Naked Heat (15 page)

“Allie, I need to know what time she left you.”

“Is this between us?”

Nikki shrugged. “For now.”

She hesitated and said, “That is when she left me. Eleven-thirty.” Heat didn’t need to look at her notes to know that the times Soleil had given her were bogus. Allie flipped her hair around her ear again. “You won’t tell Soleil?”

“That she asked you to lie in a murder investigation?” Allie’s lower lip started to tremble and Nikki put a hand on her knee. “Relax, you did the right thing.” Allie flashed a quick smile that the detective returned before she continued. “Soleil and Cassidy Towne had some bad blood between them, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, that bitch—sorry, but she kept printing all sorts of ugly crap about her. Like if she had one beer. Made Soleil nuts.”

“So we understand,” said Nikki. “Did you ever hear Soleil say anything threatening about Cassidy Towne?”

“Well, you know, who doesn’t say stuff when they’re mad? It doesn’t mean they did it.” Allie could see that she had gotten their interest and looked down, rolling her thumb on the trackball on her BlackBerry just to have something else to do. When her eyes came up and found Nikki scrutinizing her, she set the PDA on the coffee table and waited, knowing what was coming.

“Tell me what you heard her say.”

“It was just talk.” Allie shrugged it off. Heat simply watched her, waiting.

Rook leaned forward onto his thighs and smiled. “She always wins the staring contests, trust me, I know. You might as well, you know . . .”

Allie made her decision to come clean. “One night last week she took me to dinner. The cool artists do that. They know my salary. Anyway, Soleil wanted Italian so she took me to Babbo.” She misread the look that passed between the other two and explained, “You know, Mario Batali’s place in Washington Square?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” said Rook.

“We were eating upstairs, and Soleil has to use the loo, so she excuses herself and goes downstairs. A minute later, I hear all this shouting and a crash. I recognized Soleil’s voice so I ran down the steps and there’s Cassidy Towne on the floor with her chair tipped over. Just when I got there, Soleil grabs a knife off her table and says . . .” Allie dry-swallowed again. “She says, you like stabbing people in the back? How would you like me to stab you in yours, you frickin’ pig.”

Nikki walked out of the parking garage off Times Square and found Rook buying two hot dogs from a sidewalk vendor across from the
GMA
studios. “This is why you hopped out of a moving car?” she asked.

“I call that more rolling than moving,” he said. “I saw the stand and sprung into my signature hero deployment. Keeps my reflexes sharp. Dog?” He held one out to her.

“No, thanks, job’s dangerous enough.” As they crossed Broadway Detective Heat made her habitual check for suspicious parked cars, ever mindful of the Crossroads of the World, the New Normal, and life on orange alert. By the time they reached the other side of the street, Rook had finished his first dog.

“Man, I don’t know if I can eat two. What the hell, yes, I can.” He started in on the other, filling his cheeks like a squirrel, making her laugh as they walked north, weaving between the tourists. Except for the gun on her hip, thought Nikki, they could be a suburban couple themselves.

Between swallows, Rook asked, “Why are we checking Soleil’s other alibi? Let’s suppose maybe she hired the Texan to stab Cassidy Towne. What’s her whereabouts going to tell us?”

“It gives us a chance to talk to people in her life. We follow the leads we have, not the ones we wish we had. Besides, look what the last alibi check gave us.”

“We learned Soleil lied to us?”

“Exactly. So let’s talk to some more people who might tell us the truth.”

Waiting for the cross signal on 45th, Rook followed her gaze to the newsstand where a dozen Nikki Heats hung from clothespins along the roof of the kiosk.

“How many weeks till November?” she said. And then the light changed and they crossed the street to enter the lobby of the Marriott Marquis.

They found Soleil’s old keyboardist Zane Taft exactly where his agent had told Nikki he would be, in the Marquis Ballroom on the ninth floor. Nikki had also gotten the musician’s cell phone number, but she didn’t call ahead. Soleil could have already texted him, as she did Allie, but if she hadn’t yet, no reason to give him a heads-up and a chance to call his former lead singer to line up their alibi stories.

He was alone in the ballroom, on a riser overlooking the empty dance floor, doing a sound check on his keyboard. The first thing Nikki noticed about him was his smile, big and open and crammed with perfect teeth. He fished out Diet Cokes from the ice bucket the hotel had left for him, a man glad for the company.

