New York Dead (35 page)
The clerk received the verdict, read it to himself, then handed it to Judge O’Neal. She read it and handed it back to him.
“The defendant will rise and look upon the jury; the jury will look upon the defendant.”
Stone stood with his client.
“The clerk will read the verdict.”
The clerk looked at the piece of paper. “We, the jury, unanimously find the defendant guilty as charged.”
Stone’s client sighed audibly.
Well you might sigh, Stone thought. I tried to get you to plead to the lesser charge, you dumb schmuck. But you thought you could beat it.
“The jury is released with the thanks of the court for a job well done,” Judge O’Neal said. “Sentencing is set for the twenty-fifth of this month; bail is continued pending.” She struck the bench with her gavel and rose. The courtroom rose with her.
Stone turned to his client. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get a better verdict.”
“You warned me,” the man said. “Can I go home now?”
“Yes. We have to decide whether to appeal; I really think you should consider the expense.”
The man sighed again. “Why bother? I’ll do the time.”
“You’re free until sentencing, but you’d better be prepared not to go home after that. Bring a toothbrush.”
They shook hands, and the man walked sadly away. Stone began gathering his notes.
“Mr. Barrington?”
Stone looked up. Judge O’Neal was standing to one side of the bench, behind the railing.
“In my office, please,” she said primly.
Stone groaned. He had pressed his luck often in cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, and she had repeatedly called him down for it. Now, the lecture. Hell, he thought, I’m lucky not to have been held in contempt. He trudged into her chambers, ready to take his medicine.
She had perched on an arm of the big leather sofa. She undid her robes, and they fell aside to reveal a bright red dress that went particularly well with her blonde hair. She crossed her legs.
They look awfully good, he thought. Something stirred in him for the first time in a long while.
“I read about the Nijinsky case, of course,” she said. “I believe you discovered Ms. Nijinsky in a thoroughly dead condition.”
“That’s right, Judge. She was what a friend of mine calls ‘New York Dead.’”
“In that case, I will remind you of our wager of some time past,” O’Neal said, uncrossing her legs and recrossing them in the other direction.
He had forgotten.
“You, sir, owe me a dinner,” she said.
Stone smiled. “Yes, Your Honor,” he replied.
T
he Public Affairs Department of the New York City Police Department was not helpful in the research for this book. Individual officers were, however, and I would particularly like to thank Detective Jerry Giorgio of the 34th Squad Homicide Team for some enlightening conversations.
I thank Elaine Kaufman for keeping the home fires burning on Second Avenue and for running a place where a writer can get a decent table.
I am grateful to my editor, Ed Breslin, my London publisher, Eddie Bell, and all their colleagues at HarperCollins for their appreciation of this book and their hard work on its behalf.
Once again, I want to extend my gratitude to my agent, Morton Janklow, his associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the people at Janklow & Nesbit for their continuing care and concern for my career.
Stone Barrington: The First Five
New York Dead;
Dirt;
Dead in the Water;
Swimming to Catalina;
Worst Fears Realized
New York Dead
Everyone is always telling Stone Barrington that he’s too smart to be a cop, but it’s pure luck that places him on the streets in the dead of night, just in time to witness the horrifying incident that turns his life inside out.
Suddenly he is on the front page of every New York newspaper, and his life is hopelessly entwined in the increasingly shocking life (and perhaps death) of Sasha Nijinsky, the country’s hottest and most beautiful television anchorwoman.
No matter where he turns, the case is waiting for him, haunting his nights and turning his days into a living hell. Stone finds himself caught in a perilous web of unspeakable crimes, dangerous friends, and sexual depravity that has throughout it one common thread: Sasha.
“Hollywood-slick and fast-moving”
—
Los Angeles Daily News
“Suspenseful and surprising”
—
Atlanta Constitution
Dirt
Feared and disliked both for her poison pen and for her ice-queen persona, gossip columnist Amanda Dart finds the tables have turned. When an anonymous gossipmonger begins faxing the scathing details of Amanda’s sexual indiscretions to national opinion makers, she turns to Stone Barrington—ex-cop, fulltime lawyer, and sometime investigator—for help.
“This slickly entertaining suspenser displays Woods at the top of his game with no signs of flagging…. The narrative rockets toward an abrupt but absolutely stunning denouement. Using all his skills here, and subtly reminiscent of the waggish P.G. Wodehouse, Woods delivers a marvelously sophisticated, thoroughly modern, old-fashioned read.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“The devious plot…deftly skewering society types, would be enough to hook most of us, but veteran thriller writer Woods…shrewdly stacks the deck further by bringing back Barrington, the immensely likable star of…
New York Dead
. The result makes for a lost weekend’s worth of dirty fun—the kind you would want your friends to find out about.”
—
People
Dead in the Water
A beautiful young woman sails a large yacht into the harbor of the lovely Caribbean island nation of St. Marks.
Alone.
But she had departed from the other side of the Atlantic in the company of her husband, a well-known writer. His absence places Allison Manning under the intense scrutiny of St. Marks’s considerable Minister of Justice, Sir Winston Sutherland—and, therefore, under the protection of the otherwise vacationing Stone Barrington.
Sir Winston’s motives are unclear but his methods bear little resemblance to the judicial system ex-cop attorney Stone is accustomed to navigating—and Stone finds himself inextricably caught in a swirling storm of island madness and murder, made worse by a hurricane of sensational press coverage.
