Never Tease a Siamese: A Leigh Koslow Mystery (26 page)

Rochelle’s hard heels banged on the floor as she flailed. "Get off me!"

"Say you’re sorry!"

The security guard sat on the floor a few paces away, rubbing his head. He had taken a worse tumble than the other two, and apparently did not feel obliged to intercede again—perhaps because the person signing his checks was on top.

Warren groaned. "Oh, for the love of—" He moved swiftly around Leigh and headed down the stairs, but his intervention, thankfully, did not prove necessary. Just as Rochelle spat out a panicked apology
,
Nikki’s small body lifted straight up into the air.

"No, no, Nikki," Jared admonished firmly. He had both hands around her waist, keeping her squirming feet a good foot and a half off the ground. "No fighting, Nikki. You promised me no fighting, Nikki."

His sister growled, but gradually stopped squirming. "All right, all right!" she conceded at last. "I’m finished. Put me down, Jared."

He did.

"Now, you!" ordered the security guard, pointing a skinny finger at a still-angry, but considerably chastened, Rochelle. "Get out. Now! If you don’t I’ll have you arrested for trespassing. Do you understand?"

Rochelle opened her lips—which were a shiny lavender today—but closed them again without saying anything. She rose to her feet, threw Nikki a malignant glance, pivoted awkwardly on her heels, and walked out the door.

"Are you all right, ma’am?" the security guard asked Nikki tentatively, keeping his distance. He was still rubbing his head.

"I’m peachy," she snapped, feeling the long pink streaks across her cheek, compliments of Rochelle’s polka-dotted tips. Her voice softened a bit. "Sorry about tackling you like that," she said to the guard. "Nothing personal."

He threw her a skeptical look, then followed Rochelle silently out the door.

"We were just going, too," Warren announced, taking a firm grip on Leigh’s hand as she joined him at the bottom of the stairs. Jared had already started back to the basement, and only the three of them remained in the foyer.

Nikki shook her head in disgust, her arms folded tightly across her chest. "Do you
believe
that? Me, Lilah Murchison’s kid. Of all the stupid—"

"But how can you really be sure?" Leigh interrupted, careful to keep her tone in check. She was bigger than Rochelle, but she didn’t have any fingernails, either. "I mean, there’s a
chance
, isn’t there?"

"No!" Nikki answered immediately. "I
do
have a birth certificate. It says that I am proudly and officially the child of Wanda Loomis and a man both she and the state refer to as 'Unknown.' There, are you happy? Sheesh!"

Birth certificates can be faked
, Leigh thought to herself, resisting the urge to make the statement out loud. "Listen, Nikki," she said instead, ignoring the paralyzing squeeze Warren was delivering to her hand. "Yesterday I found proof that Lilah Murchison gave birth to another child when everyone
thought
she was pregnant with Dean. She adopted him, and gave her own baby away."

Nikki stared at her blankly. "Say what?"

"I think she gave her own baby away because it was a girl, and her husband desperately wanted a boy. This house, her social standing—everything she had except her cash was tied up in her marriage, and she had to preserve it at all costs. I think the baby she had was you, and that she gave you to one of her only available relatives, Wanda Loomis, to raise."

The other woman’s blank look gave way to a slowly spreading, sarcastic smile. "Oh, please," she said with a laugh. "Is that why you keep coming over here and bugging me?"

Leigh didn’t answer.

"Well, forget it. For one thing, Wanda Loomis barely raised the brats she had. She wouldn’t take in so much as a gnat unless it came with regular payments, and I can assure you there was no money to spare in the Loomis house at any time during my so-called childhood. Secondly, if I was Ms. Lilah’s daughter, don’t you think she would have told me? You’d better believe if I
did
know, I’d be in Tahiti right now sunning my sorry butt on the sand."

She took a breath. "And even
besides
all that—I’m only twenty-three! Dean is twenty-five." She threw Leigh a withering look. "Got any other bright ideas?"

"No," Warren said loudly, moving Leigh bodily towards the door. "We’ve got to get back to work now. Thanks for your hospitality, Ms. Loomis."

He opened the door himself, but found he couldn’t go through it. Few people could, with Maura Polanski’s two-hundred-plus pounds filling the space.

"I should have known," the detective said heavily, glaring at Leigh. "Murder at the Murchison house—you’re here. A cat fight at the Murchison house—you’re here. Why do I carry a pager, anyway? It would save time if I just followed you around."

"Jared’s not talking to you," Nikki said to Maura icily. "We were just leaving."

"I don’t want to talk to Jared," Maura answered calmly, stepping inside. She introduced herself. "I want to talk to you. And I’m not here to talk about Mrs. Murchison’s murder—just some issues about her estate."

Nikki rolled her eyes with a groan. "You think I’m her kid, too? Get in line."

"We’ll catch up with you later, Maura," Leigh piped up, hurrying out. "I’ll call you in an hour or two. Okay?"

Warren followed, but received another elbow in the ribs on the way. "You’re fired," Maura growled.

"Hey!" he defended. "You know perfectly well what I’m up against."

"Yeah," the detective tossed back with a smirk, "But I’m not the one who married her."

Pretending to ignore the exchange, Leigh headed for the car. They could make fun of her all they wanted. She still had the oriental chest under one arm, and neither one of them had noticed.

Chapter 20

"What
is
it with you?" Leigh’s officemate Alice complained. "You’ve had your monitor on that same page for almost an hour, and you haven’t typed a word.
Furthermore, your disgusted sighs every ten seconds are driving me loco. Why don’t you just go home? I hear Saturdays in the office are great for concentrating."

"I don’t have a car," Leigh lamented. "My smart-aleck, do-gooder of a husband stranded me here until five-thirty." Her eyes narrowed. "And confiscated my box besides."

