“Why else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself because you need to find out the part of her then that’s part of you now. That’s the best reason I can think of to keep going.” He paused and added, “Or you could just throw in the towel because it got difficult, like Carter Damon did.” Heat sat up and glowered at him. “Hey,” he said, “I’m pulling out all the stops here.”
“No kidding. Comparing me to that washout? Not too manipulative.”
“I have my moments.” He looked past her to the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue that loomed over Central Park West. “He was a force of nature, wasn’t he? Did you know he was once NYPD commissioner? They told him the department was hopelessly corrupt and lazy. TR turned it around in two years. You remind me of him. Although you’d have to work on the mustache.”
Nikki laughed. Then she grew pensive and stared deeply into him, seeing something there precious and infinite. Finally she stood. “Time to get back to work?”
“If you insist. And if you’re crazy enough to keep going, I’m crazy enough to follow.”
Algernon Barrett was the next name on the list of wealthy tutoring clients Nikki had gotten from the PI who’d tracked her mother, and when Heat pulled up to the gate of his business, she asked Rook if they had the wrong address. Located on a dead-end street of cement factories and auto scrap yards in the Bronx, Barrett’s Jamaican catering company, Do The Jerk, appeared anything but prosperous. “Know how they say not to judge a book by its cover?” asked Rook, stepping around weeds on their walk up the fractured walkway to the front entrance. “Do judge a caterer by his cockroaches.”
However, as they waited in the small lobby that seemed suited more to a car wash, Rook drifted to the windowed double doors giving onto the food preparation plant and said, “I take it back. You could eat off the floor in there and not be a rodent.”
They paced twenty long minutes before the receptionist answered a phone buzz and led them down a dingy, Masonite-paneled hall to the owner’s office. Algernon Barrett, a whip-skinny Jamaican with an impressive set of Manny Ramirez dreds cascading from under his knit cap, didn’t get up. He remained seated behind his massive desk, peering around an accumulation of spice bottles, unopened UPS cartons, and horse racing magazines scattered there, making no effort even to acknowledge them. In fact, with his designer sunglasses on, it was hard to tell if he was even awake. But his attorney certainly was. Helen Miksit, a former star prosecutor who had quit for private practice and carved an equally strong reputation on the opposite side of the aisle, sat in a folding chair beside her client. The Bulldog, as she was known, didn’t extend any courtesies, either.
“I wouldn’t bother sitting,” she said.
“Nice to see you again, too, Helen.” Nikki extended her hand, which the lawyer shook but without rising.
“Your first lie of the morning. Trying to remember the last time we crossed paths, Heat. Oh, right, the interrogation room. You were putting the pins to my client Soleil Gray. Right before you badgered her so much she killed herself.” That was untrue; they both knew the famous singer had jumped under that train in spite of Nikki’s words, not because of them. But the Bulldog was all about living up to the nickname, so to argue the point would only feed the beast.
In his own form of defiance, Rook grabbed two folding chairs that faced the big screen showing a cable poker tournament and swung them around for him and Nikki. “Whatever,” said Miksit.
“Mr. Barrett, I’m here to ask you some questions about the time that my mother, Cynthia Heat, was your daughter’s music tutor.”
The Bulldog crossed her legs and sat back. “Ask away, Detective. I’ve advised my client not to answer anything.”