New York Dead

by Stuart Woods

  New York Dead

  Stuart Woods

  From Publishers Weekly

  Woods's latest (after Palindrome) is a slick thriller set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, the stomping ground of Stone Barrington, a well-bred but unpretentious detective who, in a city of several million people, always ends up in the right place at the right time. Late one evening, as Stone trudges home from Elaine's Restaurant, popular TV newscaster Sasha Nijinsky plummets 12 stories from her terrace and lands on a heap of dirt 20 yards away from him-remarkably, still alive. Stone fails to apprehend the person who flees Sasha's penthouse and, after the ambulance carrying her collides with a fire truck, Sasha herself disappears. Despite the fact that no corpse is in evidence, the baffled NYPD eagerly pins a murder rap on Sasha's distraught lesbian lover. Stone refuses to accept his colleagues' pat solution and even maintains that Sasha might have survived thanks to skydiving training and her billowing, parachute-like robe. Bed-hopping TV newspeople, a sexy blonde judge sporting a red dress beneath her robes, a serial killer targeting cabbies and a creepy med-school dropout turned mortician who idolizes Sasha romp through this calculatedly melodramatic crime story all the way to its grisly B-movie finale. 75,000 first printing; $125,000 ad/promo; author tour.

  Stuart Woods

  New York Dead

  The first book in the Stone Barrington series

  This book is for

  Nick Taylor and Barbara Nevins,

  who are New York Alive

  Chapter 1

  Elaine’s, late. The place had exhausted its second wind, and half the customers had gone; otherwise she would not have given Stone Barrington quite so good a table – number 4, along the wall to your right as you enter. Stone knew Elaine, had known her for years, but he was not what you would call a regular – not what Elaine would call a regular, anyway.

  He rested his left leg on a chair and unconsciously massaged the knee. Elaine got down from her stool at the cash register, walked over, and pulled up a chair.

  “So?”

  “Not bad,” he said.

  “How about the knee?” Anybody who knew him knew about the knee; it had received a.22-caliber bullet eleven weeks before.

  “A lot better. I walked up here from Turtle Bay.”

  “When’s the physical?”

  “Next week. I’ll tap-dance through it.”

  “So what if you fall on your ass, tap dancing?” Elaine knew how to get to the point.

  “So, then I’m a retiree.”

  “Best thing could happen to you.”

  “I can think of better things.”

  “Come on, Stone, you’re too good looking to be a cop. Too smart, too. You went to law school, didn’t you?”

  “I never took the bar.”

  “So take the bar. Make a buck.”

  “It’s fifteen years since I graduated.”

  “So? Take one of those cram courses.”

  “Maybe. You’re coming on kind of motherly, aren’t you?”

  “Somebody’s gotta tell you this stuff.”

  “I appreciate the thought. Who’s the guy at the bar?” To a cop’s eye the man didn’t fit in somehow. He probably wouldn’t fit anywhere. Male Caucasian, five-six, a hundred and seventy, thinning brown hair, thick, black-rimmed glasses adhesive-taped in the middle.

  “In the white coat? Doc.”

  “That his name or his game?”

  “Both. He’s at Lenox Hill, I think. He’s in here a lot, late, trying to pick up girls.”

  “In a hospital jacket?”

  “His technique is to diagnose them. Weird, isn’t it?”

  Doc reached over to the girl next to him and peeled back her eyelid. The girl recoiled.

  Stone laughed out loud and finished the Wild Turkey. “Bet it works. What girl could resist a doctah?”

  “Just about all of them is my guess. I’ve never seen him leave with anybody.”

  Stone signaled a waiter for the check and put some cash on the table.

  “Have one on me,” Elaine said.

  “Rain check. I’ve had one too many already.” He stood up and pecked her on the cheek.

  “Don’t be such a stranger.”

  “If I don’t pass the physical, I’ll be in here all the time. You’ll have to throw me out.”

  “My pleasure. Take care.”

  Stone glanced at Doc on the way out. He was taking the girl’s pulse. She was looking at him as if he were nuts.

