by Edie Claire
"Me, unless the will says otherwise. I live in the house and watch them all the time anyway, so it makes sense. But Dean could make trouble. He tried to kick me out just this morning." She sniffed derisively. "The wuss."
Having suspicions about who might have actually kicked whom, Leigh made a mental note to avoid annoying Jared’s sister.
"Do you need a place to live?" Randall asked with concern. "Or is your mother’s house—"
"I’m not living with my doofus brothers!" She answered sharply. Then she moderated her tone. "Thanks for asking, Doc, but we’ll be fine."
Leigh’s mental notes had a tendency to get lost. "Jared has a brother, too?"
Nikki Loomis whirled around on Leigh like a viper. "Jared is not a doofus," the little bodybuilder said icily, fists clenched. "Next to Bill and Red, he’s a goddamned Einstein!"
Leigh took a quick step back, trying to figure out where her comment had gone wrong. "I didn’t mean to imply—" Then she stopped backpedaling and smiled. Actually, she was glad to see that Jared had a bodyguard. "Take it easy," she said agreeably. "You’re talking to one of his biggest fans here. I just didn’t know he had any siblings."
Nikki’s fists relaxed.
"Jared has been living in Mrs. Murchison’s garage apartment for a while now," Randall explained. "He does her kennel cleaning in exchange."
Leigh looked from her father to Nikki and back again, gritting her teeth. Jared worked for Mrs. Murchison, too? Her father never told her anything.
"I was concerned that he and Nikki have someplace to go if necessary," Randall continued evenly. Then he turned back to Nikki. "You’ll let me know if you need help?"
She looked uncomfortable, but nodded. "So, anyway. Are the cats ready to go? Did Number One Son need any teeth pulled?"
Leigh startled at the segue. First, because Nikki seemed to be taking the sudden death of her employer quite in stride, and two, because Number One Son was an odd thing to name a cat when one already had the human version.
Randall shook his head. "No, they just got a cleaning. But I'd give them a couple more hours to get back on their feet."
Nancy Johnson popped her head in from the waiting room. "Dr. Koslow? I.J. Kloo's on line one. He says it's an emergency."
The veterinarian exited abruptly, leaving Leigh to stare awkwardly at Nikki, who stared unabashedly back at her. Luckily, Leigh soon remembered her temporarily derailed mission to save Ricky Rhodis' questionable hide. "I hope you don't mind my asking," she began tentatively, watching the other’s woman’s fists for signs of renewed tightening. "But as your brother might already have told you, someone tried to steal something from the clinic last night. Call me crazy, but I have this feeling that they wanted one of the Siamese. Do you have any idea why anyone might?"
Nikki’s hands stayed relaxed. "One of those two?" she asked in a ho-hum fashion. "Seems unlikely. Miss Brooks is getting on in years, and you probably know about Number One Son's problems."
"Nikki?" Nancy poked her head back inside the room. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't help overhearing part of your conversation earlier. Is something wrong with Mrs. Murchison?"
Not anxious to hear the sobering news repeated, Leigh quietly excused herself from the room and trooped sluggishly back down the stairs. If news of a plane crash—any plane crash—weren’t depressing enough, the prospect of giving Adith Rhodis the bad news about her grandson—namely that she had failed to save him from one of those quaint cells with a twelve-by-twelve-inch view of the Monongahela River—weighed heavily on her spirits. She crossed over to the Siamese cats’ cage and exhaled in frustration. The female was on her feet now, grooming her ruffled chest indignantly, but the still-recumbent male was only just paddling his legs.
Thinking that the bony felines must be uncomfortable lounging about on nothing but papers and the steel cage flooring, she turned to the stack of worn towels above the cages, collected a large green one, and opened the cage door.
"No!" The reaction of the kennel cleaner, who had been happily washing dishes in the sink, could not have been more dramatic if she had approached the patient with a straight razor. Jared whirled around, sending a stainless-steel bowl and dishwater flying across the floor, crossed the distance to her in two paces, and blocked the cage opening with a meaty arm. "No towels with Murchison cats, Leigh Koslow!"
