The Bad Always Die Twice (8 page)

“I’m sorry to hear Jeremy can’t come tomorrow night. Alan Ball’s coming. Jeremy adores his work.” Victoria took a seat in a cushioned chair on the stone terrace that looked out on an immaculately groomed garden. “Sit.”

“I’m not staying. I’m beat. The office was crazy today. Apparently, people like the idea of hiring a woman who’s been accused of killing a dead man.”

“All the more reason why you should have a nice cup of green tea. It’s energizing.”

Nikki leaned on the back of a chair, letting her hair fall forward over her face. “I don’t want to be energized, Mother. I want to go home, put my PJs on and crawl into my bed. I want to be comatose.”

Victoria frowned. “Tell me you’re not serious about sticking your nose into this business with Rex.”

“It’s not about Rex, Mother. It’s about Jessica.” Nikki watched the dogs play tag with each other as they circled the pool. First Ollie chased Stanley, then Stanley chased Ollie, their ears flopping as they sailed around the yard. They made her smile.

“I’m utterly against it, but if Jessica were my friend and I felt inclined to
not
mind my own business—” Victoria met her gaze with those famous piercing blue eyes, “then I’d start with the wife.”

“You think Edith could have something to do with this?”

Victoria shrugged theatrically. “If you were Rex’s wife and he rose from the dead, wouldn’t you kill him?”

Chapter 7

T
he next day Nikki showed a house on The Strand in Hermosa Beach to an Arab sheik with a name she couldn’t pronounce. Then she stopped by Edith’s around noon. Security was tight at her front gate and it took two calls to the house before she was able to get in. Shondra, Edith’s maid, answered the front door in her black-and-white uniform. The homes with the maids in frilly white aprons always amused Nikki. Even Victoria wasn’t
that
pretentious.

But Edith had put up with so much crap with Rex that Nikki was willing to give her a bye on that issue. Besides, the woman had grown up in Echo Park. A woman who fought her way from Echo Park to the canyon neighborhood of Outpost Estates in central Hollywood, even to live in a tacky tomb, deserved a little leeway.

Still, Nikki knew for a fact that Shondra hated the uniform. A pretty girl in her early twenties with mocha skin, dark hair, and her mother’s brown eyes, she dreamed of being a model. Her mother, Edith’s housekeeper, had gotten her the job; Shondra only did it to make her rent. She and her cousin shared the position so they could both go on look-sees.

“Edith in?” Nikki asked.

“Right this way.” Halfway across the front hall, Shondra looked over her shoulder and whispered, “Mrs. March says I have to do it this way.”

Nikki smiled. “You do it perfectly.”

Shondra led her to Rex’s library and held open the door. Inside, Edith and Thompson were having lunch on a hideous coffee table fashioned from animal horns and a slab from a redwood tree.
Was that even legal?
A footstool made from an elephant’s foot, complete with toenails, made up the furniture grouping.

“Edith, I’m so sorry,” Nikki said as she walked in. Shondra closed the door behind her.

If possible, Rex’s library was decorated even worse than the salon. There were animal heads on the walls: bison, elk, a bighorn sheep. To Nikki’s knowledge, Rex had never hunted big game in his life.
Exactly where did a person buy a stuffed elk’s head the size of a VW bug?

“For what?” Edith popped a morsel of sandwich into her mouth. It smelled like chicken salad. “For the fact that Rex is really dead, or that he lied about it the first time?”

Edith’s words sounded harsh, but her face told a different story. Her eyes were puffy from crying, her mouth tight at the corners, making her smile lines more pronounced. She wasn’t an attractive woman, but Nikki had always thought she did well with what she had. She always appeared regal. Today, she just looked sad and exhausted.

“I don’t know,” Nikki confessed, throwing both hands up and letting them fall. “For all of it, I guess. I just feel so bad for you, Edith. You don’t deserve this.”

“Will it affect the sale of the house?” Thompson asked.

