Over My Live Body (24 page)

“I don’t blame you. It wasn’t
your
fault,” Morgan blurts out while we’re waiting in line in the West Broadway café he suggested we go to for a quick fix. In the week I’ve been out of the hospital, every minute of my life has been spent finishing up work on my sculptures and moving the pieces to the Soho loft in time for the exhibit. I don’t know what I would have done without Morgan’s help, and I’ve felt guilty because what happened to Morgan’s life happened
because
of me. I’m relieved he brought it up first. “I didn’t want to upset you with it,” he says, “because you’ve been doing so good getting your shit together for the exhibit. I figured the last thing you needed was to be reminded of what you went through.”

“I was afraid after what happened to Vittorio…”

“Curtiz killed Vittorio,
you
didn’t. He would have killed you too, if you hadn’t got away. I’m glad you got away.”

“Thanks.” I give his arm a squeeze. “
I’m
glad I got away
too.
” I take a few tentative steps as the line moves. “Anyway, I certainly wasn’t the first and I wouldn’t have been the last.
You
read the stories in the
Daily News
. I saw them in your studio. Front page, two days running, nothing bigger bumped it. They found the name of his
next
intended with his remains, a runway grunge model
and
the names and addresses of all those near and dear to
her
.”

“Snooping in my studio,” Morgan tsk-tsks. “Shame on you.” He frowns at the menu board behind the counter and decides on a latte and a heart-shaped shortbread cookie. “
They
didn’t tell you everything?”

I know who
they
refers to, someone tall and dark and good-looking and close-mouthed.

I shrug. “Trying to protect me after the fact, I guess.”

“To compensate for the half-assed job they did when it counted. What’re you going to have?”

I order a triple cappuccino. Morgan does a double take. “Whew, you’re going to be flying.”

“I’ve got to get this work done,” I sigh. “We’re having an
opening
tomorrow.” I take a slug of cappuccino the minute it’s served to me. “And I got all this unexpected advance publicity…I’m not sure
what
to expect.”

“I’ll be there for you,
bella
.” We sit at the counter facing the street within the frame of the triangular design featuring a roasting globe decaled on the window. “You don’t have to worry about that.” Morgan clears his throat between sips of his latte, “Okay if I bring somebody?”

I frown. “Somebody as in…”

“We’re just friends. For now. I’m just lonely. I was living pretty dangerously for a few days there. Raoul and others…anyway, I’m going to get tested, Delilah. This afternoon. I’m going to be tested and retested until I know there’s nothing wrong with me.” The latte makes a foamy mustache on Morgan’s lip, makes him look rabid. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

I put my hand over his. “I’ll be there for
you too
.
Whatever
happens.”

“You’ll never guess who called me to see how you were.” Morgan breaks off a piece of cookie and hands it to me. “Sachi.”

I frown. “Let’s see…hmmm, do I know someone named Sachi? Name rings a bell, but I can’t remember the face.” I stuff the morsel of cookie in my mouth. “
Either one
of them.”

Morgan laps up the last of his latte and waits for me to finish my cappuccino. “You going back to work now? I’ll be there to help you soon as I…”

“I’ll manage.” I squeeze his arm again before we head off in different directions. The chill makes me pull my anorak closer. It feels like winter already. If I manage to sell some pieces of sculpture, I’m going to invest in a heavier coat.
I look to my left and right and behind me. Force of habit.
At least there’s no one out here in the street responsible for giving me these chills.
A dark car suddenly stops short at the corner of West Broadway and Prince Street, the tires grazing against the curb with a loud rasp. I stand on the corner like a statue.

The driver shouts “De
li
lah!” through the passenger window. I walk over to the car tentatively, recognizing its bad paint job, its stained, cracked upholstery, the driver’s voice. “I stopped by Lafayette,” Quick says. “They told me you went for coffee and where.”

I smile nervously.
Detective Quick, are you stalking me
? “I was just on my way back.”

“I have to swing back that way. I’ll drop you off. Get in.”

I settle in the seat next to him, avoiding the damp spot next to an empty coffee cup. “Royko,” he grumbles, tossing the cup in the back seat. The interior of the car is nice and warm and I feel even warmer. “How’re you doing?”

“Better than I was the
last
time you saw me.”

“The people over at Downtown Hospital, are they doing a follow up on you for post-traumatic stress?”

“They talked to me about it and gave me some referrals.”

“
Use
them.”

“If I need to…”

“You
will,
” he says adamantly. No ifs, buts, or maybes. He hangs a left on Spring Street. “When all the excitement of the exhibit blows over. When you stop being so busy.”

I nod.

