Queens Noir

Hollywood Lanes by Megan Abbott

Forest Hills

The way their banner-blue uniforms pressed up against each other — the wilting collar corners, her twitchy cocktail apron and his regulation pinman trousers — I was only a kid, but I knew it was something and it made my head go hot, my stomach pinch. Eddie worked the alley, made the lanes shine with that burring rotary machine. Carol slung beer at the cocktail lounge, heels digging in the heavy carpet, studded each night with peanut skins, cigarette ashes, cherry stems.

They were there every day, at 3:30, in the dark, narrow alley behind the pinsetting machines. And I saw them, saw them plain as day while I sat just outside the machine room on a metal stool, picking summer scabs off my knee. First time by accident, just hiding out back there, where it was quiet and no one came around.

Eddie’d been there a month, he and his wife Sherry, who ran concessions with my mother over by the shoe station. He had blue-black hair, slick like those olives in the jar at the Italian grocery store. When he walked through the joint, coming on his shift, everyone — the waitresses, even old Jimmy, the sweaty-faced manager — lit up like a row of sparklers because he was a friendly guy with a lot of smiles and his uniform always finely pressed and the strong smell of limey cologne coming off him like a movie star or something.

No one could figure him and Sherry. Sherry with the damp, faded-blond features, eyes empty as the rubber dish tub she was always resting her dusty elbows on. Cracking gum, staring open-mouthed at the crowds, the families, the amateur baseball team, the VFW fellas, the beery young marrieds swinging their arms around, skidding down the lanes, collapsing into each other’s laps after each crash of the pins, Sherry never moved, except to shift her weight from one spindly leg to the other.

Just shy of thirteen, I was at Hollywood Lanes every day that summer. Husband three months gone, my mother was working double shifts to keep me in shoes, to hear her tell it. I helped the dishwashers, loading racks of cloudy glasses into the steaming machine, the only girl they ever let do it. Some days, I helped Georgie spray out the shoes or use Clean Strike on the balls.

But I always beat tracks at 3:30 so I could be behind the pin racks. Eddie and Carol, his hands spread across her waist, leaning into her, saying things to her. What was he saying? What was he telling her?

Sherry’s face looked tired in the yellow haze of the fluorescent pretzel carousel. “Kid,” she said, “you’re here all the time.”

I didn’t say anything. My mother was stacking cups in the corner, squirming in her uniform, too tight across her chest.

“You know Eddie? You know him?” Sherry gestured over to the lanes.

I nodded. My mother spun one of the waxy cups on her finger, watching.

“I know what’s what,” Sherry said, looking over at my mother. I felt something ring in my chest, like a buzzer or school bell.

“You don’t know,” my mother responded, looking at the rotating hot dogs, thick and glossy.

“I got eyes,” Sherry said, gaze fixed on the lanes, on Eddie running the floor waxer over them jauntily. He liked using the machine. He kind of danced with it, not in a showy way, but there was a rhythm to the way he moved it, twirled around on it like he was ice-skating. Billy, the last guy, twice Eddie’s age, looked like he would fall asleep as he did it, weaving down each lane, hung over from a long night at Marshall’s Tavern. His hands always shook when he handed out shoes. Then he threw up all over the men’s room during Family Night and Jimmy fired him.

“Don’t tell me I don’t got eyes,” Sherry was saying.

“We all got eyes,” my mother said. “But there’s nothing to see.” Her brow wet with grease from the grill, her eye shadow smeared. “There’s not a goddamned thing to see.”

I didn’t say anything. I rarely said anything. But something was funny in the way Sherry was looking at Eddie. She always had that blank look, but it used to seem like a little girl, a doll, limbs soft and loose, black buttons for eyes. Now, though, it was different. It was different, but I wasn’t sure how.

Back there in that space behind the pins, it was like backstage and no one could see even though all eyes were facing it. As soon as you walked in a bowling alley, that was where your eyes went. You couldn’t help it. But you never imagined what could be going on behind the pins, so tidy and white.

And each day I’d watch. It was a hundred degrees or more back there. It was filled with noise, all the sharp cracks echoing through the place. But I was watching the way Carol trembled. Because she always seemed so cool and easy, with her long pane of dark hair, her thick fringe of dark lashes pasted on in the ladies’ room one by one. (“They get her tips, batting those babies like a raccoon in heat,” Myrna, the old lady who worked dayshift concessions, said. “Those and the pushup brassiere.”)

Carol was talking to Diane, the other cocktail waitress. Diane used to work at the Stratton, but to hear her tell it, the minute her tits dropped a half-inch, they put her out on her can. She hated the Lanes. “How much tips can I get from these Knights of Columbus types?” she always groaned. She worked at Whitestone Lanes too and had plenty to say about the customers there.

I was sitting at a table in the cocktail lounge, looking at pictures of Princess Grace in someone’s leftover Life magazine. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one ever bothered me until happy hour.

“She can jaw all she wants,” Carol said, eating green cherries from the dish on the bar. “It’s all noise to me.” She was talking about Sherry.

“She should take it up with her man, she has something to say about things,” Diane said.

“I don’t care what she does.”

“What I hear, she can’t show her face in Ozone Park. They all remember her family. Trash from trash.”

“I’m going to haul bills tonight, I can tell. Look at ’em,” Carol said, surveying the softball team swarming in like bright bumblebees.

“Yeah, good luck,” Diane added, then nodded at Carol’s neckline. “Bend, bend, bend.”

In the bathroom once, right after, I pretended to be fixing my hair, snapping and resnapping a rubber band around my slack ponytail. I knew Carol would be in there, she always went in there after. When she came out of the stall, I looked at her in the mirror. Her face steaming pink, she brushed her shiny hair in long strokes, swooping her arm up and down and swiveling a little like she was dancing or something. She was watching her own face in the mirror. I wondered what she was watching for.

I saw the dust on her back, between her shoulder blades. I wanted to reach my hand out and brush it away.

Eddie was oiling the lanes and saw me watching, eating french fries off a paper plate at the head of lane 3. “And there’s my girl.” He said it like we talked all the time, but it was the first time he’d ever said anything to me. “Stuck inside every day. Don’t you like to go to the Y or something? Go to the city pool?”

“I don’t like to swim,” I answered. Which was true, but my mother didn’t want me to go there by myself. When summer started, she let me go once to a pool day with the kids at school, but when I got home, she was sitting on the front steps of our building like she’d been waiting for me for hours. Her face was red and puffy and I never saw her so glad to see me. That was the only time I went. Besides, she’d never liked it. Mr. Upton, before he left, was always telling her I’d get diseases at the public pool.

“All kids like to swim, don’t they?” Eddie was saying. He tilted his head and smiled. “Don’t girls like to show off their swimming suits?”

I ate another fry, even though it was too hot and made my mouth burn, lips stinging with salt.

“I always liked to go, just splash around and stuff,” he said. “You got no one to take you, huh?”

“I don’t really swim much,” I said.

He nodded with a grin, like he was figuring something out. “I get it. Well, I’d take you, but I guess your daddy wouldn’t like it.”

I felt my thigh slide on the plastic seat. I looked at the far end of the lanes. I felt my leg come unstuck and slide off the edge of the seat and it was shaking. “He’s gone,” I said.

Eddie paused for a flickering second before he smiled. “Then I guess I got a chance.”

Fred Upton was my mother’s husband. My real old man died when I was a baby. He had some kind of infection that went to his brain.

There were some guys in between, but two years ago it was all about Mr. Upton. We moved from Kew Gardens when she got tangled up with him and quit her job at Leona Pick selling dresses. She’d met Mr. Upton working there, sold him a billowy nightgown for his fiancée, and he took her out for spaghetti with clams at LaStella on Queens Boulevard that very night. They got hitched at City Hall three weeks later.

Before he left, times were pretty good. It was always trips to Austin Street to buy new shoes with t-straps and lunch at the Hamburger Train and going in the women’s clothing store with the soft carpet, running our hands through the linen and seersucker dresses — with names like buttercup yellow, grasshopper green, goldenrod, strawberry punch. One day he bought her three dresses, soft summer sheaths with boatneck collars like a woman you’d see on TV or the movies. The sales lady wrapped them in tissue for her even when my mother told her they weren’t a gift.

“They’re a gift for you, aren’t they?” the lady had said, her pink — cake-icing lips doing something like a smile.

Those dresses were sitting in the closet now, unworn for months, yellowing, smelling like stale perfume, old smoke. Never saw my mother out of one of her two uniforms these days, except when she slept in the foldout couch, usually in her slip. Some days I tugged off her pantyhose while she slept.

“He said he was going to Aqueduct,” I heard my mother say on the telephone to a girlfriend soon after he left. “But his sister tells me he’s in Miami Beach.”

It had been three months now, and wherever Mr. Upton went, he wasn’t in Queens. Someone my mother met in a bar told her he’d heard Mr. Upton was dead, killed in a hotel fire in Atlantic City the same night he’d left. That was the last I knew. I didn’t ask. I could tell she didn’t want me to. I hoped she’d forget about Mr. Upton and marry a mailman or a guy who worked in an office. As it was, I figured us for six more weeks of this and we’d be moving in with my grandmother in Flushing.

“She’s got ants in her pants, that one,” Myrna was saying to Sherry. Myrna had a big birthmark on her cheek that twitched whenever she disapproved of something, which was a lot. She was talking about Carol, who she called “Lane 30,” because that was where the cocktail lounge was. “Thinks she’s got it coming and going.”

“Don’t I know. She better watch where she shakes that,” Sherry said, face tight and sallow under the fluorescent light. She looked like a sickly yellow bird, a pinched lemon.

“You got ideas.”

