“Traffic always goes to hell in this city when it rains,” Dino said.
“Yeah.”
“You sure this business can’t be connected somehow with what you’re working on?” Dino asked.
“I’ve thought about it again and again,” Stone replied, “and I don’t see how it could be. Arnie had finished the job with me.”
“Arnie’s wife said he went to the movies yesterday afternoon, and he was planning to eat out; it was her bridge night.”
“Does that sound like he was working for me?”
“I guess not. I’m sorry to harp on this, Stone, it’s just that I don’t have anywhere else to go with it.”
“Maybe it really was some stupid junkie.”
“Maybe it was, but it just doesn’t sit right.”
“I know; it doesn’t sit right with me, either.”
“You know if Arnie was working for somebody else? Some other PI?”
Stone shook his head. “He didn’t say anything about it if he was.”
They drove on in the rain. As they crossed the bridge, the sky suddenly began to clear. They buried Arnie Millman in bright sunshine, under a cloudless sky.
Stone stood at the graveside with fifty other cops and looked up to see Amanda Dart standing on the other side, at the rear of the crowd. When the service was over, Stone said to Dino, “I won’t need a ride home.” He hurried after Amanda, who was walking quickly toward her waiting car.
“Hi,” he said, catching up to her. “Can I catch a lift back to Manhattan?”
“Hello, Stone. Sorry, I’m not going back to Manhattan for a while; I have some business on this side of the river.”
“I’m surprised to see you here,” he said. “Did you know Arnie Millman?”
She nodded. “He was an occasional source for me.”
“Arnie?”
“Yes, and I liked him. Why are you so surprised?”
“Somehow, he didn’t seem the type to be hobnobbing with newspaper columnists.”
“Stone, Arnie didn’t hobnob with me; he called me on the phone when we had to talk. I really only met the man face-to-face on one occasion. Anyway, you would be amazed to know who some of my sources are.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to run, darling. Want to get together later this week?”
He knew what that meant, and he thought of Arrington. “Ah… I’ll call you, if that’s okay.”
“That’s okay.” She got into the back of her car, and the driver closed the door.
Stone sprinted toward Dino’s departing cruiser, barely catching it in time.
“Ride didn’t work out?” Dino asked.
“Nah, she wasn’t going back to Manhattan.”
“You know a woman who gets chauffeured around in a Mercedes?”
“That was Amanda Dart.”
“What the hell was she doing here?”
Stone nodded toward the two young detectives in front. “I’ll tell you later.”
They drove back to Manhattan in silence. When they reached Stone’s house, Dino got out of the car with him.
“So, what was Amanda Dart doing at Arnie Millman’s funeral? She his ex-wife or something?”
“Funny. She said Arnie used to be a source for her.”
“For a gossip columnist? I don’t believe it.”
“She apparently has some fairly unbelievable sources.”
“That don’t add up,” Dino said flatly.
“She’s probably got a source or two in every station house in Manhattan,” Stone said. “How do you think these people get the story so fast when somebody of note gets arrested? It makes sense: it’s just funny that Arnie was one of them.”
“Well, I guess he liked a few extra bucks as well as the next guy.”
“I guess so. I gotta run. See you.”
Dino waved good-bye and got back into his car.
Stone put Arnie and Amanda out of his mind and started thinking about his dinner date.
Chapter 24
Stone arrived at Arrington’s building on time and was announced by the lobby man. On the way up he reflected on the fact that he had once known another woman who had lived in this building, and the memory of that experience made him uneasy.
She came to the door wearing an apron over white pants and a white turtleneck sweater, seeming a negative image of the girl in black he had last seen that morning. There was a glass of wine in her hand. “Hi, come on in.”
He followed her into a small apartment, especially small for such a posh building. There seemed to be only a living room and, through an open door, a bedroom. A counter divided the larger room into living and kitchen areas. She waved him to a stool at the counter and poured him a glass of red wine from an open bottle that was already nearly half empty. “Or would you prefer booze?” she asked belatedly.
“This is fine,” Stone said, settling on the stool. “Smells good; what are you cooking?”
“A lamb dish,” she said. “One of a repertoire that includes only half a dozen recipes, all easy.”
“Easy is okay when it smells like that.”
“How was your day?”
“I went to a funeral in Brooklyn, that’s how my day was.”
“Oh. Somebody important to you?”
“Somebody I knew when I was a cop. Another cop, retired.”
“Are you sad?”
“I didn’t know him all that well, but he sometimes worked for me. He was a likeable guy.”
“I’m not sad anymore,” she said. “Again, I’m sorry about last night.”
“Last night had its rewards. And this morning.”
She smiled a little. “I’m glad you think so. Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes; good thing you were on time.”
“I’m compulsively on time.”
“Not I.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She checked something in the oven, then pulled a stool up to face him. “I don’t get you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you don’t add up.”
“No?”
“No. You’re this extremely polished man; you live in this very impressive house; you dress beautifully; you have something to do with a prestigious law firm, but you don’t actually work there; and yet you’re retired, at an early age, from a blue-collar job that doesn’t produce a whole lot of polished men.”
“I was something of a misfit on the force,” he said.
“That I believe.”
“And I was never allowed to forget it.”
“How so?”
“Well, as my former partner once said to me, ‘Stone, the police force is a kind of mystic lodge, and you never joined.’”
“You didn’t buy into the cop culture?”
“Not really. I found the work fascinating and often rewarding, but, I confess, I was unable to become one of the guys. I knew it, and they knew it. The only cop I was ever really close to was my ex-partner, Dino.”
“Dino Bacchetti?”
Stone blinked. “How did you know that name?”
“I wrote something for New York magazine once, about a case at the Nineteenth Precinct. I interviewed him for it.”
“I’m surprised you got out of his office with your virtue.”
She laughed. “I nearly didn’t; Dino is very smooth.”
“That he is.”
“So you were white bread among the Italians, the Irish, and the Hispanics in the department?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“What, exactly, do you do for Woodman and Weld?”
“Their dirty work, mostly; the odd criminal case, the odd investigation.”
“Now I’m getting the picture.”
“So I add up now?”
“The house doesn’t add up.”
“I inherited it from a great-aunt, my grandfather’s sister.”
“Money, too?”
“Just the house. I did a lot of the restoration myself, but it damn near broke me.”
“I’m glad you’re not filthy rich,” she said.
“I’m not glad,” he replied. “I’ve got nothing at all against filthy rich. My father, God rest his soul, would be deeply ashamed of my attitude.”