“Now, there’s a story with a happy ending,” he said as he resumed his ascent.
Rook found an ‘07 Hautes-Cotes de Nuits in the back of the fridge that he accused her of hiding from him, and then he settled beside Nikki on the couch to look through the photo albums with her. “This is all I have left,” she said, indicating the banker’s box of family keepsakes on the floor beside her. “I don’t even know what’s missing. Whoever searched this apartment the night of the murder got the rest and must have left before he got to these.”
“Nikki, if this is hard for you …”
“Of course it’s hard for me. How could it not be?” Then she rested her palm on his thigh. “That’s why I’m glad to have you here with me to do this.”
They kissed, each tasting Burgundy on the other’s tongue. Then he surveyed the room and gave her a thoughtful look. “I’ve always wanted to ask, and I never quite knew how.”
“You mean, ask how I could live here after her murder?” When he reacted, she said, “Come on, Rook, the way you just scoped out this place was the most ridiculous tell I’ve seen. Well, since the last time I beat you at poker.” He didn’t respond, but just watched her.
She swiveled her knees to the coffee table and traced her fingers around the edges of a photo album. “It’s hard to say why. People encouraged me to move, back then. But leaving here felt like I would be leaving her. Maybe I will want to move out sometime. But it’s always seemed right to be here. This was always home; this is our connection.” She sat up straight and clapped her hands twice to bring a mood change. “Ready to look at some boring pictures?”
They began slowly at first, turning pages that led off with her parents’ individual grammar and high school portraits along with serious and goofy poses with family, mostly elderly. Her dad’s college photos from George Washington University included a few action shots of him playing basketball for the Colonials and cradling his business school diploma at commencement on the DC Capitol Mall. There were numerous pictures of her mother at the New England Conservatory, mostly at a Steinway or standing in front of one. There was even a picture of Professor Shimizu handing her a bouquet and a trophy, but no chamber duo shots, except for one with Leonard Frick. No glimpses of BFF Nicole Bernardin. When Nikki closed the back cover on the first album, Rook said, “It’s like a mash-up Syfy Channel meets Lifetime movie where a rip in the space-time continuum removes all traces of the best friend.”
She stared at him and said flatly, “That’s right. That’s exactly what it’s like.”
But that did coax a smile out of her, and he said, “Know what we should do? No-brainer. Ask your father.”
“No.”
“But of all people, wouldn’t your dad—”
“Not going to happen, OK? So drop it.”
Her sharpness left him nothing to say but “Moving on?”
The second album of the pair chronicled the courtship of Jeff and Cynthia Heat, a young trophy couple about Europe, including Paris, but still without Nicole. When Rook asked if she might be in the wedding party, Nikki told him there hadn’t been one. Products of the seventies, her mom and dad had succumbed to a bout of post-hippie rebellion and eloped. The ensuing series of photographs were taken of baby Nikki in New York, including a hilarious snapshot of her when she was barely walking, holding on to the wrought iron bars of Gramercy Park, peering through them angrily at the lens. “I’ve seen that expression from most of the prisoners you put in the holding cell.” She laughed at that but then closed the album. “That’s it? Come on, it’s just getting to the good stuff.”
“We’re done. The rest is mostly me at my gawky worst and we’re not doing this for your entertainment or my humiliation. I got enough of that in seventh grade. I know for a fact there’s no sign of Nicole in these.”
“I have another crazy thought.”
“You, Rook? Imagine that,” she said, refilling their glasses.
“Actually, it’s not so out there. Has it occurred to you since we found out her name this morning that you might actually be Nicole’s namesake?” He watched the impact of that play across her brow. “Ah, not so crazy now, is it?”
She tossed it around and said, “Except my legal name isn’t Nicole.”
“So? Nikki, Nicole. Not so far off. Makes sense, especially if they were such close friends…. Although, from this,” he said, indicating the photo albums, “Nicole’s looking more like she turned into an imaginary friend.”
