Stuart Woods_Stone Barrington 21

eyes.
    “Stone, your client Herbert Fisher is waiting to see you,” she said.
    Stone sighed. “Come on, Peter,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to a New York character.” He led the way to his office.

5
    S tone introduced Peter to Herbie Fisher. “Peter, I have some business to discuss with Herbie. Why don’t you go upstairs and get unpacked? We’ll leave for dinner at eight-fifteen.”
    “All right,” Peter said, and ran up the stairs.
    Stone turned and looked at Herbie. “What’s going on, Herbie?” he asked. “You look kind of soggy.”
    “That’s because I went for a swim in New York Harbor.”
    “In December?”
    “It wasn’t exactly my choice.”
    Stone went into the little bathroom off his office, got a towel, returned and handed it to Herbie. “Have a seat and tell me about it.”
    Herbie took off his sodden overcoat, draped it over a chair, and sat down, running the towel over his hair. “Well, I went on a singles lunchtime cruise,” he said.
    “They do cruises in December?”
    “Singles don’t care if it’s cold; it’s warm inside the yacht.”
    “Yacht?”
    “These are expensive cruises. They use a seventy-foot yacht, and they serve a good lunch and wine. It’s two hundred fifty a head.”
    “Sounds profitable. Any likely women?”
    “Yes, a number.”
    “So why did you decide to get off before the yacht reached the dock?”
    “There was an altercation,” Herbie said.
    “What started it?”
    “There were these two guys, dressed well, but kind of beefy. They had knives.”
    “For this they charge two-fifty a head?” Stone asked.
    “I don’t know what they were doing there. Well, no, that’s wrong; I have a very good idea what they were doing there.”
    “Which was?”
    “Stephanie.”
    Stephanie was Herbie’s sort of ex-wife. She and her brother had, according to news reports, stolen nearly a billion dollars from their father’s asset management firm and skipped to a Pacific island nation with no extradition treaty.
    “She sent me some divorce papers a couple of times, but I just threw them away,” Herbie said.
    “Never a good idea to throw away legal documents,” Stone pointed out. “Then what?”
    “I was standing near the rear of the yacht’s saloon, talking to a girl, and these two guys appeared and said they needed to talk to me. They shoved me out on the afterdeck, and one of them said, ‘You should have signed the papers.’ Then both of them produced switchblades.”
    “And how did you handle that?” Stone asked, fascinated now.
    “I thought about it for about a nanosecond,” Herbie said, “and then I decided that there was no way to handle it that didn’t involve a lot of spilled blood, and it was my blood in question, so I ran for the rail. I jumped on a rear cockpit seat running, then just took a long leap.”
    “And where was the yacht at this time?”
    “Out near the Statue of Liberty,” Herbie replied.
    “I suppose the two guys didn’t follow you into the water?”
    “No, it was really, really cold. I made for Lady Liberty.”
    “Wearing an overcoat?”
    “I thought it would get even colder if I took it off. I swam like hell, and I was beginning to get pretty tired when my feet touched bottom. I waded the rest of the way. There was a dock with a ladder, so I climbed up that. I found a men’s room and turned on the heated hand-dryer thing, you know?”
    “Yes, I’ve met many of them.”
    “I dried my clothes a little and got warm, then I went back outside and mingled with the tourists, who were boarding the ferry for the return trip. Nobody asked me for a ticket.”
    “I guess they’re unaccustomed to selling tickets to patrons who arrived at the statue under their own steam.”
    “Yeah. When I got ashore I took a cab here.”
    “Why, Herbie? What would you like me to do?”
    “I would like to be divorced,” Herbie replied. “Will you handle that for me?”
    Herbie had won the lottery a couple of years before, and he had paid Stone a million-dollar retainer to handle all his legal affairs, and not a few of his personal problems.
    “Of course,” Stone said. “Maybe the best way to start would be to send me the papers Stephanie asked you to sign. Do you still have them?”
    “Yeah, they’re somewhere in my apartment.”
    “Well, grab a cab, go home, get out of those clothes, take a nice hot bath with a glass of brandy floating in it, and when the brandy is all gone, get out of the tub and fax me the