Heat Wave

  She looked down at her bag. “You snooped my warrants, didn’t you?”

  His turn to grin. “Just thinking like a journalist.”

  Two hours later, Heat returned to find Rook staring at the whiteboard. “Come up with any more theories while I was out?”

  “In fact, yes.”

  She went to her desk and checked her voice mail. Her mailbox was empty. Nikki tossed the handset onto the cradle in frustration and looked at her watch.

  “You all right? Trouble with your search warrants?”

  “Au contraire,” she said. “I’m just stressing my wiretap. The other stuff went great. Better than great.”

  “What did you find?”

  “You first. What’s your new theory?”

  “Well. I’ve been thinking it all over and now I know who it is.”

  “Not Agda?”

  “Why? Is it Agda?”

  “Rook.”

  “Sorry, sorry. OK. This is off-the-wall. I’m off Agda. But I’m thinking about something she said about the new piano.” This piqued Nikki’s interest. She sat against the edge of her desk with her arms folded. “Am I getting warmer?” he asked.

  “I know I’m not getting younger. Get to it.”

  “When you interviewed her, Agda said something like the new piano was so gorgeous, she almost fainted when it came out of the crate.” He paused. “Who delivers pianos in crates anymore? Nobody.”

  “Interesting, go on.” In fact, these were waters she was fishing in, and Nikki was curious to hear his take.

  “We know the piano came in because we saw it there after the theft. So I got to wondering, why bring in a crate unless something is going to go out in it after you remove the piano from it?”

  “And so now you are saying it’s who?”

  “Obviously. The piano company is a front for art thieves.”

  “Is that your final answer?” The flat expression she showed him made Rook backpedal so fast, Nikki wanted to burst out laughing. But she held her poker face.

  “Or…,” he said, “let me finish. You served a warrant at the Guilford and at a personal storage place. I’m sticking with my piano crate scenario, but I say it’s…Kimberly Starr.” Although her face remained neutral, Rook became animated. “I’m right, I know it. I can see it all over you. Tell me I’m wrong, then.”

  “I’m not telling you squat.” Raley and Ochoa came into the bull pen. Heat started over to them. “Why spoil the fun?”

  “Raley and I showed around Buckley’s picture,” said Ochoa. “We scored two positive hits. That doesn’t suck.”

  “Doesn’t suck at all.” Nikki dared to let herself feel the thrill of gathering momentum on the case. “And they’ll testify?”

  “Affirm,” said Raley.

  Nikki’s desk phone rang and she lunged for it. “Detective Heat.” She kept nodding as if the caller could see her, and said, “Excellent. Great. Excellent. Thanks much.” When she hung up, she turned to her team. “Wiretap’s up. We’re going to the dance.” For once things were moving at Heat speed.

  Nikki and Rook sat wedged into a corner of the tiny room, knee-to-knee on metal folding chairs behind the police technician who was recording the calls. The AC vent whistled, so Heat had had the air turned off to let her hear without that distraction, and it was suffocating in there.

  A blue LED meter spiked on the console. “Picking up,” said the technician.

  Heat put on her headphones. The ring purred on the line. Her breathing became shallow the way it had on the raid in Long Island City, only this time she couldn’t calm herself. Her heart thunked at a disco cadence until Nikki heard the click of the answer and one of the beats skipped.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m using your direct line because I don’t want the receptionist knowing I’m calling you,” said Kimberly Starr.

  “OK…” Noah Paxton sounded wary of her. “I don’t understand why not.”

  Nikki hand-signaled the technician to ensure he was recording. He nodded.

  Kimberly continued, “You’re about to understand, Noah.”

  “Is something wrong? You sound strange.”

  Nikki closed her eyes into a tight squint of concentration, wanting only to hear. With headphones on, the fidelity was iPod-quality. She clocked every nuance. The air hiss of the office chair Noah was sitting in. The hard swallow that came from Kimberly.

  Now Nikki waited. Now she wanted words.

  “I need your help with something. I know you always did things for Matthew, and now I want you to do the same for me.”

