Richard Castle: Heat Wave

"Go ahead," she said, alert for the dodge or the call to the bull pen for a shyster.

"No offense, Mr. Rook."

"Jamie, please."

"If I have to answer police questions, that's one thing. But if you're going to quote me for some expose in Vanity Fair or First Press-"

"Not to worry," said Rook.

"-I owe it to Matthew's memory and to his family not to air his business in the pages of some magazine."

"I am only here on background for an article I'm doing on Detective Heat and her squad. Whatever you say about Matthew Starr's business will be off the record. I did it for Mick Jagger, I can do it for you."

Heat could not believe what she'd just heard. The bald ego of a celebrity journalist at work. Not only name-dropping but favor-dropping. And it sure didn't help get Paxton in the mood.

"This is a horrible time to do this," he said, trying her now that Rook had met his terms. He turned away to study whatever was on his flat-screen and then brought it back to her. "He hasn't even been dead twenty-four hours. I'm in the middle of…Well, you can imagine. How about tomorrow?"

"I only have a few questions."

"Yes, but the files are, well, I'm saying I don't keep everything," he snapped his fingers, "right at hand. Tell you what. Why don't you tell me what you need, and I can have it ready when you come back?"

All right. She had tried smooth 'n' soothe. He was still dodgy, and now he had it in his head that he could stiff-arm her out of there in lieu of an appointment at his convenience. Time, she decided, to switch tactics.

"Noah. May I call you Noah? Because I want to keep this friendly while I tell you how this is going to go. OK? This is a homicide investigation. I am not only going to ask you some questions right here and right now, I expect you to answer them. And I'm not worried about whether you have your figures," she snapped her fingers, "right at hand. Know why? I'm going to have our forensic accountants go through your books. So you can decide right now how friendly this can be. Do we understand each other, Noah?"

After the smallest pause, the man put it right out there for her in a headline. "Matthew Starr was broke." A calm, measured statement of fact. What else was it Nikki Heat heard behind it? Candor, for sure. He was looking her directly in the eye when he said it; there was no aversion now, only clarity. But there was something else, like he was reaching out to her, showing some other feeling, and when she struggled to grasp the word for it, Noah Paxton said it as if he were in her mind with her. "I feel so relieved." There it was, relief. "Finally, I can talk about this."

For the next hour Noah did more than just talk. He unfolded the story of how a personality-branded wealth machine had been flown to great heights piloted by the flamboyant Matthew Starr, amassing capital, acquiring key properties, and building iconic towers that indelibly shaped the world's view of the New York skyline, and then had rapidly been imploded by Starr's own hand. It was the tale of a boom-to-bust crash in a sharp downward spiral.

Paxton, who corporate records said was thirty-five, had joined the firm with his newly minted MBA near the peak of the company's upswing. His sure handling of creative financing to green-light construction of the avant-garde StarrScraper in Times Square had cemented him as Matthew Starr's most trusted employee. Perhaps because he was forthcoming now, Nikki looked at Noah Paxton and saw a trustworthiness about him. He was solid, capable, a man who would get you through the battle.

She didn't have much experience with men like him. She had seen them, of course, on the Metro-North train to Darien at the end of the day, with ties loosened, sipping a can of beer from the bar car with a colleague or neighbor. Or with wives in Anne Klein at prix fixe dinners before curtain on Broadway. That might have been Nikki in the candlelight with the Absolut cosmo, filling him in on the teacher conference and planning the week at the Vineyard, if things had gone differently for her. She wondered what it must be like to have that lawn and the reliable life with a Noah.

"That trust Matthew had in me," he continued, "was a two-edger. I got to know all the secrets. But I also got to know all the secrets."

The ugliest secret, according to Noah Paxton, was that his Midas-touch boss was driving his company into the ground and couldn't be stopped.

"Show me," said the detective.

"You mean, like, now?"

"Now or in a more…," she knew this dance and let her pause do its work, "formal setting. You choose."

He opened a series of spreadsheets on his Mac and invited them inside the U of his workstation to view them on the big flat-screen. The figures were startling. Then came a progression of graphs chronicling the journey of a vital real estate developer who was practically laser-printing money until he plummeted off a red-ink cliff, well ahead of the mortgage meltdown and ensuing foreclosure debacle.

"So this isn't about hard times in a bad economy?" asked Heat, pointing over his shoulder at what looked to her like an escalator to the basement painted red.

"No. And thank you for not touching my monitor. I never understood why people have to touch computer screens when they point."

"I know. The same people who need to mime telephones with their fingers when they say call me." When they laughed, she got a whiff of something citrus-y and clean off him. L'Occitane, she guessed.

"How did he manage to stay in business?" asked Rook when they retook their seats.

"That was my job and it wasn't easy." And then, with a disclosure look to Nikki, "And I promise you it was all legal."

All she said was "Just tell me how."

"Simple. I started liquidating and divesting. But when the real estate bust came along, it ate our lunch. That's when we ran into the buzz saw with financing. And then we hit a snag maintaining our labor relations. You may not know it, but our sites are not working these days." Nikki nodded and swept her glance to Fat Tommy's champion. "We couldn't service our debt, we couldn't keep construction going. Here's a simple rule: no building, no rent."

Heat said, "It sounds like a nightmare."

"To have a nightmare, you have to be able to sleep." On the office couch she noted the folded blanket with the pillow resting on it. "Let's call it a living hell. And that's just the business finances. I haven't even told you about his personal money problems."

"Don't most CEOs build a firewall between their corporate and personal finances?" asked Rook.

Damn good question. He's finally acting like a reporter, thought Nikki, so she jumped aboard. "I always thought the idea was to structure things so a failure in business doesn't wipe out the personal and vice versa."

"And that's how I built it when I took over his family finances, too. But, you see, both sides of the firewall were blazing cash. You see…" A sober look came over him and his young face gained twenty years. "Now, I truly need assurance this is off the record. And won't leave this room."

"I can promise that," said Rook.

"I can't," said Detective Heat. "I told you. This is a homicide investigation."

"I see," he said. And then he took the plunge. "Matthew Starr indulged some personal habits that compromised his personal fortune. He did damage." Noah paused then took the plunge. "First, he was a compulsive gambler. And by that, I mean losing gambler. He not only hemorrhaged cash to casinos from Atlantic City to Mohegan Sun, he bet the horses and on football with local bookies. He was in debt to some of these characters for serious money."

Heat wrote a single word on her spiral pad: "Bookies."

"And then, there were the prostitutes. Matthew had certain, um, tastes we don't need to get into-unless you say so, I mean-and he satisfied them with very expensive, high-end call girls."