by Stuart Woods
Dino piped up. “If she’s dead, is it a corpsenapping? And is that a crime?”
Leary tapped the diary with a stubby finger. “You read this?”
“Only the last page,” Stone said.
“The last page was one of her better days. This was a very unhappy lady.”
“She was about to become the only female news anchor on a major network. I would have thought she had it all.”
“Anybody would think so. But she sounds scared to me. Maybe afraid she couldn’t cut it.”
“Maybe. It’s a natural enough reaction.”
“The diary makes her sound like a suicide.”
“Maybe,” Stone said. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay, here’s what happened, maybe,” Leary said. “You get this big pileup on Lex, and two ambulances respond. You know how competitive they are. One goes to Bellevue with the driver and the other guy, and the other ambulance goes to some other hospital.”
“That’s what I figured,” Dino said.
“Run it down,” Leary replied. He handed the diary to Stone. “Read that and tell me she didn’t try to knock herself off.”
Stone and Dino spent the rest of the night calling every hospital in Manhattan and reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary.
When the day shift came on, Lieutenant Leary called a meeting and brought the new group up to date.
“Okay, now you know everything we know,” he said to the four assembled teams. “The press knows about the dive, because this guy Scoop What’s-his-name?-”
“Berman,” Stone said.
“-Berman shows up and gets his tape. They don’t seem to know that the lady hasn’t been seen since, and I want to keep it that way as long as possible. This is Barrington and Bacchetti’s case, reporting directly to me. Barrington, Bacchetti, go sleep. I don’t want you back here before noon. The rest of you, check on every private clinic, every doctor’s office in the five boroughs, if you have to. Check Jersey and Westchester, too. On Long Island, just check the fancy private clinics. I want this woman found this morning, dead or alive. When you find her, Stone and Bacchetti get the interview, unless it’s deathbed stuff. Nobody, but nobody says a word to the press except me, for the moment. I don’t have to tell you what this celebrity shit is like. The mayor’ll be on the phone as soon as he wakes up, and he’ll want to know. I’ll ask him to buy us a few hours to find the woman.”
As the detectives shuffled out, Leary called Stone and Dino back. “ Barrington, I’m assuming you’re up to this. You’re still on limited duty, officially.”
“I’m up to it, Lieutenant.”
“I mean it about the sleep,” Leary said. “You grab four or five hours. This one ain’t likely to be over today, and I want you in shape to fuckin’ handle it.”
“Yessir,” they replied in unison.
Stone limped up the steps of the Turtle Bay brownstone, retrieved the Times from the stoop, and let himself in. He was met by the combined scent of decay and fresh wood shavings. No messages on the answering machine in the downstairs hallway. Too tired and sore to take the stairs, he took the elevator to the third floor. It creaked a lot, but it made it.
His bedroom looked ridiculous. An ordinary double bed stood against a wall, with only a television set, an exercise machine, an old chest of drawers, and a chair to help fill the enormous room. He switched on the television and started to undress.
“Television journalist Sasha Nijinsky last night fell from the terrace of her twelfth-floor East Side penthouse. An off-duty police detective who was at the scene gave chase to someone who had apparently been in Ms. Nijinsky’s apartment, but was, himself, injured and lost the possible perpetrator. Astonishingly, Ms. Nijinsky may have survived the fall. She was taken to a Manhattan hospital, and we have had no further word on her condition. We’ll keep you posted as news comes in.”
“You’re guessing about the Manhattan hospital, sport,” Stone said to the newscaster. “That was my guess, too.”
He stripped off his clothes and stretched out on the bed, switching the channel to The Morning Show.
“Sasha Nijinsky has done just about everything in broadcast journalism, and she’s done it fast,” a pleasant young man was saying. They cut to a montage of shots from Nijinsky’s career, and he continued, voice-over.
“Daughter of the Russian novelist Georgi Nijinsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union more than twenty-five years ago, Sasha was six years old when she came to this country with her parents. She already spoke fluent English.” There were shots of a bearded man descending from an airplane, a surprised-looking little girl in his arms.