Despite his bluster, he didn't seem angry so much as scared. "Number One Son eats towels, Leigh Koslow!"
She stood like a statue for a moment, thinking, then calmly retracted the towel. Wool sucking. It was one of those weird feline psychiatric things she had heard her dad talk about, along with martian-chasing (which affected her own dear Mao Tse) and excessive grooming (which thankfully did not). Wool suckers, which were very often Siamese, had a thing about cloth. They would chew on and sometimes even eat dishtowels, carpeting, drapes...
Jared pulled back his arm. Leigh shut the cage door quietly, then gazed through the bars at the groggy male, who had begun tossing his head in effort to sit up. Could it be?
"Jared," she asked earnestly, trying to attract his attention as he diligently began mopping up the water he had spilled. "What types of things has Number One Son eaten? Do you know?"
"Number One Son gets sick, Leigh Koslow," he answered, working feverishly. "Number One Son have to be operated on over and over. Dr. Koslow says he doesn't want to operate anymore. No towels with Murchison cats, Leigh Koslow."
She stood thinking for another moment, then reopened the cage door. "I'm going to take him upstairs to my dad," she explained as she wrapped up the awkwardly thrashing cat in the towel she was holding. "I think maybe he needs an x-ray."
***
"Are you sure Dr. Koslow ordered this?" Jeanine asked skeptically, drawing herself up to full diva height. "I don't believe I heard anything about it."
Cradling the agitated cat on top of the hard x-ray table, Leigh fought back over a decade's worth of accumulated annoyance and smiled. "Yes. Now if you could just hang onto him for me for a moment, I'll gown up. The film's all loaded."
Jeanine pushed a strand of unruly, curly dark hair behind one ear with a scowl. "Just a minute," she said shortly, turning in the direction of the treatment room, where Randall was still on the phone.
Leigh let out an exasperated sigh. She supposed she could wait until her father was available, but she was perfectly capable of taking the x-ray herself, and frankly, she couldn't stand the suspense. What if she were right? Her idea was completely bizarre, but it made sense. Why else would someone want to steal both a worthless cat and the contents of its litter box?
Number One Son certainly had precedent. The file she had just read showed that he'd been operated on three times already for intestinal blockage: dishtowel, oriental carpet tassel, and hair scrunchy, respectively. She couldn't imagine what cloth-like item could possibly be valuable enough for someone to go to such lengths to retrieve it—or even how the cat could have gotten hold of it in the first place—but she darn well wanted to find out.
"He's still on the phone," Jeanine reported sullenly, walking to the x-ray table and putting a hand on Number One Son. "But I suppose it's all right."
Leigh smiled and headed for the rack to slip on her lead gown and gloves. She hadn't gone three paces before she stopped cold.
"Oh, wait," she said to herself, out loud. "I can't."
She looked helplessly back at Jeanine, whose wide mouth broke into a devious grin. "Oh, no?"
Leigh's face reddened. "I mean, I might be able to, I just—"
Damn. She didn't know that she was pregnant. In fact, she probably wasn't. But she couldn't be sure she wasn't. And so she was stuck. Keeping a pregnancy secret at a vet clinic was like keeping a wig secret at a beauty salon. With Dr. Koslow's strict rules about x-ray and gas exposure, the staff knew about each others’ babies before their husbands did.
And Jeanine would keep this little nugget to herself for all of about five seconds. "Say no more," the tech said smugly. "I'll gown u
p. You just hit the button."
Leigh bit her lip and held onto Number One Son while Jeanine got ready, then she stepped behind the lead shield and watched as the tech stretched the cat out on his side. Leigh snapped the picture, unloaded the cassette, and headed for the processor.
Jeanine stayed at the x-ray table, smirking.
Chapter 3
"Now do you believe me?" Leigh asked excitedly.
Randall removed his glasses and peered closely at the radiograph. It took a long time for him to answer. "Well, it seems to be moving along well enough. Not a lot of gas—none of the bowel loops are distended." He shook his head sadly. "Maybe it won't block him up this time. The cat's already got a bellyful of adhesions, and if I have to go back in again—"
"But what is this, Dad?" she asked emphatically, pointing. "It obviously isn't just cloth."
