Free New York Dead by Stuart Woods Page A

pianist and from a background much like Dad’s—well-off Connecticut people, the Stones—who’d been wiped out in the crash. She was younger than Dad and very taken with the contrast between his upper-class education and his working-class job.”
    Cary wrinkled her brow. “Not Matilda Stone.”
    “Yes.”
    “Her work brings good prices these days at the auctions. I hope you have a lot of it.”
    “Only three pictures; her favorites, though.”
    “Go on with the autobiography.”
    “They lived together through the war years—the army wouldn’t take Dad because he was branded as a Communist, even though he never joined the party. They had a tough time. Then, after the war, Dad rented a property on Hudson Street, where he finally was able to have a proper workshop. Some of Mother’s friends, who had done well as artists, began to hire him for cabinetwork in their homes, and, by the time I was born, in ’fifty-two, he was doing pretty well. Mother’s work was selling, too, though she never got anything like the prices it’s bringing now, and, by the time I was old enough to notice, they were living stable, middle-class lives.
    “When I was in my teens, Dad had quite a reputation as an artist-craftsman; he was building libraries in Fifth Avenue apartments and even designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The Barringtons and the Stones were very far away, and I didn’t hear much about my forebears. Somehow, though, my parents’ backgrounds filtered down into my life. There were always books and pictures and music in the house, and I suppose I had a sort of Yankee upbringing, once removed.”
    “Did you go to Harvard, like your father?”
    “No; that would have infuriated him. I went to NYU and walked to class every day. By about my junior year, Ihad decided to go to law school. I didn’t have any real clear idea about what lawyers actually did—neither did a lot of my classmates in law school, for that matter—but, somehow, it sounded good. I did all right, I guess, had a decent academic record, and, in my senior year, the New York City Police Department had a program to familiarize law students with police work. I worked part-time in a station house, I rode around in a blue-and-white, and I just loved it. The cops treated me like the whitebread college kid I was, but it didn’t matter, the bug had bit. I took the police exam, and, almost immediately after I got my law degree, I enrolled in the Police Academy. In a way, I think I was imitating my father’s choice of a working-class life.”
    “You never took the bar?”
    “I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was hot to be a cop.”
    “Are you still?”
    “Yes, sort of. I love investigative work, and I’m good at it. I had a couple of good collars that got me a detective’s shield; I had a good rabbi—a senior cop who helped me with promotion; he’s dead now, though, and I seem to have slowed down a bit.”
    “But you’re different from other cops.”
    Stone sighed again. “Yes, I guess I am. I’ve been an outsider since the day I started at the academy.”
    “So you’re not going to be the next chief of police?”
    Stone laughed. “Hardly. You could get good odds at the 19th Precinct that I’ll never make detective first grade.”
    “What are you now?”
    “Detective second.”
    “So, you’re thirty-eight years old, and…”
    “Essentially without prospects,” Stone said, shrugging. “I can look forward to a pension in six years; a better one, if I can last thirty.”
    “Why are you limping?”
    Stone told her about the knee, keeping it as undramaticas possible. She listened and didn’t say anything. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, “and don’t leave out anything.”
    “My bio is much simpler,” she said. “Born and grew up in Atlanta; the old man was a lawyer, now a judge; two years at Bennington, which my father thought was far too radical—I was wearing only black clothes and not washing my hair