“Rook” was all she said and held up the phone.
“Take it. I don’t mind.”
“It’s Rook,” she reiterated, as if it required no further explanation. Nikki let his call drop to voice mail.
“Forward him to my phone,” said Lauren, stirring her bloody Mary. “You could do worse than Jameson Rook. That man is doable.”
“Oh, sure, that’s just what I need. The ride-along isn’t bad enough without putting that in the mix.” When her phone pulsed to indicate voice mail, she pressed the button for a fetch and held the phone to her ear. “Huh. He says he’s come upon something big about the Matthew Starr case and needs me to see it…” She held up a staying palm to Lauren as she listened to the rest and then hung up.
“What’s the development?”
“Didn’t say. He said he couldn’t talk now but to come to his place right away, and left his address.”
“You should go,” said Lauren.
“I’m almost afraid to. Knowing him, he’s probably made citizen’s arrests of anybody who knew Matthew Starr.”
When the industrial strength elevator reached his loft, Rook was waiting for her on the other side of the accordion mesh doors. “Heat. You actually came.”
“Your message said you had something to show me.”
“I do,” he said and strode from the entry and disappeared around a corner. “This way.”
She followed him into his designer kitchen. At the other end of it, in the great room, as the cable designer shows called those open spaces that merged living rooms and dining rooms off an overlooking kitchen, there was a poker table, a real poker table with a felt top. And it was surrounded by…poker players. She came to a halt. “Rook, there’s nothing you need to show me here about the case at all, is there?”
“Say, you are a detective, aren’t you?” He shrugged and gave a little impish grin. “Would you have come if I had just plain invited you to play poker?”
Nikki got hit with a major turn-around twinge, but then the poker crowd rose to greet her and there she was.
As Rook escorted her into the room, he said, “If you really, really need a work reason to be here, you can thank the man who got you your warrant for the Guilford. Judge, this is Detective Nikki Heat, NYPD.”
Judge Simpson looked a bit different in a yellow polo shirt, hunkered behind tall stacks of poker chips instead of his bench. “I’m winning,” he said as he shook her hand. A network news anchor she and the rest of America admired was also there, with her filmmaker husband. The anchorwoman said she was glad a cop was there because she had been robbed. “And by a judge,” said her husband. Rook placed Nikki in the empty seat between him and the newswoman, and before Nikki knew it, the anchor’s Oscar-winning husband was dealing her a hand.
It was a low-stakes game, she was relieved to discover, and then that turned to worry they had lowered the ante in deference to her pay grade. But it was clear this was more about fun than money. Although winning still mattered, especially to the judge. Seeing him out of his robe for the first time, the overhead light shining on his bald head, the manic obsession he brought to his play, Nikki couldn’t shake the comparison to another Simpson. She would have given up a whole pot just to hear the judge say “D’oh!”
After the deal of the third hand, the lights dipped out and came back up. “Here we go,” said Nikki. “Mayor said we’d have rolling brownouts.”
“How many days is it for this heat wave?” asked the filmmaker.
“This is day four,” said his wife. “I interviewed a meteorologist and he said it’s not a heat wave unless it’s three consecutive days above ninety degrees.”
A woman appeared in the kitchen and added, “And if the heat lasts more than four days, consult your doctor immediately.” The room burst into laughter, and the woman stepped from behind the counter, taking a deep, theatrical bow, complete with a graceful upward arm sweep. Rook had told her about his mother. Of course, she already knew who Margaret was. You don’t win Tony Awards and show up in the Style section and Vanity Fair party collages as often she did and go unnoticed. In her sixties now, Margaret had gone from the ingénue to the grand dame (although Rook once confided in Nikki that his spelling was grand d-a-m-n). The lady exuded every bit of the joyful diva, from her opening line to the way she entered the great room to take Nikki’s hand and fuss about how very much she had heard about her from Jamie.
“And I’ve heard a lot about you,” Nikki replied.
“Believe it all, darling. And if it’s not true, when I get to hell, I’ll sort it out there.” Then she swept—no, there was no more accurate way to describe it—she swept back into the kitchen.
Rook smiled at Nikki. “As you can see, I believe in truth in advertising.”
“So I’m learning.” She heard ice plinking in a rocks glass and saw Margaret uncapping a bottle of Jameson. Yes, she thought, I’m learning a lot, Jameson Rook.
The news anchor appealed to Rook’s sense of civic responsibility and he killed his air-conditioning. Nikki looked up from her cards, and her eyes followed his shorts and U-2 3D T-shirt as he moved barefoot across the oriental rug to the far wall. He bent to open the sash windows that gave onto his penthouse view of Tribeca, and when Nikki’s eyes drifted off him, it was to the hulk of a distant building, RiverStarr on the Hudson, backlit by Jersey City. The structure was dark, except for the red aviation lamp atop an idle crane balanced above girders awaiting skin. They’d wait a long time.
Margaret took her son’s chair beside Nikki and said, “It is a very good view.” And as Rook bent to open the next window, the doyenne leaned in to whisper, “I’m his mother and even I think it’s a great view. But that’s just me taking credit.” And then, just to be clear: “Jamie got my ass. It got a marvelous review in Oh! Calcutta!”
Two hours later, after Rook, then the news anchor, and then her husband folded, Nikki won yet another hand against the judge. Simpson said he didn’t care, but judging from his expression, she was glad she got the court order out of him before the poker game. “Guess the cards aren’t falling my way tonight for some reason.” She really wanted him to just say “D’oh!”
“It isn’t the cards, Horace,” said Rook. “For once, somebody at this table can read your tells.” He got up and crossed to the counter to peel a tepid slice of Ray’s out of the box and fish another Fat Tire from the ice in the sink. “Now, to me, tonight, anyway, you’ve got a great poker face. I can’t see what’s going on behind the taciturn judicial mask. It could be woo-hoo or yay-boo. But this one here, she’s gotcha.” Rook took his seat again, and Nikki wondered if the whole pizza-and-beer run had been a ruse to move his chair closer to hers.
“My face gives nothing away,” said the judge.
“It’s not about you giving it away, it’s what she’s taking,” said Rook. He turned to her as he spoke to the judge. “I’ve been with her weeks now, and I don’t think I’ve ever known someone so adept at reading people.” He held that look to her, and although they were nowhere close to breathing each other’s exhalations like they had on Starr’s balcony that day, she felt a flutter. So she turned away to rake in the pot, wondering what the hell she was playing with here, and she didn’t mean the cards. “I think I should call it a night,” she said.
Rook insisted on walking her down to the sidewalk, but Nikki stalled until they were embedded in the group departure of the other guests, so she could get away clean. A group seemed the perfect place to fulfill that. Because the truth of it, she reflected on the ride down, was that she didn’t want so much to be alone as not to be paired up.
Not tonight anyway, she thought.
The news anchor and her husband lived in walking distance and made their exit just as Simpson flagged a cab. The judge was heading uptown near the Guggenheim and asked if Nikki wanted to share the ride. She sorted her feelings about leaving Rook hangdogging on the sidewalk versus staying and having to deal with the awkwardness of the good-night moment, or worse, the come-back-up moment, and answered yes.