New York Dead (Stone Barrington 1)

Stone turned to her. “I got the impression from what you said in the elevator that I shouldn’t necessarily believe everything Barron Harkness tells me.”

“Why, Detective,” Cary said, her eyes wide and innocent. “I never said that.” She scrunched down in the seat and laid her head back. “And, anyway, you’re off duty, remember?”

Chapter 10

Elaine accepted a peck on the cheek, shook Cary ’s hand, and gave them Woody Allen’s regular table. Stone heaved a secret sigh of relief. This was no night for Siberia.

“I’m impressed,” Cary said when they had ordered a drink. “Whenever I’ve been in here before, we always got sent to Siberia.”

“You’ve clearly been coming here with the wrong men,” Stone replied, raising his glass to her.

“You could be right,” she said, looking at him appraisingly. “You’re bad casting for a cop, you know.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t be coy. It’s not the first time you’ve been told that.”

Pepe, the headwaiter, appeared with menus. Stone waved them away and asked for the specials.

“No, it’s not the first time I’ve been told that,” Stone said, when they had chosen their food. “I’m told that every time a cop I don’t know looks at me.”

“All right,” she said, leaning forward, “I want the whole biography, and don’t leave anything out, especially the part about why you’re a cop and not a stockbroker, or something.”

Stone sighed. “It goes back a generation. My family, on my father’s side, was from western Massachusetts, real Yankees, mill owners.”

“ Barrington, as in Great Barrington, Massachusetts?”

“I don’t know; I didn’t have a lot of contact with the Massachusetts Barringtons. My father was at Harvard – rather unhappily, I might add – when the stock market crash of ’twenty-nine came. His father and grandfather were hit hard, and Dad had to drop out of school. This troubled him not in the least, because it freed him to do what he really wanted to do.”

“Which was?”

“He wanted to be a carpenter.”

“A carpenter? You mean with saws and hammers?”

“Exactly. He took it up when he was a schoolboy at Exeter, and he showed great talent. My grandfather was horrified, of course. Carpentry wasn’t the sort of thing a Barrington did. But when he could no longer afford to keep his son in Harvard, well…”

“What does this have to do with your being a cop?”

“I’m coming to that, eventually. Dad got to be something of a radical, politically, as a result of the depression. He gravitated to Greenwich Village, where he fell in with a crowd of leftists, and he earned a living knocking on people’s doors and asking if they wanted anything fixed. He lived in the garage of a town house on West Twelfth Street and didn’t own anything much but his tools.

“He met my mother in the late thirties. She was a painter and 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?”