Class Act

1

Stone Barrington hipped his way out of a cab (the Bentley was being serviced) and found a discreet doorway with a polished brass number. He rang a bell, which was answered by a silken female voice. “How may I help you?” She made it sound more like a bordello than what he was looking for.

“Stone Barrington to see John Coulter.”

“Please come in.” A buzzer gently sounded.

Stone entered the doorway, which led him to another doorway, that led to a comfortably furnished sitting room — Chesterfield sofa, wing chairs, etcetera — which made the place seem more like an exclusive gentleman’s club. A young woman in a Chanel suit sat behind a large mahogany desk. “Good morning,” she said, identifying herself by her voice as the person Stone had heard on the intercom. “Mr. Barrington?”

“Yes.”

“Will you follow me?”

That turned out to be an unexpected pleasure, as the suit was snug and its contents shapely. She led him to a door bearing a brass-plate placard: lark was imprinted upon it. She knocked gently, but firmly. There was a muffled response, then she opened the door and stood back for Stone to enter first.

The room was akin to a junior suite in an upscale boutique hotel. Once the door had closed behind him, he found that even the hospital bed was made of mahogany, as was the rack beside it, from which a pair of IV bags were draped. The lighting was pleasant, without the usual glare, a cheerful conflagration burned in a gas fireplace and a silk dressing gown hung from a peg on the wall near the foot of the bed.

“Stone?” a man’s voice asked. “Is that you? It hurts to open my eyes.” The man was unidentifiable, because of a large bandage across the bridge of his nose.

“It is I, Jack. I hope you feel a good deal better than you look.”

“They just gave me some morphine. It will kick in shortly, then I’ll feel human again.” Jack Coulter’s voice was the well-modulated, upper-accented baritone Stone had expected.

“Ahhhh,” Jack breathed.

“The morphine kicked in?”

“I’m probably going to become addicted before they let me out of here. Would you like a drink?”

“What, grain alcohol?”

“There’s a bar in the cupboard over there.” Jack waved a hand.

Stone opened the door and found a full wet bar — sink, ice machine, a row of Baccarat whiskey glasses, and a dozen choices of libation. He found a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon, filled a glass with ice, then filled that with bourbon. “I’m not offering you one, because I don’t think you should mix booze and morphine,” he said.

“I don’t need it,” Jack said contentedly. “Have a seat.”

Stone pulled up a well-padded, burnished leather armchair and sank into it. Jack seemed to doze for a moment. Stone took the opportunity to reminisce about his first encounter with the man who had walked into his office, in his Turtle Bay townhouse, a few years back. He was maybe six-four, 250, wearing a dated suit that he could barely button. He had had a haircut that had been inflicted entirely with electric shears, and had been carrying a large suitcase and a smaller, non-matching duffel. He was frightening, until he spoke, in a voice much like the one he used now. He was also a good storyteller.

His name was John Fratelli, he said, and he had been a guest at an upstate hostelry called Sing Sing, until early that morning. He had spent the past twenty-three years there and had served all his time, without application for parole.

That explained the haircut, Stone thought, and the twenty-three years explained the suit. Stone inquired as to why he had not accepted parole. Fratelli explained that he had had an obligation to protect a fellow resident, who was smaller and weaker than he, and who had been in increasingly delicate health for the past three years. A few days earlier, he had died in his bed. His name was Eduardo Buono.

Fratelli’s name meant nothing to Stone, but Buono’s rang a loud bell. He had been the mastermind behind the heist of fifteen million dollars from a currency-handling operation at John F. Kennedy Airport, after which he had distributed half the take among a half dozen abettors, then vanished into the mists with the other seven and a half million, after instructing them not to spend a penny of the money for a year. They had, of course, paid off their bookies, were fitted with new wardrobes, and drove shiny new Cadillacs off dealers’ lots — all this in the first two weeks after their score. When arrested and confronted with their misdeeds and the sentences they would probably draw, they had ratted out, as the expression goes, their benefactor, Eduardo Buono, who thereafter never said a word to anybody until he met John Fratelli, on the bus from Rikers Island to Ossining.

The two men had bonded on the drive up, to the point where Buono had confessed to his new friend that he was terrified of being raped in prison and sought his help in avoiding that fate. Fratelli’s mien was imposing enough that few challenged him, and Buono had served his time virginally. Late in his life he gave Fratelli a reward for his fealty, the name and address of a New York City bank and the number of a large safe-deposit box and its key, which had resided for better than two decades in the orifice he had been so anxious to protect.

Fratelli said he had just come from the bank.

Stone had looked at the man’s tatty luggage with new respect and discovered what appeared to be two bullet holes. Fratelli said that someone had gotten there ahead of him and had been waiting when he left the bank.

For the next hour or so, the two men had conducted a wide-ranging discussion, under the protection of attorney-client privilege, on the means of disappearing from New York City, arriving in a place where Fratelli could be more anonymous, change his identity, and make more secure banking arrangements. Stone had also directed him to Brooks Brothers, where he could find apparel more suitable to the current quarter of the century.

Stone had heard from Fratelli sporadically, piecing together his story from their chats over the years. Fratelli had lost weight, grown hair, opened an offshore account, and met a very nice woman and her family, who were people of means. A few months later Stone had attended their wedding, and they had settled down in Hillary Coulter’s Fifth Avenue apartment. The next time Stone had seen them was at a large dinner party in that apartment, during which men with shotguns had entered and relieved all present of their jewelry. Jack Coulter had thought people from his past had done it, but that turned out not to be true.

“Stone,” Jack said, waking from his reverie. “I expect you want to know how I got here.”

“If you’d like to tell me, Jack.”

“Michael O’Brien,” he explained.

O’Brien had been among the detectives investigating the robbery, and he thought he had recognized Coulter as Fratelli. Stone had disabused him of that notion, and they had heard no more about it, until now.

“Tell me how it happened,” Stone said.