“Not as good as what?”
“Well . . . It’s sort of embarrassing, but he’s dead, so I guess I can say.” The boy fidgeted and shoved his hands under his thighs so he was sitting on them. “My uncle had a, you know, classier job before. But a couple of months ago . . . well, he got fired all of a sudden.”
Ochoa nodded. “That’s too bad. What did he do when he got fired?” Pablo turned when he heard the keys in the front door, and the detective tried to get him back. “Pablo? What job did he get fired from?”
“Um, he was a driver for a limo company.”
“And why did he get fired?”
The front door opened and Padilla’s cousin, the one they had left at the funeral home came in. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Pablo stood up, and his body language needed no translation even for Raley. It said this interview was over.
Even though Detective Heat didn’t have an appointment, Cassidy Towne’s editor at Epimetheus Books did not make her wait. Nikki announced herself in the lobby, and when she and Rook stepped off the elevator onto the sixteenth floor of the publishing house, his assistant was waiting. She keyed the code into the touchpad that opened the frosted glass doors to the offices and escorted them through a brightly lit hallway of white walls with blond wood accents. This was the nonfiction floor, so their path was decorated by framed covers of Epimetheus books, each a biography, exposé, or celebrity-rant best seller encased side by side with a reprint of its peak New York Times list.
They reached a bull pen area of three assistants’ desks outside three wooden doors that were conspicuously larger than the others they had passed. The center door was open and the assistant led them in to meet the editor.
Mitchell Perkins smiled over a pair of black-rimmed bifocals, dropped them onto his blotter, and came around the desk to shake hands. He was cheerful and much younger than Nikki had expected for a senior editor of nonfiction—in his early forties, but with tired eyes. She quickly understood when she saw the piles of manuscripts spilling out of his étagère and even sprouting up from the floor beside his desk.
He gestured to a conversation area off to one side of his office. Heat and Rook sat on the couch; he took the armchair in front of the window that spanned his whole north wall, giving a spectacular unobstructed view of the Empire State Building. Even for the two visitors who had spent most of their lives in Manhattan, the panorama was awe-inspiring. Nikki almost remarked that the office could be used as a movie set with a backdrop like that, but it wasn’t the proper tone for this meeting. First she had to offer condolences for the loss of an author. Then she had to ask him for his dead author’s manuscript.
“Thank you for seeing us on short notice, Mr. Perkins,” she began.
“Of course. When the police come, would I do anything but?” He turned aside to Rook and added, “These are unusual circumstances, but it’s wonderful to meet you. We almost met last May at Sting and Trudie’s Rainforest Benefit after-party, but you were in deep conversation with Richard Branson and James Taylor and I was a bit intimidated.”
“No need for that. I’m just people.”
So Rook, thankfully, provided the ice-breaking laugh, and Nikki could then steer to business. “Mr. Perkins, we’re here about Cassidy Towne, and first of all, we’re sorry for your loss.”
The editor nodded and puckered his cheeks. “That’s very thoughtful, certainly, but may I ask how you came to hear we may, or may not, have had some association with her?”