Over Her Dead Body Read Online Free PDF

story, but she delegated to Nash the job of editing my copy. The former editor of a now defunct men’s magazine that the company had owned, he seemed too old and brainy to be at
Buzz,
but according to rumor he was biding his time until another number one gig opened up. He was a little mercurial—sometimes gruff, sometimes friendly, sometimes even flirty—but he was never a meany. He asked good questions and shortened some of my sentences, making my copy snappier.
    I also enjoyed being out in the pod, the epicenter of action. Ryan pretty much ignored me, but I really dug Jessie—and Leo was unintentionally amusing. By week two he’d educated me on the difference between “stalkerazzi” and “cooperazzi” photos. Stalkerazzi were the ones taken against the celebrity’s wishes. Cooperazzi shots looked like those of stalkerazzi, but, according to Leo, the celebrities actually
wanted
you to see them in those situations.
    Unfortunately, that’s where the good stuff ended. The atmosphere at
Buzz
was often vile thanks to Mona. Her verbal bullwhipping was never directed at me personally, but seeing others subjected to it was about as much fun as watching someone have his stomach pumped. I’d learned since I started work that there was even a Web site called “I Survived MonaHodges.com.”
    And it wasn’t simply that she was a tyrant. What really incensed the staff was that she was always upending things, like a toddler in a high chair who’s suddenly unhappy or bored with the SpaghettiOs and flips the bowl upside down. She would tear up pages of the magazine just before we went to press so that they’d have to be done all over again.
    Even when she wasn’t being difficult, she was just plain weird. She had this bizarre obsession with food, which led to all sorts of chaos. For instance, she swore that the French fries at the McDonald’s on Ninth Avenue were the best in the city, and she frequently dispatched one of her two assistants all the way over there to purchase them.
    Surprisingly, I rarely saw much of Robby other than at daily meetings, where he tended to keep his head low. His office was around the corner from the pod, near the entrance from reception, and he was generally there when I hightailed it out of the place at night. One day when I was using the copier near his office, I overheard Mona drop one of his stories on his desk and bark, “This sucks, do you know that?”
    At first I told myself to give it time, that eventually I’d be able to ignore Mona and just focus on what I liked about the job. But I was near the end of my rope and had adopted a different strategy: to hang in through the publication of my book in the fall. Having the connection to
Buzz
would be an enormous advantage and would surely help me line up some press interviews. I would just have to do my best to not let Mona get under my skin.
    It was actually Mona who called with the news about Kimberly. She had phoned me once or twice at home before, but never this early in the morning. As soon as I heard her say my name, I felt this large, prickly pit begin to form in my tummy, as if a porcupine had managed to wedge its way in there.
    “Did you hear the news?” she asked bluntly. “Kimberly Chance was arrested last night.”
    Had I
heard
the news? Did the woman think I kept a police scanner in my bedroom?
    “No, I didn’t hear,” I said. The truth was always best with Mona, because, as I’d suspected on the first day I’d met her, she could smell a lie the way some people could smell a dead mouse in the walls. “What for?”
    “Hitting a policeman,” she said. “They say she’s going to be arraigned today. What does that mean, exactly?”
    “It means she’ll be going before the judge to plead—guilty or not guilty. I’ll go down for the arraignment.”
    “Can you go
now
?”
    “The courts don’t start till nine-thirty,” I explained. “Should I give Robby a call? He’d probably want to be there since it’s his