Naked Heat (22 page)

“So what’s the deal over there, Oach? How do they account for that?”

“Manager just gives me a dumb-ass look and says, ‘Don’t ask me.’ Good luck proving anything, these guys are too slick.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “they’ll claim burglary or one of the drivers did it. Even Padilla himself, out of spite.” And then she added, “Just to confirm, it was a night Padilla was working, right?”

“That they confirmed. Just before they canned him.”

“So, what? They’ve just been ripped out of the book?”

“No. Actually, they’ve been sliced.”

An hour later, Nikki left Captain Montrose’s office after briefing him on all developments so he could turn around and do the same thing with his superiors down at One Police Plaza. He trusted Detective Heat and told her she was covering all the bases he would. The extra briefings were to satisfy the media pressure on 1PP. Mindful of his upcoming promotion review, the skipper made it his hobby to smile and dial, keeping them in the loop almost hourly.

Raley had set up shop at his desk, with digital copies of surveillance cam video from the parking garage where Perkins had been mugged that morning, as well as from camera-equipped stores and residences all along 96th Street. “I’ve got a long night ahead of me, but if we get lucky, maybe one of these’ll give us a pretty picture of the assailant.” As he loaded one of the time-coded videos, he asked, “So you don’t think it was the Texan?”

“Wouldn’t rule anything out, Rales, not on this case,” Nikki answered. “But I broke Wolf’s collarbone and put one in his shoulder. Perkins is no Ironman, but whoever overpowered him like that had to have some strength. So I’d bet against the walking wounded.”

She made her way over to Rook at his squatter’s desk across the pen from hers, to get an update on Cassidy Towne’s manuscript. She got a strange vibe off him before he even spoke. Nikki dismissed it, chalking it up to more of Rook’s schoolboy jealousy over her reunion with Petar. “What are you getting out of this, anything?”

“I’m a quarter of the way in,” he said. “All pretty much as Mitchell Perkins advertised. Reed Wakefield’s backstory. She’s setting the table but no bombshells yet. She could use an editor, though.” That strange look crossed his face again.

“What?”

“There’s an extra hard copy on your desk. Actually, in. I put it in your file drawer.”

“Rook, either you tell me what’s on your mind, or I swear, we don’t have a Zoo Lockup, but I’ll organize one just for you.”

He considered a beat then opened his messenger bag and took out a newspaper. It was the afternoon edition of the
New York Ledger
, folded open to the “Buzz Rush” column. The editors had decided the brand-name value of the column had only inflated since Cassidy Towne’s murder, so they were keeping it, but with guest columnists until they settled on a permanent choice. That day’s “Buzz” was bylined anonymously by someone called The Stinger.

Nikki felt her face flush when she saw the lead item.

HEAT CRAVE

NYPD hottie and cover girl
Nikki Heat
plus magscribe-cum-boyfriend
Jameson Rook
have been arm in arm on another case, this time, trying to solve the murder of this column’s founding doyenne,
Cassidy Towne
. Apparently her brief taste of fame gave her a craving for more spotlight because Heat has been taking her act to all the high-viz peeps and places, most notably on a tear to bring down singer
Soleil Gray.
Detective Hot has been tailing the former Shades lead wherever she goes, including rehearsal halls and even a command perf busting up Miss Gray’s rehearsal at
Later On
by showing her autopsy photos of stabbing victims! Since Soleil wasn’t rehearsing a number from
Sweeney Todd
, you have to wonder, why all the heat? Is a certain detective getting ready for her next close-up, Mr. DeMille?

Heat looked up from the paper and Rook said, “Nikki, I am so sorry.” Her head spun. She pictured trucks unloading bound stacks of the
Ledger
curbside to newsstands all over the city. Copies piled on tables in apartment lobbies or landing on doormats . . . Captain Montrose getting a call from 1PP. She also thought back a few hours to her meeting with Soleil Gray and Helen Miksit, and the lawyer’s parting words about how the PR machine can turn against you. Nikki was certain that this was a shot across her bow from The Bulldog.

“You OK?” asked Rook. In the tenderness of his tone Nikki heard all the empathy he had for what was swirling inside her, a maelstrom of regret and anger carrying crumpled pages of
First Press
and the
New York Ledger
.

