Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  Bing.

  The monitors began flashing, beeping. Columbus blinked awake, an eye opened. And then he managed a huge yawn. The audience laughed and applauded.

  Georgette didn’t laugh, she was still scolding herself.

  ‘You cut it fine, kiddo. Was Columbus like the tightrope walker who pretends to fall?’

  Harry had made something of an effort. His blue blazer was a trifle small but you could forgive that because it matched his eyes. Since his hair had silvered up a year or so back, they seemed even bluer. Simone and Harry were in the corridor behind the stage, nobody else in earshot.

  ‘It’s not a circus.’ Although on reflection, that’s exactly what it was. ‘No. It was stupid of me. I should have –’

  ‘Could have, should have. It was great. I’m proud of you. Your mom would have been too. No Simone?’

  ‘She called. She had a rehearsal.’

  ‘Always the rehearsal. That girl will be rehearsing her own funeral. You hungry? You want to get something?’

  She heard the need in his voice, would have succumbed even though she was emotionally exhausted but she caught a glimpse of Mirabella breaking off from a small group, ready to leave.

  ‘I need to speak to Mirabella.’

  Harry didn’t press. ‘Don’t forget, Tuesday, your cousin, the Scotsman.’

  ‘I’ll be there. Thanks for coming.’

  He squeezed her in a big hug. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Go on.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the exit that Mirabella had just taken.

  Georgette found the professor on the sidewalk waiting for her car to pluck her from the cool October air. Car lights cruised by, krill in an ever-flowing dark ocean.

  ‘I’m sorry, I wanted to thank you.’

  ‘That’s okay. I didn’t want to interrupt you and your dad. He enjoy it?’

  ‘He did.’ Georgette couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about my request?’

  Mirabella gave a half-smile. ‘I’m guessing you’ve been waiting most of the night to ask me that.’

  Georgette shrugged, busted. Like many other scientists exploring cutting-edge research she was dependent on grants. The university grant not only gave her a salary, it triggered matched funding from Rasmussen, a large bio-tech firm that provided her with a fully-equipped and serviced laboratory in their nearby facility and a rental supplement for an apartment otherwise beyond her means. She had applied for further funding but the next stage she had proposed would be contentious.

  Mirabella said, ‘I’m not actually on the committee.’

  ‘No, but you know a lot more people on it that I do.’

  ‘Your work is impressive, Georgi, really impressive, but I’m not going to lie. University boards and committees are by their nature conservative.’

  ‘The Times article didn’t help?’

  ‘They are a lot more worried by the cons than they are excited by the pros. Trying your process on a human being …’

  ‘You and I both know that I can’t go much further with hamsters. There was a teenage boy in Buffalo last month who drowned. I might have been able to save him.’

  ‘I know that.’

  She went to interject. Mirabella showed ‘stop’.

  ‘I also know that you have worked out a portable system whereby the body can be transferred to your lab; the chemistry was beyond me but one of my colleagues talked me through it. Even so …’

  She didn’t need to finish, Georgette could have done it for her: even so, a human is a whole other situation – if they are “dead”. The limousine was pulling into the curb. Mirabella reached for her door.

  ‘They meet next Thursday. You’ll be the first to know. Just … be realistic, okay?’

  The door closed, the car merged with traffic, leaving Georgette like a shipwrecked sailor watching a clipper on the horizon disappear from view.

  3

  She was naked from the waist down, a pair of silken running shorts absurdly electric blue against the grey October sky lay beside feet still encased in expensive, almost-new sneakers. The blood had zigzagged over her chest before beginning to crust. Her hair was brown, about Georgette’s length and her freckles were cute and far too friendly for the monster who must have looked down upon her before discarding her in the crumbling ruins. It could have been a film set, gothic horror, a pretty victim in a tuft of tall grass where chunks of old masonry and bricks fought for territory with angry bracken. But this was no movie, it was all too real, the location just a few hundred yards from Manhattan’s east flank.