“It looks good,” he says. “Your exhibit. What I saw of it.”

“Thanks. Want to come up and see the rest?”

“I can’t now. I’m on the job,” he pats the steering wheel as if I need a reminder that this clunker doesn’t belong to him. “Tomorrow,” he says softly.

“You coming to the opening?”

“Tomorrow’s my RDO,” he says. I frown. “My day off. I should be able to make it.” He pulls up to the curb, sparing the tires this time. “Before you go up, I’ve been meaning to warn you. I may call you if we need you to do a drawing for us some time.”

I nod as I open the car door. “I could do that.”

He smiles then, a rare top-hat-and-tuxedo smile that he dusted off just for this occasion. “I may call you even if we
don’t
.”

I hope you enjoyed reading
Over My Live Body
as much as I enjoyed writing it. It's the first in a series of crime novels involving sculptor Delilah Price and Detective Patrick Quick as well as a motley crew of artist friends (and frenemies) and police personnel. At the beginning of my second novel,
Student Bodies
, Delilah has a lot on her mind; in order to survive as an artist in New York City, she applied for a job as a substitute teacher, which will leave her with less time to sculpt. Her first assignment is as a substitute for a substitute at a middle school in Brooklyn. The previous substitute failed to show up and is soon declared a missing person. On her way to the school the morning of her first day on the job, Delilah witnesses a teenage girl falling to her death from a subway platform. Several witnesses claim she was pushed. The girl turns out to be a student at the school where Delilah has been hired to teach. The environment there is anything but conducive to a positive learning experience. Delilah increasingly notices that female students seem intimidated by a tenured faculty member who seems to have a way with the ladies or at least acts like he thinks he does.

Her romantic interest, Detective Patrick Quick, is distracted. He's busy working a case, tracking down a serial rapist who had been attacking transient women on the Lower East Side and Alphabet City. The most recent attacks, however, have been on young women in Greenwich Village and SoHo, and one of the victims is Delilah's fair weather friend Sachi. Quick and other detectives working the serial rapist case had been convinced that the suspect was a recidivist who was released from Riker's Island not long before the attacks began, but while there have been other cases matching the same M.O., some of the evidence in the Greenwich Village/SoHo incidents doesn't match and Quick considers the possibility of a second rapist. That second rapist may be too close to Delilah for comfort.

I welcome comments from my readers, which can be sent to me at [email protected] as well as on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Susan-Israel-books/1422085928004817
.

Be safe out there,

Susan

Susan Israel lives in Connecticut with her beloved dog, but New York City lives in her heart and mind. A graduate of Yale College, her fiction has been published in
Other Voices
,
Hawaii Review
and
Vignette
and she has written for magazines, websites and newspapers, including
Glamour
,
Girls Life
,
Ladies Home Journal
and
The Washington Post
. She’s currently at work on the second book in the Delilah Price series,
Student Bodies
.

“You want to know what the problem
is
with these goils? They want it and they can’t get it any other way, so they wear their blouses down to here so their tits are hanging out and wear their skirts up to their ass.
Then
 they scream ‘Rape.’”

“You want to know what
your
  problem is? You’re a sexist pig!” I bellow at the radio. Dr. Judy tells the guy virtually the same thing and hangs up on him. The next caller wants to know how to protect herself.
Everybody
on radio talk shows is talking sexual assault these days, in response to the ABC rapist, so named because his first victims lived on the streets of Alphabet City. He didn’t have to bang down doors to get to them and nobody paid much attention until he did start breaking in past a few doors, entering through a few open windows, and moving west to First, then Second Avenue.

“I live on Third Avenue,” the caller says, her voice shaky, “I’m a student at Tisch. I come home late at night. The security in my building is
lousy
. I think I’ve even been followed a couple of times.”

I turn off the radio and look out of my own window. Force of habit. I know what it’s like to be followed; I was stalked and abducted by a madman the end of last year and I
still
  freeze when I hear footsteps come too close behind me. I still duck into stores where I have no intention of buying anything and wait until the coast is clear. On the streets of New York City, the coast is never clear; there’s always somebody likely to walk behind you. But they’re
not 
all out to
get
  you. It’s easier to think this in the relative safety of my own apartment, behind a door with four locks, than when I’m out
 
there.

