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.
