by Stuart Woods
“Can I give you a lift?” she asked. “I’ve got a car waiting, and you’ll never get a cab down here at this time of the evening.”
“Sure, I’d appreciate that.” He took a deep breath. “If you’re all through with work, how about some dinner?”
“You’re off duty now?”
“The moment you say yes.”
She looked at him frankly. “I’d like that.”
They ran across the pavement to the waiting Lincoln Town Car, one of hundreds that answer the calls of people with charge accounts.
“Where to?” Cary said, as they settled into the back seat.
“How about Elaine’s?” Stone said.
“Can you get a table without a reservation?”
“Let’s find out.”
“Eighty-eighth and Second Avenue,” she said to the driver.
Stone turned to her. “I got the impression from what you said in the elevator that I shouldn’t necessarily believe everything Barron Harkness tells me.”
“Why, Detective,” Cary said, her eyes wide and innocent. “I never said that.” She scrunched down in the seat and laid her head back. “And, anyway, you’re off duty, remember?”
Chapter 10
Elaine accepted a peck on the cheek, shook Cary ’s hand, and gave them Woody Allen’s regular table. Stone heaved a secret sigh of relief. This was no night for Siberia.
“I’m impressed,” Cary said when they had ordered a drink. “Whenever I’ve been in here before, we always got sent to Siberia.”
“You’ve clearly been coming here with the wrong men,” Stone replied, raising his glass to her.
“You could be right,” she said, looking at him appraisingly. “You’re bad casting for a cop, you know.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t be coy. It’s not the first time you’ve been told that.”
Pepe, the headwaiter, appeared with menus. Stone waved them away and asked for the specials.
“No, it’s not the first time I’ve been told that,” Stone said, when they had chosen their food. “I’m told that every time a cop I don’t know looks at me.”
“All right,” she said, leaning forward, “I want the whole biography, and don’t leave anything out, especially the part about why you’re a cop and not a stockbroker, or something.”
Stone sighed. “It goes back a generation. My family, on my father’s side, was from western Massachusetts, real Yankees, mill owners.”
“ Barrington, as in Great Barrington, Massachusetts?”
“I don’t know; I didn’t have a lot of contact with the Massachusetts Barringtons. My father was at Harvard – rather unhappily, I might add – when the stock market crash of ’twenty-nine came. His father and grandfather were hit hard, and Dad had to drop out of school. This troubled him not in the least, because it freed him to do what he really wanted to do.”
“Which was?”
“He wanted to be a carpenter.”
“A carpenter? You mean with saws and hammers?”
“Exactly. He took it up when he was a schoolboy at Exeter, and he showed great talent. My grandfather was horrified, of course. Carpentry wasn’t the sort of thing a Barrington did. But when he could no longer afford to keep his son in Harvard, well…”
“What does this have to do with your being a cop?”
“I’m coming to that, eventually. Dad got to be something of a radical, politically, as a result of the depression. He gravitated to Greenwich Village, where he fell in with a crowd of leftists, and he earned a living knocking on people’s doors and asking if they wanted anything fixed. He lived in the garage of a town house on West Twelfth Street and didn’t own anything much but his tools.
“He met my mother in the late thirties. She was a painter and a pianist and from a background much like Dad’s – well-off Connecticut people, the Stones – who’d been wiped out in the crash. She was younger than Dad and very taken with the contrast between his upper-class education and his working-class job.”
Cary wrinkled her brow. “Not Matilda Stone.”
“Yes.”
“Her work brings good prices these days at the auctions. I hope you have a lot of it.”
“Only three pictures; her favorites, though.”
“Go on with the autobiography.”
“They lived together through the war years – the army wouldn’t take Dad because he was branded as a Communist, even though he never joined the party. They had a tough time. Then, after the war, Dad rented a property on Hudson Street, where he finally was able to have a proper workshop. Some of Mother’s friends, who had done well as artists, began to hire him for cabinetwork in their homes, and, by the time I was born, in ’fifty-two, he was doing pretty well. Mother’s work was selling, too, though she never got anything like the prices it’s bringing now, and, by the time I was old enough to notice, they were living stable, middle-class lives.
“When I was in my teens, Dad had quite a reputation as an artist-craftsman; he was building libraries in Fifth Avenue apartments and even designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The Barringtons and the Stones were very far away, and I didn’t hear much about my forebears. Somehow, though, my parents’ backgrounds filtered down into my life. There were always books and pictures and music in the house, and I suppose I had a sort of Yankee upbringing, once removed.”
“Did you go to Harvard, like your father?”
“No; that would have infuriated him. I went to NYU and walked to class every day. By about my junior year, I had decided to go to law school. I didn’t have any real clear idea about what lawyers actually did – neither did a lot of my classmates in law school, for that matter – but, somehow, it sounded good. I did all right, I guess, had a decent academic record, and, in my senior year, the New York City Police Department had a program to familiarize law students with police work. I worked part-time in a station house, I rode around in a blue-and-white, and I just loved it. The cops treated me like the whitebread college kid I was, but it didn’t matter, the bug had bit. I took the police exam, and, almost immediately after I got my law degree, I enrolled in the Police Academy. In a way, I think I was imitating my father’s choice of a working-class life.”