  Stone was a little drunk – too drunk to drive, he reckoned, if he had owned a car. The night air was pleasant, still warm for September. He looked up Second Avenue to see a dozen cabs bearing down on him from uptown. Elaine’s was the best cab spot in town; he could never figure out where they were all coming from. Harlem? Cabdrivers wouldn’t take anybody to Harlem, not if they could help it. He turned away from them; he’d walk, give the knee another workout. The bourbon had loosened it up.

  He crossed Eighty-eighth and started downtown, sticking to the west side of the street. He lengthened his stride, made a conscious effort not to limp. He remembered walking this beat, right out of the academy; that was when he had started drinking at Elaine’s, when he was a rookie in the 19th Precinct, on his way home after walking his tour. He walked it now.

  A cop doesn’t walk down the street like anybody else, he reflected. Automatically, he checked every doorway as he swung down Second Avenue, ignoring the pain, leaning on the bourbon. He had to prevent himself from trying the locks. Across the street, half a dozen guys spilled out of a yuppie bar, two of them mouthing off at each other, the others watching. Ten years ago, he’d have broken it up. He would have now, but it didn’t look like it would last long. The two guys turned away from each other, hurling insults. Neither was willing to throw the first punch.

  At Eighty-sixth Street, two hookers were working the traffic. He’d have ignored them on his beat; he ignored them now. He remembered when Eighty-sixth was Germantown, when the smell of sauerbraten wafted from every third doorway. Somewhere along here there had been a place called the Gay Vienna that served kalbshaxe – a veal shank that looked like a gigantic drumstick. The place had had a zither player, the only one he’d ever heard. He’d liked it. He’d lived over on Eighty-third, between York and East End, had had a Hungarian landlady who made him goulash. She’d put weight on him, too much weight, and it had stuck. He’d lost it now, five weeks on hospital food. He was down to a hundred and eighty, and, at six-two, he looked slender. He vowed not to gain it back. He couldn’t afford the alterations.

  Stone rubbed his neck. An hour in one of Elaine’s hard, armless chairs, leaning on the table, always made his neck and shoulders tight. About Seventieth Street, he started to limp a little, in spite of himself. In the mid-Sixties, he forgot all about the knee.

  It was just luck. He was rolling his head around, trying to loosen the neck muscles, and he happened to be looking up when he saw her. She was free-falling, spread-eagled, like a sky diver. Only she didn’t have a parachute.

  Con Edison was digging a big hole twenty yards ahead, and they had a generator going, so he could barely hear the scream.

  Time slowed down; he considered whether it was some sort of stunt and rejected the notion. He thought she would go into the Con Ed hole, but she didn’t; instead, she met the earth, literally, on the big pile of dirt the workmen had thrown up. She didn’t bounce. She stuck to the ground as if she had fallen into glue. Stone started to run.

  A Con Ed man in a yellow hard hat jumped backward as if he’d been shotgunned. Stone could see the terrified expression on his face as he approached. The man recovered before Stone got there, reached down, and gingerly turned the woman onto her back. Her eyes were open.

  Stone knew her. There was black dirt on her fac
e, and her red hair was wild, but he knew her. Shit, the whole city knew her. More than half the population – all the men and some of the women – wanted to fuck her. He slowed just long enough to glance at her and shout at the Con Ed man. “Call an ambulance! Do what you can for her!” He glanced up at the building. Flush windows, none open; a terrace up top.

  He sprinted past the scene, turned the corner of the white-brick, 1960s apartment building, and ran into the lobby. An elderly, uniformed doorman was sound asleep in a chair, tilted back against the wall.

  “Hey!” Stone shouted, and the man was wide awake and on his feet. The move looked practiced. Stone shoved his badge in the old man’s face. “Police! What apartment has a terrace on the Second Avenue side?”

  “12-A, the penthouse,” the doorman said. “Miss Nijinsky.”

  “You got a key?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go!”

  The doorman retrieved a key from a drawer, and Stone hustled him toward the elevators. One stood open and waiting; the doorman pushed twelve.

  “What’s the matter?” the man asked.

  “Miss Nijinsky just took a dive. She’s lying in a pile of dirt on Second Avenue.”

