by Stuart Woods
Skydiving without a parachute: his very thought, what, ten minutes ago? He gingerly picked up the phone again and dialed.
“Homicide,” a bored voice said.
“It’s Barrington. Who’s the senior man?”
“Leary. How’s the soft life, Barrington?”
“Let me speak to him.”
“He’s in the can. I just saw him go in there with a Hustler, so he’ll be awhile.”
“Tell him I’ve stumbled onto a possible homicide. Lady took a twelve-story dive. I’m in her apartment now.” He gave the address. “An ambulance is already here, but we’ll need a team to work the scene. Rumble whoever’s on call. Bacchetti and I will take the case.”
“But you’re on limited duty.”
“Not anymore. Tell Leary to get moving.”
“I’ll tell him when he comes out.”
“I wouldn’t wait.” He hung up. He had not mentioned the victim’s name; that would get them here in too much of a hurry. He heard the elevator doors open.
“Stone?” Bacchetti called from outside the door.
“It’s open. Careful about prints.”
Dino Bacchetti entered the room as he might a fashionable restaurant. He was dressed to kill, in a silk Italian suit with what Stone liked to think of as melting lapels. “So?” he asked, looking around, trying to sound bored.
“Sasha Nijinsky went thataway,” Stone said, pointing to the terrace.
“No shit?” Dino said, no longer bored. “That explains the crowd on the sidewalk.”
“Yeah. I was passing, on my way home.”
Dino walked over and clapped his hands onto Stone’s cheeks. “I got the luckiest partner on the force,” he said, beaming.
Stone ducked before Dino could kiss him. “Not so lucky. I chased the probable perp down the stairs and blew it on the last landing. He walked.”
“A right-away bust would have been too good to be true,” Dino said. “Now we get to track the fucker down. Much, much better.” He rubbed his hands together. “Whatta we got here?”
“She was moving to a new apartment tomorrow,” Stone said. He beckoned Dino to the table and opened the diary with the pen.
“Not in the best of moods, was she?” Dino said, reading. “Skydiving without a parachute. The papers are going to love that.”
“Yeah, they’re going to love the whole thing.”
Dino looked up. “Maybe she jumped,” he said. “Who’s to say she was pushed?”
“Then who went pounding down the stairs at the moment I arrived on the scene?” Stone asked. “The moving men?”
“No sign of a struggle,” Dino observed.
“In a room full of cardboard boxes, who can say?”
“No glasses out for a guest, if What’s-his-name did show.”
“The liquor’s packed, like everything else. I’ve had a look around, I didn’t see any. She didn’t sound in any mood to offer him a drink, anyway.” Stone sighed. “Come on, let’s go over the place before the Keystone Kops get here.”
“Yeah, Leary’s got the watch,” Dino said.
The two men combed the apartment from one end to the other. Stone used a penlight to search the corners of the terrace.
“Nothing,” Dino said, when they were through.
“Maybe everything,” Stone said. “We’ve got the diary, her address book, and a stack of change-of-address cards, already addressed. Those are the important people, I reckon. I’ll bet the perp is in that stack.” He took out his notebook and began jotting down names and addresses. Apart from the department stores and credit card companies, there were fewer than a dozen. Had she had so few friends, or had she just not gotten through the list before she died? He looked over the names: alphabetical. She had made it through the W’s.
They heard the elevator doors open, and two detectives walked in, followed by a one-man video crew. He was small, skinny, and he looked overburdened by the camera, battery belt, sound pack, and glaring lights.
“You, out,” Dino said. “This is a crime scene.”
“Why do you think I’m here?” the cameraman said. He produced a press card. “Scoop Berman,” he said. “Scoop Video.”
“The man said this is a crime scene, Scoop,” Stone said, propelling the little man toward the door.
“Hey, what crime?” Scoop said, digging in his heels.
“Possible homicide,” Stone replied, still pushing.
“There’s no homicide,” Scoop said.
“Yeah? How do you know?”
“Because she ain’t dead,” Scoop said.
Stone stopped pushing. “What are you talking about? She fell twelve stories.”
“Hang on a minute, guys,” Scoop said. He rewound the tape in his camera and flipped down a tiny viewing screen. “Watch this,” he said.
Stone and Dino elbowed the other two cops out of the way and focused on the screen. An image came up; the camera was running toward the Con Ed site downstairs. It pushed past an ambulance man and zoomed in on the form of Sasha Nijinsky. She was wearing a nightgown under a green silk robe.
“Easy, now, lady,” someone was saying on the soundtrack. “Don’t try to move; let us do the moving.”
A white-clad back filled the screen, and the camera moved to one side, then zoomed in tight on her face. She blinked twice, and her lips moved.
“Okay, here we go,” the voice said, and the ambulance men lifted her onto a stretcher. The camera followed as they loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. One man got in with her and pulled the door shut. The ambulance drove away, its lights flashing and its whooper sounding.
“I had to make a choice then,” Scoop said. “I called in the incident, and then I went for the apartment.”
