Honey, Is That A Dead
Hooker Under Our Bed?
by J.A. Kazimer

 

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Kristy McMillan said, thrusting her head against the fluffy, hotel pillow. The creak of the mattress springs kept a steady rhythm. The sexual symphony sounded vaguely like: Creak… groan… oh, baby… harder… creak… With an oh, God, oh, yes, thrown in for good measure.

Stan McMillan, the Waterbed King of the greater northeastern Peoria area and Kristy’s husband of two and a half days, counted backwards from one thousand, trying to talk himself out of coming. The conversation in his brain went like this: 976...Don’t do it...975…Cum now and she’ll divorce you…974…Oh, God…SHIT!

“Damn it.” She smacked him in the head when he collapsed on top of her in an exhausted heap of spent, sweaty lust. Rolling his body off hers and onto the red satin sheets, she sat up. In the eerie glow of light streaming from the Las Vegas strip below, she opened the nightstand drawer, searching for her own satisfaction. Her hand brushed a leather bound bible, caressing the cheap inlayed gold.

Shit, where was it? Her hand pushed further back into the drawer, locating George, her vibrating companion, aptly named for the forty-third president. George was big, loud, and uncaring about poor Stan’s premature incompetence issues.

She pulled George out, and flicked him on. The low murmur of rattling plastic and batteries hummed throughout the room, as a pinpointed beam of light shot from the tip. George wasn’t very bright, but it got the job done. More than she could say about her husband. “Uuuuhhhhhaaa,” she moaned, pressing the cold plastic to her.

“Honey?” Stan wrinkled his nose.

“What?!” Patience wasn’t a virtue for Kristy, and neither was brains, but Stan loved her anyway. It might have had something to do with her d-cup breasts, thirty-inch waist, and bleach blonde hair. Big boobs, a mouth like a vacuum, and a hot body went a long way to make up for half-frozen dinners, and thousand dollar invoices from pet psychics. However, late at night, satiated and satisfied, Stan knew it went much deeper than the physical. They were two of a kind, two peas in the proverbial pod. His friends didn’t understand what he saw in her, but they didn’t know his terrible secret either. No one did.

He waved a hand in front of his nose. “Do you smell something?”

“If you are trying to get me to smell your farts, forget it.” She turned George off, and switched on the light.

Stan frowned. “No…it smells like something died…”

Eyes narrowing, she sniffed the air. “Yewwww.” She reached over him, picking up the hotel phone. Pressing zero, she waited for the operator to answer.

“How may I direct your call?” the polite voice on the phone asked.

“My room smells like death.”

“Excuse me?”

Kristy repeated the comment. “My husband is paying twelve hundred a night for this suite, and it stinks.” She could hear the clattering of keys on a keyboard.

Finally, the voice said, “Have you looked under the bed?”

“What?”

“Under the bed. This is Vegas after all.” The voice sighed and hung up the phone.

She scrambled off the bed. “Move away from the bed!”

“What? What is it?” Stan glanced around, confusion and fear growing in his eyes.

She pointed to the mattress, and he shrugged his shoulders in question. She indicated again, stomping her foot. “Look under the mattress, you jerk.”

Gripping the edge of the bed, he tugged. The mattress slid a few inches to the right. Kristy stood behind him, peering into the darkness. “I can’t see anything. Can you?”

He shook his head.

“Pull it all the way off.”

Swallowing hard, he did as she asked. The mattress fell onto his foot. “Fuck,” he squealed and jumped around, arms flailing like a skittish cat. His fist smashed into the glitzy Tiffany lamp on the nightstand, knocking it to the floor with a crash. Bits of glass flew everywhere and the room went dark.

“Fuck,” Kristy echoed, as he slammed into her, knocking her to the shag pink carpeting. Stan, naked and hopping on one foot, ran into the nightstand again, sending ‘George’ and himself flying backwards into the bed frame. There was a loud bang, and then dead silence.

 

 

“Stan?” she ventured from her place on the floor. “Honey, are you hurt?”

“Call an ambulance!” came his reply.

“Oh, baby. Did you break something?” She stumbled to the phone, dialing 911.

A weak beam of light shot from inside the bed frame, as did the buzz of George on high speed. “Not exactly.”

Kristy gazed into the bed frame. Stan lay sprawled on top of what looked like a dead body. In one of Stan’s hands was George, and in the other, a prosthetic leg with bright purple toenails airbrushed onto its stubby plastic toes. Kristy’s scream echoed along the strip twenty stories below.