  “Jesus God.”

  “She’s being introduced to him right now.”

  It was a short building, and the elevator was slow. Stone watched the floor numbers light up and tried to control his breathing. When they hit eleven, he pulled out his gun. As the elevator slowed to a stop on twelve, he heard something, and he knew what it was. The fire door on twelve had been yanked open so hard it had struck the wall. This noise was followed by the sound of somebody taking the steel steps of the fire stairs in a hurry. The elevator door started to open, and Stone helped it.

  “Stay here, and don’t open the apartment door!” he said to the doorman.

  The fire door was opposite the elevator; he yanked it open. From a floor below, the ring of shoe leather on steel drifted upward. Stone flung himself down the stairs.

  The guy only had a floor’s start on him; Stone had a chance. He started taking the steps two at a time. “Stop! Police!” he shouted. That was procedure, and, if anybody was listening, he wanted it heard. He shouted it again.

  As he descended, Stone got into a rhythm – bump de bump, bump de bump. He concentrated on keeping his footing. He left the eighth floor behind, then the sixth.

  From the sound of it, he was gaining. Aiming carefully, he started taking the steps three at a time. Whoever was below him was hitting every one. Now Stone was barely a flight of stairs behind him. At the third-floor level he caught sight of a shadow. The ringing of the steel steps built to a crescendo, echoing off the cinder-block walls of the staircase, sounding much like a modern composition a girl had once dragged him to hear.

  The knee was hurting badly now, and Stone tried to think ahead. If the man got out of the stairwell before he could be caught, then he’d have the advantage on level ground, because Stone wouldn’t be able to run him down before the knee went. Stone made a decision; he’d go for a flight at a time.

  On the next landing, he took a deep breath and leaped. He landed right, pushed off the wall, and prepared to jump again. One more leap down the stairs, and he’d have his quarry in sight. This time, as he jumped, something went wrong. His toe caught the stamped tread of the steel step – not much, just enough to turn him in midair – and he knew he would land wrong. When he did, his weight was on the bad knee, and he screamed. Completely out of control now, he struck the wall hard, bounced, and fell backward down the next flight of stairs.

  As he came to rest hard against the wall, he struggled to get a look down the stairs, but he heard the ground-floor door open, and, a moment later, he heard it slam. He hunched up in the fetal position, holding the knee with both hands, waiting for the pain to subside just enough to allow him to get to his feet. Half a minute passed before he could let go of the knee, grab the railing, and hoist himself up. He recovered his pistol, and, barely letting his left foot touch the floor, lurched into the lobby. The guy was gone, and there was no hope of catching him now. Swearing, he hammered the elevator button with his fist.

  He pressed his cheek against the cool stainless steel of the elevator door, whimpering with pain and anger and sucking in deep breaths.

  The bust of the century, and he had blown it.

  Chapter 2

  There were only two apartments on the twelfth floor, and the doorman was standing obediently in front of 12-A. The door was open.

  “I told you not to open it,” Stone said irritably.

  “I didn’t,” the old man said indignantly. “It was wide open. I didn’t go in there, either.”

  “Okay, okay. You go on back downstairs. There’ll be a lot of cops here in a few minutes; you tell them where I am.”

  “Yessir,” the doorman said and headed for the elevator.

  “Wait a minute,” Stone said, still catching his breath. “Did anybody come into the building the last half hour? Anybody at all?”

  “Nope. I wake up when people come in. I always do,” the old man said defensively.

  Sure. “What time did Miss Nijinsky come home tonight?”

  “About nine o’clock. She asked for her mail, but there wasn’t any. It had already been forwarded to the new address.”

  “She was moving?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What sort of mood was she in?” Stone asked.

  “Tired, I’d say. Maybe depressed. She was usually pretty cheerful, had a few words to say to me, but not tonight. She just asked for her mail, and, when I told her there wasn’t any, she just sighed like this.” He sighed heavily. “And she went straight into the elevator.”

  “Does she normally get many visitors in the building?”

  “Hardly any. As a matter of fact, in the two years she’s been here, I don’t remember a single one, except deliverymen – you know, from the department stores and UPS and all.”

