New York Dead

Fittipaldi.”
    Fangio stood on it.

    The emergency room at Bellevue was usually a zoo, but this was incredible. People were lying on carts everywhere, overflowing into the hallways, screaming, crying, while harried medical personnel moved among them, expediting the more serious cases.
    “What the hell happened?” Dino asked a sweating nurse.
    “Subway fire in the Twenty-third Street Station,” she replied, “not to mention half a dozen firemen and a couple of ambulance drivers. We caught it all.”
    “There’s nobody at the desk,” Stone said. “How can we find out if somebody’s been admitted?”
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, wheeling a cart containing a screaming woman down the hallway. “Paperwork’s out the window.”
    “Come on,” Stone said, “let’s start looking.”
    Fifteen minutes later, they hadn’t found her. Dino was looking unwell.
    “I gotta get outta here, Stone,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m not cut out for this blood-and-guts stuff.”
    “Wait a minute,” Stone said, pointing across the room at a man on a stretcher. “A white coat.”
    They made their way across the room to the stretcher. The man’s eyes were closed, but he was conscious; he was holding a bloody handful of gauze to an ear.
    “Are you an ambulance driver?” Stone asked. “The one the fire truck hit?”
    The man nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion brought.
    “What happened to your patient?” Stone asked.
    “I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “My partner’s dead; I don’t know what happened to her.”
    Stone straightened up. “Then she’s got to be here,” he said.
    “But she’s not,” Dino replied. “We’ve looked at every human being, alive or dead, in this place. She is definitely not here.”
    They looked again, anyway, even though Dino wasn’t very happy about it. Dino was right. Sasha Nijinsky wasn’t there.
    “Downstairs,” Stone said.
    “Do we have to?”
    “You sit this one out.”
    Stone walked down to the basement and checked with the Bellevue morgue. There had been two admissions that evening, both of them from the subway fire, both men. Stone looked at them to be sure.
    He trudged back up the stairs and went to the main admissions desk. “Have you admitted an emergency patient, a woman, named Nijinsky?” he asked. “Probably a private room.”
    “We don’t have a private room available tonight,” the nurse said. “In fact, we don’t have a bed. If she came into the emergency room, she’s on a gurney in a hallway somewhere.”
    Stone walked the halls on the way back to the ER, where he found Dino in conversation with a pretty nurse. “Say good night, Dino,” Stone said.
    “Good night, Dino,” Dino replied, doing a perfect Dick Martin.
    The nurse laughed.
    “She’s not here,” Stone said.
    “So, now what?”
    “The city morgue,” Stone said.

    Compared with Bellevue, the city morgue, just up the street, was an island of serenity.
    “Female Caucasian, name of Nijinsky,” Dino told the night man. “You got one of those?”
    The man consulted a logbook. “Nope.”
    “You got a Caucasian Jane Doe?”
    “I got three of them,” the man replied. He pointed. “They’re still on tables.”
    Stone walked into the large autopsy room, the sound of his heels echoing off the tile walls. “Let’s look,” he said.
    The first was at least seventy and very dirty.
    “Bag lady,” the attendant said.
    The second was no older than fifteen, wearing a black leather microskirt.
    “Times Square hooker, picked up the wrong trick.”
    “Let’s see the third,” Stone said.
    The third fit Sasha Nijinsky’s general description, down to the hair color, but she had taken a shotgun in the chest.
    “Domestic violence,” the attendant said smugly.
    Stone couldn’t tell if the man was for it or against it. “It’s not she,” he said.
    “Don’t talk like that,” Dino whispered. “It’s not her.”
    “It is not she,” Stone said again. He produced a card and wrote his home number on the back, then handed it to the attendant. “This is extremely important,” he said. “If you get a Nijinsky in here, or a white Jane Doe in her thirties, call me. And please pass that on to whoever relieves you. If someone overlooks her, heads will ricochet off these walls for days to come.” “I got ya,” the man said, and he stapled Stone’s card to his logbook. “They won’t miss it here.”

    In the car, Dino, who was usually the most