He took another look at the inch-long, roughly club-shaped white spot and shook his head. "No, it's metal. But this," he pointed to the fuzzy white area around it, "is probably the cloth that made him eat it."
Leigh stared. She wasn't great with x-rays, but she knew metal when she saw it. Being perfectly stark white on a field of black and gray, it was hard to miss. "It could be a ring, if you were looking at it straight-on," she hypothesized. "Or some sort of broach."
"Maybe," he mumbled noncommittally.
She pivoted him to face her. "You have to admit it, Dad. Ricky Rhodis could be telling the truth. Someone could have convinced him to snatch the cat before it got back to Mrs. Murchison. Let's say they knew the cat had swallowed this—this whatever it is. That could be what Ricky meant when he told his grandmother he wasn't stealing…only returning."
Randall looked back at his only daughter skeptically. "This cat never leaves Mrs. Murchison's house, except to come here. How do you suppose it could swallow something that belonged to someone else?" He turned back to examine the film again, then shook his head. "It's probably no more than the pop-top from a can of tuna."
Leigh let out a breath and thought a moment. "However," her father continued, "Your theory does explain the cat carrier and the bagged-up litter, though given the amount of time it takes for foodstuffs to pass completely through the system—"
"Dad," she interrupted quickly, her hopes rising again. "We're not dealing with a Ph.D. in feline proctology, here, remember? They wouldn't know how long to wait. And as long as you admit it's a reasonable possibility that Ricky Rhodis wasn't stealing drugs, you really can't—"
Randall stopped his daughter's arguments with a raised hand, then shook his head with a smile. "Sometimes I think you should have gone to law school," he teased.
She grinned back. "Nah. I kind of like my soul."
He took the radiograph down from the viewer and turned around. "I'm going to take a few more views and make sure this cat's not in any immediate danger. Tell you what, you talk to the Rhodis boy and see if he'll give you a more reasonable explanation for his presence here than he gave the police last night. If so, perhaps we can drop the charges."
Leigh smiled broadly. She felt like jumping up and down, but her father never appreciated gush. "Thanks, Dad," she said quickly. "I'll go visit him right after we're done. If we take a V-D view right away do you think—"
He interrupted her again. "You don't need to stay for the x-rays. Somebody else can help me."
"But—"
He waved off her protests, his standard matter-of-fact tone ever so slightly on the nervous side as he added, "We need to run an ethylene oxide sterilization anyway. That can be—well, hazardous."
Leigh took one look at his face and ceased her protests. He knew already.
Jeanine.
Imaging various ways of torturing the technician with her own dental equipment, Leigh looked away.
"Fine, I'll go talk to Ricky," she answered quickly. "He talks; he walks. How hard can that be?" She headed out into the hallway and turned towards the door, only to see the clinic’s two joined-at-the-hip veterinary assistants, Marcia and Michelle, standing at the treatment room door, grinning at her.
She made a quick turn for the exit and walked through it without looking back.
Jeanine was going to pay.
***
Trying not to think about her previous encounters with the facility, Leigh approached the Allegheny County Jail with confidence. She was going to get Ricky Rhodis off. Johnny Cochran had nothing on her—and she wasn't even an attorney.
Which turned out to be unfortunate. "It's not visiting hours," the graying desk attendant told her curtly, pointing one pudgy finger at a nearby sign. "Come back then. You on the list?"
Taken aback, but only momentarily, Leigh drew up her shoulders and tried her best to look like she knew what she was doing. She ordinarily avoided lying, but a cause was a cause. "This isn't a social call," she said firmly.
"You a lawyer?" The man asked, eyeing her cynically. "Or a spiritual advisor?"
Leigh smiled. Eureka. "The latter. I'm a personal evolution coach with the Church of the Blessed Redeemer. I've been engaged by Ricky Rhodis's grandmother to counsel the boy. She feels it's imperative that he get spiritual help immediately, and I agree."
The man's eyes narrowed. "Never heard of that church. Where is it?"
