Queens Noir

by Robert Knightly

  "Yeah." She waved the empty champagne flute as she took a sideways step across the deck. She knew it took most date-rape drugs about fifteen minutes to kick in. She excused herself and tottered into the luxurious salon that was bigger than some Manhattan apartments. She spent about ten minutes in the bathroom, then staggered out, tripping over the step at the threshold to the deck.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  She grabbed her head and lurched across the deck. He looped his right arm around her waist.

  "Easy," he said.

  "Feel funny."

  "Maybe you should come inside and lie down."

  "Tryin' to 'memba ... something I gotta tell ya ..."

  He led her inside, slammed the salon door closed, and shoved Nikki onto her back on his couch. He pulled off his shirt in a single flourish. "Now the fucking fun starts, mama."

  Nikki lay motionless on the couch, hands in her jacket pockets. "Whajoo give me?"

  "Ketamine," he said, unbuckling his pants. "Horse tranquilizer. When it wears off you'll remember nothing. But tonight you're mine, for any fucking thing I please." He stripped to his boxer shorts, turned his back to hang up his pants. Then he kneeled before Nikki and slid his two index fingers under the waistband of her Spandex pants. "Now, let's see what you have here for the ass master."

  Nikki pulled her right hand out of her jacket pocket and rammed a .25 caliber Colt automatic to his left temple. "What I have here is the end of your miserable life, motherfucker," she said.

  Sheridan froze, still kneeling in front of Nikki. "Please ... It's a joke."

  "Real side splitter," she said. "Let's see if you remember the same old joke you pulled on a girl named Eileen Lavin."

  His face collapsed into a spasm of tics, coming apart in pieces like a mosaic held together by a lifetime of lies. "Who?"

  "Maybe a little champagne will improve your memory."

  Nikki stood up, pointing the gun, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and poured.

  "Drink," she commanded. He looked at the bubbling flute, his eyes skittery. He licked his dry lips. "Drink the fucking champagne, Dr. Sheridan."

  "No, please-"

  She shoved the pistol into his left ear again and yanked back the metal slide. "Then I will blow your sick fucking brains across your boat and leave you for the gulls."

  He drank the entire glassful.

  She poured another. "Drink, motherfucker."

  He downed it.

  She said, "Eileen Lavin was going to be a nun."

  "Her? She was a nut. Everyone called her Sister Psycho."

  "You took her on your father's boat. Out here where you take all the young girls, because this is the spot where your parents died all right. But they didn't drown. No, this is the spot where your father discovered your mother screwing his best friend on his boat. The place where he killed them, in a jealous rage. And then shot himself. When you were seventeen. I found all this with a few keyboard strokes. Jilted Hubby Kills Wife, Lover, Self. Nice. And so what was it, doc? When you wanted to get even with Mom, you took poor Eileen Lavin out here to the same spot? On the same boat? Here, under the Throgs Neck Bridge, you drugged and raped her. Over and over and over again. All night."

  "No girl gets on a boat with a man unless she wants to go with the flow."

  "Like your mother? Your father found out she was going with the flow on his boat while he was busting his ass at work to pay for it. He heard talk, slipped out here in a dingy, snuck aboard, and made her pay. And you're still making her pay, aren't you, you sick fuck? Every time you take another young girl out on your boat, you're getting even with Mom. Am I right? But you got careless with Eileen Lavin. You didn't use protection. Or maybe the rubber broke because she was a virgin. Something went wrong. And you knocked her up. But it was 1982. Before DNA testing was refined. She couldn't prove it was you."

  "You're as nuts as Sister Psycho," he said, yawning.

  "She was a fucking virgin! You took her out here, you drugged her, you raped her, you knocked her up. She had to give the baby up for adoption. Then she tried to get her baby back. Everyone abandoned her. You destroyed her life. You destroyed her soul. You destroyed her mind. Until she went up on that bridge and jumped. And died right about here, right where we're anchored."

  "You can't blame that on me. And why the hell do you care? What's it to you?"