“Sure I got ideas. And I’m no rabbit. Maybe she needs to hear that.”

“I’ll see she does.”

Sherry nodded. Those flat eyes were jumping. That slack lip now drawn tight. Her face all moving, all jigsawing around. She looked different, more interesting. Not pretty. It was all too much for pretty. But you couldn’t take your eyes off it.

I wasn’t supposed to be back there at all. Once, years before, some kid, not even fifteen years old, was working at the Lanes. He got stuck in the pinsetter machine and died. There were a million different stories of how it happened, and ever since, no one under twenty one was supposed to be back there. But I never got near the clanging machine. I stayed in the alcove where they kept the cleaning equipment.

From there, I could see them and they never saw me. They never even looked around.

Sometimes, Eddie would be whispering to Carol, but I couldn’t hear.

They were just pressed together, and when the machine wasn’t going, when no one was bowling, you could hear the rustle of their uniforms brushing against each other.

The more he moved, the more she did, and I could hear her breathing faster and faster. He covered her and I couldn’t see her except her long hair and her long legs wound round. I was too far to see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes. It was like he was shaking her into life.

“Things are getting interesting,” Mrs. Schwartz said to my mother, who was resting against the counter, slapping a rag around tiredly. You can lean, you can clean, Jimmy always said.

“Don’t count on it,” my mother replied.

“Sherry might try harder, wants to keep a man like that,” Mrs. Schwartz said. She was the head of one of the women’s leagues. She was always there early to gossip with Diane. I think she knew Diane from the Stratton, where Mrs. Schwartz met her second husband. They liked to talk about everybody they knew and the terrible things they were doing. “Looks like a singer or something,” she added, twisting in her capris. “A television personality. Even his teeth. He’s got fine teeth.”

“I never noticed his teeth,” my mother said.

“Take note.” Mrs. Schwartz nodded gravely.

Diane walked up, clipping her name tag on her uniform. No one said anything for a minute. They were watching Sherry walk into the ladies’ room, cigarette pack in hand.

“She can’t even be bothered to put on lipstick,” Mrs. Schwartz said, shaking her head. “Comb her hair more than twice a day.”

“Her skin smells like grill,” Diane commented under her breath. The two women laughed without making any noise, hands passing in front of their faces.

Mrs. Schwartz left to meet her teammates surging into the place with their shocks of bright hair and matching shirts the color of creamsicles.

Diane was watching Sherry come out of the bathroom. “Trash,” she said to my mother. Then, in a lower voice, “They used to live upstate. Her father’s doing a hitch in Auburn. Got in a fight at a stoplight, beat a man with a tire iron. Man lost an eye.”

“How do you know?” my mother asked.

“Jimmy told me. He gave her hell for making a call to State Corrections on his dime.” Diane shook her head again. “Mark my words, she’s trouble. Trash from trash.”

I looked over at Sherry, leaning against a ball return to tie her apron. She had her eyes on them, on all of us. She couldn’t hear, but it was like she did.

“Mark my words,” Diane said. “Blood will tell.”

That whole summer, I’d lie in bed at night waiting for my mother to come home from her shift waiting tables at the tavern. I’d lie in bed and think about Eddie and Carol. It was like how I used to think about Alice Crimmins, the Kew Gardens lady who killed her kids so she could be with her boyfriend. I couldn’t get her face from the newspaper out of my head. Two, three times a night, I’d run around testing all the window latches, the window gates.

Now, though, it was all about Eddie and Carol. I’d stay under my sheets — cool from sitting in the refrigerator for hours while I watched television and ate Chef Boyardee — and think about how they looked, all flushed and pulsing, how you could feel it coming off them. You could feel it burning in them. It made my throat go dry. It made something ripple in me, like the time I rode the rollercoaster at Fairyland and thought I just might die.

Then I’d start thinking of Sherry standing behind that counter all day. When she’d first started she cracked gum and looked bored, went in the bathroom twice a day to wash hot dog sweat off her hands and spit out her gum in the sink.

But lately she didn’t look bored. And nights, she’d get into my head. Standing there like that, her head dropping, eyes lowered, watching. I wondered when she was going to make her move. Was she waiting to see it for herself? Hadn’t she figured out yet when and where it was happening, right behind the wall of pin trestles that she — we all — stared at every day all day?

Each day it seemed closer and closer. Each day you could feel it in the place, even as the clean and fresh-faced Forest Hills kids pounded their bright white tennis shoes down the alleys; even as the shiny-haired teenagers hunched over the pinball machines, shoving their hips, twisting their bodies, like they wanted to squirm out of their skin; even as the customers at the bar, steeled behind smoked glass by lane 30, cocooned from the pitch of the squealing kids and mooning double dates, cool in their adult hideaway of tonic and beer, crushed ice and lemon rinds and low jazz and soft-toned waitresses with long, snapping sheets of hair and warm smiles, and a bartender who understood them and would know just what to do to make them happy... even with all that going on at the Lanes, it was going to happen.

“I don’t like the way they talk about her,” Diane was whispering to my mother, leaning over my mother’s counter, tangerine nails tapping anxiously. “Sherry and Myrna and Myrna’s friends from the Tuesday league.”

“Talk’s just talk,” my mother answered, loosening her apron.

“Listen,” Diane said, leaning closer. Looking over at me, trying to get me not to listen. “Listen, she deserves something. Carol does.” Her voice even lower, husky and suddenly soft. “Her mom’s at Creedmore. She’s been there awhile. Took a hot iron to Carol when she was a kid. She was sound asleep when it happened. Still a scar the shape of a shield on her stomach.”

Diane was looking at my mother, looking at her like she was asking her something. Asking her to understand something.

My mother nodded, eyes flickering as the fluorescent light made a pop. “You got a customer, Diane,” she said, pointing toward the bar.

I was thinking they might stop. Might take a few days off, let things cool off. But they didn’t. They only changed it up a little. From what I could tell, Carol came in the back way for her shift and met Eddie first. Met him back there before anyone even saw her. But they didn’t stop. And one day Eddie came out with a streak of Carol’s lilac lipstick on his bleach-white collar, just like in a story in a women’s magazine.

I watched him walk across the place, lane by lane, with the stain on him. I glanced over at Sherry, who was leaning against the pinball machine and watching him. I thought: This is it. She’s too far to see it, I thought to myself. But if he moves closer. If she moves closer.

Yet neither of them did.

When I saw him later, the lipstick was gone, collar slightly damp. I pictured him in the men’s room scrubbing it off, scrubbing her off. Looking in the mirror and thinking about what he’d done and what he couldn’t help but keep doing.

The kids from Forest Hills High School were all over the place that afternoon, all in their summer clothes, girls with tan legs and boys freshly showered and gleaming. The rain had sent them, some straight from lounge chairs at the club, others from lifeguarding or the tennis courts. I always noticed the fuzzy edges of my summer Keds around them. I always wondered how the girls got their hair so shiny, their clothes so crisp, their eyes so bright.

I had a feeling it was going to happen that day. I couldn’t say why. Before Sherry even got there. But when she did, I knew for sure.

She looked like she’d been running a fever. There was this gritty film all over her skin and red blotches at her temples. Her uniform was unwashed from the day before, a ring of grease circling her belly.

She was late and I’d just left my post, just left the two of them. They never took their clothes off, ever, but sometimes he’d lift her skirt so high I could see flashes of her skin. I was searching for the scar, but I never saw it.

Her fingers pinched around his neck, the rushed pitch to her voice... it felt different this time. It felt like something was turning. Maybe it was something in the way his hands moved, more quiet, more careful. Maybe something in her that made her move looser, almost still.

I got it then. And I knew for sure when I saw them break apart and each look the other way. She dropped her skirt down with a snap of one wrist. He was already walking away.

I flicked off the last piece of the strawberried scar on my knee. The skin underneath was still tender, puckered.

And now there was Sherry. I was coming from the back and she was right in front of me, talking at me, her voice funny, toneless.

“I saw you sitting over there yesterday. By the machine room.”

“No one’s at concessions,” I said, wondering where my mother had gone.

“It was the same time. I saw you come out from there at the same time yesterday.”

“I guess,” I said.

It was ten minutes later, no more, when we all heard the shouting. Jimmy, Myrna, Eddie, two guys putting on their bowling shoes — we all followed the sounds to the ladies’ room.

Carol was hunched over, hair hanging in long panels in front of her. She seemed surprised, her mouth a small “o.” It looked like Sherry’d just punched her in the stomach.

But then I saw it in her hand. The blade was short and Sherry held it so close to her, elbows at her waist. The blade was short enough that it couldn’t have gone deep.

Jimmy backhanded Sherry. She cracked her head on the stall door and slid slowly to the floor, one hand reaching out for Jimmy’s shirt.

The knife fell and I saw it was one of those plastic-handled ones they used to open the hot dog packages at concessions.

Eddie pushed past Jimmy and knelt down beside Sherry. She had a surprised look on her face. He was whispering to her, “Sherry, Sherry...”

Carol was watching Eddie. Then she looked down at her stomach and a tiny blotch of red against the banner-blue.

“That ain’t nothing,” Myrna said, birthmark twitching. “That ain’t nothing at all.”

Myrna taped up Carol with the first-aid kit. Then Jimmy took all three of them to his office. I walked over to concessions, but no one was there.

That was when Diane came running in, shouting for someone to call an ambulance.

“We don’t need no ambulance,” Myrna said. “I hurt myself worse getting out of bed.”

But Diane was already on the phone at the shoe rental desk.

We all ran down the long hallway and up the stairs to the boulevard. Someone must have already called because the ambulance was there.

