Originally listed in 2006 for $24.9 million with the late broker to the stars, Linda Stein, Sting and wife Trudie Styler's luscious layout has since suffered a $5 million price chop and a brokerage switch, leaving it listed for $19 million with Halstead's Mark Friedman and Robert Cabrera. That is, until Monday, when, according to the Web site Streeteasy, it entered contract. Mr. Friedman confirmed that the property had indeed gone to contract, but upon follow-up questions he hastily warded, "I can't really talk about it right now. I'm in the middle of 10 things right now."

The four-bedroom, 6,600-square-foot duplex was originally two apartments combined by former owner and fellow musicman Billy Joel, who sold the apartment to Sting in the 1980s, which explains the Park view piano room on the upper floor. Of the apartment the listing boasts, "newly renovated and restored to perfection!"  And crowning features include French doors with original glass transoms, "pristine" parquet floors with mahogany inlay, 28 18-foot windows with views overlooking Central Park and the East Side skyline (even though it's only the second and third floor), 23 closets to stash the ghosts of music's past, and a prep kitchen with a butler's pantry to "facilitate glorious dinner parties."

In the spring of 2008, the former Police frontman hopscotched a few blocks south to 15 Central Park West, closing on a $26.5 million, 16th-floor apartment in the golden goose of the West Side's gold coast.

cmalle@observer.com

What I miss much more are the real estate brokers themselves, especially the few at the top. They were eloquent, acrobatic, cruel, connected, imaginative, well bred and ill-mannered, sometimes all in the same afternoon.

There were all kinds. Kirk Henckels was a good-natured equestrian who always wore a bow tie. Carrie Chiang was a competitive ballroom dancer. John Burger liked talking on the phone about the subtleties of Park Avenue co-op design, even if he was poolside in the Hamptons.

Dolly Lenz was the genius power broker who explained over lunch at the Four Seasons that she doesn’t have tirades; she just cuts people out of her life. After I wrote a story that described how the recession had made her into a mere mortal, she stopped talking to me.

A. Laurance Kaiser IV, whose father died after leaving his Park Avenue club and stepping into a pothole, sold a single duplex at 834 Fifth Avenue four times—first for $225,000; then to John DeLorean; then to Reginald Lewis, the first African-American allowed into a so-called Good Building; then to Carl Icahn’s old chief investor, who paid $33,444,500.

“They lie, the brokers—they lie to brokers, they lie to clients. There’s lying. Lying,” Linda Stein, probably the first New York celebrity real estate agent, told me in the spring of 2007. “There is no high except the money, which is extremely taxable.” She was found murdered by her assistant that October.

And Edward Lee Cave was the pristinely genteel agent whose eponymous brokerage was taken over last year by Brown Harris Stevens. “When I first started, all the doormen had white gloves,” he sighed then. “And they don’t anymore. It’s called change.”

Stein's attacker beat her 24 times, continuing even after she was lying paralyzed and unconscious on the floor of her Fifth Avenue co-op, according to Tuesday's testimony by a coroner from the New York City Chief Medical Examiner's Office. Showing a series of disturbing autopsy photos of Stein's badly bruised and bloodied head and her broken neck, Dr. Michelle Slone said the victim must have been hit at least two dozen times, but it could have been as many as 80.

The 5'3", 132-pound Stein was unconscious by the time she fell, according to Dr. Slone, who examined the body Oct. 31, 2007, after Mandie Stein found her mother dead in her apartment at 10:30 p.m. the night before. There were no bruises on Stein's hands to indicate she fought back.

Stein had five lacerations on her head, caused by a blunt metal object, according to the coroner. Her neck was snapped at some point in the beating, likely from someone stepping on it, after which she would have been paralyzed. 

Family members of both the victim and defendant flinched when prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon showed autopsy photos of Stein's face and body, so badly beaten it was unrecognizable. Natavia Lowery, the 28-year-old personal assistant accused of the murder, watched the photos with a passive expression.

Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon asked the diminutive 5'1" coroner, "Could you have made these wounds?"

"Me?" Dr. Slone asked. "Well, someone my size," she said, if they were armed with a heavy metal weapon such as a stapler or candlestick holder.