“I don’t see why it would.” Nikki directed her response to Edith; she was her client, the eye-candy wasn’t. “You already have a contract. If the buyers back out, you’ll keep the earnest money.”

“I don’t want the earnest money. I want out of this house! I thought I made that clear to you and that bimbo friend of yours months ago.” She pressed her lips together, pushing her plate and half a sandwich away. “I want out of this life. I want you to call the buyer and insist the sale take place as planned.”

“Have another half a sandwich, Edie darling,” Thompson insisted, pushing a white porcelain plate of sandwich triangles toward her. “You have to eat more than that.”

“I can’t possibly. I just can’t.” She sat back against the leather couch constructed of various animal hides sewn together like a puzzle.

Rex had referred to the room as his
big game
library. Nikki and Jessica had privately called it the
cemetery room
. Nikki had seen the work of many a bad decorator in her years as a real estate agent, but this room definitely made her top ten list of worst rooms.

“I . . . can certainly contact the buyers, just to check in with them and be sure everything is running smoothly on their end,” Nikki said slowly, deciding to just ignore the bimbo remark. What could she say? Nikki knew what Jessica was, and she had a sneaking suspicion that Edith did, too. That she had known all along. “It’s better that I not suggest there’s any option but to complete the sale. We don’t want to put any ideas in their heads.”

“Good. Now, why did you come by?” Edith sipped from a glass of lemonade that Thompson had pushed into her hand. Her voice had a little edge to it; now, the blade was definitely directed toward Nikki.

“I . . . I don’t know.” She chewed on her lower lip, tasting the last of her Bobbi Brown lipstick. “I guess I just came by to see how you are. To see if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“There isn’t.” Thompson slid his arm around Edith’s shoulders.

Nikki couldn’t decide if it was a gesture of protection or isolation.

“I’ve got everything under control here,” he said.

“Right. Sure. Of course.” Nikki rocked back on her sensible-heeled black boots. “And, I guess I just wanted you to know that Jessica didn’t do it, Edith. Kill Rex. She has no idea how it happened, how he got in her apartment—”

“Oh, please. He’d been there before. They’d been sleeping together for months when he disappeared.”

There was more than just an edge to Edith’s voice now. She was bordering on downright hostility.

Nikki stared at the cheetah-skin rug beneath her feet. Surely another illegal acquisition. “I didn’t know that until yesterday,” she said quietly. “So I guess I came to apologize for that, too.” She looked up. “But Jessica’s not a bad person. She just—”

“Did she know he was still alive?” Edith interrupted.

“No. Did you?” Nikki didn’t know where she found the cojones to ask.

“Of course she didn’t,” Thompson put in. “I think you need to go, Miss Harper.”

Nikki hesitated. This was Edith’s house; Thompson was only a guest, though, granted, one with benefits. “I’m just trying to piece things together, Edith. To help Jessica understand what happened.”

“I don’t know what the hell happened. All I know is that Rex died in a plane crash and I started a new life.”

Thompson smiled at her and leaned forward to kiss her.

“Then he comes back,” Edith continued, “long enough to get himself murdered, stark naked, in some floozy’s bed.”

Nikki wanted to argue that her statement wasn’t entirely true. Yes, Jessica was probably a floozy, but Rex hadn’t been completely naked. She decided to keep quiet and let Edith continue.

“I just want it to all go away.” Edith’s voice cracked. “Can you do that, Nikki, can you make this all go away?”

Apparently the question was rhetorical. Thompson got to his feet. “Let me show you out.”

It wasn’t an invitation. Nikki headed for the door on his heels. “I’ll be happy to call the buyer and feel them out, if you want me to. I can’t imagine why this would affect their taking the house, though.”

“We could probably charge more,” Thompson commented, holding the leather paneled door open for her. “There’s been more about Rex in the papers and magazines in the last year than the previous five, when he was still alive.”

