“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 de
livering 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?”
“Maybe I can close the case someday. But closure?” She dismissed the entire concept with the wave of a hand.
“I don’t know how you got through it, Nikki.” He rested his hand on her wrist. “You were very strong then.” Rook signaled for the check.
“Maybe strong is what broke us up.”
He smiled a little and said, “And not me cheating?”
“Oh, right.” She grinned. “That, too.”
On their way out, Nikki excused herself to the ladies’ room and Petar thanked Rook for the nice meal. “You’re a very lucky guy, Jameson Rook,” trilling the R, a remnant of the accent. “Take this the right way, OK? I honestly hope you’re luckier than I was. I could never get through that protective wall of hers. Maybe you won’t give up.”
In spite of himself, Rook had to admit maybe he and the old boyfriend had something in common, after all.
The April air had chilled overnight, and as they waited Sunday morning on the empty sidewalk outside of NEC’s Main Conservatory Building to meet her mom’s former professor, Nikki could see vapor trails from Rook’s nose. It reminded her of Lauren Parry’s breath inside that freezer truck, and she turned away to watch a bus roll by on Huntington Avenue. Then they both heard bouncy synthesized music followed by a man’s amplified voice singing the Flashdance song “Maniac.” The two of them turned all around, searching for the source.
“He’s up there,” said the gray-haired woman approaching from the bus stop. She pointed to an eighth-floor open window in an apartment building behind the NEC residence hall, where a black man in a red long-sleeved shirt and matching black leather vest and fedora sang into the mic of his karaoke machine. “That’s Luther.” She waved up to the window, and Luther waved back, still swaying and singing, his booming voice echoing off the face of the building. “Every morning, when he sees me, he auditions like this for the Conservatory. I told him once we don’t do pop, but he seems undaunted.” Professor Yuki Shimizu extended her hand and introduced herself.
The three of them ascended the foot-worn marble steps and entered through hallowed wooden doors into the vestibule. “I guess you know NEC is a national landmark,” said the professor. “The oldest private music institution in America. And no, I wasn’t here when it opened. It just feels like it.”
As they signed in at Security, Professor Shimizu said, “Pardon me for staring, but I can’t help it. You look just like your mother.” The old woman’s smile filled her entire face and warmed Nikki. “Take that as a supreme compliment, my dear.”
“So taken, Professor. Thank you.”
“And since it’s my day off, how about calling me Yuki?”
“And I’m Nikki.”
“Most people call me Rook,” he said. “But Jameson’s fine, too.”
“I’ve read your magazine articles.”
“Thank you,” he said.
A twinkle played in the woman’s eyes. “I didn’t say I liked them.” She threw a wink Nikki’s way and led them down a corridor to the right. In spite of the gray hair earned over seventy-six years, she strode with vitality and purpose, not a bit like she even knew what a day off felt like.
As they passed a rehearsal hall, a scattering of students awaiting their turns sat cross-legged on the brown and tan carpet, beside their backpacks and instrument cases, listening to iPods. From inside the hall, Bolero pounded against the closed door, all lush and percussive. Rook leaned over and whispered to Nikki, full of suggestiveness, “Mm, Bolero.”
Professor Shimizu, strides ahead of them, stopped and turned. “You like Ravel, Mr. Rook?” she asked, clearly having nothing wrong with her hearing. “Almost as sexy as Flashdance, eh?”
She took them downstairs to the Firestone Audio Library, where she had arranged a booth for them to meet in, for quiet and privacy. Once they all sat, she regarded Heat again and said, “Nikki, you became a police officer, right? So much for the apple falling from the tree theory.”
“Actually
, I had planned on becoming a performer myself,” she said. “I went to college next door at Northeastern and was on track get my degree in Theater Arts when my mother was killed.”
Professor Shimizu surprised her. The old woman rose to her feet and crossed to Nikki’s chair, clasping both her hands in both of hers. “I have no words. And we both know none can fill that void.”
Rook could see Nikki blink away some mist as the woman returned to her seat, so he began for her. “Professor, may I go back for a moment to our metaphorical apple tree?”
She turned aside to Nikki. “Writers.”
“You feel her mom was quite promising as a performer?”
“Let’s talk about the whole student, Jameson. The goal of this institution is not simply to grind out performers like sausage. This is a school, but it is also a community. We stress collaboration and growth. That means artistically, that means technically, and, most importantly, as a person. They are all connected if one is to achieve mastery.” The old teacher turned to address Nikki. “Simply put, your mother embodied those values like few I have seen in my almost sixty years here, both as a student and as faculty.” She paused for effect and said, “And do I look like I’d blow smoke up your skirt?” Heat and Rook laughed, but the professor remained serious. “Your mother also confounded me, Nikki. She studied, she practiced, she inquired, she experimented, and then she studied and practiced some more—all so she could realize her passion, her dream of becoming a concert pianist of the first order. I knew she would get there. The faculty had a pool going about when she would get her first recording contract from Deutsche Grammophon.”