Naked Heat (26 page)

Rook rapped the key on the kitchen table and tried to recall if he had seen Cassidy go to or near a mail drop. He couldn’t come up with one and wasn’t sure if there was one in this neighborhood. And then he remembered her daughter, Holly. Holly Flanders had said she found out where Rook lived by looking on the waybills for the messenger service her mother used to send him material. He couldn’t remember the name of the service, and there was no way to find that needle in the haystack of Cassidy Towne’s office.

After he locked up, Rook walked to Columbus to hail a cab down to Tribeca, to see if he still had any of the shipping envelopes he had received from Cassidy. As the cab passed West 55th, he had a brain tug that the place was located somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. He did a Google search of messenger services on his phone, and five minutes later the taxi dropped him outside Efficient Mail and Messenger on Tenth Avenue, a storefront squeezed between an Ethiopian restaurant and a small grocer with hot tables and pizza by the slice. The garbage pileup had gobbled the sidewalk outside, and under Efficient’s dingy awning some of the letters were sputtering in the neon window sign, which read, “Checks Cashed — Copies — Fax.” A little run down, he thought as he went inside, but if the key fits, paradise.

The place smelled of old library and pine disinfectant. A small man in a turban sat on a high stool behind a counter. “You wish to make copy?” Before Rook could say no, the man spoke rapidly in a foreign language to a woman using the sole copy machine. She answered back in a short, angry tone and the man said to Rook, “Be five minute.”

“Thanks,” said Rook, not wanting to engage or explain. He was already at the wall where the bank of brass mail cubbies ran its length from knee to eyebrow. He scanned them and found number 417.

“You rent mailbox? Monthly special.”

“All set.” Rook held up the key and inserted it. It went in cleanly, but the lock didn’t budge. He waggled it with some force, remembering that the teeth of the key had a freshly cut edge and might need some coaxing. Still nothing. He looked and realized that when the counterman had distracted him he had put the key in 416.

The teeth of the key snagged in 417, then it opened. He got down on one knee to look inside and his heart kicked.

Two minutes later, in another cab to Tribeca, he tried Nikki again. She was still in interrogation. This time Rook didn’t leave a message. He slouched back between the seat and back door of the taxi and took the stack of double-spaced, typewritten pages from the envelope. They were curled from having been half-rolled to fit inside the mail cubby, so he flattened them on his thigh and held the paper-clipped packet to the window light to read the chapter title again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

______

FADE OUT

Chapter Eighteen

N
ikki Heat was big on hands. Sitting in an interrogation room, what she could observe physically about the person across the table was as important as what that person was saying—or not saying. Facial expressions, of course, were key. So were posture, demeanor (restless, fidgety, calm, checked out, and so forth), state of hygiene, and attire. But hands told her a lot. Soleil Gray’s hands had been lean and strong from the rigors of her athletic stage dancing. Strong enough, as it turned out, to overpower Mitchell Perkins with such force that people assumed his assailant had been a man. One of the tells Nikki had misjudged when the singer had been sitting at the table with her lawyer just the day before was the cut on her knuckle which the detective had taken to be from the rehearsal hall, not the street mugging.

Now, self-reproach was trying to creep in on Heat, pestering her with the virulent notion that if she had only looked at that hand with a more open view to causes she might have averted a tragedy. She told that idea to have a seat, she’d deal with it later.

Morris Granville’s hands were soft and pallid, as if he soaked them daily in bleachy water. He was also a nail biter, although he wasn’t doing it in front of her. Swollen domes of irritated skin enveloped the nail stubs at the tip of every finger, and the cuticles that weren’t scabbing were raw. She considered those hands and his loner lifestyle and decided to let her projection end right there.

His mind was on Soleil Gray as well, and it wasn’t lost on Nikki that her despised moment of fame was the very thing that had brought Morris Granville to her. He had sought out Detective Heat because of her public connection to the now-dead singer, so he could share his moment of special bonding: the night he saw Soleil argue on the sidewalk outside a club with her ex-fiancé, Reed Wakefield.

“And you are certain this was the night Reed Wakefield died?” asked Heat. She had been through this with him and asked that same question in different ways over the last half hour, looking for the slipup. Morris Granville was a bona fide celebrity stalker. For this reason the detective was exercising a high degree of caution. His experience could provide an important missing piece of the puzzle, but Heat didn’t want to jump for that candy in a weak moment of wishful thinking.

Nikki had run all her back-channel checks. Asking him what date it was. “May 14.” What night of the week that was. “A Friday.” What the weather was like. “It was drizzling off and on. I had an umbrella with me.” Whether there was security. “I already said there wasn’t any. Nobody else was out there.” She told him these, as well as the other details he had given her, were all things she could check. He said that was good because then she would believe him. She noted that he seemed to relish the fact that she was writing down his answers. But she was skeptical there, too. Heat knew his need to be at the center of things could be driving that the same way it drove everything else in his life.