#

“Until two hours ago, you had no idea there was a dead hooker under the bed?” A bored cop in a bright yellow oxford shirt asked Kristy. They were standing in the hallway outside the suite, waiting for the crime scene technicians to clear it.

Nodding, she wiped her eyes with a snotty tissue. “How could this have happened?”

“Well, this is Vegas after all.” He shrugged. “We get three or four of these cases a year. Fucking tourist.” He paused. “No offense.”

“How long had that poor…woman…been down there?”

The cop took out a notebook, and flipped through a few pages. “Looks like twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Your husband was a lucky man.” She glared at him, and he quickly added, “If the body had been in full rigor when he landed on top of her, he might have been hurt.”

Twisting her wedding ring, she declared, “But we’ve been in this suite for the last two and a half days.”

The cop’s eyes narrowed. “Have you been with Stan the entire time?”

Her face paled. “Stan would never do something like this. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Doubt crept into her eyes. “Of course, his first wife died under mysterious circumstances…”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, you see, I met Stan six months ago. He’d been widowed for four…”

The cop touched the tip of his pen to paper and took notes as Kristy told him all about Stan. At one point, his hand cramped and he had to ask her to slow down. Fifteen minutes later, the sordid tale of Stan’s first wife’s death, and how he couldn’t satisfy Kristy in bed were duly noted.

#

“Mr. McMillan, we have your fingerprints all over the victim, as well as DNA. A casino camera caught you in the bar chatting with her three hours before. Why don’t you just tell me what happened?” A plain-clothes detective said in a friendly tone. His freshly pressed suit, and product-slicked hair made Stan feel like a bum in comparison. Stan’s hair stuck up at odd angles, and he wore a pink hotel bathrobe.

“I told you already, Officer.” Detective G.P. Roberts was neatly typed on the shiny metal of the detective’s badge, but Stan refused to call him Detective. “My fingerprints and…other stuff…got on her body when I fell on top of her. As for talking to her in the bar, I have no idea what you are talking about. I’d never even met her.” Stan shook his head.

That was the truth, wasn’t it? He closed his eyes, and pictured her face—eyes and mouth wide—eyes vacant, so like his mothers. She looked like something out of a Wes Craven flick, a thick sheen of plastic reflecting off the dildo-flashlight. Like Freddy Krueger in a bad porno movie.

“She was a beautiful woman…well, if you could overlook the prosthetic leg and the penis…” Detective Roberts smiled, as Stan flinched. “Was that why you killed her, because she was a man?”

“She was a man?”

“Yes, born Radcliff Reginald the Third.”

 

 

Stan gave a whole body shiver. “He…she…looked like a woman…” The detective shrugged. “This is Las Vegas—Drag Queen capital of the World.” He leaned forward, resting his meaty arms against the table. “So the two of you got acquainted at the bar, you invited her up to your room for a little action while the misses took in a show, you got what you wanted—a little sucky, a little fucky—and blam out comes her penis and all bets are off. So you wrapped a Glad bag around her head…”

“No!” Stan threw his hands over his ears. “I didn’t kill her…him.” He pounded his fist on the table, the pink sleeves of the housecoat muting his ire. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Not even your first wife?”

Stan’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“Mrs. Debra McMillan was found inside the trash can of the family home.” The detective read from a file. “The cause of death was asphyxiation. The lead investigator believed she tripped and fell into the waste basket, which conveniently tangled around her head as she slowly suffocated to death.”

Stan squeaked, “How…

“Now do you want to keep playing games or are you going to come clean?”

Stan sighed. This was going to be a long night.

#

“Will the defendant please rise?” a tall, African American bailiff said, gesturing to Stan.

He shuffled to his feet. A grim-faced, lawyer stood next to him, staring at the tabletop. Kristy, dressed in black as if she was attending a funeral rather than a trial, sat directly behind him, softly sniffling into a red, silk handkerchief. Stan swallowed hard, and faced the judge.

The honorable, William Legacy, read from a small slip of paper. “In the matter of the state of Nevada versus Stanley Homer McMillan, what say you?” he asked the juror foreman, a man with sharp, irregular features and an ulcer.

The foreman stood, clearing his throat like a cat with a hairball. “We the jury,” he paused looking directly at Stan, “find the defendant guilty of second degree murder.”

With a choked cry, Kristy jumped from her seat. “Nooooo,” she wailed, grasping at an emotionless Stan as he was dragged away in handcuffs. Detective G. P. Roberts nodded in satisfaction—one more dirt bag off the streets.

