Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The inside of Mrs. Miller’s duplex was exactly what you’d expect, and worse than I could have imagined.
There were cats everywhere. On the sofa, on the chairs, on top of the bookshelf, curled up in a basket by the door.
I had definitely underestimated when I mentioned the number six; there were probably twice that, and that was if I saw them all.
And the faint smell of eau de chat that I had noticed in Nick’s place on Saturday morning was many times magnified in here.
My head started spinning as soon as I walked through the door and had it shut behind me.
“Don’t mind the mess,” Mrs. Miller told me, shooing a gray tabby off the sofa so I could sit down. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
The duplex had the same layout as Nick’s—living room in front, kitchen in the middle, bedroom in back.
But where Nick’s had been sparse and masculine, Mrs. Miller’s was cluttered with the accumulation of decades.
Doilies on every surface, porcelain figurines on the mantel, framed photographs covering one entire wall.
“I’ll just put the coffee on,” Mrs. Miller said, disappearing into the kitchen.
I moved closer to the photographs, skirting cats as I went. Most were older—the photographs, I mean, although the cats may have been, too. There were faded color photos from the seventies and eighties, black and white ones that had to be from the fifties and sixties.
The wedding photo was in the center of the collection.
Mrs. Miller couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or -three, in a very short white dress with matching go-go boots and a puffy shoulder-length veil.
The whole ensemble should have looked ridiculous, but somehow it worked.
Her intended stood beside her in a powder-blue tuxedo with a ruffled shirt, grinning at the camera like he’d won the lottery.
She’d been a brunette then, with dark hair falling past her shoulders in fluffy curls, and a build that was petite but voluptuous, quite unlike the desiccated specimen she was these days.
Something about her was familiar, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It might have been that she bore a superficial resemblance to Jacquie. They were two olive-skinned brunettes with bouncy dark curls, fifty years or so apart in age, both compact and neatly curved.
But that didn’t feel like quite enough. There was something about the face, something specific.
I thought back to the people I had seen recently, so many of them with that Mediterranean coloring. Mendoza, of course. And Jacquie. Sal Gomorra. The two mob guys.
If I shrank Izzy Spataro down to human size in my head, and gave him a neck and feminine features… would he look like Mrs. Miller did in her youth? Or Gio Abruzzi? There was something about that bone structure, the set of the eyes, that was familiar.
“That’s me and my Henry,” Mrs. Miller said, making me jump. She’d come back from the kitchen carrying two mugs of coffee. “Married forty-three years before the cancer took him.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said automatically, accepting the mug she offered. The coffee smelled fine—nothing obviously wrong with it—although I had no intention of drinking it. Not until I was sure Mrs. Miller wasn’t trying to poison me.
“It’s been more than ten years now.” Mrs. Miller settled into an armchair, cradling her own mug. “You get used to the loneliness.”
As if on cue, Patches jumped into her lap. Mrs. Miller stroked her absently.
“Did you and your husband have children?” I asked, keeping my own mug carefully in my hands but not raising it to my lips.
She shook her head. “Not for lack of trying. We went at it like rabbits when we were young. But I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. And then after he passed, well, the cats became my babies.”
I glanced around the room, counting again. Definitely more than twelve. Possibly more than fifteen.
“Mrs. Miller,” I said, “can I ask you about Nick?”
Her expression shifted, the smile fading. “Poor boy. I still can’t believe he’s gone. The police were here most of Saturday, you know. Going through his things, asking me questions.”
“Lieutenant Copeland?”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s her name. Very professional, she was.
Asked me the same questions you did—when I last saw Nick, whether I heard anything unusual, whether he had any enemies.
” She shook her head. “I told her what I told you. Nick was a good boy. Quiet, polite, always helped with my groceries.”
“What about his girlfriend? Jacquie?”
“Oh, she’s a sweet thing. Pretty as a picture. You could tell she loved him.” Mrs. Miller took a sip of her coffee. “They had a fight a few weeks back. I could hear them through the wall—these old places, you know, the insulation isn’t what it should be.”
“What did they argue about?” Megan, by any chance? It would have been too recent to be about David, but Kenny might not be off the table. If Nick had known about him and had minded, of course.
“Oh, I don’t know, dear.” She flapped a thin hand. “I could hear them yelling at one another, but not what they said. Just the raised voices.”
