“I’m Detective Heat.” She tossed his file and a pen on the table and sat. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”
He stared at her some more and said, “I loved your magazine article.”
“Mr. Granville . . .”
“So formal. Morris is fine. May I call you Nikki?”
“No.”
“I saved an issue. Is there any chance I could get you to sign it?”
“Zero.” She watched him tilt his head down. His mouth twitched ever so slightly and his dense eyebrows flicked, as if he was having some sort of inner conversation. While he talked to himself, she said, “If you read that article, you’d know I’m a busy person. Do you want to tell me what you’ve got to say, or shall I call the van so we can get you to Riker’s in time for chow?”
“No, don’t.”
“Then let’s hear it.”
“I wanted to talk to you because I saw in ‘Buzz Rush’ yesterday that you were following Soleil Gray around.”
Coming from a stalker, that put the Ledger item in an entirely different context for Nikki. She thought about The Stinger and understood the enmity celebrities felt for the gossip press. But she came back to Granville and wondered, What was his deal? Was this Hinesburg’s insensitive joke coming to pass? Heat knew stalkers had no single profile, but her take from his file was that his “special identification issue” was focused on a single celebrity, Toby Mills. That’s where all the complaints derived. And all the trespassing citations and disorderly conducts. At least officially, he didn’t have a pattern of obsession with celebrities in general—not Soleil Gray and, hopefully, not cover girl cops.
“What’s your interest in Soleil Gray?”
“She was an awesome musician. A great loss.”
“That’s it? Thank you for the visit, Mr. Granville.”
Nikki gathered up her materials to go, and he said, “No, that’s not all.” She paused but gave him a look under an arched brow that said he’d better bring it. He blinked and lifted his palms off the tabletop, leaving perspiration ghosts in the shape of hands on the surface. “I saw her once. In person.”
His look of pride at what he thought was the apparent significance of that fact made her reflect on the psychology of these people, the latch-ons. How they defined themselves by proximity to a stranger. In extreme cases, usually in schizophrenics, they even believed the star was communicating uniquely to them through messages embedded in their songs or talk-show interviews. They obsessed about them to the point that they would go to extraordinary lengths to make themselves relevant in their lives—some even to the point of killing the objects of their infatuation. “Go on,” she said. Something in his urgency told her there was no harm in playing it out. “So you saw her, lots of people have.”
“She was outside a nightclub one night, actually early morning by then. It was late enough I was the only one out there.”
“Where?”
“At Club Thermal down in the Meat Packing District. And Soleil? She was dru-unk, loaded. Really loud and waving her arms all over and having this major fight out on the sidewalk, you know where all the limos line up?”
At the mention of the limos, Heat took the files out of her hands, set them back in front of her, and nodded. “Yeah, I know the place. Tell me what you saw.” The irony struck her that, for this shining moment in his twisted life, Granville was relevant, and that she was feeding that very need.
“Like I said, she was loud and really hot—yelling, you know? And when I saw who she was fighting with, I thought, if I can ever get close enough with my cell phone, this picture would make the cover of People or Us. Or at least the Ledger.”
“Why couldn’t you get closer? Was there security?”
“No. It was past closing. And they were the only other ones on the sidewalk. I didn’t get too close because I didn’t want them to see me.”