New York Dead

raised his eyebrows at one, and the man gave a huge shrug. A moment later, he hung up.
    “Gather round,” Stone said to the group. “Any luck?” he asked when they had assembled.
    “Zilch. She’s nowhere,” a detective said.
    “How many more places to check?” Stone asked.
    “Not many.”
    “Add all the funeral parlors in the city to your list,” Stone said. “Start with the ones in Manhattan. What else we got?”
    “We got a suspect,” Detective Gonzales said. He referred to a sheet of paper. “One Marvin Herbert Van Fleet, male Caucasian, forty-one, of a SoHo address.”
    “What makes him a suspect?” Stone asked.
    “He’s written Sasha Nijinsky over a thousand letters the past two years.” Gonzales held up a stack of paper.
    Stone took the letters and began to go through them. “I want you all to myself,” he quoted. “Come and live with me. I’ve got a nice place…. You and my mother will get along great.” He looked up. “This is pretty bland stuff. Not even anything obscene. He doesn’t so much as want to sniff her underwear.” “Nijinsky wanted him arrested, but apparently he didn’t do anything illegal. She finally got a civil court order, preventing him from contacting her.”
    “What else have we got on him?”
    “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