“Sasha distinguished herself as an actress at Yale, but not as a student. Then, on graduation, instead of pursuing a career in the theater, as expected, she took a job as a reporter on a New Haven station. Four years later, she came to New York and earned a reputation as an ace reporter on the Continental Network affiliate. She spent another three years here, on The Morning Show, where she honed her interviewing skills, then she was sent to Moscow as the network’s correspondent in the Soviet Union for a year, before being expelled in the midst of spy charges that she has always maintained were fabricated.”
“On returning to this country, she further enhanced her growing reputation, covering both national political conventions before the last election. Then her Sunday morning interview show, Newsmakers, pitted her against the nation’s top political figures. She proved to be as tough as ever in those interviews, and it was said in Washington that nobody wanted to go on her show, but everyone was afraid not to.
“Earlier this month, the industry was not surprised when it was announced that Sasha Nijinsky would join anchorman Barron Harkness as co-anchor on the network’s evening news, which, although still the leading network newscast, had recently slipped in the ratings. Harkness, an old colleague of Sasha’s on The Morning Show, could not be reached for comment, as he is not due back until today from assignment in the Middle East.”
Stone switched off the set. Make a note to talk to Harkness, he told himself, then he put the case from his mind. He thought, as he always did when he wanted to clear his head, about the house and his plans for it. It was in terrible condition.
He turned his thoughts to plumbing fixtures. In minutes, he was asleep.
Chapter 5
Stone arrived at the station house at one o’clock sharp. The squad room was abuzz with detectives on the phone. He raised his eyebrows at one, and the man gave a huge shrug. A moment later, he hung up.
“Gather round,” Stone said to the group. “Any luck?” he asked when they had assembled.
“Zilch. She’s nowhere,” a detective said.
“How many more places to check?” Stone asked.
“Not many.”
“Add all the funeral parlors in the city to your list,” Stone said. “Start with the ones in Manhattan. What else we got?”
“We got a suspect,” Detective Gonzales said. He referred to a sheet of paper. “One Marvin Herbert Van Fleet, male Caucasian, forty-one, of a SoHo address.”
“What makes him a suspect?” Stone asked.
“He’s written Sasha Nijinsky over a thousand letters the past two years.” Gonzales held up a stack of paper.
Stone took the letters and began to go through them. “I want you all to myself,” he quoted. “Come and live with me. I’ve got a nice place… You and my mother will get along great.” He looked up. “This is pretty bland stuff. Not even anything obscene. He doesn’t so much as want to sniff her underwear.”
“Nijinsky wanted him arrested, but apparently he didn’t do anything illegal. She finally got a civil court order, preventing him from contacting her.”
“What else have we got on him?”
“Interesting background,” Gonzales said. “He went to Cornell Medical School, graduated and all, but never completed his internship.”
“Where?”
“At Physicians and Surgeons Hospital.”
“Pret
ty ritzy. Why didn’t he finish?”
“File says he was dropped from the program as ‘unsuited for a medical career.’ There have been some complaints about him posing as a doctor, but since he apparently never actually treated anybody, there was nothing we could do. He worked at the Museum of Natural History for a while.”
“What’s he do now?”
“He’s an embalmer at Van Fleet Funeral Parlor.”
Stone felt a little chill. “Pick him up for questioning.”
“Here’s a photograph.”
Stone looked at the picture of Marvin Herbert Van Fleet. “Hang on, this guy’s got an alibi.”
“How do you know that? We haven’t asked him yet.”
“Because I saw him at the bar at Elaine’s twenty minutes before Nijinsky fell.”
There was a brief silence. “Twenty minutes is a long time,” Gonzales said.
“You’re right,” Stone agreed. “I left and walked down Second Avenue. He could have taken a cab and gotten there before I did. Pick him up. No, give me that address. Dino and I will talk to him.”
