Never Tease a Siamese: A Leigh Koslow Mystery (24 page)

He wheeled around towards her and opened his mouth to speak, but as luck would have it, Nikki chose that moment to push open the front door. "Come on in," she said gruffly, turning back inside.

Leigh followed her, avoiding Warren’s gaze. They stopped in the foyer, which was dark, cat-filled, and loud. And for the first time at the mansion, she noted the distinct aroma of cat litter wafting through the air. "Is Jared all right?" she asked with concern.

Nikki crossed her arms over her chest. Her eyes had huge bags underneath and she was sporting wrinkles Leigh hadn’t noticed before. "He’s a wreck," she answered blandly. "Seven o’clock in the morning those blasted detectives were back here wanting to take him to the station. Kept him there for hours saying the same things over and over.
Then
they made us take the freaking bus back home!"

The woman looked ready to kill something, and Leigh took a reflexive step backward. "I’m sorry," she offered genuinely. "I thought they were going to go easy on him. They don’t really think—"

If a person’s ears could steam, Nikki’s would have. "They
wouldn’t
think it if it weren’t for that son of a—" The stream of vulgarity that issued from the younger woman’s mouth included several adjectives Leigh had never heard before. All were applied to Dean Murchison.

"You wouldn’t believe what he told them! They picked him and Rochelle up too, early this morning, and grilled them over good. So Dean goes and starts saying all sorts of complete crapola about how his mother was
scared
of Jared, how she was worried about him becoming violent—he even said she was worried about Jared attacking her in her bed!"

"That’s ridiculous," Leigh agreed. It was ridiculous. It also smacked loudly of more husband-coaching on the part of dear, devious Rochelle, who was undoubtedly smart enough to fear being blamed for the murder herself.

"Well, those idiot detectives didn’t seem to think so!" Nikki railed. "They wanted to know about any violent incidents in Jared’s past—any fascination with whips or torture—" her voice broke up briefly, and she took a deep breath and swallowed. When she spoke again her voice was controlled, but simmering. "Jared doesn’t have a violent bone in his body. Not one. He’s big, yes, but he has no idea what kind of power that could give him. His mind doesn’t even work that way. He could never intentionally hurt anybody."

"The police will see that," Leigh agreed. "They’ll know exactly what Dean and Rochelle are trying to do."

"The detectives are idiots!" Nikki yelled, her eyes flashing fire. "If it weren’t for this broad with the hair, we would never have gotten out of there. She told that Hollandsworth guy to lay off Jared, and damned if he didn’t listen to her. If she hadn’t I swear they would have arrested him then and there."

Leigh and Warren exchanged glances.

"Um…what kind of hair did 'the broad’ have?" Leigh asked tentatively.

Nikki looked at her as if she had gone mad. "Red. And it was all piled up on her head like in the sixties or something."

Kudos to Aunt Bess
, Leigh thought with a smile. The woman could always be counted on when the cavalry wasn’t available. What she was doing interfering in her paramour’s work on the middle of a Wednesday morning was an open question, but, given her gene pool, not a particularly surprising one.

"I’m sure they were just doing the good cop/bad cop routine or something," Leigh assured. "They have nothing to charge Jared with. They were probably just testing him out for themselves, to see if they could get a rise out of him—"

"A rise?" Nikki shrieked again.

Leigh noted that of the half-dozen cats that had been prowling around the foyer when they arrived, only one remained. Odds were, it was deaf.

"A rise!" Nikki repeated, smacking a fist into a palm. "Do you have any idea what
hell
my older brothers put Jared through? They beat him up every chance they got. Treated him like a damned punching bag! And Jared never fought back—
never
. He would just huddle up and take it. If I hadn’t been there to protect him, I hate to think what might have happened!"

Leigh’s eyes widened as she looked at the tiny woman, who, compared to Jared, gave new meaning to the phrase
little sister
. "But how did you—"

Nikki offered an evil smile. "Let’s just say I wrote the book on fighting dirty. If Bill and Red ever have kids, it’ll be a miracle."

Warren, who had up to that point been standing close by Leigh’s side, shrank back a step.

"Nikki! Are you up there, Nikki?" Jared’s voice traveled up from the direction of the kitchen, and his sister quickly turned toward it.

"Just a minute!" she called back. Then she turned to her guests. "Just sit somewhere."

As soon as the other woman had disappeared down the hall, Leigh poked her husband soundly in the ribs. "Wuss."

"Hey!" he protested, rubbing his side. "You didn’t marry me because I was macho."

"Why did I marry you, then?"

"Free financial advice for Hook."

"Oh. Right."

Nikki returned almost immediately, and she appeared to have rethought the sitting
idea. "I’m taking Jared to the clinic as soon as he finishes here," she announced. "The sooner he gets back to his normal routine, the better."

She eyed them critically then, as if realizing she had not been offered an explanation for their presence. "So, what do you need?" she asked sharply.

Leigh pulled the key out of her pants pocket. "Remember this?"

"Yeah," Nikki responded, unimpressed. "What about it?"

"We think it unlocks a decorative box of Mrs. Murchison’s. Something hand-painted with scenes from the Orient."

Nikki still looked unimpressed. "Yeah, so? I’ve never seen anything like that."

"She kept it hidden," Leigh continued. "Dean has known about it since he was a
kid. She kept it on the bottom shelf of the linen closet on the second floor."

Nikki’s eyes widened a little. She took the key from Leigh’s hand, and an evil smile spread slowly across her face. "So. Dean wanted something of Ms. Lilah’s, did he?"

  She turned from her guests without ceremony and started up the stairs at a jog. Careful to avoid catching her husband’s eye, Leigh followed. He
might
have made a grab at her arm as she went, but the whoosh of air behind her right elbow, she reasoned, could just as easily have been a draft.

