Naked Heat

  "I don't know about that," said Rook. "I wouldn't mind finding the recipe for these jalapeno corn sticks." He was helping himself to a sample from the cast-iron corncob forms on the counter.

  "Rook?" said Heat.

  "What? They're crunchy outside, moist on the inside, and the kick from the pepper . . . Mm, the way it melds with the butter . . . Man."

  Ochoa returned from the pantry. "Nothing," he said to Heat.

  "Same in the office, and bedrooms," reported Raley as he came in the other doorway. "What's he doing?"

  Nikki turned to see Rook's face, contorted into a wince. "Being a nuisance. You know, Rook, this is why we don't let you come along."

  "Sorry. I got a little spice issue here. Know what I wish I had? Some sweet tea."

  Raley gave Rook a foul look and joined his partner, who was trying to open a locked door at the back of the kitchen. "What's in here?" said Ochoa.

  "My wine closet," said the chef. "I have some rare bottles in there worth thousands. And it's temp controlled."

  That got Heat very interested. "Where's the key?"

  "There is no key, it takes a code."

  "OK," she said, "I'll ask nicely. Once. What is the code?" When he said nothing, she added, "I have a warrant."

  He seemed amused. "Why don't you use it to jimmy the door?"

  "Ochoa, call Demolitions and tell them we need a team with a blast matrix. And evacuate the building."

  "Hold on, hold on. Blast matrix? I have a 1945 Chateau Haut-Brion in there." Nikki cupped a hand behind her ear. He sighed and said, "It's 41319."

  Ochoa entered the code on the keypad, and a servo motor whirred inside the lock. He flipped on the light switch and stepped into the large closet. After a short moment, he stepped out and shook his head to Heat.

  "Why are you hassling me, anyway?" said the chef. The attempt at peeved bravado had returned.

  Nikki stood over him, close enough to make him have to strain his neck to look up at her. "I told you. I want you to give up the body of Cassidy Towne."

  "What would I know about Cassidy Towne? I didn't even know the bitch."

  "Yes, you did, I heard you fighting," said Rook. "Whoo," he blew air out of his mouth in a huff, "must have gotten a seed."

  Vergennes acted as if a distant memory had been jogged free. "Oh, that. We argued, OK? What the hell, you think I killed her because she was pissed I wouldn't comp her a party of twelve at my opening?"

  "We have a witness that says you hired them to steal her body."

  He scoffed. "I'm done. This is getting crazy. I want my lawyer."

  "All right. You can call him after we take you to the precinct," said Heat.

  Taking opposite sides of the kitchen, Raley and Ochoa moved in a line, systematically opening and closing custom cabinets, all full of either cookbooks, imported dinnerware, or a Williams-Sonoma's worth of kitchen gadgets.

  "For real, my mouth is seriously on fire." Rook stepped to the big Sub-Zero. "Wow, this is some fridge. Gorgeous."

  Vergennes called out, "No, don't, that's broken."

  But Rook had already pulled the handle. And then he got knocked backward when the body of Cassidy Towne bumped open the refrigerator door as it toppled out and landed on the Spanish tiles at his feet.

  The uniformed officer posted at the front door ran in when he heard Rook scream.

  Richmond Vergennes was a different man when confronted by the harsh reality of the Interrogation Room. The cockiness was gone. Nikki watched his hands, callused and scarred by years on the cook line. They were quaking. From the chair beside him, Vergennes's lawyer gave him the nod to begin. "First of all, I didn't kill her, I swear."

  "Mr. Vergennes, think of how many times in your career you've heard a waiter bring a dish back to the kitchen and tell you the customer says it's cold. That's about half as many times as I've sat here and heard the guy in cuffs on your side of the table say, 'I didn't do it, I swear.' "

  The lawyer chimed in. "Detective, we are hoping to be cooperative here. I don't think there's any call to make this difficult." The suit was Wynn Zanderhoof, a partner in one of the big Park Avenue firms that specialized in entertainment law. He was their criminal face, and Heat had seen plenty of him over the years.

