The Corpse Wore Stilettos Read online

  The Corpse Wore Stilettos

  MJ O’Neill

  The Corpse Wore Stilettos

  Red Adept Publishing, LLC

  104 Bugenfield Court

  Garner, NC 27529

  http://RedAdeptPublishing.com/

  Copyright © 2019 by MJ O’Neill. All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: March 2019

  Cover Art by Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Corpse Wore Stilettos

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  For Brian, who never stopped believing

  “Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.” – Yves Saint Laurent

  Chapter 1

  In the four months since my dad’s unexpected trip to the slammer had plunged my family into poverty and me into desperate employment at the county morgue in St. Louis, Missouri, I’d learned to accept a lot of things. I’d stopped lamenting that the color of the blood clashed with my lipstick. While I still considered shoe booties fashion suicide, I had grown to appreciate their practicality in maintaining the pristine condition of my Jimmy Choos. For the most part, I had become acclimated to the gore, although I still reserved the right to call certain things icky. I’d come to terms with my every move being tracked by a time clock and with taking orders instead of giving them to maids and cooks. And I’d mostly accepted becoming a peer of people who thought wine from a box was an innovation and that a gourmet meal could be cooked in a microwave.

  But one morgue situation still astonished me.

  “Ahemmm.” I cleared my throat, hoping Miss Skinny Thing, squished like a pancake between Big Max and the steel autopsy table, would realize the two of them weren’t alone in the morgue. Why people thought sex in a morgue was some arousal-heightening, must-have experience was beyond me. The cold stainless steel tables would give anyone’s ass frostbite, the place reeked of a combination of spoiled milk and formaldehyde, and the lighting was more suited to interrogations than romance. Yet since starting at the morgue, at least twice a week, I’d had the lucky job of chasing away lusty lovers from the hospital above us.

  This was the last thing I needed tonight. A girl couldn’t even find a secluded place next to a dead body to lament her broken heart without being reminded of all the happy people in the world.

  Martin and I would never know necromantic love like this. Not that the Martin Eldridge would ever be caught dead in a place like this doing that. But still. He was gone. We had broken up months ago, right after my dad’s arrest, but nothing had made it seem permanent like receiving the box of my leftover belongings from his apartment.

  Fighting back my irritation, I focused on tonight’s winning couple in the game of “morgue make-out.” Big Max was the large LPN from pediatrics, and Miss Skinny Thing was a candy-striper bimbo who’d probably had zero intentions of shagging Big Max until she found herself all revved up on a combination of the forbidden and the macabre. Oblivious to my presence, they started rounding second base. Her dress hung crookedly from the X-ray viewer mounted on the wall.

  “Max,” I said in a fairly audible tone. I was trying not to startle them into flying off the autopsy table but needed to speak loudly enough that they would get the hint before he started to “show me something beautiful, baby,” as Miss Skinny Thing put it.

  I would have thought that with something as serious as dead people, the county would spring for a decent security system, but for some reason, it never made the “necessities” list in the budget. The hospital’s living people tended to get all the money. While entering through the morgue’s main intake door required a badge, anyone with half a wit who knew their way around the hospital could make it down here through what had affectionately become known as the “sexavator,” the unmonitored service elevator used for transporting bodies from the hospital’s main wings to the morgue.

  “Max!” I yelled, startling both of them.

  Miss Skinny Thing let out a tweet like a crushed bird. Max flew off the table and landed with a loud crunch on what might have been his knee. The instrument table next to him toppled over, metal clanking with a shrill clatter as it hit the institutional linoleum. Max scrambled to find something to cover all God had given him.

  “Sweet Lord Jesus!” he yelled.

  “I don’t think he’s going to help you today, Max,” I said.

  Miss Skinny Thing scrambled for her clothes and flew out the door. As I helped Max to the emergency room to get his knee looked at, I tried to provide comfort by reminding him that the average male would have seven sexual partners in his lifetime. I followed with the story of a Moroccan emperor who had held the Guinness World Record for siring at least 867 offspring. Before I rattled off some additional useless fact about the resilience of knees —I had a habit of spouting trivial facts when I got nervous—we arrived at the ER.

  The triage nurse asked what had happened. Max looked at me like an eight-year-old boy who had just been busted by his mom for stealing cookies.

  “Max was helping me. We were... moving morgue equipment,” I said in a thinly veiled rescue attempt, grasping for the first explanation that made sense. No one deserved Nurse Nancy’s wrath. “I’m so sorry you were hurt, Max.”

  Relief flashed across his face. “Uh, it’s all right. It was my own fault.”

  I left Max to the nurse and headed for the cafeteria. Between the text from Martin and that ordeal, I needed ice cream. Despite how often I had to play sex police in my new career, I still found it surreal that anyone would want to do that in a morgue. I was pretty sure Max now regretted the decision. I would be pissed if he filed for workers’ comp and I had to do the paperwork.

