NOTE FROM HAL: The Office Wife is the second book, after The Nest, in  a new mystery series. Teddie and Herman are each in loving but sexless marriages; so they have become (as the series is called) Friends with Benefits.

They share the narration of these mysteries in alternating first-person voices. Here, in the first 1,000 words of the novel, she is in boldface; he is in plain text.

Chapter 0

I saw it first. The body.

We’d snuck into the abandoned factory from the old railroad tracks. I took pictures of the giant machinery until my phone wouldn’t flash anymore. Grimy skylights, almost as opaque as the roof, didn’t let in much light. I looked up at them, but I should have been watching my feet. I tripped over something on the floor. It was soft.

A woman lay on her back, with her head to one side. She couldn’t have been there since the factory closed. Her ankle boots, jeans, turtleneck sweater and down jacket had none of the old dust on them. And she didn’t smell. She hadn’t, you know, decomposed.

“Herman!”

He trotted over. “Oh my God!”

I didn’t want to touch her. Neither did he, but he knelt beside her and held his phone close to her nostrils. The screen didn’t fog up. This was the worst kind of déjà vu. We’d have to call 911. Again.

Last year we discovered a dead body, but telling the police did not turn out well for us.

We didn’t want to make the call. But civic responsibility (like “The Force”) is strong with us. We both punched in the digits.

My phone got answered first, so Teddie hung up hers.

“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“So, uh, there’s a body. A woman. She’s not breathing. I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”

“What’s your location?”

“The TimberTime furniture factory on Old Capital Road, between Dundee and Morris.”

“Please remain where you are and stay on the line. We’ll have someone there shortly.”

Teddie said, “They’ll be coming from the street side. Let’s find a door and open it for them.”

In the dim light we made our way carefully, walking through grit that stuck to our shoes, on a floor littered with half-finished chair and table legs. I stepped on one of them; it rolled underfoot and I lost my balance. Teddie caught my arm. Kept me from landing on my backside. She’s strong from playing tennis.

But then she slipped on something herself and snagged her coat sleeve on a flange sticking out from one of the hulking machines. I leaned against it to un-hook her coat and came away with a stinky oil stain all the way down my pants. Eventually we got out of the factory floor and into a hallway with frosted-glass office doors. Beyond that was the lobby.

I remembered the lobby. When I was in public school we had a field trip here, to show us how furniture was made. All the machines were running then, with a deafening cacophony. (Not many safety rules in those days. Nobody wore earplugs.) And the lobby had been filled with the factory’s chairs and tables, cabinets and chests of drawers on display. Now it was silent and empty.

The main entrance on Old Capital Road had a big double door with tall windows on either side through which we saw the emergency van drive up. Two EMTs—a man and a woman—jumped out carrying their kits. I rattled the door and yelled, “It won’t open!”

“Move away, sir.”

His partner went out of my sight for a moment, then returned with a fire-fighter’s axe. I jumped back from the door as she broke through the adjacent window and knocked away the shards. They picked up their kits, switched on headlamps, and followed Teddie and me through the lobby and the office hall, onto the factory floor.

The stethoscope failed to find a heartbeat, and the oximeter clipped to her finger didn’t register a pulse. She really was dead.

Quick footsteps. A uniformed cop hurried up and beckoned us away from the body. “What were you two doing here?”

“Uh, we just moved in, nearby. We were exploring the neighborhood.”

He keyed that into a tablet. “Did you break the window in front?”

“No! That was the EMTs. We walked along the old railroad tracks behind the factory. We climbed up onto the loading dock—”

“We didn’t break in there either! A door on the railroad side was open,” Teddie said.

“We just wanted to have a look around.”

He typed on his tablet and said aloud, “Body discovered Monday, February 11, 2019 at . . . when was it?”

Teddie said, “Half an hour ago.”

He checked his watch “—approximately 1:10 p.m. By . . .?” He lifted his head to look at us.

We gave him our names. He keyed them into his tablet, then closed it. “New to the area?”

“Yes.”

“Married?”

Teddie said, “Yes.” I said, “Uh-huh.”

Somebody else was coming, in a hurry: a Black woman in her fifties, short and buff, her Afro mostly gray. She looked at the cop with the tablet. He shook his head.

She kept going, past us, and knelt beside the body, took pictures with her phone, then turned around and gave us her attention. “Oh, shit. You, again!”

We were well acquainted with Detective Sarah Larson, from the Homicide Division of the Grand Lake City Police Department. She’d been the lead investigator of the murder, last year, that put Herman and I in her crosshairs.

She knew who we were. And she knew the big secret that we had to protect.

Chapter 1

Opening our book on the day we stumbled onto the body makes a grabber of a prologue. The rest of this book is about what happened to Teddie and me as a result of finding the body, that day in February.

I’m going to tell what happened, too. You shouldn’t have only what Herman saw or said or felt. You need what I saw and said and felt, too.

And like I told Herman, we should start when it all started, which was a month earlier. On January twelfth. In the cottage.

Hal Glatzer is an author, playwright and performer on his native island: Manhattan.

As a journalist in the 1980s he covered—and had four non-fiction books published about—the emerging technologies of small computers and telecommunications. He has been an Active [i.e. professional] member of Mystery Writers of America since 1986, when his high-tech thriller The Trapdoor was published.

Dead In His Tracks is Glatzer’s lavishly illustrated bildungsroman about the rise and fall of a family-owned streetcar empire in California. And the brief audio-plays he calls “minuscule mysteries” are funny takeoffs on the hard-boiled detective genre: all-alliterative adventures of Mark Markheim, the Hollywood hawkshaw.

Three of his historical mysteries are narrated by Katy Green, a working musician in the years just before World War II, whose gigs lead to trouble. In Too Dead to Swing Katy joins an all-female Swing band; in A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen she searches for a stolen manuscript in a classical music conservatory; and in The Last Full Measure, she joins the dance band on an ocean liner heading for Hawaii on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Too Dead to Swing and A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen are also audio-plays distributed by audible.com

Glatzer’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche plays and stories are all set, authentically, in Victorian/Edwardian times. For the past three years he has written a Sherlockian audio-play and produced it in old-time-radio style, for the annual January celebration known as BSI [Baker Street Irregulars] Week. Videos of those productions are on his YouTube channel.

His most recent novels, The Nest, The Office Wife, and The Two Birds are present-day whodunits that break some conventions of the cozy, accidental-detective genre.

When Glatzer isn’t working as an author, he’s working as a musician, playing guitar and singing the twentieth century’s “Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.

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