Naked Heat (20 page)

“Well,” said Raley, “he
is
paper trained.”

“That’s funny from you.” Ochoa chuckled. “Paper trained. Clever.”

Raley looked up from his work, at the other cop across the table. “Clever?”

“Come on, Rales, he’s a writer. ‘Paper trained’?”

Rook laughed. It sounded a little forced because it was. “My God, is this Interrogation 2, or have I stumbled into the Algonquin Roundtable?”

Roach put their noses back into their printouts. “Help you, Rook?” said Ochoa.

“Heard you guys were flogging the paperwork pretty hard, so I brought you some refreshment.” He set a cup beside each. “One coffee, hazelnut creamer for you, and for Detective Raley, some sweet tea.” He noticed an eye flick from Raley to Ochoa. It transmitted some disdain, low-grade stuff, like the vibe he had gotten from them since his return. After both muttered absent “
T
hanks, man”s and just kept reading, he almost left. Instead, he sat.

“Want a hand with this? Maybe spell one of you?”

Raley laughed. “Hey, the writer say he wants to
spell
us, that’s clever, too.”

Ochoa gave him a flat stare. “I don’t get it.”

“Forget it, just forget it.” Raley turned sideways in his chair and stewed.

Ochoa enjoyed his moment of busting his partner’s chops and then air slurped his coffee, which was still too hot to drink. He set down his cup and then rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands. Poring over phone records was just one typical donkey chore in a detective’s day. But Esteban Padilla had had several phones and made a lot more calls than they had anticipated for a produce truck driver, and this task, after so much seatwork looking through limo manifests, was making both cops paper blind. It was why they had moved the chore to Interrogation. Not just for the table space, but for the peace. And now, here was Rook. “OK. Want to tell us what this is about? The waiting on us, the ‘
H
owya doin’, Roach,’ the offer to help with all this?”

“All right,” said Rook. He waited for Raley’s attention, which he got. “Yeah, it’s sort of . . . Call it an olive branch.” When neither detective responded, he continued. “Look, you know and I know there has been an undercurrent of tension since the moment I saw you in the kitchen at Cassidy Towne’s. Am I right?”

Ochoa picked up his cup again. “Hey, we’re just doing the job, man. As long as that works, I’m cool.” He tested the coffee and then took a long sip.

“Come on. Something’s going on here and I want to clear the air between us. Now, I’m not insensitive. I know what’s different. My article. It’s because I didn’t give you guys enough credit, is that it?” They didn’t say anything. It struck him right then what room he was in and how ironic that here he was interrogating two detectives, trying to get them to talk. So he played his ace card. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me.”

A look passed between them both, but again Ochoa spoke. “OK, since you ask, yeah. But I wouldn’t call it getting credit. It’s more like, you know, we’re a team. Just like you’ve seen us do it. So it’s not about getting our names in more or being made heroes, we don’t want any of that. Just how come it wasn’t more like it’s all of us together, you know? That’s all.”

Rook nodded. “I thought so. It wasn’t intentional, I assure you, and if I had it to do over, I’d write it differently. I’m sorry, guys.”

Ochoa studied Rook. “All I can ask.” He stuck out his hand, and after they shook, he turned to his partner. “Rales?”

The other detective seemed more tentative, but he said, “Cool,” and also shook with the writer.

“Good,” said Rook. “Now, my offer still stands. How can I help here?”

Ochoa beckoned him to scoot his chair closer. “What we’re doing is going over Padilla’s phone records looking for any calls that weren’t to friends, family, his boss, whatever.”

“You’re trying to spot anything out of pattern.”

“Yeah. Or a pattern that tells us something.” Ochoa handed a phone record to Rook and placed a pink sheet listing the friend and family and work numbers on the table between them. “You see any numbers that don’t appear on the pink sheet, hit ’em with the highlighter, got it?”

“Got it.” Just as Rook began to scan the first line of calls, he felt Raley’s eyes on him and looked up.

“I have to say this, Rook. There is one more thing bugging me, and if I don’t get it off my chest, it’s just going to keep eating and eating at me.”

Rook could see the gravity of this on his face and set down his sheet. “Sure, let me hear it, let’s get it all out. What do you want to say to me?”

Raley said, “Sweet Tea.”

Puzzled, Rook said, “Help me out here. You don’t like the tea?”

“No, not the damn tea. My nickname. Sweet Tea. You put it in the article, and now everybody’s calling me that.”

