Putnam described Maxine Berkowitz as the perfect marriage of reporter and beat. She’d come to WHNY from Columbus, Ohio, as weekend anchor, but “she never won the focus groups, so instead of releasing her, I got the notion to recycle her as a consumer watchdog. You know, an in-your-face viewer advocate. Somebody who’d walk through walls and bust down doors.” He dabbed an eye and said, “She herself came up with the segment title, ‘The Doorbuster.’ ” He went on to describe a team player, beloved by her coworkers.
Not satisfied with the company line George Putnam handed her, Nikki asked to speak with someone who was close to Maxine. The news director hesitated then led her and Rook onto the set, where News 3’s hip-hop meteorologist bent over his weather desk. “Oh my God,” said Rook, “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting Coolio Nimbus.”
The young black man straightened up quickly, and short dreads danced on his head. But the signature smile and mischievous eyes of New York’s Most Playful Weathercaster were dimmed by sadness. This man looked like he had lost his best friend.
Nimbus walked them to his cubicle just off the set. When Nikki got there she turned, looking for Rook, but she had lost him along the way. Heat spotted him gawping at his own face with bewildered fascination as it filled a fifty-four-inch LED monitor above the sports desk. By the time he joined her, she had gotten pretty much the same view of Coolio’s best friend Max as she’d gotten from the news director, although the weatherman said, “There’s some shit maybe you need to know. But I’m not sure I should spill.”
“I know this is tough, Mr. Nimbus,” said Nikki, “but we need to hear about any possibility if we’re going to find your friend’s murderer.”
A familiar voice interrupted. “Good lord, it’s Nikki Heat.”
Greer Baxter, the iconic face of WHNY News, towered over them. The veteran news anchor’s stiff helmet of blond hair framed her handsome features. The newscaster had several tissues tucked into her blouse collar to keep her neck makeup from rubbing off. Both Heat and Rook rose, but he might as well have been invisible. She clasped Nikki’s hand in both of hers and said, “Poor Maxine. Such a tragedy. Such a loss.” And then, in a gear shift as smooth as turning the page on the night’s top stories, she said, “Now, Nikki Heat, you and I need to have a talk. We need to book your appearance on my little spot.”
The spot Greer Baxter humbly referred to, “Greer and Now,” was the expanded interview segment that closed out each night’s primetime newscast. Baxter had a reputation as a skilled interviewer who scored newsworthy guests. “With all due respect,” began Nikki, “I-”
“Ah-ah,” said Greer. “I won’t take no. We lost one of our own. If you don’t have enough information to go on with me tonight, I understand. But I need you. I’m serious. Call me. Or I’ll be calling you, Nikki Heat.”
After she moved on, Heat turned her attention back to Coolio Nimbus. “What should I know about Maxine Berkowitz?”
Minutes later, back in the news director’s office, George Putnam came around his desk and closed his door. “Coolio told you this?” Heat nodded. He flopped into his executive swivel and rocked back with an exhale, deep in painful thought. Then he came forward, resting rolled-up shirtsleeves on his desk and presenting his block of a freckled face to them. “It’s true. Max and I had an affair. It started years ago when I began coaching her for her new role.”
“As your mistress?” asked Rook.
“As the best damned consumer advocate in TV,” he said. “I had this notion that people could sleep together and still work together.” Both Heat and Rook kept eyes front. “I was wrong. I knew too much. Running this newsroom, I had to keep secrets from her. She’d find out, of course, when I’d send a memo to the staff about a change, and she’d get all bent about not being told first. It ate us up.” Nikki let the silence do the work. Putnam filled it. “I broke it off a year ago. It ended ugly. But that affair was ancient history. I mean, when a romance is over, it’s over. Right?”
Rook turned immediately to Nikki and said, “Yes… Absolutely.”
Heat said, “Mr. Putnam, I’d like your whereabouts midday today, please.” But even as Heat jotted down his statement, she knew it wasn’t him and that getting Putnam’s alibi was just a formality.
The real killer was somewhere out there.
Rook made their dinner that night in his loft while they drank unfiltered hefeweizen and Nikki watched across the kitchen counter after her bath. “What magic’s happening in that oven of yours, Mr. Jameson?” she said. “Loving the garlic and fresh thyme.”
“It’s Good Eats Forty Cloves and a Chicken.” Then Rook held up the cookbook and said, “How weird is this? Alton Brown calls this the perfect make-ahead meal for those pesky serial-homicide weeks, or when you’ve had a long day chasing Naughty Nurses.”
While they ate, they watched News 3 @ 10. Of course, the lead story was the strangulation murder of their consumer advocate, Maxine Berkowitz. Greer Baxter’s stoic reading was offset by video of WHNY staffers in tears and a live shot from 72nd and Riverside Drive, where the field reporter, standing before a makeshift curbside memorial of candles and flowers, showed the crime scene, which police had cordoned off waiting for a daylight evidence search. The reporter said, “NYPD Captain Wallace Irons is with me. He is commander of the Twentieth Precinct.”
“He’s also the shortest distance between a body bag and a TV camera,” heckled Rook as Wally stepped into the bright lights beside the reporter.
Irons kept his appearance basically ceremonial. When Heat had briefed him a half hour before, she gave him the fundamentals: cause of death, time of death, and how the body had been discovered. He used his airtime as a plea for eyewitnesses to come forward, as she had coached him to do. Nikki had not, however, told Irons about the string. Or that this likely was the work of a serial killer. She would do that first thing in the morning. But for now she held it back simply because she did not trust her commanding officer’s big mouth.
After dishes, they uncorked an Haute-Côtes de Nuits then time traveled to 1999. Joe Flynn’s surveillance photos of her mother made it an emotional trip for Nikki. The private eye’s telescopic lens captured Cynthia Heat just as her daughter remembered her: sleek, elegant, and poised. Nikki’s dad had commissioned the tail, suspecting his wife of having an affair, and not without cause. Cindy Heat’s moves were all about hiding a secret life-from her husband and from her own kid. Nikki and her father never discussed it. They were each afraid to give it voice, but they both suspected her of hiding something. Both had no idea it was a double life as a CIA operative spying on the families that hired nice Mrs. Heat to tutor piano. Nikki reflected on the irony that a husband’s worry about a cheating spouse led him to hire a private investigator whose creeper photos might now give up clues to a rogue ex-CIA conspiracy.
Nikki had loaded the thumb drive Flynn gave her onto Rook’s MacBook Pro and, shoulder-to-shoulder, they watched the slide show on its monitor. Once Nikki got past the nostalgia of seeing eleven-year-old images of her mom, she focused on the other faces. Some pictures were peep-shots taken through windows into homes; most were taken on Manhattan sidewalks as the tutor-under-surveillance arrived or departed with binders of sheet music under one arm. Heat recognized the Jamaican, Algernon Barrett, who had been ducking behind his lawyer’s skirts to avoid her. One shot captured Cynthia with the brewery tycoon Carey Maggs, sitting on the planter outside his apartment building, laughing at something his little boy must have just said. More pictures of the same ilk flashed by. Vaja Nikoladze’s Rudolf Nureyev mop of hair dated the photo of him chatting with Cindy Heat on the gravel drive of his Hastings-on-Hudson property. A Georgian shepherd pup sat obediently by his left leg.