Nikki went to her desk in the second bedroom to make her cell phone and e-mail rounds on the case progress, and when she returned, she found Rook cross-legged in the middle of the living room floor. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Being incorrigible, what else? It’s my job.” He pressed the play button on the old VHS player and the TV screen resolved into a video recording of Nikki, seated beside her mother at the piano. The date stamp read: “16 July 1985.”
“OK, Rook, that’s fine, you can turn it off.”
“How old were you then?”
“Five. We’ve seen enough. We’re good.”
A man’s deep voice came from off camera. “What are you going to play, Nikki?”
“Your dad?” asked Rook. She shrugged as if she didn’t know who and just stood in place, watching.
On the twenty-five-year-old video, young Nikki Heat, decked out in a yellow jumper, swung her feet to and fro under the bench and smiled. She talk-shouted to the camera, “I am going to play Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Rook expected to start hearing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Instead, the girl looked to whoever held the camera and confidently announced, “I would like to play his Sonata Number Fifteen.” Cynthia gave her a nod to begin, and Nikki poised her hands over the keyboard, counted silently to herself, and began the piece, which was immediately familiar to Rook. He moved closer to the TV, impressed to say the least. The piece was challenging but doable for small hands, and she struck all the notes without a miscue, although her cadence felt rote, but hell, the kid was only five. As the little girl continued to play, her mother leaned close to her and said, “Beautiful, Nikki. But don’t rush. Like Mozart said, ‘The space between the notes is music, too.’”
Heat indulged Rook his voyeurism but hit the stop button as soon as the song ended. Rook applauded, and meant it. He turned to the piano across the room: The same one, situated exactly as it had been in the video. “Do you still know the song?”
“Forget it.”
“Come on, command performance.”
“No, show’s over.”
“Please?”
Nikki sat on the couch and positioned herself turned away from the piano. Her pose gave off the vibe he got from the Sargent painting she had avoided in Boston. “You need to understand. I haven’t even opened the lid since her murder.” Her features tightened and her complexion took on a slight pallor. “I can’t bring myself to play it. I just can’t.”
A pair of sirens screamed by, wailing beneath her window in the middle of the night, and Nikki stirred. Somebody heading to emergency or jail, as that old Eagles song about New York had gotten so right. The alarm on the nightstand read 3:26
A.M.
She flopped an arm to Rook’s side of the bed and found nothing but cool sheets.
“Please tell me you’re not surfing porn,” she said, tying a bow on the front of her robe. He sat in his undershorts at her dining table in the darkened room, his face cast in creepy lunar light from his laptop screen.
“In my own way, I am. Writer’s porn.” He looked up at her. The spiky bed head didn’t make him look any less crazy. “What is it that is so darn satisfying about a Google search? It is kinda like forbidden sex. You wonder, should I/shouldn’t I? But you can’t get it out of your head, so you say the hell with it, and, next thing you know, you’re sweaty and panting with excitement as you get exactly what you need.”
“Look, if you’d rather be alone …”
He spun his MacBook toward her so she could see the search results. “Leonard Frick. Remember the cello guy in your mom’s video?”
“Otherwise known as the cellist.”
“Who also played the clarinet in her chamber trio with Nicole. Multitalented.” Rook hitched a thumb to the screen. “Leonard Frick, graduate of the New England Conservatory, is currently employed as principal clarinetist for the Queens Symphony Orchestra.”
“Otherwise known as the principal clarinet.”
“This is why I gave up the bassoon. Too many rules.” He stood. “This guy had to know both your mom and Nicole as well as anyone. We need to go see him.”
“Now?”
“Of course not. I need to get dressed first.”
She pressed herself against him and caressed his ass with each hand, then jerked him to her by his cheeks. “Now?”
He untied her robe and felt her skin spread warmth across his chest. “I suppose we could go back to bed. You know, for a bit. There’d still be time to see him on our way to the precinct.”
