“You paid them?”
“Please. That would be insulting. I handed out Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards. And worth it, too, because one of them opened up to me.” He tapped a name in his book. “Hattie Pate. Hattie was friends with Fabian Beauvais. Guess you kill a few hundred chickens, you get to know somebody. Anyway, she said Fabby came in all freaked one day. She asked what’s wrong, and he told her someone was out to kill him.” He paused. “Shall I repeat that?”
“Go on.”
“Beauvais told Hattie he’d been doing some freelance work for a bunch of guys. Some sort of ATM theft ring. They turned on him all of a sudden and said they were going to—quoting now, ‘fuck him up and kill him dead.’ They knew where he lived, so it was Hattie who turned him on to the SRO where he moved and we found his hidden ten grand. Gee, is it possible money’s why they were after him?” He stared at her, nodding and grinning while she processed his information. “I’ll say it again, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
She was so absorbed chewing over Rook’s story—and his indiscretion with the press flak—that she hadn’t noticed the news conference had broken up and that Wally Irons now stood a few feet away. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” said Nikki, jumping in ahead of Rook. “I’m just bringing him up to speed on the case.” The captain didn’t totally appear to buy that, but his cell phone lit up and he moved on into the precinct.
When Irons was gone, Heat shifted in the god-awful molded seat to face Rook. “I’ll grant that you raise a lot of interesting points. But I hear nothing that changes the case I have against Gilbert.”
“You call a death threat nothing?”
“No, and you damn well know I’ll check it out.” She patted his notebook. “I want Hattie’s contact info so I can get on this. But for now, that’s hearsay, and hearsay doesn’t trump the evidence I’ve got on Gilbert.”
“Take a step back like I did, Nikki. Can you really call it evidence?”
“You bet I can.”
“Because I can recontextualize everything you’ve got.” It struck her that, up to that morning when Rook got blindsided by the news of the task force, he would have said, “We’ve got” instead of “you’ve.” He mimed tracing a square in the space between them with both hands and said, “I could reframe everything in a scenario that shows that the only connection Gilbert had to Beauvais was coping with a political dirty trickster who was harassing him and his campaign.”
“Wow, you could be Keith Gilbert’s press aide now, Rook,” she said with no small amount of sarcasm. “Spinning the whole thing to make the poor commissioner look like the victim.”
“Maybe not a victim, but clearly he was victimized.”
“Then riddle me this. Why did Gilbert deny knowing Beauvais?”
“Who knows? Maybe it had nothing to do with the killing. Or maybe he got pissed at being harassed by the Haitian. Maybe Beauvais was going to blow the whistle on the mistress. Or Keith and Alicia had a love child; another John Edwards situation. So Gilbert threatens him—just shooting off his mouth in the heat of passion—and then that ATM theft gang ends up killing him for stealing their ten grand. That would sure make me a little circumspect.”
He closed his notebook and slapped the palm of his hand with it a few times while he mulled an idea. “I think you need to look harder at the two brutes from that SRO. You know, just because Beauvais got himself killed doesn’t mean he was a good guy.”
Valid point. Nikki often caught herself falling into the natural trap of sanctifying murder victims.