  “Things?” His tone was still guarded.

  “Come on, Noah, cut the shit. We both know Matt pulled a lot of crap that was shady and you handled it. I need some of that from you now.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “I have the paintings.”

  Nikki caught herself making tension fists and loosened her grip.

  Paxton’s office chair creaked. “Excuse me?”

  “Am I not speaking English? Noah, the art collection. It wasn’t stolen. I took it. I hid it.”

  “You?”

  “Not me personally. I had some guys do it while I went out of town. Forget all that. The thing is, I have them and I want you to help me sell them.”

  “Kimberly, are you nuts?”

  “They’re mine. I didn’t get insurance. I deserve something out of all those years with that son of a bitch.”

  Now it was Heat’s turn to swallow hard. It was starting to come together. Her heart was punching to get out.

  “What makes you think I’d know how to sell them?”

  “Noah, I need help. You were Matthew’s fixer, now I want you to be mine. And if you’re not going to help me, I’ll find someone who will.”

  “Whoa, whoa, Kimberly, slow down.” Another pneumatic hiss, and Heat pictured Noah Paxton rising up behind his horseshoe-shaped desk. “Don’t call anybody. Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “We should talk this out. There’s a solution to all this, you just need to keep your head.” He paused and asked, “Where are these paintings?”

  A swell of anticipation gathered up Nikki and carried her until she felt suddenly weightless at its crest. A trickle of sweat curved around the vinyl ear seal of one of her headphones.

  “The paintings are here,” said Kimberly.

  “And where’s here?”

  Say it, thought Nikki, say it.

  “At the Guilford. Pretty cool, huh? All the searching they’ve been doing and they never left the building.”

  “All right, listen to me. Don’t call anybody, just relax. We need to work this out face-to-face, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Good. Stay there. I’ll be right over.” And then he hung up.

  Nikki took off her headphones. When Rook removed his, he said, “I called it. I was right. It was Kimberly. Ha-ha, where’s my five?” He held up his palm to her.

  “Uh, we don’t do fives.”

  Rook stood. “Listen, we’d better get over there before Noah. If this woman killed her husband, who knows what she’ll do next.”

  Nikki rose. “Thanks for the pointer, Detective Rook.” He held the door for her and they strode out.

  NINETEEN

  Heat, Raley, Ochoa, and Rook crossed through the lobby of the Guilford to the elevators. When the doors opened, Nikki put the palm of her hand on Rook’s chest. “Whoa, whoa, where do you think you’re going?”

  “With you.”

  She shook her head. “No way. You stay down here.”

  The automatic doors kept trying to close. Ochoa braced them open with his shoulder to keep them from bouncing.

  “Come on, I did what you said. I thought like a detective and I deserve to be there when you take her down. I’ve earned that.” When all three of the detectives broke into laughter, Rook walked it back a hair. “How about I just wait in the hall?”

  “You told me you’d wait in
the hall when I arrested Buckley.”

  “OK, I got impatient once.”

  “And on our raid in Long Island City, what did you do after I told you to stay behind?”

  Rook kicked the toe of his shoe against the lip of the rug. “Look, this is starting to sound more like an intervention than an arrest.”

  “I promise, we won’t make you wait long. After all,” she said with mock solemnity, “you’ve earned that.” She got in the elevator with Roach.

  “Just for that I may do my whole article about someone else.”

  “Break my heart,” she said as the doors shut on him.

  When Detective Heat entered through the front door of the apartment, she found Noah Paxton by himself in the living room. “Where’s Kimberly?”

  “She’s not here.”

  Raley and Ochoa stepped in behind Nikki. “Check all the rooms,” she said. Ochoa disappeared with Raley down the hallway.

  “Kimberly’s not back there,” said Paxton. “I already checked.”

  Heat said, “We’re do-it-yourselfers. We’re funny that way.” Her gaze went to the room full of artwork, hanging as it always had been, floor to ceiling. Nikki marveled at the sight. “The paintings. They’re back.”

