He untied her robe and felt her skin spread warmth across his chest. “I suppose we could go back to bed. You know, for a bit. There’d still be time to see him on our way to the precinct.”
At seven-thirty that morning, Heat and Rook waited at the crosswalk outside her neighborhood Starbucks, holding three coffees: one for each of them and the other for Rook’s car service driver, who waited leaning against the fender of the black Lincoln across East 23rd. Traffic stopped and they got the walk signal, but halfway across their driver called, “Heads up!” They heard the roar of an engine and turned to face the grill of a maroon van mere feet from mowing them both down. They jumped back just in time, and it charged through the intersection and raced on. Shaken, they hurried across while they still had the right of way.
“Holy fuck, scared the hell out of me. You guys OK?”
Nikki saw that she had a case of latte leg, nothing unusual for her, and blotted it with a napkin. “What was that guy doing,” she asked, “texting?”
“No, must have been drunk or high,” said their driver. “He was looking right at you.” Nikki stopped cleaning the stain and took a step to the curb to see if she could get a plate on the van. It was long gone.
“Am I a suspect?” asked Leonard Frick. The once-skinny kid in the tux with the cloud of steel wool hair had filled out over the decades. Now, sitting across from him in the rehearsal hall at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, Heat put him at two-seventy, and the only hair on his head was a silver goatee framed by the dimples that appeared like parentheses when he smiled.
“No, sir,” said Nikki, “this is purely for background.”
Rook asked, “You didn’t kill them, did you?”
“Of course not.” Then he said to Nikki, “He’s not a cop, is he?”
“What gave him away?” That brought out the dimples as Mr. Frick laughed. He seemed happy for the company and told them how his career in music had ebbed and flowed since the seventies. First came fill-in work as a substitute for some of the smaller symphony orchestras in the Northeast. Then a bit of commitment-testing unemployment until he landed steady work in a few Broadway orchestra pits, including Phantom, Cats, and Thoroughly Modern Millie before he settled into the QSO.
“OK, it’s not the New York Phil, but it’s a great bunch, union benefits, plus, once a year I get to play that solo clarinet opening in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Worth the whole trip just to lay out that great ascending note and see every face in the orchestra break into a grin. Even the bassoon players, and they’re all nuts.” Rook smiled and nodded in agreement. Leonard offered Nikki his condolences. “I loved your mom. I loved them both, but trust me, your mother outshined all of us. And I’m not saying that because I had a crush on her. All the guys did. She was pretty like you. And had this special gift, this … force that made her competitive and driven to excel, but also very kind to her fellow students. Nurturing, even. And music conservatories are notoriously cutthroat at that level.”
“Let me ask you about that,” said Rook. “Were there any ugly rivalries that might have lasted over the years?”
“None that I know of. Plus, Cindy was too into her music to make enemies or get involved in the petty stuff. That girl worked. She studied every great piano recording—Horowitz, Gould, the lot. She was the first one in the rehearsal studio in the morning and the last one out at night.” He chuckled. “I spotted her at Cappy’s Pizza one Sunday and was going to go to her table and kid her, asking her how she could live with herself, not rehearsing, and with a Chopin recital the next day. Then I look over and see she’s moving her fingers along her placemat like it’s a freakin’ keyboard!”