New York Dead

by Stuart Woods

  He came around the unit, and she stood perhaps thirty feet from him, her feet spread in something like a fighting stance, leaning against the wind. She was no more than six feet from the low railing. Stone began walking toward her.

  “Stop, Stone,” she said. “Stop right there, or I’ll jump.”

  He stopped, but he had already covered twenty feet; only ten separated them.

  “You made me believe you were protecting him, but all along you were protecting yourself, weren’t you? Right from the very beginning,” he shouted over the wind.

  “No,” she said.

  “You wanted to be with me so you would know what I knew about Sasha’s case, that’s all.”

  “No, Stone,” she said. “I loved you from the start. I love you now, believe me. Get me out of this, and I’m yours. Barron can go to hell. Just get me out of this, and I’ll make your life wonderful. Really, I will.”

  “You were sleeping with Sasha, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but it meant nothing. It was just another erotic experience, don’t you see?”

  It was coming together for him now. “You were fucking Sasha, and so was Harkness. Harkness wanted her, not you, didn’t he?”

  “We were all fucking each other, sometimes all at once,” she said. “She wanted him – not because she loved him, but because she could destroy him if she was married to him. She only wanted to cut off his balls, and then the evening news would have been all hers.”

  “And you, what did you want?” He edged a little closer.

  She backed up a couple of steps. The edge was nearer now. The wind was gusting, and she leaned into it for a moment. “Well, you were useless, weren’t you?” She spat. “You wouldn’t free yourself of that dead-end job, so that you could get ahead. Barron was simply the best alternative. I didn’t love him, though; I loved you. Why do you think I kept seeing you?”

  “You didn’t love me any more than you loved Barron or Sasha, Cary.” He stepped closer; he could grab her now. He put a foot forward but kept his weight on the rear one. He reached out and snaked a hand around her waist.

  There was a howl from behind him, and the wind struck his back. Involuntarily, his weight shifted onto the forward foot, and then to the toe. He let go of Cary. Slowly waving his arms for balance, he fell toward her, still pushed by the wind. Cary stepped instinctively back from him, and her calf struck the railing. In desperation, she reached out and grabbed at his coat lapel. Then they both toppled over the railing, out into the night. Sixty-five stories of thin air welcomed them.

  Stone stopped short; something had his ankle. He ignored it, watched Cary slip from him and fall, facing him, revealed by flashes from lighted windows, all the way down until she struck the top of what looked like a Yellow cab.

  Chunks of gravel were spilling from the top of the building now, falling past Stone to the street. Whoever had him was slipping over the side with him. He’ll let go, Stone thought, and I’ll join her. Then he stopped moving.

  There was a chorus of grunts and muffled shouts from above, and, inch by inch, he was hauled back to the top of the building, scraping his shin quite badly. When he was back on top, lying with his cheek pressed gratefully to the gravel, he could see Dino hanging on to his ankle, and Barron Harkness and Hi Barker hanging on to Dino. They let go of each other reluctantly.

  Stone crawled over to a ventilator and sat down with his back to it. “Thanks, Dino,” he was finally able to say. “You did it again.”

  “And it’s the first time you ever thanked me for it,” Dino puffed.

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Hi Barker said to nobody in particular. “But it’s going to make one hell of a story.”

  Only Barron Harkness seemed to give a thought to Cary. “She’s gone,” he said absently. “My wife is gone.”

  Dino was the first to answer him. “Get used to it, pal.” He snorted. “She’s New York Dead.”

  Chapter 52

  Stone sat with his client and watched the jury file back into the courtroom. He had a sinking feeling about this. He didn’t like his client much, and he wasn’t sure the man was innocent. He was afraid the jury didn’t share his indecision.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” Judge O’Neal asked.

  Stone thought she was looking particularly attractive today, as much as she could in judicial robes.

  The foreman stood. “We have, Your Honor,” he replied. “The foreman will hand the verdict to the clerk.”

  The clerk received the verdict, read it to himself, then handed it to Judge O’Neal. She read it and handed it back to him.

  “The defendant will rise and look upon the jury; the jury will look upon the defendant.”

  Stone stood with his client.

  “The clerk will read the verdict.”

  The clerk looked at the piece of paper. “We, the jury, unanimously find the defendant guilty as charged.”

  Stone’s client sighed audibly.

  Well you might sigh, Stone thought. I tried to get you to plead to the lesser charge, you dumb schmuck. But you thought you could beat it.

  “The jury is released with the thanks of the court for a job well done,” Judge O’Neal said. “Sentencing is set for the twenty-fifth of this month; bail is continued pending.” She struck the bench with her gavel and rose. The courtroom rose with her.

  Stone turned to his client. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get a better verdict.”

  “You warned me,” the man said. “Can I go home now?”