“It’s impossible,” Dino said.
“You saw her move, saw her blink,” Scoop said.
“Holy shit,” Dino said.
“Okay,” Stone said to the two cops. “You work the scene with the technical guys, and then knock on every door in the building. I want to know if anybody saw anybody come into the building after nine o’clock tonight.” He grabbed Dino’s elbow. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 3
Stone hung up the car phone. “The company dispatcher says the wagon is going to Lenox Hill Hospital, but the driver hasn’t radioed in to confirm the delivery yet.”
“Seventy-seventh and Park,” Dino said, hanging a right.
Dino always drove as if he’d just stolen the car. Being Italian didn’t hurt either.
The two had been partners for nearly four years when Stone had got his knee shot up. It hadn’t even been their business, that call, but everybody responded to “officer needs assistance.” The officer had needed assistance half a minute before Stone and Dino arrived on the scene; the officer was dead, and the man who had shot him was trying to start his patrol car. He’d fired one wild shot before Dino killed him, and it had found its way unerringly to Stone’s knee. It had been nothing but a run-of-the-mill domestic disturbance, until the moment the officer had died and the bullet had changed Stone’s life.
Dino had won an automatic commendation for killing a perp who had killed a cop. Stone had won four hours in surgery and an extremely boring amount of physical therapy. He rubbed the knee. It didn’t feel so terrible now; maybe he hadn’t screwed it up as badly as he had thought.
They screeched to a halt at the emergency entrance to Lenox Hill, and Stone limped into the building after Dino.
“You’ve got a woman named Nijinsky here,” Dino said to the woman behind the desk, flashing his badge. “We need to see her now.”
“I didn’t get her name, but she’s in room number one, first door on your right. Dr. Holmes is with her.”
Dino led the way.
“I’d never have guessed her name was Nijinsky,” the woman said after them.
They found the room and a resident taping a bandage to a woman’s forehead. The woman was black.
“Dr. Holmes?” Stone sai
d.
The young man turned.
“Yes?”
Stone limped into the room. “You’ve got another patient, a woman, here.”
“Nope, this is it,” Holmes said. “An uncommonly slow night.”
“You’re sure?” Stone asked, puzzled.
The doctor nodded at the black woman. “The only customer we’ve had for two hours,” he replied. He watched Stone shift his weight and wince. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I just banged my knee; no problem.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“Yeah,” said Dino, “let’s have a look.”
Stone pulled up his trouser leg.
Dino whistled. “Oh, that looks great, Stone.”
“Tell me about it,” the doctor said.
Stone gave him an abbreviated history.
The doctor went to a refrigerator, came back with a flat ice pack, and fastened it to Stone’s knee with an Ace bandage. Then he retrieved a small box of pills from a shelf. “Keep the ice on until you can’t stand it anymore, and take one of these pills now and every four hours after that. See your doctor in the morning.”
“What are the pills?” Stone asked.
“A nonsteroid, antiinflammatory agent. If you haven’t completely undone your surgery, the knee will feel better in the morning.”
Stone thanked him, and they left.
“What now?” Dino asked as they turned onto Lexington Avenue.
Stone was about to answer when they saw the flashing lights. At Seventy-fifth and Lexington there was a god-awful mess, lit by half a dozen flashing lights. “Pull over, Dino,” he said.
Dino pulled over. Stone got out and approached a uniformed officer. He pointed at a mass of twisted metal. “Was that smoking ruin once an ambulance?” he asked the cop.
“Yeah, and what used to be a fire truck hit it broadside.” He pointed at the truck, which was only moderately bent.
“What about the occupants?”
“On their way to Bellevue,” the cop said. “Seven from the fire truck, two or three from the ambulance.”
“Anybody left alive?”
“I just got here; you’ll have to check Bellevue.”
Stone thanked him and got back into the car.
“Is that the same ambulance?” Dino asked.
“It’s the same service.” Stone stuck a flashing light on the dashboard. “Stand on it, Fittipaldi.”
Fangio stood on it.
The emergency room at Bellevue was usually a zoo, but this was incredible. People were lying on carts everywhere, overflowing into the hallways, screaming, crying, while harried medical personnel moved among them, expediting the more serious cases.
“What the hell happened?” Dino asked a sweating nurse.
“Subway fire in the Twenty-third Street Station,” she replied, “not to mention half a dozen firemen and a couple of ambulance drivers. We caught it all.”
“There’s nobody at the desk,” Stone said. “How can we find out if somebody’s been admitted?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, wheeling a cart containing a screaming woman down the hallway. “Paperwork’s out the window.”
“Come on,” Stone said, “let’s start looking.”
Fifteen minutes later, they hadn’t found her. Dino was looking unwell.
“I gotta get outta here, Stone,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m not cut out for this blood-and-guts stuff.”
“Wait a minute,” Stone said, pointing across the room at a man on a stretcher. “A white coat.”
They made their way across the room to the stretcher. The man’s eyes were closed, but he was conscious; he was holding a bloody handful of gauze to an ear.
