Naked Heat (8 page)

“So we still have the mystery of the missing office papers. Her hard copies.” She opened a marker and circled that posting on the board.

Raley said, “It sure looks to me like somebody wanted to get their hands on whatever she was working on.”

“I think you’re right, Rales, and I’ll take it a step further. I’m not closing any doors”—Heat used the marker to gesture to the list of interviewees on the board—“but this is starting to feel less like payback for what she wrote and more like stopping what she was writing. Any help there, Rook? You’re our inside man.”

“Absolutely. I know she had a big project going on the side. That’s why she told me she was burning the midnight oil so much; why she was in the same clothes some mornings when I showed up.”

“Did she tell you what it was?” asked Nikki.

“Couldn’t get it out of her. I assumed it was a magazine piece and maybe she saw me as a rival. The control thing again. Cassidy told me once—and I even wrote it down to quote in the article—‘If you have anything hot,’ ” Rook closed his eyes to summon the exact words, “ ‘you keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and your secrets buried.’ Basically, she was saying if it’s that big you don’t talk it up or someone might beat you to it. Or sue you to stop it.”

“Or kill you?” said Nikki. She moved on to point out two days on the time line. “JJ, Cassidy’s building super and resident oral historian, said he changed her locks twice. First time was when she felt like someone had been in her place. Based on our interrogation of her estranged daughter, she’s the one who had been in there. It also accounts for her prints. She alibied with a john the night of the murder. We’re checking, good luck. As for the other lock change, we interviewed Toby Mills, who admits to the kick-down and says it was in response to Towne initiating a stalker episode. Sharon?”

“Copies of the incident report are on your desks along with a picture of this man.” Hinesburg held up a security cam still. “He’s Morris Ira Granville, still at large. I copied CPK and the One-Nine.”

Heat tossed her marker onto the aluminum tray that ran along the bottom of the whiteboard and crossed her arms. “I don’t need to tell you Montrose is getting heavy pressure about the missing body. Roach, I got the Cap’s OK to pull some manpower from Burglary to canvass those apartments and businesses around”—she paused to find the victim’s name on the other board—“Esteban Padilla’s crime scene. That way you can stay on this and the body jacking for now.”

“I have a thought,” said Rook. “That typewriter Cassidy Towne used. Those Selectrics had a ribbon cartridge that spooled through the type guide a letter at a time. If we had any of her old ribbons, we could look at them and at least see what she was working on.”

“Roach?” said Nikki.

“On it,” said Ochoa.

“Back to the apartment,” from Raley.

A few minutes after the meeting broke up, Rook sidled up to Heat, holding his cell phone. “I just got a call from another one of my sources.”

“Who is it?”

“A source.” He slipped his iPhone into his pocket and crossed his arms.

“You’re not going to tell me who, are you?”

“You up for a ride?”

“Is it worth one?”

“Do you have any better leads? Or maybe you’d like to hang around here so you can sit with Captain Montrose and watch the five o’clock news.” Nikki considered that a moment. She dropped a stack of files onto her desk and snatched up her keys.

Rook told her to pull up to the curb on 44th Street in front of Sardi’s. “Beats hanging out at a round-the-clock car wash, don’t it?”

“Rook, I swear, if this is your sneaky way of getting me out for a drink, it won’t work,” she said.

“And yet, here you are.” When she popped the transmission into Drive, Rook said, “Wait. I’m kidding. That’s not what I’m doing.” When she put it back in Park, he added, “But if you change you mind, you know I’m always game.”

Inside at the host podium, Nikki spotted Rook’s mother, waving from her table across the room. She answered with a wave and then put her back to the woman so she couldn’t see the anger on her face as she spun to Rook. “Your mother? This is your source? Your mother?”

“Hey, she called and said she had information on the murder. Would you turn that down?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean that.” He studied her. “OK, you do. Which is why I didn’t want to tell you. But what could I say to her? Tell her you didn’t want to hear whatever information she had? And what if it’s useful?”

“You could have done this by yourself.”

“She wanted to talk to the police. That would be you. Come on, we’re here, it’s the end of the day, what have you got to lose?”

Nikki put on a smile and turned to walk to the table. On her way, still grinning, she quietly said to him, “You are so going to pay for this.” And then she let her smile grow as they approached Margaret Rook.

