“Let me guess. He’s no longer William Holden, he’s Jason Bateman.”
“He’s not a lover, he’s a spy.” Heat laughed. “Hear me out, Detective.” He waited until she stopped chuckling and then he leaned closer to her, trying his best not to have madman eyes. “International banker has sort of a phony ring to it. Kind of like ‘embassy attache’ or ‘government contractor.’ It sounds to me like a cover.”
“OK… And what is the possible connection to my mother?”
“I don’t know.” She scoffed and took a sip of her coffee. He repeated, “I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“I don’t know!” he hissed. “Isn’t this great?!!” This time his eyes had indeed widened madly. Nikki looked around self-consciously, but nobody in the cafe had noticed. Even the man on the sidewalk smoking the roll-your- own had turned the back of his blue suit to them. Rook startled her, grabbing Nikki by the elbow. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Tyler Wynn-air quotes-international investment banker-was using your mother just like his fake job. As a cover. Pretending to be her lover.” He paused. “Notice I said, ‘pretending.’ Which is why Cindy quit and moved back to the U.S. when she married your dad.”
Heat finished her coffee and slid a euro under the saucer. “Rook, you need to know. There’s out of the box and there’s out of your mind.”
He worked on her the whole way back to the hotel, and one point of his logic she found hard to refute. That they came to Paris to look into the change in her mother’s life, and since Tyler Wynn had been such a factor-spy or not-they’d be remiss not to see if Uncle Tyler was still around to talk to. “Or is that too sensitive an area for you?” he asked. A crafty move on Rook’s part because, even if it were, the challenge aspect of his question made it impossible for her to back down.
Up in their hotel room Rook paced, spitballing how best to approach checking out Tyler Wynn. “I still have some viable clandestine contacts over here from the days I worked my Russia-Chechnya article. Also, there are a few favors I could call in at CIA and NSA. No, wait… Maybe we should start incrementally and make a vanilla sort of inquiry through the U.S. embassy… Or possibly, Interpol. On the other hand,” he rambled, going back and forth, “this is potentially important enough that we could step it up to the DCRI-that’s the French equivalent of the CIA, if you didn’t know.” He noticed Nikki getting on her cell phone. “Who are you calling?”
She held up a finger for silence. “ Bonjour, Mme. Bernardin? C’est Nikki Heat. First of all, thank you for your hospitality and for those wonderful photographs. I am so grateful to have them.” She nodded and said, “You, as well. I was hoping I could ask a favor. Do you have phone number for Tyler Wynn?” Heat smiled at Rook and began writing it down.
When she hung up, he said, “Well, there’s the lazy way, if you go for that sort of thing. I don’t. Feels kind of like cheating.”
Nikki held up the pad with Wynn’s phone number. “Should I not call it, then?”
He said, “Do you want to play games or get serious about this case for once?”
Her call began in French, but whoever answered spoke English. When Rook saw her shocked reaction when she asked to speak to Tyler Wynn, he scooted from his spot standing at the window to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “That’s terrible,” she said. Rook waved for her attention, mouthing “What?”s like a pestering adolescent, and she turned away to concentrate, muttered a series of “Uh-huhs,” asked for an address, which she wrote down, then said her thanks and hung up.
“Come on, out with it. What’s terrible?”
“Tyler Wynn is in the hospital,” said Nikki. “Somebody tried to kill him.”
Rook leaped to his feet and spun in a circle. “That. Is the coolest. Lead. Ever.”
TEN
The taxi driver knew the place, the Hopital Canard, in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, one of the wealthiest districts in Paris. The cabbie glanced at the couple in the backseat and asked if it was an emergency. They both answered at the same time. She said no, he said yes. Rook asked her, “And exactly what was it you told me Wynn’s housekeeper said his condition was?” He cupped his ear.
“Critical gunshot.”
“And that’s not an emergency?”
She took his point and told the driver, “Just get there as quickly as you can.”