  "Sure, Counselor. Especially after your client made our lives such a breeze. Resisting arrest, brandishing a weapon at a police officer, obstructing an investigation. And all that comes after the murder of Cassidy Towne. Plus the conspiracy to hijack her body. Plus the numerous charges related to that. I think difficulty is the word of the day for Mr. Vergennes."

  "Granted," said the attorney. "Which is why we were hoping to strike some sort of arrangement to mitigate the unnecessary tensions surrounding all this."

  "You want a deal?" asked the detective. "Your client is facing a murder charge, and we have a confession from a man in the crew he paid to steal the damn body. What are you going to bargain with, a complimentary dessert?"

  "I didn't kill her. I was home with my wife that night. She'll vouch."

  "We'll check." There was something that crossed his face when she said that. His dark Cajun looks lost their cockiness. Like the alibi wouldn't hold or maybe something else. What was it? She decided to pick at that and see where it led. "When you say you were with your wife, when was that?"

  "All night. We watched some TV, went to bed, woke up. Like that."

  She made a show of opening her notebook and poising her pen. "Tell me the exact time you and your wife went to bed."

  "I dunno. We watched some Nightline, then hit the hay."

  "So," said Nikki as she wrote, "you're saying it was twelve o'clock? Midnight?"

  "Yeah, or a few minutes after. Those late-night shows are all like five minutes late getting started."

  "And what time did you get home?"

  "Mm, about eleven-fifteen, I guess."

  Something seemed off to Heat, so she pressed. "Chef, I hear all the stories about the restaurant business. Especially for a new restaurant, isn't quarter after eleven kind of early for you to be home?"

  She could see she was getting at something. Vergennes was showing nerves, working his mouth like he was looking for a strand of hair with his tongue. "Business was light, so I, ah, knocked off early."

  "Oh, I see. What time did you knock off?"

  His eyes roamed the ceiling. "Don't remember, exactly."

  "No problem," she said. "I'll be checking with your staff, anyway. They'll tell me what time you left."

  "Nine o'clock," he blurted.

  Nikki wrote it down. "Does it typically take you two and a quarter hours to get to SoHo at that hour from Sixty-third and Lex?" When she looked up from her pad, he was coming unglued. His lawyer leaned over to show him a note he'd scrawled, but Vergennes pushed it away.

  "All right, I didn't go straight home." The attorney tried again by putting a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off and said, "I'll tell you exactly where I was. I . . . was at Cassidy Towne's."

  Heat wished Lauren Parry had had that body sooner so she could have a more accurate time of death. It was entirely possible that the TOD was before midnight. She followed her instinct to seize Vergennes's moment of weakness and take the leap. "Are you saying you went to Cassidy Towne's and stabbed her?"

  "No. I'm saying I went to Cassidy Towne's and . . ." He trailed off, lowering both his head and his voice, mumbling something she couldn't make out.

  "Excuse me, I don't hear that. You went to Cassidy Towne's and what?"

  Vergennes's face was sallow when he looked up, his eyes unable to hide the misery of his shame. "I went there . . . and . . . I fucked her."

  Nikki watched him bend down to dry wash his face with the palms of his hands. When he rose up from his manacles, some of his color had returned. She tried to look at this heartthrob master chef who had conquered Manhattan and put him together with Cassidy Towne, the unofficial arbiter of public scandal. Something in her didn't see them as a couple, although, after years on the
job, Nikki could believe just about anything. "So you and Cassidy Towne were having an affair?"

  Nikki tried not to paint the picture before she got his answer. The one she saw was a married man trying to break it off, an argument got too heated, and so on. Once again, she went to training and listened instead of projecting.

  "We weren't having an affair." His voice was weak and hollow. Nikki had to strain to hear him even in the quiet room.

  "So that was your first . . . liaison?"

  The chef seemed amused by a private thought. He said, "Sadly, no. It was not our first 'liaison.' "

  "You're going to have to explain to me why you don't call this an affair."

  The dead quiet that followed was broken by his lawyer. "Rich, I have to advise you not to--"

  "No, I'm going to get this out now so they'll see I didn't kill her." He settled down and then came out with it. "I was doing Cassidy Towne for one reason. I had to. I bought this new place right before the economy cratered. I had zero budget for advertising, suddenly people weren't dining out, and if they were, they were skittish about new restaurants. I was desperate. So Cassidy . . . made a deal with me." He paused again and muttered his pitiful, defining words. "Sex for ink."

