Stuart Woods - New York Dead

“I hope you will, Detective Barrington, because, while I will help you in any way I feel I reasonably can, I do not intend to have my privacy unduly disturbed, nor do I wish to have my name splashed about in the tabloids, nor my professional reputation besmirched.”

“Well, we’ll leave you to your work, Mr. Van Fleet.”

“Call, if you think of anything else.”

“We will.”

The front of the funeral parlor was deserted when they passed back through.

“He’s dirty,” Dino said, when they were on the street again.

“I don’t know,” Stone replied. “He said pretty much what I’d have said in the circumstances, if I were innocent.”

“Maybe he’s not dirty on Nijinsky, but he’s dirty on something,” Dino said emphatically. “He’s a gold miner, for a start.”

“A what?”

“A gold miner. You’re so fucking naive, Stone, you really are. When we got there, he had just finished pulling that corpse’s gold teeth. He put ’em in the Coke can. Didn’t you hear it rattle? Why do you think he was sewing her mouth shut? Doesn’t want anybody poking around in there, that’s why.”

“Jesus Christ, Dino, how do you think of this stuff?”

“I got a suspicious nature, didn’t you know that?”

“I knew that.”

“I think when this Nijinsky thing is over, we want to take a closer look at fuckin’ Doc Van Fleet.”

“Let’s not wait until then,” Stone said.

They reached the car, and Dino looked at his watch. “You still want me to meet Barron Harkness’s plane?”

“Yeah. I wanted us to see Hiram Barker this afternoon, but seeing if Harkness is on that airplane is more important.”

“You go on and see Barker, and I’ll meet the plane.”

“It would be better if we both were there.”

“Fuck procedure. We got a lot to do, right? I’ll meet you at the TV studio at six forty-five, and we’ll do Harkness together.”

“Okay, you take the car, and I’ll get a cab.”

As Dino drove away and Stone looked for a cab, he drew deep breaths of fresh, polluted New York City air into his lungs. From now on he’d have different memories when he caught the scent of formaldehyde.

Stone went to the Vanity Fair offices in midtown and, after a phone call was made, he was given Hiram Barker’s address. As he entered the lobby of United Nations Plaza, he remembered a line about the apartment house from an old movie: “If there is a god,” a character had said, “he probably lives in this building.” After another phone call, the deskman sent him up to a high floor.

“I can just imagine why you’re here,” Barker said as he opened the door.

He was larger than Stone had expected, in both height and weight, a little over six feet tall and broad at the middle. The face was not heavy but handsome, the hair sleek and gray, slicked straight back.

“I’m Hi Barker,” he said, extending a fleshy hand. He waved Stone into a spacious, beautifully furnished living room with a view looking south toward the United Nations.

Stone introduced himself. He heard the tinkling of silver in the background; he saw a woman enter the dining room and begin to set the table.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Barker asked solicitously.

Stone was thirsty. “Perhaps some water.”

“Jeanine, get the gentleman some Perrier,” Barker said to the woman.

She left and returned with a heavy crystal glass, decorated with a slice of lime.

“Sit you down,” Barker said, waving at one end of a large sofa, while flopping down at the other end, “and tell me what I can do for you.” He cocked his head expectantly.

“You can tell me where you were between two and three this morning,” Stone said.

Barker clapped his hands together and threw his head back. “I’ve been waiting all my life for a cop to ask me that question!” he crowed.

Stone smiled. “I hope I won’t have to wait that long for an answer.”

“Dear me, no.” Barker chuckled. “I got home about one thirty from a dinner at the de la Rentas ’, then went straight to bed. The night man downstairs can confirm that – ah, the time, not the bed part. Security is ironclad here, you know. We’ve got Arabs, Israelis, and Irish in the building, and nobody , but nobody , gets in or out without being seen.”

Stone didn’t doubt it.

“Am I a suspect, then?”

“A suspect in what?” Stone asked.

“Oh, God, now I’ve done it! I’m not even supposed to know there’s a crime!”

“Is there?”

“Well, didn’t somebody help poor Sasha out into the night?”

“I’d very much like to know that,” Stone said, “and I’d like to know why you think so.”

“She wasn’t the sort to take a flying leap,” Barker said more seriously.

“That’s why I’ve come to see you, Mr. Barker.”

“Hi, please call me Hi. I’ll be uncomfortable if you don’t”

“Hi it is then.”

“And why is it you’ve come to see me?”

“Because of your Vanity Fair piece. I’ve read it, and it seemed extremely well researched.”

“That’s a very astute observation,” Barker said. “Most people would have thought it produced from gossip. No, I spent a good six months on that. I was researching it even before Tina at the magazine knew I wanted to do it.”

“And you talked with Miss Nijinsky at some length?”

“I did, a good six hours over three meetings.”

“Did you make any tape recordings?”

“I did, but when I finished the piece I returned the tapes to her, as agreed.”

“You didn’t, perhaps, make a copy?”

Barker’s eyes turned momentarily hard. “No. That’s not the way it’s done.”

“How well did you know her before you began research for the article?”

“We had a cordial acquaintance. We’d been to a few of the same dinner parties. That was before the piece. By the time I finished it, I think I knew her as well as anybody alive.”

“You can do that in six hours of conversation?”

“If you’ve done six months of research beforehand, and if nobody else knows the person at all.”

“She had no close friends?”

“None in the sense that any normal person would call close.”

“Family?”

“She hardly ever saw them after she left home to go to college. I think she was close to her father as a young girl, but she didn’t speak of him as a confidant, not in the least.”

“Did she have any confidants?”

“Not one, as far as I could tell. I think by the time we had finished, she thought of me as one.” Barker shook his head. “But no, as well as I got to know her, she never opened up to me. I took my cues as much from what she didn’t say as what she said. There was a sort of invisible, one-way barrier between that young woman and the rest of the world; everything passed through it to her, but very little passed out.”

“Do you think she was a possible suicide?”

“Not for a moment. Sasha was one tough cookie; she had goals, and she was achieving them. Christ, I mean, she was on the verge of the biggest career any woman ever had in television news. Bigger than Barbara Walters. That sort of person commits suicide only in trashy novels.”

“All right,” Stone said, “let’s assume murder.”

Barker grinned. “Let’s.”

“Who?”

Barker crossed his legs, clasped his hands behind his neck, and stared out at the sweep of the East River. “Two kinds of people might have murdered Sasha Nijinsky,” he said. “First, people she hurt on the way up – you know, the secretary she tyrannized, the people she displaced when she got promotions – there was no shortage of those. But you’d have to be a raving lunatic to kill such a famous woman just for revenge. The chances are too good of getting caught and sent away.”