When she hung up, he said, “Well, there’s the lazy way, if you go for that sort of thing. I don’t. Feels kind of like cheating.”
Nikki held up the pad with Wynn’s phone number. “Should I not call it, then?”
He said, “Do you want to play games or get serious about this case for once?”
Her call began in French, but whoever answered spoke English. When Rook saw her shocked reaction when she asked to speak to Tyler Wynn, he scooted from his spot standing at the window to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “That’s terrible,” she said. Rook waved for her attention, mouthing “What?”s like a pestering adolescent, and she turned away to concentrate, muttered a series of “Uh-huhs,” asked for an address, which she wrote down, then said her thanks and hung up.
“Come on, out with it. What’s terrible?”
“Tyler Wynn is in the hospital,” said Nikki. “Somebody tried to kill him.”
Rook leaped to his feet and spun in a circle. “That. Is the coolest. Lead. Ever.”
TEN
The taxi driver knew the place, the Hopital Canard, in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, one of the wealthiest districts in Paris. The cabbie glanced at the couple in the backseat and asked if it was an emergency. They both answered at the same time. She said no, he said yes. Rook asked her, “And exactly what was it you told me Wynn’s housekeeper said his condition was?” He cupped his ear.
“Critical gunshot.”
“And that’s not an emergency?”
She took his point and told the driver, “Just get there as quickly as you can.”
The traffic had another idea. Along with its romance and charm, Paris also came with a morning rush hour. The driver kept surfing his radio dial in ADHD fashion, mostly to French hip-hop and electronic dance stations. The oonce-oonce-oonce rhythm track didn’t match their cadence along the Seine. He turned down the music as the car crept by a traffic marker that read, “Bois de Boulogne, 10 km,” and asked, “You have been yet to Bois de Boulogne? Very pretty for romantic walks. Like Central Park in New York.” Then he pumped up the oonce-oonce again.
Rook said to her, “Love that name. In fact, I’m entitling my new Victoria St. Clair romance novel, Le Chateau du Bois de Boulogne. Which-correct me here-loosely translated means ‘castle of wood in the baloney.’ I predict overseas sales will skyrocket.”
The hospital was just off the A-13 in a quiet neighborhood of medical and dental offices. A surprisingly small four-story modern facility, Hopital Canard appeared more like an upscale private clinic than a big city hospital. “This is what money gets you,” said Rook as they strolled past the manicured hedges and potted palms on the way to the entrance. “Trust me, you won’t see a lot of hobos expiring on the ER floor in this establishment. I’ll bet they even warm the bedpans.”
Nikki pointed out that flowers seemed to have gotten things off on the right foot the day before with the Bernardins, so they stopped at the small shop off the lobby. Minutes later, armed with some peonies in cellophane, they bypassed the front desk and rode the elevator to the second floor. On the way up, she said, “Not that I’m complaining, but I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to sign in.”
“It’s the peonies. In my experience as an investigative journalist, I’ve learned you can get by almost any security situation unchallenged by carrying something. Flowers, clipboard… And it’s a breeze if you’re eating something, especially off a paper plate.”
“Room two-oh-three,” she said, consulting the note she’d made at the hotel. They turned a corner, and outside the door of 203, a uniformed policier rose up from his folding chair to face them. Heat elbowed Rook. “You don’t have a plate of baked beans on you, do ya?”
In French, the policeman told them no visitors. Nikki replied, also in French, that she had spoken to M. Wynn’s housekeeper, who assured her that it would be all right to see him. “We’ve come a long way,” said Rook. “And we love your country.”
The cop gave him a disdainful look and said, “ Allez,” looking like he’d enjoy a bit of exercise to break the monotony, if it came to that. Heat held up her NYPD identification, a tone changer. The homegrown officer from the suburban prefecture studied the foreign credentials carefully, looking from her photo to her and back, his eyes darting under the short brim of his cap. Speaking rapidly and flawlessly like a native, Nikki explained that her mother, Cynthia Heat, had been very close to “Oncle Tyler,” and that his shooting might be connected to a homicide case she was working on back home. The gendarme seemed intrigued but immovable. Until he heard the old man’s weak voice coming from the open door of the room.
“Did you say… you were Cindy Heat’s daughter?”
“Yes, Mr. Wynn,” she called toward the pale yellow privacy drape. “I’m Nikki Heat, and I came here to see you.”
After a pause, then a prolific hawking of phlegm, the disembodied voice said, “Let her in.” The policeman’s eyes flicked side to side, unprepared for this scenario. At last he regarded Nikki’s ID once more, handed it to her, and stood back to let them pass. As she and Rook entered the room, they could hear the policier making a call on his walkie-talkie to cover himself.
For Nikki the scene behind the curtain took her right back to February in St. Luke’s Roosevelt, where Rook had been clinging to life after his shooting. Tyler Wynn, frail and propped up on one side to keep the left half of his back elevated off the mattress, watched her through dazed, half-mast eyelids. Then he managed to bring a weak smile to his dry, cracked lips. “My God,” he said. “Look at you. It’s like I died and went to heaven and met up with dear Cindy.” And then a rascally twinkle shined through. “I am still alive, aren’t I?” He laughed, but that brought on deep, painful coughing. He held up his palm to signal them not to worry, and when it subsided, he drew in some oxygen from the clear tube under his nose. “Sit, please.”
There was only one chair, and Rook pulled it up bedside for Nikki, carefully avoiding the batch of cables snaking from under Tyler’s sheets to the array of monitors. She briefly introduced Rook as he found a path around to the foot of the bed and the windowsill where he perched. “The magazine writer,” he said. “Right. Pardon me for not getting up.” He briefly lifted both arms, which were connected to multiple IV drips. “Bad combination, three gunshots and a bad heart.”
“You’ll tell us when you need us to go, promise?” she asked.
Tyler Wynn just smiled and said, “Look at all these machines. The French sure like to make a grand spectacle of everything, don’t they? Cooking, cinema, sex scandals, les hopitaux. This country perfected modern medicine, but before that, I’m told, they used to operate without anesthetic. Didn’t even wash their hands. So I guess, all in all, I’m lucky.” He rolled his head her way on the pillow and stared. “Everybody tell you how much you look like your mom?”
“All the time. It’s a compliment.”
“You know it.” He took her in some more and then said, “I heard you tell my personal gendarme you were investigating a homicide.”
“Yes, I’m with the NYPD.”
“I read that article.” He cocked an eyebrow at Rook. “Looks like you got more than a byline, young man.”
“No complaints,” he said.
There was so much Nikki wanted to talk over with him; so many questions she wanted to get answers to in order to fill those gaps in her connection to her own mother. And there were some questions she was afraid to ask. But one look at the old man told her this wouldn’t be a long visit. She made a decision to prioritize and start with the case essentials. Crude as that might be, first and foremost, she had an investigation to conduct. Heat knew all about putting her personal needs to the side. They would have to wait for later or the next visit.