“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.”