Free Morgue Mama by C.R. Corwin

religion editor. She was cradling another cactus for her desk. She already had a dozen of them, some of them two feet tall. The newsroom joke is that they thrive on Nanette’s dry prose. Instead of making my usual beeline to the morgue, I meandered through metro to Aubrey’s desk.
    Aubrey was busy putting a human face on the half-naked female corpse found over the weekend in the parking lot of an abandoned factory on Morrow Street. Morrow runs parallel with the interstate, in the southern end of the 3rd District. There are lots of abandoned factory buildings there. They find lots of bodies there.
    “Prostitute?” I asked. The female bodies were almost always prostitutes, the male bodies almost always drug dealers.
    She gave me an of-course-she-was shrug while looking for her coffee mug among the clutter. “Mother with three little kids, too. She had their pictures in her purse. Among the needles and condoms, and the wad of lottery tickets.”
    “You want me to pull any files for you?” I asked.
    “Eric’s already on it,” she said. She took a gulp from her mug—I could tell from her expression that the coffee was cold. “Just stay on him, Maddy. He’s got the attention span of a snowflake in Honolulu.”
    I squinted toward the morgue. Eric was at his computer, eyes six inches from the screen, arched hands attacking his keyboard like tap-dancing tarantulas. “He looks sufficiently motivated,” I said.
    She knew what I meant. “Don’t even go there—he’s the world’s biggest geek.”
    “A geek in heat,” I said.
    She dismissed me with a long “Puh-leeze” and another gulp of cold coffee.
    I circled through the morgue to hang up my coat and get my mug, and then went to the cafeteria to fix my first dose of Darjeeling tea. When I returned Doreen Poole was waiting for me at my desk. “I need some stuff on the mayors’ wives,” she said.
    “The mayor has more than one wife? Now that’s a story.”
    Doreen started nibbling at her lower lip. I love to piss her off. And it’s not just because she’s the one who started the Morgue Mama thing. It’s the way she floats through her day like a soggy cloud, oblivious to all the parades she’s raining on. “The wives of past mayors,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing a story about how their role has changed over the years.”
    “Thinking of doing a story?” I asked. This is the part of my job I’ve always hated. Reporters are always
thinking
of doing a story on something. What it means is that they don’t have anything important to write about at the moment, so they try to pull some flimsy feature story out of thin air. They’ll have Eric or me work for hours finding
stuff
about the story they’re
thinking
of writing. Then something important does happen on their beat and they’re off on that and all our work was for nothing. “Let me guess, Doreen,” I said. “You saw that documentary on A&E last night about the presidents’ wives and you thought it might be interesting to localize it.”
    “I think it would be interesting.”
    I fished the tea bag out of my mug. At home I always add a couple squirts of skimmed milk and honey to my Darjeeling tea. At work I drink it straight. Darjeeling is one of the famous black teas from northern India, grown in the shadows of Mt. Everest, which has always been my favorite mountain. When reporters come to the morgue begging for my files on this or that, I want them to go away feeling they’ve just climbed Everest. “My guess is that the lives of mayors’ wives haven’t changed much over the years,” I said. “They slowly turn into alcoholics waiting for their husbands to come home at night.”
    I told Doreen to make me a list of some specific mayors’ wives and I’d see what I could find. After she threw back her head and stormed off, I threw my teabag in the trash and went to work finding everything we had on Tim Bandicoot, his wife Annie, and his rival, Guthrie Gates.
    ***
     
    Friday, April