New York Dead

“Interesting background,” Gonzales said. “He went to Cornell Medical School, graduated and all, but never completed his internship.”

“Where?”

“At Physicians and Surgeons Hospital.”

“Pretty ritzy. Why didn’t he finish?”

“File says he was dropped from the program as ‘unsuited for a medical career.’ There have been some complaints about him posing as a doctor, but since he apparently never actually treated anybody, there was nothing we could do. He worked at the Museum of Natural History for a while.”

“What’s he do now?”

“He’s an embalmer at Van Fleet Funeral Parlor.”

Stone felt a little chill. “Pick him up for questioning.”

“Here’s a photograph.”

Stone looked at the picture of Marvin Herbert Van Fleet. “Hang on, this guy’s got an alibi.”

“How do you know that? We haven’t asked him yet.”

“Because I saw him at the bar at Elaine’s twenty minutes before Nijinsky fell.”

There was a brief silence. “Twenty minutes is a long time,” Gonzales said.

“You’re right,” Stone agreed. “I left and walked down Second Avenue. He could have taken a cab and gotten there before I did. Pick him up. No, give me that address. Dino and I will talk to him.”

Dino arrived, waving a magazine. He tossed it onto Stone’s desk. “I had to wrestle two women for this,” he said. “It just hit the newsstands this morning, and this must be the last copy in the city.”

Stone picked it up. The new issue of Vanity Fair, and Sasha Nijinsky was on the cover. SASHA! BY HIRAM BARKER, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, a headline read. Stone laughed. “Now, that’s timing. You read it yet?”

“Not yet,” Dino said. “Be my guest.”

The tone of the piece reeled back and forth between sycophancy and bitchiness. Nijinsky’s career was recapped briefly, but a lot of space was devoted to her social and sex lives. All the unflattering stuff came from unnamed sources, including a report of a secret affair between Nijinsky and her old colleague on The Morning Show, and new co-anchor on the evening news, Barron Harkness. “They were never seen together in public,” the source said, “and a lot of the staff thought they were screwing in her dressing room. She would never go into his.”

Stone finished the piece and added Hiram Barker to his list of interviewees. He picked up the phone, dialed the Continental Network, and asked for Barron Harkness.

“Mr. Harkness’s office,” an interesting female voice said.

“This is Detective Stone Barrington of the Homicide Division, New York City Police Department,” he said. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Harkness.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Harkness is on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic,” the woman said. “This is Cary Hilliard, his assistant. May I help you?”

Stone remembered the television report that the anchorman had been on assignment in the Middle East. “I want to speak to Mr. Harkness regarding the…” (What was it? Not a homicide – not yet, anyway.) “…about Sasha Nijinsky. Can you tell me what time his plane is due in?”

“He won’t be in the office before about five thirty,” the woman said. “And he’ll be going on the air at seven o’clock, on the evening news.”

Stone liked the woman’s voice. “I’d like to know the airline and flight number, please. It’s important.”

The woman hesitated. “What was your name again, please?”

“Detective Stone Barrington. I’m in charge of the Nijinsky case.”

“Of course. He’s due in on an Alitalia flight from Rome at four twenty, but he’ll be met and helicoptered in. You’d do better to see him here. I know he’ll want to talk to you. He’s very fond of Sasha.”

“At what time?”

“It’ll be hell from the moment he arrives until the newscast is over. Come at a quarter to seven, and ask for me. I’ll take you up to the control room, and you can talk to Barron as soon as he’s off the air.”

“Six forty-five. I’ll see you then.”

“Oh, we’re not in the Continental Network building. We’re at the Broadcast Center, at Pier Nineteen, at the west end of Houston Street.”

“I’ll see you at six forty-five.” Stone hung up. He really liked her voice. She was probably a dog, though. He’d made the voice mistake before.

Dino had turned on the television, and a doctor was being interviewed on CNN about Nijinsky.

“Doctor, is it possible that Sasha Nijinsky could have survived her fall from twelve stories?”

“Well,” the doctor replied, “as we’ve just seen on the videotape, she obviously survived, at least for a few moments, but it is unlikely in the extreme that she could recover from the sort of injuries she must have sustained in the fall. I’d say it was virtually impossible that she lived more than a minute or two after striking the earth.”

“That still don’t make it a homicide,” Dino said.

“It’s a homicide,” Stone said. “If she’s dead.”

“Whaddaya mean ’if she’s dead’?” Dino asked. “Didn’t you hear the doctor, there? She’s a fuckin’ pancake.”

“Look,” Stone said, “do you know what terminal velocity is?”

“Nope,” Dino replied. Nobody else did either.

“An object in a vacuum, when dropped from a height, will accelerate at the rate of thirty-two feet per second, and continue accelerating – in a vacuum. But in an atmosphere, like the earth’s, there will come a point when air resistance becomes equal to acceleration, and, at that point, the object will fall at a steady rate.”

“But it’ll keep falling,” Dino said, puzzled.

“Sure, but it’ll stop accelerating.” Stone had everyone’s undivided attention now. “I read a piece in the Times a few weeks ago about cats, and how cats have been known to fall from a great height and survive. There was one documented case where a cat fell twenty-six stories, landed on concrete, and survived with only a couple of broken bones.”

“How the fuck could it survive a fall like that?” a detective asked.

“Like this,” Stone said. He held out his hand, palm down. “When a cat starts to fall, he immediately orients himself feet first – you know that cats will always land on their feet, right?”

“Right,” the detective said.

“Not only does he get into a feet-first position, but he spread-eagles into what’s called the flying-squirrel position, like this.” He spread his fingers. “Flying squirrels don’t fly, like birds, they glide, because they have a membrane connecting their front and back legs, and, when they spread out, they’re sort of like a furry Frisbee.”

“But a cat ain’t a flying squirrel,” another detective said.

“No,” Stone agreed, “and he can’t glide like one. But by presenting the greatest possible area to the air resistance, a cat slows down his rate of acceleration and, consequently, his terminal velocity.”

“You mean he falls slow,” Dino said.

“Compared to a human being, anyway. A cat’s terminal velocity is about sixty miles an hour. But a human being’s terminal velocity is a hundred and twenty miles an hour. That’s why a cat could survive a fall from twenty- six stories, when no human could.”

The group digested this for a moment.

“But Sasha Nijinsky ain’t no cat,” Dino said.

“No,” Stone said, “she’s not.” He looked up to see that Lieutenant Leary had joined the group. “But,” he continued, “she fell from twelve stories, not twenty-six. And not onto concrete, but into a large pile of freshly dug earth. And look at this.” He opened the Vanity Fair to its center spread and showed a photograph to the assembled detectives.

The shot was of Sasha Nijinsky, and she seemed to be flying. The earth was thousands of feet below her, and she was wearing a jumpsuit and a helmet and had an unopened parachute strapped to her back. She was grinning at the camera, exposing rows of large, white teeth; her eyes were wide behind goggles.

“Sasha Nijinsky was a sky diver,” Stone said. “An experienced one, too, with more than a hundred jumps. And