Ochoa said, “I haven’t noticed that.”

“Why would you?
Y
ou aren’t me.”

“Again, I apologize,” said Rook. “Better?”

Raley shrugged. “Yeah. Now that I unloaded, yeah.”

“Who calls you that?” pressed his partner.

Raley fidgeted. “Lots of people. Desk sergeant, a uniform in booking. It doesn’t matter how many, I don’t like it.”

“Can I say something as your friend and your partner? In the scheme of getting over yourself? . . . Get over yourself.” And one second after they resumed their work, Ochoa punctuated it with “. . . Sweat Tea.”

They studied the records in silence. A few minutes later, on his second printout, Rook asked Ochoa for the highlighter.

“Got one?”

“Yeah.” As he took the marker from Ochoa, it registered exactly what he had. “Holy shit.”

“What?” said Roach.

Rook highlighted the phone number and held it up. “This number? It’s Cassidy Towne’s.”

A half hour later, Detective Heat stood over the array of highlighted phone records Roach had laid out side by side, in chronological order, on her desktop out in the bull pen. “So what do we have?”

“We have a couple things, actually,” began Raley. “First, we have the connection we’ve been looking for between Esteban Padilla and Cassidy Towne. Not just a phone call, but a regular pattern of calls to her.”

Ochoa picked up the tour, pointing to a series of highlights on the first pages, the ones on the left side of her desk. “The first calls come here, once or twice a week last winter and into spring. These correspond to the dates he was working the limo. A sure sign Padilla was one of her informants.”

“Know what I think?” said Rook. “I’ll bet you can look at the dates of those calls to her, check who Padilla had booked that night, and match them to items in her column the next day. Assuming any of the tips were newsworthy.”

“Newsworthy?” said Heat.

“OK, gossipworthy.”

She nodded. “But I take your point. What else?”

“Here it gets even more interesting,” continued Raley. “The calls stop abruptly right here.” He tapped the printout for May. “Guess when this was?”

“The month Padilla got fired from the limo company,” she said.

“Right. A whole cluster of calls just after that—we’ll have to guess what that was about for now—and then nothing for almost a month.”

“And then they pick up again here.” Ochoa appeared on Nikki’s right and used the yellow highlighter cap to show resumption of contacts. “Calls. Lots of calls all of a sudden in mid-June. Four months ago.”

Heat asked, “Do we know if he was working another limo company then?”

“We checked that,” said Raley. “He started driving the produce deliveries end of May, shortly after he got canned from driving the black cars. So I doubt if he was still giving gossip tips.”

“At least not new ones.” Rook leaned in past Nikki and spread his fingers to span the gap in calls. “My guess is this hiatus in calls was when Mr. Padilla was not providing daily tips to Ms. Towne. And the resumption of calls in June was all about research for whatever the hell book she was writing. Depending on where she was with her manuscript, as a writer, I’d say that would be about the right timing.”

Nikki scanned the highlighted pattern, a time line in its own right, and then turned to face her detectives and Rook. “Great work. This is big. We not only have our connection between Padilla and Towne, but if Rook’s right about what the pattern means, it suggests why he was killed. If she was murdered for what she was writing, he could have been murdered for being her snitch.”

“Same as Derek Snow?” asked Rook.

“For once, not such a whacko theory, Mr. Rook. But still, only a theory until we can make a similar link. Roach, get on our concierge’s phone records first thing in the morning.”

As Roach left the bull pen, she heard Raley say in a low voice, “I’m looking forward to some sleep, but whenever I close my eyes, all I see are printouts of phone records.”

And Ochoa replied, “Me, too, Sweet Tea.”

Nikki was putting on her brown leather jacket when Rook stepped up to the coatrack, closing his messenger bag. “You boys kiss and make up?” she asked.

“How did you know that? Did we have that post-make-up-sex glow?”

“I may be sick,” she said. “Actually, I happened to catch you through the glass in Observation.”

“That was a private conversation.”

“Funny, that’s what the bad guys think when they’re in that room, too. Everybody forgets it’s a two-way mirror.” She flicked her eyebrows at him, a full Groucho. “But that was a good thing you did, reaching out to them like that.”

“Thanks. Listen, I was thinking . . . I’d love to cash in that rain check for last night.”

“Oo . . . sorry. Can’t tonight, I’ve made plans. Petar called.”

