"How did it end?"
"They both cried and then hugged each other."
"And then what?"
"They kissed."
"As in kissed good-bye?"
"As in romantic."
"And after they kissed?"
"They left together."
Nikki double-tapped her pen on her spiral notebook. He was getting to the part she wanted to hear, and she had to make sure to ask in a way that didn't set him up to please her. She kept her question general. "How did they leave?"
"Holding hands."
So she got more specific. "I mean did they walk? Take a taxi? How did they leave?"
"They got in one of the limos. There was one waiting right there."
Heat concentrated on trying to sound detached even though she could feel her pulse rate rising. "Whose limo was it, Morris? The one Soleil came in or Reed Wakefield's, do you know?"
"Neither, I saw them come in cabs."
She tried not to get ahead of herself, although the temptation was strong. She told herself to keep the slate blank, just listen, not project, ask simple questions.
"So it was just there and they flagged it?"
"No."
"What, they helped themselves to someone else's limo?"
"Not at all. He invited them and they got in with him."
Heat pretended to be perusing her notes to keep the gravity out of her next question. The one she had been waiting to ask. She wanted to make it sound offhand so he didn't go defensive on her. "Who invited them for a ride?" Pablo drank the last swallow of the electric-blue energy drink and set the empty bottle on the interrogation room table. Because of his age, Roach wouldn't make the boy sit through the interrogation but had strategically allowed him to have his snack in there to let the stakes sink in on Esteban Padilla's cousin Victor. Raley set the teenager up with an officer from Juvenile to watch TV in the outer area and returned to Interrogation 1.
He could tell by how Victor looked at him when he sat down across the table that Raley and his partner had been right when they planned their strategy. Victor's concern for the boy was their wedge. "Happy as a clam," said Raley.
"Bueno," said Ochoa, and then he continued in Spanish. "Victor, I don't get it, man, why won't you talk to me?"
Victor Padilla wasn't as self-assured outside of his neighborhood or his home. He said the words, but they sounded like they were losing steam. "You know how it is. You don't talk, you don't snitch."
"That's noble, man. Stand by some code that protects bangers while some dude that carved up your cousin walks free. I checked you out, Homes, you're not part of that world anyway. Or are you some kind of wannabe?"
Victor wagged his head. "Not me. That's not my life."
"So don't pretend it is."
"Code's the code."
"Bullshit, it's a pose."
The man looked away from Ochoa to Raley and then back to Ochoa. "Sure, you're going to say that."
The detective let that comment rest, and when the air was sufficiently cleansed of innuendo, he head-nodded to the Tumi duffel of money on the table. "Too bad Pablo can't hang on to that while you go away."
The guest chair scraped on the linoleum as Victor slid back an inch and sat upright. His eyes lost their cool remoteness and he said, "Why should I go away anywhere? I haven't done anything."
"Dude, you're a day laborer sitting on almost a hundred Gs in greenbacks. You think you're not going to get dirt on you?"
"I said I haven't done anything."
"Better tell me where this came from is all I can say." He waited him out, watching the knot of muscle flex on Victor's jaw. "Here it is straight up. I can ask the DA about making this problem go away if you just cooperate." Ochoa let that sink in and then added, "Unless you'd rather tell the kid that you're going away but, hey, at least you were loyal to the code."
And when Victor Padilla bowed his head, even Detective Raley could tell that they had him. Twenty minutes later Raley and Ochoa stood up when Detective Heat came into the bull pen. "We did it," they said in an accidental chorus.
She read their excitement and said, "Congratulations, you two. Nice work. I scored a hit, too. In fact, I'm getting a warrant cut right now."
"For who?" asked Raley.
"You first." She sat on her desk to face them. "While I'm waiting for my warrant, why don't you tell me a story?"
While Raley rolled over two desk chairs for them, Ochoa got out his pad to consult as he spoke. "Just like we thought, Victor says his cousin Esteban was making money on the side selling information about his celebrity riders to Cassidy Towne."
Raley said, "Ironic when you consider the big stall was all about some snitch code."
"Anyway, he was spying for pocket money that he got if his tips were hot enough to make her column. Twenty here, fifty there. Adds up, I guess. It's all a beautiful thing until one night last May when some bad shit goes down on one of his rides."
"Reed Wakefield," said Nikki.
"We know that, but here's where Victor swears to God his cousin never told him what happened that night, only that there was some bad business and the less he knew the better."
"Esteban was trying to protect his cousin," said Heat.
"So he says," added Raley.
Ochoa flipped a page. "So whatever exactly went down is still unknown."
Heat knew she could fill in some of that blank, but she wanted to hear their raw story first, so she didn't interrupt.
"Next day cousin Esteban gets canned from his limo job, some vague BS about personality conflict with his clients. So he's out of a gig, gets bad-mouthed in the business, and has to drive lettuce and onions around instead of A-listers and prom queens. He gets all set to sue-"
"Because he's been wronged," interjected Raley, quoting the Ronnie Strong commercial.
"— but drops it because once our gossip columnist hears from him about whatever happened that night-obviously involving Reed Wakefield somehow-she gives him a load of money to drop his suit and chill so he doesn't attract attention to it. Probably she didn't want a leak before her book was done."
Nikki jumped in here. "Cassidy Towne gave him a hundred large?"
"Nope, more like five grand," said Raley. "We're coming to the big payout."
"Esteban wanted more, so he double-dipped. He called up the subject of his tip to Cassidy Towne and said he was going to go public with what he saw that night unless he got a healthy chunk of change. Turns out it wasn't so healthy."
Raley picked it up. "Padilla got himself a hundred grand and then got himself killed the very next day. Cousin Victor freaks but hangs on to the money, figuring to use it to get away someplace where whoever did this can't find him."
"So that's what we got," said Ochoa. "We got some of the story, but we still don't have the name of whoever Padilla was shaking down."
They looked up at Nikki, sitting on her desk grinning.
"But you do, don't you?" said Raley. In the auditorium of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Battery Park City, Yankee phenom Toby Mills posed with an oversized prop check for one million dollars, his personal gift to the varsity athletic program of the public school. The audience was packed with students, faculty, administrators, and of course, press-all on their feet for his ovation. Also standing, but not applauding, was Detective Nikki Heat, who looked on from behind the curtain at the side of the stage, watching the pitcher grip 'n' grin with the athletic director, flanked by the Stuy baseball team turned out in uniform for the occasion. Mills smiled broadly, unfazed by the strobe flashes pummeling him, patiently turning to his left then his right, well acquainted with the choreography of the photo op.
Nikki was sorry that Rook couldn't be there. Especially since the school was only a few blocks from his loft, she had hoped that if he hurried he could meet her there to close the loop on his article. She had tried to return his calls on the drive down, but his phone rang out and dumped to voice mail. She knew better than to leave a message with sensitive content, so she said, "So let me get this straight. It's OK for you to bug me when I'm working, but not the other way around? Hey, hope the writing's going well. Got something going on, call me immediately when you get this." He'd be pissed about missing it, but she'd let him interrogate her, a thought that gave Nikki the first smile of her long hard day.