Frozen Heat (2012) (9 page)

“Riddle me this: What is Detective Heat’s First Rule of Investigation?” Before she could reply, he answered it himself. “‘Look for the odd sock.’ The odd sock being the one thing that doesn’t go with, or seems out of place in, all the evidence.”

“And?”

“And what is the odd sock of your mother’s life? Simple. Why have all that passion, talent, and classical training only to give it up to teach rich brats ‘Heart and Soul’?” He waited, same as he’d seen her wait out the homeless man through the glass.

“I … uh …” She lowered her gaze to the counter, having no answer to share.

“Then let’s find out. How? Let’s follow the odd sock.”

“Now?”

“Of course not. Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’re going to Boston to visit your mom’s music school.”

“Do I have a say in this?”

“Sure. As long as it’s yes.”

They certainly seemed to know Jameson Rook at the front desk of the Lenox Hotel. After a short walk from the Back Bay Amtrak station, the two of them had planned to drop their overnight bags at the bell desk and move on with their day, but a beaming old gent whose nameplate read “Cory” welcomed the famous writer back and offered them a suite upgrade to something called “Heaven on Eleven” and early check-in. Looking out their top-floor room at the view of the Back Bay, Rook said to Nikki, “I used to come to this hotel a lot because it’s next door to the PL.” He made a nod to the Boston Public Library below. “Logged a lot of hours in there working on a romance.”

“Which book was that?”

“Not a book. Sandra, in the microfiche section.”

“You’re dating yourself.”

“I was then, too. Sandra proved immune to my charms.”

His phone buzzed. It was Cynthia Heat’s music professor from the New England Conservatory returning his call with apologies that she wouldn’t be available until the next morning. Rook set a time to meet, thanked her, and then hung up. “I hereby declare this day to be an RTWOTC.”

“What’s RTW … whatever?”

“Romantic Trip While On The Case. And you call yourself a cop?”

They had set out to stroll Newbury Street to select one of the thousands of sidewalk cafes for lunch, but on Boylston, when they got a whiff of a gourmet food truck selling pulled pork Vietnamese noodles and rice bowls, a quiche on Newbury didn’t stand a chance. They unpacked the white paper bag on a park bench in Copley Square and began their impromptu picnic. “Nice view,” said Rook, pointing to the bronze statue in front of them. “The ass of John Singleton Copley and a twenty-four-hour CVS.” He put his hand on her knee and added, “Wouldn’t have it any other way.” When she didn’t reply, he repeated, “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I should never have left New York.”

Rook put his container of noodles down to give her his full attention. “Look, I know it’s not your nature to take what feels like a step back in the middle of a case. Especially this one. Trust me, I know you are all about pure effort. But you have to try to see this as work. Even if it doesn’t feel like it every second, you are still investigating something my gut tells me is important. And remember, that squad of minions you browbeat are hard at it back home. This is good strategy. It’s divide and conquer, in action.”

“Doesn’t feel like it to me.” Heat set aside her rice bowl and made phone rounds of the investigation while he ate. When she had finished, she couldn’t mask her disappointment. “They came up empty at the nursing home.”

“Too bad. I halfway wondered if that lab cleaning residue might have come from there. They must have some medical solvents in a place like that.”

She shook her head. “Roach checked that already.”

“You know, we ought to have a name like that. A compressed nickname like Raley and Ochoa. Roach.” And then he added, “Only ours would be romantic. I mean there was Bennifer, right? And there’s Brangelina. We could be …”

“Done with this relationship?” She laughed. But he kept on.

“Rooki? … Naw.”

“Would you stop?”

“Or how about … Nooki? Hm, I like Nooki.”

“Is this how you lost Miss Microfiche? Talk like this?”

He hung his head. “Yes.”

A rain shower rolled into Boston, so they took things indoors, to the Museum of Fine Arts. They dashed through a downpour from their taxi, past a group of guerilla artists on the sidewalk with political works on display. One was a lovely, if unimaginative, acrylic painting of a greedy pig in a top hat and tails, smoking a cigar. It caught Rook’s eye, though, and as he ran by, he almost tripped over a sculpture of a three-foot-tall gold leaf fist clenched around a wad of cash. “What a way to go,” he said to Nikki once they got in the lobby. “KO’d by the ‘Fist of Capitalism.’”