But defense attorneys seized on uncertainties in the doctor's reconstruction of what happened in Stein's apartment that afternoon. "The blows could have been dealt by a construction tool of some kind, let's say a pipe," asked Wilfred Sta. Ana. Dr. Slone agreed a metal pipe, wooden object or even hammer could have been responsible for the star-shaped lacerations all over Stein's body.

Mr. Sta. Ana also questioned the coroner about the time of death, which she said could have occurred almost any time that day because Stein was found in a state of rigor mortis.

As the prosecution's case draws to a close, speculation has begun to mount about the defense's case, and specifically whether Ms. Lowery, who could spend 25 years in prison, will testify. Defense attorneys have been tightlipped, and declined to offer any indication of their strategy in the next few weeks.

"How do you go from, like, a best friend," Ms. Lowery asked of her boss, real estate broker Ms. Stein, "to an enemy?" 

On the tape, she recalled a warm relationship that went suddenly bad on the afternoon of Oct. 29, 2007, when Stein was smoking marijuana and checking emails and began swearing and yelling racist remarks at her assistant.

"What, you stuck on stupid or something?" Ms. Lowery repeated Stein's words, which she said were the breaking point.

She said she beat the 62-year-old star Douglas Elliman broker more than six times with a yoga stick, and then went about her day as usual, including running errands and buying Tasti D-lite. But when she returned to the Fifth Avenue office of Douglas Elliman without her boss, she faced what she'd done.

"I felt sorry. Really sorry," she said. "I stayed in a bad mood for a little while. I prayed. God, what's going on with me?"

Ms. Lowery's confession is a crucial piece of evidence in the prosecution's case. No fingerprint or DNA traces were found in the apartment at 965 Fifth where Stein lived or on Ms. Lowery's clothing.

Throughout the one-and-a-half-hour tape, Ms. Lowery repeated that she was not herself those few minutes. She occasionally wiped tears from her eyes, but generally seemed composed. "I went back to the apartment and I just wanted [Stein] to come to the door," she said. "I wanted to hear her voice. But she didn't.

"I just wanted to call somebody," she said in the video. "Say something." But she didn't talk to anyone about what may have happened that day, until 10 days later when she confessed to police at the 7^th Precinct in Lower Manhattan.

Ms. Lowery, 28, has since recanted the confession, saying police pressured her into saying she killed Stein. By the time the videotaped confession began around 7:45 a.m., Ms. Lowery had been sitting or lying on a bench in a windowless cinderblock room for 14 hours.

On cross-examination, defense attorney John Christie tried to get Detective Antonio Rivera to admit he proposed crucial details about the murder to Ms. Lowery."Did you suggest to Ms. Lowery," asked Mr. Christie, "that Linda Stein was blowing marijuana in her face so she killed her?"

Detective Rivera calmly denied all suggestions the confession was coerced. 

Ms. Lowery is on trial for killing her boss, Linda Stein, a real estate broker to celebrity clients. Prosecutors say she changed details of her confession to hide that she was also stealing thousands of dollars from her boss. Prosecutors spent most of this week interviewing detectives on the case, and plan to continue next week.

"I want to die here," Ms. Lowery began her written confession of the murder of real estate broker to the stars Linda Stein, made around 6:40 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2007, which was read by Detective Kevin Walla in court on Tuesday.

While being questioned, the personal assistant, then 25, filed her nails with a letter opener, until police took her purse, cell phone and other possessions, according to the detective's testimony. After that, she sat hunched with her head in her arms every time her questioners left the room.

Prosecutors describe a cold-blooded murder committed by a thief who knew she was about to get caught. But in her confession, Ms. Lowery told of an act of passion committed after a bitter argument with her boss. "[Stein] was blowing [marijuana smoke] in my face," she wrote in the statement Detective Walla read in court. "I told her, 'Stop. I can't function right now' ... She should have left me alone."

Ms. Lowery described beating her boss with a yoga stick, which Stein was holding. "It wasn't supposed to hurt like that," she wrote in the confession read by Detective Walla.

Ms. Lowery also hinted in her account that the killing was motivated by Stein's discovery that her assistant had stolen thousands of dollars from her.