At first, it was like my mother had just lain down on the street. But the way her neck was turned looked funny. Like her head had been put on wrong.

Diane grabbed me from behind and pulled me back.

That was when I saw a middle-aged man in a gray suit sitting on the curb, his face in his hands. His car door was open like he’d stumbled out to the sidewalk. He was crying loudly, his whole body shaking. I’d never heard a man cry like that.

Diane was telling everyone who would listen, “She said she saw him. She said she saw Fred Upton pass by on the 4:08 yesterday. But he’d never take a bus, would he? That’s what she said. So she wanted to watch for it at the same time today. See if it was him. You know how she always thought she was seeing him somewhere. No one must’ve hit the bell because the bus didn’t stop. And she just ran out onto the street after it. That car didn’t have time to stop.”

She looked over at the man, who started sobbing even louder.

“Hit her like a paper doll,” Diane continued. “Nothing but a paper doll going up in the wind and then coming down.”

Later, I would figure it out. My mother, nights spent looking out diner windows, uniform steeped in smoke, thinking of the stretch of her thirty years filled with glazy-eyed men stumbling into her life — all with the promise of four decades of union wages like her old man, repairing refrigerators, freezers in private homes, restaurants, country clubs, office buildings — for her whole life never stopping for more than one Rheingold at the corner bar before coming home for pot roast at the table with the kids.

Those men came but never for long, or they came and then turned, during the first or second night in her bed, into something else altogether, something that needed her, sure, but also needed the countergirl at Peter Pan bakery, or four nights a week betting horses at the parking garage on Austin Street, or a night watching the fights at Sunnyside Garden even when it was her birthday, and, yeah, maybe he needed the roundcard girl he met there too.

There was a dream of something and maybe it wasn’t even a guy like her old man or the one in the Arrow Shirt ad or the doctor she met at the diner, the one with the big apartment in the new high-rises, the view from the bedroom so great that she’d have to see it to believe it, he’d said. Maybe it wasn’t a man dream at all. But it was something. It was something and it was there and then it was gone.

Only the strong survive by Mary Byrne

Astoria

My father announced this from a comfortable armchair by a window. Clad in good pajamas, he had “showered, shat, and shaved,” as he put it himself. In fact, this had been engineered and executed by an obese but energetic Polish lady of some thirty-eight years who was now about to leave after the graveyard shift. An old phonograph exuded Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams, I don’t know which. Or care. Schmaltzy music kept my dad quiet. It was almost as important as the nurses.

The Pole bustled back into the room, sweating already, and hung about with bags and baskets.

“A proper scavenger,” said Dad.

“You can talk,” the Pole shot back.

“Live where you’d die. Build a nest in your ear.” He eyed me crossly. We exchanged stares.

“I weel not take much more of thees,” said the Pole. “He’s gotta be put in a home. Those opiates are bedd for his hedd. Hallucinations again last night, squirrels climbing the bedroom vall and someone up a ladder—”

“She’s cleaning the house out little by little,” said my dad, “hence the multifarious bags.”

“—not to mention the insults and the smell of his excreta,” she went on.

I stood up, hoping she’d get the hint. I had no desire to discuss Dad’s excreta — or anyone else’s — with a sweaty and exhausted Pole.

“Get someone to relieve me a few nights,” she ordered, heading for the door. “I gotta lotta werk on.”

She was mixed up in illegal sweatshops, and perhaps even illegal aliens. A true wart on the heel of humanity, she even had her own off-off-illegal sweatshop, in which the most desperate of Eastern Europeans put together for her benefit little trinkets and zippered bags made from the offcuts of the real thing.

“When you kill a pig, nothing goes to loss but the squeal,” Dad pronounced as she flounced out the door.

We were alone. My son Sean hadn’t come home last night, an increasingly frequent occurrence. The big house was silent but for the ticking of old clocks, Dad’s only hobby and luxury. Every room had several of them. “Are them things gonna be bongin’ all night?” my wife had said the first night we slept there after the honeymoon.

Naïma, the day-shift nurse, was late. Normally my wife dealt with any kind of overlap problem before going off to her museum job. But she was absent at the moment, as she was more and more these days.

“Where’s the Swamp Rat?” asked Dad, as if reading my thoughts.

Nulty Jr. eyed Nulty Sr. I wondered just how senile the old man really was.

“Some art shindig in St. Petersburg,” I replied. I wondered why I bothered.

“Home to the swamps,” said Dad.

“No, the other St. Petersburg, the Russian one.”

That seemed to silence him, or else his thoughts wandered off to something else. He dubbed my wife the Swamp Rat as soon as he heard she came from Tampa, Florida. At the time, I was offended for her. I was in love with this dark little hustler — she reminded me of Edith Piaf. I called her La Piaf. Then. But little by little the very things that pleased me at first made me hate her later: her bustling ass, the way she crimped her thin frizzy hair, a moue thing she did with her mouth as if to strengthen up facial muscles. I soon saw her thrifty housekeeping as meanness. She was prepared to spend money on no one but herself. She even squeezed enough for little facelifts and gold wire here and there over the years. This was on top of sports clubs, gyms, dance classes, and trainers. The house was feng shui — compliant, another recent source of trouble and expense.

By now, I approved the nickname. She’d been in it for the money from the start, and I had been reeled in, hook, line, and sinker. I suspect the facelifts and staying in shape were preparation for getting away from me in the best possible circumstances. Women always went away — my mother took off without a by-your-leave.

I left the old man alone for a minute and went down to collect the mail. Although I received my business mail in the bar we owned on Broadway, The Two Way Inn (because there are two ways in), the family’s private mail arrived here. Sometimes Naïma or Old Jessica left personal mail lying around for days. I disapproved of such a risk. Dad trained me to structure my day around things like that: “Get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. Leave nothing lying to fester.”

There was a postcard from the Swamp Rat singing the praises of St. Petersburg. I knew she was there with the big Armenian, her latest conquest, but I could prove nothing and was waiting for something to come to a head. There was junk mail for my son Sean and more for my daughter Maureen, who had just moved out for the second time with a second man. Rectitude hadn’t made it to the third generation.

At the bottom there was a letter with a Canadian postmark from a lawyer’s office in Québec. My heart gave a lurch. Suddenly Naïma was behind me. I smelled her perfume before I turned to face her. She was flushed.

“Musing again?” She had a light, assured voice. I envied her calm contentment. In another life I would have loved her and this would have done me good.

I looked at the letter then looked at her.

“Come on, I’ll make you a decent coffee before you go.” She took my elbow.

I walked to the bar each morning as Dad once did. This always cleared my head. There was no spring in New York this year. There never is. I left the house huddling against a cold wind blowing off the river, but by the time I reached Mt. Carmel Cemetery, the summer had arrived. Here it was, late, when we’d almost given up hope.

I paused for a moment to look at the broken, half-buried headstones of Irish-born immigrants from famine times, people who’d worked in the factories, greenhouses, and homes of the nearby rich. Every dog has his day, I could hear Dad say, although I knew the old man always felt a bit of a fraud in the mansion on 12th Street. It was the house which had so impressed La Piaf at first. I heard my father again: Not a house for a humble tiller of the soil. Somehow it was bearable because it wasn’t ours. It belonged to Dad’s brother, Uncle Eddie, Canadian millionaire. The Two Way Inn belonged to him as well. No one knew exactly how Eddie Nulty had made his money. Fact is, he was the eldest of ten, had come out around the time of the Irish Civil War, worked in bars at first, then got on the ladder and sent for his little brother.

The further I walked, the more my step steadied and took on a rhythm independent of my thoughts. I could hear the reassuring rattle of the El.

“And that’s when the difference between the two brothers showed,” my mother told me, way back. “Eddie went to get your father off the boat. He was crumpled, dirty, and sick after all that time at sea. But Eddie pounced! On what? Your dad’s boots. They weren’t polished, and were laced with binder twine.”

“So Eddie was pissed?”

“Watch your language. Eddie was mixed up in something,” said Mom. “I heard talk of guns. Your father told me a story about when he was a boy, going to the market with their father in the early morning. They came across Eddie doing lookout on the road. ‘What’s up?’ your grandfather asked. ‘Court martial,’ Eddie said. ‘They’re in the field, decidin’ whether they’ll kill himself or not.’ ‘Have nothing to do with all this,’ the father told the young boy.”

She was convinced Eddie was still mixed up in something. Nobody could get that rich by legal means. Yet occasionally, when Dad was on a bender, he got so out of hand that Mom called Eddie, regretting it afterwards. Somehow Eddie knew how to whip Dad into line. And things would continue for another while. When it was over, Mom banged on about conversations she’d heard, money she’d seen handed over in cabs, and about a bar being the best place to launder money. “What do you know about laundering?” I often replied. “You got Jessica to do it for you!”

I regretted such remarks now, and wondered where she was.

In no time at all I reached Broadway, with its crowds and traffic and fruit displays. I liked it better here. This was home. Men on the sidewalk spoke Chinese and Slav and Arabic into cell phones. Visit Queens and see the world. Here was where the Nultys started out, in a small apartment over a busy junction. Young parents, two small children, plenty of stress, and plenty of fun. Dad drove a bus and binge-drank. One day he parked the bus full of passengers and went into The Beer Garten (there was no garten) and got drunk. There was hell at home and Eddie was sent for.

It was an icy winter’s day when Eddie came up the steep narrow stairs wearing a black coat with some kind of fur collar, like a rich man in the movies. Mom wrung her hands. Dad was strangely obeisant as if to his own father, and it was all settled. The German wanted to sell up The Beer Garten. Eddie would buy and Dad would run it. He had to make it work and live on the proceeds. The word autonomous was bandied about.