“You never took the bar?”
“I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was hot to be a cop.”
“Are you still?”
“Yes, sort of. I love investigative work, and I’m good at it. I had a couple of good collars that got me a detective’s shield; I had a good rabbi – a senior cop who helped me with promotion; he’s dead now, though, and I seem to have slowed down a bit.”
“But you’re different from other cops.”
Stone sighed again. “Yes, I guess I am. I’ve been an outsider since the day I started at the academy.”
“So you’re not going to be the next chief of police?”
Stone laughed. “Hardly. You could get good odds at the 19th Precinct that I’ll never make detective first grade.”
“What are you now?”
“Detective second.”
“So, you’re thirty-eight years old, and…”
“Essentially without prospects,” Stone said, shrugging. “I can look forward to a pension in six years; a better one, if I can last thirty.”
“Why are you limping?”
Stone told her about the knee, keeping it as undramatic as possible. She listened and didn’t say anything. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, “and don’t leave out anything.”
“My bio is much simpler,” she said. “Born and grew up in Atlanta; the old man was a lawyer, now a judge; two years at Bennington, which my father thought was far too radical – I was wearing only black clothes and not washing my hair enough – so I finished at the University of Georgia, in journalism. Summer between my junior and senior years, I got on the interns’ program at the network, and, when I graduated, they offered me a job as a production assistant. I’m thirty-two years old, and I’m still a production assistant.”
“But at a higher level, surely? After all, you’re assisting Barron Harkness.”
She laughed. “It’s a nice place to work, if your father can afford to send you there. The perks aren’t bad.” She looked at him sideways. “You skipped something.”
“What?”
“Married?”
“Nope.”
“Never? Why not?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“Cynic.”
“Probably.”
“No girl?”
“Not at the moment. I was seeing somebody for a couple of years. When I was in the hospital, she accepted a transfer to LA.”
“Sweet.”
Stone shrugged. “I didn’t come through with the commitment she wanted; she took a hike.” He imitated her sidelong glance. “What about you?”
She sighed. “The usual assortment of yuppies during my twenties. I’m just out of a relationship with a married man.”
“Those don’t work, I’m told.”
“This one sure didn’t. He kept me on the hook for four years, and then he just couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife.”
“That’s the drill. Still hurting?”
“Now and then, if I don’t watch myself. I think I’m relieved, more than anything else.”
“Was it Harkness?”
“No; he wasn’t in the TV business. Advertising.”
“For what it’s worth, I think the guy’s nuts.”
She smiled, a wide mouth full of straight, white teeth. She started to speak, but didn’t. Instead, she concentrated on her pasta.
Stone watched her, and he felt the possibilities in his gut.
When they left Elaine’s, the rain had stopped, and the air was cool. The car still waited for them.
“Can I drop you?” she asked. “It’s one of the perks of the job; I think I probably spend more of the network’s money on cars than they pay me.”
“Sure, thanks. It’s early; I’ll give you a nightcap at my house.”
“Sold.”
They got into the car, and Stone gave the driver his address.
She looked at him, eyebrows arched. “That’s a pretty expensive neighborhood. You on the take?”
Stone laughed. “Nope. I’ll explain later.”
They drove straight down Second Avenue, and at Sixty-ninth Street they ran into a wall of flashing lights. A uniformed cop was waving traffic through a single open lane.
“Pull over here,” Stone said to the driver. He opened the car door and turned to Cary. “Give me a couple of minutes, will you?” He flashed his badge at a uniform and crossed the yellow tape. A Checker cab was stopped at the intersection, and a small group had gathered around the driver’s open door. Stone saw Headly, from the detective squad.
Headly nodded. “Cabdriver caught one in the head,” he said to Stone. “Looks like he was stopped for the light, somebody pulled up next to him, and just popped him one.”
Stone glanced into the cab at the dead driver, sprawled across the front seat. There was a lot of blood. “You got it covered?” he said to Headly.
“Yeah,” the detective replied.
Suddenly the cab was bathed in bright light. Stone turned, shielding his eyes.
“Howdy, Stone,” Scoop Berman said, still operating his camera. “You on this one?”
“It’s Headly’s,” Stone said. “You can give him the hard time.” He stepped out of Scoop’s lights and bumped into Cary Hilliard, who was staring at the dead driver. He took her elbow. “You don’t want to see that,” he said, turning her toward their car. “How’d you get past the tape?”
“Press card,” she said, showing a blue, plastic shield on a string around her neck. She took it off and stuffed it into her handbag.
In the car they were both quiet for a block or two.
“You see a lot of that stuff?” she asked finally.
“Enough. More than I’d like to see. Did it upset you?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t get a good enough look, thank God. I faint at the sight of blood.”
They turned into Turtle Bay, and the car stopped.
“Wait for me,” Cary said to the driver.
They climbed the steps, and Stone opened the front door of the house.