  They were in the ruins of the old smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island jammed between Queens, where Georgette had been born, and Manhattan where she was still trying to grow up. And looking at a dead young woman who would never get the chance to grow one day older than this. Maybe twenty-five, younger than me, thought Georgette. The current in the East River rushing downtown like office workers who’d caught a signal delay seemed a weird juxtaposition against stony death. Fifty yards away, beyond the iron picket fence that surrounded the tourist attraction, a crowd was growing behind the crime tape. Murder played well in any theatre.

  ‘Gina Scaroldi. A local. Cornell Tech student ID on her.’

  Garry Benson was the lead detective. He probably used Georgette more than any of the other Homicide cops. The wind played havoc with his fine fair hair. Scandinavian genes back there somewhere. Georgette noted most guys of that ilk were bald by fifty. Benson still had a good decade to enjoy mussed hair.

  Georgette checked her thermometer, felt the chill breeze across her own face, judging its strength and smelling the faint tang of diesel on the back of its hand. Whenever you were estimating a time of death on a body left outdoors, you wanted to use every sense you had. A body left a long time would be far better off with an insect specialist. Drownings or near fresh corpses, that was Georgette’s arena.

  ‘Three and a half hours, somewhere around there.’

  It was just on 9.15 now.

  ‘So about five forty-five this morning,’ said Greta Lipinski, Benson’s partner, as if she knew him well enough to realize math wasn’t a strong point.

  ‘What I’ve always said, jogging is a dangerous sport.’

  It was one of the crime scene guys. Georgette had been around cops all her life. She didn’t take offense even if their comments seemed heartless. It was just a way to cope. But she noticed the photographer react. She didn’t recognize him. He was new. He’d get used to it. Or go into aerial or marine photography to escape the memories.

  ‘Twenty-four hour surveillance,’ said Georgette, who had noted the sign on arrival.

  Benson said, ‘Looks like he picked the lock on the gate, made sure it was open, ready. I don’t think this is the sort of guy gives us a look at anything useful.’

  The gate faced Queens. The path was narrow at this point. There was bracken closer to the river where the killer could hide without having to pick a lock, but it would have been ucomfortable there, and the bracken could have clawed right through his clothes and ripped out DNA. If he had any brains at all he would avoid that.

  ‘It would have been dark,’ said Lipinski. ‘ He’d be invisible.’

  Georgette couldn’t help running in her head the kind of nature film that shocks you as a kid. The crouching lion, the stray impala. Benson put himself in the shoes of the killer.

  ‘If he was hiding back in here, he’d be able to hear her feet slapping the paving, and even if she’s cautious, she’s not thinking any threat is coming from here because it’s fenced off. He dashes out, hits her on the side of the head, see that mark? Drags her in here, rapes her, cuts her throat, or vice versa.’

  As Georgette went to stand, she noticed a wound on the inner thigh of the dead girl. ‘Wound’ was not exactly the right word. It was like a cube of flesh had been excised the way you cut shapes out of dough with a cookie-cutter. It was only about an inch square but deep, almost to the bone:

  ‘You get
photos of this mark here?’

  ‘Yeah, Kelvin got plenty. Sorry, Kelvin – Doctor Georgette Watson.’

  They each nodded. She wondered if he would puke.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ asked Benson.

  She said she thought it looked like a hat, side on.

  ‘Like there’s the thin brim and here’s the crown.’

  ‘That’s what Greta thought.’

  ‘But see here …’ Benson leaned down and pointed with a pen to the ‘brim’, ‘… the ends seem angled in.’

  Georgette scrutinized. He was right. She took Benson’s pen off him and copied the shape onto her arm. Turned it around. It looked like an inverted house with most of the pointy roof chopped off. That was as close as she could get.

  ‘Got me beat. Maybe it’s a symbol.’

  Benson scuffed the dirt. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t like it. They start doing this shit, it means more might be in store.’

