Over Her Dead Body

Over Her Dead Body Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Over Her Dead Body Read Online Free PDF
Author: Kate White
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, FIC022000
guess what that’s about?” she whispered.
    “Somebody wrote an unfunny caption?”
    “No, I suspect it’s about the chicken salad. Mona has it for lunch every day at two. If the celery content is over thirty-five percent, someone’s ass is on the line.”
    I was too speechless to reply. What have I gotten myself into? I wondered. But in truth I hadn’t seen anything yet. At around six-thirty, Mona came trouncing out of her office packed like an Italian sausage into an orange Dolce & Gabbana evening gown and asked an editorial assistant two desks away from me to put concealer on the eczema patches on her back. I had to fight the urge to gag.
    “God,” I muttered to myself, “this is going to be murder.”
    Six weeks later, to my absolute horror, I turned out to be right.

CHAPTER 2
    A s a crime writer, I’ve often had people remark to me that celebrities are treated differently by the legal system from the rest of us. Cops, for instance, supposedly handle them with kid gloves, and juries show them more leniency. I’m not sure if that’s true—I’ve never seen any hard evidence on it. But there’s one thing I know for a fact. When you commit a crime in New York City and are arraigned in court, you go through a series of humiliations that doesn’t vary no matter how famous you are.
    It starts with processing in the police station. That’s where the paperwork is done. Afterward you are transferred to the courthouse at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan and are placed in one of the holding cells in the basement—more commonly known as “the pens.” I’ve never been down there, but I hear they stink to high heaven, especially in summer. The courthouse opens at nine-thirty, and you are eventually brought upstairs to face the judge in one of the two arraignment courtrooms on the ground floor. They call this “producing the body.”
    I was considering what a great equalizer arraignment is as I sat in AR-1—arraignment courtroom number one—on a squelching hot Tuesday in July six weeks after my arrival at
Buzz.
The air conditioner seemed to be on the fritz, and four or five large standing fans were making such a loud whirring noise that you couldn’t hear a damn word the lawyers or judge were saying.
    The “body” I was waiting to behold was that of singer Kimberly Chance—or, as she’d been dubbed by “Juice Bar,”
Fat
Chance—a twenty-seven-year-old white-trashy singer who had become famous a year ago after winning a reality TV contest called
Star Maker,
a rip-off of
American Idol.
Last night she’d become involved in an altercation with her boyfriend outside a downtown club. When a police officer attempted to break it up, she slapped him across the face—the cop, not the boyfriend. I learned of this development at six a.m. and had arrived in court at nine-thirty. It was now eleven, and though there was still no sign of Kimberly, I knew she’d come through the back door eventually. According to the law in New York, the body has to be produced within twenty-four hours.
    Celebrities like Kimberly had been committing crimes at a steady pace this summer, enough to guarantee me two or three days of work a week at
Buzz.
To my surprise, I liked certain aspects of my job more than I’d thought I would. Granted, I was working at a magazine that published articles primarily about the binges, breakups, and botched plastic surgeries of the stars. Actually, “article” is probably the wrong word. Many pages were made up mostly of photos with deep captions or chartlike articles that someone on staff had dubbed “charticles.” But my pieces were generally given more room and ran about the length of a crime piece in
People.
I even sort of liked covering celebrities. Their crimes as a whole just seemed more titillating than those of mere mortals.
    And just as Robby had predicted, Mona appeared to be slightly in awe of me. She often sent me e-mails with tips she’d received, or she offered her own take on a
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