Nikki had run all her back-channel checks. Asking him what date it was. "May 14." What night of the week that was. "A Friday." What the weather was like. "It was drizzling off and on. I had an umbrella with me." Whether there was security. "I already said there wasn't any. Nobody else was out there." She told him these, as well as the other details he had given her, were all things she could check. He said that was good because then she would believe him. She noted that he seemed to relish the fact that she was writing down his answers. But she was skeptical there, too. Heat knew his need to be at the center of things could be driving that the same way it drove everything else in his life.
There was another question she wanted to ask Morris Granville. An obvious one to her, but she held it, wanting to get to the things she didn't assume first, in case he decided to stop talking. "What happened with the fight?"
"It went on a long time."
"In the rain?"
"They didn't seem to care."
"Did it ever get violent?"
"No. Just arguing."
"What did they say?"
"I couldn't hear it all. Remember, I said I didn't want to get too close?"
Heat mentally ticked off one of her consistency cross-checks. "Did you hear anything?"
"It was about their breakup. She said he was only into himself and getting high. He said she was a selfish bitch, stuff like that."
"Did she threaten him?"
"Soleil? No way."
Heat made another mental note that Granville sounded like he had taken on some role as Soleil's defender. She began to wonder if this stalker's outreach was rooted in squaring himself in her legacy somehow. She filed it as a possibility but left herself open. "Did Wakefield threaten her?"
"Not that I heard. And he was out of it, too. He kept holding on to the light post for balance until they were done."
"How did it end?"
"They both cried and then hugged each other."
"And then what?"
"They kissed."
"As in kissed good-bye?"
"As in romantic."
"And after they kissed?"
"They left together."
Nikki double-tapped her pen on her spiral notebook. He was getting to the part she wanted to hear, and she had to make sure to ask in a way that didn't set him up to please her. She kept her question general. "How did they leave?"
"Holding hands."
So she got more specific. "I mean did they walk? Take a taxi? How did they leave?"
"They got in one of the limos. There was one waiting right there."
Heat concentrated on trying to sound detached even though she could feel her pulse rate rising. "Whose limo was it, Morris? The one Soleil came in or Reed Wakefield's, do you know?"
"Neither, I saw them come in cabs."
She tried not to get ahead of herself, although the temptation was strong. She told herself to keep the slate blank, just listen, not project, ask simple questions.
"So it was just there and they flagged it?"
"No."
"What, they helped themselves to someone else's limo?"
"Not at all. He invited them and they got in with him."
Heat pretended to be perusing her notes to keep the gravity out of her next question. The one she had been waiting to ask. She wanted to make it sound offhand so he didn't go defensive on her. "Who invited them for a ride?"
Pablo drank the last swallow of the electric-blue energy drink and set the empty bottle on the interrogation room table. Because of his age, Roach wouldn't make the boy sit through the interrogation but had strategically allowed him to have his snack in there to let the stakes sink in on Esteban Padilla's cousin Victor. Raley set the teenager up with an officer from Juvenile to watch TV in the outer area and returned to Interrogation 1.
He could tell by how Victor looked at him when he sat down across the table that Raley and his partner had been right when they planned their strategy. Victor's concern for the boy was their wedge. "Happy as a clam," said Raley.
"Bueno," said Ochoa, and then he continued in Spanish. "Victor, I don't get it, man, why won't you talk to me?"
Victor Padilla wasn't as self-assured outside of his neighborhood or his home. He said the words, but they sounded like they were losing steam. "You know how it is. You don't talk, you don't snitch."
"That's noble, man. Stand by some code that protects bangers while some dude that carved up your cousin walks free. I checked you out, Homes, you're not part of that world anyway. Or are you some kind of wannabe?"
Victor wagged his head. "Not me. That's not my life."
"So don't pretend it is."
"Code's the code."
"Bullshit, it's a pose."
The man looked away from Ochoa to Raley and then back to Ochoa. "Sure, you're going to say that."
