Free The Trials of Nikki Hill by Dick Lochte, Christopher Darden

frozen fish dinner. “I’d love to,” she said. “But I’ve got notes to type and I need some sleep. Been up since four.” “Fess up. You headin’ out to Spago, right, with your new fast friends?”
    “Hell, yeah. Then we might just jet off to Mah-zet-lan.”
    “I knew it. She’s goin’ Hollywood. Probably won’t be able to make it to Juanita’s tomorrow night, either.”
    Every month Nikki and the other women who constituted the Inglewood Money Mavens investment club met at one or another’s home for drinks, dinner, gossip, and whatever news of their stocks and bonds the remaining time allowed. Nikki usually enjoyed the gatherings, but if Loreen didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t tell all about Madeleine Gray’s murder, what would the rest of the Money Mavens think? That she was one stuck-up bitch.
    Of course, they’d think that if she didn’t go, too.
    “I’ll be there,” Nikki said.
    “Probably won’t be as glam as a secret agent like yourself is used to.”
    “Girl, the day I outglam Juanita is the day fish stop swimming.” Juanita Janes was a very theatrical actress, formerly of Broadway but for the last seven years a member of the cast of a popular soap opera,
The Power and the Passion.
    “Juanita’s something all right,” Loreen said. “Takes a special kind of woman to make a turban look like anything ’cept the result of a bad head wound.”
    “By the way, my title is Special Assistant,” Nikki said, feigning annoyance, “not Secret Agent.”
    “ ’Scuse me,” Loreen said, chuckling. “All your secrecy musta confused me.”

E LEVEN
    T he morning was overcast and gloomy, a fitting backdrop for Nikki’s arrival at the four-story building on Mission Road in downtown Los Angeles where the county autopsies were performed. A traffic snarl on the freeway had made her at least ten minutes late. That was only part of the reason for her anxiety, however. It was her first visit to the dreary facility.
    She walked down a long hall, purposely keeping her eyes above the level of an incoming body bag. A confusion of people in a variety of uniforms moved swiftly around her. Nikki thought that if she worked there she’d keep on the run, too, to avoid having to think about the constant presence of death. By standing in his way, she got an orderly pushing an empty gurney to pause long enough to direct her to the elevators.
    There, she waited beside a man smoking a cigar, its fumes adding to her general malaise. She was relieved when he took a car going up, but, descending alone to the second basement level, she longed for even his smokestack company.
    She emerged from the elevator to face a sign on the wall reading “Autopsy Room.” Her nostrils were assailed by a strange and powerful odor. Not a stench exactly. Something strong and...what? Malignant? She tried to find some category for it. A combination of Mr. Clean and collard greens? A mix of medicine and funk? It confused her senses and increased her apprehension. She remembered something Blackie had once told her about the way cops would soak their handkerchiefs in cologne before dropping in at the morgue. Good advice that came to mind too late.
    She paused, poked in her handbag for perfume, breath spray, anything. Coming up empty, she gritted her teeth and prepared for the next sensory assault—the visual one. She told herself that if a wimp like Ray Wise could stand the sight of a body reduced to dead meat, blood, bone, and tripe, so could she. She made a silent prayer that her sensitive stomach would not betray her, clasped her leather briefcase close to her chest, and ventured forth. The words of the late, great King Pleasure never seemed more appropriate: “So afraid of where I’m going, so in love with where I’ve been.”
    A right turn introduced her to an amazing sight: a logjam of corpses on gurneys. She shivered. The chill she was feeling had more to do with emotion than air-conditioning. Head held high, she made her