Dino arrived, waving a magazine. He tossed it onto Stone’s desk. “I had to wrestle two women for this,” he said. “It just hit the newsstands this morning, and this must be the last copy in the city.”
Stone picked it up. The new issue of Vanity Fair, and Sasha Nijinsky was on the cover. SASHA! BY HIRAM BARKER, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, a headline read. Stone laughed. “Now, that’s timing. You read it yet?”
“Not yet,” Dino said. “Be my guest.”
The tone of the piece reeled back and forth between sycophancy and bitchiness. Nijinsky’s career was recapped briefly, but a lot of space was devoted to her social and sex lives. All the unflattering stuff came from unnamed sources, including a report of a secret affair between Nijinsky and her old colleague on The Morning Show, and new co-anchor on the evening news, Barron Harkness. “They were never seen together in public,” the source said, “and a lot of the staff thought they were screwing in her dressing room. She would never go into his.”
Stone finished the piece and added Hiram Barker to his list of interviewees. He picked up the phone, dialed the Continental Network, and asked for Barron Harkness.
“Mr. Harkness’s office,” an interesting female voice said.
“This is Detective Stone Barrington of the Homicide Division, New York City Police Department,” he said. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Harkness.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Harkness is on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic,” the woman said. “This is Cary Hilliard, his assistant. May I help you?”
Stone remembered the television report that the anchorman had been on assignment in the Middle East. “I want to speak to Mr. Harkness regarding the…” (What was it? Not a homicide – not yet, anyway.) “…about Sasha Nijinsky. Can you tell me what time his plane is due in?”
“He won’t be in the office before about five thirty,” the woman said. “And he’ll be going on the air at seven o’clock, on the evening news.”
Stone liked the woman’s voice. “I’d like to know the airline and flight number, please. It’s important.”
The woman hesitated. “What was your name again, please?”
“Detective Stone Barrington. I’m in charge of the Nijinsky case.”
“Of course. He’s due in on an Alitalia flight from Rome at four twenty, but he’ll be met and helicoptered in. You’d do better to see him here. I know he’ll want to talk to you. He’s very fond of Sasha.”
“At what time?”
“It’ll be hell from the moment he arrives until the newscast is over. Come at a quarter to seven, and ask for me. I’ll take you up to the control room, and you can talk to Barron as soon as he’s off the air.”
“Six forty-five. I’ll see you then.”
“Oh, we’re not in the Continental Network building. We’re at the Broadcast Center, at Pier Nineteen, at the west end of Houston Street.”
“I’ll see you at six forty-five.” Stone hung up. He really liked her voice. She was probably a dog, though. He’d made the voice mistake before.
Dino had turned on the television, and a doctor was being interviewed on CNN about Nijinsky.
“Doctor, is it possible that Sasha Nijinsky could have survived her fall from twelve stories?”
“Well,” the doctor replied, “as we’ve just seen on the videotape, she obviously survived, at least for a few moments, but it is unlikely in the extreme that she could recover from the sort of injuries she must have sustained in the fall. I’d say it was virtually impossible that she lived more than a minute or two after striking the earth.”
“That still don’t make it a homicide,” Dino said.
“It’s a homicide,” Stone said. “If she’s dead.”
“Whaddaya mean ’if she’s dead’?” Dino asked. “Didn’t you hear the doctor, there? She’s a fuckin’ pancake.”
“Look,” Stone said, “do you know what terminal velocity is?”
“Nope,” Dino replied. Nobody else did either.
“An object in a vacuum, when dropped from a height, will accelerate at the rate of thirty-two feet per second, and continue accelerating – in a vacuum. But in an atmosphere, like the earth’s, there will come a point when air resistance becomes equal to acceleration, and, at that point, the object will fall at a steady rate.”
“But it’ll keep falling,” Dino said, puzzled.