From there on, Dad appeared to play the game, fitting in quite well with the bar routine and keeping our little family from the poor house. For years we lived over the bar. Later on, Eddie bought us the mansion and persuaded Dad to move. I never knew exactly how the accounts were handled, but Eddie engaged a hot-shit accountant from Manhattan and even a tax accountant in case Dad messed that up as well. For a long time Dad was strict as a sergeant major, rising before dawn, polishing his shoes himself, eating a raw egg before breakfast: all stuff Uncle Eddie favored or advised. Even then, I knew there was no way Eddie was shining his own shoes. But I said nothing, knowing The Importance of Shoe Shining in the Family. Back in Monaghan, nobody shined their shoes, if they had any. A school photo of Dad showed most of the kids had no shoes at all — only Dad in the front row had a good pair of black boots, black socks, short pants, and a black turtleneck. I reckoned he was taken out of school shortly after that to work in the fields, until Eddie sent him the ticket for Canada.

On certain sections of the streets there were signs of the usual fracas of the previous night: bottles and cans and overturned garbage. In recent times, crowds of young local men gathered at night to drink and carouse, as if they belonged to a different species, married to the night. Sometimes they didn’t even bother going to a bar. Sometimes bar owners use the tobacco ban to keep them out. Visitors slumming the bars at night made a helluva noise while they were there, then again as they revved up to leave. Residents complained about them as much as they did about the youngsters, who sold and smoked weed and giggled a lot, then kicked the garbage out of the cans and around the street. I had known most of them since they were kids — they were Sean’s age. I wondered if Sean spent time with them, but didn’t dare ask. So far they’d left me and the bar alone, and although there was increasing talk of hate crimes and savage attacks in the night, I couldn’t see them being the perps. For the moment, anyone kicked down subway steps had been openly gay or Muslim — or even black — but I knew that could change.

“So you rich fucks get up for a little while every day?” My friend George was standing in the doorway of his restaurant.

“Gid adda here,” I grinned.

“Whadaya like, I gad it,” said George, waving me in.

“Check the shop and be right back.”

I entered the dark interior of The Two Way Inn. It was quiet but for an Abba song coming at low volume from the jukebox: I don’t wanna talk... about things we been through... The usual lineup of men drinking silently in the late morning never failed to remind me of a scene from an O’Neill play. There was no green, no shamrocks, no Irish beers, no black-and-white pictures of small villages, whiskey mirrors, leprechauns, shillelaghs, no objects made of bog turf, nothing Irish visible. The occasional token of a German past remained undisturbed, for here the Swamp Rat had no influence and didn’t like the atmosphere. No fucking compliance here, feng shui or otherwise. For a long time a German firm continued to provide German songs for the old jukebox until we updated. One of these songs survived: “Oh Mein Papa,” due to popular demand, had been remastered and now kept company with the Carpenters, Abba, Maureen McGovern, Roberta Flack, the O’Jays, John Denver, and — as they say — much, much more. The bar had remained untouched for so long that it was becoming popular with the yuppie crowd out from Manhattan. It was mentioned in one or two hip magazines in search of “awthennic” places to spend their money. The barmen were instructed to charge more in the evenings. I invested in chairs and tables for the sidewalk, and after being fined twice for putting them out, eventually paid for a licence. These days I pay smoking fines, although we try to stop ’em smoking till the cops have gone to bed. Because what interests the yuppies is the interior, and the music. If it’s like a stage set for me, how much more must it be for them?

I waved through the open kitchen door to our Mexican factotum (Dad’s title for him). He navigated between the kitchen here, the corridors of the apartments above, and the garden on 12th Street.

“Buenos dias, Pepe,” I said. “Que pasa?”

“Land of the free and the brave,” replied Pepe.

I nodded to the young man behind the bar, an ex-seminarian from the old country, solid as an Aran Island, robbing only exactly enough so as not to make it obvious and rock the boat for the other bartenders doing the same.

“Gimme a shot from the real bottle you keep under the bar,” said one of the O’Neill characters. “The curate isn’t cooperating.”

I nodded again at the young man. “Go ahead,” I said, “what they have there wouldn’t fill a hole in their tooth.”

The young man ran a round down the bar: He had instructions to give them every third drink free, but to go easy on the non-fiddled bottle.

“Come on, lads, put yer hearts into it.” This was another of Dad’s goads. “Ye’ll never get cirrhosis the way ye’re drinkin’.”

The young man handed me the morning mail, which reminded me of the letter from Canada. I reached into a pocket, fished it out, and sat at a table. No one sat at a table except in the evenings.

The letter was typed. This didn’t look good. It was from a lawyer. My eyes shot to the bottom paragraph: It is with regret that we must inform you of the intention of Mr. Edward Nulty to dispose of his properties in Astoria.

Alerted, no doubt, by press references to a property boom, I thought. More warehouse conversions and hoardings bearing the legend, Jesus hates this building.

Do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions, the letter finished. It gave the coordinates of some fancy broker in Manhattan who would contact me instanter.

I hated the British tone of it all. I even hated their tight vowels up there. I wondered what had stung Eddie into action. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket. The O’Neill characters who had been studying me turned back to their drinks again.

I got up, nodded to the company, and made my way next door to George, who had lunch ready.

“You donna looka good.”

“No.”

“You dyin’?”

“No.”

“Yo’ family die?”

“No.”

“So then!” George handed me a glass of his special heavy aperitif wine.

“Ya mass,” he said. I said nothing. “You looza all yor money?” George had been imitating his father’s accent for so long and spending three months a year in Greece that it was second nature. He looked anxious. Money was serious.

“Maybe.”

George was all attention. “Money is not love,” he said slowly.

“I got neither.”

“First, you eat.”

It seemed to me there were more of the little white plates than usual. I told George my woes, as I often do. What had once been a place serving hero sandwiches had become a high-class restaurant. Through the kitchen door I could see two Indians hard at work. And I’m not talking about Native Americans. Behind a little desk sat George’s brother Lazarus, once short-order cook and pea soup expert, and his sister Hermione. They were all getting on in years.

The phone in the kitchen rang. One of the Indians answered it. “007!” he said, and giggled. “Bond, James Bond!” He was laughing so hard the other Indian had to take the phone from him.

Above our heads hung photos of George’s parents and grandparents on the whitewashed terrace of a modest house in Cyprus. The men were dressed as popes, the women in black. They’d heard that the house had long since made way for a pink Turkish villa. None of them had ever tried to go back, even when it became possible.

“Eat.”

George forced food on me like I remembered my mother doing before she vanished. He raised his glass and said, “Eleftheria i thanatos.”

I nodded, repeated the words, and drank deeply.

Freedom or death.

Me and George took a stroll in Astoria Park to walk off the wine. We stopped to lean on the rail and look at the garbage floating in the water below. I wanted to drop into the Noguchi Garden Museum. I loved the smooth control and order of the marble and granite pieces. It reassured me.

George refused. “The fuck? All that cold stone giva me the creeps.”

“Some Greek you are,” I said.

“Malaka. Irish fucks only let gays and lesbians into their parade this year, for the foist time! St. Pat’s for all, my ass!”

“Greeks’d know all about gays.”

“We’re all getting old,” said George.

We picked divine olives from tubs in about three emporia, then stopped off at Noureddine’s for mint tea before the evening crowd arrived to smoke hookahs loaded up with honey-dipped sheesha. I’d heard the Pole say Noureddine’s place ran women behind closed steel shutters in the afternoon. I supposed it was possible. I supposed she’d know.

Noureddine was talking about an old lady who’d been robbed on her own stairs as she returned from the bank. The robbers were said to be local.

“You don’t do that on your own turf,” Noureddine said. He looked like he knew what he was talking about. Then he told us about a younger brother he was educating, who’d managed to get a job teaching Spanish in Texas.

“Sounds like sand to the Arabs to me,” I said.

“We’re from northern Morocco,” he explained. “Spanish is like a mother tongue to us. We go where it pays.”

We left Noureddine and headed off, George to Danny McGrory (my dad’s name for Nana Mouskouri and now our code name for George’s wife, also known as La Callas or La Diva) and me to the Swamp Rat, due back that evening.

“Bet you’re sorry now you didn’t finish your doctorate and get a chair of philosophy,” George said. “Never get off your ass at all.” His phony accent had disappeared. My problems were affecting him even more than me.

“Hit me now with the child in me arms,” I replied.

“Till the white rose blooms again,” he said as we parted.

Back on 12th Street, I surveyed the signs of Old Jessica’s daily visit — more spray-on polish, more quick-fix polluting solutions. Jessica was a failed Irish immigrant ten years older than myself. She needed the money, I couldn’t in all conscience fire her. The shine in the house was getting higher, but everything else was going downhill, except for the feng shui compliance.

Old Jessica appeared from the kitchen quarters. “You’d want to straighten up,” she said. “Yer gettin’ a dowager’s hump.”

“Don’t shit a man who’s already down,” said Sean, skipping down the stairs and out the front door before either of us could react.

Jessica shook her head indulgently. “I’da made two pairs a pants outta his one,” she said.

We mounted the stairs to Dad’s room, where Naïma was bedding him down for the evening. Mitch Miller was playing.

“I’m goin’ plantin’ spuds tomorrow, will ye help me?” Jessica asked Dad.

“I will,” he said.

“Have ye the tools?”

“I have.” He counted on his fingers: “I have two spades, two graips, and a shovel.”

“Right so,” said Jessica. “Be ready at dawn.”

I wasn’t sure I liked this kind of fooling with a man’s already fucked-up mind.

“Once a man, twice a boy,” Jessica said as she went by me.

“I want to be taken to the Astoria Sanatorium,” Dad said distinctly as soon as Jessica left.