  The cafeteria generated customers for the hospital as much as it provided a service to families and employees. On most days, the main entrée looked unrecognizable, and brown gravy covered everything. Despite the questionable nature of the other food in the cafeteria, though, I could always count on the ice cream machine. I grabbed my cup of vanilla, heaped on some Oreo cookies as an extra treat, and headed for checkout.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but this card has been declined.”

  “Seriously?” I asked the cashier to try it again, but I knew what the result would be.

  Since my dad’s arrest on racketeering and money-laundering charges, every day brought a new reminder that my life had turned into a Shakespearean tragedy. Or maybe a comedy. Six months ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice
about spending thousands of dollars on a beautiful new Louis Vuitton handbag. Now, even scraping together change for ice cream from the hospital cafeteria proved challenging.

  When the police had arrested my dad, they froze all of our assets—bank accounts, credit cards, investment funds. They seized our house, leaving my mom and grandmother, Grand, homeless. We’d blown through my meager savings in the first few weeks after I’d moved home from Boston to help my family in the wake of my father’s arrest.

  If I didn’t want my mom, Grand, and me out on the streets and eating cat food, I needed a job. Luckily, Grand’s boyfriend, Claude, had some connections with county law enforcement. When he offered to put in a good word to help me land something, I was thrilled. I pictured myself as a receptionist at the police station or an assistant at the courthouse. But all he could get me was a job in the morgue, and it was better than nothing. While morgue work didn’t have much call for Art History, my minor in biology—along with my beauty pageant award for outstanding makeup—was good enough to land me here.

  My parents didn’t like to acknowledge my employment at all. They took every opportunity to insult my new job as being beneath me, asking when I would return to my more respectable job at a museum in Boston. As if I could. When Daddy was first arrested and I flew home to help Mom, I took one look at them and knew I was home to stay. I’d never seen my larger-than-life mother look so small and shaken. I didn’t understand how the people who’d raised me could seriously believe I’d be fine back in my cushy apartment while Grand sweated about whether mattresses in shelters could be Febrezed. Waters women stuck together. Waters women took care of their own.

  So now I worked at the morgue, waiting for the misunderstanding with my dad to be cleared. Because it was a misunderstanding. As if bean-counting Clarke Waters could be part of the mob.

  But my job barely paid enough to cover rent and an occasional Oreo ice cream splurge. The ice cream was supposed to be salve for my romantic soul. Before I’d interrupted Big Max, I’d been looking for a place to recover from the news that I was no longer going to be Mrs. Martin Eldridge of the Boston Eldridges.

  I turned from the cafeteria and headed to the morgue office, contemplating that my relationship was officially a casualty of my dad’s wrongful arrest. I was amazed that one misunderstanding could have wreaked so much havoc.

  As soon as I left Boston, Martin—or in my opinion, Martin’s mother—had concluded that with me in St. Louis, maybe it was best for us to “take a break.” He texted that the break would free me to focus on my family situation. Never mind that it had the added bonus of also delinking the Eldridges from a mob scandal. As soon as my dad was cleared, Martin and I would be back together. But looking at the Gucci hatpin and Michael Aram cheese board staring up at me from the box of exiled things I had received in the mail today, I had my doubts.

  I was shaken from my reverie by the morgue phone ringing down the hall, and I made a mad dash for it.

  “County morgue, Kat speaking. How may I assist you?” I managed to get out between gasps of air.

  “Oh, Katherine, there you are. For a moment, I thought maybe no one was there,” said the raspy voice at the other end of the line.

  “Sorry, Dr. Hawthorne. I was taking care of a problem with the elevator.”

  “If we could charge room fees for every time that happened, we might get enough money to upgrade some of our equipment.” Dr. Hawthorne, the medical examiner, was like a favorite high school science teacher—old and frumpy but kind of cool.

  I thought perhaps he’d hired me so he could brag about having a Harvard grad on staff, but he seemed to like me.

  “We have a murder victim on her way to you. I’m finishing some things up here with the detectives and folks from the mayor’s office.”

  “The mayor’s office?”

  “Yes, lots of eyes on this one, Katherine. We’ll need to be on our toes. Go ahead and start processing her. I’ll see you soon.”

  The county hospital morgue acted as overflow for the county medical examiner’s main office up the street. In my short stint at the morgue, I’d processed only one other murder. Male, black, twenty-two, allegedly killed by his brother for sleeping with his brother’s wife and stealing his power tools. I would have guessed a chain saw would slice clean through the man’s head, but there they were, the gurney and the body with the protruding chain saw, all rolling along.

  Curating bodies wasn’t much different from curating art, which had been my job at the museum in Boston. First came authentication to confirm that the art—or in this case, the body— was who it was claimed to be. Then came investigation of the story. The most valuable art pieces had interesting, verifiable stories. The most valuable autopsies were the ones that told the story the victim could no longer tell.