The detective let that comment rest, and when the air was sufficiently cleansed of innuendo, he head-nodded to the Tumi duffel of money on the table. "Too bad Pablo can't hang on to that while you go away."
The guest chair scraped on the linoleum as Victor slid back an inch and sat upright. His eyes lost their cool remoteness and he said, "Why should I go away anywhere? I haven't done anything."
"Dude, you're a day laborer sitting on almost a hundred Gs in greenbacks. You think you're not going to get dirt on you?"
"I said I haven't done anything."
"Better tell me where this came from is all I can say." He waited him out, watching the knot of muscle flex on Victor's jaw. "Here it is straight up. I can ask the DA about making this problem go away if you just cooperate." Ochoa let that sink in and then added, "Unless you'd rather tell the kid that you're going away but, hey, at least you were loyal to the code."
And when Victor Padilla bowed his head, even Detective Raley could tell that they had him.
Twenty minutes later Raley and Ochoa stood up when Detective Heat came into the bull pen. "We did it," they said in an accidental chorus.
She read their excitement and said, "Congratulations, you two. Nice work. I scored a hit, too. In fact, I'm getting a warrant cut right now."
"For who?" asked Raley.
"You first." She sat on her desk to face them. "While I'm waiting for my warrant, why don't you tell me a story?"
While Raley rolled over two desk chairs for them, Ochoa got out his pad to consult as he spoke. "Just like we thought, Victor says his cousin Esteban was making money on the side selling information about his celebrity riders to Cassidy Towne."
Raley said, "Ironic when you consider the big stall was all about some snitch code."
"Anyway, he was spying for pocket money that he got if his tips were hot enough to make her column. Twenty here, fifty there. Adds up, I guess. It's all a beautiful thing until one night last May when some bad shit goes down on one of his rides."
"Reed Wakefield," said Nikki.
"We know that, but here's where Victor swears to God his cousin never told him what happened that night, only that there was some bad business and the less he knew the better."
"Esteban was trying to protect his cousin," said Heat.
"So he says," added Raley.
Ochoa flipped a page. "So whatever exactly went down is still unknown."
Heat knew she could fill in some of that blank, but she wanted to hear their raw story first, so she didn't interrupt.
"Next day cousin Esteban gets canned from his limo job, some vague BS about personality conflict with his clients. So he's out of a gig, gets bad-mouthed in the business, and has to drive lettuce and onions around instead of A-listers and prom queens. He gets all set to sue--"
"Because he's been wronged," interjected Raley, quoting the Ronnie Strong commercial.
"--but drops it because once our gossip columnist hears from him about whatever happened that night--obviously involving Reed Wakefield somehow--she gives him a load of money to drop his suit and chill so he doesn't attract attention to it. Probably she didn't want a leak before her book was done
."
Nikki jumped in here. "Cassidy Towne gave him a hundred large?"
"Nope, more like five grand," said Raley. "We're coming to the big payout."
"Esteban wanted more, so he double-dipped. He called up the subject of his tip to Cassidy Towne and said he was going to go public with what he saw that night unless he got a healthy chunk of change. Turns out it wasn't so healthy."
Raley picked it up. "Padilla got himself a hundred grand and then got himself killed the very next day. Cousin Victor freaks but hangs on to the money, figuring to use it to get away someplace where whoever did this can't find him."
"So that's what we got," said Ochoa. "We got some of the story, but we still don't have the name of whoever Padilla was shaking down."
They looked up at Nikki, sitting on her desk grinning.
"But you do, don't you?" said Raley.
In the auditorium of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Battery Park City, Yankee phenom Toby Mills posed with an oversized prop check for one million dollars, his personal gift to the varsity athletic program of the public school. The audience was packed with students, faculty, administrators, and of course, press--all on their feet for his ovation. Also standing, but not applauding, was Detective Nikki Heat, who looked on from behind the curtain at the side of the stage, watching the pitcher grip 'n' grin with the athletic director, flanked by the Stuy baseball team turned out in uniform for the occasion. Mills smiled broadly, unfazed by the strobe flashes pummeling him, patiently turning to his left then his right, well acquainted with the choreography of the photo op.
