“All right. You can call him after we take you to the precinct,” said Heat.
Taking opposite sides of the kitchen, Raley and Ochoa moved in a line, systematically opening and closing custom cabinets, all full of either cookbooks, imported dinnerware, or a Williams-Sonoma’s worth of kitchen gadgets.
“For real, my mouth is seriously on fire.” Rook stepped to the big Sub-Zero. “Wow, this is some fridge. Gorgeous.”
Vergennes called out, “No, don’t, that’s broken.”
But Rook had already pulled the handle. And then he got knocked backward when the body of Cassidy Towne bumped open the refrigerator door as it toppled out and landed on the Spanish tiles at his feet.
The uniformed officer posted at the front door ran in when he heard Rook scream.
Richmond Vergennes was a different man when confronted by the harsh reality of the Interrogation Room. The cockiness was gone. Nikki watched his hands, callused and scarred by years on the cook line. They were quaking. From the chair beside him, Vergennes’s lawyer gave him the nod to begin. “First of all, I didn’t kill her, I swear.”
“Mr. Vergennes, think of how many times in your career you’ve heard a waiter bring a dish back to the kitchen and tell you the customer says it’s cold. That’s about half as many times as I’ve sat here and heard the guy in cuffs on your side of the table say, ‘I didn’t do it, I swear.’ ”
The lawyer chimed in. “Detective, we are hoping to be cooperative here. I don’t think there’s any call to make this difficult.” The suit was Wynn Zanderhoof, a partner in one of the big Park Avenue firms that specialized in entertainment law. He was their criminal face, and Heat had seen plenty of him over the years.
“Sure, Counselor. Especially after your client made our lives such a breeze. Resisting arrest, brandishing a weapon at a police officer, obstructing an investigation. And all that comes after the murder of Cassidy Towne. Plus the conspiracy to hijack her body. Plus the numerous charges related to that. I think difficulty is the word of the day for Mr. Vergennes.”
“Granted,” said the attorney. “Which is why we were hoping to strike some sort of arrangement to mitigate the unnecessary tensions surrounding all this.”
“You want a deal?” asked the detective. “Your client is facing a murder charge, and we have a confession from a man in the crew he paid to steal the damn body. What are you going to bargain with, a complimentary dessert?”
“I didn’t kill her. I was home with my wife that night. She’ll vouch.”
“We’ll check.” There was something that crossed his face when she said that. His dark Cajun looks lost their cockiness. Like the alibi wouldn’t hold or maybe something else. What was it? She decided to pick at that and see where it led. “When you say you were with your wife, when was that?”
“All night. We watched some TV, went to bed, woke up. Like that.”
She made a show of opening her notebook and poising her pen. “Tell me the exact time you and your wife went to bed.”
“I dunno. We watched some Nightline, then hit the hay.”
“So,” said Nikki as she wrote, “you’re saying it was twelve o’clock? Midnight?”
“Yeah, or a few minutes after. Those late-night shows are all like five minutes late getting started.”
“And what time did you get home?”
“Mm, about eleven-fifteen, I guess.”
Something seemed off to Heat, so she pressed. “Chef, I hear all the stories about the restaurant business. Especially for a new restaurant, isn’t quarter after eleven kind of early for you to be home?”
She could see she was getting at something. Vergennes was showing nerves, working his mouth like he was looking for a strand of hair with his tongue. “Business was light, so I, ah, knocked off early.”
“Oh, I see. What time did you knock off?”
His eyes roamed the ceiling. “Don’t remember, exactly.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll be checking with your staff, anyway. They’ll tell me what time you left.”