“Got a gig here tonight, a Sweet Sixty.”

“Birthday party?” asked Rook.

Zane shrugged. “Life, huh? Four years ago today I’m at the Hollywood Bowl in Shades, playing our second encore, looking out at Sir Paul in the front row and making eye contact with Jessica Alba. And now?” He popped the tab on his aluminum can and Coke fizzed over. “I should have had a business manager. Anyway, tonight I’m getting duked an extra three hundred because birthday boy likes Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and I know all the songs from
Jersey Boys
.” He slurped the overflow from around the rim of the can. “Fact is, Soleil was the band. She gets the fat contract, I get to play ‘Do You Like Piña Coladas?’ for boomers who are recession-proof enough to afford parties for themselves.”

Nikki said, “You don’t sound bitter.”

“What’s that going to get you? And, hey, Soleil’s still a pal. She checks on me from time to time, or when she hears about a studio gig, she’ll make a call for me. It’s cool.” He smiled and all those teeth reminded Heat of the keyboard on his Yamaha.

“Have you been in touch with her recently?” Nikki phrased it openly, seeing how he played it.

“Yeah, she called about half an hour ago, telling me to expect a visit from the famous detective, what’s-her-name. That’s her saying that, not me.”

“No problem,” she said. “Did Soleil tell you why we’re here?”

He nodded and took another hit off his soda. “Here’s the truth. Yes, she was with me the other night. You know, when the lady got killed. But not for long. She met up with me at the Brooklyn Diner on Fifty-seventh about midnight. I was only on the first bite of my Fifteen Bite Hot Dog when she got a call and freaked and said she had to go. That’s Soleil, though.”

“I can never finish those,” said Rook. “And I’m a dog eater.”

Nikki ignored Rook. “So she was only with you for how long?”

“Ten minutes, if.”

“Did she say who the call was from?”

“No, but I heard her say his first name when she answered. Derek. I remember it because I started thinking . . . and the Dominos. You know as in,” and then he started riffing the iconic piano solo from “Layla,” the coda sounding as authentic as if the band were in the room. Later that night, he’d be playing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” for a landscape contractor from Massapequa, Long Island.

As soon as the doors closed to the ballroom, Rook said to Heat, “Know how you’ve been kidding me, always saying my insider knowledge ain’t crap?”

“Who says I was kidding?”

“Well, stop. Because I know who Derek is.”

Nikki U-turned herself in the hallway and stepped in front of him. “Seriously? You know who Derek is?”

“I do.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” When she moaned and strode to the elevator, he caught up with her. “Hang on, I mean I’ve never met him. But hear me out—I was with Cassidy Towne when she got a call from a Derek, and I heard his last name when her assistant said he was on the line.”

Multiple synapses started firing in Heat’s brain at once. “Rook . . . If there’s a connection between Soleil and this Derek and Cassidy Towne . . . I don’t want to say what it means yet, but I have an idea.”

“Me, too,” he said. “You first.”

“Well, for one, what if he is the Texan?”

“Sure,” said Rook. “Timing of the call to Soleil, her reaction . . . Derek could be our killer. Maybe he and Soleil were both involved in that big story Cassidy wouldn’t tell me about. And they wanted it and her killed.”

“Fine, fine, fine. What’s the last name?”

“I forget.” She shoved him and he stumbled back into a potted plant. “Hang on, hang on now.” He took out his black Moleskine notebook and flipped to some early pages. “Here. It’s Snow. Derek Snow.”

The address trace didn’t take long. A half hour later, Heat was parking the Crown Victoria in front of Derek Snow’s fifth-floor walk-up on 8th Street a few blocks east of Astor Place.

She and Rook made the climb of five flights with a squad of heavily armed uniformed cops borrowed from the Ninth Precinct. There was another contingent on the fire escape, both high and low. Their reward for the hike was to knock and get no answer. “It is just past one,” said Rook. “He could be at work.”

“I suppose I could maybe knock on a few doors to see if anybody knows where he works.”

“I don’t think that’s going to help you.”

Nikki gave him a puzzled look. “Why not?”

Rook leaned toward the door and touched his nose. She leaned in and sniffed.

They had a battering ram, but the super was there to unlock the door to the apartment. Nikki entered with one hand over her nose and the other resting on the grip of her service weapon. The uniforms rolled in behind her, then Rook.