“Sure, but it’ll stop accelerating.” Stone had everyone’s undivided attention now. “I read a piece in the Times a few weeks ago about cats, and how cats have been known to fall from a great height and survive. There was one documented case where a cat fell twenty-six stories, landed on concrete, and survived with only a couple of broken bones.”
“How the fuck could it survive a fall like that?” a detective asked.
“Like this,” Stone said. He held out his hand, palm down. “When a cat starts to fall, he immediately orients himself feet first – you know that cats will always land on their feet, right?”
“Right,” the detective said.
“Not only does he get into a feet-first position, but he spread-eagles into what’s called the flying-squirrel position, like this.” He spread his fingers. “Flying squirrels don’t fly, like birds, they glide, because they have a membrane connecting their front and back legs, and, when they spread out, they’re sort of like a furry Frisbee.”
“But a cat ain’t a flying squirrel,” another detective said.
“No,” Stone agreed, “and he can’t glide like one. But by presenting the greatest possible area to the air resistance, a cat slows down his rate of acceleration and, consequently, his terminal velocity.”
“You mean he falls slow,” Dino said.
“Compared to a human being, anyway. A cat’s terminal velocity is about sixty miles an hour. But a human being’s terminal velocity is a hundred and twenty miles an hour. That’s why a cat could survive a fall from twenty-six stories, when no human could.”
The group digested this for a moment.
“But Sasha Nijinsky ain’t no cat,” Dino said.
“No,” Stone said, “she’s not.” He looked up to see that Lieutenant Leary had joined the group. “But,” he continued, “she fell from twelve stories, not twenty-six. And not onto concrete, but into a large pile of freshly dug earth. And look at this.” He opened the Vanity Fair to its center spread and showed a photograph to the assembled detectives.
The shot was of Sasha Nijinsky, and she seemed to be flying. The earth was thousands of feet below her, and she was wearing a jumpsuit and a helmet and had an unopened parachute strapped to her back. She was grinning at the camera, exposing rows of large, white teeth; her eyes were wide behind goggles.
“Sasha Nijinsky was a sky diver,” Stone said. “An experienced one, too, with more than a hundred jumps. And that” – he thumped the photograph with his forefinger-”was the position she was in when I saw her falling. Also, she was wear
ing a full-length nightgown and a bathrobe when she fell, and she might have gotten some extra air resistance by the ballooning out of those garments. When she fell, she automatically assumed the position she’d been trained to assume when free-falling. And, by doing that, she slowed down her rate of acceleration and, most important, her terminal velocity.”
No, one spoke for a long time. Finally, Dino broke the rapt silence. “Horseshit,” he said.
“Maybe not,” Stone said.
“Let me tell you something, Stone – I read that lady’s diary, and I say she was suffering from too much fucking, too much fuckin’ ambition, and too much fuckin’ fame, all of it too fuckin’ soon.” Dino closed the magazine and, with his finger, drew an X over her face. “That girl jumped off that terrace. She ain’t no cat, and she ain’t no flying squirrel.”
“I think somebody helped her,” Stone said. “And she may still be alive.”
Dino shook his head slowly. “I’ll tell you what she is. She’s New York Dead.”
Chapter 6
The Van Fleet Funeral Parlor had a Gramercy Park address, but it was around the corner, off the square.
“Italians know all about death,” Stone said to Dino. “What do you know about this place?”
Dino shrugged. “It’s not Italian, so what could I know? The location tells us, don’t it? Good address, not so good location. If you don’t want to pay for a first-class funeral at Frank Campbell’s, where the elite meet to grieve, then you go to, like, Van Fleet’s. It’s cheaper, but it’s got all the fuckin’ pretensions, you know?”
Dino parked in a loading zone and flipped down the sun visor to display the car’s ID. They walked back half a block and entered the front door, following a well-dressed couple. They stopped in a vestibule while the couple signed a visitors’ book, presided over by a man in a tailcoat.
“The Wilson party?” the man asked Dino, in unctuous tones.
“The NYPD party,” Dino said, flashing his shield. “Who runs the place?”