His gut took the express elevator to the basement, but he maintained an unfazed smile and kept it casual. “Really? A drink after, then?”

“Problem is, I don’t know when after will be. We’re going to get together on his dinner break. Who knows, I may end up back at the show. I’ve never seen them shoot one of those things.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got to run or I’ll be late. Catch you in the
A.M.
” She made sure the squad room was empty, then kissed his cheek. He started to reach for her but thought better of it in the police station and all.

But as he watched her go out the door, he wished he had put his arms around her. Irresistible as he was, she might have canceled her dinner.

Roach came in early the next morning to find Jameson Rook camped out at his commandeered desk. “I was wondering who turned on the lights in here,” said Raley. “Rook, did you even go home last night?”

“Yeah, I did. Just thought I’d get here early for a jump on the day.”

Ochoa said, “You don’t mind me saying so, you look kinda messed up. Like you’ve been skydiving without goggles.”

“Thanks.” Rook didn’t have a mirror to look at, but he could imagine. “Well, I’m burning that candle, you know? When I leave here, it’s off to my night job at the keyboard.”

“Uh-huh, I’ll bet it’s tough.” Ochoa gave him a pleasant nod, and the pair moved across the bull pen to log on to their computers.

Ochoa’s comment was sympathetic, but it only made Rook feel guilty. Guilty, first, that he’d had the audacity to tell an NYPD homicide detective how difficult life could be in his comfortable Tribeca loft, writing. And guilty, second, because he had not been writing at all. He tried, all right. He had two full days of notes to write up to stay current with his Cassidy Towne article. But he didn’t write them up.

It was Nikki. He couldn’t let go of Nikki having dinner with her old college lover. He knew it was nuts for him to be so . . . freaked. What he admired in her was her self-sufficiency, her independence. He just didn’t like it when she was so independent of him. And with an old boyfriend. Around 11
P.M.
, unable to concentrate on his work or even watch the news, he had started to wonder if this was how it started with stalkers. And then he started to think maybe he’d do his next article as an investigation of stalkers. But then, he wondered . . . if you do a ride-along with a stalker, are you stalking the stalker?

It all got very weird.

That’s when he made a phone call. There was a comedy writer he knew on a late-night talk show in LA who had been in the business forever, and sure enough, this guy had the story on Petar Matic. “Don’t you love the name, Rook? Sounds like a product a mohel would sell on an infomercial.” Call a comedy writer, get a one-liner. But it was the only laugh Rook got from the conversation.

Comedy writing, especially in late night, was a small circle of frenemies, and Rook’s LA guy knew one of the
Later On
comedy writers who had done community service a few years back. “Hold on,” said Rook, “why would a comedy writer have to do community service?”

“Beats me. Pitching a Monica Lewinsky joke after 2005? Who knows?”

So while the
Later On
comedy writer was doing his community service at the Bronx Zoo—for DUI, Rook’s friend eventually recalled—on the crew with him doing cage cleaning and litter detail was this bright guy from Croatia, a nature documentary shooter. Rook asked if Petar was there for DUI, too.

“No, here’s the poetry. Nature filmmaker. Busted for what?” Rook’s friend paused for a drumroll. “Smuggling endangered species into the country from Thailand. He did six months of eighteen in jail, got early release for good behavior, and was assigned community service. To the zoo!”

“More poetry,” said Rook.

The two hit it off, and at the end of their stint at the zoo, the comedy writer got Petar a gig at
Later On
as a production assistant. “Not quite a step up from shoveling the elephant yard,” said the voice from LA, “but entry level, and he did OK. Worked his way up to segment producer pretty quick. My friend says once Petar sets his mind to something, there’s no stopping him.”

That was the thought that left Rook sleepless, worried about that signature Petar Matic tenacity—plus conflicted over whether he should tell Nikki about her ex’s smuggling bust. But suppose he did tell her? That could make it worse, exponentially worse. He made a list of potential fallout. It could damage a perfectly good relationship she enjoyed with an old friend, which Rook would then feel bad about. Sort of. He might inadvertently create greater interest in Petar. Nikki had a naughty side, and maybe the bad boy thing was something she would spark to all the more. And finally, how did it make him look, doing background checks on her old boyfriends? It made him look . . . well, insecure, needy, and threatened. Sure wouldn’t want to give that impression. So when he saw her come through the door at the other end of the bull pen, smiling, he knew exactly what to do. Look busy and pretend he didn’t know anything.