  Noah seemed to share her bewilderment. “I don’t understand it, either. I’m just trying to figure out where the hell they came from.”

  “Relax, you don’t have to playact anymore, Noah.” She watched the furrows crease his brow. “They never left the Guilford, right? We tapped her phone call to you not twenty minutes ago.”

  “I see.” He thought a few seconds, no doubt sorting through his side of the conversation, wondering if he could be an accessory after the fact. “I told her she was nuts,” he said.

  “Now, that’s a good citizen.”

  He opened his palms to her. “I apologize, Detective. I knew I should have called you. Guess I still have my protective instinct for the family. I came over here to talk sense into her. Too late now.” Nikki just shrugged. “When did you find out she stole them? During that phone call?”

  “No. The alarm bells sounded for me when I heard our widow-in-mourning bought a piano and left town for the delivery. Does Kimberly strike you as someone who’d leave rearranging her precious antiques to a work crew and a dimwit nanny?” Nikki ambled to the Steinway and tinkled one key. “We checked with the building super. He confirmed the piano movers came here in the morning with a huge crate, but didn’t recall them leaving with one. It fell off his radar, I guess, after all the confusion around the blackout.”

  Noah smiled and shook his head. “Wow.”

  “I know, pretty sneaky, huh? They never left the building.”

  “Ingenious,” said Paxton. “And not a word I associate with Kimberly Starr.”

  “Well, she wasn’t as smart as she thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nikki had run this over and over in her head so that it was crystal clear to her. Now she would bring Noah along on the ride. “Did you know Matthew had changed his mind about selling his collection?”

  “No, I didn’t know anything about that.”

  “Well, he had. The same day he was killed, a woman from Sotheby’s named Barbara Deerfield came over here to appraise it. She was murdered before she got back to her office.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “I believe her murder was connected to Matthew’s.”

  His brow darkened. “It’s tragic, but I don’t understand the connection.”

  “Neither did I. I kept wondering, Why would anyone kill an art appraiser? Then I discovered that Starr’s entire art collection was made up of forgeries.” Nikki watched a pallor wash out Noah Paxton’s face.

  “Forgeries?” He let his gaze wander the walls. Nikki saw his eye fall upon a piece of art near the archway. The one covered by a shroud.

  “Fakes, Noah.” His attention snapped back to her. “The whole collection.”

  “How can that be? Matthew paid top dollar for these paintings, and from reputable dealers.” Paxton’s color was coming back and then some as he grew more agitated. “I can assure you when we bought these they were not fakes.”

  “I know,” said the detective. “The insurance documentation pictures bore that out.”

  “Then how could they now be fakes?”

  Nikki sat on the arm of a sofa that cost more than most people’s cars. “The appraiser took her own set of photos of the collection as notes. We found her camera and her pictures didn’t match the insurance shots. She had documented a roomful of forgeries.” Heat paused to let that sink in. “Sometime between the purchase and her appraisal, someone switched the art.”

  “That’s unbelievable. You’re sure of this?”

  “Absolutely. And Barbara Deerfield would have come to the same conclusion if she had lived to study her pictures. In fact,” said Nikki, “I’d say that the reason Barbara Deerfield was killed was because somebody didn’t want it to get out that the sixty-million-dollar Starr Collection was bogus.”

  “Are you saying Matthew was trying to palm off fakes?”

  Heat shook her head no. “Matthew never would have hired an appraiser if he knew they were fakes. And after all the money and ego he invested in his Little Versailles? He’d have had a meltdown if he ever found out.”

  Noah’s eyes widened in revelation. “Oh my God. Kimberly…”

  Nikki rose and strolled over to the John Singer Sargent oil of the two innocents, enjoyed it for just a glance, and said, “Kimberly beat someone else to stealing that art collection. I arrested a second crew that broke in here later, during the blackout, and they found nothing but empty walls.”

  “Everyone went to a lot of trouble just to steal something that’s worthless.”