Just by entering the museum, he sensed Nikki had become temporarily released from her cares. She grew animated, telling him the MFA had been a weekly pilgrimage when she went to college at Northeastern. She hooked his arm and took him to see all of her favorites in the collection, including the Gilbert Stuart oils of Washington and Adams and
The Dory
by Winslow Homer. Transfixed, Rook said with reverence, “You know, his water is the wettest you’ll ever see in a painting.” The John Singer Sargents triggered warm memories of the print of
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Rook had given her when they first started seeing each other. Heat and Rook kissed under
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
, a masterpiece from the period when the artist made a living painting American expatriates in Paris. The four daughters didn’t seem to mind the PDA.

Another Sargent, on loan from a private collector, hung to the side by itself. Also painted in Paris, it was the artist’s portrait of a Madame Ramon Subercaseaux.

“I’ve never seen this one,” said Rook. “Isn’t it amazing?” But a shadow fell over her demeanor again. All Nikki did was grunt a cursory “uh-huh” as she moved on to the next gallery. He lagged behind to take in the portrait. It captured an elegant young woman with dark hair seated at an upright piano. Mme. Subercaseaux was posed turning away from the instrument. Her melancholy eyes stared out, meeting the viewer’s, and one hand rested behind her on the keyboard. The painting evoked the feeling of a pianist, interrupted.

Rook followed after Nikki, understanding her discomfort with it.

The showers had cleared out, and Heat asked him how much he would hate getting dragged along on a nostalgia tour of her alma mater, just across the street. “On an RTWOTC Saturday?” he asked. “First, I’d love to.”

“And second?”

“If I said no, I’d be kissing off any chance of hotel sex.”

“Damn straight.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” he said.

Frankly, the notion of a tour didn’t excite him, but he didn’t regret a bit of it, simply because he could see how the visit energized her. Rook watched Nikki’s cares shed at each point of interest and every old hang she showed him. She snuck him in the backstage entrance to Blackman Auditorium to see where, as a freshman, she played Ophelia in
Hamlet
and Cathleen, the summer maid, in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
. At Churchill Hall, where Heat studied Criminal Justice, they found the doors locked but she pointed to the fifth floor so he could see the window of her Criminology lecture hall. Looking up at it, he said, “Fascinating, the actual window,” then turned to her, adding, “That hotel sex better be mighty raucous.” He paid for that crack by having to endure small talk with her freshman Medieval Lit professor, whom she stumbled upon in the campus Starbucks grading
Beowulf
term papers. Crossing the quad took them to the bronze statue of Cy Young. Relishing her role as tour guide, Nikki proudly informed him it stood on the exact location of the mound where Young had pitched the first-ever perfect game when the site had been the old Huntington ballpark.

“Photo op,” he said, handing her his iPhone.

Nikki laughed. “You’re such a boy.”

“I wish. This is so I can pretend I know something about baseball. When you grow up without a dad, raised by a Broadway star, there are gaps. Swear to God, until this moment I thought Cy Young was the composer who wrote ‘Big Spender.’”

She snapped one of him aping the legendary pitcher, reading signs from the catcher. “Let me get a close-up.” She zoomed in on his face and, in the viewfinder, saw him looking past her, frowning.

Nikki turned to see what Rook was reacting to and said, “Oh, my God … Petar?”

The skinny man in the Sherpa cap and designer-torn denim who was walking past, stopped. “Nikki?” He pulled off his sunglasses and beamed. “Oh, my God. This is crazy.”