  “Thanks,” Stone said. “You go on back to your post, and we’ll probably have more to ask you later.”

  Stone stepped into the apartment. He reached high to avoid messing up any prints on the door and pushed it nearly shut. A single lamp on a mahogany drum table illuminated the living room. The place was not arranged for living. The cheap parquet floor was bare of carpets; there were no curtains or pictures; at least two dozen cardboard cartons were scattered or stacked around the room. A phone was on the table with the lamp. Stone picked it up with two fingers, dialed a number, waited for a beep, then, reading off the phone, punched in Nijinsky’s number and hung up. He picked his way among the boxes and entered the kitchen. More packed boxes. He found the small bedroom; the bed was still made.

  Some penthouse. It was a mean, cramped, three-and-a-half-room apartment, and she was probably paying twenty-five hundred a month. These buildings had been thrown up in a hurry during the sixties, to beat a zoning restriction that would require builders to offset apartment houses, using less of the land. If they got the buildings up in time, they could build right to the sidewalk. There were dozens of them up and down the East Side.

  The phone rang. He got it before it rang a second time.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Bacchetti.”

  “Dino, it’s Stone. Where are you?”

  “A joint called Columbus, on the West Side. What’s up?”

  “Hot stuff.” Stone gave him the address. “Ditch the girl and get over here fast. Apartment 12 – A. I’ll wait five minutes before I call the precinct.”

  “I’m already there.” Bacchetti hung up.

  Stone hung up and looked around. The sliding doors to the terrace were open, and he could hear the whoop-whoop of an ambulance growing nearer. There was an armchair next to the table with the lamp and the phone, and next to it a packed carton with a dozen sealed envelopes on top. Stone picked up a printed card from a stack next to the envelopes.

  Effective immediately,

  Sasha Nijinsky is at
>
  1011 Fifth Ave.

  New York 10021.

  Burn this.

  The lady was moving up in the world. But, then, everybody knew that. Stone put the card in his pocket. The ambulance pulled to a halt downstairs, and, immediately, a siren could be heard. Not big enough for a fire truck, Stone thought, more like an old-fashioned police siren, the kind they used before the electronic noisemaker was invented.

  He walked out onto the terrace, which was long but narrow, and looked over the chest-high wall. Sasha Nijinsky had not fallen – she had either jumped or been muscled over. Down below, two vehicles with flashing lights had pulled up to the scene – an ambulance and a van with SCOOP VIDEO painted on the top. As he watched, another vehicle pulled up, and a man in a white coat got out.

  Stone went back into the apartment, found a switch, and flooded the room with overhead light. He looked at his watch. Two more minutes before this got official. Two objects were on the drum table besides the lamp and the phone. He unzipped her purse and emptied it onto the table. The usual female rubbish – makeup of all sorts, keys, a small address book, safety pins, pencils, credit cards held together with a rubber band, and a thick wad of money, held with a large gold paper clip. He counted it: twelve hundred and eleven dollars, including half a dozen hundreds. The lady didn’t travel light. He looked closely at the gold paper clip. Cartier.

  Stone turned to the other object: a red-leather book with the word DIARY stamped in gold. He went straight to the last page, today’s date.

  Hassle, hassle, hassle. The moving men are giving me a hard time. The paparazzi have been on my ass all day. The painters haven’t finished in the new apartment. My limo caught on fire on East 52nd Street this afternoon, and I had to hoof it to the network through hordes of autograph-seekers. And the goddamned fucking contracts are still not ready. For this I have a business manager, a lawyer, and an agent? Also, I haven’t got the change-of-address cards done, and the ace researchers don’t have notes for me yet on the Bush interview, and What’s-his-name just called and wants to come over here right now! I am coming apart at the seams, I swear I am. As soon as he leaves, I’m going to get into a hot tub with a gigantic brandy and open a vein. I swear to God it’s just not worth it, any of it. On Monday, I have to smile into a camera and be serious, knowledgeable, and authoritative, when all I want to do with my life is to go skydiving without a parachute. Fuck the job, fuck the fame, fuck the money! Fuck everybody!!!