  "That baby she put in the orphanage? That baby was adopted by a good family, a nice elderly Greek family in Astoria. They called her Nicola. They died when the kid was twelve. Then that baby was bounced around the foster system like a meal ticket. Treated like, well, a bastard. Scroungy orphan. Second-class citizen. She was beaten, abused, neglected. The only time anyone paid any attention to her was when she grew a pair of tits. Then she couldn't get the filthy bastards off her! Then she became a party favor."

  "Fuck ... you ... talking 'bout?" His voice was becoming disjointed.

  "I'm talking about your own daughter, asshole! The one you made when you raped Eileen Lavin. The rape-baby that caused her to jump off that bridge." She pulled the diaries out of her jacket pockets and read wrenching portions of Eileen's words to Dr. George Sheridan.

  "She ... wush ... fucking nuts!" he said, his voice slurry and his jaw slack. "Jush . . . like . . . joooo." His eyes were bloodshot and glazed, like stained glass. He stood and staggered sideways, a straw man, his body devoid of muscle con trol. Nikki pulled a pair of driving gloves from a jacket pocket, wiggled them on, and led him back onto the rear deck of The Dog's Life, rocking in the bay under the Throgs Neck.

  "You started using the horse drug as a veterinary student. You used it on Eileen Lavin. You literally fucked her out of a life." Nikki paused and looked up at the bridge, crowded with cars under the crescent moon. "You also fucked me out of a mother. And you gave me a fucking monster for a father. When I was old enough, I went into computers just so I could trace my biological parents. I found out who my real mother was from the old baptismal records. My first adoptive mother told me the name of the church where I was baptized. I was the only girl baptized there the year I was born without a father's name on the certificate. Once I had my mother's name, Eileen Lavin's father-my grandfather, that piece of sanctimonious dogshit-gave me her diaries. From them I found marvelous you. Times change. People don't. Your hardwiring is the same. Crisscrossed, short-circuited. You're fucking e-vil, doc. Twenty-five years later, you're still taking girls my mother's age out on your boat. Drugging them. Date raping them. Only now you're more careful. You use a rubber. You shave your body. You pay for meals in cash. You wipe away all fingerprints. You leave no trace of anything. But you are still getting even with your mother, aren't you? Before you tried to rape me, you even called me mama!"

  "I never . . . hurt anybody," he said. "I just fucked 'em, thass all."

  Nikki shoved him into a deck chair, pressed the button for the mechanical winch, and the anchor rose. She climbed to the fly deck and started the twin engines. When she was done here, she would simply steer the boat to the small fishing dock, hop off, and let the tide take The Dog's Life back out into the dark bay. But first Nikki descended to the deck and packed up the picnic basket which she'd take with her, then washed the flute glass, filled the champagne bottle with water, and threw them into the bay. She used the Windex to wipe her fingerprints from everything she'd touched on board. She'd get rid of her sneakers before she got home, in case they left footprints.

  Nikki led Dr. Sheridan, who was barely able to walk, to the edge of the aft deck. She opened the entry gate and looked him in his bleary eyes. "Do you know what today is?" she asked.

  His head flopped like a bobble doll's. "Shuuunday."

  "It's the third Shuuunday of Juuuuune, assbag," she said, mocking him. "That's the day my mother, Eileen Lavin, jumped from this bridge twenty-five years ago."

  "Fuckin' nutjob." His voice sounded like it was coming out of a deep well.

  She opened the gate. "Fuck you."

  "How ... can joo do this
h ... to me?"

  "Easy," Nikki Lavin Sheridan replied, shrugging. "I have your blood in my veins."

  "Please ..."

  "Happy Father's Day, Dad," she said, and pushed him into the black water. She watched him flail and kick. The ketamine was paralyzing him. He tried to scream but his mouth filled with water, and Nikki watched Dr. George Sheridan slip into the same grave that had swallowed her mother under the Throgs Neck Bridge.

  GOLDEN VENTURE

  BY JILL EISENSTADT

  The Rockaways

  e's waiting for her to die, Rose knows. She's no dummy. It's June and her son, Paulie, is once again thinking about inheriting her house on Rockaway Beach.