  “Yes. We have to decide whether to appeal; I really think you should consider the expense.”

  The man sighed again. “Why bother? I’ll do the time.”

  “You’re free until sentencing, but you’d better be prepared not to go home after that. Bring a toothbrush.”

  They shook hands, and the man walked sadly away. Stone began gathering his notes.

  “Mr. Barrington?”

  Stone looked up. Judge O’Neal was standing to one side of the bench, behind the railing.

  “In my office, please,” she said primly.

  Stone groaned. He had pressed his luck often in cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, and she had repeatedly called him down for it. Now, the lecture. Hell, he thought, I’m lucky not to have been held in contempt. He trudged into her chambers, ready to take his medicine.

  She had perched on an arm of the big leather sofa. She undid her robes, and they fell aside to reveal a bright red dress that went particularly well with her blonde hair. She crossed her legs.

  They look awfully good, he thought. Something stirred in him for the first time in a long while.

  “I read about the Nijinsky case, of course,” she said. “I believe you discovered Ms. Nijinsky in a thoroughly dead condition.”

  “That’s right, Judge. She was what a friend of mine calls ‘New York Dead.’”

  “In that case, I will remind you of our wager of some time past,” O’Neal said, uncrossing her legs and recrossing them in the other direction.

  He had forgotten.

  “You, sir, owe me a dinner,” she said.

  Stone smiled. “Yes, Your Honor,” he replied.

  Acknowledgments

  The Public Affairs Department of the New York City Police Department was not helpful in the research for this book. Individual officers were, however, and I would particularly like to thank Detective Jerry Giorgio of the 34th Squad Homicide Team for some enlightening conversations.

  I thank Elaine Kaufman for keeping the home fires burning on Second Avenue and for running a place where a writer can get a decent table.

  I am grateful to my editor, Ed Breslin, my London publisher, Eddie Bell, and all their colleagues at HarperCollins for their appreciation of this book and their hard work on its behalf.

  Once again, I want to extend my gratitude to my agent, Morton Janklow, his associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the people at Janklow amp; Nesbit for their continuing care and concern for my career.

  “W
e Are Very Different People”:

  Stuart Woods on Stone Barrington

  An Interview by Claire E. White

  Stuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia on January 9, 1938. His mother was a church organist and his father an ex-convict who left when Stuart was two years old, when it was suggested to him that, because of his apparent participation in the burglary of a Royal Crown Cola bottling plant, he might be more comfortable in another state. He chose California, and Stuart only met him twice thereafter before his death in 1959, when Stuart was a senior in college.

  After college, Stuart spent a year in Atlanta, two months of which were spent in basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger program” of the Air National Guard. He worked at a men’s’ clothing store and at Rich’s department store while he got his military obligation out of the way. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren’t hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. “It is a measure of my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.”

  At the end of the sixties, after spending several weeks in London, he moved to that city and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. At the end of that time he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. But after getting about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and “…everything went to hell. All I did was sail.”

  After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, “…just enough money to get into debt for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, “…racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly,” he spent eighteen months learning more about sailing and, especially, ocean navigation while the boat was built at a yard in Cork.

  He moved to a nearby gamekeeper’s cottage on a big estate to be near the building boat. In the summer of 1975 he sailed out to the Azores in a two-handed race, in company with Commander Bill King, a famous World War II submarine commander and yachtsman, who had done a round-the-world, single-handed voyage. Commander King then flew back to Ireland, and Stuart sailed back, single-handed, as his qualifying cruise for the OSTAR the following year.

  The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, dividing his time between Manchester and Atlanta, while selling his grandfather’s business, a small-town department store, and writing two non-fiction books. Blue Water, Green Skipper, was an account of his Irish experience and the OSTAR, and A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland, “was a travel book, done on a whim.

  He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he competed in the now notorious Fastnet Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart and his host crew finished in good order, with little damage. That October and November, he spent skippering his friend’s yacht back across the Atlantic, calling at the Azores, Madiera and the Canary Islands, finishing at Antigua, in the Caribbean.

  In the meantime, the British publisher of Blue Water, Green Skipper had sold the American rights to W.W. Norton, a New York publishing house, and they had also contracted to publish the novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an outline, for an advance of $7500. “I was out of excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I finally had to get to work.” He finished the novel and it was published in 1981, eight years after he had begun it. The novel was called Chiefs.

  Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hard-back, the book achieved a hefty paperback sale and was made into a six-hour critically acclaimed television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, John Goodman, Billy D. Williams, and Stephen Collins.

  Chiefs also established Stuart as a novelist in the eyes of the New York publishing community and was the beginning of a successful career. He has since written fifteen more novels, the most recent of which are Dead in the Water, which just came out in paperback, and Swimming to Catalina, just out in hardcover from HarperCollins. Both books feature Stone Barrington, the handsome, sophisticated attorney/investigator, and are New York Times bestsellers. Chiefs won the coveted Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America, and Stuart was nominated again for Palindrome. Recently he has been awarded France ’s Prix de Literature Policière, for Imperfect Strangers.