  Heat reflected back on her Sardi's experience with Rook's mother. Apparently, Cassidy didn't restrict herself to actors.

  "You have to understand, I love my wife." Nikki just listened. No sense telling him the hundreds of times she's heard that, too, from husbands in that chair. "This wasn't something I came up with. She caught me at a vulnerable time. I said no at first, and she just made it harder to refuse. Said if I loved my wife, I'd . . . sleep with her so we didn't lose our investment. It was stupid. But I did it. I hated myself for it, and you know what's crazy? She didn't even seem into me. It was like she just wanted to prove she could make me do it."

  He paused and his face drained again, turning the color of an oyster. "Can't you see? That's why I had those guys steal the body. I woke up yesterday morning and my wife has the TV on and says, 'Hey, somebody killed that gossip bitch.' I thought, Holy Mother . . . I screwed her the night before, now she's dead, and whose DNA are they going to find in her? Mine. So my wife will know I've been banging her? I panic, I'm trying to think, what can I do?

  "This food supplier I work with has some connections to some wiseguys for hire, so I call him up and tell him he's got to get me out of a jam. It cost me large, but I got the goddam body."

  "Wait, you did this because you were afraid your wife would find out about your relationship?" asked Nikki.

  "People knew I was hanging around Cassidy. Your writer pal, for one. Only a matter of time till it came back and bit me, I thought. And Monique's got all the money. I signed a prenup. I'm losing my ass in this economy, the new place is going down; if she cuts me off, next week I'm slinging sauce on ribs at Applebee's."

  "So why have the body delivered to where you and your wife live?"

  "My wife left yesterday for Philly to work publicity for the Food and Wine Festival. It was all I could think of until I could think of something better." He grew somber after his outburst, the way people did when they'd unloaded their guilt. "Those dudes came by and shook me down for another fifty grand to dispose of her. I don't have that, so they left her with me and told me to think fast."

  Nikki flipped to a fresh page of her notebook. "And what time do you claim you last saw Cassidy Towne alive?"

  "I did see her alive. It was about ten-thirty. That's when I left her apartment."

  Raley and Ochoa were off hunting for Cassidy Towne's typewriter ribbons so when Heat wrapped Vergennes's interrogation and he was led off to be processed for Riker's, she assigned Detective Hinesburg to check out his alibi. The chef said he had paid for the cab home with a credit card around ten-thirty, so there would be a record with the card company and the taxi.

  "Blast matrix?" said Rook from his old desk, which he had reclaimed across the bull pen.

  Heat welcomed the half smile he was putting on her face, especially in the wake of her disappointment about Vergennes apparently alibi-ing out. She had the body but probably not the killer. "What, you've never heard of a blast matrix?"

  "No," he said, "but it didn't take me long to figure out that was just a Heatism. Sort of like the Zoo Lockup, am I right? Some BS term you make up and sling out there to scare the ignorant into thinking there's big trouble coming if they don't comply."

  "It worked, didn't it?" Her desk phone rang and she picked it up.

  He laughed. "The Heatisms always do."

  Nikki finished her call and asked Rook if he felt like a ride. Lauren Parry was ready with Cassidy Towne's autopsy.

  As they came into the precinct lobby on their way to the car, Richmond Vergennes's lawyer was signing out. "Detective Heat?" Wynn Zanderhoof hurried to intercept her, toting his Zero Haliburton attache, one of those aluminum cases you saw slick hit men and power-suited drug dealers using to carry bundles of cash in every eighties cop movie. "A word, please?"

  They stopped at the glass door, and when the attorney just stood there, Nikki got the hint and asked Rook to wait for her at the car. When they were alone, the lawyer said, "You know a murder charge is going to get laughed out of the DA's office."

  Heat didn't believe Richmond Vergennes killed Cassidy Towne, but she couldn't entirely rule it out yet and so was not about to let the pressure off. "Even if his alibi checks, that doesn't mean he didn't hire somebody to do it, just like he outsourced stealing the body."

