Stuart Woods - New York Dead

“At least we’ve got some sort of lead,” Stone said. “Let’s call Minute Man first.”

After a long wait for the information, Stone was told that a Minute Man car had picked up a Ms. Balfour at the Algonquin Hotel at six thirty and had delivered her to an East Sixty-third Street address. Stone scribbled it down. “The Algonquin is right down the block from the Harvard Club; the car must have been stopped in traffic when Duncan mistook it for his.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dino said.

Armed with their new information, the two detectives faced Leary, who was an unhappy man. “I hope to God this is no fuckin’ wild-goose chase,” he said, when he had heard their story. “The chief of detectives has already been on the phone this morning, and I’m expecting a call from the mayor any minute.”

As if on cue, the phone rang. Leary put his hand on it. “Get out of here and run down that lead,” he said. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”

Stone and Dino sat in their car outside the address, an elegant town house on East Sixty-third Street.

“I’m scared,” Dino said.

“I know how you feel,” Stone replied.

“You know how much we need this to be something, don’t you? I’d like to get a shot at the balls of the guy who leaked to the papers. I’d cut’em off and make him eat’em.”

“I’d hold him down while you did it,” Stone said. “All right, let’s go.”

They trudged up the front steps and rang the bell, then watched through iron grillwork as a uniformed maid approached the door.

“Yes?” she said, opening the door slightly.

Stone showed his badge. “My name is Detective Barrington. Is there a Ms. Balfour at this address?”

“Just a minute,” the maid said, closing the door and shutting them out. She went to a telephone in the entrance hall, spoke a few words into it, then returned and opened the front door wide. “Please come in,” she said. “Mrs. Balfour will be right down.”

As they entered, Stone saw half a dozen pieces of matched luggage piled to one side of the front door. The detectives were shown to a small sitting room, and, as they sat down, the maid opened the door to another man, who began removing the baggage.

A moment later, there was the click of high heels on the marble floor of the entrance hall, and Sasha Nijinsky walked into the sitting room.

As the detectives got to their feet, Stone was swept with an overwhelming sense of relief that made him light-headed.

“I’m Ellen Balfour,” Sasha Nijinsky said. “How may I help you?”

Something is wrong here, Stone thought. Relief began to be replaced by panic.

“Well?” the woman said into the stunned silence.

“Aren’t you…” Stone couldn’t get the words out.

“Oh, I see,” the woman said, nodding her beautiful head gravely. “It’s the third time this week I’ve been mistaken for her.”

“Oh, shit,” Dino said, involuntarily, then recovered himself.

The woman turned and looked at him.

“Excuse me, please,” Dino pled.

“I wonder, Mrs. Balfour, if you have some personal identification?” Stone said, hoping against hope that this woman was Nijinsky and hiding it. “Something with a photograph?”

The woman opened her handbag and produced a New York driver’s license with a very nice picture.

“I can only apologize for the intrusion,” Stone said, returning the license to her. “A gentleman turned up at the precinct this morning and reported having seen Sasha Nijinsky.”

“I’ll bet it was the man from the Harvard Club last night,” she said.

“It was.”

“He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.”

“He was very certain. He’d met Miss Nijinsky only a couple of weeks ago.”

“I’ve been putting up with this for years,” Mrs. Balfour said, “and I’ve resisted changing my hair, but now I’m just going to have to go for a new look, I guess. And after the newspaper stories this morning, I’m getting out of town.”

“I don’t blame you,” Stone said.

“If you get any reports of sightings in the Hamptons, please ignore them,” Ellen Balfour said. “My husband doesn’t think this is funny anymore.”

Back in the car, neither detective spoke until they were nearly back to the precinct.

“I guess we’d better get into Sasha’s financial records,” Stone said finally.

“Yeah,” Dino replied disconsolately. Dino’s idea of a financial record was the color of the sock he kept his money in. “Tell you what, I’ll go through the interview reports again on the people you and I didn’t talk to personally; you do the financial records, okay?”

“Okay,” Stone said.

Stone was impressed with Sasha’s records. She kept the kind of system that he kept meaning to set up for himself.

Her checkbook was the large, desk model, and every stub was fully annotated; she kept a ledger of the bills she received and paid; there was no preparer’s signature on her tax returns, so she must have done them herself. It seemed that Sasha Nijinsky had never been late on a payment for anything, and, periodically, there was a large check written – usually between twenty-five and a hundred thousand dollars – to a brokerage account. The lady had been making a lot of money for years, and she knew how to save it.

Stone was surprised, then, when her most recent brokerage statement showed the value of her holdings was only thirty-seven thousand dollars and change. He began back-tracking through the brokerage statements, which were bundled by year and secured with strong rubber bands. They made good reading. Figuring roughly, Stone estimated that Sasha had saved just under eight hundred thousand dollars during the past five years and that, through shrewd trading, this had grown to just over two million during that time. Then, eight months back, an even two million had been withdrawn, paid by the broker with a cashier’s check made out to Cash.

Having an easily negotiable instrument of that size in her possession seemed at odds with Sasha’s character as revealed in her records, Stone thought; the consequences of losing it would have been catastrophic for her, and he could find no record of the sum having been placed in any other of her accounts. Two million dollars was just gone. Furthermore, at the time she had disappeared, Sasha had been about to close a substantial real estate transaction which, according to her records, she had no ready funds to cover. And there was no record of a mortgage application or commitment letter. Strange.

“Dino, you keep at the interview reports,” Stone said. “I think I’m going to pay Sasha’s lawyer a visit.”

“You find something?”

“No, I’m missing something. Or rather, Sasha is.”

It was five o’clock when Stone presented himself at the midtown law offices of Woodman amp; Weld, and the receptionist fled her desk, clutching her coat, as soon as she had announced him.

“I’m Frank Woodman,” a tall, athletic man in his fifties said, extending his hand. “Come on back to the conference room; there’s a meeting still going on in my office.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve come at a bad time,” Stone said, following Woodman down a plushly carpeted hallway.

“Not at all,” Woodman said over his shoulder. “I’m happy to do anything I can to help Sasha.” He led the way into an elegant conference room, which was furnished in English antiques, and sat down at the head of the table.

Stone took a chair. “Mr. Woodman, to get right to the point, two million dollars seems to be missing from Sasha’s brokerage account.”

Woodman nodded. “I know about that,” he said, “but only because Sasha mentioned it in passing. I should tell you that, even as her sole attorney, I know less about Sasha’s affairs than most lawyers in my position would know. She was… well, secretive, I guess I’d have to say.”