Naïma smiled down at him. “They gave it a new name now. Mt. Sinai.”

“You should never paint bricks,” said Dad. “They do it all the time here.” Then: “The sanatorium must’ve laid an egg.” Then he spotted me. “Priest or minister? You’re doing everything wrong today.”

“What did I do now?”

“You sailed up the broad expanse of Killala Bay. Give me me box.”

This was a tin box containing mementos that he pored over from time to time. He pulled a collection of objects out of it and spread them over the bed: a silver dollar wrapped in tissue paper, a Rockaway Playland token, postcards, beaded Indian leather (Native American). He indicated the display to me:

“Wanna take a leak before I go?” Naïma asked.

“You only want to see my dick, that’s what you’re after.”

I told her to go ahead and lifted Dad back into bed. He was light as a feather.

“Ain’t you the big heavy lad,” I said.

“What good is it to you when you’re gone?”

We sat in silence. Then he said, without opening his eyes, “When did Da die?” I never heard Dad use that word before, and realized he thought he was talking to his brother Eddie.

“Long ago,” I said.

“What’d ya kill her for?” he asked, opening his eyes, now noticing me. “I think I’ll go to bed now,” he said, then seemed to doze.

The Pole arrived, still threatening to quit. The weather had already turned heavy.

“A storm is brassing,” she said. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what language she was massacring.

Dad said, with his eyes closed, “You’re a bitch and you never were anything else.”

After that, the house settled for a while. I tend to sit in front of the TV when I want to think. People leave me alone. I haven’t read a book in years, once my favorite occupation. My attention was drawn by an item on the World Cup about to be played out in Germany. Several players from the winning 1974 German team were paraded out, one a smart older business-exec version of his younger self with a name like Baking Powder, which is what me and George had dubbed him at the time. The other was a thicker-set man who left football in 1974 and opened a newspaper kiosk. “I wasn’t cut out for all that,” the man explained.

Perhaps this was what Dad should have done, long ago: something simple, no overreaching. There were horses for courses and that was all. It would have meant no Irish education for me and my sister, but what did that change? And perhaps Mom would still be with us. I recalled vacations from university when Mom seemed to be having an early “change of life,” as she called it to her friends (nurses with real problems and families to deal with). She talked of going into a convent, where she would have peace and quiet from them all. By then, Dad had settled down to controlled drinking, a cup with milk and whiskey under the bar at all times. As if trying to numb himself. At times I think she might be with some Little Sisters, atoning in peace and quiet, not far away. Unless she’s dead. Who was the woman Uncle Eddie killed? Was this a reference to the Civil War, or something more recent?

At 9 p.m. the Swamp Rat was poured out of a cab, laughing. The Armenian gallery owner helped her out, laughing also, wearing a beige cashmere coat that was too warm for the weather. Then he took himself off in the cab.

I lit the lights and poured us a drink. The storm was beginning to crackle outside. A door opened upstairs, releasing a few bars of Al Martino, then closed again.

My wife’s breath smelled of olives and feta and all kinds of Balkan fare, something she complained of in others in the past. She was excited, smoking. She’d clearly been fucking the Armenian satisfactorily all week. It was Setrak this, and Setrak that.

“The Matisses were breathtaking. I never realized they were so big.” She pulled out a notebook with names written in Cyrillic in a baby hand, pronouncing them as if she spoke Russian fluently. They’d obviously discovered plenty of new, cheap talent to flog for their new gallery project.

I found myself getting angry, but this was nothing compared to what I felt when I discovered that the Armenian’s parents had gone with them.

“He’s a hotelier, he got a special deal, why not take advantage?”

I felt a pang for the demented man upstairs in the bed, and my lost mom. I was spoiling for a fight.

“It’s a long way from coffin ships,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“That was your sales pitch when you met me, wasn’t it?”

She said nothing.

“Your stock-in-trade. Up from Florida with a Scots name, you quickly got the hang of things here and decided you were Irish. Only the strong survive, you used to say.”

“So?” She was icily still.

There was silence. I wanted to bring something to a head. I got up to get another bottle from the fridge. I was still in the kitchen when the question jumped out like a genie from a lamp. “Am I getting a hump?”

“You always had one,” I heard her laugh out from the next room. “I thought it was from all the reading and thinking you used to do. Big thinker.”

I came back, the cold bottle in my hand.

“Didn’t you know that?” she laughed again, throwing her head back.

I wanted to shove the laugh down her throat. Both of us had taken plenty of drink but I felt stone-cold sober as I swung the bottle. It caught her on the side of the head.

She slumped down on the sofa slowly and quietly.

In a panic, I felt her pulse, almost afraid to touch her skin. There was no sound from upstairs.

She was alive, breathing clearly, inclined to snore. Nat King Cole sang, “I thought you loved me, you said you loved me...” as I sucked air into my lungs and ran out of the house, forgetting to code in the alarm. It was raining to beat the band.

Old rancors and memories boiled up as I walked. Cars hissed by in the wet. My father’s first car was an old Falcon, whereas even the shabbiest Two Way Inn customer could surprise by turning out in something decent like an ageing Cadillac for the odd expedition to Far Rockaway. My Dad loved those words, Far Rockaway. “Goddamnit!” The Falcon stalled at every red light, and before it did I went into an agony of apprehension feeling a giggle build up inside, knowing there was no way to stop it rumbling up and out to hurt Dad’s feelings and make him swear even more, or even lash out and hit me. Saving Face for Ireland.

That was the “up-and-up” era. “We’re on the up-and-up,” Dad often said. That same year we went “home” to Ireland as a family, to thatched cottages and women in aprons and cardigans with anxious looks. I was put to sleep in a room full of bunk beds for students of Irish.

The males of the family laughed at jokes they didn’t share and at Dad’s hat. Nobody wore hats over there, at most they pushed a cap or beret around their heads when answering a question, as if it helped them think. I heard one of them say, “See any dollars fall outta the hat, boys?” We were overcharged everywhere we went. A vendor refused to tell Dad the price of an ice cream until he admitted we were “Yanks.” Dad was oblivious, delighted with everything.

I could still feel this anger somewhere inside now, untreated. I walked and walked.

There’d been a trip to Nevada as well, to another relative. Mom and Dad took us to shows of people I couldn’t stand, like Carol Channing and Buck Owens and Fats Domino. They watched these shows with the half-attention of people waiting for something more important to arrive, who expected better things of life and had the impression the real action was happening elsewhere. Me and Sis sniggered as Carol Channing threw imitation diamond rings into the audience, and Dad hissed, “Will you cut that out?”

* * *

A while later I found myself near the river, somewhere between the two big bridges. My clothes were sodden and the earth was muddy and smelled fresh. The world was washed down.

I heard my own voice quote A.E. Houseman aloud: “Yonder lies the gate of hell.”

“What’s that, Daddyo?” a voice said, and I saw the outlines of eight young men in hoodies against the evening sky. “Didn’t we see yo’ down hea’ the other day with yo’ friend?”

I realized the urgency of the situation, slid and lurched onto the street, dropping my cell phone. I ran until I reached a late-opening grocery store but was stopped at the door.

“Sorry,” the man said, “no can do.”

“There’s eight of them. I need to phone for help.”

“If we let you in, they’ll smash the place up.” He shut the door.

They soon caught me again, forced me to the ground, then kicked me as I lay. They broke my eyeglasses and took my wallet. They’d already smashed my phone.

I heard a saxophone peal out clearly, cutting the air like a knife, before I eventually lost consciousness.

I woke up in Mt. Sinai with stitches on my face. “Those kids feel threatened,” the nurse said. “They feel they’re being forced out by neighborhood change. They’re afraid of losing it to people from Manhattan, from anywhere.”

“We’re all going to lose it,” I said to George when he arrived to take me home. I gave no info to the cop who came, refused to file a complaint.

At the house, all was quiet. The front door lay open as I’d left it.

George refused to come in because I’d told him I socked one to the Swamp Rat.

When I went in, she was nowhere to be seen, although I knew there’d be trouble tomorrow. I looked in on Dad. The Pole was dozing in an armchair in his room.

“Someone rattled your cage,” he said, his eyes open. “I never saw a more miserable creature.”

The Pole opened her eyes or woke, depending on what she’d been doing. “All quiet,” she said too quickly, not mentioning my face. She stood up. “I’m going to get something to drink.”

“See the ass on that one — it’s far too big,” Dad sighed.

I knocked lightly on my wife’s bedroom door. We’d had separate rooms for years. There was no reply. I opened it as quietly as I could.

She lay on the white bed. The duvet (as she always liked to call it) had soaked up a lot of the blood, although I knew there was positively none when I’d left her downstairs. I approached, calling her name softly. She looked as youthful as the young Piaf I once loved.

This time there was no pulse.

I headed for the phone. As I shouted for an ambulance, I heard the Pole on the stairs and my father asking, “Am I dying?”

The police weren’t as sympathetic as I might have expected. This was perhaps due to my face, which was beginning to bruise up nicely. My story was disjointed, with periods that I couldn’t account for. They refused to let me call George, then changed their minds and called him themselves. He came, white-faced, but was of little help, as he hadn’t entered the house with me. He was escorted out, promising me that he’d send someone straight away.

“Bail or bond?” he tried to crack wise as he left. It didn’t work.

The Pole was bossy and informative, giving remarkably precise times and details of my comings and goings.

Naïma was hurried out of bed for questioning and arrived looking worried and hollow-eyed.

They even visited Dad’s room, where Tony Bennett was warbling, “If we never meet again...”

“What are yis havin’?” Dad asked the cops. Then: “Have you a light on that bicycle?”