  In 1984 Stuart married for the first time, but the marriage ended in 1990. “I married too young,” he says. “I was only forty-seven.” Then, after fifteen years in Atlanta, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he spent five years, building a house and meeting his second wife, Chris, who was working in a local bookstore while trying to write her own novel. He now divides his time between Florida and Connecticut and travels widely. At fifty-nine, he has no plans to retire. “I reckon I’m good for another fifteen or twenty novels, maybe more,” he says. “I began to be a lot more careful about my health after I learned that heart disease can be prevented by drinking red wine, so I should be around for a long time.”

  CEW: When did you first know you wanted to be a novelist?

  SW: My mother taught me to read a year before I went to school, and I became a voracious reader. I first tried to write a novel when I was nine, but I gave up when I found out how hard it was.

  CEW: Did you take any formal writing classes or seminars?

  SW: The only writing class I ever took was a correspondence course at the University of Georgia, because I needed an additional five credits to graduate. Any teaching I learned from came from my early bosses in the advertising business, who were sticklers for persuasive prose. I learned a lot there.

  CEW: I’d like to talk about the latest two novels which feature the popular character, Stone Barrington: Dead in the Water and Swimming to Catalina. What was your inspiration for the storylines?

  SW: The inspiration for Dead in the Water came from an article I read in a yachting magazine about an incident where a woman’s husband died in the middle of the Atlantic and she managed to sail herself the rest of the way across. I wrote a short story about it for another sailing magazine, and later, it occurred to me that it might make a basis for a novel. Still later, it occurred to me that it might make a Stone Barrington novel. Near the end of the book, when Arrington marries her movie star, I thought that might make a good beginning for the next book, which is how Swimming to Catalina came along.

  CEW: In Swimming to Catalina, Stone Barrington returns and Hollywood and its pretensions are skewered – hilariously. Did you spend a lot of time in Hollywood to research the story or did it grow out of your experience in having Chiefs turned into a TV mini-series?

  SW: My experience of Hollywood comes from being in Los Angeles on book tour every year or two and having some friends in the movie business. Chiefs was filmed in Chester, South Carolina, and that never took me to California. I didn’t do any specific research for the book.

  CEW: What or who was the inspiration for Stone Barrington?

  SW: There was no particular inspiration for Stone Barrington. I just put him together as the story went along, and I liked him, so I brought him back.

  CEW: How much of Stuart Woods is there in Stone Barrington?

  SW: Stone and I share a few tastes, but we are very different people.

  CEW: How did you first become involved with sailing?

  SW: I moved from London, where I was working in advertising, to Ireland, in 1973, to begin to write my first novel. I worked for two days a week at an ad agency in Dublin to support myself, and spent the rest of the time in a little flat in the stable yard of a castle in County Galway. While there, I took up dinghy sailing against small children, losing regularly. You can’t win dinghy races when you weigh more than the boat.

  CEW: What was it like sailing alone for six weeks during the
OSTAR?

  SW: The company was good.

  CEW: What was the most difficult challenge you have faced in your sailing career?

  SW: That came when the forestay broke, about four hundred and fifty miles north of Bermuda… I was holding onto it at the time, and it could have killed me, but I was lucky. I managed to repair it and finished the race.

  CEW: Your love for the water and yachting is reflected in your work. Do you still spend much time on the water?

  SW: I sail on other people’s boats, when asked, and my small motorboat is for sale, in Florida.

  CEW: After Blue Water, Green Skipper, you finished your first novel, Chiefs. What was the most difficult aspect of writing this novel?

  SW: The most difficult aspect of writing Chiefs was to finish it. It took me eight years. After that, I gained confidence, and now I write two books a year.

  CEW: Please tell us about your writing habits: do you write everyday, do you use the computer, do you always write in the same location or do you take a laptop everywhere you go etc.?

  SW: I usually write a chapter – five to ten pages – at a sitting, which usually comes at mid-afternoon and takes under two hours. First, I re-read the previous day’s work and make small corrections, and that gets me into the new chapter. Near the end of a book, I tend to write two chapters a day, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I write wherever I am, and I take a laptop when I travel while writing a book.

  CEW: You are known for being a master of creating suspense in a novel. What techniques do you use when plotting to achieve that timing of the suspense and action which keeps the reader eager to turn the page to see what happens next?

  SW: The process of writing is still a kind of magic to me, and I never try to analyze it too deeply, for fear that it might stop working. I do try to make each chapter a small story in itself, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and I try to end each one in such a way as to lead naturally into the next one. It seems to work.