Leigh kept pace with her hostess up the flight and down the corridor, stopping outside a dark paneled door. Nikki flung it open to reveal a closet with two opposing walls of wide, relatively shallow, wooden cabinets. She then dropped to her knees and flipped the tiny metal latch that held the bottom compartment shut tight.

Leigh had seen such "Pittsburgh closets" before; with all the ash that used to float around during the days of big steel, one’s linen’s had to be protected from "the gray factor." She could still remember the smoky skies from her own childhood, but for the last two decades, the burg’s air had been almost squeaky clean.

"Which side?" Nikki asked, hauling out piles of linens into a tangled jumble on the floor. "And by the way, how do you know all this?"

"I guess the other side," Leigh answered, noting that the first compartment contained nothing but yellowed sheets and a few odd place mats. "And Nancy Johnson told me. She used to roam around the place when she was a child and her mother worked here."

Nikki paused for a split-second only. "Nancy? Oh, yeah. I guess I knew that." She had the mirror-image compartment half emptied when a gleeful smile spread across her face. Leaning further into the deep cabinet, she pulled out a shallow, gold-gilded oriental chest, its gleaming black sides beautifully decorated with pastoral scenes from the Orient.

"That’s it," Leigh whispered breathlessly. She threw a quick look over her shoulder to see if Warren had followed her up the stairs. Oddly, it appeared he had not.

"I’ve got one word for you, Dean old boy," Nikki chortled malevolently, taking the chest into her lap. She inserted the key into the tiny golden lock, and it fit perfectly.

"
Gotcha
."

Chapter 19

Nikki pulled, and the lid of the chest creaked open on stiff metal hinges. She gave the contents only the most cursory of glances before diving in and pulling things out.

"Wait!" Leigh begged, kneeling down to collect the stray sheets of paper the other woman was strewing across the closet floor. "Some of this might be important!"

"The only thing that’s important," Nikki growled, "is putting nails in Dean Murchison’s coffin. Him and that witch of a wife of his. They killed Ms. Lilah—I’d bet my life on it!"

Leigh paused a moment. "But you said you didn’t think Dean would kill his own mother."

"Well, I changed my mind!" she railed. "The two of them killed her and now they want Jared to take the fall while they walk off with all her money. And I say: over
somebody’s
dead body!"

The phrase sent a little chill down Leigh’s spine. Partly because she was standing not a dozen feet from where Mrs. Murchison had, only last night, had the life choked out of her—and partly because she had no doubt that Nikki meant every word she was saying.

"This is garbage!" the woman raged, emptying out the last of the papers. "The latest will in here is from 1982. The rest of this crap looks like she’s had it in here since she was a kid. Cat pictures, stories about cats. Who the hell cares?"

Leigh sifted hastily through the piles of paper. Nikki was right. It looked as if Lilah hadn’t put anything in the box in more than a decade. It also looked as if the box had once served as her personal memento trove—full of the kind of things everyone has that they don’t want anyone else to see, yet can’t quite part with, either.

"When did Albert Murchison die?" Leigh asked pointedly, poring over one of the wills.

"I don’t know!" Nikki answered gruffly. "Sometime when Dean was a kid."

"This was the last will she needed to hide from him then," Leigh muttered. Whether Lilah and Albert ever had a joint will, or whether Albert only thought they did, Leigh didn’t know. But Lilah had been quite insistent in the 1982 will that her cats be generously provided for in the event she should predecease her husband. And the legal document attached, which to Leigh’s untrained eyes appeared to be some sort of prenuptial agreement, made that seem quite possible. The fate of the couple’s young son, however, was mentioned more as an afterthought. "Well, how do you like that? Dean had to split it with the cats even way back then."

"It doesn’t make sense," Nikki said to herself. She had scooted back to lean against the wall of the closet, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere in space. "He and Rochelle
had
to be looking for her latest will."

"I’m sure they were," Leigh responded, anxious to take advantage of the other woman’s quixotic state. Perhaps it would make her talkative. "Dean probably remembered that she kept wills in the box and figured maybe she would have a copy here. But she didn’t, because after Albert died she had no need to hide her copies anymore. She probably just left the box there because she had no particular reason to move it. Presumably, her later wills were all similar anyway—providing for both Dean and the cats. It was only recently that she decided to cut him out altogether." She cleared her throat. "And admit to the world that he wasn’t her biological son."

Nikki ceased staring into space and focused on Leigh. "She knew she was going to die," she said self-importantly.

Leigh’s pulse quickened. "She did?"

Nikki nodded slowly. "She never admitted it to me, but I knew. I made the doctor appointments; I submitted the insurance papers. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with her—it was all medical mumbo jumbo to me. And she seemed fine, except for a few bad headaches. But she started getting all philosophical on me. Talking about everything in the short term. Met with the new lawyer; didn’t breed any more of the cats." She let out a long, heavy breath. "I knew, all right."

Leigh leaned in. "Did Dean know?"

"I think so," Nikki answered shortly, her eyes once again flashing with anger. "I think she told him the night before she left for New York, when they had that huge fight. Jared could hear them yelling all the way out in the garage apartment."

"Did she tell him he wasn’t her son?" Leigh asked breathlessly. She didn’t think Nikki had any idea how important the timing was. Whoever was responsible for sending the threats to the clinic had known about the missing heir
before
the will was read. Had Dean?

Nikki shook her head again. "I didn’t hear anything like that. All I heard was a bunch of screaming about money. I thought it sounded like she told him he
wasn’t
going to be rich and that he needed to get over it and start planning otherwise. She did a lot of bragging about how she had started out with nothing and did just fine." She paused. "He was like—really,
really
, POed."