  "You're getting up there," is this year's phraseology, as if turning eighty-five begins her ascent. Up and up, she'll levitate a little higher each birthday, while Paul, Maureen, and the kids line up on the sand waving bye bye. Paulie's latest brainstorm is to just move in now-this weekend. "We'll take care of you," he insists, somehow oblivious to the way this sounds.

  "Maureen's a doctor, after all. You'll get to play with your grandkids. All the time!"

  "Oh, they'd sure love the free baby-sitting . . ." Rose is telling her new Chinese friend, Li. "But at fourteen and ten? Those kids think I'm boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do! I'm no dummy!"

  This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she's collapsed in a stained dining room chair, cradling her arthritic elbow. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first ever crimes (give or take a little parking on her late husband Vincent's handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with pride. If Vin, may he rest in peace, could see Li lying here in his favorite shirt-the ivory one with black piping and breast pocket snaps-he'd surely be impressed. Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to spend each Sunday morning riding around Belle Harbor on their mopeds. "The Good Guys" they called themselves, and went looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to this Robin Hood level: A good deed and a crime too!

  "It was mostly his excuse to get out of church," Rose adds and crosses herself; a reflex.

  "Yesu Jidu!" Li suddenly claps from his spot beneath the dining room table, an awkward choice of seating conversation-wise but okay; maybe it's cultural.

  "Yesu Jidu? . . . Parla Inglese?" Maybe he's dreaming with his eyes open. So weak and emaciated, it's like taking care of a child again. Like Vin in the end. But this fellow can't be much older than thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal frame and wet-looking hair even now that it's dried. In one hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With the other, he points a shaky finger at the iron crucifix from Calabria hung over Rose's marble sideboard.

  "Yesu Jldu," he repeats. "Mel"

  At last, Rose gets it. "You're Jesus Christ! Well, no wonder we're hitting it off!"

  And not an hour ago, he was on his knees, in his undies, puking up the Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.

  For some reason, this cracks her up all over again.

  When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was ringing too. Rose fumbled for her bifocals. Three a.m.

  "Are all the doors locked?" Paulie panted. "Turn on the TV! There's a boatload of illegal chinks out-!"

  "Who taught you to talk like that?"

  "I'm comin' over."

  "Who said?"

  "Don't you get it? They're washin' up by-what?"

  "What?"

  "I heard something."

  "Helicopters?"

  "Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!"

  It was easier to just push aside the window curtain. Yes, the giant metal insects were out there hovering. But that was not so unusual here on the shore where they're often called in for drownings, drug traffickers, and big-wig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound dead whale that just washed up in Arverne Friday, the sky had been pocked with press copters all week. But this new swarm buzzed the other end of the beach, up near Riis Park, and seemed to be composed of police and Coast Guard choppers.

  "Get Dad's gun; I'll feel better."

  "Paulie ..."

  "Get it, Ma, or they'll be stormin' our fuckin' house."

  "Who taught you that language?" Our house.

  "If you don't get it, I'm comin'."

  So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She'd never get back to sleep now anyhow. Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Paul's old red surf-shop sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammer toe or two.

  The gun, still loaded and ready to guard Vincent's Bootery on 116th Street was hidden, appropriately, in one of Vin's old cowboy boots. It was painful, physically and every which way, for Rose to crouch in the closet and extract it. Yet she lingered, running her hand along the familiar broken-in black leather and fancy white boot stitching, letting herself miss the husband she mostly despised. The revolver sagged heavily in her big front sweatshirt pocket but the feeling was not altogether unpleasant, a little like a baby there. Vincent's Bootery was now a cell phone store.

  The backdoor sticks. To open it, you have to lean with your whole weight, wham, shoulder-first. Each time Rose does this, she imagines falling onto the brick patio where she'll lay in crumpled agony until 8:30 a.m. when, obligated, Paulie comes to check she's not drinking, and forevermore forces her to wear that medical leash with the button to press in case of emergencies.

  "I know you would have come and rescued me," Rose says, as she shuffles toward Li with a breakfast tray. "If I were out there wailing in pain, I know you would."

  Li just bows (or has a cramp). He reaches clumsily for the tray and a bowl skids off, smashing. Together, the two wrestle the food down to the scratched-up dining room tile. Can he hear all her joints popping? she wonders. His smooth black eyes both avoid and study her as if she's a phantom or royalty, the Queen of Queens maybe.

