His poker face could lose him the game.
Accused bathtub strangler Nicholas Brooks showed no emotion — and no curiosity — when a cop told him “something happened to your girlfriend,” a Manhattan murder jury learned yesterday as the second week of testimony began in the watery death of his swimsuit-designer girlfriend, Sylvie Cachay.
“Did he ever ask, ‘What happened to my girlfriend?’ ” prosecutor Joel Seidemann asked former cop Vincent Guastamacchia yesterday of confronting Brooks in the lobby of the Soho House hotel, where, five floors up, Cachay was being pronounced dead.
“No,” testified the ex-cop, who now handles security for The Rolling Stones.
“Did he ever ask to see her?” the prosecutor asked. “No,” Guastamacchia replied.
Brooks is insisting he’d left the beautiful brunette asleep in their bed the night in December 2010 on which she was pulled dead from the room’s overflowing bathtub. Yet he didn’t act shocked when he returned to the hotel after an hour of drinking to find the hotel surrounded by emergency vehicles, the ex-cop said.
“There wasn’t much reaction,” the ex-cop said.
There was plenty of emotion otherwise yesterday in the tragic case. Prosecutors played for the first time the 911 calls made by hotel staff who found her body while responding to water-leak complaints from guests below.
“We have a woman who killed herself in a bathtub!” a male manager shouts urgently to the 911 operator.
And the day’s last witness, Alicia Maleno, sobbed so hard while recounting a text exchange with Cachay that the judge called a break and defense lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman unsuccessfully demanded a mistrial.
“I hate me for being weak,” Cachay had texted two weeks before she died, admitting to Maleno that she had not broken up with Brooks as she’d promised.