Stone handed her the letter without comment.

She read it, and her eyes went wide. “Sasha’s alive?” she asked, stunned.

“It would seem so,” Stone said, reading the report. “An expert says it’s almost certainly her handwriting, and her fingerprints are on the letter.” He read on. “They were very clear, because she had olive oil on her fingers – extra virgin olive oil, according to this.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” she said, incredulously.

“No, it doesn’t,” he replied. “Nevertheless…”

She walked over to the sofa and retrieved her coat, seemingly lost in thought. “That means she’s going to be able to identify whoever pushed her off that balcony, doesn’t it?”

“I hope so. I wonder why she hasn’t done it already.”

Cary slipped into her coat and walked to the door, unlocking it.

“You’re leaving? When can I see you?”

“I’ll call you,” she said. “I’ve left my job, and I’m staying with a friend. Don’t worry, we’ll see each other. You’ll see me sooner than you think. Pay no attention to what you hear.”

“What am I going to hear?” he asked.

She ignored his question; her brow was furrowed. “There’s something I never told you,” she said. “I should have told you a long time ago.” She seemed to be wrestling with whether to tell him now.

“What is it?”

She looked at the floor. “Barron wasn’t on that airplane from Rome.”

Stone stared at her. “But Dino saw him…”

She looked up at him, then slipped through the door. “Dino didn’t do his job,” she said, then closed the door behind her, leaving him alone in the room.

Stone went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on his face, his mind racing. Then he rejoined the crowd and found Dino, who was making his way out of the party with Mary Ann. He could see the car outside, festooned with tin cans and old shoes.

“Dino, when you went to the airport to meet Barron Hark-ness’s plane, did you actually see him get off?”

“Stone, c’mon, okay?” He kissed an old lady on the lips.

Stone managed to stay alongside him. “You didn’t actually see him, did you?”

“I checked the manifest, all right? Hey, Cheech, how you doin’?”

Stone bodily prevented a fat woman from squeezing between them. “Dino, you didn’t see him.”

“Stone, I’m leaving on my honeymoon; gimme a major fucking break, will you?”

Stone stopped moving, and the crowd surged past him. He watched Dino carried along by the crowd to the car, then he was driving away, waving.

Chapter 43

Late in the evening, as Stone was drifting off to sleep, the telephone rang. He fumbled for it. “Hello?”

“Mr. Barrington?” The voice was vaguely familiar.

“Yes?”

“This is Herbert Van Fleet.”

Stone looked at the clock. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered under his breath. “What is it?”

“I know I must have awakened you. I’m very sorry.”

“What do you want, Mr. Van Fleet?”

“I want to retain you.”

“Retain me?”

“I understand that you are practicing law now.”

“Yes, that’s right, but why do we need to talk about this at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night? Can you call my office number tomorrow morning?”

“I’m afraid it’s more urgent than that. I’ve been arrested.”

Stone sighed and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “What were you arrested for, Mr. Van Fleet?”

“Please call me Herb.”

Annoyed. “What were you arrested for, Herb?”

“They’re calling it attempted rape. They want to arraign me in a couple of hours, in night court.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m in a place called the Tombs. They let me make this one call.”

“You’re going to need to raise bail, Herb. Can you lay your hands on some money?”

“How much money?”

“I should think that, with no previous arrests, the judge might want as much as twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, or you can put up ten percent and some property to a bail bondsman. You won’t get the ten percent back.”

“I’ve got about forty thousand dollars in a money market account,” Van Fleet said.

“That should do it,” Stone said. “All right, Herb, I’ll represent you at the arraignment. My fee for that will be a thousand dollars. If you want me to represent you after that, we can talk about a further retainer.”

“All right, that’s acceptable.”

“I’ll meet you at night court.” Stone hung up, oddly elated. Herbert Van Fleet was a strange person, but this was the first time somebody had asked Stone to represent him, his first client outside Woodman amp; Weld. It promised to be a fairly lucrative representation too. He began to get dressed.

Night court was a zoo. Every prostitute, vagrant, and petty criminal arrested during the past few hours would be arraigned there, and the crowd was colorful and noisy. From the back of the huge courtroom, Stone could barely hear the judge, who was shouting.

Stone counted. Standing before the bench, looking at the floor and shifting their weight from one foot to the other, were twenty-four Chinese men, all neatly dressed in business suits. He took a seat down front and listened, curious. The men had been gambling in the basement of a restaurant in Chinatown, only a few blocks away, and an old lady next door had turned them in. Their Anglo lawyer, in unctuous tones, was explaining to the somewhat amused judge that his clients were all respected members of the community, businessmen out for an evening of diversion. They were not criminals, not really, and were very sorry to have disturbed the old woman’s sleep. The judge released the men on their own recognizance.

Stone got up, introduced himself to the bailiff at the door to the holding cells, and, shortly, Herbert Van Fleet appeared, in handcuffs. Stone sat him down in one of the little rooms set aside for consultation with attorneys. “All right, Herb, tell me exactly what happened.”

Van Fleet sighed. “I was at the Tribeca Grill, having a drink, and I got to talking to this girl. I offered her a ride home – she said she lived in the West Village – and, on the way, we were getting sort of friendly, and-”

“Exactly what do you mean by ‘getting sort of friendly’?”

“We were holding hands, and she was sitting close to me. We stopped at a traffic light on Sixth Avenue, and we kissed.”

“Did you put your hands between her legs or on her breasts?”

“Yes, on her breasts, and she seemed to like that. It was when I put my hand down the front of her dress that she became difficult.”

“Difficult?”

“She started screaming at me. I didn’t realize how drunk she was until that moment. She started to get out of the van, and I tried to persuade her to calm down, and then she started screaming for help.”

“Were you fighting?”

“I had hold of her wrists and was talking to her, trying to get her to calm down, when a police car pulled up alongside us at the light, and she jumped out of the van and started screaming hysterically about how I had tried to rape her.”

“Did you ever get your hand on her breast – inside her dress, I mean?”

“Yes, but just for a minute.”

“Herbert, is that all that happened? Is there any more? I have to know if I’m going to be able to give you a proper defense.”

“I swear to you, that was all there was to it. If the police car hadn’t just happened to show up, it would have been all over in a minute. She would either have calmed down, or she would have gotten out of the van. This whole thing about attempted rape is completely crazy. Oh, I forgot, the policemen gave me a breath test – made me blow up one of those balloons.”

“Did they indicate what the results were?”

“No, I asked them, but they didn’t answer.”

“Did they give the girl the same test?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see them do that. They put me in the back of the police car while they were talking to her and calming her down.”