“One of his best…Woods is a pro and this goes by like a summer breeze, with just enough heat to make you sweat.”
—
Detroit News
“Fast paced…Thoroughly entertaining.”
—
Publishers Weekly
Swimming to Catalina
Stone Barrington had thought he’d heard the last of Arrington Carter after she’d left him to get engaged to Vance Calder, Hollywood’s hottest star. The last thing Stone expected was a desperate call from Calder.
Arrington has vanished, and her new fiancé wants Stone to come to L.A. and find her.
The assignment turns out to be the most dangerous and treacherous of Stone’s career. Powerful people are gunning for him. Where is Arrington? Why did she disappear? And does Vance Calder
really
want her back?
People
magazine’s “Page Turner of the Week”
“A heck of a plot, intrigue, and cover-up between the first page and the last.”
—
San Antonio Express News
Worst Fears Realized
It is the scenario that every ex-policeman dreads—all around him people are dying, and Stone Barrington suspects the killer may be someone he’d put in prison years before. Stone hooks up with his ex-partner from the NYPD, Dino Bacchetti, now the head of detectives in the 19th Precinct, and the two men must pool their resources to protect those close to them.
Stone’s former love, Arrington, now married to movie star Vance Calder, is back, too, and nose-to-nose with the new woman in Stone’s life—who has a Mafia bloodline and who may be as dangerous as she is beautiful.
From a premier table at Elaine’s to dark back alleys where lurk Armani-clad mobsters with the latest lethal accessories, Stone launches a life-and-death hunt that will test him as no case has ever done before.
“Satisfying to the last dirty deed…This seductive novel will have readers twitching with suspense.”
—
Library Journal
“Excellent…A fun read for fans of undercover agents who get plenty of action under the covers.”
—
USA Today
More Stone Barrington and Stuart Woods coming from PerfectBound…
The five Stone Barrington novels described above (there are, to date, nine, also including
L.A. Dead
;
Cold Paradise
;
The Short Forever
) are available from PerfectBound e-books as of April 2003. Please visit www.perfectbound.com for details of and to purchase these five titles and other Stuart Woods e-books titles. And get all the latest news on Stuart Woods at www.stuartwoods.com.
And new in hardcover from Stuart Woods…
Dirty Work
Back in New York City after the London adventures of
The Short Forever
, cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington is approached by a colleague at the firm of Woodman & Weld seeking help with a celebrity divorce case.
Heiress Elena Marks needs proof of her layabout husband’s infidelity before she can begin divorce proceedings. When the undercover work Stone sets up turns dirty—and catastrophic—leaving the errant husband dead and the mystery woman gone without a trace, Stone must clear his own good name and find a killer hiding among the glitterati of New York’s high society.
Carpenter—the beautiful British intelligence agent first encountered in
The Short Forever
—arrives in New York to begin an investigation of her own; Stone suspects that her case is strangely connected to the dead husband. And he and Dino, his former NYPD partner, are set to face the most bizarre and challenging assignment of their very colorful careers.
Stuart Woods
was born in Manchester, Georgia; graduated from the University of Georgia; and served in the Air National Guard. A professional sailor, Mr. Woods participated in the Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976 and the catastrophic Fastnet Race in 1979, in which fifteen competitors died.
W.W. Norton published Woods’s first novel,
Chiefs
, in 1981. It won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America that year and was made into a six-hour television drama starring Charlton Heston.
Mr. Woods, who has written twenty-six novels—including nine featuring Stone Barrington—currently resides in Florida, New York City, and Maine.
Please visit www.stuartwoods.com.
Critical Acclaim for Stuart Woods
and
DEAD IN THE WATER
“Fast-paced, filled with enough humor, sex, and clever surprises all the way to the last page to make it thoroughly entertaining amusement.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Trying to make this neat tale last more than one sitting would be like staying up all night nursing a Godiva truffle.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review
DIRT
“Blackmail, murder, suspense, love—what else could you want in a book?”
—
Cosmopolitan
“Dirty fun.”
—
People
“This slickly entertaining suspense displays Woods at the top of his game…. Subtly reminiscent of the waggish P. G. Wodehouse, Woods delivers a marvelously sophisticated, thoroughly modern, old-fashioned read.”
—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review
“There is something delightfully nasty about the way Stuart Woods settles every account in his crime capers. Even more delightful is the juggling act that lasts almost to the last page, when payoffs fall like autumn leaves.”
—
New York Daily News
IMPERFECT STRANGERS
“[Woods] does show a reader a good time.”
—
The Washington Post Book World
“Engage[s] the reader’s imagination in an unconventional way. Compel[s] us, in our mind’s eye, to place [the novel’s] events on the silver screen in the shadow of a latter-day Hitchcock, and somehow it works.”
—
Chicago Sun Times
HEAT
“High melodrama and unexpected twists make this Teflon-coated blockbuster business as usual in Woods’s practiced hands.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A high-concept action thriller.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Keeps you reading.”
—
Cosmopolitan
L.A. TIMES
“A slick, often caustically funny tale.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Stuart Woods is a wonderful storyteller who could teach Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy a thing or two.”
—
The State
(Columbia, S.C.)
NEW YORK DEAD
“Suspenseful and surprising.”
—
Atlanta Journal & Constitution