by Stuart Woods
At exactly nine o’clock, the car stopped, and Stone could hear a garage door being raised. He was being taken indoors without getting out of the car first, and he didn’t like it. He tore at the side curtain, but by the time it came loose he could hear the garage door winding down again.
The chauffeur opened the left-hand door for him, and, as he got out of the car, Stone saw another door leading off the garage. The chauffeur opened that one for him too, then quickly closed it behind him.
Stone looked around. He was in a nicely decorated vestibule with one other door, probably leading to the street. He tried that door and the one behind him; he was locked in. There was nowhere to go but up. An open elevator awaited him, and there was only one button. He pressed it, and the elevator rose slowly, creaking, reminding him of the one in his own house. Old. The elevator stopped, and the door opened.
Stone stepped out of the car into another vestibule, much like the one downstairs. There was an elegant, gilded mirror and a vase containing a large flower arrangement resting on an antique table. A hallway led away from the vestibule, and from that direction he could hear a murmur of conversation and the tinkle of silver against china. They had apparently started without him. A woman’s laugh rose above the talk, then subsided. Was that voice familiar?
Stone walked slowly down the hallway and emerged into a very large, rectangular room, which had been divided into two areas. Ahead of him was a living area, with two leather sofas facing each other before a fireplace, in which a fire merrily burned. Soft chamber music came from speakers somewhere. There was something familiar about the room. To his left was a dining table set for eight, and, apparently, Stone was not the only one late for dinner, for three places were empty. The conversation was louder now.
A woman in a backless dress sat with her back to him, a man next to her, and a couple faced him from across the table. Both the men were in evening clothes. At the end of the table, to his right, dressed to kill, her elbow resting on the table, her hand holding a glass of wine, her face turned to greet him, smiling invitingly, was Sasha Nijinsky.
Stone took a step forward and opened his mouth to speak. Instead of what he had intended to say, a scream burst from his lips. A searing pain had thudded into his buttocks; his back arched, his knees bent, and he fell heavily onto the polished hardwood floor, his body convulsing.
He had only a moment of consciousness to grasp that Sasha and the other people at the table were immobile; were glassy eyed; were, of course, dead.
Chapter 49
Stone came awake slowly. His first sensation was that his ass was on fire; the second was that every joint, every muscle in his body hurt like hell. His vision was cloudy for a moment, and he blinked his eyes rapidly to clear it. He became aware that he could not move.
He was naked. His shoulders lay on a hard table, his hands were bound behind him, and his feet were tied and suspended from a block and tackle above him, which raised him half in the air. Instinctively, he squirmed, tugging at his bonds, but they were too tight. His hands were numb.
He could move only his head, and he craned his neck to see as much as he could. He was in a long, narrow room; the walls and ceiling were covered in white tiles, aged and cracking. Two overhead bulbs were protected with steel screens. The tabletop was made of metal and sloped from head to foot. There was a faint chemical smell, something he couldn’t identify.
He craned his neck farther. Near the other end of the room, just at the edge of his vision, was a vertical object, but he could not swivel his head and eyes far enough to make it out. He tried the bonds again, trying at least to stretch them enough to allow the flow of blood to return to his hands. No luck.
Minutes passed, and he wracked his brain for some other means of escape. He found that by manipulating his shoulders he could creep sideways on the table, but it became apparent to him that, since his feet were elevated, if he slipped over the edge, his head would strike the floor very hard. He stopped moving and waited.
Perhaps twenty minutes passed before he heard a scraping noise somewhere behind him, followed by hollow footsteps striking the cement floor. The chauffeur appeared, upside-down, the collar of his uniform hanging open. He reached up and ripped the mustache from his upper lip.
“There, thatsa better,” he said in his Italian accent. Then he laughed.
“Herbert?” Stone said.
Van Fleet laughed again. “Didn’t recognize me, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. Listen, Herb, could you loosen whatever you’ve got around my wrists? The circulation has stopped.”
“Sure,” Van Fleet said. He grabbed Stone under the arms, lifted him, and flipped him over on his stomach. He fiddled with the bonds.
Stone’s ankles hurt now, but he could feel the blood flowing back into his hands. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, could you turn me back over, please?”
Van Fleet turned him over on his back again. “Are you cold?” he asked solicitously.
“No, it’s quite warm in here. Where am I, exactly?”
“You are in what used to be part of a kosher meat-processing plant. It runs along one side of my loft, and it is accessed by moving the refrigerator in my kitchen, then removing a panel from the wall.” He laughed again. “Neither you nor the FBI were able to figure it out.”
“It’s very clever, Herb. Now, can we talk about what’s going on here?”
Van Fleet stepped forward and began feeling around Stone’s neck.
“Don’t do that,” Stone said, irritably. He didn’t like the man’s hands on him.
Van Fleet took his time at whatever he was doing. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Just to rest your mind, I have no sexual interest in you. I don’t like men that way.”
Stone was relieved to hear that, but not much.
“How much did you take in before I used the stun gun?” Van Fleet asked.
“So that’s what it was.”
“That’s right. Something like fifty thousand volts, but only for a few milliseconds.”