Alice threw her a pathetic look. "I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But I
will
float you cab fare if it’ll get you the hell out of here."

"Thanks," Leigh said genuinely. "But I do need to work. Maybe some more caffeine…" She started to get up, but her head swam a little, and she sat back down. Perhaps she had had enough caffeine after all.

She knew, logically, that Warren was right. There was no reason for her to continue to obsess over the threats to the clinic and their almost certain link to Lilah Murchison’s murder. Maura was on it, and the detective was perfectly capable of ferreting the matter out eventually, even if she was busy with other cases. Leigh should never have taken the box out of the Murchison house, and it needed to go either back there or to Maura ASAP.

But she still couldn’t stop thinking about it. She had been so sure that Nikki was the one. Furthermore, she had also almost convinced herself that Rochelle was behind the threats—that she had found a copy of the will before the reading and that she, too, had guessed who Nikki was. But the untouched box, and the women’s little tiff, had shot that theory all to heck.

Rochelle might be on the shrewd side, but she obviously lacked the subtlety necessary for an elaborate, anonymous extortion campaign. Subtle people didn’t generally confront their nemesis at the scene of a murder and threaten (in front of at least one known witness) to slit their throat.

No. Dean and Rochelle were responsible for Ricky Rhodis’s brush with the law, but that was about it. They probably genuinely believed that Nikki and/or Jared had killed Mrs. Murchison.

Someone else was the real heir. And someone else knew the whole story—without needing to attend the will reading. If Mary Polanski knew about the baby switch, who else might? And why would they have been let in on the secret in the first place?

Alice groaned out loud, and Leigh felt a sticky-note pad bounce off the back of her head. "I mean it, you," Alice warned. "One more sigh, and I’ll—"

"Mail call," their young receptionist twittered pleasantly, dropping a small stack of mail on Alice’s desk, and an even smaller one on Leigh’s. "I like that postcard," she said approvingly, pointing to the top of Leigh’s stack with a fake nail. "It’s so true."

She turned to leave, and Leigh picked up the card. It was addressed to her in plain printed letters, but the part where a message should be was blank. She turned it over curiously, and her blood ran cold.

Springtime in Pittsburgh
.

She sat perfectly still for a moment, just looking at it. It could be a coincidence, perhaps. You could get such cards anywhere. But the lettering was familiar. And the two cards had arrived the same day.

It was odd that there was no message. But maybe the sender figured he didn’t need one.

She swallowed.

"You
are
here! Praise the Lord!"

Leigh looked up into the flushed face of Adith Rhodis, and her brain tried to shift gears. The older woman was dressed in a navy blue polyester skirt, which ended a good three inches above the rim of her knee-high stockings, and a matching polyester top and cardigan, which had probably not buttoned since the Carter administration.

"I’ve been trying to catch up with you all day, honey! To think that Lilah Murchison really
was
alive all along, but now she’s dead anyway, and you were actually there when it happened—not that you called me, of course, but that’s okay—and now everybody’s wondering what’s going on and you didn’t answer your phone here, then they said you were at the clinic, but then they said you’d come back here, except you hadn’t, and—" She took a much needed breath. "I’ve got something important to tell you!"

Leigh dropped the card like a hot potato. She couldn’t think about it now. Why should she? Evidently, someone thought she was being a snoop. But they could rest easy, because they were going to get exactly what they wanted. From now on, she was keeping to her resolution of the morning. She was leaving everything to the police.

At least to all outward appearances.

She looked eagerly into Adith’s gleaming eyes. "What?"

"Excuse me, ma’am," Alice said to the older woman, standing up. "But did you, by any chance, come here in a car?"

Adith looked at her oddly. "Well, sure, honey."

"Excellent," Alice exclaimed, plopping back down in her seat. "Leigh—
go get in it.
"

***

The ancient sedan rattled like a peddler’s cart as Adith weaved fearlessly in and out of the North Side traffic. "I’m afraid I made a mistake the other day," she said regretfully. "I told the girls what I told you and they all told me I was crazy. Course, I never claimed to have known Albert all that well, I just figured he was like a lot of old fuddy-duddies his age. Sexist and all. And I still think I could have been on to something, but that Lois, she’s just always so blasted smug about everything, like the time when she told everybody her cousin had had a thing going with Elvis—"

"Mrs. Rhodis," Leigh cut in as politely as possible. "What exactly are we talking about?"

"Oh, sorry," she apologized, narrowly avoiding the rear fender of a white Cadillac, whose blue-haired driver appeared equally competent. "I mean why Ms. Lilah would have switched those babies. The girls—they seem pretty sure that Albert would have doted on a baby daughter just as much as he would have on a son. I guess he had a sister he was pretty close to once, and they just couldn’t see him dumping his wife on account of her not having a boy."

Leigh sat back a little, though she kept a tight hold of the hand grip on her door. "Really?"

"So they say," Adith continued. "And I’ll tell you what we all agreed. There’s only one good reason why Ms. Lilah would give up her own flesh and blood for somebody’s else’s baby."

Leigh waited. Adith never gave anything away without a suitably dramatic pause.

"There must have been something wrong with it."

She stared at the older woman for a moment, digesting the thought.
Something wrong with it.

"You got to remember that Lilah was at least forty when she had the baby," Adith continued. "So it wouldn’t be too surprising, right?"

Leigh’s mind traveled back to the conversation she had had with Dean’s biological mother, Becky. She had said that her grandmother had actually encouraged her to keep her baby—right up until the week before it was born. Which would not coincidentally be the week that Lilah’s baby was born. The week when a desperate Lilah enlisted Peggy’s aid in a hastily hatched scheme.

"So we were thinking maybe the baby was deformed or something," Adith continued.