And yet as a fact instead of as prose, it made him stop and think.
He skimmed ahead to observations he had made about the numerous times he saw her coming and going through those French doors to her garden in the little walled back courtyard. Cassidy would get off a phone call with her editor, and Rook would follow her out there and wait patiently while she deadheaded some of her plants or tested the soil moisture with her fingers. She told him that tiny enclosure was the whole reason she’d chosen that place to live. One evening, when he arrived to accompany her to a Broadway opening party, she greeted him in her cocktail dress holding a clutch purse in one hand and a garden trowel in the other.
Then he stopped again. This time on a quote he planned to use in the article, maybe even in boldface—the one that elegantly tied together her vocation with her avocation. The one when Cassidy said if you are on to something big, “Keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and your secrets buried.”
Rook sat back in his chair and stared at that quote. Then he shook his head, dismissing his thought. He was just about to scroll on when he remembered another quote he had heard recently. From a Detective Nikki Heat. “We follow the leads we have, not the ones we wish we had.”
He looked at his watch and got out his cell phone to call Nikki. But then he hesitated, feeling that if this was some fool’s errand he was about to undertake, he didn’t want to drag her along, especially after the day she had had. He thought about bagging the idea he was hatching altogether. But then he had another notion. He went to his notebook and thumbed back until he found the number he wanted.
“You’re lucky you caught me,” said JJ. “I was about to go out to the movies.”
“Well that’s my good luck.” Rook took a step closer to Cassidy Towne’s front door, hoping the super would pick up his cue and spare the chatter. And if that move was too subtle, he decided to eliminate ambiguity. “So if you’ll just open up, I can do my thing and you can make your show.”
“You go to the movies these days?”
“A few.”
“Know what bugs me?” asked JJ, not making any move toward the carabiner holding all the keys dangling from his belt. “You pay your money getting in, and it’s not cheap, am I right? And you sit down to watch a film, and what do people do during the movie? Talk. They talk and talk and talk. Spoils the whole experience.”
“I agree,” said Rook. “What film are you going to?”
“Jackass in 3D. That is one funny buncha wing nuts, I tell you. And it’s in 3D, so you know the laughs are going to be big when those fellas start crashing their shit into light poles and such.”
Twenty dollars eventually diverted the super’s attention away from social commentary to opening the door. JJ demonstrated how to lock up and left for the cinema. Once inside, Rook locked the door behind him and snapped on lights so he could navigate the clutter in Cassidy Towne’s apartment, which was only in a slightly more orderly state of the disarray he had last seen.