Over My Live Body by Susan Israel Page A

waiting for me in my apartment.”
    “Was there any sign of forced entry?”
    “I didn’t look. I just ran.”
    “Well if, when you get around to looking, something looks fishy, don’t go inside, just go someplace else to call us. Okay now, you say this person’s been calling you and following you. For how long?”
    I shrug. “I wasn’t aware of it until he started leaving messages. I was getting hang-up calls for…oh, I guess weeks, then he began talking. And leaving messages when no one was home.”
    “What did he say?”
    I babble what I can remember of the messages, watching the mustached cop’s face, waiting for a reaction. His lips pucker like he’s eaten something sour. “And yes,” I assure him, “I saved the messages.”
    “Good thinking,” he says. It’s hard to tell what this cop is thinking.
    Detective Quick was equally inscrutable last night. Or was he ? I remember him losing it a couple of times, showing some emotion, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have just called him instead of coming here. Contact your local precinct is what he advised me to do, so here I am doing what I was told and getting the distinct feeling that this centuries-old yogurt copthinks I’m making an unnecessary stink over a well-intentioned if poorly packaged bouquet of dead flowers.
    “What are you going to do about this?”
    His mustache twitches like he’s anticipating a sneeze. “Fill out a sixty-one,” he says, signaling me to follow him. He leads the way up a flight of stairs, past stacks of filing cabinets, and stops in front of a door with a gold shield affixed to it, a magnification of the one dangling from a chain around his neck. He holds it open for me, slams it shut behind him, and ambles past me into a small office on the left. I follow him inside. He yanks a pink form out of a manila folder propped on top of the gun metal desk and barks questions at me, filling in the answers sloppily with a felt-tip pen. I cross and uncross my legs, fumbling through some of the answers, correcting myself a couple of times. The detective glares at me and reaches for a bottle of correction fluid. “I haven’t had much sleep,” I say. An apology.
    “Things tend to get blown out of proportion when you’re over-tired,” he grumbles, block-printing the information I mixed up. A low blow.
    I go through it all again, the account of every phone call that I can recall, the notes, the messages.
    “This guy who’s allegedly following you,” he clears his throat. “Have you ever gotten a good look at him?”
    I nod.
    “Enough so you can describe him?”
    “He’s big.”
    “Well, that’s a start.”
    I try to mimic cop talk. “Last seen wearing a dirty blue baseball cap, gray T-shirt…I think it was gray, and blue jeans. Indigo blue, you know, really dark. Blue eyes. Couldn’t see the color of his hair, it was covered by the baseball cap.”
    “Eyebrows?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Did you see the color of his eyebrows? That would give an approximation of hair color at least.”
    I shake my head. “He wore the cap low. I could barely see his eyes.”
    “How many times you seen him?”
    “Only once that I know of,“ I say. Yogurt cop stops writing and raises his eyebrows. “But he was seen later that same day, tailing me back to West Eighth Street.”
    “By whom?”
    I cough. “My ex-boyfriend.”
    “ Ex- boyfriend . You’re still on good terms?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Good enough though for him to be telling you this information.” Good enough for him to be leaving you flowers.
    “ Bad enoughthat I had to call the cops on him three nights ago.”
    Yogurt cop’s mustache is really twitching now. “What’d he do?”
    I pull the hem of my dress down over my knees and run it back and forth through my fingers. “Threaten me, sort of. He’d pushed me around before. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
    “Sounds like you got problems, sort of,” he says impassively, making a new notation on the form