There was another question she wanted to ask Morris Granville. An obvious one to her, but she held it, wanting to get to the things she didn’t assume first, in case he decided to stop talking. “What happened with the fight?”

“It went on a long time.”

“In the rain?”

“They didn’t seem to care.”

“Did it ever get violent?”

“No. Just arguing.”

“What did they say?”

“I couldn’t hear it all. Remember, I said I didn’t want to get too close?”

Heat mentally ticked off one of her consistency cross-checks. “Did you hear anything?”

“It was about their breakup. She said he was only into himself and getting high. He said she was a selfish bitch, stuff like that.”

“Did she threaten him?”

“Soleil? No way.”

Heat made another mental note that Granville sounded like he had taken on some role as Soleil’s defender. She began to wonder if this stalker’s outreach was rooted in squaring himself in her legacy somehow. She filed it as a possibility but left herself open. “Did Wakefield threaten her?”

“Not that I heard. And he was out of it, too. He kept holding on to the light post for balance until they were done.”

“How did it end?”

“They both cried and then hugged each other.”

“And then what?”

“They kissed.”

“As in kissed good-bye?”

“As in romantic.”

“And after they kissed?”

“They left together.”

Nikki double-tapped her pen on her spiral notebook. He was getting to the part she wanted to hear, and she had to make sure to ask in a way that didn’t set him up to please her. She kept her question general. “How did they leave?”

“Holding hands.”

So she got more specific. “I mean did they walk? Take a taxi? How did they leave?”

“They got in one of the limos. There was one waiting right there.”

Heat concentrated on trying to sound detached even though she could feel her pulse rate rising. “Whose limo was it, Morris? The one Soleil came in or Reed Wakefield’s, do you know?”

“Neither, I saw them come in cabs.”

She tried not to get ahead of herself, although the temptation was strong. She told herself to keep the slate blank, just listen, not project, ask simple questions.

“So it was just there and they flagged it?”

“No.”

“What, they helped themselves to someone else’s limo?”

“Not at all. He invited them and they got in with him.”

Heat pretended to be perusing her notes to keep the gravity out of her next question. The one she had been waiting to ask. She wanted to make it sound offhand so he didn’t go defensive on her. “Who invited them for a ride?”

Pablo drank the last swallow of the electric-blue energy drink and set the empty bottle on the interrogation room table. Because of his age, Roach wouldn’t make the boy sit through the interrogation but had strategically allowed him to have his snack in there to let the stakes sink in on Esteban Padilla’s cousin Victor. Raley set the teenager up with an officer from Juvenile to watch TV in the outer area and returned to Interrogation 1.

He could tell by how Victor looked at him when he sat down across the table that Raley and his partner had been right when they planned their strategy. Victor’s concern for the boy was their wedge. “Happy as a clam,” said Raley.

“
Bueno
,” said Ochoa, and then he continued in Spanish. “Victor, I don’t get it, man, why won’t you talk to me?”

Victor Padilla wasn’t as self-assured outside of his neighborhood or his home. He said the words, but they sounded like they were losing steam. “You know how it is. You don’t talk, you don’t snitch.”

“That’s noble, man. Stand by some code that protects bangers while some dude that carved up your cousin walks free. I checked you out, Homes, you’re not part of that world anyway. Or are you some kind of wannabe?”

Victor wagged his head. “Not me. That’s not my life.”

“So don’t pretend it is.”

“Code’s the code.”

“Bullshit, it’s a pose.”

The man looked away from Ochoa to Raley and then back to Ochoa. “Sure, you’re going to say that.”

The detective let that comment rest, and when the air was sufficiently cleansed of innuendo, he head-nodded to the Tumi duffel of money on the table. “Too bad Pablo can’t hang on to that while you go away.”

The guest chair scraped on the linoleum as Victor slid back an inch and sat upright. His eyes lost their cool remoteness and he said, “Why should I go away anywhere? I haven’t done anything.”

“Dude, you’re a day laborer sitting on almost a hundred Gs in greenbacks. You think you’re not going to get dirt on you?”

“I said I haven’t done anything.”

“Better tell me where this came from is all I can say.” He waited him out, watching the knot of muscle flex on Victor’s jaw. “Here it is straight up. I can ask the DA about making this problem go away if you just cooperate.” Ochoa let that sink in and then added, “Unless you’d rather tell the kid that you’re going away but, hey, at least you were loyal to the code.”

And when Victor Padilla bowed his head, even Detective Raley could tell that they had him.

Twenty minutes later Raley and Ochoa stood up when Detective Heat came into the bull pen. “We did it,” they said in an accidental chorus.

She read their excitement and said, “Congratulations, you two. Nice work. I scored a hit, too. In fact, I’m getting a warrant cut right now.”

“For who?” asked Raley.

“You first.” She sat on her desk to face them. “While I’m waiting for my warrant, why don’t you tell me a story?”