Rook stood by, leaning an elbow on Cy Young’s pitching arm, as he watched Nikki and her old college boyfriend hug. And just a little too exuberantly to suit him. Now he did regret the campus tour. This guy Petar went up his ass from the day he had met him last fall. Rook convinced himself it was not some possessive, irrational jealousy of an old flame. Although Nikki said that’s precisely what it was. Petar Matic, her Croatian ex, screamed Eurotrash, and Rook couldn’t believe Nikki didn’t see it. To Rook, this journeyman segment producer for
Later On!
, a post-midnight talk show he looked down on as Fallon-lite, posed as if he held the pulse of late night comedy in his pale-fingered grip. Rook knew there was only one thing Petar Matic held the pulse of every night, and he tried not to imagine it.

“Oh, and James is here, too,” Petar said, parting at last from Nikki.

“It’s Jameson,” said Rook, but Petar was too busy delivering a man hug shoulder bump for it to register.

Nikki touched his cheek and said, “Look at you, you grew your beard back.”

“Just stubble,” Petar said. “Stubble’s like the new deal.”

“All the rage in Macedonia,” said Rook. Petar seemed oblivious to the jab and asked what they were doing there. “Just a getaway.” Rook draped his arm around her shoulder and said, “Nikki and I are grabbing a little alone time.”

“Thought I’d show him our old stomping grounds,” she said. “What about you?”

“I’m having alone time, too. But alone.” He chuckled at his own joke and continued, “I came up from New York for the day to guest lecture a Communications seminar about the future of late night talk shows.”

“Professor Mulkerin?” asked Nikki.

“Yep. Funny, I barely got a C in that class, and now I’m the star alum.”

“Well, it was great to see you,” Rook said, the verbal equivalent of checking his watch.

“You, too, Jim. I wish I had known. We could have planned dinner together.”

Nikki said, “Let’s!” The smile she gave Rook held the hotel sex card clenched in its teeth.

Rook forced a grin. “Great.”

On the cab ride back to the Lenox, since Nikki didn’t have a knife, she cut the silence with her tongue. “Know what you’ve got, Rook? Petar envy.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“You have a thing against him, and it shows.”

“I apologize. I just didn’t see dinner with your old boyfriend as part of the RTWOTC plan. Is this payback because I got a massage from a practitioner who happened to be somewhat attractive?”

“Rook, she was a Victoria’s Secret model without the angel wings.”

“You thought so, too, huh?”

“Your jealousy is transparent and over-the-top. Forget old boyfriend. Yes, Petar did try to rekindle when we ran into him last fall, but I ended that.”

“He hit on you? You never told me that.”

“Now he’s just an old friend.” She paused to peer up at the top of the Pru then said, “And yes, this still is an RT-whatever. But just to remind you, since you may have been too traumatized—or in denial after your gunshot—Petar was a huge help breaking that case. This is my chance to say thank you.”

“By having me buy his dinner?”

She looked out the window and smiled. “Win-win for me.”

He booked a table at Grill 23 for the simple reason that, if it was good enough for Spenser, it was good enough for him. After starting off with topneck clams and an extraordinary Cakebread Chardonnay, dinner wasn’t pure hell for Rook. Perhaps just purgatory. Mostly he smiled and listened as Petar gassed on about himself and his exciting behind-the-scenes role booking guests for
Later On!
“I’m this close to the big get,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Brad and Angelina.”

“Wow,” said Nikki, “Brangelina.”

“I hate those cute nicknames,” said Rook.

Petar shrugged. “Nikki, remember what they called us? Petnik?”

“Petnik!” She laughed. “Oh my God, Petnik.” Rook reached for the ice bucket and filled his own glass, wondering what the hell it was about scruffy waifs with sad, soulful eyes that attracted women. What was this magical allure of underachievement and unruly hair?

After a main course of memory lane conversation and Nikki’s fifth cell check of messages from the precinct, Petar came out of his self-absorption to observe that she seemed preoccupied. Nikki set down her fork, leaving a perfectly good duck fat tater tot still speared on it, and napkinned her mouth. The clouds that had parted for her rolled in on a new cold front. She told Petar about the new development in her mother’s case, pausing only for the plates to be cleared before she resumed.

To his credit—for once—Petar listened intently and without interruption. His face sobered and his eyes grew hooded by an old sadness. When she finished, he shook his head and said, “There’s no such thing as closure for you, is there?”