flicked, as if he was having some sort of inner conversation. While he talked to himself, she said, 'If you read that article, you'd know I'm a busy person. Do you want to tell me what you've got to say, or shall I call the van so we can get you to Riker's in time for chow?'
'No, don't.'
'Then let's hear it.'
'I wanted to talk to you because I saw in 'Buzz Rush' yesterday that you were following Soleil Gray around.'
Coming from a stalker, that put the Ledger item in an entirely different context for Nikki. She thought about The Stinger and understood the enmity celebrities felt for the gossip press. But she came back to Granville and wondered, What was his deal? Was this Hinesburg's insensitive joke coming to pass? Heat knew stalkers had no single profile, but her take from his file was that his 'special identification issue' was focused on a single celebrity, Toby Mills. That's where all the complaints derived. And all the trespassing citations and disorderly conducts. At least officially, he didn't have a pattern of obsession with celebrities in general-not Soleil Gray and, hopefully, not cover girl cops.
'What's your interest in Soleil Gray?'
'She was an awesome musician. A great loss.'
'That's it? Thank you for the visit, Mr. Granville.'
Nikki gathered up her materials to go, and he said, 'No, that's not all.' She paused but gave him a look under an arched brow that said he'd better bring it. He blinked and lifted his palms off the tabletop, leaving perspiration ghosts in the shape of hands on the surface. 'I saw her once. In person.'
His look of pride at what he thought was the apparent significance of that fact made her reflect on the psychology of these people, the latch-ons. How they defined themselves by proximity to a stranger. In extreme cases, usually in schizophrenics, they even believed the star was communicating uniquely to them through messages embedded in their songs or talk-show interviews. They obsessed about them to the point that they would go to extraordinary lengths to make themselves relevant in their lives-some even to the point of killing the objects of their infatuation. 'Go on,' she said. Something in his urgency told her there was no harm in playing it out. 'So you saw her, lots of people have.'
'She was outside a nightclub one night, actually early morning by then. It was late enough I was the only one out there.'
'Where?'
'At Club Thermal down in the Meat Packing District. And Soleil? She was dru-unk, loaded. Really loud and waving her arms all over and having this major fight out on the sidewalk, you know where all the limos line up?'
At the mention of the limos, Heat took the files out of her hands, set them back in front of her, and nodded. 'Yeah, I know the place. Tell me what you saw.' The irony struck her that, for this shining moment in his twisted life, Granville was relevant, and that she was feeding that very need.
'Like I said, she was loud and really hot-yelling, you know? And when I saw who she was fighting with, I thought, if I can ever get close enough with my cell phone, this picture would make the cover of People or Us. Or at least the Ledger.'
'Why couldn't you get closer? Was there security?'
'No. It was past closing. And they were the only other ones on the sidewalk. I didn't get too close because I didn't want them to see me.'
Nikki was drawn in. Assuming he wasn't delusional or grandiose, he seemed credible in his own nutty way. She wanted him to be telling the truth. 'Who was she fighting with? Why was it such a big deal?'
'Because,' he said, 'she was fighting with Reed Wakefield the same night he died.'
Chapter Seventeen
Jameson Rook glanced up across his office from the screen of his laptop and cast a longing look at the helicopter sitting on the windowsill. His orange Walkera Airwolf had survived the violent room toss by the Texan and now beckoned the writer to take a time-out and come play. He could rationalize a break, too. After drafting for hours, the aluminum body of his MacBook Pro was warm to the touch, bearing witness, he told himself, to his laudible work ethic. It reminded him of the way the helicopter fuselage warmed agreeably after it took flight around his loft.
'And lead me not into temptation,' he said and went back to his keyboard. A journalist who relied heavily on his personal observations, who liked to get his shoes dirty and his shins bruised, whether it was diving for cover in the rubble of a Grozny high-rise during a Russian air attack, tracking Bono to rural Senegalese hospitals with singer Baaba Maal, or getting a polo lesson in Westchester County from one of the visiting young royals, Rook knew the stories were in the experience, not on the Internet. He had a vivid memory and a notes system that delivered him back into the moment every time he pulled the frayed black ribbon of his Moleskine bookmark to part it to a lined page of quotes remembered and details observed.
He worked rapidly from beginning to end of the articles as he wrote, drafting at first-impression speed, leaving gaps and reserving the fine work to be done later when he would move once again from front to back. He made numerous passes like that but always continuously, without any backtracking, for a sense of flow. He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.
The voice of Cassidy Towne came back to him, and through him she was once again alive in Times New Roman, in all her lively, bitchy, guffawing, honest, vengeful, and righteous self. As Rook chronicled his days and nights with her, what emerged was a woman for whom everything in life, from getting the best cut of Nova to landing an exclusive with an S amp;M dominatrix who'd brought a congressman to his knees, was a transaction. Her mission in the world was not to be a conduit but a source of power.
A restlessness came over Rook as he neared the end of his rough draft. The discomfort came from knowing how much was not known about the defining event of her life. Sure, he could fill in the gaps in the middle, there was plenty of color for that, but the piece concluded before it reached the real end of the story. His word count swelled; he had enough for a two-parter (note to call the agent), but the bulk of his article, as soundly as it was coming together, felt like a drumroll without the cymbal crash.
Just like Cassidy Towne's book.
He picked up the helicopter's radio controller, but guilt pangs made him set it down beside his laptop and reach for her unfinished manuscript. Moving from his desk to the easy chair beside the small fireplace filled with candles, he flipped through her text again, wondering what he had missed. What crescendo had she been building to?
The storyteller in him felt like he would be cheating to submit an exclusive profile that concluded with a glaring loose end. Questions, however intriguing, were not satisfying to him and wouldn't be to the reader he respected so much, either.
That's when he went old school. He took out a fresh Circa notepad, found a fountain pen that had some ink in it, and started to freestyle. What do I want? To find the ending for my article. No, you don't. Then what? You know. Do I? Yes, you know, you just haven't defined it properly yet…
Every time Rook did this, he thought that if someone found these ramblings in his trash, they would think he was a madman. It was actually a technique he had picked up from a fictional character in one of the Stephen King novels, a writer who, when he needed to sort out a plot, interrogated himself on paper. What seemed like a cool device in a novel got put to use by Rook once, and it worked so well connecting him to his subconscious that he employed it whenever he needed to think through dense terrain. It was like having a writing partner who didn't take a percentage.
… You are defining the wrong goal. I know my goal, to name her killer in the damned article. And Esteban Padilla's. And Derek Snow's. You know the killer, it's the Texan. That's a technicality. That's right, you want whoever hired him. Soleil Gray? Maybe. But now that she's dead, too, it's a guess. Unless… Unless? Unless I-Unless
