He looked sheepishly around the hall. “Shh, you’ll get me fired. Not the producer, I’m a segment producer.”
Rook made himself known. “You book the guests and do the pre-interviews.”
“Very good. Jim knows his stuff.”
Heat looked at Rook and smiled. “Jim. Love it.”
Petar explained, “The pre-interviews are to help Kirby know what to ask his guests. They get about six minutes with him once they hit the chair, so I talk to them before the show and give him a list of suggested topics, maybe some funny story that happened to them.”
“Sort of like being a ghost writer,” said Rook.
Petar frowned. “Well, better than that. I do get my name in the credits. Listen, I have some time, do you want to come to the green room for something to eat or drink? We could catch up.”
Rook tried to get Nikki’s eye. “We’d love to but—”
“We’d love to,” said Nikki. “We can spare a few minutes.”
The show was a live broadcast, so it wasn’t on for hours; therefore the green room was all theirs. Rook began to feel, what . . . ? Sullen. He had hoped to take Nikki out to dinner, but there they sat, filling up on Thai chicken skewers and smoked salmon wraps.
“This has turned into a day of good omens. First, five minutes ago, Soleil Gray suddenly canceled for some unknown reason.” Heat turned to catch Rook’s eye, but he was already doing the same with her. “So with her taking a powder that means one of my backup guests is coming in to take her segment, a feather for me. And now you, Nikki. How many years has it been?”
Nikki swallowed a tiny bite of salmon roll-up and said, “No, no. Let’s not start counting years.”
“No, let’s,” said Rook.
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin and said, “I met Petar when I took a semester abroad. I was in Venice studying opera production at the Gran Teatro La Fenice when I met this gorgeous film student from Croatia.”
The accent, thought Rook. Rrr.
“We had this mad fling. Or at least I thought it was a fling. But when I came back to the States to resume my classes at Northeastern, who shows up in Boston?”
“Pete?” answered Rook.
Nikki laughed. “I couldn’t send him back, could I?”
“No, you couldn’t.” And Petar laughed, too. Rook just kept himself busy twirling his satay in some peanut sauce.
Nikki and her old flame exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together and catch up. “You know,” said Petar, “when I saw your article in that magazine, I thought of looking you up.”
“But why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t sure what your life was. You know.”
Rook chimed in. “It’s pretty busy. In fact, Detective, we should get going.”
“You are working on a big case?”
She looked around to make sure the room was clear and said, “Cassidy Towne.”
Petar nodded and shook his head at the same time. Rook started trying to figure out how he did that and then decided not to.
“It was a shock. And then it also wasn’t. She didn’t have many friends, but I liked her.”
“You knew her?” asked Nikki.
“Sure. Hard not to. In my job here I am constantly barraged by columnists, PR folks, book people. Some want to get authors on the show, some want to know who’s on or, in Cassidy’s case, how they behaved, who they were with, stories I might have heard that didn’t make it on the air . . .”
“So you and Cassidy had some sort of relationship?” Rook tried to put just enough stink on it for Nikki to absorb with the most unsavory connotation.