  The worst part of the NYPD job – besides the inevitable corpse – was having to write up her report. Though she was able to record her observations on the spot, they still had to be transcribed into a hardcopy document, so she hauled herself back to the Homicide squad room, that on this occasion meant the Queens North command at Forest Hills. Benson and Lipinski had stayed at the scene to interview potential witnesses. If the victim was a regular, chances were somebody would recognize her.

  Was it her imagination or had Garry Benson been flirting with her when he told her how the Times photograph made her look like a film star? No, she was going to shut that thought down. As well as whether Mirabella might have had any success in talking the board around. That question had been ransacking her brain every spare minute.

  A shadow fell across her desk. The new guy. He was standing there with a coffee in each fist.

  ‘I got you a long black, or one with cream.’

  The only time she grabbed coffee here was when the heat was down and her hands needed warming. Her guess was East River water might taste similar. But Kevin – no, Kelvin – had gone to the trouble so she took the one with cream.

  ‘Thanks, Kelvin.’

  When he hung there, she added, ‘Is there something?’

  He lowered his voice, looked around, warily. ‘Is it always that … bad?’

  ‘Often a lot worse.’ There was no point sugar-coating it.

  ‘You get used to it, right?’

  ‘You can tolerate it better, that’s all.’ She didn’t say that the majority of those in his job would go onto something else after two or three years. He didn’t comment, just nodded and headed over to the elevators. That was the thing with murder: you could ignore it, but it never left you. She did this job for one reason only, money. She needed the money to make her dream a reality. That dream was to bring people thought dead back to life. But if the board wasn’t going to …

  There she went again. Full circle.

  By the time Georgette arrived home, she’d resisted at least a half-dozen times the urge to call Mirabella. Tonight she was going to meet her cousin – or, more correctly, Harry’s cousin. Maybe bagpipes and haggis could take her mind off her research. She stood at the door of her apartment building looking for her keys. Not them too. She couldn’t have lost them, could she? But maybe she had. She always kept them in the inside pocket of her handbag but they were not there. A disaster script had already been written in her brain – buzzing her neighbors to get inside this door, then calling Simone to get the spare pair to her apartment – when her frantic search revealed them underneath her hairbrush. That’s right. After she’d discarded the crime-scene suit she’d re-brushed her hair and for some reason she must have grabbed her keys. Well, she had been distracted. Garry Benson. He may not be that attractive but he was single …

  She stopped herself: No, don’t even think about it, girl.

  An hour later, she was on the sidewalk out front, freshly showered and dressed. Where the hell was Simone? Surely her band rehearsal had finished by now. Probably having hot sex with the drummer – Presley, was that his name? Or was that the bass player who preceded him? A deep rumble gave away her sister’s imminent arrival. The old Silverado cut across a lane of traffic and skidded to a halt to the eruption of angry horns. Simone’s finger extended out of the window and pointed to the dark sky.

  She yelled, ‘New York’s Finest, assholes!’ Which, like most of what came out of her sister’s mouth, was a lie or at best distortion. From Simone’s point of view, having a dad and sister on the department transferred all benefits to her.

  Georgette got in. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘Not anymore.’ Simone tramped it out of there, more angry horns in her wake. Georgette always missed her sister until they were actually together again. She shuddered at the mess: used take-out containers, a hairbrush, scripts for TV commercials and some aspiring-director’s no-budget short film.

  ‘How did your talk go?’ Simone asked, looking in the rear-view, admiring her curls. ‘I would have been there but … well, you tell me your news.’

  Georgette couldn’t fathom how Simone was not involved in accidents, figured her modus operandi hadn’t changed; she caused them but skated by unscathed.

  ‘Pretty good. For a minute I thought Columbus wasn’t going to make it. I was worried. But he came through. You got a mention.’

  Simone smiled, pleased. ‘You tell them I have an audition for Cabaret starring as Sally Bowles?’

  ‘Get out!’