The first thing she recognized when she saw Derek Snow’s body was that it wasn’t the Texan. The young African-American sat slumped forward at the kitchen table with his face down on a place mat. The dried pool of blood on the linoleum underneath him came from a puncture in his white shirt, just below his heart. Heat turned to get the OK signal from the cops who had cleared the other rooms of the apartment, and then she turned back to find Rook on one knee doing what she was about to do, checking out his forearms.

Rook turned to her and said the word just as she was thinking it. “Adhesive.”

Chapter Nine

J
ameson Rook sat off to the side of the bull pen with his back against his squatter’s desk while the rest of the detectives from Homicide plus a few familiar faces from Robbery-Burglary and a pair from Vice drew up chairs around the whiteboard. Behind them, through the glass wall, he could see Nikki rising from her meeting with Captain Montrose.

Just as cop humor is laced with dark understatement, cop tension is also between the lines. The veteran reporter in him could hear it in the silence—the way the room fell quiet when Detective Heat came into the pen and stepped up to address them. He saw it in the faces turned to her, all experienced, many showing the world-weariness years on the job had etched into them, but all full of attentiveness.

He had been discreet about his note-taking since his return to the Two-Oh. Rook had an unexpected exclusive that was all going into his Cassidy Towne article, but in deference to Nikki’s sensitivity and the fish eyes he had been getting from some of the squad, his MO had been to memorize key words or to scrawl them on scraps of paper or, if something required more jotting than he felt he could sneak, to make an unnecessary trip or two to the men’s room. But that day, Rook surrendered to the volume of detail coming at him and began to take written notes in the open. If anybody noticed, he or she didn’t seem to care. They were all taking notes, too.

The spine of his black Moleskine answered with a comforting crack as he bent it back so the fresh page would lie flat on his thigh. He heard the throaty tone in Nikki’s voice when she said a simple good afternoon to the packed room, and the journalist wrote on the top line in block letters, “Game Changer.”

Detective Heat confirmed it with her opening remarks. “I just briefed Captain Montrose to let him know what we all suspect from today’s developments. Although the autopsy is pending and CSU is still on the scene of this afternoon’s homicide, I have reason to believe we are now dealing with a professional killer.” Somebody cleared a throat, but that was the only sound in the room. “What began as a search for a revenge killer, perhaps someone who hired our John Doe Texan to murder Cassidy Towne, it’s clear this has ratcheted up to where we have someone who is trying to cover something up and has a pro contractor on the job as a sort of silencer.

“We already had allocated extra resources on this case because of the high-profile nature of the first victim, but due to this change in scope, the Cap has requested, and has received from 1PP, the clearance to bring in extra manpower and lab resources to find our killer.” Nikki called on one of the Burglary plainclothes, who had a finger raised. “Rhymer?”

“What do we have on the new vic?”

“Still developing, but here’s the rundown I do have.” Nikki didn’t need notes; she had it all in her head and wrote each item on the new, smaller whiteboard that had been brought in and set up beside Cassidy Towne’s. “Prelim TOD is same night as our gossip girl. OCME will give us a time window soon and I’ll forward to you. Derek Snow was an African-American male, twenty-seven, according to DMV. No arrests, except for a couple of speeding tickets. Lived alone in a one-bedroom, Lower East, steady tenant, paid his rent, no problems, neighbors loved him. Stable employment, worked since ’07 as a concierge at the Dragonfly House in SoHo. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a five-star boutique hotel, quiet and discreet, attracts lots of creatives, mostly Euros but Hollywood-friendly, also.”

She waited for them to make their notes before she continued. “Rhymer, I’d like you and Roach to head down to his apartment to dig a little deeper with the neighbors, see if one didn’t love him. Or if anybody has new thoughts on something they saw or heard.

“I don’t know if he liked boys or girls, but see if he had any relationships worth looking at. Check the neighborhood, too. It’s one of those blocks where everybody knows your name, so hit the diners and the bodegas.”

Ochoa, who was sitting beside Rhymer, a clean-cut Carolina transplant, said, “In that neighborhood you can get yourself a nice tat while you’re down there, too, Opie. ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ on your knuckles, maybe?”