Nikki was sorry that Rook couldn't be there. Especially since the school was only a few blocks from his loft, she had hoped that if he hurried he could meet her there to close the loop on his article. She had tried to return his calls on the drive down, but his phone rang out and dumped to voice mail. She knew better than to leave a message with sensitive content, so she said, "So let me get this straight. It's OK for you to bug me when I'm working, but not the other way around? Hey, hope the writing's going well. Got something going on, call me immediately when you get this." He'd be pissed about missing it, but she'd let him interrogate her, a thought that gave Nikki the first smile of her long hard day.
Toby's eye flicked to Heat in one of his turns, and his smile lost some of its luster when he registered her presence. It gave Nikki second thoughts about coming to see him in this venue, especially after her experience that day on the Intrepid. But he made no move to flee. In fact, when he finished shaking hands with the team mascot, who was attired in fifteenth-century garb as Peter Stuyvesant, Mills made his good-night wave then strode across the stage directly to her and said, "Did you catch my stalker?"
Without hesitating and without lying, Heat said, "Yes. Let's find a place to talk."
Heat had arranged to have use of a room nearby and she escorted Toby Mills into a computer lab and gestured to a chair. He noticed Raley and the two waiting uniform cops on the way in and got a funny look on his face when one uniform stayed inside while the other closed the door and posted himself outside with his body blocking the little window slit. "What's going on?" he asked.
Nikki replied with a question. "Isn't Jess Ripton here? I'd expect he'd be all over an event like this."
"Right. Well, he was going to come but called to say he had a sponsor fire to put out and to start without him."
"Did he say where he was?" asked the detective. Heat already knew The Firewall wasn't at his office or his apartment.
Mills looked up at the classroom wall clock. "Ten of nine, he's probably having his second dirty martini at Bouley."
Without being told, Detective Raley moved to the door. He gave a soft two-tap as he opened it, and the cop in the hall stepped aside to let him out.
The departure of the plainclothes cop wasn't missed by Toby. "This is starting to weird me out a little here, Detective."
That was pretty much the effect Heat was hoping to have on the pitcher. Her instincts were on alert that Ripton had broken form and wasn't there, but on the plus side it gave her a chance to apply pressure on Mills without the security blanket of his handler. "It's time, Toby."
He looked perplexed. "Time? Time for what?"
"For us to have a talk about Soleil Gray." Nikki paused and, when she saw the blinks come to his eyes, continued. "And Reed Wakefield." She took another beat and, when she could see him dry swallowing, added, "And you."
He tried his best, he truly did. But as sophisticated as were the circles a multimillionaire athlete in Gotham traveled in, Toby Mills was at heart still the kid from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and his upbringing made him a poor liar. "What about Soleil Gray and . . . Reed? What have they got to do with this? I thought this was about that creep following me and my family around."
"His name is Morris Granville, Toby."
"I know that. But he's always just 'the creep' to me. Did you get him or not? You said you got him."
"We did." She could see he wanted her to continue, and so she didn't. Toby Mills wasn't a star now, he was her interrogation suspect and she was going to run the board, not he. "Tell me how you knew Soleil Gray and Reed Wakefield."
His eyes darted to the door where the uniform waited, then back to her. And then he studied his shoes, looking in them for the answer to give now that he had no script from The Firewall.
"Soleil and Reed, Toby. Let's hear it."
"What's there to know? I heard about her today. Man . . ." And then he tried out, "I read in the paper you were harassing her. Were you chasing her today, too?"
Heat did not rise to his bait, let alone acknowledge it. "My question remains, how did you know Soleil and Reed?"
He shrugged like a child. "Around, you know? It's New York. You go to parties, you run into people. 'Hey, howarya,' like that."