  Autopsies were broken into two phases, the external examination and the internal. As a diener—a German word for “servant” and, thankfully, one that sounded way fancier than “corpse washer” for when my mom talked to people at her bridge club—I had responsibility for the external exam and helping Dr. Hawthorne with the internal.

  I put on my gown, gloves, and shoe booties and found the voice recorder. Pulling my mop of wavy honey-brown hair into a ponytail, I flipped through my iPod for music to get me in the right mood and cranked up some Florence + the Machine. The paramedics pushed through the doors with the murder victim.

  My biology minor hadn’t been a total waste. When I looked at dead bodies, I rarely found them alarming. They almost looked like large rubber dolls. The blood drained and pooled at the body’s lowest point. If they were left lying on their backs, all the blood pooled there, or wherever gravity took it, giving the face a white rubbery appearance.

  I signed for the body and wheeled her to the autopsy room. The walls were a murky brown color probably called Morgue Drab. Two X-ray readers from the 1970s hung on the back wall, next to an enormous walk-in refrigerator that looked like it belonged in a Burger King. No fancy sliding drawers. Instead, bodies were placed like bags of lettuce on the shelves. Our facility could use an Extreme Makeover: Morgue Edition.

  Two steel exam tables with built-in sinks sat in front of the fridge. To the right was the sexavator. The wall to the left had a large floor scale and a table where the body could be processed. I rolled her over to the scale for weighing and transferred her to the mobile gurney. People would be surprised how easily someone could be moved when their comfort wasn’t a concern.

  The main way I knew the corpses weren’t dolls was by the smell. This woman had been dead longer than a few days. Within a couple of days of death, the bacteria that normally existed in the body started to eat the contents of the intestine, then the intestine itself. The bacteria were well on their way with this woman.

  Holding my nose, I glanced over her. Something didn’t seem quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t just that her face was covered with blood and numerous contusions. Underneath all that, she was beautiful. She wore what Grand would refer to as “hoochie mama” clothing—fishnets, thigh-high miniskirt, and low-cut blouse. A simple gold cross hung from her neck. Her hands were in bags, standard procedure for foul play. But her shoes made me gasp—gorgeous Valentino Rockstud caged stilettos worth close to a grand at Barneys.

  After leaving the autopsy room, I headed up the hallway and opened the door to what I loosely termed the evidence room, home of bad wigs, cheap costume jewelry, a surprising number of rubber blow-up devices, and evidence bags. Here, in various states of abandonment, were autopsy remains not needed in criminal cases but not claimed by family members after the case closed. Once I’d grabbed a couple of evidence bags from the back file cabinet, I returned to the autopsy room. I put all the jewelry into a bag and labeled it “Jane Doe.”

  Before beginning the inspection, I turned on the voice recorder.

  “Female Jane Doe, approximately nineteen or twenty, white, brown hair, brown eyes,” I began as a brisk slamming of the door interrupte
d me. At first, I thought Dr. Hawthorne had arrived sooner than expected. Then I heard a deep, silky voice I didn’t recognize.

  “What the hell kind of music is that, DC? Some new phase you’re in? Your phone’s off again. We’re only about ten minutes ahead of old man Hawthorne, so we have to work—”

  As I rounded the corner from the exam room, the man stopped talking and walking, apparently realizing I wasn’t who he’d expected. For a moment, I thought I’d walked onto the set of Extreme Loggers. He wasn’t a pretty man but was naturally rugged, his sharp jaw with a slight five o’clock shadow. He had coal-black, tousled, curly hair and deep, dark eyes and wore perfectly cut blue jeans and a slightly rumpled flannel shirt. He looked momentarily startled, then a cool mask slipped over his features. He stood tall, his posture locked tight, his eyes searching.

  “You’re not DC,” he said.

  “Is it the white skin that gives it away or the ponytail?” I replied, staring at him.

  He looked me over, his eyes narrowing with intense scrutiny, but he didn’t respond.

  Daryl Claiborne, DC to his friends, was a Southern black man and fellow morgue assistant. He was also my best friend. “He had to take his cat to the pet psychologist, so I’m covering for him. May I help you?”

  “Pet psychologist?” The man said the words quickly and began looking all around as if searching for something. His anxiousness reminded me that I was alone with a stranger.

  “Yes, it’s a growing profession. Americans spend forty-one billion dollars a year on their pets, more than the gross domestic product of all but sixty-four countries in the world.” And there it was. I couldn’t stop it. A nervous blurt with no other purpose than to make me look like a complete idiot. “I’m sorry, Mr....”

  “McPhee, Burns McPhee.”

  “Mr. McPhee. I have a lot of work to do. I’ll let DC know you came by.”

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t turn to go. He stood there as if sizing up the situation and what to do next.