peepsie Cunningham story could wait. Mrs. Cunningham was, after all, a suicide, not a murder.
    Wetzon lay down on her bed again and unfolded the red, white, and blue afghan she and Carlos had crocheted as a backstage project in honor of the bicentennial when they danced for Bob Fosse in Chicago in 1976. They had agreed to share it, each taking it for a year, and this was her year—at least until July Fourth. She thought about the choreographers she and Carlos had worked with who were gone. Gower Champion first. And then Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse had both died in 1987. It made her sad and nostalgic.
    Drawing the afghan up around her ears, she thought about Silvestri.
    The truth was, she was crazy about him, but she didn’t find it easy to admit. Not to herself. And certainly not to him. If she admitted it, wouldn’t she begin to depend on him more and more and less on herself? She had been by herself for a long time, and except for a few short—very short—affairs there had been no one since Bud Silverberg, whom she had met in college. He had been with the Air Force in exotic Morocco. He had just stopped writing, and she had found out not long afterward from a mutual friend that he had fallen in love with and married a Moroccan girl.
    “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you,” the friend had said.
    Neither can I , she had thought. Well, this was one relationship she