New York Dead Read Free

had to prevent himself from trying the locks. Across the street, half a dozen guys spilled out of a yuppie bar, two of them mouthing off at each other, the others watching. Ten years ago, he’d have broken it up. He would have now, but it didn’t look like it would last long.The two guys turned away from each other, hurling insults. Neither was willing to throw the first punch.
    At Eighty-sixth Street, two hookers were working the traffic. He’d have ignored them on his beat; he ignored them now. He remembered when Eighty-sixth was Germantown, when the smell of sauerbraten wafted from every third doorway. Somewhere along here there had been a place called the Gay Vienna that served kalbshaxe—a veal shank that looked like a gigantic drumstick. The place had had a zither player, the only one he’d ever heard. He’d liked it. He’d lived over on Eighty-third, between York and East End, had had a Hungarian landlady who made him goulash. She’d put weight on him, too much weight, and it had stuck. He’d lost it now, five weeks on hospital food. He was down to a hundred and eighty, and, at six-two, he looked slender. He vowed not to gain it back. He couldn’t afford the alterations.
    Stone rubbed his neck. An hour in one of Elaine’s hard, armless chairs, leaning on the table, always made his neck and shoulders tight. About Seventieth Street, he started to limp a little, in spite of himself. In the mid-Sixties, he forgot all about the knee.
    It was just luck. He was rolling his head around, trying to loosen the neck muscles, and he happened to be looking up when he saw her. She was free-falling, spread-eagled, like a sky diver. Only she didn’t have a parachute.
    Con Edison was digging a big hole twenty yards ahead, and they had a generator going, so he could barely hear the scream.
    Time slowed down; he considered whether it was some sort of stunt and rejected the notion. He thought she would go into the Con Ed hole, but she didn’t; instead, she met the earth, literally, on the big pile of dirt the 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 asif 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 hisbreathing. 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.