While Raley rolled over two desk chairs for them, Ochoa got out his pad to consult as he spoke. “Just like we thought, Victor says his cousin Esteban was making money on the side selling information about his celebrity riders to Cassidy Towne.”

Raley said, “Ironic when you consider the big stall was all about some snitch code.”

“Anyway, he was spying for pocket money that he got if his tips were hot enough to make her column. Twenty here, fifty there. Adds up, I guess. It’s all a beautiful thing until one night last May when some bad shit goes down on one of his rides.”

“Reed Wakefield,” said Nikki.

“We know that, but here’s where Victor swears to God his cousin never told him what happened that night, only that there was some bad business and the less he knew the better.”

“Esteban was trying to protect his cousin,” said Heat.

“So he says,” added Raley.

Ochoa flipped a page. “So whatever exactly went down is still unknown.”

Heat knew she could fill in some of that blank, but she wanted to hear their raw story first, so she didn’t interrupt.

“Next day cousin Esteban gets canned from his limo job, some vague BS about personality conflict with his clients. So he’s out of a gig, gets bad-mouthed in the business, and has to drive lettuce and onions around instead of A-listers and prom queens. He gets all set to sue—”

“Because he’s been wronged,” interjected Raley, quoting the Ronnie Strong commercial.

“—but drops it because once our gossip columnist hears from him about whatever happened that night—obviously involving Reed Wakefield somehow—she gives him a load of money to drop his suit and chill so he doesn’t attract attention to it. Probably she didn’t want a leak before her book was done.”

Nikki jumped in here. “Cassidy Towne gave him a hundred large?”

“Nope, more like five grand,” said Raley. “We’re coming to the big payout.”

“Esteban wanted more, so he double-dipped. He called up the subject of his tip to Cassidy Towne and said he was going to go public with what he saw that night unless he got a healthy chunk of change. Turns out it wasn’t so healthy.”

Raley picked it up. “Padilla got himself a hundred grand and then got himself killed the very next day. Cousin Victor freaks but hangs on to the money, figuring to use it to get away someplace where whoever did this can’t find him.”

“So that’s what we got,” said Ochoa. “We got some of the story, but we still don’t have the name of whoever Padilla was shaking down.”

They looked up at Nikki, sitting on her desk grinning.

“But you do, don’t you?” said Raley.

In the auditorium of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Battery Park City, Yankee phenom Toby Mills posed with an oversized prop check for one million dollars, his personal gift to the varsity athletic program of the public school. The audience was packed with students, faculty, administrators, and of course, press—all on their feet for his ovation. Also standing, but not applauding, was Detective Nikki Heat, who looked on from behind the curtain at the side of the stage, watching the pitcher grip ’n’ grin with the athletic director, flanked by the Stuy baseball team turned out in uniform for the occasion. Mills smiled broadly, unfazed by the strobe flashes pummeling him, patiently turning to his left then his right, well acquainted with the choreography of the photo op.

Nikki was sorry that Rook couldn’t be there. Especially since the school was only a few blocks from his loft, she had hoped that if he hurried he could meet her there to close the loop on his article. She had tried to return his calls on the drive down, but his phone rang out and dumped to voice mail. She knew better than to leave a message with sensitive content, so she said, “So let me get this straight. It’s OK for you to bug me when I’m working, but not the other way around? Hey, hope the writing’s going well. Got something going on, call me immediately when you get this.” He’d be pissed about missing it, but she’d let him interrogate her, a thought that gave Nikki the first smile of her long hard day.

Toby’s eye flicked to Heat in one of his turns, and his smile lost some of its luster when he registered her presence. It gave Nikki second thoughts about coming to see him in this venue, especially after her experience that day on the
Intrepid
. But he made no move to flee. In fact, when he finished shaking hands with the team mascot, who was attired in fifteenth-century garb as Peter Stuyvesant, Mills made his good-night wave then strode across the stage directly to her and said, “Did you catch my stalker?”

Without hesitating and without lying, Heat said, “Yes. Let’s find a place to talk.”

Heat had arranged to have use of a room nearby and she escorted Toby Mills into a computer lab and gestured to a chair. He noticed Raley and the two waiting uniform cops on the way in and got a funny look on his face when one uniform stayed inside while the other closed the door and posted himself outside with his body blocking the little window slit. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Nikki replied with a question. “Isn’t Jess Ripton here? I’d expect he’d be all over an event like this.”

“Right. Well, he was going to come but called to say he had a sponsor fire to put out and to start without him.”

“Did he say where he was?” asked the detective. Heat already knew The Firewall wasn’t at his office or his apartment.

Mills looked up at the classroom wall clock. “Ten of nine, he’s probably having his second dirty martini at Bouley.”

Without being told, Detective Raley moved to the door. He gave a soft two-tap as he opened it, and the cop in the hall stepped aside to let him out.