Read Online If I Should Die Before I Die by Peter Israel - Free Book Online

Sunday, in Brooklyn, during the daylight hours. She was twenty-one.
    Then the Killer had taken the summer off.
    Then Rosemary Stevenson Sutter had died in September at night, in her bedroom above Riverside Drive, in Manhattan. Rosemary Sutter was blonde, thirty-seven, married. Her body had been discovered by her husband in the early morning hours, when he returned from a business trip. She too had died by suffocation, but unlike all the others except one she’d had sex that night, with either her killer or another man.
    The Sutters, as portrayed by the media, had had a pretty open marriage. Alan Sutter had “business interests” outside the New York area, it was pointed out, and the papers invariably used the quotation marks. Friends of Rosemary Sutter had said that she was “estranged” from her husband (quotation marks again) and had taken solace from time to time with other men. Younger men, it seemed. Alan Sutter himself was in the clear: he’d been in transit at the time his wife was murdered. The media, picking up on the differences in this case, wondered out loud if it had been a copycat killing. The police, emphasizing the similarities, thought not.
    In other words, sure, Carter McCloy could have killed the five women. But at that point you could have said the same thing about thousands of other people, and that was substantially what I told my “client” when she called in that day on my direct dial, at about 1:30 P.M ., while I was brown bagging it at my desk.
    For the record, I was eating a Revere Special: Muenster cheese and sliced tomato, with mustard, on bagel, and a bottle of Moosehead. You can have the bagel toasted or plain. I normally go for plain. The office was in its usual midday lull, which is probably why she called then. The Counselor was off at La Gonzesse, the French bistro over on Lexington where he usually goes for lunch. He’d be back around 2:30 because we had Barger at three. Charlotte McCullough had taken a sick day. Ms. Shapiro was also eating at her desk because we ordered in from the same deli. Roger LeClerc was either out or upstairs, conning lunch in the kitchen from Althea, the Camelot’s cook and housekeeper, because the front door was locked and all incoming calls were routing upstairs to Ms. Shapiro.
    Normally at such times, Muffin, the Counselor’s Wife’s cocker bitch, makes her rounds. She knows not to cross my threshold, but she’ll walk past anyway, wagging her tail if I look at her, and sometimes hunker down outside the door for a few minutes. Dogs never give up hope entirely, I guess. But Muffin didn’t show up, and I realized then that I hadn’t seen her since that morning on the street, when her owner was crying in the red slicker and the red fisherman’s hat.
    â€œThese are your choices,” I told the Counselor’s Wife on the phone, after summarizing for her what Bobby Derr had dug up. “We can let Derr go on, which will cost money, time, and probably end up nowhere. Or we can go to the police with what we have. Or we can drop it, at least for now.”
    â€œI’m not worried about the money,” she said calmly. “We can’t go to the police. You know why that is. But we can’t drop it either, silly as that may sound to you. At least I can’t.”
    She was giving me an out, I guess, but I didn’t take her up on it. I thought of asking her if she’d told the Counselor yet, but I now knew the answer to that one without asking.
    â€œHow’s Muffin?” I said.
    â€œMuff—? Oh, she’s fine.”
    â€œWell, and how are you?”
    â€œMe?” A short laugh. “Oh, I’m okay. I’m fine too.”
    â€œWhere are the two of you living these days?”
    Pause.
    â€œLook, Phil, maybe someday I’ll tell you all about it. Or maybe I won’t. I’m in a state of flux right now about a lot of things.”
    â€œDoes that mean