“Nine o’clock,” he blurted.
Nikki wrote it down. “Does it typically take you two and a quarter hours to get to SoHo at that hour from Sixty-third and Lex?” When she looked up from her pad, he was coming unglued. His lawyer leaned over to show him a note he’d scrawled, but Vergennes pushed it away.
“All right, I didn’t go straight home.” The attorney tried again by putting a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off and said, “I’ll tell you exactly where I was. I . . . was at Cassidy Towne’s.”
Heat wished Lauren Parry had had that body sooner so she could have a more accurate time of death. It was entirely possible that the TOD was before midnight. She followed her instinct to seize Vergennes’s moment of weakness and take the leap. “Are you saying you went to Cassidy Towne’s and stabbed her?”
“No. I’m saying I went to Cassidy Towne’s and . . .” He trailed off, lowering both his head and his voice, mumbling something she couldn’t make out.
“Excuse me, I don’t hear that. You went to Cassidy Towne’s and what?”
Vergennes’s face was sallow when he looked up, his eyes unable to hide the misery of his shame. “I went there . . . and . . . I fucked her.”
Nikki watched him bend down to dry wash his face with the palms of his hands. When he rose up from his manacles, some of his color had returned. She tried to look at this heartthrob master chef who had conquered Manhattan and put him together with Cassidy Towne, the unofficial arbiter of public scandal. Something in her didn’t see them as a couple, although, after years on the job, Nikki could believe just about anything. “So you and Cassidy Towne were having an affair?”
Nikki tried not to paint the picture before she got his answer. The one she saw was a married man trying to break it off, an argument got too heated, and so on. Once again, she went to training and listened instead of projecting.
“We weren’t having an affair.” His voice was weak and hollow. Nikki had to strain to hear him even in the quiet room.
“So that was your first . . . liaison?”
The chef seemed amused by a private thought. He said, “Sadly, no. It was not our first ‘liaison.’ ”
“You’re going to have to explain to me why you don’t call this an affair.”
The dead quiet that followed was broken by his lawyer. “Rich, I have to advise you not to—”
“No, I’m going to get this out now so they’ll see I didn’t kill her.” He settled down and then came out with it. “I was doing Cassidy Towne for one reason. I had to. I bought this new place right before the economy cratered. I had zero budget for advertising, suddenly people weren’t dining out, and if they were, they were skittish about new restaurants. I was desperate. So Cassidy . . . made a deal with me.” He paused again and muttered his pitiful, defining words. “Sex for ink.”
Heat reflected back on her Sardi’s experience with Rook’s mother. Apparently, Cassidy didn’t restrict herself to actors.
“You have to understand, I love my wife.” Nikki just listened. No sense telling him the hundreds of times she’s heard that, too, from husbands in that chair. “This wasn’t something I came up with. She caught me at a vulnerable time. I said no at first, and she just made it harder to refuse. Said if I loved my wife, I’d . . . sleep with her so we didn’t lose our investment. It was stupid. But I did it. I hated myself for it, and you know what’s crazy? She didn’t even seem into me. It was like she just wanted to prove she could make me do it.”