Dose of Murder, Mystery and Mayhem , livre ebook

A Dose of Murder, Mystery and Mayhem
Edited by
Nicole Gestalt
featuring stories from
Michael Bracken Albert Tucher
Casey Pascal P.R. Chase
Logan Zachary Edmond Fumki
Morrigan Cox
and
Hollis Queens




A Dose of Murder, Mystery and Mayhem
Published in 2016 by
House of Erotica
www.houseoferoticabooks.com
an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2016 House of Erotica under exclusive licence from the individual authors
The rights of the authors have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.



Introduction
A Dose of Murder, Mystery and Mayhem brings together an eclectic mix of stories from P.I.’s to mischievous maids and a mix of changing room detectives thrown in - there is something for everyone who likes their erotica tinged with intrigue.
When a submission call is put out into the world you never know quite what sort of stories you will get sent back - that is part of the excitement of putting together an anthology. I will admit I was both nervous and excited to read the submissions. When they started to trickle in I wasn’t disappointed. The stories I have selected show off a number of different styles that have been the core of all good mystery stories for many years.
So whether you like your stories with a bit of grit or more light hearted cosy mystery all there stories pack a bit of heat and I hope you enjoy!
Nicole Gestalt
August 2016



Selfies
by Michael Bracken
I had once supported myself quite well by tailing cheating spouses, taking revealing photographs of their infidelities, and delivering prints and negatives to divorce attorneys and the clients they represented. Social media and changing social mores eliminated much of my business. Cheaters now out themselves through their posts, tweets, and selfies. Sexual activities that had once been illegal even between consenting adults bound by marriage are now the subject of bestselling books and casual discussion among co-workers.
Though a sporadic trickle of clients keeps my balance sheet in the black, I did not replace my buxom receptionist when she accepted a better offer from the insurance company with offices two floors below mine, nor did I replace my curvaceous girlfriend when she received a better offer from a senior partner at the law firm where she works as a paralegal. So, I spend my days surfing the Internet and my evenings trying to remember what it feels like to get laid by a woman who doesn’t charge for massages with happy endings.
Sitting in my office one Tuesday morning, reading the day’s headlines on the local newspaper’s website, I heard a delicate cough. I looked up to see a slender blonde standing in the open doorway. She wore a black sheath dress that hugged her minimal curves, held her purse in one hand and held a manila envelope in the other. She was almost pretty.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s no one out front.”
“My receptionist is on break,” I explained. I didn’t explain that Stella’s break had lasted almost eighteen months. “Do you have an appointment?”
My visitor shook her head. “I’m sorry. Do I need one?”
I made a production of checking my empty appointment calendar. “I have time now,” I said as I motioned toward the two chairs on the visitor side of my desk. “Come in. Have a seat.”
She crossed the room, examined both chairs, and then selected the one closest to my desk.
I asked, “What can I do for you?”
“You did some work for my mother.” She opened the manila envelope, pulled out half a dozen glossy 8”x10” photographs, and spread them across my desk.
In the top photograph, an older, prettier, and quite naked version of the woman sitting on the far side of my desk was impaled beneath an equally naked man half her age who had a distinctive port-wine birthmark on his left ass cheek. I did not need to examine the photographs to remember the woman, though I pretended I did as I sifted through them and felt myself becoming aroused. Janice Shepherd was the only client I ever had so desperate to end her marriage that she hired me to prove her infidelity, and photographing her with her lover had been one of the few times I used a tripod and a timer. I asked, “How did you find me?”
The blonde flipped one of the photographs over and I saw my name and address rubber-stamped on the back. She said, “I hadn’t expected to find you here after all these years, Mr. Flock, but I had to try.”
“Carl.” Like her, I hadn’t expected to find myself in the same office after all these years. I had gone private after three years spent walking a beat in a bad neighbourhood, and, after a few prosperous years that saw me adding a receptionist and subcontracting work to off-duty beat cops I had once worked with, I had thought I was riding a rocket to the top. Instead, I’d gone into free fall. “Call me Carl.”
As Janice’s daughter reached across the top of my desk and we shook hands, she said, “Kathleen Shepherd.”
“What can I do for you Miss Shepherd?”
“I was five when my parents divorced,” she said. “Neither one ever told me why. My father took his own life a few years later, but my mother didn’t pass until recently. While going through her things, I found these.”
Kathleen nodded at the six photographs still spread across my desk. They had been carefully cultivated from several hundred taken over the course of a long evening which left my client satisfied and her pre-Viagra lover spent. I had been careful to make prints of only those photographs in which the woman was identifiable, and I had destroyed all negatives in which any part of the man’s face was visible. “I didn’t realize you were a private investigator,” she said. “I thought you were a photographer.”
“I am when I need to be,” I said.
“So, why did you take these pictures?”
“The same reason I took all the others like these,” I explained. “To help people exit bad marriages.”
“My father hired you?” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Both of my parents are dead, so there’s no one left to protect.”
I didn’t correct her. There’s always someone to protect.
***
When Kathleen Shepherd exited my office a few minutes later, I never expected to see her again. That afternoon, the insurance company downstairs called with an assignment. An auto-mobile accident victim with no identifiable social media presence was claiming a back injury. Two days later I delivered several dozen digital photographs of the man unloading flat screen televisions from the back of a stolen delivery truck. The following week I helped an elderly woman without computer skills locate a long-lost cousin, and I was back to killing time cruising the Internet when Edgar Wainwright invited me to lunch at his club.
I had neither seen nor spoken to Wainwright in several years and was surprised to see how little retirement had changed him. Though his lion’s mane of hair had completed its transition from black to silver and the creases at the corners of his eyes had deepened, he still wore a tailored three-piece suit and still stood ramrod straight when he greeted me.
“How many divorce cases did you work for me?” Wainwright asked after we settled into place at his table and I had my fist wrapped around a tumbler of Jack-and-Coke.
“Several dozen,” I said. I had never known Wainwright to represent a male client in a divorce, and I suspected he hired some of the women I found straddling drunken husbands in cheap motel rooms, but his checks cleared the bank so I never asked questions. “You were my best client.”
“One of them has come back to bite us in the ass,” he said.
Though I had a premonition, I asked, “Which one?”
“The Shepherds,” he said. “Janice and Charles. They had a daughter, must have been five when they divorced, and she was in the office the other day. She had questions about some photos she’d found.”
I didn’t tell him Kathleen had been to see me first. “You spoke to her?”
“No,” Wainwright said. “One of the junior partners told her the attorney who handled her mother’s divorce had retired and suggested she let the matter drop. After he escorted her from the office, he phoned me.”
I sipped from my drink.
“This should never have happened,” Wainwright said. “I told Mrs. Shepherd to destroy the photographs after we had the final decree. There should have been nothing for her daughter to find.”
That the photos still existed had surprised me, but I had not been bothered by their existence nearly as much as Wainwright.
“You need to dissuade Miss Shepherd from asking any more questions about those photographs.” Wainwright opened his wallet and fanned six crisp Benjamins on the table between us. “This should be enough to get you started.”
I scooped up the money, folded it in half, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. Then I finished my Jack-and-Coke and returned to my office to spend time rereading my file from the Shepherd case, refreshing my memory of the events that led to my photographing Wainwright’s client in flagrante delicto.
***
Charles Shepherd came from generations of family money, had been a professor of biblical history, and was president of the state’s largest Bible college at the time of the divorce. Janice Wilson Shepherd came