When Ms. Lowery offered to buy her own lunch, Stein replied, "I never heard a black person say [they can save money]," according to the confession. 

Detective Walla's full day of testimony came after court ground to a halt on Monday. Ms. Lowery made an emotional plea to trade her team of three attorneys from Neighborhood Defender Services in Harlem for Paul Brennar, a lawyer hired by her family. Judge Richard Carruthers denied the request, but permitted Mr. Brennar to sit at the defense table as an adviser.

On Tuesday, Ms. Lowery's young defense team launched their most spirited attack yet.

"There are a number of ways to solve a murder, aren't there?" Thomas Giovanni began his cross-examination of Detective Walla.

"None of Ms. Stein's blood was found on my client's possessions," he pressed the detective in a rapid-fire line of questioning. "There were no witnesses to the incident. No hair and fiber were found on Linda Stein's body. No DNA connecting my client to this case, correct?"

The powerful Manhattan real estate broker made a lot of money and enemies on the way to the top, Mr. Giovanni said, both of which could have motivated a number of people to kill her.

Stein's younger daughter, Mandy, was already questioned on the witness stand about her financial difficulties. She was found with blood on her hands the night of the Oct. 30, 2007 murder, after trying to roll her mother over to perform CPR. Police allowed her to wash it off before forensic investigators arrived, Mr. Giovanni noted. He also asked the detective about possible motives of ex-lovers, construction workers who Ms. Stein had berated at her building at 965 Fifth, and disgruntled co-workers.

"You need to get an understanding of who Linda Stein was," the defense attorney said, "To get an understanding of who would want to hurt her."

According to broker Louise Stocker, Ms. Lowery had said, "We're going to have to put an end to this," when asked about working for Stein a couple of days before Stein's October 2007 murder. Ms. Stocker's testimony came on Thursday, during the second week of the prosecution's case.

Stein, 62, could not grip with her right hand after treatment for breast cancer, and needed assistance washing her hair, putting on makeup or buttoning her shirt. Ms. Lowery, then 25, helped her with all these basic tasks, Ronald Tardanico, the Douglas Elliman broker who hired Ms. Lowery, testified on Friday.

Mr. Tardanico testified that the young assistant approached him in mid-October, after working for Stein for three months, asking to change positions because she was finding it difficult to work with the broker. Ms. Lowery said Stein would often ask her to stay late into the evening "just to keep her company," Angelique Loffredo, a detective at the 19^th Precinct, testified on Friday.

Ms. Lowery complained about being made to work late for no reason when the detective visited the Lowery family at their home on Montrose Avenue in Brooklyn. Sitting in the second row on Friday, Ms. Lowery's mother shook her head vigorously and whispered, "That's not true," until court security told her to be quiet. 

Ms. Lowery said the broker yelled racial slurs at Puerto Rican construction workers in her presence. She grew skilled at calming her boss down and offering her "the purple pill," which helped calm her nerves, the detective testified.

Starting in August of 2007, Ms. Lowery began to transfer over $30,000 to herself from her boss's Wachovia and American Express accounts, a financial investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney's office also testified Friday in court.

Ms. Lowery used the money to pay off her student loans, buy plane tickets, take out cash to use for minor expense like cab rides, and, eventually, in December 2007 to pay for her first attorney in the murder trial.

Prosecutors played answering machine messages of Ms. Lowery impersonating her boss to pay of over $1,100 in student loans and open an American Express account.

In the second week of the trial, testimony flew by, often finishing ahead of schedule. Veteran prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon questioned witnesses with precision. A team of three defense attorneys from Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem declined to cross-examine many witnesses or asked one or two brief questions.

The full wooden benches of the first week gave way to largely empty wooden benches, except for the two families—Stein's Upper East-siders dressed largely in black, and Ms. Lowery's family and friends from church in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors are expected to call more detectives, promising a more dramatic week if they show Ms. Lowery's confession to police at the 9^th Precinct.

Ending the first week of testimony in the murder trial of Stein's former assistant, Natavia Lowery, prosecutors called Mark Benecke, who worked with Ms. Stein selling pricey homes to the stars at real estate firm Douglas Elliman. The judge abruptly called a recess for the weekend after Mr. Benecke's revelation.