She was seated in a corner banquette, regally situated between the caricatures of José Ferrer and Danny Thomas. It occurred to Nikki Heat that the setting for Margaret Rook was probably always regal. And if it wasn’t, she made it so. Even at the poker game in Rook’s loft when Nikki met her last summer, his mother’s presence had been decidedly more Monte Carlo than Atlantic City.

After hugs and hellos, they sat. “Is this your usual table?” Nikki asked. “Nice and quiet.”

“Well, it’s before the pre-theater rush. Trust me, kiddo, it will get loud enough when the buses unload from New Jersey and White Plains. But yes, I like this table.”

“It’s her favorite view,” said Rook. He twisted in his chair, and Heat followed his gaze to his mother’s own caricature on the facing wall. The Grand Damn of Broadway, as he called her, smiled back from the 1970s.

Mrs. Rook draped her cool fingers on Nikki’s wrist and said, “I have a feeling your caricature might have been up there, too, if you had stuck with theater after college.” It jarred Nikki that Rook’s mother knew this, since she’d never mentioned it to her, but then it came to her. The article. That damned article. “I would like another Jameson,” said the actress.

“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” said Rook, probably not for the first time in his life. Nikki asked the waiter for a Diet Coke and Rook ordered an espresso.

“Right, you’re on duty, Detective Heat.”

“Yes, Jameso— Jamie said you could tell me something about Cassidy Towne.”

“Yes, do you want to hear it now, or wait for cocktails?”

“Now,” said Heat and Rook in unison.

“Very well, then, but if I get interrupted, don’t blame me. Jamie, you do remember Elizabeth Essex?”

“No.”

“Look at him. It always irritates Jamie when I tell him stories about people he doesn’t know.”

“Actually, it only bugs me when you tell them two or three times and I still don’t know who they are. This will just be the first time, so go, Mother, go.”

Nikki prodded her more gently by giving her what she wanted, an official ear. “You have relevant information to the Cassidy Towne case? Did you know her?”

“Only in passing, which was how I liked it. We all trade in favors, but she reduced the high art to low commerce. When she was new at the paper, Cassidy would invite me to drinks and ask me to trade her house seats for planting items about me in her column. Oh, I made sure I paid for the drinks. It was different with male actors. She would promise a lot of men ink in exchange for sex. From what I heard, she wasn’t always good for her end of the bargain, either.”

“So is your information about her . . . recent?” Nikki asked with hope attached.

“Yes. Now, Elizabeth Essex—write that name down, you’ll need it—Elizabeth is a marvelous patroness of the arts. She and I are on the committee to bring an outdoor program of Shakespeare soliloquies to the fountain at Lincoln Center next summer. This afternoon we met with Esmeralda Montes from the Central Park Conservancy for lunch at Bar Boulud before it gets too cool for the patio seating.”

“Where’s that coffee?” said Rook. “I could use the caffeine.”

“Relax, hon, I’m getting there, it’s important to set the stage, you know? So we’re on our third glass of a very nice Domaine Mardon Quincy, talking all about the murder and the stolen body, as everyone must be, and Elizabeth, who does not hold her liquor well, reveals, in a moment of wine-soaked melancholy, a rather shocking piece of news I feel duty-bound to share.”

Nikki asked, “And what would that be?”

“That she tried to kill Cassidy Towne.” As the waiter delivered the drinks, Margaret relished the looks on their faces and lifted her fresh rocks glass in a toast. “And, curtain.”

Elizabeth Essex couldn’t stop staring at Nikki Heat’s badge. “You’d like to talk to me? About what?”

“I’d rather not discuss it out here in the hallway, Mrs. Essex, and I think neither would you.”

The woman said, “All right, then,” and opened the door wide, and when the detective and Rook were standing on the imported Venetian terrazzo in her foyer, Nikki began.

“I have some questions to ask you about Cassidy Towne.”

Suspects and interviewees in murder cases have a panorama of reactions to the police. They become defensive, or belligerent, or emotional, or stone-faced, or hysterical. Elizabeth Essex fainted. Nikki was eyeballing her for a tell and the woman became a marionette with severed strings.

She came to as Heat was in the middle of her call for an ambulance, and the woman pleaded with her to hang up, that she would be fine. She hadn’t hit her head, and her color was coming back, so Nikki obliged. She and Rook steadied her on the way to the living room, and they settled into an L-shaped sofa set angled to take advantage of the penthouse view of the East River and Queens.

