She wouldn’t have been much of a detective if she hadn’t noticed the thick smoke screen of his word choice. Perkins hadn’t come out owning the simple fact that Cassidy was writing a book for him. He’d parsed. Nice guy, perhaps, but he was playing a chess game. So she decided to come straight up the gut. “Cassidy Towne was writing a book for you and I’d like to know what it was about.”
The impact was visible. His eyebrows peaked and he recrossed his legs, shifting himself to get comfortable in his soft leather chair. “Well then, the small talk portion is over, I suppose.” He smiled, but it lacked heart.
“Mr. Perkins—”
“Mitch. This will strike a more pleasant note for all of us if you’ll call me Mitch.”
Heat remained cordial but pressed the same theme. “What was her book about?”
He could play that game, too. His non-answer was to turn again to Rook. “I understand you were contracted by First Press to do five thousand words on her. Did she say something to you? Is that how we got here today?”
Rook never got a chance to respond. “Excuse me,” Nikki said. She maintained the decorum Perkins had established but rose and moved away to lean with her hips on his desk so he had to twist and pivot away from Rook. “I am running an open homicide investigation and that means following every possible lead to find Cassidy Towne’s killer. There are a lot of leads and not a lot of time, so—if I may?—how I got my information is how I got my information. How I got here is not your concern. And if striking a more pleasant note is what you want, let’s begin with me asking the questions and you being direct and cooperative, all right . . . Mitch?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Absolutely,” he replied. She noted that he closed his eyes briefly as he said the words. Mitch was one of those.
“So can we start over again with my question? And if this helps, I do know she was working on a tattletale book, a tell-all.”
He nodded. “Of course, that was her wheelhouse.”
“So who or what was the subject?” She sat down again across from him.
“That I don’t know.” In anticipation of her, he held up a staying palm. “Yes, I can confirm we had a deal for a book with her. Yes, it was to be a tell-all. In fact, Cassidy guaranteed it would be newsworthy across the board, not just the tabloids and ambush TV shows. It would, in the parlance of the Paris Hilton generation, be hot. However.” He closed his eyes again and opened them, making Nikki think of barn owls. “However . . . I can only say that I do not know the subject of her exposé.”
“You mean you know and won’t say,” responded Heat.
“We are a major house. We trust our authors and give them great latitude. As such, Cassidy Towne and I operated on blind faith. She assured me she had a blockbuster book, I assured her I would get it to market. Now, sadly, we may never know what the subject was . . . Unless you can locate the manuscript.”
Detective Heat smiled. “You know, and you’re not telling. Cassidy Towne got a huge advance, and especially in this economy, that doesn’t happen without a solid proposal and everybody signing off.”
“Forgive me, Detective, but how would you know whether she got any advance, let alone a sizable one?”
Rook weighed in on that issue. “Because it was the only way she would be able to fund her network of tipsters. You know newspapers. She didn’t have the budget from the Ledger to pay that tab. And she wasn’t a wealthy woman.”
Nikki added, “I can get into her bank records, and I bet I’ll see a deposit from Epimetheus in a sum that says you knew exactly what you were buying.”
“If you do, and there is such an advance, the linkage you insinuate is only conjecture.” He said no more, and a beat of silence passed between them.
Nikki got out a business card. “Whoever this book was about could be the killer or lead us to the killer. If you change your mind, here’s how to reach me.”
He took her card and put it in his pocket without reading it. “Thank you. And if I may say, as good as Jameson Rook here is, his article barely did you justice. In fact, I’m starting to think there may even be a book in Nikki Heat.”
For her, nothing could have more definitively ended the meeting.