  “Kimberly didn’t know the paintings were worthless. The grieving Mrs. Starr thought she was scoring her multimillion-dollar Lotto hit for a shitty marriage.”

  “Obviously the other burglars thought it was valuable, too.” Paxton gestured to the art. “Otherwise why would they try to steal it?”

  Nikki stepped away from the painting and faced him. “I don’t know, Noah. Why don’t you tell me?”

  He took his time before he answered, looking at her to gauge if she was asking a rhetorical question or something with more stink on it. He couldn’t have liked the way her eyes were boring into him, but he went for rhetorical. “I could only guess.”

  If her session at the medical examiner’s that morning was theater, for Nikki this was Brazilian jujitsu and she was done boxing. On to the grappling. “Do you know a Gerald Buckley?”

  Paxton squeezed his mouth into an upside-down U. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “Curious, Noah. Gerald Buckley knows you. He’s the overnight doorman here.” She watched him work his earnest face. Nikki found him almost convincing; he wasn’t bad. She was better. “Here’s a refresher. Buckley’s the man you hired to set up the second burglary during the blackout.”

  “That’s a lie. I don’t even know him.”

  “Now that is truly weird,” said Ochoa from the archway. Paxton was edgy. He hadn’t seen the other two detectives return, and he flinched when Ochoa spoke. “Me and my partner took a drive up to Tarrytown this afternoon. To a bar there.”

  Raley said, “Place called the, uh, Sleepy Swallow?”

  “Whatever,” said Ochoa. “Guess that’s your regular hang, right? Everybody knows you. And the bartender and a waitress both ID’d Mr. Buckley sitting at your table for a very long time a few nights ago.”

  “During the blackout,” added Raley. “About the time Buckley should have been in for that shift he canceled.”

  “Buckley is not your strongest point man,” said Heat. Noah’s eyes were getting less focused and he whipped his head from detective to detective as each spoke, like he was following the ball at a tennis match.

  “Dude caved like a sandcastle,” added Ochoa.

  “Buckley also says you called him up and told him to
hurry over here to the Guilford and let Pochenko in the rooftop door. That was just before Matthew Starr was murdered,” said Nikki.

  “Pochenko? Who’s Pochenko?”

  “Smooth. Not going to trip you up, am I?” said Heat. “Pochenko’s somebody whose picture you didn’t recognize in my photo array. Even though I showed his picture to you twice. Once here, once at your office.”

  “You’re fishing. This is all speculation. You’re putting everything on hearsay from a liar. An alcoholic who’s desperate for money.” Paxton was standing in a direct sun ray from one of the high windows, and his forehead glistened in the light. “Yes, I’ll admit I met this Buckley guy at the Swallow. But only because he was shaking me down. I used him a couple of times to arrange hookers for Matthew and he was trying to extort hush money out of me.” Paxton raised his chin and thrust his hands in his pockets, body English for that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, thought Nikki.

  “Let’s talk about money, Noah. Remember that little transgression of yours my forensic accountants uncovered? That time when you fudged the books to hide a few hundred grand from Matthew?”

  “I already told you that was for his kid’s college.”

  “Let’s pretend that’s the truth for now.” Nikki didn’t believe him but was applying another rule of jujitsu: When you’re closing in for a takedown, don’t get faked into a sucker hold. “Whatever your reason, you managed to cover your tracks by putting that money back two years ago, right after one of the paintings from this collection, a Jacques-Louis David, got fenced for that exact amount. A coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Ochoa shook his head. “No way.”

  “The detective is definitely not coincidence-friendly,” said Raley.

  “Is that how you started, Noah? You needed a few grand so you had one of his paintings forged and then swapped it for the real one, which you sold? You said yourself that Matthew Starr was a philistine. The man never had a clue the painting you put on his wall was a fake, did he?”

  “That’s bold,” said Ochoa.

  “And you got bolder. After you saw how easy it was to get away with that, you tried it with another painting, and another, and then started flipping the whole collection like that, piece by piece, over time. Do you know Alfred Hitchcock?”