“No,” Stone said, “she’s not.” He looked up to see that Lieutenant Leary had joined the group. “But,” he continued, “she fell from twelve stories, not twenty-six. And not onto concrete, but into a large pile of freshly dug earth. And look at this.” He opened the Vanity Fair to its center spread and showed a photograph to the assembled detectives.

The shot was of Sasha Nijinsky, and she seemed to be flying. The earth was thousands of feet below her, and she was wearing a jumpsuit and a helmet and had an unopened parachute strapped to her back. She was grinning at the camera, exposing rows of large, white teeth; her eyes were wide behind goggles.

“Sasha Nijinsky was a sky diver,” Stone said. “An experienced one, too, with more than a hundred jumps. And that”—he thumped the photograph with his forefinger—”was the position she was in when I saw her falling. Also, she was wearing a full-length nightgown and a bathrobe when she fell, and she might have gotten some extra air resistance by the ballooning out of those garments. When she fell, she automatically assumed the position she’d been trained to assume when free-falling. And, by doing that, she slowed down her rate of acceleration and, most important, her terminal velocity.”

No, one spoke for a long time. Finally, Dino broke the rapt silence. “Horseshit,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Stone said.

“Let me tell you something, Stone—I read that lady’s diary, and I say she was suffering from too much fucking, too much fuckin’ ambition, and too much fuckin’ fame, all of it too fuckin’ soon.” Dino closed the magazine and, with his finger, drew an X over her face. “That girl jumped off that terrace. She ain’t no cat, and she ain’t no flying squirrel.”

“I think somebody helped her,” Stone said. “And she may still be alive.”

Dino shook his head slowly. “I’ll tell you what she is. She’s New York Dead.”

Chapter

6

The Van Fleet Funeral Parlor had a Gramercy Park address, but it was around the corner, off the square.

“Italians know all about death,” Stone said to Dino. “What do you know about this place?”

Dino shrugged. “It’s not Italian, so what could I know? The location tells us, don’t it? Good address, not so good location. If you don’t want to pay for a first-class funeral at Frank Campbell’s, where the elite meet to grieve, then you go to, like, Van Fleet’s. It’s cheaper, but it’s got all the fuckin’ pretensions, you know?”

Dino parked in a loading zone and flipped down the sun visor to display the car’s ID. They walked back half a block and entered the front door, following a well-dressed couple. They stopped in a vestibule while the couple signed a visitors’ book, presided over by a man in a tailcoat.