The traffic had another idea. Along with its romance and charm, Paris also came with a morning rush hour. The driver kept surfing his radio dial in ADHD fashion, mostly to French hip-hop and electronic dance stations. The oonce-oonce-oonce rhythm track didn’t match their cadence along the Seine. He turned down the music as the car crept by a traffic marker that read, “Bois de Boulogne, 10 km,” and asked, “You have been yet to Bois de Boulogne? Very pretty for romantic walks. Like Central Park in New York.” Then he pumped up the oonce-oonce again.
Rook said to her, “Love that name. In fact, I’m entitling my new Victoria St. Clair romance novel, Le Chateau du Bois de Boulogne. Which-correct me here-loosely translated means ‘castle of wood in the baloney.’ I predict overseas sales will skyrocket.”
The hospital was just off the A-13 in a quiet neighborhood of medical and dental offices. A surprisingly small four-story modern facility, Hopital Canard appeared more like an upscale private clinic than a big city hospital. “This is what money gets you,” said Rook as they strolled past the manicured hedges and potted palms on the way to the entrance. “Trust me, you won’t see a lot of hobos expiring on the ER floor in this establishment. I’ll bet they even warm the bedpans.”
Nikki pointed out that flowers seemed to have gotten things off on the right foot the day before with the Bernardins, so they stopped at the small shop off the lobby. Minutes later, armed with some peonies in cellophane, they bypassed the front desk and rode the elevator to the second floor. On the way up, she said, “Not that I’m complaining, but I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to sign in.”
“It’s the peonies. In my experience as an investigative journalist, I’ve learned you can get by almost any security situation unchallenged by carrying something. Flowers, clipboard… And it’s a breeze if you’re eating something, especially off a paper plate.”
“Room two-oh-three,” she said, consulting the note she’d made at the hotel. They turned a corner, and outside the door of 203, a uniformed policier rose up from his folding chair to face them. Heat elbowed Rook. “You don’t have a plate of baked beans on you, do ya?”
In French, the policeman told them no visitors. Nikki replied, also in French, that she had spoken to M. Wynn’s housekeeper, who assured her that it would be all right to see him. “We’ve come a long way,” said Rook. “And we love your country.”
The cop gave him a disdainful look and said, “ Allez,” looking like he’d enjoy a bit of exercise to break the monotony, if it came to that. Heat held up her NYPD identification, a tone changer. The homegrown officer from the suburban prefecture studied the foreign credentials carefully, looking from her photo to her and back, his eyes darting under the short brim of his cap. Speaking rapidly and flawlessly like a native, Nikki explained that her mother, Cynthia Heat, had been very close to “Oncle Tyler,” and that his shooting might be connected to a homicide case she was working on back home. The gendarme seemed intrigued but immovable. Until he heard the old man’s weak voice coming from the open door of the room.
“Did you say… you were Cindy Heat’s daughter?”
“Yes, Mr. Wynn,” she called toward the pale yellow privacy drape. “I’m Nikki Heat, and I came here to see you.”
After a pause, then a prolific hawking of phlegm, the disembodied voice said, “Let her in.” The policeman’s eyes flicked side to side, unprepared for this scenario. At last he regarded Nikki’s ID once more, handed it to her, and stood back to let them pass. As she and Rook entered the room, they could hear the policier making a call on his walkie-talkie to cover himself.
For Nikki the scene behind the curtain took her right back to February in St. Luke’s Roosevelt, where Rook had been clinging to life after his shooting. Tyler Wynn, frail and propped up on one side to keep the left half of his back elevated off the mattress, watched her through dazed, half-mast eyelids. Then he managed to bring a weak smile to his dry, cracked lips. “My God,” he said. “Look at you. It’s like I died and went to heaven and met up with dear Cindy.” And then a rascally twinkle shined through. “I am still alive, aren’t I?” He laughed, but that brought on