But something, then. Some reason why Jacquie might still have been upset with Nick.
Then again—I told myself sternly—I wasn’t getting paid to prove that Jacquie was guilty.
“What about other women? Did you ever see anyone other than Jacquie?”
Mrs. Miller thought about it. “There was the blonde, like I said. But I don’t think that was romantic. He never seemed happy to see her.”
No, I could imagine. “What about problems at work? Did he ever mention anything like that?”
“Not to me,” Mrs. Miller said. “He’s worked at the same place for as long as he’s lived here. And he paid his rent on time.”
She pointed to the coffee table. There was a stack of mail there, as well as a check. I tilted my head slightly.
It was from Nick. Made out to Coco Miller in the amount of eleven hundred dollars. Dated the day before he died. The memo line said “Rent—December.”
So he’d been current on his rent. Even a bit early, really. That ruled out the most obvious motive for a landlord killing a tenant.
Unless the check bounced, of course. Just because he wrote it, didn’t mean he had the funds to cover it. But as long as Sal was still paying him a salary, surely he was keeping up with his bills.
“The lieutenant asked me about guns,” Mrs. Miller offered. “Whether I owned any, whether I’d heard a gunshot. Henry had a hunting rifle, but I sold it after he died. Didn’t like having it in the house.”
I nodded. “I hear you. My husband died a few months ago too, and I’ve been thinking about getting a gun—” For the agency more than for personal reasons, but she didn’t need to know that, “—but I don’t know how comfortable I am about it.
If I don’t have one, I know I won’t use it.
If I do, there’s always a chance that something will go wrong. ”
She nodded sympathetically. She could be telling the truth.
Or she could be lying, and she had another gun hidden somewhere.
A pistol, with a silencer, because Nick surely hadn’t been murdered with a hunting rifle.
Maybe tucked away in a sofa cushion, or under her mattress, or buried at the bottom of a pan of kitty litter.
Somewhere the police hadn’t thought to check or hadn’t been allowed to search without a warrant.
“The crime scene people stayed until late afternoon,” Mrs. Miller continued. “They even looked through my trash, can you imagine? Looking for evidence in an old woman’s garbage.”
“They’re just being thorough,” I said.
“I suppose.” She took another sip of coffee, then looked at me over the rim of her mug. “Something wrong with that coffee?”
“Not at all.” I lifted it to my lips and pretended to take a sip. “Although I should probably get going, and not waste any more of your time.”
I set the mug down on the coffee table and got to my feet. Mrs. Miller’s eyes lingered on it for a second, like she could tell that I hadn’t had any of it. She probably could, since the mug was still full.
She didn’t mention it, though. “Of course, dear,” she said instead, and rose too, and set her own mug aside. “If there’s anything else you want to ask me, you come on back.”
I nodded. “I’ll do that. Thank you, Mrs. Miller.”
She followed me to the threshold. “You take care now, dear. And don’t do anything stupid.”
The door shut behind me, and I stood on the porch for a moment, drawing a deep breath of fresh air through my nose and holding it.
I’d be smelling cat for days, but it had been worth it.
Jacquie and Nick had been arguing recently, which might give my client a motive for murder.
Nick had paid his rent on time—this time, at least—which seemed to take Mrs. Miller’s motive for murder away.
There was still the question of whether he’d kicked one of her cats, but if he had and she had executed him for it, it wasn’t as if she’d admit it.
Besides, even if he had, surely it would have been easier to just evict him, or report him to the police for animal abuse, or something.
I climbed into the Lexus and sat for a minute before I called the office. “Any news?”
“Zach’s in place outside the Body Shop and reports that all is well,” Rachel said.
“I heard. Mrs. Miller just caught me snooping and invited me in for coffee.”
There was a beat. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “I didn’t actually drink any of it. I’m not stupid.”
“Good,” Rachel said. “Third time lucky, and all that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, ma’am. I need you to do a bit more digging on Mrs. Miller. Find out who she was before she married Henry in the mid-seventies. Where she’s from, her maiden name, that sort of thing. She said she and Henry didn’t have children; please double-check that for me.”
“On it,” Rachel said. After a second she added, “Gina?”
“What?”
“Did you go by Kenny’s place?”