At seven-thirty that morning, Heat and Rook waited at the crosswalk outside her neighborhood Starbucks, holding three coffees: one for each of them and the other for Rook’s car service driver, who waited leaning against the fender of the black Lincoln across East 23rd. Traffic stopped and they got the walk signal, but halfway across their driver called, “Heads up!” They heard the roar of an engine and turned to face the grill of a maroon van mere feet from mowing them both down. They jumped back just in time, and it charged through the intersection and raced on. Shaken, they hurried across while they still had the right of way.
“Holy fuck, scared the hell out of me. You guys OK?”
Nikki saw that she had a case of latte leg, nothing unusual for her, and blotted it with a napkin. “What was that guy doing,” she asked, “texting?”
“No, must have been drunk or high,” said their driver. “He was looking right at you.” Nikki stopped cleaning the stain and took a step to the curb to see if she could get a plate on the van. It was long gone.
“Am I a suspect?” asked Leonard Frick. The once-skinny kid in the tux with the cloud of steel wool hair had filled out over the decades. Now, sitting across from him in the rehearsal hall at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, Heat put him at two-seventy, and the only hair on his head was a silver goatee framed by the dimples that appeared like parentheses when he smiled.
“No, sir,” said Nikki, “this is purely for background.”
Rook asked, “You didn’t kill them, did you?”
“Of course not.” Then he said to Nikki, “He’s not a cop, is he?”
“What gave him away?” That brought out the dimples as Mr. Frick laughed. He seemed happy for the company and told them how his career in music had ebbed and flowed since the seventies. First came fill-in work as a substitute for some of the smaller symphony orchestras in the Northeast. Then a bit of commitment-testing unemployment until he landed steady work in a few Broadway orchestra pits, including
Phantom
,
Cats
, and
Thoroughly Modern Millie
before he settled into the QSO.
“OK, it’s not the New York Phil, but it’s a great bunch, union benefits, plus, once a year I get to play that solo clarinet opening in Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
. Worth the whole trip just to lay out that great ascending note and see every face in the orchestra break into a grin. Even the bassoon players, and they’re all nuts.” Rook smiled and nodded in agreement. Leonard offered Nikki his condolences. “I loved your mom. I loved them both, but trust me, your mother outshined all of us. And I’m not saying that because I had a crush on her. All the guys did. She was pretty like you. And had this special gift, this … force that made her competitive and driven to excel, but also very kind to her fellow students. Nurturing, even. And music conservatories are notoriously cutthroat at that level.”
“Let me ask you about that,” said Rook. “Were there any ugly rivalries that might have lasted over the years?”
“None that I know of. Plus, Cindy was too into her music to make enemies or get involved in the petty stuff. That girl worked. She studied every great piano recording—Horowitz, Gould, the lot. She was the first one in the rehearsal studio in the morning and the last one out at night.” He chuckled. “I spotted her at Cappy’s Pizza one Sunday and was going to go to her table and kid her, asking her how she could live with herself, not rehearsing, and with a Chopin recital the next day. Then I look over and see she’s moving her fingers along her placemat like it’s a freakin’ keyboard!”
“Mr. Frick,” said Nikki, “do you know anyone from back then who would have a reason to kill them? My mother or Nicole, or both?” His answer was the same no. “Has anyone contacted you looking for either of them?” Again, it was a no.
It fell to Rook to steer the interview back to the Odd Sock. “You’re just one of many to talk about Cynthia’s drive and determination.”
“And talent,” said Leonard.
“What happened?”
“Beats me. It turned like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The change came when Nicole invited Cindy to come stay with her folks in Paris for a couple of weeks after graduation.” He turned to Nikki, explaining, “The Bernardin family, they were wealthy. Nicole’s parents offered to pay for the whole trip, and the plan was for your mom to come back in time to do her tryouts for all of the symphony orchestras that had been talent scouting her. She was supposed to be away for two or three weeks. That would have been June 1971. She didn’t come back until 1979.”