Nikki seemed glad for Ochoa’s tension breaker, and when the laughter settled, she said, “CSU is sweeping his place with a special eye toward any hard connection to Towne or Miss Gray. I’ll let you know. And let’s not forget our common COD by stabbing and the apparently identical restraints with the duct tape. I’m heading over to OCME now to see the results of Snow’s autopsy, but aside from the new arrival of other possible suspects, we are still liking our John Doe Texan, so show his sketch and the picture of Soleil Gray in your files when you make your rounds.

“I also want a team to work the Dragonfly. Malcolm, you and . . . how about Reynolds from Vice? Cover the usual coworker angles, beefs with guests or vendors, the union. But it is a hotel, so look into the vice aspects, too. He was a concierge, and rumor has it some of them actually have been known to procure.” She paused again for the chuckles to subside. “But our best connection is through a new person of interest, the rock singer, Soleil Gray, who connects—loosely, so far—to Cassidy Towne and to Derek Snow. Rook, any thoughts on Snow’s connection?”

She had startled him from a thought. His Moleskine dropped to the floor, where he left it. He almost stood, but that would be dorky, so he just sat a little straighter, feeling all the cop stares turned his way. “Uh, yeah, actually, I have something very interesting now that I hear he worked at the Dragonfly. Before I knew the specific hotel, I assumed the connection might be he was one of Cassidy Towne’s sources. Cassidy paid her sources for their tips. That’s unusual. Richard Johnson of ‘Page Six’ at the
Post
told me he doesn’t pay tipsters. Other papers don’t have the budget. But she did, and they were mostly in personal service industries. Limo drivers, private trainers, cooks, masseuses, and, of course, hotel employees. Concierges.” He started to relax as he saw the nods of understanding from the detectives.

“That’s a viable theory, so we’ll go with that for now,” said Heat, as one of the detectives handed Rook his Moleskine with a nod and a smile.

“I’m not done,” Rook said. “That was where I came down before I just heard he worked at the Dragonfly. That’s the hotel where Reed Wakefield died last May. Soleil Gray’s fiancé.”

Heat didn’t like to bigfoot Malcolm and Reynolds, but she wanted to check out the Dragonfly herself. Those two detectives could cover the other angles, but she wanted to check out the Reed Wakefield death. Nikki called ahead to Lauren Parry to tell the ME she would be later than planned. While she had her friend on the phone, Heat asked her if she could look up the coroner findings on Wakefield, then she and Rook headed for SoHo. Lauren called back while Nikki was parking in an open space in front of Balthazar, just around the corner from the hotel on Crosby.

“COD was toxic overdose, ruled accidental,” said the medical examiner. “Deceased was a habitual user, a self-medicator. Looked from his history like one of those seesaw cases, you know, took something to bring himself up, then something else to level it off, something else to set him down. Blood work and stomach showed high alcohol, plus toxic amounts of cocaine, amyl nitrate, and Ambien.”

“I have the file on its way to my office, but I’m on the road. Is there a notation in yours about the inquest?”

“Yeah, of course. And we all talked about it here, too, so I remember it pretty well from the office buzz. They took a close look, especially after Heath Ledger, to cover all the bases. He was depressive, distraught after his engagement broke off, but gave no hints of suicidal thoughts. They interviewed coworkers, family, even the ex.”

“Soleil Gray?”

“Right,” said Lauren. “Everyone says the same thing. He was pretty much to himself the final month of shooting his last movie. When it wrapped, he went to the hotel in SoHo, basically, to cocoon and shut out the world.”

Nikki thanked her for the crib notes and apologized for being late. “If you want, I could just get your Derek Snow report over the phone.”

“Not on your life,” said Lauren. “You get your happy ass down here when you’re done.” And then she left it with a cryptic “I promise to make it worth your while.”

It was a difficult time to visit the Dragonfly. The staff was clearly shaken by the news of the concierge’s murder, but, as one of those small hotels with a casual air but impeccable couth, they soldiered on without letting their high-end guests know anything was amiss. Though nobody could miss the accumulation of expensive flower arrangements filling the area around the concierge desk, no doubt from devoted travelers who mourned Derek Snow.

The manager and night manager, who got called in early for the interview, met Heat and Rook in the bamboo-paneled lounge, which had not yet opened. Both had been on duty during the weeks Reed Wakefield stayed there, up to his death. They confirmed what Lauren had conveyed in her synopsis, and it jibed with what Heat, Rook, and most New Yorkers knew about the tragedy. The actor checked in alone, spent most of the time in his room, leaving only occasionally, like when housekeeping needed to service it, or at night. He came and went alone because it was clear that was what he wanted. He was polite but kept to himself. The only complaint he made was to insist housekeeping re-close his drapes and leave the lights off in his room when they were finished.

