Nikki made a note to have Roach check for the exact date, just for the time line. “And what about the second time? Did she feel like somebody was still getting in?”
The super laughed. “Didn’t need a feeling. Some dude kicked the door in on her. Right in her face.”
Heat immediately turned to Rook, who said, “I knew she had the door fixed, because JJ was working on it when I came over to meet her for dinner. I asked her why, and she told me that she locked herself out and she had to break in. It seemed weird, but if Cassidy Towne was nothing else, she was full of surprises.”
“Hoo, tell me,” from JJ, who shook hands again with Rook.
Heat turned to Roach. “Is there an incident report on this?”
“None,” said Ochoa.
“Running a double-check now,” added Raley.
“When was this, JJ?”
He turned to his workbench, looked at some busty babe tool calendar, and pointed to a day with an orange grease pencil mark on it. Heat wrote down the date and asked, “Do you know what time of day this was?”
“Sure do. It was one in the afternoon. I was about to have my cigarette when I heard it. I’ve been trying to cut back, those things are bad for you, so I put myself on a schedule.”
“You say you heard it? You mean you actually saw it happen?”
“Saw it after it happened. I was up the sidewalk, no smoking in here, and heard the shouting and then, boom. Dude kicked that door right in.”
“And did you see who did it? Could you describe him?”
“Sure can. You know Toby Mills, right? The baseball player?”
“Sure do. You say he looked like Toby Mills?”
“No,” said JJ. “I’m saying it was Toby Mills.”
The Yankees were up a game in the Division Series, but without the services of starting pitcher Toby Mills, who was on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring he’d suffered in a heroic sprint to cover first base in Game One. Mills got the out for the win and a complete game, but also got the DL for an indefinite period and had to enjoy the rest of the ALDS as a spectator. On the drive back across the Central Park transverse to the pitcher’s town house on the Upper East Side, Heat said, “OK, Jameson Rook, A-list magazine journalist, now I have a question for you.”
“I have a feeling this isn’t going to be about the pony play, is it?”
“I’m trying to fathom why, if you were flying in close formation with Cassidy Towne for an up close magazine profile, you didn’t know about Toby Mills kicking her door down.”
“Simple. Because I wasn’t around when it happened and because she didn’t tell me.” He shifted toward her in his seat. “No—more than that. She lied to me about it by saying she did it herself. And I’ll tell you something, Nik, if you knew Cassidy, you could see her doing it. I mean she wasn’t just strong, she was . . . she was a force of nature. Things like locked doors didn’t stop her. I even wrote that little metaphor in my notes for the article.”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I do take your point. And she not only lied to you, there was no police report.”
“An odd sock.”
“You don’t get to say that, all right?”
“Odd sock?”
“That’s ours. I don’t want to hear that from you again unless you’re sorting your fluff-and-fold.” The light changed at Fifth Avenue and she drove out of the park, past the rows of embassies and consulates. “What sort of problem did she have with Toby Mills or vice versa?”
“Not much that I know of currently. She used to write about his wild-child days when he first got to the Yankees, but that was history. Last week she did run an item that he had moved to his new digs in the East Side, but that’s hardly the stuff scandals are made of. Or assaults.”
“You’d be surprised, writer boy, you’d be surprised,” she said with a superior grin.
As they stood at the intercom at the front door of Toby Mills’s town house, Nikki Heat’s smile was a distant memory. “How long has it been?” she said to Rook.