“Good afternoon,” Stone said. “I am Detective Barrington, and this is Detective Bacchetti, New York City Police. I believe you have an employee here named Marvin Herbert Van Fleet.”
“He’s not an employee,” the woman said. “He’s a partner in the firm, he’s our chief…technical person, and he’s my son.”
Stone nodded. “May we see him, please?”
“Now?”
“Please.”
“I’m afraid he’s busy at the moment.”
“We’re busy, too,” Dino said, apparently unable to contain himself.
Stone shot him a sharp glance. “I’m afraid we can’t wait for a more convenient time,” he said to the woman.
“One moment, please,” Mrs. Van Fleet said, not happy. She walked down the hallway a few paces, picked up a phone, dialed two digits, and spoke quietly for a moment. She hung up and motioned to the detectives.
They followed her down the hallway. She turned right through a door and walked rapidly down another hall. The decor changed to utilitarian. A vaguely chemical scent hung in the air. She stopped before a large, metal swinging door and indicated with a nod that they were to enter. Then she brushed past them and left.
Stone pushed the door open and, followed by Dino, entered a large room with a tile floor. Before them were six autopsy tables, two of them occupied by bodies covered with sheets. At the far end of the room, the body of a middle-aged woman lay naked on another table. A man stood with his back to her, facing a counter built along the wall. Memories of dissecting frogs in high school biology swept over Stone; the smell of formaldehyde was distinct.
“Marvin Van Fleet?” Stone said.
A sharp, metallic sound was followed by a hollow rattling noise. The man turned around, and Stone saw a soft drink can on the tabletop.
“Herbert Van Fleet,” the man said. “Please call me Doc. Everybody does.”
The man was not handsome, Stone thought, but his voice was—a rich baritone, expressive, without any discernible accent. A good bedside voice. The detectives walked briskly to the end of the room, their heels echoing off the tile floor. They stopped at the head of the autopsy table. Stone introduced himself and Dino.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Van Fleet said. He stepped over to the naked body on the table and picked up the forceps that rested beside the head.
“Oh? Why is that?” Stone replied.
“Well, of course I heard about Miss Nijinsky on television this morning. Given the nature of our relationship, I thought perhaps someone would come to see me.” He produced a curved suturing needle and clamped it in the jaws of the forceps.
“Did you and Sasha Nijinsky have a relationship?” Stone asked.
Van Fleet looked thoughtful for a moment. “Why, yes, we did. I was her correspondent, although she seemed to think of me as an antagonist, which I never intended myself to be. She was my…” He paused. “She was an object of interest to me, I suppose. I greatly admired her talents. Do you know how she’s doing?” he asked, concernedly. “She’s in the hospital, they said on television.”
“We don’t have any information on her condition,” Stone said. God knew that was true.
Van Fleet nodded sadly. He bent over the corpse, peeled back the lips with rubber-gloved fingers, and inserted the needle in the inside of the upper lip, passing it through the inside of the lower lip, then pulled it tight.
Stone stopped asking questions and watched with a horrible fascination. So did Dino. Van Fleet continued to skillfully manipulate the forceps and the needle, until the web of thread reached across the width of the mouth. Then he pulled the thread tight, and the mouth closed, concealing the
stitching on the inside of the lips. Van Fleet made a quick surgical knot, snipped off the thread, and tucked the end out of sight at the corner of the mouth.
“Shit,” Dino said.
“Mr. Van Fleet, could you leave that until we’re finished, please?” Stone said.
“Of course.”
“Can you account for your whereabouts between two and three
A.M.
this morning?”
“
You
can account for my whereabouts at two,” Van Fleet said, smiling. “I was where you were.”
“I remember,” Stone said. “At what time, exactly, did you leave Elaine’s?”
“A few minutes after you did,” Van Fleet said. “About two twenty, I’d say. Maybe the bartender would remember.”
“Where did you go then?”
“I drove down Second Avenue, and in the sixties I saw a sort of commotion. It seemed that someone had been hurt. I have some medical skills, so I stopped to see if I could help. They were loading a stretcher into an ambulance. I didn’t know it was Sasha until this morning, when I turned on
The Morning Show.
”
“Who else was at the scene when you stopped?” Stone asked.
“Two ambulance men, two or three Con Ed men, and a man with a television camera.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went home.”
“What route did you take?”
“I continued down Second Avenue all the way to Houston, then turned right, then left on Garamond Street. That’s where I live.”
“Did you see anyone you knew?”
“At two thirty in the morning?”
“Anyone at all. Someone else in your building?”
“There is no one else in my building. I live over a former glove factory.”
“We’d like to see your apartment. May we go there now?”
“Why?”
“It would help us in our investigation. If you had nothing to do with what happened to Miss Nijinsky, then we’d like to be able to cross you off our list of suspects.”
“I’m a suspect?” Van Fleet asked, surprised. “What do you suspect me of?”
“Well, we haven’t established the cause of…what happened, yet.”
“Was there a crime?”
“We haven’t determined that yet.”
“My impression from the news was that Sasha’s fall was a suicide attempt.”
“That’s certainly a possibility. We treat any unknown cause of death as homicide, until we know otherwise.”
“Then you suspect me of a homicide you’re not sure was committed?”
“As I said, Mr. Van Fleet, everyone who had anything to do with her is a suspect, until we know for sure what happened. Do you object to our seeing where you live?”
Van Fleet shrugged. “Not really, but I think I should ask my lawyer how he feels about it.”
“That’s your right.”
“Unless you have a search warrant.”
“We can get one if we feel it’s necessary.”
“If a judge feels it’s necessary, you mean.”
“We can get a search warrant.”
“I watch a lot of police shows on television, you see. I understand these things.”
“You object to our seeing your apartment, then?”
“No, I don’t, not really. However, I don’t think you have a good enough reason to ask. If you do have a good enough
reason, then you can get a search warrant, can’t you?”
“It would certainly make us feel better about you if we had your cooperation, Mr. Van Fleet.”
“Please don’t misunderstand me, Detective Barrington, I’m most anxious to help. I greatly admire Sasha, and I would do anything I could to help you resolve what happened to her. But I don’t really see how visiting my home would help you, and I think such a visit would be an unwarranted invasion of my privacy. Of course, a judge may feel differently, and, if so, I’ll be happy to cooperate.”
“I see,” Stone said. He was getting nowhere.
“Is there anything else I can do to help you?”
“Not at the moment, Mr. Van Fleet. I expect we’ll talk again.”
Van Fleet nodded. “Any time. My pleasure. But there’s something I think you should consider.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s quite true that I have a history of what some people would call annoying Sasha Nijinsky. But I’m sure you can tell from the letters I wrote her that I had only admiration for her, that, certainly, I had no reason to cause her harm.”
“We’ll take that into consideration in our inquiry,” Stone said.
“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.
Chapter
S
tone 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.”