She handed him the newspaper. “I want my fifteen minutes back.”

Jameson Rook called a car service to bring him home. Nikki had asked him for a night of quiet, and he respected her desire without question and with only the slightest twinge of paranoia that she might be meeting up with Petar. After she gave Montrose the heads-up about the
Ledger
item, they had each taken a copy of Cassidy Towne’s manuscript to read overnight, and Rook promised he would only call if he hit something that jumped out about the case. “E-mail instead,” she had said, and he saw in her a need to find an oasis of solitude in her life. Probably starting with some lavender-scented bubbles in that claw-footed cast-iron tub of hers.

After the black car dropped him in Tribeca, he navigated the garbage heaps and approached his front stoop carrying a bag of Chinese takeout in his teeth while he fished for his door key. He thought he heard a foot scrape beside the stairs. There was no traffic on the street. Down the block, Rook watched the taillights of his ride disappear around the corner. Just as he was thinking about the manuscript in his messenger bag and weighing fight or flight, he saw movement in the shadows of the stoop and turned with his fists up as Cassidy Towne’s daughter stepped forward.

“Did I scare you?” said Holly Flanders.

“Mno.” He took the bag out of his mouth and said, “No.”

“I’ve been waiting here a couple of hours.”

He looked around, instinct telling him to be cautious and make sure he wasn’t going to be surprised by a companion.

“I’m here alone,” she said.

“How did you know where I live?”

“Last week, after I saw you at my mother’s a couple of times, I boosted a key for the new lock from JJ’s workshop and let myself in again to see who you were. I found your name and address on her receipts for the messenger service.”

“Enterprising and creepy all at the same time.”

Holly said, “I need to talk to you.”

He set a place for her on the L of his kitchen counter so they wouldn’t be side by side. He wanted to look at her when they talked. “China Fun,” he announced as he unpacked the bag. “I always over-order, so eat up.”

She didn’t say much at first because she put everything into her eating. Holly Flanders was lean but had the eye circles and complexion of someone who wasn’t a slave to the food pyramid. When she finished her plate, he dished over some more pork fried rice. She held up a palm and said, “That’s OK.”

“Take it all,” said Rook. “There are kids starving in Beverly Hills, you know. Of course, that’s by choice.”

When she’d finished the rest of it, he asked, “What did you want to talk to me about? By the way, that’s one of my great qualities as a reporter. Asking the inobvious question.”

“Riiight.” She chuckled politely and nodded. “ ’K, well, I felt like I could do this because you were nice to me when I got busted the other day. And could relate to the no-parent thing.”

“Right,” he said and then waited, wondering where this was going.

“I know you’re going to write this article about my mother, right? And . . .” Holly paused, and he saw light shimmer off the pools forming in her eyes. “. . . And I know everybody is probably telling you how bad she was. And I’m here to tell you, damn, she was all that.” Rook drew the mental image of Holly standing over her mother’s bed while she slept, holding a handgun on her, a millimeter of finger movement from blowing her away. “But I came to tell you, since you’re going to write her story, don’t make her all about being a monster.”

Holly’s lips quaked, taking on lives of their own, and a tear streamed down each cheek. Rook handed her his napkin and she dabbed her cheeks and blew her nose. “I have a lot of anger at her. Maybe more now that she’s gone, because I can’t work any of this shit out with her now. That’s part of why I didn’t kill her; we weren’t done, you know?”

Rook didn’t know, so he just nodded and listened.

She sipped her beer and, when she had settled enough to continue, said, “All of the bad things about her were true. But in the middle of it is one thing. About eight years ago my mother made contact with me. She had some way of tracking me to my foster home and got permission from my family to take me to dinner. We went to this Jackson Hole burger place I liked in my neighborhood, and it was bizarre. She has the waitress take a picture of us like it was my birthday party or something. She doesn’t eat, just sits there telling me all this stuff about how tough it was when she found out she was pregnant, and that she thought she would keep me at first, so she didn’t have an abortion and then she changed her mind the first month because it wasn’t going to work in her life—‘it’ she said, like I was an ‘it.’

“Anyway she goes through this whole blah-blah about why she did it and then she says she had been thinking long and hard about it and feeling so bad—agony, I remember that was what she said she felt, like she was always in agony—and asked what I thought, if maybe we could talk about getting together.”

