by Stuart Woods
“It’s Stone. You’d better get over to Arrington’s apartment; I’ve got a fine mess for you.”
“Is Arrington all right?”
“Yeah, she’s okay. The Bruce brothers are not, and I’ve got one dead wiseguy and one wounded.”
“You call nine-one-one?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be right there.” Dino punched off.
Stone took a moment to look around the apartment. A laptop computer sat on Arrington’s desk, connected to her printer. A single sheet of paper lay in the out tray; he picked it up and read it. Next to the computer was a stack of three Federal Express packets, one addressed to the NYPD, one to the New York Times, and one to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. After reading the final issue of DIRT, it was not hard to figure out what was in them. He picked up two of the packets, went to Arrington’s large handbag on the floor beside the sofa, and tucked them into the bag. Then, starting to feel shaky, he sat down on the sofa and took a few deep breaths. His face and his hands were sweaty; he tucked the pistol into its holster, got a handkerchief from his pocket, and began to mop his face. Then he began to feel nauseous. He bolted for the bathroom.
Chapter 59
The bicyclist pulled up a couple of doors down from the address he had been given and got off the machine. It was a ten-speed racing bike, and he was dressed to use it – tight cycling pants, a nylon jacket, a helmet, and very large yellow-tinted goggles. He leaned against a tree and waited, consulting his watch. Half an hour passed, then the woman emerged from the building, just as he had been told she would, dressed in a ball gown and a fur jacket. The chauffeur braced at the rear door of the Mercedes S600; she got into the rear seat, and the car pulled away from the curb.
“We’re going to the Plaza Hotel, Paul,” Amanda said. “I expect to be there until about eleven. We’ll go to the front door.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Paul said. “Mrs. Dart, would you mind if I stop at a drugstore and pick up some aspirin? I’m getting a headache.”
“Of course, Paul; we have time.” Amanda pressed the switch that raised the rear sunshade, giving her some privacy, then leaned back, her neck against the headrest, and took some deep breaths. Amanda could sleep in seconds, and she often took advantage of slow automobile trips in Manhattan, where the average speed of traffic was four miles per hour, to rest. “I’m going to take a quick nap, Paul,” she said. “Please don’t disturb me until we’re arriving at the Plaza.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Paul replied.
Amanda liked to think of something pleasant as she fell asleep. She thought about her lunch date with Dick Hickock the following day, and it made her smile.
The cyclist followed the car down Lexington Avenue; traffic was heavy. The car stopped for two lights, but the cyclist wasn’t happy with the layout of traffic. Then something good happened. The chauffeur double-parked in front of a drugstore, put his emergency blinkers on, got out of the car, and went into the store. Perfect.
The cyclist maneuvered to the right of the car, where the woman was sitting, her head against the headrest, her eyes closed, mouth slightly open. He checked the door lock button; it was up. He stepped off the bicycle, leaned it against a parked car, and reached under his jacket. His hand emerged holding an icepick. The chauffeur’s absence made his pistol unnecessary.
Quietly, he opened the rear door of the Mercedes. The woman seemed to be sleeping. He took a wad of Kleenex from his jacket pocket, then, holding her head back with his left hand on her forehead, he drove the icepick up her nose and into her brain. Her eyes opened wide, but she didn’t have time to cry out, or even to move. He jerked the handle of the icepick back and forth, in order to do as much damage as possible. She slumped, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose. He stanched it with the Kleenex, and she stopped bleeding. Her heart was no longer pumping blood.
He closed her eyes, then noticed the diamond necklace. He gave it a short, sharp jerk, and it came away in his hand. Then he shut the car door, got onto the bicycle, and pedaled away down Lexington. At the next corner he turned east, stopped, and looked back. The Mercedes passed him; the driver did not look alarmed. The cyclist smiled to himself and moved off.
The big car rolled to a stop in front of the Plaza. It was a gala benefit evening, and limos crowded the front door area, depositing their gorgeously dressed passengers. The hotel’s doorman stepped up to the Mercedes and opened the rear door.
Amanda Dart’s body rolled slowly out of the car into the gutter, now nothing but dirt.
Chapter 60
Stone was lying on Arrington’s living room sofa, a damp washcloth across his forehead, when Dino walked into the room.
“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.
Stone opened his eyes. “Do I really have to get up and talk to you?”
Dino looked around at the carnage. “I think maybe that would be a good idea,” he said. The sound of approaching sirens came, muffled, through the walls.
The last of the bodies was wheeled out of the apartment. Stone and Dino stood in the kitchen. Stone reached into the printer tray and handed Dino the sheet. “I thought you might like to read the final edition of DIRT,” he said.
Dino read the document twice, then Stone handed him a Federal Express packet. “This is addressed to your department,” he said, “so I didn’t open it, but I expect it contains some backup for the charges in the scandal sheet.”
Dino opened the packet and leafed through a dozen sheets. “Well,” he said, “Mr. Richard Hickock has been a bad boy, but there’s nothing in here for me. Federal income tax evasion isn’t against the laws of New York State. I’ll forward it to the FBI. Eventually it’ll find its way to the proper law enforcement agency, I’m sure.”
“Hickock could grow old while that happens,” Stone said.
“Oh, they’ll get around to it.”
“You think you’ll be able to get anything out of the wiseguy I wounded?”
“Who knows? We’ll see what’s on his yellow sheet, see what we have to bargain with. Maybe he’ll hand me somebody.”
“My bet is that a bullet from the nickel-plated twenty-five with the silencer killed Arnie Millman.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ll see.”
They made ready to leave. “Arrington!” Stone called out.
“Coming,” she called back from the bedroom.
“How’s the new apartment?” Stone asked.
“We’re moving in in a couple of weeks,” Dino replied. “Mary Ann is going nuts, buying stuff. Did you know Ralph Lauren makes wallpaper? I didn’t.”
Arrington appeared with a suitcase, walked over to Stone, set down the case, and leaned against him. “I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said.
“You don’t,” he replied.
They made their way slowly downtown in a taxi.
“Pull over here for a minute, will you, driver?” Stone said. The cab pulled over to the curb. Stone reached into Arrington’s bag, retrieved the two packets, got out of the car, and dropped them into a Federal Express bin.
“What was that?” Arrington asked when he was back in the cab.
“Oh, just jump-starting the wheels of justice,” he replied.
“So it’s over?” Arrington asked.
“It is,” Stone said.
“No loose ends?”
“Well, yes. There’s the murder of Martha McMahon, Amanda’s secretary.”
“Murder? You think Amanda pushed her?
“That’s my best guess, but nobody will ever be able to prove it. Amanda will get away with it.”
She took her hand in his. “Stone, my darling,” she said, “if I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that nobody gets away with anything. Ever.”
He turned and kissed her lightly. “I hope you’re right,” he said.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to every gossip columnist in the business, for giving me such good material.
I am also
grateful to my editor, HarperCollins Vice President and Associate Publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff, for all their hard work; and to my literary agent, Morton Janklow, his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the people at Janklow and Nesbit for their careful attention to my career over the years.
“We 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?