  "The Queen of Queens and Yesu Jidu will commence to dine. Choice of Fiberall, orange juice, Sambuca."

  It's a far swim from the meals she used to make, for her daddy, then her husband, then her son, for the endless stream of relatives from Italy and Bensonhurst, for Good Guys and Bad Guys, their loud wives, sandy children, pets! On a Sunday like this, she'd be expected to serve the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side, dessert, espresso, and mints. She prayed for a daughter to help her. When that didn't work, she prayed for an air conditioner. Finally, "I just prayed they'd leave me the fuck alone, excuse my Italian. And here I am. Until Paulie gets his way. Or the whale saves me."

  "A bacterial time bomb," the papers are calling the washed-up finback. If the city doesn't get rid of her before the next high tide, she could infect the whole waterfront. Rockaway's summer of '93 would be an environmental disaster, a PR nightmare! A blessing for Rose. No one will bother coming near her house if the beach is closed. Rose will live happily ever after for one more summer. Rose and Li-

  Sadly, no one's ever seen a Chinese person in Rockaway besides the delivery boy for Wok and Roll. People would definitely notice. Li's dark hair and busy eyebrows are actually a lot like young Vin's were, but there are those nearly lidless eyes to give Li away, high cheekbones, a nose like some kind of exotic sliced mushroom. He sniffs with what might be disgust at the box of Fiberall cereal.

  "If Paulie hadn't had my gas turned off, I'd make you my famous cutlets and escarole," Rose apologizes. "Or some soup-I know your people like soup. The nerve of that kid after forty-five years of scarfing my rigatoni. On a Sunday like this, I'd serve an antipasti and a pasta, two meats-

  Eyes closed, Li begins quickly eating the cereal, with his hands, from the box, no milk. He's got a way of chewing with his whole head that Rose has never seen before. And Rose has seen a whole lot of people eating.

  "I'd go easy on that Fiberall," she warns.

  He streaked across her lawn just as she made it out the backdoor, without falling. There goes the neighbor
's huge black lab, Blacky, off its leash again, she'd assumed. And though she'd noticed his bark sounded odd, like a croup, she was too distracted, thinking how the wretch had gone to pee in his favorite spot against her shower house. No point reasoning with the owners, people so deeply unoriginal that they'd name a black dog Blacky. Didn't they also want her property? Eager to buy and tear down the place Paulie was born in to build something they called a solarium. Owning things others covet might make some feel powerful, but it just filled Rose with fear.

  In the distance, Ambrose lighthouse pulsed on, off, on, but its usual soothing rhythm was jangled by searchlights roaming the dark, chaotic waves. She could hear sirens. Screams? The helicopter din made it hard to make out. Then that lumpy policeman appeared, bouncing around the side of the house.

  "What!" Rose snapped, clutching her sweatshirt closed. She'd been hassled by the law once before, after starting a fire on the beach. Had she really fallen, this officer would have been the one to find her. Quite by accident, while coveting the ivy climbing up her facade, the decorative inlaid tile, flowering shrubbery, large picture windows, his flashlight would have suddenly illuminated what was left of her, Rose Camille Maria Impoliteri. A shriveled, bloodied human carcass. An ugly, used-up thing requiring removal. A nuisance.

  "We were ringin' but you were out here, I guess," the policeman said, and only then remembered to flash a badge. "O'Donnell."

  Behind him, a second, trimmer uniform materialized. This one trailing a nightstick along the beach wall and whacking now and then at Rose's ornamental grasses. He looked so much like an old classmate of Paulie's. Kevin? Kieran? But then they all did. Those fair-haired Rockaway lifeguards and rangers, cops, firefighters, Coast Guard; they could all pass for larger versions of the St. Francis High School bullies who tagged her son "Guido" and "Greaseball Wop," "Guinnie Rat" and "Zipperhead."

  "Stop!" her frail voice failed to yell. "Why's he doin' that?"

  "Just checkin' around." O'Donnell smiled, still bouncing, in place now. "You see anything unusual?