Dirt

of my sources are.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to run, darling. Want to get together later this week?” He knew what that meant, and he thought of Arrington. “Ah … I’ll call you, if that’s okay.”
    “That’s okay.” She got into the back of her car, and the driver closed the door.
    Stone sprinted toward Dino’s departing cruiser, barely catching it in time.
    “Ride didn’t work out?” Dino asked.
    “Nah, she wasn’t going back to Manhattan.”
    “You know a woman who gets chauffeured around in a Mercedes?”
    “That was Amanda Dart.”
    “What the hell was she doing here?”
    Stone nodded toward the two young detectives in front. “I’ll tell you later.”
    They drove back to Manhattan in silence. When they reached Stone’s house, Dino got out of the car with him.
    “So, what was Amanda Dart doing at Arnie Millman’s funeral? She his ex-wife or something?”
    “Funny. She said Arnie used to be a source for her.”
    “For a gossip columnist? I don’t believe it.”
    “She apparently has some fairly unbelievable sources.”
    “That don’t add up,” Dino said flatly.
    “She’s probably got a source or two in every station house in Manhattan,” Stone said. “How do you think these people get the story so fast when somebody of note gets arrested? It makes sense: it’s just funny that Arnie was one of them.” “Well, I guess he liked a few extra bucks as well as the next guy.”
    “I guess so. I gotta run. See you.”
    Dino waved good-bye and got back into his car.
    Stone put Arnie and Amanda out of his mind and started thinking about his dinner date.
     
Chapter 24
     
    Stone arrived at Arrington’s building on time and was announced by the lobby man. On the way up he reflected on the fact that he had once known another woman who had lived in this building, and the memory of that experience made him uneasy.
    She came to the door wearing an apron over white pants and a white turtleneck sweater, seeming a negative image of the girl in black he had last seen that morning. There was a glass of wine in her hand. “Hi, come on in.” He followed her into a small apartment, especially small for such a posh building. There seemed to be only a living room and, through an open door, a bedroom. A counter divided the larger room into living and kitchen areas. She waved him to a stool at the counter and poured him a glass of red wine from an open bottle that was already nearly half empty. “Or would you prefer booze?” she asked belatedly.
    “This is fine,” Stone said, settling on the stool. “Smells good; what are you cooking?”
    “A lamb dish,” she said. “One of a repertoire that includes only half a dozen recipes, all easy.”
    “Easy is okay when it smells like that.”
    “How was your day?”
    “I went to a funeral in Brooklyn, that’s how my day was.”
    “Oh. Somebody important to you?”
    “Somebody I knew when I was a cop. Another cop, retired.”
    “Are you sad?”
    “I didn’t know him all that well, but he sometimes worked for me. He was a likeable guy.”
    “I’m not sad anymore,” she said. “Again, I’m sorry about last night.”
    “Last night had its rewards. And this morning.”
    She smiled a little. “I’m glad you think so. Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes; good thing you were on time.”
    “I’m compulsively on time.”
    “Not I.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.”
    She checked something in the oven, then pulled a stool up to face him. “I don’t get you,” she said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, you don’t add up.”
    “No?”
    “No. You’re this extremely polished man; you live in this very impressive house; you dress beautifully; you have
something
to do with a prestigious law firm, but you don’t actually work there; and yet you’re retired, at an early age, from a blue-collar job that doesn’t produce a whole lot of polished men.” “I was something of a misfit on the force,” he said.
    “That I believe.”
    “And I was never allowed to forget it.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, as my former partner once said to me, ‘Stone, the police force is a kind of mystic lodge, and you never joined.’”
    “You didn’t buy into the cop culture?”
    “Not really. I found the work fascinating and often rewarding, but, I confess, I was unable to become one of the guys. I knew it, and they knew it. The only cop I was ever really close to was my ex-partner, Dino.” “Dino Bacchetti?”
    Stone blinked.