They went away and left him alone.

They took me with them.

Two days later I was home again. George went bail, with nothing proved or decided either way. The eight hoodies couldn’t be found, obviously, although George and Noureddine were working on it. If those guys were from Astoria, they were dead meat. If they were from elsewhere, I was.

I was just thinking about lots of fresh coffee when I heard the door chimes and saw Jessica hobbling toward the door. I could see Pepe pretending to trim something with shears in the garden. Sean was slumped in a sofa, not sure whether he was more angry with me than he was sorry for himself. I spoke to him little. I didn’t know how.

Jessica ushered four people into the hall, all looking like Jehovah’s Witnesses on the way to a ball. They said they were real estate brokers, sent by Eddie to visit the house, swore blue that someone had given them an appointment.

It was certainly beginning to look like a plot. I felt more like Hamlet by the minute.

They checked out the house, came back to the hall again, and asked to see the cellar. I said there was no cellar. They informed me there was an extensive cellar. I changed my tune and asked Jessica to get the key. She shuffled off to the kitchen and returned after a while looking purple and perplexed. There was no sign of the key.

“Surely you have a second key,” said one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I hate people who use the word surely.

“No surely about it,” I answered. “The door is reinforced, for the wine, and Dad lost the key before he lost his mind, or shortly after. There was one key left, in the kitchen, always in the same place. Nobody’s been down there for a long time, the wine was my father’s baby.”

I didn’t tell them about my own (poor) taste in wine, or the fact that Pepe thought the marquis on the bottles was my father.

George arrived just then, got the measure of the scene, and hooshed them out the door to their fancy car, saying, “It’ll take a locksmith, it’s reinforced. We’ll call you already.”

Jessica joined in then, and Sean. “This house is in mourning!” they shouted. “Get outta here!”

The suits were so astonished, they just left, saying they’d need an appointment to visit The Two Way Inn.

“Visit it,” said George. “Anyone can. It’s open from dawn to dusk.” Then to me, he said, “What harm can it do? You’re not married to ’em. Yet.”

George spent the rest of the day calling the locksmith, calling Noureddine, keeping me on the wagon, and driving me to my bank, where a young man in a bad suit and eyeglasses told me the Swamp Rat had cleared out all of our accounts. I thought I caught a glimpse of the bank manager observing me through sanded glass somewhere, but George said I was paranoid. “Ye goin’ perrenawd on me,” was what he said.

The young man looked at me as if to say, Ya ain’t the first and ya won’t be the last.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said George, which wasn’t how I’d describe it.

Back home Jessica fed us, then I tried to reach Eddie in Vancouver. It took me awhile to hunt up the number, and it cost me a great deal to dial it. Sean sat and watched. I’d never have managed it if George hadn’t been there. Now I knew how my mother used to feel.

There was no reply. I didn’t think it funny he wouldn’t even have a servant, or an answering service.

We contacted several retirement homes for my dad. I thought there might be a problem with proof of income and all that, but George said it was best to have a place ready in case the worst happened.

“So what’s the worst can happen?” I asked.

“You in the clink,” said George. “The rest of the family can manage for themselves, your dad can’t.” Sean didn’t look like he agreed much.

A locksmith friend of George’s was due to turn up after work the following day and tackle the cellar door. I was all for cancelling him and forgetting about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but George thought we should go through the motions, at least till we contacted Eddie.

A lady came out from a home to check Dad out. I thought this untimely haste. She went up and explained to him exactly what she was doing there.

“No bother at all. Work away,” he replied, as if he’d understood everything. Then he said, “What time is the tea? I’d eat a scabby child off the floor.” He leaned over and put on Richard Harris singing “MacArthur Park.”

The retirement home lady and George had gone when I went up to spend ten minutes with Naïma before she left.

“He’s very restless,” she said. “Something’s upset him. He’s been through his box three times already.”

We agreed he might have understood about the retirement home.

As we settled him and fluffed his pillows, I noticed something odd on the white sheet, under his ass. It was a warm key.

“The ship’s name was Murphy and the boat’s goin’ up a hill,” he said, looking at me and giggling.

It turned out to be the key to the cellar, of course.

The Pole was in place and a thick fog had crept in from the river when George came by for a nightcap, later. I was sitting in my TV seat, as usual, watching nothing.

“Is The Two Way Inn running itself these days?” he asked.

“They’ll rob no more and no less, they know the score.”

I told him about the key. He was enthusiastic.

“Let’s do it,” he said, “before those assholes in the suits come back.”

Armed with flashlights and warm pullovers, we headed down there. I thought we might bring up a few bottles of real wine as well.

The cellar had more rooms than the ground floor, since some of them had been made into smaller spaces for storage. I reckoned nothing down there but the wine would be usable after years in dust and damp. Even the central heating and air-conditioning had been installed in a building off to the side of the ground floor, so nothing varied the conditions down here. You could feel the fog oozing in from the street and garden. I noticed a half-dozen shed snakeskins.

George was going through the wine and I was giving a last check to each corner, when I almost stumbled on something soft that gave with my foot. It stank.

There were two bodies, one lying flung over the other. By their clothes, I could tell that the one underneath was a woman, the one on top a man. I gagged. George came running.

Before I even got a proper look at them, he waved me upstairs to call the cops.

I didn’t think they’d believe me this time.

We all waited for them in Dad’s room. I was still coughing stuff out of my throat.

“Throw it up,” said Dad, “the chickens’ll ate it.”

“I quit,” said the Pole.

“So do I,” I replied.

I tried calling Eddie one more time. There was still no reply. I was beginning to think I knew where he was.

The cops took me with them again. It was more complicated, although they probably reckoned that even if I’d killed the Swamp Rat, it was still manslaughter and not first-degree murder. Much as I disliked her and wondered what she’d done with my money, I wished it was neither.

George and the Pole stood and watched me leave. They looked as if they were beginning to believe I’d done something bad. I felt I might be better behind bars for a while. I’d have time to think. It would force Sean to get serious, and reassure him that I was being punished for killing his mother, although I was still sure I hadn’t.

I got back again some hours later. The house was crawling with forensics people, plugging the causal breach. I wondered if they’d sort this one out. Why was the cellar locked, and how come Dad had the key? What if Dad was the killer?

Soon they announced that the bodies had been down there for six months.

I did a quick calculation. “That’s when Mom skipped out and Dad lost the plot.”

“One of the bodies is your mother, Mr. Nulty, the other appears to be your Uncle Eddie, from Vancouver. Your mother was shot. We haven’t found the weapon, but the bullet is an old-fashioned one.”

“Sunuvabitch!” said George. “And the uncle?”

The cop ignored him and continued to address me. “Your uncle had his head smashed in by a blunt weapon.”

There was a lot of legal stuff to handle after that. Eddie’s estate was protected by some Canadian legal thing. It looked like no one would get at it for a while, least of all the inheritance-hunters who had set the ball rolling. It also looked as if his remaining brothers and sisters would inherit. The Irish legend of the Canadian uncle would become a reality. The real estate people were slapped down by my lawyer. House and bar were declared private for the receptions and funerals. (I did wonder if the Armenian would consider himself in or out, and then I wondered why he hadn’t showed up lately.)

Sean began to throw his weight in and help with the arrangements.

Noureddine and George got a private investigator to come up with some loose threads: “An out-of-work Yugoslav brute called Niko is throwing money around. Turns out he got it from the Armenian. We’re trying to find out why.”

They got Niko up a dark alley one night. He admitted he’d found the door open and gone for it. He refused to admit anything else.

They called the cops, who found out the Armenian was in some kind of smuggling thing with Russia. The Swamp Rat was either in, or else she never knew about it. No one could figure out what had happened to the money. The Pole had disappeared and was suspected of working for the Armenian, among other things.

It didn’t stop there. George and his pals found someone Niko’d boasted to about knifing my wife. It could never be proved that he’d done it for the Armenian, although the cops suspected this. They also suspected that Eddie had killed my mother, but couldn’t prove that either. Nobody knew why, although she might have had something on him that she tried to use, or threatened to use. No gun was found. They reckoned my father had then killed Eddie, but couldn’t prove that either. He might’ve hid the gun, but then why didn’t he try to hide the bodies too?

“He lawst his mind, remember?” said George.

Naïma slept in the house until I found someone to replace the Pole. We got a clinic to take Dad for a week while the funerals were happening. The heat soared to over 100, and we mopped our brows and showered a lot and drank too much alcohol.

When all the bodies were buried — we did it the same day, same time, three hearses and three coffins had never been seen before except after an accident — Naïma and I went to see my father in the clinic.

“How are things at home?” he asked me. “How is everyone? How’s She?”

I presumed he was talking about the Eternal Feminine, his mother, his wife, his daughter-in-law. Whatever.

“What kind of work are they doin’ on the farm?” he asked.

“That’s a great man for his age,” said an Irish voice from the next bed. They keep ’em in twos so one keeps an eye on the other. Cuts down on staff.

I couldn’t see its owner due to a screen, but recognized it as a Monaghan accent. I wondered if this was an accident, or if someone had actually tried to group them.

“Pray to Saint Theresa, she’ll help you,” the Monaghan voice said.

“She cured Patsy Gibney,” said my father.

“It’s 7 o’clock. Ye’d be doing the milkin’ now,” the voice continued.

“What?”

He repeated it four times before Dad got it.

“Indeed, an’ I wouldn’t,” Dad replied. “I’m finished with all that now. I’m a suckler.”

I tried to explain to Naïma my ideas about the agricultural metaphor outliving its context. She looked at me funny.

As we left, the two men thought they were preparing to dose an uncooperative beast from a bottle.

