STONE WALKED Barbara Stein downstairs.
“Would you like to come and get the key now?” she asked. “You can ride with me.”
“Yes, thank you.” They got into her car, while the chauffeur held the door for her. Stone looked around the interior. It was the new Maybach, made by Mercedes-Benz, and he hadn’t been in one before.
“Go ahead and play with the seat,” she said, pointing to the controls. “Everyone wants to.”
Stone tried the switches and discovered that it was much like a first-class airline seat. He could nearly recline.
“Fun, isn’t it?” she asked, smiling.
Stone thought she looked very nice in a smile. “Yes, it is. I drive the small economy version of your car.”
“I would never have bought the thing, but Morris ordered it before he died, and I thought, what the hell?”
“How long were you and your husband married?” Stone asked, as they made their way silently through traffic.
“Twenty-one years,” she said. “I was twenty-two and working as a flight attendant on the transatlantic route. Morris flew with me twice, then asked me to dinner in London. I was swept off my feet. He had been widowed for less than a year.”
Stone was doing the arithmetic. She was older than he had thought, but apparent youth was common among the well-tended women of the ultrarich class.
“Do the math, yet?” she asked. “You’re blushing. It’s so rare to meet a man with blond hair these days; you even have blond eyebrows. What are your national origins?”
“English on both sides, all the way back to the Bronze Age, but I suppose a Viking rapist must have insinuated himself, somewhere along the way.”
“I expect it gets blonder in the summertime.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I’m Polish, myself,” she said. “My maiden name was Murawski.”
“A handsome people, the Poles.”
She laughed. “I like you, Mr. Barrington.”
“Please call me Stone.”
“And I’m Barbara. Where did the name come from?”
“My mother’s name was Matilda Stone.”
“The painter?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen her things at the Metropolitan, in the American Wing.”
The car drew to a smooth halt in front of 1111 Fifth Avenue, and they got out and went inside.
Barbara Stein lived in a three-story house, it turned out, but it was situated at the top of a fourteen-story apartment building. The elevator opened directly into the foyer, and a butler stood waiting to open the doors to the living room, which was on the top floor.
“There are two other floors downstairs,” she said, “but we always enjoyed entertaining up here, because of the terrace. She led him through French doors to a beautifully planted terrace stretching the width of the building, with spectacular views west and south over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum.
“Breathtaking,” Stone said.
“Would you like something to drink? Iced tea, perhaps?”
“Thank you, perhaps another time. I’d really like to get that key and get some people over there as quickly as possible.”
“Of course; please follow me.” She led him down a floor to a gigantic bedroom and thence to a large, mahogany-paneled dressing room, filled with a man’s clothing. She rummaged in the top drawer of a built-in stack and came up with a key. “Here it is.” She gave him the address.
“Do you know if he has a safe there?”
“I expect so; there’s one here, too, behind his suits.”
“Then, if it’s not too much of an imposition, I’d like to bring some people back here to go through his things and open the safe.”
“Of course; whenever you like.”
“In the meantime, you might ask your staff to pack all these things, and they needn’t be careful about how they do it.”
She laughed. “I’ll see that they make a mess of it.” She led Stone back upstairs and to the foyer. “Thank you so much for your advice. When can we start on the annulment?”
“First, let me see what we come up with in the search, then we can make a decision.”
She rang for the elevator and held out her hand. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.” She held onto his hand just a moment longer than necessary.
“I’ll phone you later today,” Stone said. “Are you in the book?”
“Under B. Stein.”
He gave her his card. The elevator arrived, and Stone rode down. On the sidewalk, he phoned Lance.
“Yes?” Lance drawled.
“Meet me at . . .” Stone looked at the address and read it to him. “Between Lex and Third.”
“Why?”
“Because I have the key to Whitney Stanford’s apartment at that address.”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Fine, and bring some help and a safecracker. Later, you’ll need to go to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, too, where his wife lives.”
“Wife?”
“Of some months. She was formerly married to Morris Stein.”
“The Morris Stein?”
“The same.”
“Good God!”
“Fifteen minutes.”
THEY ARRIVED at the building, in the East Sixties, simultaneously, Lance with two companions. It was a small apartment building, with no doorman. They took the elevator to the top floor and let themselves in. “We have Mrs. Stanford’s permission, so a warrant won’t be necessary,” Stone said.
“A warrant is rarely necessary,” Lance replied drolly. The place was a two-bedroom floor-through, professionally decorated in an impersonal style, with a roof terrace at the back.
“All right,” Lance said, “take the place apart, but this is a covert search; everything must be left exactly as it was. Jim, find the safe and get started on that first.” The two men went to work, and so did Stone and Lance.
“Watch me for a minute,” Lance said. He donned a pair of latex gloves, went to a desk in the living room, pulled out a drawer, and set it on top of the desk, then he removed and replaced precisely the contents of the drawer. “Like that,” he said. “I realize you haven’t been trained to do this, so go slowly, and check the bottoms of the drawers, too.” He handed Stone some gloves.
He left Stone to the desk and went to another room. Stone went through the drawers very carefully, and under the right-hand top drawer he found a small piece of paper taped in place.
“Lance,” he called.
“Yes?”
“You’re not going to need to crack the safe; I’ve found the combination.”
Lance returned, looked at the piece of paper once, then went away again. A moment later, he called out, “Stone, come in here.”
Stone found his way to the master bedroom and into a dressing room. Lance stood before an open safe.
“My God,” he murmured. There were four passports stacked up in a corner of the safe, next to stacks of cash in dollars, pounds and Euros. Stone picked up a stack. “Two-dollar bills,” he said, “unused and with consecutive serial numbers. The rest seem to be hundreds.”
“Photograph everything,” Lance said to his men, “then put it all back. I want an individual, readable shot of every page of every passport. Take down the serial numbers of every bank note.”
Lance left them to it while he and Stone went quickly through the other rooms of the apartment. Except for the contents of the safe, not another scrap of paper yielded any useful information.
TWO HOURS LATER they had finished and returned everything in the apartment to its original state. As they were about to open the door, there was a noise from the other side. Lance held a finger to his lips, and he and the other two men produced guns and stood away from the door.
There was a scraping noise that went on for, perhaps, thirty seconds, then the door opened and two men walked in, followed by a woman.
The woman was Tiffany Baldwin.