To Stone’s surprise, Harkness was at least six four, two twenty, and flat bellied. He looked shorter and fleshier on camera.
“Come on, let’s go up to my office,” Harkness said.
They climbed another spiral staircase, entered a hallway, and turned into Harkness’s office, a large, comfortably furnished room with a big picture window looking down into the newsroom. Harkness waved Stone to a leather sofa. “Coffee? I’m having some.”
“Thank you, yes,” Stone said. He could use it; he fought off the lassitude caused by the bourbon and the newscast.
Cary Hilliard disappeared without being told, then came back with a Thermos and two cups. Both men watched her pour, then she took a seat in a chair to one side of Harkness’s desk and opened a steno pad. “You don’t mind if I take notes?” she asked Stone.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Forgive me if I don’t take any; I remember better if I do it later.” He turned to Harkness. “Mr. Harkness—”
“Please call me Barron; I’d be more comfortable. And your first name?”
“Stone.”
“A hard name,” he said, smiling slightly.
“I’ll try not to be too hard on you.”
“Where is Sasha Nijinsky? What hospital?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any information on that.”
Harkness’s eyebrows went up. “I understood you were in charge of this investigation.”
“That’s nominally so, but I’m not the only investigator on the case, and I don’t have all the information.” That wasn’t strictly true; he did have all the information there was; there just wasn’t much.
“I trust
somebody
knows what hospital she’s in. Certainly nobody at the network does.”
“I expect somebody knows where she is,” Stone said. “I understand you were traveling last night?”
“Yes, from Rome. I expect you’ve already checked that out.”
“What time did you arrive at Kennedy?”
“Four thirty or five.”
Stone nodded. “Mr. Harkness, did Sasha Nijinsky have any enemies?”
Unexpectedly, Harkness broke into laughter. “Are you kidding? Sasha climbed over half the people at the network to get where she is, and the other half are scared shitless of her.”
“I see. Did any of them hate her enough to try to kill her?”
“Probably. In my experience, lots of people kill who have less cause than Sasha’s victims.”
That was Stone’s experience too, but he didn’t say so. “Who among her enemies do you think I should talk to?”
“Christ, where to begin!” Harkness said. “Oh, look, I’m overstating the case. I don’t think anybody around here would try to kill Sasha. Do you think somebody kicked her off that terrace?”
“We have to investigate all the possibilities,” Stone said.
“Well, I can’t imagine that, not really. Maybe she caught a burglar in the act? Something like that?”
“It’s possible,” Stone said. It was, too, given that the doorman spent his evenings sound asleep. “We’re looking at known operators in her neighborhood.”
“On the other hand,” Harkness said, “Sasha was one tough lady; I don’t think a burglar could get the best of her. I’ll tell you a story, in confidence. After the last elections, Sasha and I left this building very late, and, before we could get to the car that was waiting for us, a good-sized black guy stepped out of the shadows. He had a knife, and he said whatever the ghetto version of ‘your money or your life’ is these days. Before I even had time to think, Sasha stuck out her left arm, straight, and drove her fist into the guy’s throat. He made this gurgling noise, dropped the knife, and hit the pavement like a sack of potatoes. Sasha stepped over, kicked the knife into the river, and said, ‘Let’s go.’ We got into the
car and left. Now
that
is what Sasha can be like. She’d been studying one of those martial arts things, and, when most people would have turned to jelly in the circumstances, she used what she knew. Me, I’d have given the guy anything he wanted.” Harkness put his feet on his desk. “Now, do you think a burglar—or anybody else, for that matter—could heave somebody like that over a balcony railing?”
“You could be right,” Stone said. You could be the guy who heaved her over the edge too, he thought. You’re big enough and in good enough shape to handle a woman—even one who had martial arts training. “That brings us to another possibility. Did Sasha strike you as the sort of person who might take her own life?”
Harkness looked down at the carpet for a moment, drumming his fingers on the desk noisily. “In a word, yes,” he said. “I think there was something of the manic-depressive in Sasha. She was high at a lot of times, but she was down at times, too. She could turn it off, if she was working; she could look into that camera and smile and bring it off. But there must have been times, when she was all alone, when it got to her.”