“Fuck him,” muttered my dad. “Throw it all over him and let it soak in.”

“We’re off now, Dad,” I said.

He eyed me for a moment, then he said: “The divine diarrhea of the dollar.”

I recognized the words of Salvador Dali, and wondered again just how senile my father really was, and if it might strike me too.

But not yet, dear God, not yet. For the moment, me and Naïma were going to make a team. We’d get my dad home and whip Sean into some kind of shape. Rectitude was on the march again.

First Calvary by Robert Knightly

Blissville

The little girl is playing there by herself. She’s off in a corner of the yard by the alleyway where the girls come out of the Good Shepherd School at 3 o’clock when the bell rings and walk through to the street. But it’s already late, getting dark, time for all little kids to be home with their mothers. Nobody can see her there in the alley, he knows, because he’s been watching her awhile from behind the iron picket fence. She doesn’t see him, nobody sees him. For about the hundredth time, she takes her baby out of the carriage, fixes its clothes, talks to it, and puts it down again. He’s on the move now, out from behind the fence, walking quick on stubby legs down the alley. She can’t see him coming, she’s got her head in the carriage again.

“Be good now, baby,” he hears her say just as he reaches her and she straightens up and sees him. “Oh!” she says.

He pushes her hard and she flops down like a doll on her behind. He’s down the alley, out the gate, onto Greenpoint Avenue almost before she starts bawlin’.

He crosses the avenue, pushing the carriage in front of him fast as he can along the high stone wall between himself and the dead people buried in First Calvary. He dares not look left for fear of the Stone Saints high up on their pedestals standing watch over the graves. Even though he knows they can’t see him because their backs are turned to the street. He knows why this is so because his Nan has told him. Saints give fuck-all for the likes of the shanty Irish, Nan says. As he rolls across Bradley Avenue, he sneaks a look at the front door of the Cork Lounge, where Nan takes him and the dog on Saturday afternoons, after the stores for a growler of Shaeffer “to go.”

The carriage is big as him but he can push it all right. He hurtles past the people sitting on the front stoops of the houses, there like always, the mothers hanging out the windows in their parlors, resting big folded arms on windowsills all up and down the block, watching. He knows this, so he keeps his head down behind the carriage, pushing it up the block fast as he can, up and on his toes, leaning into it like the football team he’s seen practicing in the vacant lots off Review Avenue alongside the Newtown Creek.

Still, he feels the eyes on him, watching. He trips! Hits the pavement on hands and knees. The carriage rolls forward by itself, already two squares of sidewalk ahead, but he’s up! After it! Tears stinging his eyes, he grabs the handlebars, just missing the cars parked at the curb. He rights his ship and sails on up the sidewalk. His hands are dirty, right knee scraped where his overalls ripped. They’ll ask about that, he knows. He’ll say: I fell, it don’t hurt. At the corner, he wheels around onto Starr Avenue.

For the only time he can ever remember, there’s nobody on his stoop. Home free! He backs up the stoop, dragging the carriage by its handlebars up the four stone steps and into the vestibule of his tenement, then down the long, carpeted hallway to the door to the basement stairway, and parks it there in the dark. No one can see him reach in and take the doll in its frilly dress into his arms.

“Be good now, baby,” he cautions, then lays it back down in the carriage, covering it, head and all, with the pink blanket so no one can see.

He climbs the four flights of stairs, holding tight to the wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands, all the way to the top where he lives with Nan and Aunt May. Nan’s his grandmother and Aunt May’s mother and his father’s mother. He knows this because they told him, and his home will always be with them as long as he’s a good boy, and his mother drinks and his father’s a whoremaster. He does not remember his mother because she dropped him off when he was eight months and didn’t come back. Nan keeps house and Aunt May goes to work at the phone company. And Aunt May is the boss of all of them, Nan says when Aunt May can’t hear her. There’s an old dog named Dinah lives with them, it’s Aunt May’s dog, it won’t let him walk it. He reaches up for the doorknob and goes inside.

“Young man!” Aunt May calls from the parlor. He goes in to her. She’s in her housecoat, sitting in the arthritis chair by the window. Nan calls it that because Aunt May has that, and sits in it all the time. Nan’s not there, she went to the store. He sees the open window and pillow on the sill, the sheer curtain wafting in and out on the summer breeze, before dropping his eyes to the little fox terrier sitting alongside the chair, studying him, alert as if also waiting for him to account.

“I found it,” he says, staring at the dog who stares back, weighing his words with beady, angry eyes. Then, curling its upper lip to show fangs, growls from deep down in its little chest.

“Where did you find it?” Aunt May snaps.

“In the schoolyard.”

“Liar!”

“She gave it to me.”

Aunt May makes him push it all the way back. As he runs the gauntlet, he again keeps his head down, eyes to the pavement. The little girl is still there, bawlin’, with her mother and a bunch of little girls. The other little girls are bawlin’ too; he has no idea why. When the little girl sees him, she stops, runs to the carriage, snatches up her doll and hugs it. But when Aunt May holds him by the scruff of the neck in front of the little girl and tells her to give him a good slap right across his face, she starts bawlin’ again. Staked out by bloodthirsty hostiles, his face burns under their piteous stares. In sight of the Stone Saints across the street giving him the ass, he prays with all his might that all the windows in all the houses on every block be nailed shut.

Bottom of the sixth by Alan Gordon

Rego Park

Plaster dust fell lazily through the air. He watched it idly, betting on which finger it would land. His right hand was dominating his field of vision at the moment. His right hand, and the dust that drifted down from the crappy plasterboard someone had once used to patch up the ceiling, so old and crumbled that a loud noise could loosen it.

Like, say, a gunshot.

The dust fell on his ring and middle fingers, which twitched slightly when it hit them. That was a good thing, he decided. He moved the other three fingers, then rotated his hand on the floor where it rested. Even better. He was falling very much in love with the plaster dust, with his working fingers, with the hand and the wrist that turned it. He did a quick inventory of the rest of his body. Everything seemed accounted for, or at least attached. Something hurt around the right side of his rib cage.

Let’s try breathing, he thought. Haven’t done that for a while.

He sucked in air, and started to cough violently. The thing that hurt in his rib cage, which apparently had only been kidding before, began to throb badly. He used the right hand that he still liked so much to poke cautiously at the spot. It was tender and painful. But it wasn’t bleeding. Protruding slightly from the inside of the vest was the mashed tip of a bullet.

Michaels pushed himself up from the floor, pointing his gun unsteadily in front of him.

“You okay?” asked Carter, who was getting to his feet.

“Basically, yeah,” said Michaels. “Might have cracked a rib.”

Carter looked at Michaels’s vest, which had a neat entry hole on the front.

“Damn, those things actually work,” he said. “Who knew?”

“Not that guy,” said Michaels, pointing in front of him.

The man lying on the floor was groaning weakly, two bullet holes in his back and a pool of blood seeping out from under him.

“Shot his own man in the back,” observed Carter. “Just because he got in the way. That’s cold.”

A pile of blue uniforms burst through the door, guns drawn.

“Oh good, now you’re here,” wheezed Michaels. “Tell me you got him.”

“Got who?” asked one of the uniforms.

“Wasn’t someone supposed to be covering the fire escape?”

“Yeah. Merck. He’s still out there. He didn’t see anything.”

Michaels and Carter looked at each other.

“Two-bedroom apartment,” said Michaels. “There’s the door, which was us, and the fire escape, which is Merck. Where is the fucker?”

One of the uniforms called for EMS. The two detectives and the other three fanned out across the living room. Carter took a deep breath, then kicked open a bedroom door. He waited two beats. Nothing happened.

“Portillo, if you’re in there, you know you ain’t getting away,” he called. “Make this easy. No one got hurt.”

“Wait a second,” protested Michaels.

“Shut up, I’m working,” said Carter. He barged through the door, a uniform close behind.

“Clear!” they called a second later.

Carter came out and looked at the second bedroom.

“Portillo, I am not playing!” he shouted. “Don’t get any stupider on me!”

There was no response. Carter sighed, then kicked the door in.

“Fuck me, it’s empty,” he said, peering inside. “Guy did a Houdini. Where’d he go?”

“Hey, detective,” called a uniform from the first bedroom. “Take a look at this.”

They all crowded in. There was a floorboard that wasn’t quite flush with the rest. The uniform pulled, and a section of floor came up. The hole underneath was ringed by a dozen brick-sized packages wrapped in layers of plastic.

“Crawl space,” said Carter, shining a flashlight into it. “Looks like it goes all the way to the elevator shaft. He’s probably gotten to the basement by now.”

“Not one of our finer days,” said Michaels.

The EMS crew came in and went to work on the wounded man. Michaels took his first deep breath, regretting it immediately. He pried the bullet out of his vest and tossed it to one of the uniforms.

“Bag this,” he ordered. “Bag the coke. Get Evidence Retrieval in here for prints. I’m gonna ride along with the Swiss guy.”

“I thought he was Latino,” said the uniform. “How do you figure he’s Swiss?”

“’Cause of all the holes in him,” said Michaels.

The ambulance screeched up the ramp to the emergency room at Queens General, with Carter’s Corvette pulling up right behind them, his bubble light flashing on top. Two RMPs brought up the rear.

“I want him guarded 24/7,” said Carter to the uniforms. “Two men at all times, and heads up. If this guy wants to finish the job, he’ll come in blasting.”

They followed the gurney inside. There was a flurry of green scrubs and shouting, then the doors to the OR hissed shut, leaving the two detectives standing with a surgeon.

“How long for the operation?” asked Michaels.

“To take the bullets out, not long,” said the surgeon. “But we got to get Neuro down to take a look at the spine. I don’t think the guy walks again.”

