workmen had thrown up. She didn’t bounce. She stuck to the ground as if she had fallen into glue. Stone started to run.
A Con Ed man in a yellow hard hat jumped backward as if he’d been shotgunned. Stone could see the terrified expression on his face as he approached. The man recovered before Stone got there, reached down, and gingerly turned the woman onto her back. Her eyes were open.
Stone knew her. There was black dirt on her face, and her red hair was wild, but he knew her. Shit, the whole city knew her. More than half the population – all the men and some of the women – wanted to fuck her. He slowed just long enough to glance at her and shout at the Con Ed man. “Call an ambulance! Do what you can for her!” He glanced up at the building. Flush windows, none open; a terrace up top.
He sprinted past the scene, turned the corner of the white-brick, 1960s apartment building, and ran into the lobby. An elderly, uniformed doorman was sound asleep in a chair, tilted back against the wall.
“Hey!” Stone shouted, and the man was wide awake and on his feet. The move looked practiced. Stone shoved his badge in the old man’s face. “Police! What apartment has a terrace on the Second Avenue side?”
“12-A, the penthouse,” the doorman said. “Miss Nijinsky.”
“You got a key?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go!”
The doorman retrieved a key from a drawer, and Stone hustled him toward the elevators. One stood open and waiting; the doorman pushed twelve.
“What’s the matter?” the man asked.
“Miss Nijinsky just took a dive. She’s lying in a pile of dirt on Second Avenue.”
“Jesus God.”
“She’s being introduced to him right now.”
It was a short building, and the elevator was slow. Stone watched the floor numbers light up and tried to control his breathing. When they hit eleven, he pulled out his gun. As the elevator slowed to a stop on twelve, he heard something, and he knew what it was. The fire door on twelve had been yanked open so hard it had struck the wall. This noise was followed by the sound of somebody taking the steel steps of the fire stairs in a hurry. The elevator door started to open, and Stone helped it.
“Stay here, and don’t open the apartment door!” he said to the doorman.
The fire door was opposite the elevator; he yanked it open. From a floor below, the ring of shoe leather on steel drifted upward. Stone flung himself down the stairs.
The guy only had a floor’s start on him; Stone had a chance. He started taking the steps two at a time. “Stop! Police!” he shouted. That was procedure, and, if anybody was listening, he wanted it heard. He shouted it again.
As he descended, Stone got into a rhythm – bump de bump, bump de bump. He concentrated on keeping his footing. He left the eighth floor behind, then the sixth.
From the sound of it, he was gaining. Aiming carefully, he started taking the steps three at a time. Whoever was below him was hitting every one. Now Stone was barely a flight of stairs behind him. At the third-floor level he caught sight of a shadow. The ringing of the steel steps built to a crescendo, echoing off the cinder-block walls of the staircase, sounding much like a modern composition a girl had once dragged him to hear.
The knee was hurting badly now, and Stone tried to think ahead. If the man got out of the stairwell before he could be caught, then he’d have the advantage on level ground, because Stone wouldn’t be able to run him down before the knee went. Stone made a decision; he’d go for a flight at a time.
On the next landing, he took a deep breath and leaped. He landed right, pushed off the wall, and prepared to jump again. One more leap down the stairs, and he’d have his quarry in sight. This time, as he jumped, something went wrong. His toe caught the stamped tread of the steel step – not much, just enough to turn him in midair – and he knew he would land wrong. When he did, his weight was on the bad knee, and he screamed. Completely out of control now, he struck the wall hard, bounced, and fell backward down the next flight of stairs.
As he came to rest hard against the wall, he struggled to get a look down the stairs, but he heard the ground- floor door open, and, a moment later, he heard it slam. He hunched up in the fetal position, holding the knee with both hands, waiting for the pain to subside just enough to allow him to get to his feet. Half a minute passed before he could let go of the knee, grab the railing, and hoist himself up. He recovered his pistol, and, barely letting his left foot touch the floor, lurched into the lobby. The guy was gone, and there was no hope of catching him now. Swearing, he hammered the elevator button with his fist.
He pressed his cheek against the cool stainless steel of the elevator door, whimpering with pain and anger and sucking in deep breaths.
The bust of the century, and he had blown it.
Chapter 2
There were only two apartments on the twelfth floor, and the doorman was standing obediently in front of 12- A. The door was open.
“I told you not to open it,” Stone said irritably.
“I didn’t,” the old man said indignantly. “It was wide open. I didn’t go in there, either.”
“Okay, okay. You go on back downstairs. There’ll be a lot of cops here in a few minutes; you tell them where I am.”
“Yessir,” the doorman said and headed for the elevator.
“Wait a minute,” Stone said, still catching his breath. “Did anybody come into the building the last half hour? Anybody at all?”
“Nope. I wake up when people come in. I always do,” the old man said defensively.
Sure. “What time did Miss Nijinsky come home tonight?”
“About nine o’clock. She asked for her mail, but there wasn’t any. It had already been forwarded to the new address.”
“She was moving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“What sort of mood was she in?” Stone asked.
“Tired, I’d say. Maybe depressed. She was usually pretty cheerful, had a few words to say to me, but not tonight. She just asked for her mail, and, when I told her there wasn’t any, she just sighed like this.” He sighed heavily. “And she went straight into the elevator.”
“Does she normally get many visitors in the building?”
“Hardly any. As a matter of fact, in the two years she’s been here, I don’t remember a single one, except deliverymen – you know, from the department stores and UPS and all.”
“Thanks,” Stone said. “You go on back to your post, and we’ll probably have more to ask you later.”
Stone stepped into the apartment. He reached high to avoid messing up any prints on the door and pushed it nearly shut. A single lamp on a mahogany drum table illuminated the living room. The place was not arranged for living. The cheap parquet floor was bare of carpets; there were no curtains or pictures; at least two dozen cardboard cartons were scattered or stacked around the room. A phone was on the table with the lamp. Stone picked it up with two fingers, dialed a number, waited for a beep, then, reading off the phone, punched in Nijinsky’s number and hung up. He picked his way among the boxes and entered the kitchen. More packed boxes. He found the small bedroom; the bed was still made.
Some penthouse. It was a mean, cramped, three-and-a-half-room apartment, and she was probably paying twenty-five hundred a month. These buildings had been thrown up in a hurry during the sixties, to beat a zoning restriction that would require builders to offset apartment houses, using less of the land. If they got the buildings up in time, they could build right to the sidewalk. There were dozens of them up and down the East Side.
The phone rang. He got it before it rang a second time.
“Yes?”
“This is Bacchetti.”
