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produced a curved suturing needle and clamped it in the jaws of the forceps.
    “Did you and Sasha Nijinsky have a relationship?” Stone asked.
    Van Fleet looked thoughtful for a moment. “Why, yes, we did. I was her correspondent, although she seemed to think of me as an antagonist, which I never intended myself to be. She was my…” He paused. “She was an object of interest to me, I suppose. I greatly admired her talents. Do you know how she’s doing?” he asked, concernedly. “She’s in the hospital, they said on television.” “We don’t have any information on her condition,” Stone said. God knew that was true.
    Van Fleet nodded sadly. He bent over the corpse, peeled back the lips with rubber-gloved fingers, and inserted the needle in the inside of the upper lip, passing it through the inside of the lower lip, then pulled it tight.
    Stone stopped asking questions and watched with a horrible fascination. So did Dino. Van Fleet continued to skillfully manipulate the forceps and the needle, until the web of thread reached across the width of the mouth. Then he pulled the thread tight, and the mouth closed, concealing the stitching on the inside of the lips. Van Fleet made a quick surgical knot, snipped off the thread, and tucked the end out of sight at the corner of the mouth.
    “Shit,” Dino said.
    “Mr. Van Fleet, could you leave that until we’re finished, please?” Stone said.
    “Of course.”
    “Can you account for your whereabouts between two and three A.M. this morning?”
    “
You
can account for my whereabouts at two,” Van Fleet said, smiling. “I was where you were.”
    “I remember,” Stone said. “At what time, exactly, did you leave Elaine’s?”
    “A few minutes after you did,” Van Fleet said. “About two twenty, I’d say. Maybe the bartender would remember.”
    “Where did you go then?”
    “I drove down Second Avenue, and in the sixties I saw a sort of commotion. It seemed that someone had been hurt. I have some medical skills, so I stopped to see if I could help. They were loading a stretcher into an ambulance. I didn’t know it was Sasha until this morning, when I turned on
The Morning Show
.” “Who else was at the scene when you stopped?” Stone asked.
    “Two ambulance men, two or three Con Ed men, and a man with a television camera.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “I went home.”
    “What route did you take?”
    “I continued down Second Avenue all the way to Houston, then turned right, then left on Garamond Street. That’s where I live.”
    “Did you see anyone you knew?”
    “At two thirty in the morning?”
    “Anyone at all. Someone else in your building?”
    “There is no one else in my building. I live over a former glove factory.”
    “We’d like to see your apartment. May we go there now?”
    “Why?”
    “It would help us in our investigation. If you had nothing to do with what happened to Miss Nijinsky, then we’d like to be able to cross you off our list of suspects.”
    “I’m a suspect?” Van Fleet asked, surprised. “What do you suspect me of?”
    “Well, we haven’t established the cause of… what happened, yet.”
    “Was there a crime?”
    “We haven’t determined that yet.”
    “My impression from the news was that Sasha’s fall was a suicide attempt.”
    “That’s certainly a possibility. We treat any unknown cause of death as homicide, until we know otherwise.”
    “Then you suspect me of a homicide you’re not sure was committed?”
    “As I said, Mr. Van Fleet, everyone who had anything to do with her is a suspect, until we know for sure what happened. Do you object to our seeing where you live?”
    Van Fleet shrugged. “Not really, but I think I should ask my lawyer how he feels about it.”
    “That’s your right.”
    “Unless you have a search warrant.”
    “We can get one if we feel it’s necessary.”
    “If a judge feels it’s necessary, you mean.”
    “We can get a search warrant.”
    “I watch a lot