Elizabeth Essex, late fifties, wore the Upper East Side uniform, a sweater set and pearls, complete with the tortoiseshell headband. She was attractive without trying, exuded wealth without trappings. She insisted she was all right and pressed Detective Heat to continue. Her husband would be home soon and they had evening plans.

“Well, then,” said Detective Heat, “one of us should start talking.”

“I’ve been waiting for this,” said the woman with quiet resignation. Nikki was back to observing responses more familiar to her experience. Elizabeth Essex was vibing a mix of guilt and relief.

“You are aware, I assume, that Cassidy Towne was found murdered this morning?” said Heat.

She nodded. “It’s been on the news all day. And they say now her body was stolen. How does that happen?”

“I have information that you attempted to kill Cassidy Towne.”

Elizabeth Essex was full of surprises. She didn’t hesitate; she simply said, “Yes, yes I did.”

Heat looked over to Rook, who knew enough to stay out of Nikki’s way on this one. He was busy tracking a jet that was banking around Citi Field on short approach to La Guardia. “When was this, Mrs. Essex?”

“June. I don’t know the exact date, but it was about a week before the big heat wave. Do you remember that?”

Nikki held her gaze but sensed Rook shifting his weight on the cushions beside her. “And why is it that you wanted to kill her?”

Again, the woman’s answer came without pause. “She was screwing my husband, Detective.” But the demure politeness had also quickly fallen away, and Elizabeth Essex spoke from a primal place. “Cassidy and I were on the board of the Knickerbocker Garden Club. I used to have to drag my husband to our events, but suddenly, that spring, he seemed more enthused than I to attend. Everybody knew Cassidy spent her life with her legs in the air, but how would I ever suspect it would be with my husband?” She paused and swallowed dryly and, as if anticipating Heat’s question, said, “I’m fine, let me get this out.”

“Go on,” said Nikki.

“My attorney found an investigator to follow them, and sure enough, they met for several trysts. Nicer hotels, usually. And once . . . once, on our guided visit to the botanical garden, they disappeared from the tour and rutted like animals behind the herbaceous and mixed borders.

“Neither of them knew that I knew, and I didn’t blame my husband. It was her. It was the slut. So when our summer banquet came, I did it.”

“What did you do, Mrs. Essex?”

“I poisoned the bitch.” She now had every bit of her color back, seeming exhilarated with her story. “I did some research. There’s a new drug kids are into. Methadrone.” Heat knew it very well. It went under the name M-Cat and Meow-Meow. “You know why it’s so popular? Access. It’s found in plant food.” She grinned. “Plant food!”

“That stuff can be fatal,” said Rook.

“Not to Cassidy Towne. I got in the kitchen at the banquet and put it in her dinner. It seemed poetic. To die of plant food poisoning at our garden club event. Either I got the proportions wrong, or she just had an incredible constitution, but it didn’t kill her. She just thought she had picked up some gut-wrenching stomach bug. You know something, I’m actually glad I didn’t kill her. It was more fun to watch the bitch suffer.” And then she laughed.

After she settled, Heat said, “Mrs. Essex, can you verify your whereabouts between midnight and four this morning?”

“Yes, I can. I was on a red-eye from Los Angeles.” And to bring home the point, she added, “With my husband.”

“Then I assume,” said Nikki, “that you and your husband have a good relationship?”

“My husband and I have a great relationship. I got divorced and married again.”

Minutes later, Heat broke the silence of the elevator ride down and said to Rook, “I’m eager to meet more of your sources. Circus cousins, colorful uncles, perhaps?”

“Don’t you worry, I’m just warming up.”

“You got nuthin’,” she said, and stepped into the lobby.

At five-thirty the next morning, Nikki Heat’s combat trainer tried to put a choke hold on her and ended up on his back on the mat. She danced a circle around him as he got up. If Don felt it, he didn’t let on. He deked a move left but she read it and side-slipped his attack from the right. He barely grazed her as he went by. But the ex–Navy SEAL didn’t go flat on the ground this time, instead taking his fall in a shoulder roll, whirling back around on her and taking her by surprise with a back-scissors to her knee on the blind side. They both hit the mat, and he grappled and pinned her until she tapped out.