  "True. And that's good diligence on your part, Detective." Zanderhoof smiled the kind of empty smile that made her want to check to make sure she still had her watch and her wallet. "But I'm sure your tenacity will also lead you, at some point, to ask yourself why, if my client had someone else kill her, he didn't have them dispose of her remains then and there rather than suffer all the risk and attention caused by the incident on Second Avenue yesterday."

  He said "incident" in a downplaying way, already jockeying to have charges reduced. Fine, that was his job. Hers was to catch a killer. And as much as she didn't like being jawboned, she had to concede his point. She had as much as arrived at that conclusion herself staring at the time line on the whiteboard not three minutes before. "We'll follow this investigation wherever it leads, Mr. Zanderhoof," she said, giving no ground. No reason to until the chef was entirely ruled out. "The fact remains, your client is up to his neck in this, starting with his affair with my murder victim."

  The lawyer chuckled. "Affair? This was no affair."

  "Then what was it?"

  "A business arrangement, simple as that." He looked through the glass at Rook, leaning on the fender of the Crown Vic, and when he was sure Nikki registered that, his eyes narrowed into a smile she didn't like and he said, "Cassidy Towne was trading sex for print. She certainly wouldn't be the first woman to do that, now, would she, Nikki Heat?"

  "You're being awfully quiet." Rook twisted himself sideways in his seat to face her as best he could, given the seat belt and the radio gear between their knees. It was never an easy trip from the Upper West Side to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner down near Bellevue, and since they had hit the meat of rush hour, it was taking forever. It probably seemed longer than forever to Rook because Heat seemed far away in her thoughts. No, more than that, her vibe was brittle.

  "Sometimes I like the quiet, OK?"

  "Sure, no problem." He let exactly three seconds pass before he broke the silence. "If you're bumming about Chef Vergennes not being the killer, look at the glass-half-full part, Nikki. We got the body back. Did Montrose say anything?"

  "Oh, yeah, Cap's plenty happy. At least the tabloids won't be putting pictures of magicians and disappearing bodies on their covers tomorrow."

  "Guess we can thank Fat Tommy for that, can't we?" He searched her for a reaction, but she steadied her focus on traffic, seeming especially interested in anything that was going on out the opposite window from him. "And I'm not trying to claim credi
t because he was my source. I'm just saying."

  Nikki nodded imperceptibly and went back to studying her side mirror like she was somewhere else. Somewhere that didn't feel so comfortable if you were Jameson Rook.

  He tried another approach to connect with her. "Hey, I liked that line you hit them with back there in Interrogation. You know, the one about what did they have to offer except a complimentary dessert?" Rook chuckled. "Pure Heat. That's going in the article, for sure. That and blast matrix."

  Nikki did engage, but not how he'd expected. "No," she added sharply, "no." Then she checked the side mirror and jerked the wheel, bringing the car to a lurching stop that made everything on the backseat slide off onto the floor. She didn't care. "What the hell do I have to do to get through to you?" She poked her finger in the air, punctuating her words with a stab. "I do not, do not, want to be in your article. I do not want to be named, quoted, pictured, or so much as alluded to in your next or any other article. And further, since we seem to have hit a dead end in terms of your so-called secret journalistic sources and insights, I'm thinking this is our last ride. Call the Captain, call the mayor if you want to, I have had it. No mas. Now do you understand?"

  He studied her a beat and grew quiet.

  Before he could say anything more, Heat pulled back onto the road and punched Lauren Parry on her speed dial. "Hi, we're two blocks away. . . . Good, see you then."

  Between the stoplight and the OCME garage Nikki had second thoughts. Not about her feelings regarding the article and the myriad ways it was screwing with her life. But she worried she'd blistered Rook too much. She could rationalize it, just chalk it up to being pissed after the cheap shot from the slimebag Wynn Zanderhoof, but still, she could have handled Rook a little more deftly and at the same time made her point. She snuck a look at him as he watched the road in wounded silence. A picture memory came to her of Rook sitting right there in that very seat on so many rides, making her laugh the way he did--and then another glimpse of him, sitting there that night in the rainstorm when they couldn't get enough of each other so they spent the night trying. Heat grappled with an overwhelming twinge of regret for losing it with him.