“That was enough.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“To answer your question,” Stone said, “I took in a number of corpses sitting at a dining table.”
“Let’s not refer to them that way, please,” Van Fleet said. “They are my friends, and, if they could hear you, they’d be very upset.”
“As you wish. How did you get, uh, meet these people?”
“Oh, here and there. You might say I picked them up around town. They’re all very interesting people who do interesting work. I find that interesting work makes an interesting person, don’t you?”
Stone realized that he had now solved the disappearance of Dino’s yuppies, not that it mattered much. “Sure, I think that’s true. But, somehow, I don’t think they make very interesting conversationalists at the moment.”
“You’re quite wrong,” Van Fleet said. “I know you think of them as dead, but they’re not, you know. In fact, I’ve given them a whole new kind of life. It’s a technique I’ve developed myself, over the years, one I refined both in my work at the funeral parlor and in my previous job, at the Museum of Natural History. They remain as supple as when they were alive, in the usual sense of the word.”
Stone could think of nothing to do but keep the conversation going. Besides, there was more he wanted to know. “Tell me about Sasha, Herb.”
“Ah, Sasha.” Van Fleet sighed. “She is the centerpiece of my little dinner party, of course. Everybody likes a celebrity at the table. Adds spice to the evening.”
“Was she alive when you brought her here?”
“I told you, they’re all alive,” Van Fleet said emphatically. “Please don’t make it necessary for me to mention that again, or I will terminate this conversation immediately.”
“I’m sorry,” Stone said. “I meant alive in the usual sense of the word. What I meant to ask was, after her fall and the ambulance wreck, what sort of condition was she in?”
“Well, when
I took her out of the wreck,” Van Fleet said, “she was in very poor condition, indeed. The fall had broken some bones, but, oddly, not the skin. The traffic accident had done somewhat more damage. It took me quite a long time to bring her back to her present condition.”
“Was she… breathing when you took her?”
“Amazingly enough, yes,” Van Fleet said. “In fact, I believe that, if not for the traffic accident, she might have continued to breathe. As it was, she lasted only a few days, in spite of the very excellent medical care she received from me.”
Stone winced at the thought of Sasha alive for days with this creep. His terminal velocity theory, though, had panned out, sort of. “Who wrote me the letter?” Stone asked.
“Oh, Sasha did – with my help, of course. She wrote me two letters, you know, when I first began writing to her, so we had something to help us with her handwriting.”
“Why did she have olive oil on her hands?”
“Oh, you noticed that, did you? Well, I wanted an agent that would make a good fingerprint, and, since I was in the kitchen at the time, the oil was handy.”
“Herb, we have to talk seriously now. We have to get you some help.”
“Help?” Van Fleet sounded surprised. “I don’t need any help. I’ve done all this work on these people alone, without any help at all. And it was pretty good work, don’t you think? Let me explain it to you. I’ll skip the technical parts, but have a look.” Van Fleet took hold of the table and dragged it until Stone was facing down the room, then he put a hand under Stone’s head and raised it, so he could see.
At the other end of the room was the object Stone had not been able to make out before. The body of a young woman hung by its heels, the fingertips just brushing the floor. She had been opened with one long incision from her pubic hair to her sternum, and the abdominal cavity had been emptied. “Oh, God.” Stone breathed. He turned his head away.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,” Van Fleet said, turning Stone back to his original position. “I was going to take you through the process, but if you’d rather not…”
“I’d rather talk,” Stone said. “When I said you needed help, I didn’t mean with your work.”
“Oh, you mean a psychiatrist. That was suggested to me once, a long time ago.”
“By Dr. Garfield?”
Van Fleet walked around Stone so that he could look at him. “What do you know about Garfield?”
“Oh, Dr. Garfield and I had a long chat about you the other day, Herb. He told me about your internship, about why you didn’t complete it.”
Van Fleet bristled. “This is not an amusing conversation,” he said. “I hope when you’re at the table you can find something more interesting to talk about.” He turned and walked out of Stone’s line of vision, then seemed to leave the room.
At the table? Stone began to sweat, then, almost immediately, to shiver.
Van Fleet returned. “Sorry, I had to get my instruments. Since you’re going to be such a boring conversationalist, I may as well start work on you now.”
“Wait a minute, Herb,” Stone said quickly. “We have more to talk about.”
“Do you think you can refrain from referring to past unpleasantness?”
“Oh, yes. I’m terribly sorry about that; it was rude of me.”
Van Fleet dragged a stool over and sat down facing Stone. “All right, what would you like to talk about?”
“Tell me about the night Sasha fell from her balcony.”
“Oh, that. I’ve told you about taking her from the wreck of the ambulance. Before that, well, I left Elaine’s a bit after you did, I guess, and, on the way home, I thought I’d drop by Sasha’s building. I often did that on the way home, just to catch a glimpse of where she lived. When I turned into the block, I could see the doorman through the glass front of the building. He was asleep in a chair, and I saw somebody walk right past him into the building, and he never woke up.