I live in a sublet on Waverly Place in the West Village, far enough from striking distance of the ABC rapist to feel safe from him
. 
My past experience taught me valuable life lessons about protecting myself from harm. So did the counseling sessions to deal with post-traumatic stress. So did the detective who worked the case. I’m still dealing with him, and not professionally anymore, though he never exactly stops acting like a cop when he’s with me, which isn’t as much as I’d like him to be. His name is Patrick Quick, Detective Second Grade, recently transferred from the First Precinct to the Ninth, which encompasses more turf and more work. I sometimes get to see him on his swing, which is what cops call their days off. I still think of it in kid terms as a seat suspended from a tree, and I sometimes feel like he’s keeping me dangling on one, leaving me to propel myself back and forth until he figures out what he wants to do with me.
Quick indeed
.

He has the magical ability to pick up on brain waves, though. He senses when I’m thinking about him just as he recognizes when a suspect is lying to him. The minute my iPhone rings, I know it’s him. Hat Trick is the silly nickname I’ve heard his colleagues call him at the cop shop. There must be something to it. He’s the David Copperfield of the NYPD, pulling clues out of thin air, pulling emotions out of wounded women like me. I hastily reach to turn off the radio when I hear his voice and realize I already did. “Have you been listening to the radio?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Should I be?”

My counselor strongly advised me not to listen to the all news stations anymore. I used to depend on them to put me to sleep the way some people use white noise machines, and some of the reports I heard led me to associate other crimes with what I was going through.  After it was over,
every
  crime story I heard gave me nightmares. Quick put his foot down too. No more WCBS, no more 1010 WINS. Talk radio sometimes serves the general purpose that the former did. Until today.

“You know you shouldn’t be.” He pauses. “I got a call from Rubenstein over  in the Sixth. There was an assault on Jane Street last night. The vic lived on East Seventh. She was on her way home from visiting a friend when it happened.”

Neither Rubenstein nor Quick deal with sex crimes directly; there are detectives specifically trained to deal with that. They only get involved when the crime goes beyond rape. His use of the past tense isn’t lost on me. “Did ABC do it?” Up to now, ABC hasn’t killed any of his victims.

“We’re looking into it. Right now it doesn’t fit his MO,” he says. “Not even close. But it’s not too far from where you are. I just want you to be aware of what’s going on.”  He clears his throat. “So you’ll be careful.”

“I’ve never stopped being careful.” I assure him, switching the phone from one sweaty hand to the other. His concern evokes other physical responses in me too.
I could use a little more of that hypervigilance right here in this apartment, right now, Detective Quick, sir. 
He’s doing a week of day tour, though, 8:00 to 4:15, so immediate police protection is out of the question, but I decide to feel him out with a Mae West line. “How about this afternoon when you get off work, you come by and check my locks?”

“Can’t tonight, Delilah, I’m sorry,” he says. “I have to stop by Alison’s.”

Alison is his sister, recently released from drug rehab for the second time since December and he’s told me that he suspects she’s headed back for a longer stay. This is all he’s told me about her. Alison is my sole competitor for his attention. I try not to resent it. She’s sick. But I wonder if there’s a family dynamic that I don’t know about that’s retarding her recovery. I haven’t dared to ask more about her than “How is she doing?”

“I’ll call you tonight after I’ve seen her,” Quick promises. “Keep that door locked. Maybe I’ll oil that deadbolt for you over the weekend.”

Fine. That’s the
only
  thing in this apartment that
needs
 lubrication right now. My phone slips out of my hand and rings in protest.
Damn
. I wipe my palms on my coverall. Quick is gone by the time I pick up the phone. I hit disconnect. The minute I do, it rings again. I wipe my palms again before answering.

But it’s not Quick this time. “Delilah,” a female voice whispers, then breaks into strangled sobs. “It’s Sachi. Can you talk?”

The question shouldn’t be
can
 I, but
will
 I. Sachi has always been known to blow me off in my moments of greatest need, but when she’s needed a shoulder to cry on, she’s never hesitated to call. Except it’s been months since she’s dared to call and this time she
really is 
crying. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you come over?” she whimpers.

“Now?” Stupid question. I realize she must mean now or she wouldn’t ask. It’s just a delaying tactic. Her apartment is the last place I want to be. Also the last place she’d have wanted me to be in recent months, when she was so tight with her live-in lover that I thought only surgery could separate them. “What’s going on, Sachi?”

“I was raped.”

“
What
? When?” Later we’ll get around to the who, where and how.

“Last night.
Late
last night. What time is it?”

I look at the red LED display on my alarm clock. “Nine-fifty.”

“I got home around five. Maybe after. It was starting to get light..” She clears her throat. “Well, are you coming over or aren’t you? I
don’t
want to talk about this on the phone.”

“I’ll be there,” I promise, trying not to think of all the calls she didn’t return last December when I was in trouble, when I thought I needed her
.
 “Have you reported it? Have you been to the hospital?”

All I get for an answer is silence and a “call ended” alert.