“Did you ever see it get to her?”
“Once or twice, when we were doing
The Morning Show
together. I remember going into her dressing room once, five minutes before airtime, and she was in tears over something. But when we went on the air, she was as cheerful as a chipmunk.”
“Do you know if she ever saw a psychiatrist?”
“Nope, but I’d bet that, if she did, she didn’t tell him much. Sasha plays her cards very close to that beautiful chest.”
Stone nodded, then stood up. “Well, thank you, Mr.—ah, Barron. If anything else comes up, I hope I can call you.”
“Absolutely,” Harkness said, rising and extending his hand. “Just call Cary; she always knows where to find me.”
“Come on, I’ll walk you down,” Cary said, leading the way. Passing through the outer office, she tossed her steno pad on a desk and grabbed a raincoat from a rack. On the elevator, she turned to Stone. “Well, now you’ve had the Harkness treatment,” she said. “What did you think?”
Stone shrugged. “Forthright, frank, helpful.”
She smiled. “You got Barron’s message.”
The elevator reached the lobby, and, when the doors opened, they could see the rain beating against the windows.
“Can I give you a lift?” she asked. “I’ve got a car waiting, and you’ll never get a cab down here at this time of the evening.”
“Sure, I’d appreciate that.” He took a deep breath. “If you’re all through with work, how about some dinner?”
“You’re off duty now?”
“The moment you say yes.”
She looked at him frankly. “I’d like that.”
They ran across the pavement to the waiting Lincoln Town Car, one of hundreds that answer the calls of people with charge accounts.
“Where to?” Cary said, as they settled into the back seat.
“How about Elaine’s?” Stone said.
“Can you get a table without a reservation?”
“Let’s find out.”
“Eighty-eighth and Second Avenue,” she said to the driver.
Stone turned to her. “I got the impression from what you said in the elevator that I shouldn’t necessarily believe everything Barron Harkness tells me.”
“Why, Detective,” Cary said, her eyes wide and innocent. “I never said that.” She scrunched down in the seat and laid her head back. “And, anyway, you’re off duty, remember?”
Chapter
E
laine accepted a peck on the cheek, shook Cary’s hand, and gave them Woody Allen’s regular table. Stone heaved a secret sigh of relief. This was no night for Siberia.
“I’m impressed,” Cary said when they had ordered a drink. “Whenever I’ve been in here before, we always got sent to Siberia.”
“You’ve clearly been coming here with the wrong men,” Stone replied, raising his glass to her.
“You could be right,” she said, looking at him appraisingly. “You’re bad casting for a cop, you know.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t be coy. It’s not the first time you’ve been told that.”
Pepe, the headwaiter, appeared with menus. Stone waved them away and asked for the specials.
“No, it’s not the first time I’ve been told that,” Stone said, when they had chosen their food. “I’m told that every time a cop I don’t know looks at me.”
“All right,” she said, leaning forward, “I want the whole biography, and don’t leave anything out, especially the part about why you’re a cop and not a stockbroker, or something.”
Stone sighed. “It goes back a generation. My family, on my father’s side, was from western Massachusetts, real Yankees, mill owners.”
“Barrington, as in Great Barrington, Massachusetts?”
“I don’t know; I didn’t have a lot of contact with the Massachusetts Barringtons. My father was at Harvard—rather unhappily, I might add—when the stock market crash of ’twenty-nine came. His father and grandfather were hit hard, and Dad had to drop out of school. This troubled him not in the least, because it freed him to do what he really wanted to do.”
“Which was?”
“He wanted to be a carpenter.”
“A
carpenter?
You mean with saws and hammers?”
“Exactly. He took it up when he was a schoolboy at Exeter, and he showed great talent. My grandfather was horrified, of course. Carpentry wasn’t the sort of thing a Barrington did. But when he could no longer afford to keep his son in Harvard, well…”
“What does this have to do with your being a cop?”
