Pablo Padilla brought them to sit in the living room. Although the boy didn't say so, it seemed the invitation was not so much about hospitality as to get them all in off the street. Ochoa reflected on how this no-snitch thing was supposed to be about solidarity, but the eyes of the kid looked more like those of victims of terrorism he had seen. Or the townsfolk in some old Clint Eastwood Western who were scared of the tyrannical outlaw and his boys.
Since he was the Spanish speaker and was going to be doing the talking, Ochoa decided to go gently. 'I'm sorry for your loss' was a good place to start.
'Did you find my uncle's killer?' was where the boy started.
'We're working on that, Pablo. That's why we're here. To help find who did this and arrest him so he can be sent away for good.' The detective wanted to paint a picture of this person off the streets, impotent as a source of vengeance to anyone who cooperated.
The teenager absorbed that and looked appraisingly at the two cops. Ochoa noticed Raley was keeping a low profile, but was being eyes and ears. His partner seemed especially interested in numerous garment bags hanging on the back of a door. The boy picked up on it, too. 'That is my new suit. For my uncle's funeral.' The sound of his voice was broken but brave. Ochoa saw the water rimming his eyes and vowed never to call the vic Coyote Man again.
'Pablo, what you tell me here will be between us, understand? Same as if you called an anonymous tip line.' The boy didn't respond, so he continued. 'Did your uncle Esteban have any enemies? Anybody who wanted to harm him?'
The boy slowly shook his head before he answered. 'No, I don't know anyone who would do this. Everybody liked him, he was always happy, a good dude, you know?'
'That's good,' said Ochoa, while thinking, That's bad-at least for what he needed-but he smiled, anyway. Pablo seemed to relax a bit, and as the detective delicately asked him the usual questions about his uncle's friends, girlfriends, personal habits like gambling or drugs, the boy answered in the short-form way teenagers do, but he answered. 'What about his work?' asked Ochoa. 'He was a produce driver?'
'Yes, it wasn't what he liked, but he had experience as a driver, so that was what he got. You know, a job's a job sometimes, even if it's not as good.'
Ochoa looked over to Raley, who had no idea what they were saying but could read his partner's look signaling he had hit a point of interest. Ochoa turned back to Pablo and said, 'I hear that.' Then, 'I notice you said 'not as good.' '
'Uh-huh.'
'Not as good as what?'
'Well… It's sort of embarrassing, but he's dead, so I guess I can say.' The boy fidgeted and shoved his hands under his thighs so he was sitting on them. 'My uncle had a, you know, classier job before. But a couple of months ago… well, he got fired all of a sudden.'
Ochoa nodded. 'That's too bad. What did he do when he got fired?' Pablo turned when he heard the keys in the front door, and the detective tried to get him back. 'Pablo? What job did he get fired from?'
'Um, he was a driver for a limo company.'
'And why did he get fired?'
The front door opened and Padilla's cousin, the one they had left at the funeral home came in. 'What the hell's going on here?'
Pablo stood up, and his body language needed no translation even for Raley. It said this interview was over. Even though Detective Heat didn't have an appointment, Cassidy Towne's editor at Epimetheus Books did not make her wait. Nikki announced herself in the lobby, and when she and Rook stepped off the elevator onto the sixteenth floor of the publishing house, his assistant was waiting. She keyed the code into the touchpad that opened the frosted glass doors to the offices and escorted them through a brightly lit hallway of white walls with blond wood accents. This was the nonfiction floor, so their path was decorated by framed covers of Epimetheus books, each a biography, expose, or celebrity-rant best seller encased side by side with a reprint of its peak New York Times list.
They reached a bull pen area of three assistants' desks outside three wooden doors that were conspicuously larger than the others they had passed. The center door was open and the assistant led them in to meet the editor.
Mitchell Perkins smiled over a pair of black-rimmed bifocals, dropped them onto his blotter, and came around the desk to shake hands. He was cheerful and much younger than Nikki had expected for a senior editor of nonfiction-in his early forties, but with tired eyes. She quickly understood when she saw the piles of manuscripts spilling out of his etagere and even sprouting up from the floor beside his desk.
He gestured to a conversation area off to one side of his office. Heat and Rook sat on the couch; he took the armchair in front of the window that spanned his whole north wall, giving a spectacular unobstructed view of the Empire State Building. Even for the two visitors who had spent most of their lives in Manhattan, the panorama was awe-inspiring. Nikki almost remarked that the office could be used as a movie set with a backdrop like that, but it wasn't the proper tone for this meeting. First she had to offer condolences for the loss of an author. Then she had to ask him for his dead author's manuscript.
'Thank you for seeing us on short notice, Mr. Perkins,' she began.
'Of course. When the police come, would I do anything but?' He turned aside to Rook and added, 'These are unusual circumstances, but it's wonderful to meet you. We almost met last May at Sting and Trudie's Rainforest Benefit after-party, but you were in deep conversation with Richard Branson and James Taylor and I was a bit intimidated.'
'No need for that. I'm just people.'
So Rook, thankfully, provided the ice-breaking laugh, and Nikki could then steer to business. 'Mr. Perkins, we're here about Cassidy Towne, and first of all, we're sorry for your loss.'
The editor nodded and puckered his cheeks. 'That's very thoughtful, certainly, but may I ask how you came to hear we may, or may not, have had some association with her?'
She wouldn't have been much of a detective if she hadn't noticed the thick smoke screen of his word choice. Perkins hadn't come out owning the simple fact that Cassidy was writing a book for him. He'd parsed. Nice guy, perhaps, but he was playing a chess game. So she decided to come straight up the gut. 'Cassidy Towne was writing a book for you and I'd like to know what it was about.'
The impact was visible. His eyebrows peaked and he recrossed his legs, shifting himself to get comfortable in his soft leather chair. 'Well then, the small talk portion is over, I suppose.' He smiled, but it lacked heart.
'Mr. Perkins-'
'Mitch. This will strike a more pleasant note for all of us if you'll call me Mitch.'
Heat remained cordial but pressed the same theme. 'What was her book about?'
He could play that game, too. His non-answer was to turn again to Rook. 'I understand you were contracted by First Press to do five thousand words on her. Did she say something to you? Is that how we got here today?'
Rook never got a chance to respond. 'Excuse me,' Nikki said. She maintained the decorum Perkins had established but rose and moved away to lean with her hips on his desk so he had to twist and pivot away from Rook. 'I am running an open homicide investigation and that means following every possible lead to find Cassidy Towne's killer. There are a lot of leads and not a lot of time, so-if I may? — how I got my information is how I got my information. How I got here is not your concern. And if striking a more pleasant note is what you want, let's begin with me asking the questions and you being direct and cooperative, all right… Mitch?'
He folded his arms across his chest. 'Absolutely,' he replied. She noted that he closed his eyes briefly as he said the words. Mitch was one of those.
'So can we start over again with my question? And if this helps, I do know she was working on a tattletale book, a tell-all.'
He nodded. 'Of course, that was her wheelhouse.'
'So who or what was the subject?' She sat down again across from him.
'That I don't know.' In anticipation of her, he held up a staying palm. 'Yes, I can confirm we had a deal for a book with her. Yes, it was to be a tell-all. In fact, Cassidy guaranteed it would be newsworthy across the board, not just the tabloids and ambush TV shows. It would, in the parlance of the Paris Hilton generation, be hot. However.'