“You’ve got the duplex?” Cary asked, surprised.
“I’ve got the house,” Stone replied. He flipped on the hall light.
“You are on the take,” she said, laughing. “No honest cop could ever afford a house in Turtle Bay.”
“Would you believe I inherited it?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I did. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth, my grandfather’s sister, married well. She always had a soft spot for my father, and she willed it to him. She outlived him, though, only died early this year at the age of ninety-eight, and so her estate came to me.”
Stone led her into the library.
“It’s a mess,” she said, looking around at the empty shelves, stripped of their varnish, the books stacked on the floor, the rug rolled up, the furniture stacked in a corner, everything under sheets of plastic.
“It is now,” Stone said, “but I’m working on it. My father designed and built this room; it was his first important commission, right after World War II. Everything is solid walnut. You could still buy it in those days; now all you can get is veneer, and that’s out of sight.”
“It’s going to be magnificent,” she said.
He led her through the other rooms, pointing out a couple of pieces that his father had built. “Most of the upholstered furniture is out being re-covered. My plan is to do the place up right, then sell it and retire on the proceeds, one of these days.”
“Why not just sell it now?” she asked.
“I had a real estate lady look at it. She says I can triple the price if I put it in good shape – new heating, plumbing, kitchen – the works.”
“How can you afford to do that?”
“There was a little money in Aunt Elizabeth’s estate. I’m putting it all into the house and doing most of the work myself, with a couple of helpers and the occasional plumber and electrician.”
“Where are your mother’s pictures?”
“In my bedroom.”
“May I see them?”
Stone took her up in the old elevator. “I keep meaning to get this thing looked at,” he said over the creaking of the machinery, “but I’m afraid they’ll tell me it needs replacing.”
She stood in the bedroom and looked around. “This is going to be wonderful,” she said. “I hope to God you’ve got decent taste.”
“I’m not all that sure that I do,” he lied. “I could use some advice.”
“You may get more of that than you want; doing interiors is almost my favorite thing.” She walked across the room and stood before the three Matilda Stones. There were two views of West Ninth and West Tenth streets, and an elevated view of Washington Square. “These are superb,” she said. “You could get half a million for the three, I’ll bet, but don’t you dare.”
“Don’t worry. They’re a permanent fixture.”
“They belong in a house like, this,” she said, “and so do you. Can’t you think of some way to hang on to it? Go on the take, or something?”
“I have this fantasy,” he said. “I’m living in this house; it’s in perfect condition; there are servants in the servants’ quarters, a cook in the kitchen, and money in the bank. I don’t dare let myself dwell on it; it’s never going to happen, I know that.” He turned from the pictures and looked at her. “You said interior decorating was almost your favorite thing. What’s your favorite?”
She stepped out of her heels and turned to face him. “I’m five-eleven in my stocking feet; does that turn you off?”
Stone looked her up and down – the luxuriant, dark hair; the chiseled face; the full breasts under the black cashmere; the long legs finishing in slender feet. He hooked an arm around her narrow waist and pulled her to him.
&nbs
p; She smiled and rubbed her belly against his. “Apparently not,” she said, then kissed him.
Stone slid down a long, velvet tunnel of desire, made no attempt to slow his fall. Their clothes vanished, and they found the bed. Stone made to move on top of her, then cried out when his swollen knee took his weight.
She pushed him onto his back, kissed the knee, kissed his lips and his nipples, kissed his navel and his penis, took him in her mouth, nearly swallowed him, brought him fully erect, then slid him inside her.
Stone looked up at the long body, the firm breasts, freed from the cashmere, the lips parted in ecstasy, the glazed eyes. She sucked him inside her again and again. When he thought he would come, she stopped and sat still, kissing his ears and his eyes, then she began again. Half an hour seemed to stretch into weeks, until, bathed in sweat, his face buried between her breasts, he came with her, and their cries echoed around the underfurnished room.
They lay in each other’s arms, spent, breathing hard, caressing.
“You never told me what your favorite thing was,” Stone said.
“That was it,” Cary replied, kissing him.
Stone woke to broad daylight, and she was gone. A card was propped on the mantelpiece. There were phone numbers for home and work and an address: 1011 Fifth Avenue.
Chapter 11
Stone arrived in the detectives’ squad room of the 19th Precinct feeling rested, refreshed, fulfilled, and in an extremely good mood. The good mood was tempered somewhat by the rows of empty desks in the room. Twenty-four hours earlier, they had been filled with detectives doing his bidding, chasing down every lead on the Sasha Nijinsky disappearance, leaving only to interview her co-workers and acquaintances, again at his bidding. He had the sickening feeling that his time at the head of the investigation had come to an end.
Dino was in Lieutenant Leary’s glassed-in office at the end of the large room. Stone rapped on the glass and joined them. “Where is everybody?” he asked Dino as he pulled up a chair.
“On the cabdriver thing,” Dino said.
Stone turned to Leary. “Lieutenant, you’re not going to pull my guys off this investigation and put them on a cabdriver murder, are you?”