Mr. Benecke, who met Stein haunting Studio 54 in the 1980s, said they were watching Monday Night Football when his friend confided her suspicions. "Mark, what would you say," Stein asked, "if you thought someone was stealing from you and not doing right by you?"

The next day he called at 1 p.m. to ask his friend of 30 years to share a glass of birthday champagne. He was surprised when instead her assistant answered.

"Natavia answered the phone and said Linda was out taking a walk," Mr. Benecke recalled. Security tapes from earlier in the trial show Stein did not leave her building that day.

Ms. Lowery, 28, is accused of killing her boss and stealing thousands of dollars for taxi rides and plane tickets, and to buy her way into the premiere of American Gangster. The defense conceded in its opening statement that Ms. Lowery is guilty of theft, but not of murder.

Earlier on Friday, Robert O'Donoghue, who supervised the crime scene after Stein was killed Oct. 30, 2007, testified that the apartment where he found her badly beaten body was otherwise orderly. Police spotted small dots of blood two feet from the victim, including on a photograph of her young granddaughter sitting on a nearby table. Stein was lying face down with a hood pulled over her head, which limited blood splatter, according to Mr. O'Donoghue.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Wilfredo Sta. Ana noted that there were in fact 13 swabs of blood taken from the crime scene. "You found blood here, and here, and here," Mr. Sta. Ana pointed out each spot to the jurors, including an oil painting and desktop that were at least several feet away from the body.

Samantha Stein also testified Friday, answering questions about her dire financial situation at the time of her mother's death. Defense attorneys have pointed at Stein's two daughters' tumultuous relationship with their mother and their financial dependence on her as possible motives (daughter Mandy testified last week).

Next week Mr. Benecke is set to describe the rest of his conversation with Stein, one of the last she had before her death. The prosecution also plans to call its final few witnesses, co-workers from Douglas Elliman.

Mandy Stein, 34, described her mother as "controversial," under cross-examination by defense attorneys. They fought over money, and several weeks before her death the Manhattan broker kicked Mandy out of the New York apartment where she was staying to work on a documentary about CBGB that her mother helped fund.

"Just because you had a fight with your mother a few weeks before her death," said prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, "does not mean you killed her."

Judge Richard Carruthers warned the defense not to cast suspicion on Ms. Stein in the killing without evidence. He excluded angry e-mails exchanged between the two women.

Prosecutors also questioned building superintendent Ed McQuaid, who rushed to help Ms. Stein the night in October 2007 when she found her mother murdered.

It was impossible to enter the Fifth Avenue apartment building where Stein lived on the 18th floor without being captured on camera, Mr. McQuaid, who has managed the property for 12 years, told prosecutors.

Security footage from the afternoon of the crime shows Stein's personal assistant Natavia Lowery, who is accused of the murder, coming and going several times, wearing tight khakis and a dark grey jacket, and at points carrying her boss' turquoise handbag. She left finally at 5:04 p.m.

On the tape, Mandy Stein arrives several hours later, at 10:21. Four minutes later Mr. McQuaid is seen rushing to the apartment, where he found the 62-year-old woman lying face down in a pool of black blood.

The 9/11 operator instructed him to give the victim CPR, but it was too late.

"I didn't think it was a good idea for Mandy to see me turn her [mother] over," he said. "I knew she was dead."

Defense attorneys noted there is no blood splattered on Ms. Lowery's clothing in any of the security footage. They also pressed Mr. McQuaid on the level of security in the building, which was under construction. Stein had chastised several of the workers about the noise in the months before her death.

Natavia Lowery, 28, is charged with hitting her boss in the head 10 times with an exercise stick, and stealing from her over the six months she was employed as the prominent broker's assistant at Douglas Elliman. Stein's boldface roster of clients included Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Andy Warhol estate.

The trial, which is expected to last up to two months, continues tomorrow with the prosecution witness, a porter at the apartment building.

The indebted Ms. Lowery, now 28, stole repeatedly and often brazenly from her boss, whose star-studded Rolodex included Sting, Angelina Jolie and close friend Elton John, according to the defense's opening statement.