Nikki gave him a quick half-smile. He didn’t smile back. As he walked her to the front door, she wondered why Thompson and Edith’s reception had been so cool. Saturday night at the party, things had been hunky-dory. Edith obviously wasn’t upset by the idea that Rex really was dead now. Was this secondhand anger directed at Nikki? Was Edith upset at Nikki because Jessica had been sleeping with Rex? That didn’t make sense, because Saturday night Edith had known. She’d apparently known for months.

And what was up with Thompson’s attitude?

He held the front door open for her.

Was Edith just upset with everything that had happened, or was there something else going on here? The obvious question was, if Jessica didn’t kill Rex, who did? Was Edith trying to hide something?

Nikki glanced up at her escort as she stepped out the front door. “I’ll get back to Edith after I talk to the buyers.”

“We’d appreciate that.” Thompson nodded his square, dimpled chin and closed the door behind her before she had time to say anything more.

“Interesting,” Nikki whispered to herself as she made her way to her car. As she got in, she glanced back at the house. She was surprised to see both Thompson and Edith standing in the front hall, watching her through a side transom window.

Very interesting.

“Curtain,” Victoria called from where she sat in the first row, raising her hand high and wiggling her fingers. A hush fell over the screening room that she’d had built in the basement of her home in the days before media rooms were the rage. She’d done it elegantly, as she did everything. The room sat twenty-five privileged viewers and was a thing of beauty, imitating the theaters of bygone years. Decorated tastefully in an art deco style, with gilt trim and comfortable velvet seating, the room, even after all these years, still gave Nikki a little thrill every time she walked in.

Some of Nikki’s best childhood memories centered around this screening room. Here was where she had seen her mother’s first movies and shared her first kiss with Jeremy, back when she was fourteen.

The lights dimmed, the velvet curtain opened, and the dramatic music began to play.

Nikki leaned over in her seat and whispered in her mother’s ear, “I went to see Edith March today.”

“Did you sell the house to the sheik? I know which one it is. Amondo drove me by. I can’t believe anyone would pay fifteen million dollars for a house. A bit affected for a foreigner, don’t you think?”

“I’m showing him another in Manhattan Beach tomorrow. He didn’t like the pool in Hermosa Beach.”

“He comes from a desert. You’d think a blowup kiddy pool would tickle him. How was Edith? Playing the anguished widow?”

“No, not really. I don’t understand why you don’t like her, Mother. She’s always been nice to me. Except maybe today,” Nikki added as an afterthought.

“They just don’t make movies like this today, do they?” Victoria shook her head. She smelled faintly of her favorite jasmine perfume and the slightest hint of cigarette smoke.

“Have you been smoking again?” Nikki demanded.

“Shhhhh,” Amondo hushed from one of the seats in the back. He acted as projectionist and usher on movie nights.

Nikki stared straight ahead as Bette Davis walked onto the screen.

“It’s not that I don’t like her,” Victoria said. “I’m just not sure I trust her. When I called her today—”

“You
called
her?”

“To offer my condolences, and I must say, Nicolette, she was rather cool.”

“I got the same reception.”

“Was her beau there? The one in the soap commercial?”

Nikki smiled. “He was. And his name is Thompson.”

“I thought it was Christopher.”

“That’s his last name, Mother. It’s Thompson Christopher.”

“Ridiculous name. And how did
he
behave?”

“It was pretty obvious he didn’t want me there. The whole thing was kind of strange. They’ve both been so nice to me. He was genuinely pleasant at the party the other night.”

“Ah hah.”

Nikki glanced at her mother in the dark, light from the movie screen flickering on her face. Every hair was in place, her eyebrows perfectly sculptured, her lips a luscious hue. In the gentler light, Victoria looked twenty years younger. She could have been Nikki’s sister.

“Ah hah? Ah hah, what?” Nikki asked.

“Ah hah, that’s a clue.”

“It is?”

“People don’t change the way they treat you from one day to the next without reason.”

“Meaning?”

“Shh,” Victoria hushed, pointing at the screen. “I love this line.”