Another Sargent, on loan from a private collector, hung to the side by itself. Also painted in Paris, it was the artist’s portrait of a Madame Ramon Subercaseaux.
“I’ve never seen this one,” said Rook. “Isn’t it amazing?” But a shadow fell over her demeanor again. All Nikki did was grunt a cursory “uh-huh” as she moved on to the next gallery. He lagged behind to take in the portrait. It captured an elegant young woman with dark hair seated at an upright piano. Mme. Subercaseaux was posed turning away from the instrument. Her melancholy eyes stared out, meeting the viewer’s, and one hand rested behind her on the keyboard. The painting evoked the feeling of a pianist, interrupted.
Rook followed after Nikki, understanding her discomfort with it.
The showers had cleared out, and Heat asked him how much he would hate getting dragged along on a nostalgia tour of her alma mater, just across the street. “On an RTWOTC Saturday?” he asked. “First, I’d love to.”
“And second?”
“If I said no, I’d be kissing off any chance of hotel sex.”
“Damn straight.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” he said.
Frankly, the notion of a tour didn’t excite him, but he didn’t regret a bit of it, simply because he could see how the visit energized her. Rook watched Nikki’s cares shed at each point of interest and every old hang she showed him. She snuck him in the backstage entrance to Blackman Auditorium to see where, as a freshman, she played Ophelia in Hamlet and Cathleen, the summer maid, in Long Day’s Journey into Night. At Churchill Hall, where Heat studied Criminal Justice, they found the doors locked but she pointed to the fifth floor so he could see the window of her Criminology lecture hall. Looking up at it, he said, “Fascinating, the actual window,” then turned to her, adding, “That hotel sex better be mighty raucous.” He paid for that crack by having to endure small talk with her freshman Medieval Lit professor, whom she stumbled upon in the campus Starbucks grading Beowulf term papers. Crossing the quad took them to the bronze statue of Cy Young. Relishing her role as tour guide, Nikki proudly informed him it stood on the exact location of the mound where Young had pitched the first-ever perfect game when the site had been the old Huntington ballpark.
“Photo op,” he said, handing her his iPhone.
Nikki laughed. “You’re such a boy.”
“I wish. This is so I can pretend I know something about baseball. When you grow up without a dad, raised by a Broadway star, there are gaps. Swear to God, until this moment I thought Cy Young was the composer who wrote ‘Big Spender.’”
She snapped one of him aping the legendary pitcher, reading signs from the catcher. “Let me get a close-up.” She zoomed in on his face and, in the viewfinder, saw him looking past her, frowning.
Nikki turned to see what Rook was reacting to and said, “Oh, my God… Petar?”
The skinny man in the Sherpa cap and designer-torn denim who was walking past, stopped. “Nikki?” He pulled off his sunglasses and beamed. “Oh, my God. This is crazy.”
Rook stood by, leaning an elbow on Cy Young’s pitching arm, as he watched Nikki and her old college boyfriend hug. And just a little too exuberantly to suit him. Now he did regret the campus tour. This guy Petar went up his ass from the day he had met him last fall. Rook convinced himself it was not some possessive, irrational jealousy of an old flame. Although Nikki said that’s precisely what it was. Petar Matic, her Croatian ex, screamed Eurotrash, and Rook couldn’t believe Nikki didn’t see it. To Rook, this journeyman segment producer for Later On! a post-midnight talk show he looked down on as Fallon-lite, posed as if he held the pulse of late night comedy in his pale-fingered grip. Rook knew there was only one thing Petar Matic held the pulse of every night, and he tried not to imagine it.
“Oh, and James is here, too,” Petar said, parting at last from Nikki.
“It’s Jameson,” said Rook, but Petar was too busy delivering a man hug shoulder bump for it to register.
Nikki touched his cheek and said, “Look at you, you grew your beard back.”
“Just stubble,” Petar said. “Stubble’s like the new deal.”
“All the rage in Macedonia,” said Rook. Petar seemed oblivious to the jab and asked what they were doing there. “Just a getaway.” Rook draped his arm around her shoulder and said, “Nikki and I are grabbing a little alone time.”
“Thought I’d show him our old stomping grounds,” she said. “What about you?”
“I’m having alone time, too. But alone.” He chuckled at his own joke and continued, “I came up from New York for the day to guest lecture a Communications seminar about the future of late night talk shows.”
“Professor Mulkerin?” asked Nikki.
“Yep. Funny, I barely got a C in that class, and now I’m the star alum.”
“Well, it was great to see you,” Rook said, the verbal equivalent of checking his watch.
“You, too, Jim. I wish I had known. We could have planned dinner together.”
Nikki said, “Let’s!” The smile she gave Rook held the hotel sex card clenched in its teeth.
Rook forced a grin. “Great.”
On the cab ride back to the Lenox, since Nikki didn’t have a knife, she cut the silence with her tongue. “Know what you’ve got, Rook? Petar envy.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“You have a thing against him, and it shows.”
“I apologize. I just didn’t see dinner with your old boyfriend as part of the RTWOTC plan. Is this payback because I got a massage from a practitioner who happened to be somewhat attractive?”
“Rook, she was a Victoria’s Secret model without the angel wings.”
“You thought so, too, huh?”
“Your jealousy is transparent and over-the-top. Forget old boyfriend. Yes, Petar did try to rekindle when we ran into him last fall, but I ended that.”
“He hit on you? You never told me that.”
“Now he’s just an old friend.” She paused to peer up at the top of the Pru then said, “And yes, this still is an RT-whatever. But just to remind you, since you may have been too traumatized-or in denial after your gunshot-Petar was a huge help breaking that case. This is my chance to say thank you.”
“By having me buy his dinner?”
She looked out the window and smiled. “Win-win for me.”
He booked a table at Grill 23 for the simple reason that, if it was good enough for Spenser, it was good enough for him. After starting off with topneck clams and an extraordinary Cakebread Chardonnay, dinner wasn’t pure hell for Rook. Perhaps just purgatory. Mostly he smiled and listened as Petar gassed on about himself and his exciting behind-the-scenes role booking guests for Later On! “I’m this close to the big get,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Brad and Angelina.”
“Wow,” said Nikki, “Brangelina.”
“I hate those cute nicknames,” said Rook.
Petar shrugged. “Nikki, remember what they called us? Petnik?”
“Petnik!” She laughed. “Oh my God, Petnik.” Rook reached for the ice bucket and filled his own glass, wondering what the hell it was about scruffy waifs with sad, soulful eyes that attracted women. What was this magical allure of underachievement and unruly hair?
After a main course of memory lane conversation and Nikki’s fifth cell check of messages from the precinct, Petar came out of his self-absorption to observe that she seemed preoccupied. Nikki set down her fork, leaving a perfectly good duck fat tater tot still speared on it, and napkinned her mouth. The clouds that had parted for her rolled in on a new cold front. She told Petar about the new development in her mother’s case, pausing only for the plates to be cleared before she resumed.
To his credit-for once-Petar listened intently and without interruption. His face sobered and his eyes grew hooded by an old sadness. When she finished, he shook his head and said, “There’s no such thing as closure for you, is there?”