#

Later that night, after giving interviews to all the local news stations, Kristy sat, sipping a vodka martini and flipping through the hundreds of hotel porno stations. Her thoughts drifted to Stan. He had looked devastated as the cops led him off—almost defeated—a broken shell of the once powerful Waterbed King. She rubbed her tired eyes, and shakily stood. Too much vodka, she thought, weaving slightly.

Heading into the bathroom, she stripped off her black dress. Underneath she wore nothing but lotion and sheer onyx stockings. She twisted the shower knob to hot, and stepped into the steamy water, letting it run along her cellulite-free body.

Bang.

Kristy jumped, her heart slamming wildly in her overdeveloped chest. She quickly shut off the water, and grabbed a towel. “Hello?” she tentatively called. “Is anyone there?”

No response.

She made her way into the bedroom, carefully searching the shadows. Nothing. Sighing with relief, she sat on the waterbed, running her fingers through her wet hair. Drips of water formed a puddle on the carpeting underneath her feet.

A voice from the shadows of the thick fabric curtains whispered, “Did you look under the bed?”

Kristy screamed, dropping her towel.

The curtain moved and from the darkness, Detective G. P. Roberts stepped out.

“Where the hell have you been?” Kristy asked, throwing herself into his arms. “I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”

“Can’t get enough of me?”

She smiled—a demure, coy smile meant to tempt, tease, and ultimately bring a man to his knees. “More like I want to make sure you don’t fuck this up. Jail is no place for a lady.”

He looked hurt. “When have I ever made a mistake?”

She tilted her head. “That’s true.”

 

 

 

Carrying her to the bed, he dropped her onto the red satin sheets. The water filled bed sloshed and her silicone breasts rode the wave like a pro. He came down next to her, sliding his hands along her shapely curves with a smirk. “It makes me nuts to think of his hands on you.”

Pulling at G.P.’s belt, she smiled. “They weren’t on me all that long. As a matter of fact, I had a more fulfilling relationship with a tube of plastic.”

“Well, I’m here to make you forget all about your plastic pal, George…”

As if he could, she thought with a grin.

#

Two hours later, G.P. had been good to his word. Kristy yawned and stretched like a well-fed black widow, smiling lazily at his muscled body. “Where ever did you find a transvestite, one-legged hooker?”

He shrugged. “A dumpster next to Circus Circus. He’d been dead a day or so.”

“I almost shit when I saw the leg. You could have warned me.” She playfully tugged on his dark chest hair.

He laughed. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“That it was.” She sat up, pulling the sheet over her breasts. “The videotape in the bar…how did you do that?”

“I hired some hooker to approach dear old Stan, make it look like he was looking for some action.” He twisted a blonde lock of her hair through his fingers. “The video was grainy, and the bar is pretty dark. It could have been anyone. But as long as the jury bought it, that’s all that mattered.”

“Good point. And buy it they did.” She laughed, thinking of the jurors’ disgusted faces as they watched Stan pick up a gimpy transvestite.

“So Mrs. McMillan, what do you plan to do with your jailbird husband’s millions?”

Closing her eyes, she pictured all the things she would do, and buy—a houseboat on the Rivera, a ski cabin in Vail, and a winery in Napa…

“Why didn’t you just kill him out right?” G.P. asked, scratching his head.

For a detective, he wasn’t all that bright. “If he died, half of the estate would go to his various relatives and friends. Hell, even his maid gets a couple thousand.” She shook her head. “No, I want it all. I deserve it too after putting up with his slobbery kisses, sweaty balls, and premature ejaculation.”

“You are one cold hearted woman,” G.P. said, kissing her neck. “You always have been.”

“And that’s what you love about me.” She kissed him, trapping his hands against the headboard with thick, silk scarves. He smiled, closing his eyes as she wound the bonds around his wrists. Let the games begin…

#

In the mirror above the bed, Kristy watched G.P. sleep, his hands still tied to the bed. How innocent and sweet he looked, like a child resting after a long, hard day at play. She smiled, and kissed his forehead. He moaned, but didn’t return to consciousness.

Her hand moved toward the nightstand, a smile on her face. She let her fingers do the walking, shifting from side to side until they found the ultimate prize. Ah, she thought, as they touched the cold, shimmering plastic. Quietly, she pulled it out, excitement filling her.

“What th—,” was all G.P. could get out before the plastic bag was wrapped tightly around his face. He struggled against his bonds, weakening as oxygen slowly seeped from his blood. His lungs burned, and his brain began to shut down. The last thing he saw through the clear plastic was Kristy’s smiling face and the love of her life, a ten-inch vibrator named George.