“Listen, Nikki, one more thing about this leak.” And then he spoke the worry that had been nagging her from the moment she read the article in the car. “I imagine your dad reads the papers and watches the news, huh?”
She nodded solemnly, got her cell phone from her pocket, and then surveyed the openness off the bull pen. “I’ll be outside,” Nikki said. “I need to make a personal call.”
Heat came back into the bull pen ten minutes later smelling like fresh air and asked Rook if he wanted to take a ride to Scarsdale. He didn’t say any more than “Sure,” lest she change her mind about bringing him to meet her father. But by the time their gold unmarked crossed Broadway heading toward the West Side Highway, he felt his seat was adequately secured and said, “Can I tell you I’m surprised you asked me along?”
“Don’t feel too flattered. I’m using you.” Nikki’s comment came without eye contact because she was making a show of putting her attention on the road instead of him. “You’re my rodeo clown to distract him so things don’t get too mired.”
“A high honor, indeed. Thanks. Mired, how?”
“With any luck, you won’t have to know.”
“That bad between you two?” Her shrug didn’t satisfy him, so he asked, “How long since you last saw him?”
“Christmas. We see each other birthdays and major holidays.” Rook let silence work for once. Sure enough, nervous spaces need filling. “We’re sort of living the cards and calls relationship. You know, e-gifts instead of gifts. Seems to work for both of us.” She ran a dry tongue across her lips and focused on the road again. “Or seemed to.”
“Didn’t you want that on-ramp?” he asked. Heat blew an exhale through her teeth and circled the 79th Street rotary back to the entrance she had passed in her distraction. Rook waited until she settled into her lane. Out her window, to the west, he watched thunderheads building into giant cauliflowers across the Hudson. “Were you two always arm’s length?”
“Not so much. Didn’t help that my parents got divorced while I was away on my semester abroad in college. They didn’t tell me until I got back and he’d already moved out by then.”
“That was the summer before the…?” He left it unsaid.
“Yeah. He got one of those corporate extended-stay apartments. The Oak, on Park Avenue. Then, after Mom got killed, Dad couldn’t deal. Quit his job, left for the burbs, and started his own small real estate business there.”
“I’m looking forward to finally meeting him. This is kind of a big deal for me.”
“How so?”
“I dunno… Let’s call it future relations.”
Now she did look over at him. “You slow it down, there, bucko. This visit is strictly to tell him firsthand about the new developments in the case. It’s not… I don’t know what.”
“ Father of the Bride?”
“Stop right there.”
“Part Four. Diane Keaton puts Steve Martin on a colon cleanse right before the wedding. Anything can happen, and does.”
“I could let you out right here and you could walk back.”
“Hey,” he said, “you wanted a rodeo clown, you got a rodeo clown.”
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the driveway of a gated condo complex about a half mile from the Hutchinson Parkway. Nikki punched some numbers into the security keypad and waited, running the fingers of both hands through her hair. A sharp buzz vibrated the tiny speaker on the kiosk, and as the gate rolled aside, thunder growled in the distance. Rook said, “Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!”
“Seriously, Rook? You’re meeting my dad and quoting King Lear?”
“You know,” he said, “there’s no bigger pain in the ass than a literate cop.”
To Rook, the Jeffrey Heat who waited for them standing in his open front door held only a faint resemblance to the photos he had seen in the family album. Sure, many years had passed since those pictures captured a more robust version of the man, whose life had been under his own command and whose future loomed brightly, but at sixty-one, time hadn’t aged Jeff Heat, life had. The thousand blows of grief had tempered his kindly, jovial face into a guarded replica, one that had come untethered from trust itself and permanently inclined downward, braced for the next jolt. When he reached to shake Rook’s hand, his smile qualified as a best effort; not fake, just unable to access anything inside that passed for simple pleasure. Like the hug he gave his daughter, it was all about getting it as right as he was able.
His condo had a beige feel. Not just clean, but orderly and male. All the furnishings had the same vintage, circa Y2K, including the beached walrus of a big screen TV, the predictable indulgence of the new bachelor. He asked if they would like anything to drink, and it struck Rook that Nikki seemed almost as much a guest there as he was. They declined, and her father took the leather easy chair, establishing himself in his command center flanked by side tables bearing his phone, TV remotes, a flashlight, a portable scanner, newspapers, and a short paperback stack of Thomas L. Friedmans and Wayne Dyers.
“You home for lunch, Dad?”
“Haven’t gone in yet. Everything you’ve heard about this real estate market? It’s worse. Had to let one of my agents go yesterday.” He reached down to hike up his socks. One of them was black, the other navy.
If her father felt any slight at first reading of the latest on his ex-wife’s murder case in the tabloid at his elbow, he didn’t let on. Instead, he listened quietly as Nikki filled him in on the particulars of the case, the only spike in his emotions coming when she recapped their lunch with the former lead detective, Carter Damon. “Ass,” he said. “And useless. That clown couldn’t find sand at the beach.”
“Tell me something, Dad. Everyone says Mom and this Nicole Bernardin were such good friends. But I never heard of her.” His expression remained neutral, so she said, “Kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“Not really. I never liked her, and your mother knew it. Bad influence, let’s leave it there. After we moved back here to the States about a year before you were born, Nicole Bernardin was out of our lives. Good riddance.”
Nikki filled him in on the visit to the New England Conservatory and described the video of her mother’s recital. “I knew Mom could play, but jeez, Dad, I never saw her like that.”
“Wasted gift. That’s why I nagged her the whole time we were in Europe that she was squandering her talent.”
“So you two knew each other a long time over there?” Rook asked. “When did you and Cynthia meet?”
“1974. At the Cannes Film Festival.”
“Were you in the film industry? Nikki never mentioned that.”
“I wasn’t. After business school I got hired by a big investment group to be their man in Europe. My job was to find small hotels to buy and remodel as elite boutiques, basically copying Relais et Chateaux. I’ll tell you, it was a plum job. In my twenties, full of my own bullshit, bopping around Italy, France, Switzerland, West Germany-that’s what they called it then-all on an expense account. You sure you don’t want a soda? Beer, maybe?” he asked hopefully.
“No, thanks,” said Rook. He noticed the wet ring on the coaster beside Jeff’s chair and it saddened him to see how badly he longed to put a fresh glass on it.
“Anyway, one of our investors also put money in films, and he took me to this incredible cocktail party the famous director Fellini threw. There I was with big movie stars like Robert Redford and Sophia Loren. I think Faye Dunaway was there, too, but all I cared about was the hot American girl near the bar, playing Gershwin while everybody ignored her and drank free champagne. We fell for each other, but Cindy and I were both traveling a lot. We got more serious, though, and I started to work my itineraries around wherever she was doing her thing.”
“Playing at cocktail parties?” Rook asked.
“Some. Mostly she’d be spending a week here or a month there as live-in music tutor for rich families at their ritzy vacation homes. Like I said, a waste of a gift. It all would have been so different…” A somber quiet fell, punctuated by a rattle of thunder and rain plinking on the windowsill.
Nikki said, “We should probably head back.” She started to rise, but Rook had other ideas.
“Was she scared of the spotlight, maybe?”
“No way. I blame Nicole. The party girl. Every time I felt like I’d finally convinced her to get serious again,
