Mother Knows Best (A Margie Peterson Mystery) by Karen MacInerney Read Free Book Online

a studded dog collar my daughter would have killed for.
    “Who the hell are you?” she asked, eyeing me as if I were the one wearing a leather bustier and a dog collar. I kept my eyes on hers; it was too awkward to look anywhere else.
    Peaches’s voice came from somewhere behind her. “Is that Margie?”
    The woman in leather cocked an eyebrow at me, and I nodded.
    “Think so,” she yelled back, still giving me a speculative look. “I thought you said you were calling some muscle.”
    “She’s stronger than she looks,” Peaches said, coming up behind the woman in the bustier. “Beefy.”
    “Beefy?” I said. Granted, maybe I did have a bit of a chocolate addiction, but . . . beefy ? “You’re not exactly sylphlike yourself, you know.”
    “Keep your pants on and get in here,” she said, waving me inside. I risked a quick glance downward. I did have pants on, but the woman who’d answered the door definitely did not. As I stepped inside and the leather-woman closed the door behind me, I reflected that I’d seen more female flesh in the past twelve hours than I had in the past year.
    And I was about to see a dead body, too. Oh, boy.
    “So,” I said, not sure how to broach the subject of the corpse. “The Buick looks just like new.”
    “Tony did a good job, didn’t he?” Peaches asked, tugging her dress down. “I’m glad I got it back tonight—this isn’t the kind of job where you want to call a cab,” she said. “Did you bring the van?”
    “Of course.”
    “Good,” she said. “Because I don’t think we can fit him in my trunk.”
    “I am not putting a dead person in my minivan,” I said, holding up my right hand. “I drive my children to school in that van!”
    Peaches sighed. “Let’s at least show you what we’re looking at.”
    “What are we looking at, anyway?” I asked, wishing I’d never answered my phone.
    “We didn’t kill him,” Peaches said. “Promise. We’re just putting him in a place where he won’t get Desiree in trouble.”
    I grimaced, feeling fairly sure that coming here was a really, really, really bad idea, but followed my boss into the living room anyway. The space was tastefully decorated, with light-blue couches and a green-and-blue swirly rug that looked like it could handle all kinds of stains. “Where did you get that rug?” I asked, thinking it would look good in my own living room.
    “Isn’t it cute?” Desiree said, adjusting the strap of her bustier. “I found it at Pottery Barn last week. End-of-summer sale; it was thirty percent off.”
    “If you’re done with the HGTV highlights, he’s in here,” Peaches interrupted from down the hallway.
    “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that,” I said, and headed down the hall to where she stood next to an open door.
    If the living room looked like something out of a lifestyle catalog, the bedroom—if you could call it that—was decorated in a style I’d call “Spanish Inquisition.” An assortment of whips and flails lined the walls, and a series of complicated-looking leather harnesses hung from a beam in the ceiling. The only thing out of place was the pink-mermaid wading pool in the middle of the floor. And the dead man in it.
    “Why is he wearing green tights and a belt?” I asked. He was pale and paunchy, and had fallen so that he was half out of the pool. A big red gunshot wound gaped in the middle of his back, and blood was pooling on the pink vinyl. It wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen, and I’d known it was coming, but it was still a shock.
    “And goggles,” Peaches added.
    “He had a thing for water,” Desiree said. “He liked me to call him Aquaman.”
    Peaches sniffed, and I wrinkled my nose. It smelled like the kids’ bathroom when we were potty-training Nick.
    “Water, eh? You mean, like golden showers?” Peaches asked.
    “Yeah.” Desiree sounded a little sheepish. “He paid extra for me to pee on him,” she said. “I always had to drink two Big Gulps before he came