"Natavia was more interested in what she was doing at night" than in advancing her career as Stein's personal assistant at Manhattan real estate company Douglas Elliman, her lawyer said, as Ms. Lowery sat upright and expressionless in Manhattan Supreme Court, wearing six-inch heels and a dark grey suit.

She wasn't savvy enough to murder her boss without a trace of physical evidence, John Christie, of Neighborhood Defender Services in Harlem, told jurors.

The courtroom was packed for the opening of the trial, which Judge Richard Carruthers told jurors will likely last eight weeks. It has drawn attention due to Stein's high-profile status, as well as Ms. Lowery's confession to police that she beat her boss to death with a yoga stick for blowing marijuana in her face.

"Natavia got by in life by telling people what they wanted to hear," Mr. Christie said, addressing the prosecution's key evidence, Ms. Lowery's confession at the 7^th Precinct about a week after the murder.

The prosecution presented a very different picture of Ms. Lowery, as a calculating thief who reaped rewards "not earned, but taken anyway" during the six months she worked for Stein. Ms. Lowery opened two American Express accounts using her employer's name and forged a $4,000 check to the Girls and Boys Clubs to earn tickets to the premiere of American Gangster, according to the prosecution's opening statement.

"No one could enter that apartment building without being observed," Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, of the Manhattan District Attorney's office, told jurors of Stein's 18^th-floor apartment at 965 Fifth Avenue, which could only be accessed by a manned elevator. Security tapes will show Ms. Lowery was the only person who entered Stein's the day she was murdered, Oct. 30, 2007, the prosecutor said in her opening statement.

According to Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon, when confronted by her feisty boss about the theft, Ms. Lowery turned on the 62-year-old woman, hitting her in the back of the head six times with a yoga stick. It must have been a calculated move, the prosecutor claimed, because there was no blood on Ms. Lowery's clothing and no DNA left at the scene.

The prosecution's first witness, the victim's daughter, Mandy Stein, 34, testified that she was staying with her mother for a couple of weeks while working on a documentary, but left at 9:30 that morning. When she returned at 10:30 p.m., she found her mother face down in a pool of black and red blood. Her body was already cold and hard. 

Ms. Stein's testimony took up the bulk of the day, stretching from 11:30 in the morning until 5 p.m.

"I feel sick, but I can't be," Ms. Stein, who lives in Los Angeles, told her sister before court. But on the stand she gave a measured account of the day her mother was murdered.

Only when prosecutors showed pictures of her mother, lying dead near her desk in a North Face fleece and sneakers, did Ms. Stein lean forward in her seat, head in hands.

"Help me, help me," the hysterical Ms. Stein said four times on the emergency services tape, which prosecutors played as part of the evidence. She called two operators, one on the landline and one on her cell phone, in an effort to get help more quickly. But her mother had been dead for hours, according to autopsy reports.

In his cross-examination, defense attorney Thomas Giovanni questioned Mandy Stein, petite and dark-haired like her mother, about a relationship she described as "tumultuous." Over prosecutors' objections, Mr. Giovanni asked Ms. Stein about an incident a couple of weeks before the murder when her mother kicked her out of the apartment and her feelings of "shame" at being financially dependent on her mother.

He also asked her about a lawsuit that Ms. Stein filed recently for $10 million against Douglas Ellman for hiring Ms. Lowery. In the suit they claim the personal assistant, who was hired from a temp agency, had a history of stealing from employers. But not of violence, Mr. Giovanni noted. 

Defense attorneys are expected to wrap up their cross-examination of Ms. Stein on Tuesday. Then prosecutors plan to call the doorman and elevator operator from the Upper East-side apartment building where Linda Stein was murdered. 

While she indeed stole around $30,000 by opening credit cards in realtor (and former Ramones manager) Linda Stein's name, she did not kill Stein. The crime scene was grisly, and security tapes show Lowery leaving unbesmirched.

"Natavia's guilty of stealing," her lawyer said this morning, according to the Post. "She wasn't there when blood splattered around Linda Stein."

However compelling this logic may be, it seems ill-advised to use the phrase "blood splattered" when discussing your alleged crime.