Leigh didn't hesitate. "North Hills—off of Babcock." She smiled with aplomb. Babcock Boulevard, like many Pittsburgh thoroughfares, snaked around the North Hills in about ten discontinuous segments, more if you counted all the "Old Babcocks" that kept it company. She had lived in the area her entire life and couldn't begin to recall all its convolutions—it was a reasonably safe bet this man couldn't either.
He watched her another moment, then shrugged. "Fine. You got ten minutes."
It took considerably more than ten minutes for Ricky Rhodis's bewildered face to appear on the other side of the glass panel.
He was a shrimpy kid, five foot six at the most, skinny and pale with a thick crop of light brown hair. He could easily pass for fifteen or sixteen, although he had to be at least eighteen to land where he had landed. His pinched face looked both scared and tired, yet somehow resolute. He picked up the phone with question marks in his eyes, but he let her talk first.
"Nice to meet you," Leigh began cordially, looking around to see if their conversation was being monitored. There was a guard by the exit, but he didn't seem overly interested. "Leigh Koslow, here. Your grandmother sent me to help you out."
His soft brown eyes, which had the same mischievous sparkle as Adith's, flickered briefly with guilt. But he said nothing.
She cut to the chase. "You're here because my father, Randall Koslow, thought you must have been trying to steal drugs from the clinic. Your grandmother says that's not true. Is it?"
Ricky fidgeted in his hard plastic seat. It was several moments before he finally answered, his voice weak and tinny. "Can't say."
Leigh's brows arched. "Look," she said, lowering her voice. "I don't know why you think keeping quiet is in your best interests, but I'm telling you that my dad is willing to drop the charges—all of them—as long as he's convinced that you weren't stealing drugs. You convince me; I convince him; you’re outta here. It's that simple."
She waited for the gist of her speech to sink in, but it seemed to be taking a long time. Ricky's eyes showed nothing.
"Did you hear me?" she asked, wondering if Mrs. Rhodis had left anything out of her grandson's story—like three years of inpatient treatment at Western Psych.
"Yeah, I heard you," he answered softly, scratching his fingernails idly on the countertop. "But I'm not saying anything else. I told them I wasn't stealing drugs and I wasn't. They can't prove I was."
"They don't have to prove you were stealing drugs to lock you up," she reasoned. "They've got you on breaking and entering."
"But I didn't break in," he protested mildly.
"Trespassing, then," Leigh said with irritation. "And enough with the technicalities. The point is you're facing charges. Just tell me what you were rea
lly doing at the clinic. If you don't, I can't help you."
He started to answer, then paused in thought. "How much time do you think I could get for—for what you said?" he asked innocently.
She stared at him, dumbstruck. "More than you'd want to do, trust me." She couldn't imagine what was motivating the kid to keep mum, but it was clear she would have to motivate him otherwise. "And what about your grandmother? You think she wants to see her only grandson rot in jail? You'd break that poor woman's heart."
The guilty look returned in spades. "I told her not to worry about me," he said miserably. "I told her everything would be fine, and it will. You tell her that, okay?" He rose with a nervous jerk.
Leigh got up also. This kid was not going to walk out on her. She might have had men walk out on arguments before, but having one chose a prison cell over the pleasure of her company was downright insulting. "Ricky!" she spat into the phone earnestly. "I know about the cat."
Ricky had just pulled the receiver away from his head when his arm froze. He pulled the phone slowly back to his ear and opened his mouth to speak, but didn't.
"I thought that might get your attention," she said happily, plopping back down in her seat. "Now, can we talk? Please?"
Ricky remained standing, eyeing her with a strange mix of gratitude and resentment. He collected his thoughts, then spoke nervously. "I'm not saying nothing. You tell everybody that."
He slammed the phone in its cradle, whirled around, and made a beeline for the door.
***
Curse. Mutter. Curse. Mutter.
Leigh grumbled her way back to the clinic, stopping for a much-delayed fast-food lunch on the way. It was amazing she hadn't been hungry earlier, but then her appetite had been up and down ever since she had memorized the early symptoms of pregnancy. Naturally, said symptoms had all appeared immediately thereafter, twice. But much to her disappointment, both times were false alarms, and she now did her best to ignore such complaints.