Stinger.
Nikki felt her face flush when she saw the lead item.
HEAT CRAVE
NYPD hottie and cover girl Nikki Heat plus magscribe-cum-boyfriend Jameson Rook have been arm in arm on another case, this time, trying to solve the murder of this column's founding doyenne, Cassidy Towne. Apparently her brief taste of fame gave her a craving for more spotlight because Heat has been taking her act to all the high-viz peeps and places, most notably on a tear to bring down singer Soleil Gray. Detective Hot has been tailing the former Shades lead wherever she goes, including rehearsal halls and even a command perf busting up Miss Gray's rehearsal at Later On by showing her autopsy photos of stabbing victims! Since Soleil wasn't rehearsing a number from Sweeney Todd, you have to wonder, why all the heat? Is a certain detective getting ready for her next close- up, Mr. DeMille?
Heat looked up from the paper and Rook said, 'Nikki, I am so sorry.' Her head spun. She pictured trucks unloading bound stacks of the Ledger curbside to newsstands all over the city. Copies piled on tables in apartment lobbies or landing on doormats… Captain Montrose getting a call from 1PP. She also thought back a few hours to her meeting with Soleil Gray and Helen Miksit, and the lawyer's parting words about how the PR machine can turn against you. Nikki was certain that this was a shot across her bow from The Bulldog.
'You OK?' asked Rook. In the tenderness of his tone Nikki heard all the empathy he had for what was swirling inside her, a maelstrom of regret and anger carrying crumpled pages of First Press and the New York Ledger.
She handed him the newspaper. 'I want my fifteen minutes back.' Jameson Rook called a car service to bring him home. Nikki had asked him for a night of quiet, and he respected her desire without question and with only the slightest twinge of paranoia that she might be meeting up with Petar. After she gave Montrose the heads-up about the Ledger item, they had each taken a copy of Cassidy Towne's manuscript to read overnight, and Rook promised he would only call if he hit something that jumped out about the case. 'E-mail instead,' she had said, and he saw in her a need to find an oasis of solitude in her life. Probably starting with some lavender-scented bubbles in that claw-footed cast-iron tub of hers.
After the black car dropped him in Tribeca, he navigated the garbage heaps and approached his front stoop carrying a bag of Chinese takeout in his teeth while he fished for his door key. He thought he heard a foot scrape beside the stairs. There was no traffic on the street. Down the block, Rook watched the taillights of his ride disappear around the corner. Just as he was thinking about the manuscript in his messenger bag and weighing fight or flight, he saw movement in the shadows of the stoop and turned with his fists up as Cassidy Towne's daughter stepped forward.
'Did I scare you?' said Holly Flanders.
'Mno.' He took the bag out of his mouth and said, 'No.'
'I've been waiting here a couple of hours.'
He looked around, instinct telling him to be cautious and make sure he wasn't going to be surprised by a companion.
'I'm here alone,' she said.
'How did you know where I live?'
'Last week, after I saw you at my mother's a couple of times, I boosted a key for the new lock from JJ's workshop and let myself in again to see who you were. I found your name and address on her receipts for the messenger service.'
'Enterprising and creepy all at the same time.'
Holly said, 'I need to talk to you.'
He set a place for her on the L of his kitchen counter so they wouldn't be side by side. He wanted to look at her when they talked. 'China Fun,' he announced as he unpacked the bag. 'I always over-order, so eat up.'
She didn't say much at first because she put everything into her eating. Holly Flanders was lean but had the eye circles and complexion of someone who wasn't a slave to the food pyramid. When she finished her plate, he dished over some more pork fried rice. She held up a palm and said, 'That's OK.'
'Take it all,' said Rook. 'There are kids starving in Beverly Hills, you know. Of course, that's by choice.'
When she'd finished the rest of it, he asked, 'What did you want to talk to me about? By the way, that's one of my great qualities as a reporter. Asking the inobvious question.'
'Riiight.' She chuckled politely and nodded. ' 'K, well, I felt like I could do this because you were nice to me when I got busted the other day. And could relate to the no-parent thing.'
'Right,' he said and then waited, wondering where this was going.
'I know you're going to write this article about my mother, right? And…' Holly paused, and he saw light shimmer off the pools forming in her eyes. '… And I know everybody is probably telling you how bad she was. And I'm here to tell you, damn, she was all that.' Rook drew the mental image of Holly standing over her mother's bed while she slept, holding a handgun on her, a millimeter of finger movement from blowing her away. 'But I came to tell you, since you're going to write her story, don't make her all about being a monster.'
Holly's lips quaked, taking on lives of their own, and a tear streamed down each cheek. Rook handed her his napkin and she dabbed her cheeks and blew her nose. 'I have a lot of anger at her. Maybe more now that she's gone, because I can't work any of this shit out with her now. That's part of why I didn't kill her; we weren't done, you know?'
Rook didn't know, so he just nodded and listened.
She sipped her beer and, when she had settled enough to continue, said, 'All of the bad things about her were true. But in the middle of it is one thing. About eight years ago my mother made contact with me. She had some way of tracking me to my foster home and got permission from my family to take me to dinner. We went to this Jackson Hole burger place I liked in my neighborhood, and it was bizarre. She has the waitress take a picture of us like it was my birthday party or something. She doesn't eat, just sits there telling me all this stuff about how tough it was when she found out she was pregnant, and that she thought she would keep me at first, so she didn't have an abortion and then she changed her mind the first month because it wasn't going to work in her life-'it' she said, like I was an 'it.'
'Anyway she goes through this whole blah-blah about why she did it and then she says she had been thinking long and hard about it and feeling so bad-agony, I remember that was what she said she felt, like she was always in agony-and asked what I thought, if maybe we could talk about getting together.'
'You mean, like…'
'Well, yuh. Like she thought she could just show up and change her mind about abandoning me and I would just get in the frickin' Acura with her and live happily ever after.'
Rook let a healthy silence pass before he asked, 'What did you say to her?'
'I threw my ice water in her face and walked out.' Part of Holly Flanders showed proud defiance. Rook imagined she had told that story before to friends or barflies over the years and reveled in her heroic act of maternal repudiation, poetic in its balancing of scales. But he also saw in her the other part of Holly Flanders, the part that had brought her to his doorstep to wait in the dark, the woman who felt the weight of emotions that nest uncomfortably in any soul with a conscience that has to bear the unhealable wound of banishing another person. With ice water, no less.
'Holly, you were what, early teens, then?'
'I didn't come here to be let off the hook, OK? I came because once you found out she had put me out to foster care, I didn't want you to think that was all there was to her. I look back now, older and all, and realize she didn't just wash her hands and walk away, you know?' She finished her beer in a long gulp and set the glass down slowly. 'Bad enough I have to deal with this the rest of my life. I didn't want to make it worse by letting you write her story without telling you there was more to her than giving me away.'
At the door on her way out she got on her toes to give Rook a kiss. She went for his lips and he turned to present his cheek. 'Is that because of what I do?' she asked. 'Because I sell it sometimes?'
'That's because I'm sort of with someone else now.' And then he smiled. 'Well, I'm working on it.'
She gave him her cell number, in case he wanted to talk about the article, and left. As Rook went back to the kitchen to clean up the dishes, he lifted her plate. Underneath he found a four-by-six color photo that looked like it had spent some time folded. It was Cassidy Towne and her teenage daughter in their booth at a Jackson Hole. Cassidy was smiling, Holly was enduring. All Rook could look at was the glass of ice water. The next morning, Heat and Rook sat down at her desk to compare notes on the Cassidy Towne manuscript. First, though, he asked her if