“You mean, like . . .”

“Well, yuh. Like she thought she could just show up and change her mind about
abandoning
me and I would just get in the frickin’ Acura with her and live happily ever after.”

Rook let a healthy silence pass before he asked, “What did you say to her?”

“I threw my ice water in her face and walked out.” Part of Holly Flanders showed proud defiance. Rook imagined she had told that story before to friends or barflies over the years and reveled in her heroic act of maternal repudiation, poetic in its balancing of scales. But he also saw in her the other part of Holly Flanders, the part that had brought her to his doorstep to wait in the dark, the woman who felt the weight of emotions that nest uncomfortably in any soul with a conscience that has to bear the unhealable wound of banishing another person. With ice water, no less.

“Holly, you were what, early teens, then?”

“I didn’t come here to be let off the hook, OK? I came because once you found out she had put me out to foster care, I didn’t want you to think that was all there was to her. I look back now, older and all, and realize she didn’t just wash her hands and walk away, you know?” She finished her beer in a long gulp and set the glass down slowly. “Bad enough I have to deal with this the rest of my life. I didn’t want to make it worse by letting you write her story without telling you there was more to her than giving me away.”

At the door on her way out she got on her toes to give Rook a kiss. She went for his lips and he turned to present his cheek. “Is that because of what I do?” she asked. “Because I sell it sometimes?”

“That’s because I’m sort of with someone else now.” And then he smiled. “Well, I’m working on it.”

She gave him her cell number, in case he wanted to talk about the article, and left. As Rook went back to the kitchen to clean up the dishes, he lifted her plate. Underneath he found a four-by-six color photo that looked like it had spent some time folded. It was Cassidy Towne and her teenage daughter in their booth at a Jackson Hole. Cassidy was smiling, Holly was enduring. All Rook could look at was the glass of ice water.

The next morning, Heat and Rook sat down at her desk to compare notes on the Cassidy Towne manuscript. First, though, he asked her if she’d had any fallout from the item in “Buzz Rush,” and she said, “Not yet but the day is young.”

“You do know The Bulldog is all over that,” he said.

“I doubt she’s the author, whoever The Stinger is, but I’m sure Soleil’s lawyer worked her contacts to send me a message.”

He filled her in on his visit from Holly Flanders and Nikki said, “That’s sweet, Rook. Sort of reinforces the faith I keep investing in humanity.”

He said, “Good, then, because I almost didn’t tell you.”

“Why not tell me?”

“You know. I was afraid you might take it funny. A young woman coming to my place at night when I told you I’d be home alone, reading.”

“That is so sweet that you’d think that I’d care.” Nikki turned and left him there to sort that out while she got her manuscript.

Heat used paper clips and Rook used Post-it flags, but both had marked only a few passages in the book as pertinent to the case. And none pointed to direct suspicion of anyone as an agent of the gossip columnist’s death. And, importantly, there was no concrete indication of anything untoward in Reed’s passing. That was all deftly crafted as sly questions and hints of a bombshell payoff buildup by Cassidy Towne.

The passages they had marked were the same. Mostly they were name mentions of Soleil Gray and episodes in their drunken, druggy courtship. Tales from the movie set told of a sometimes morose Reed Wakefield who, after their romantic breakup, immersed himself deeper into the role of Ben Franklin’s bastard child. His passion to escape his own life into the character’s, many felt, would lead to an Oscar, even posthumously.

Much of the book was material the public had all known about Wakefield, but with insider detail that only Cassidy could have sourced. She didn’t spare the actor any blemishes. One of the more damning, albeit minor, stories was attributed to a former costar of three of his films. The ex-costar and now ex-friend said that, after Reed became convinced he had lobbied the director of
Sand Maidens
, a sword-and-sandals CGI epic, to re-edit their battle scene for more close-ups of him than Reed, Wakefield not only wrote him off as a friend but took revenge. Photos captured on a cell phone arrived at the costar’s wife’s office. They were candids of the costar with his hand up the skirt of one of the hot extras at the wrap party. The message written on the back of one of the photos said, “Don’t worry. It ain’t love, it’s location.”