The night of his death Wakefield did not go out, nor did he have any visitors. When he didn’t answer his door the next day—he had specified 11:30 to 12:30 for his service—the housekeeper let herself in and discovered his body in the bed. She mistakenly assumed he was sleeping and left quietly, but then became concerned, and two hours later was when they discovered that he was dead.

“What was his relationship like with Derek Snow?” When the two managers reacted, Nikki said, “I’m sorry. I know this is a difficult time, but these questions need to be asked.”

“I understand,” said the manager. “The fact is, Derek was quite popular with all our guests. He was so well suited to the job and had a passion for it. He was naturally friendly, discreet, and masterful at bookings for theater or impossible restaurants.”

Nikki asked again, “And was he also popular with Reed Wakefield?”

The night manager, a thin young man with pale skin and a British accent, said, “Truth be told, I don’t think Mr. Wakefield availed himself extensively of Derek’s services during his stay. That’s not to say they didn’t pass the greetings of the day, but that might be the extent of it.”

“Did Soleil Gray ever visit him?” asked Heat.

“Mr. Wakefield?” The manager looked at the night man, and both shook no.

“Not during that period, as far as we recall,” said the night manager.

“Did Soleil Gray ever come to this hotel at all?”

“Oh, yes,” said the manager. “She was a frequent visitor to this lounge in particular and for certain parties, as well as being a guest of the hotel from time to time.”

“Even though she could almost walk here from her apartment?” said Rook.

“Mr. Rook, the Dragonfly is a destination experience for travelers no matter how far they come.” The manager smiled. That wasn’t the first time he had said that. Probably not the first time that day.

Heat asked, “What was her relationship like with Derek Snow?”

“Same as everyone’s, I suppose,” said the manager. He turned to the night manager. “Colin?”

“Absolutely. Quite. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

His certainty and exuberance seemed a little heavy-handed for Nikki’s taste. So she just went for it. “Were they lovers?”

“No, of course not,” said the manager. “That would be a breach of policy. Why do you ask that?”

Nikki directed herself to the night manager. “Because you are hiding something.” She paused for effect and watched pink splotches surface on his cheeks. “What is it, then, did they fight? Deal in drugs? Arrange cockfights in her room? You can tell me here, or you can tell me Uptown in a more official setting.”

The manager looked at his colleague, whose scalp was showing beads of perspiration through his thinning blond hair. “Colin?”

Colin hesitated and said, “We had a bit of . . . an incident . . . involving Miss Gray. You have to understand crossing this line of discretion is very difficult for me.”

“We’re here for ya, Colly,” said Rook. “Let her rip.”

Colin withered under his manager’s look. “One evening last winter,” he began, “Miss Gray was a guest of the hotel and had a lapse in her sobriety. At two-thirty
A.M.
, on my shift, as it happens, she, ah . . . had to be subdued in the lobby. Derek Snow was still about, and I asked him to help me escort her into her room. In the process, a firearm she had in her handbag discharged, and the bullet grazed Derek’s thigh.”

“Colin?” said the manager, obviously unhappy.

“I admit, we did not adhere to procedure and report this, but the plea was made by Derek not to make a fuss, and, well . . .”

“She paid you guys off,” said Heat. Not a question.

“In a word, yes.”

“And there’s no police report of this.” Again, Heat didn’t have to ask. When Colin shook his head, she said, “How bad was his wound? Doctors are required to report those to the department.”

“It was a graze but enough for several stitches. Miss Gray was acquainted with a physician who gave cast physicals for the film industry, and an arrangement was made.”

Now that Detective Heat understood the connection between Soleil Gray and Derek Snow, she asked a few more questions, details that satisfied her and allowed her to check later, and ended the meeting. After she got the contact information for Colin, she showed the police rendering of the Texan. “Have you ever seen this man here?”

They both said no. She asked them to think of him in a different context than as a guest, perhaps on someone’s security detail. The answer was still no, although the manager kept the picture.

“That’s all for now,” said Heat, “except a question about one more person. Has Cassidy Towne ever come here?”

“Please,” said the manager. “This is the Dragonfly.”