“I found that very interesting, so I parked the van and went into the building. I just walked right past him, and he never turned a hair. I took the elevator up to the twelfth floor – I knew Sasha’s apartment number from my research – and, to my surprise, her door was open. I had just planned to leave a little present and go, but there was that open door. I couldn’t resist.
“I crept into the apartment, and I could hear these angry voices from out on the terrace. I peeped out there, and she and this other person were having a knock-down, drag-out fight, and, all of a sudden, Sasha was just dumped over the railing.
“I jumped back behind the door, and I could hear this other person rummaging around the room, looking for something, I guess. That went on for a minute, then I heard the elevator start up, and I guess the… well, the murderer heard it too, and ran. I heard the fire stairs door open, then the elevator door open, and I heard somebody running down the stairs.
“I peeped out the door, and the doorman was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down, so I just popped into the open elevator and rode down. I got out on the second floor and tiptoed down the stairs. When I saw you get back into the elevator, I left the building, got into the van, and drove around the block to where Sasha was. The ambulance arrived about that time, and I followed it. I wanted to see which hospital Sasha was being taken to, so I could send flowers.
“Then, wham! That fire truck came out of nowhere, and the ambulance got hit. You know the rest.”
“Herb, who threw Sasha off the balcony?”
Van Fleet shrugged. “Nobody I knew,” he said.
“Can you describe him?” Stone asked.
Van Fleet started to speak, then stopped. “No, I don’t think I will,” he said petulantly. “You were unkind enough to bring up the past, so I don’t think you deserve to know, at least not yet. Later, if you’re nice, you can bring it up at dinner, and maybe I’ll tell you.” Van Fleet stood up, reached down, and picked up his case. He set it on the stool, opened it, and took out a large scalpel. “Don’t worry, I’m very good at this; it’ll be absolutely painless, I promise.”
Stone had thought about dying before, but never in such close proximity to the event. Would his whole life flash before his eyes? Would it be less painful if he just relaxed and let it happen? He discovered he could not give in to it; he would go down fighting, with what meager resources he had left. “Wait a minute, Herb!” he said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“You can tell me at the dinner table,” Van Fleet said, sliding his hand under Stone’s chin and pulling it up to extend his neck.
Stone jerked his head free. “It’s about Sasha!” he said, and watched Van Fleet’s face.
Van Fleet showed interest. “What about Sasha?”
“Something you don’t know about her, something important. I wouldn’t want to say this in front of her at the table.”
“What is it?”
“You like guys, don’t you, Herb?”
“What do you mean?” Van Fleet replied indignantly. “I’m no queer. I like women.”
“What about your relationship with the men at the table?” Stone asked.
“You have a filthy mind,” Van Fleet said. “I have no kind of relationship with anybody at the table. Except Sasha, of course. We have a perfectly normal sex life.”
Perfectly normal? Stone laughed aloud. “Come on, Herb, you’re as queer as a three-dollar bill.” Words were all Stone had left to fight with, and he was at least going to get in a few punches before this maniac slaughtered him.
“That’s a lie!”
“Then why do you think you like fucking Sasha so much?”
“Sasha’s a woman, you idiot,” Van Fleet said. “We have a heterosexual relationship!”
“Sasha’s not a woman, Herbert. I found out. When she was born in Russia, her parents named her Vladimir, because she was a boy. They raised her as a girl, though, and, when she was twelve, she had a sex-change operation in Morocco!”
“You’re insane!” Va
n Fleet cried.
“You’re fucking a guy, Herbert, you goddamned faggot!” Stone screamed. “All this time you’ve been fucking a guy’s corpse, a dead guy, Herbert!”
Van Fleet was making animal noises now, and spittle had formed on his lips. He raised the scalpel over his head, and his voice became a howl.
Stone braced himself, baring his teeth. He’d bite the bastard’s arm off, if he could.
Then a huge noise filled the room, echoing off the tile walls, and, simultaneously, a hole appeared in Van Fleet’s throat; a moment later, the noise came again, and another hole appeared under his right eye. Van Fleet reeled backward and disappeared from Stone’s view.
Stone was nearly deaf from the noise, which was now settling into a constant ringing in his ears.
Then Dino walked into Stone’s view and looked down at him. “Jesus, Stone,” he said, shaking his head. “How do you get yourself into these situations?”
Chapter 50
“Well, I always told you Van Fleet was dirty, didn’t I?” Dino said. He and Stone were sitting facing each other on the sofas in front of Herbert Van Fleet’s fireplace.
Stone was dressed again and was rubbing his ankles where they had been bound. “Jesus, Dino, I guess I should have just listened to you all along,” he said sourly. He took a large swig of Van Fleet’s bourbon.
“I wouldn’t have recognized this place,” Dino said. “He’s sure done a lot to it since we were here before.”
“I didn’t recognize it either,” Stone said. “I didn’t remember the garage door in the building. I had no idea where I was. How did you figure it out?”
“You mentioned Van Fleet; that was all I had to go on. I had to take a tire iron to the downstairs door, or I would have been up here sooner.”
“How much of my conversation with Van Fleet did you hear?”
“Most of it, I guess. I had to duck out when Van Fleet came back to the kitchen to get his tools.”
“Well, why did you wait so fucking long to stop the bastard?”