  This was great news. The last time she’d seen her sister on stage she had been playing rat-excrement in some play ‘developed’ by the members of Simone’s co-op. Homeland Security could have used it as the ultimate threat on suspected terrorists.

  ‘What venue?’

  ‘St Christopher’s.’

  ‘The all-boys school?’

  ‘Yeah. The boys are doing their own production. They wanted the real thing for Sally so they advertized. That’s where I was last night, casting.’

  Georgette knew her sister well enough to figure the audition story was in part a deliberate distraction to cover up her being late again.

  ‘You were late because you were having sex with the drummer, am I right?’

  Simone crunched a gear. ‘That’s over.’

  Aha, exactly as Georgette had predicted when they last met.

  Simone turned narrow eyes on her. ‘Yeah, come on, give me the gloat.’

  Georgette said, ‘I’m not gloating.’

  ‘You are. You’re glowing in gloat. Like you swallowed kryptonite or something.’

  More or less true. She said, ‘I feel vindicated, that’s all. I told you, dating at work is a bad idea.’

  ‘I didn’t date him, I just slept with him. And anyway, a drummer is stuck up the back, you don’t have to look at him.’ She changed the subject again with the same speed and lack of warning that she changed lanes.

  ‘Dad told you anything about our cousin?’

  Harry Watson had long since ceased trying to coordinate with his younger daughter. He figured it was much simpler to pile that responsibility on Georgette while he studied the ponies or had relaxing drinks with his pals, most of whom were retired cops.

  ‘Other than he’s Scottish and a university professor, nothing.’

  ‘What’s that on your arm, some jailhouse tattoo?’

  Georgette told her about how her day started with a murdered girl on Roosevelt Island.

  ‘Benson called me a little while ago to say they now think she was strangled first, then raped and stabbed.’

  Simone made the kind of small bitter sound you do when it’s too horrible to find words. Then she said, ‘He’s sweet on you.’

  ‘Benson?’

  ‘Yeah. I can tell. You have no radar with sex. Actually, I think his partner likes you more.’

  ‘She’s not gay.’

  ‘She’s on the precinct softball team, come on.’

  Maybe Lipinski was gay. Georgette wondered if that made life simpler for her. Doubt
ed it. There was nothing easy about finding partners, or people wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about it. Simone of course didn’t worry, she just kept sampling. True, Benson was attractive but then Vance had been undeniably handsome and look where that had got her.

  ‘It’s a ship,’ Simone said matter-of-factly, nodding at the image on her arm.

  And now Georgette looked at it again she saw what she meant, like a container ship or one of those fancy cruise ships that housed a thousand people, in a big apartment building–style structure.

  ‘You could be right, you know.’

  ‘Of course I’m right. Call Benson. Or I will.’

  ‘I’m not giving you his phone number.’

  ‘See, I knew you were hot for him.’

  Georgette’s turn to change the subject. ‘He’s cooking,’ she said.

  ‘Dad, not our cousin?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Pity.’

  It would be steak and salad. It was always steak and salad.

  Harry Watson stood outside in the cool, still air and flicked the steak over on the grill. You went to a restaurant these days and ordered a steak, it practically bleated. He liked his steak approaching black but you asked for that, they looked at you like you had been found with a young woman chained up in your cellar, or worse, claimed you didn’t believe in global warming. Personally, he was a climate-change believer. His bones ached a lot more now than thirty years ago. He glanced through the window into the kitchen, saw his two girls preparing the salad and getting the cutlery, chatting. It made him feel warm inside. He recalled the same scene twenty years earlier when they were just girls who played with dolls and read pony stories. Helen would have been so pleased. Mind you, she’d be fretting – neither one married yet, not even close. He’d got a little excited earlier in the year when Georgette let that publisher guy move in. But now the publisher was pulped. Not that Harry actually liked the guy, but Georgette had, and he’d forced himself to listen to the wisdom of Helen who was always whispering into his ear, ‘Harry, stop being a cop, give the man a chance.’

  Simone was at the other extreme. Four guys a month, most losers or druggies.