“Are you an ambulance driver?” Stone asked. “The one the fire truck hit?”
The man nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion brought.
“What happened to your patient?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “My partner’s dead; I don’t know what happened to her.”
Stone straightened up. “Then she’s got to be here,” he said.
“But she’s not,” Dino replied. “We’ve looked at every human being, alive or dead, in this place. She is definitely not here.”
They looked again, anyway, even though Dino wasn’t very happy about it. Dino was right. Sasha Nijinsky wasn’t there.
“Downstairs,” Stone said.
“Do we have to?”
“You sit this one out.”
Stone walked down to the basement and checked with the Bellevue morgue. There had been two admissions that evening, both of them from the subway fire, both men. Stone looked at them to be sure.
He trudged back up the stairs and went to the main admissions desk. “Have you admitted an emergency patient, a woman, named Nijinsky?” he asked. “Probably a private room.”
“We don’t have a private room available tonight,” the nurse said. “In fact, we don’t have a bed. If she came into the emergency room, she’s on a gurney in a hallway somewhere.”
Stone walked the halls on the way back to the ER, where he found Dino in conversation with a pretty nurse. “Say good night, Dino,” Stone said.
“Good night, Dino,” Dino replied, doing a perfect Dick Martin.
The nurse laughed.
“She’s not here,” Stone said.
“So, now what?”
“The city morgue,” Stone said.
Compared with Bellevue, the city morgue, just up the street, was an island of serenity.
“Female Caucasian, name of Nijinsky,” Dino told the night man. “You got one of those?”
The man consulted a logbook. “Nope.”
“You got a Caucasian Jane Doe?”
“I got three of them,” the man replied. He pointed. “They’re still on tables.”
Stone walked into the large autopsy room, the sound of his heels echoing off the tile walls. “Let’s look,” he said.
The first was at least seventy and very dirty.
“Bag lady,” the attendant said.
The second was no older than fifteen, wearing a black leather microskirt.
“ Times Square hooker, picked up the wrong trick.”
“Let’s see the third,” Stone said.
The third fit Sasha Nijinsky’s general description, down to the hair color, but she had taken a shotgun in the chest.
“Domestic violence,” the attendant said smugly.
Stone couldn’t tell if the man was for it or against it. “It’s not she,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Dino whispered. “It’s not her.”
“It is not she,” Stone said again. He produced a card and wrote his home number on the back, then handed it to the attendant. “This is extremely important,” he said. “If you get a Nijinsky in here, or a white Jane Doe in her thirties, call me. And please pass that on to whoever relieves you. If someone overlooks her, heads will ricochet off these walls for days to come.”
“I got ya,” the man said, and he stapled Stone’s card to his logbook. “They won’t miss it here.”
In the car, Dino, who was usually the most cheerful of souls, sighed deeply. “I got a feeling,” he said.
“Oh, God, don’t get a feeling,” Stone whimpered. “Don’t get Italian on me.”
“I got a very serious feeling that this one is going to be a fucking nightmare,” Dino said.
“Thanks, Dino. I needed that.”
“And, Stone,” Dino added, “never say, ’It’s not she’ to some guy at the morgue. He’ll think you’re a jerk.”
Chapter 4
When Stone and Dino got to the precinct, the two detectives who had been at the Nijinsky apartment were sitting at their desks, cataloging evidence.
“So?” one of them asked. “Is she alive, or what?”
“Or what,” Dino said.
“So she croaked, then, or what?”
“Or what.”
Stone tugge
d at his partner’s sleeve. “Let’s see Leary.”
Lieutenant Leary, the squad’s commanding officer, was in his tiny, glassed-in cubicle, reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary. He looked up and waved the two detectives in. “Well, it took a fuckin’ celebrity swan dive to get you back on the street, didn’t it, Barrington?”
“I saw it happen,” Stone said. “From the street.” He took Leary through everything that had happened at the apartment.
“So, where’s Nijinsky now?” he asked.
“It’s like this, I think,” Stone said. “The ambulance was taking her to Lenox Hill when it got broadsided by a fire truck. Another ambulance was called and took the driver and his partner to Bellevue. The driver’s alive, but doesn’t know what happened to Nijinsky. The partner’s dead.”
“So, to ask my question again, where’s Nijinsky?”
“We don’t know. She wasn’t at Bellevue. We looked at everybody there.”
“Not in the Bellevue emergency room,” Leary said.
“No. Not anywhere at Bellevue. We checked it out thoroughly. Not at the city morgue either. They’ll call me if she shows up.”
Leary looked bemused. “What the fuck is goin’ on here?”
“Probably homicide – attempted homicide, if she’s still alive.”
“Because of the guy you chased down the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he was the pizza deliveryman, got there in time to see her take the dive, then ran.”
“Maybe. It feels like a homicide.”
“And maybe a kidnapping, too. If the lady fell twelve stories and then her ambulance got whopped by a fire truck, she ain’t walking around out there somewhere, right?”