“I’m coming to that, eventually. Dad got to be something of a radical, politically, as a result of the depression. He gravitated to Greenwich Village, where he fell in with a crowd of leftists, and he earned a living knocking on people’s doors and asking if they wanted anything fixed. He lived in the garage of a town house on West Twelfth Street and didn’t own anything much but his tools.
“He met my mother in the late thirties. She was a painter
and a pianist and from a background much like Dad’s—well-off Connecticut people, the Stones—who’d been wiped out in the crash. She was younger than Dad and very taken with the contrast between his upper-class education and his working-class job.”
Cary wrinkled her brow. “Not Matilda Stone.”
“Yes.”
“Her work brings good prices these days at the auctions. I hope you have a lot of it.”
“Only three pictures; her favorites, though.”
“Go on with the autobiography.”
“They lived together through the war years—the army wouldn’t take Dad because he was branded as a Communist, even though he never joined the party. They had a tough time. Then, after the war, Dad rented a property on Hudson Street, where he finally was able to have a proper workshop. Some of Mother’s friends, who had done well as artists, began to hire him for cabinetwork in their homes, and, by the time I was born, in ’fifty-two, he was doing pretty well. Mother’s work was selling, too, though she never got anything like the prices it’s bringing now, and, by the time I was old enough to notice, they were living stable, middle-class lives.
“When I was in my teens, Dad had quite a reputation as an artist-craftsman; he was building libraries in Fifth Avenue apartments and even designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The Barringtons and the Stones were very far away, and I didn’t hear much about my forebears. Somehow, though, my parents’ backgrounds filtered down into my life. There were always books and pictures and music in the house, and I suppose I had a sort of Yankee upbringing, once removed.”
“Did you go to Harvard, like your father?”
“No; that would have infuriated him. I went to NYU and walked to class every day. By about my junior year, I
had decided to go to law school. I didn’t have any real clear idea about what lawyers actually did—neither did a lot of my classmates in law school, for that matter—but, somehow, it sounded good. I did all right, I guess, had a decent academic record, and, in my senior year, the New York City Police Department had a program to familiarize law students with police work. I worked part-time in a station house, I rode around in a blue-and-white, and I just loved it. The cops treated me like the whitebread college kid I was, but it didn’t matter, the bug had bit. I took the police exam, and, almost immediately after I got my law degree, I enrolled in the Police Academy. In a way, I think I was imitating my father’s choice of a working-class life.”
“You never took the bar?”
“I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was hot to be a cop.”
“Are you still?”
“Yes, sort of. I love investigative work, and I’m good at it. I had a couple of good collars that got me a detective’s shield; I had a good rabbi—a senior cop who helped me with promotion; he’s dead now, though, and I seem to have slowed down a bit.”
“But you’re different from other cops.”
Stone sighed again. “Yes, I guess I am. I’ve been an outsider since the day I started at the academy.”
“So you’re not going to be the next chief of police?”
Stone laughed. “Hardly. You could get good odds at the 19th Precinct that I’ll never make detective first grade.”
“What are you now?”
“Detective second.”
“So, you’re thirty-eight years old, and…”
“Essentially without prospects,” Stone said, shrugging. “I can look forward to a pension in six years; a better one, if I can last thirty.”
“Why are you limping?”
Stone told her about the knee, keeping it as undramatic
as possible. She listened and didn’t say anything. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, “and don’t leave out anything.”
“My bio is much simpler,” she said. “Born and grew up in Atlanta; the old man was a lawyer, now a judge; two years at Bennington, which my father thought was far too radical—I was wearing only black clothes and not washing my hair enough—so I finished at the University of Georgia, in journalism. Summer between my junior and senior years, I got on the interns’ program at the network, and, when I graduated, they offered me a job as a production assistant. I’m thirty-two years old, and I’m still a production assistant.”
“But at a higher level, surely? After all, you’re assisting Barron Harkness.”
She laughed. “It’s a nice place to work, if your father can afford to send you there. The perks aren’t bad.” She looked at him sideways. “You skipped something.”
“What?”
“Married?”
“Nope.”
“Never? Why not?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”