"Is that all you knew of them, Toby? 'Hey, howarya'? Really?"
He checked the door again and pursed his lips repeatedly the way she had seen him do on TV once when he had walked the ninth man to load the bases and the top of the order was coming up with no outs. He'd need different skills to get himself out of this jam, and Toby wasn't sure he had them; she could smell it on him. So with his confidence flagging, she said, "Let's take a ride. Want to put your hands behind your back for me?"
"Are you serious?" He met her gaze, but it was he who blinked. "I met them around. You know. Parties, like I said. Reed, I guess he played in my charity softball game for the Oklahoma tornado victims in summer '09. Soleil, too, now that I think about it."
"And that's it?"
"Well, not totally. We hung out with each other from time to time. The reason I hesitated to talk about it is because it's embarrassing. I'm past all of it now, but I kinda got a little 'off the chain' when I first hit New York. Hard not to. And maybe I did do some partying with them back then."
Heat remembered Rook saying that Cassidy Towne had written up some of Mills's wild nights in "Buzz Rush." "So you're saying that was a long time ago?"
"Ancient history, yes, ma'am." He said it fast and smooth, as if he had passed the dangerous shoals and come out into calm waters.
"All before your charity game summer before last."
"Right. Way back."
"And you didn't see them after that?"
He started shaking his head for show, even as he pretended to be thinking. "Nope, can't say as I saw much of them later. They broke up, you know."
Nikki seized the opening. "Actually, I heard they got back together. The night Reed died."
Mills kept a game face but couldn't keep the blood in it, and he went a little pale. "Oh, yeah?"
"I'm surprised you didn't know that, Toby. Seeing how you were with them that night."
"With them--I was not!" His shout made the officer at the door straighten up and stare at him. He lowered his voice. "I was never with them. Not that night. Trust me, Detective, I think I'd remember that."
"I have an eyewitness who says otherwise."
"Who?"
"Morris Granville."
"Oh, come on, this is crazy. You're going to take the word of that psycho over mine?"
"When we picked him up, he told me about Club Thermal and how he saw Soleil and Reed." Heat leaned forward in her chair, toward him. "Of course, what I knew in the back of my mind was that the only reason I could think of for Morris Granville to be outside Club Thermal that night was because he was stalking you."
"Sounds like a load of bull. The guy's lying to get some kind of deal or something. He's just lying. The creep can say anything, but without proof, forget it." Toby sat back and crossed his arms, attempting to signal that he was all done.
Heat slid her chair over to the computer beside him and inserted a memory key. "What are you doing?" he asked.
When the thumb drive opened up, she double-clicked on a file, and as it loaded, she said, "I pulled this off Morris Granville's cell phone."
The image loaded. It was amateur cell quality, but the picture told the story. It was a shot of a wet street outside Club Thermal. Reed Wakefield and Soleil Gray were getting inside a stretch limo. Esteban Padilla, dressed in a black suit and red tie, held an umbrella over the open door. And inside the limousine, a giggling Toby Mills held a hand out to help Soleil get in. In his other hand was a joint.
As Mills weakened and his hands began to shake, Heat said, "Cassidy Towne. Derek Snow . . ." When he bowed his head, Nikki tapped lightly on the monitor. When he looked back up at the image, she added, "And think about this, Toby. Everyone here is dead--but you. I want you to tell me what's wrong with this picture."
And then the phenom began to weep.
Toby Mills had entered Stuyvesant High that night in the backseat of a black Escalade with a million-dollar check. He left in the backseat of a police car in handcuffs. The charges, for now, would be tokens just to hold him: lying to a police officer; failure to report a death; conspiracy; conspiracy to obstruct justice; bribery. From the confession he had made to her after he broke down and wept, it wasn't clear yet to Detective Heat if meatier charges would be brought. That would be up to a grand jury and the DA. And most importantly, if she could find a way to connect the pitcher to the Texan.
Naked Heat Page 28