“He wasn’t going anywhere, anyways,” said Michaels. “We’d like him alive and talking.”

“Don’t worry, that’s what we do,” replied the surgeon. “Welcome to Gunshots ’R’ Us.”

He vanished through the doors. Carter tugged on Michaels’s arm.

“What?”

“I figure that adrenaline rush you’ve been coasting on is about to run out,” said Carter. “Let’s get you looked at before you crash and get all whiny with it.”

Cracked rib, said the ER nurse. Cracked rib, said the X-ray tech. By the time an actual doctor came by and peremptorily taped him up, the formal diagnosis was an afterthought. The doctor pulled out a prescription pad, then looked at him quizzically.

“How much do you want it to not hurt?” he asked.

“What’s the tradeoff?” asked Michaels.

“You have any desire to be awake anytime in the near future?”

“Actually, I do,” said Michaels. “But give me something for when I need to sleep without screaming.”

The doctor scribbled something. “You’re a lucky man today,” he said as he handed it to him.

“I guess I am,” said Michaels. “Not really feeling it yet.”

He walked out of the ER. Carter was waiting for him.

“They told me you got a cracked rib,” he said.

“So I heard,” said Michaels. “How’s our boy?”

“Still in surgery,” said Carter. “And Birnbaum’s here.”

“He wants to debrief us?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Birnbaum’s moods were measured on the Richter scale. From the looks of his complexion, which was veering into the deep-purple end of red, there was major activity happening along his faultline.

“Routine execution of a search warrant, that’s what you said,” he fumed. “That is what you said, isn’t it?”

“Yes, captain,” answered Carter.

“And now I got an escaped cop-shooter with no description,” said Birnbaum. “Wonderful. Let’s call the Post and share our little victory.”

“I didn’t really get shot,” explained Michaels. “I got shot at. The bullet did not technically enter my body.”

“And my foot will not technically connect with your ass,” retorted Birnbaum.

“We did get twelve keys of coke off the street,” pointed out Carter. “And one guy to charge them against.”

“Oh, that was good work,” said Birnbaum. “Did he put up a struggle as you put the cuffs on, or was he too busy bleeding on the floor? Get Portillo, and then I can start sticking medals on someone.”

He stormed away.

“Ain’t no winning with this one, is there?” said Carter.

The surgeon came out. “You need these for evidence or something?” he asked, holding out his hand. There were two bullets in it.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Carter. “How’s the patient?”

“He’ll live, but he won’t be out of a wheelchair until someone figures out how to reconnect spinal cords.”

“That sucks,” said Michaels. “How long until he wakes up?”

“Should be soon.”

“Okay, doc, thanks,” said Michaels. He turned to Carter. “So now that they’ve sewed him up, let’s go see if he’s willing to spill his guts.”

“Not until I talk to him about his condition,” said the surgeon. “He hears that from me, not from you.”

“Look, doc, this is a serious case here,” said Michaels. “We got a shooter on the run.”

“My house, my rules,” replied the surgeon. “I’ll let you know when I’m through.”

About fifteen minutes later, he came out and gave them a nod. They went inside. The man was stretched out on a bed, a number of different monitors beeping and blinking around him. He was staring up at the ceiling, but rolled his eyes toward the two detectives as they pulled up a couple of chairs to the bed. One of his hands was handcuffed to the siderail.

“How’s it going, John?” asked Michaels.

“Who’s John?” whispered the man.

“That’s how they got you listed,” said Michaels. “You’re John Doe 375 until they find out your real name. Sorry about your situation. Guess your partner figured he didn’t want you talking.”

“I’m not talking,” said the man.

“Look at that loyalty, will you?” beamed Michaels.

“Impressive,” said Carter. “Gets shot in the back by his own boy, and still won’t give him up.”

“John — screw that, give me a name,” said Michaels. “We’ll have it by tonight with the fingerprints, so you might as well.”

“Santos,” said the man.

“Okay, Santos, nice to meet you. Here’s the thing,” said Michaels. “We took twelve keys out of the floor in the bedroom. That puts you deep into A-1 felony weight, which in real terms means a whole lotta years to life. Not only that, you get charged for what your buddy Portillo did when we came in the door.”

“What do you mean?” wheezed Santos.

“I mean two counts of attempted murder in the— Hey, I guess it’s first degree, isn’t it?”

“He was shooting at police officers,” said Carter. “Hit one. That makes it first degree in my book.”

“So that makes it another whole lotta years to life consecutive to the first whole lotta years to life,” continued Michaels.

“I didn’t shoot anyone,” protested Santos.

“Yeah, but it’s this whole acting-in-concert thing,” said Michaels. “Legal stuff, but I’m saying it means you go down for everything here.”

“He’s not my partner,” said Santos.

“Then you shouldn’t give a shit what happens to him,” said Michaels.

“I wouldn’t,” added Carter.

“You see, here’s what I’m saying, Santos,” Michaels continued. “We can give up on him and let you take the weight, and that’s a win for us. We go on to the next case, and you go upstate into maximum security...”

“That’s on account of it being a violent felony,” explained Carter.

“Where you will spend the rest of your life not being able to walk, piss, shit, or... which one am I missing?”

“Fuck,” said Carter.

“Oh yeah, fuck,” said Michaels. “On the plus side, when you get gang-banged, you won’t feel a thing. You could get some reading done while it’s going on.”

“You are going to be one well-read man,” said Carter.

“But, as you might have figured out by now...” started Michaels.

“Because you are an intelligent individual...” said Carter.

“There is a way of making this situation a whole lot easier.”

“Portillo,” said Santos.

“That’s right.”

“And you give me what? Witness Protection Program?”

“Not likely,” said Michaels. “But we could just charge you with the drugs, and there’s a lot of flexibility in the sentencing. Even probation comes into play if your info is good.”

“I can get out?”

“We could drop it down a grade or three depending on the level of cooperation we get,” explained Michaels. “This is Queens. We got a deal going with the Narcotics DA. Doesn’t mean you can go back to selling, but yeah, you can get out.”

Santos lay there, his eyes closed. “Am I ever gonna walk?”

“Not according to your doctor,” said Michaels.

“Fuck Portillo,” said Santos. “Fuck him up bad.”

“We’ll do our best,” promised Michaels. “So what have you got?”

“His sister’s kid,” said Santos. “He’s in Little League. He’s a pitcher. Portillo was always bragging on how great his nephew is. He was talking about going to see him pitch on Saturday. There’s a playoff game. He wouldn’t miss it if every SWAT team in the world was after him.”

“When? Where? What’s the sister’s name?”

“I don’t know,” said Santos.

“What’s the nephew’s name?” asked Carter.

“Portillo just called him Junior.”

“And that’s all you got? There are a thousand Little League fields in this city. How we gonna find the right one?”

Santos thought for a second. “Jews,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“He came back from this one game, I think it was last Tuesday night, and he was laughing about seeing all these Jews lining up for a bunch of school buses. He thought it was the funniest thing he ever seen.”

“Jews in New York,” muttered Michaels. “Well, that should narrow it down.”

“You got him yet?” asked Birnbaum when they entered his office.

“We know where he’s gonna be, sort of,” said Michaels. He summed up their information.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah, so far,” said Michaels. “Doesn’t really help. There are a lot of baseball fields and even more Jews to track down. Not sure how to narrow this one down in time.”

“Maybe by asking the only Jew in the room, who has risen to his position of authority over you shmucks by means of superior intelligence,” said Birnbaum.

“Enlighten us, captain,” said Carter.

“When you or I say Jew, we’re talking about a whole range of things,” said Birnbaum. “But if a guy named Portillo is laughing about seeing Jews on a bus, he’s means old-school Jews. I’m talking Hasids here.”

“Those guys in the black coats and hats with the beards and the curly things on the sides,” said Michaels.

“That sensitivity training really paid off for you,” sighed Birnbaum. “Yes, those guys. Lubavitchers, Satmars, whichever sect, that’s probably who he was talking about.”

“So we’re looking at Williamsburg or Crown Heights?” guessed Carter.

“Not necessarily,” said Birnbaum. “They’ve branched out into a lot of neighborhoods. But if they’re getting on school buses, it probably means either a synagogue or a seminary. Start calling precinct captains — those guys should be able to tell you if there are Hasid places near Little League fields.”

“We’re on it,” said Michaels.

A few hours later, Carter hung up his phone and sighed. “Damn, when Cap’s on, he’s on. Got a likely from the 112.”

“Forest Hills?” said Michaels.

“Forest Hills, Rego Park,” answered Carter. “Proud home of the Forest Hills Youth Athletic Association, which is in Rego Park. They have their own fields on Fleet Street, and first round of playoffs is this Saturday.”

“And?”

“Around the corner on Thornton, there’s a Hasidic seminary. School buses line up to take the students back to wherever they live. The Captain at the 112 says they sometimes got complaints about the street getting blocked.”

“Let’s go take a look,” said Michaels.

They drove to Fleet Street. There was a high mesh fence bordering the sidewalk, a concrete bunker of a clubhouse on the right. It was Friday, around noon, and the field was being mowed by a guy on a large riding mower. There was an old railroad bridge, overgrown with bushes and trees, and abandoned tracks ran along a path off the street, parallel to the left field line. Signs from local sponsors decorated the outfield fence.

“Looks doable,” said Carter.

“Harder than it looks,” countered Michaels. “There’s another field there.”

They strolled through the gate and up a hill. Sure enough, a second baseball diamond was set up above the first, and they could see two more past that one. A path stretched between Fields 3 and 4, running to residential neighborhoods in both directions.

“What’s past that field?” asked Carter.

“Let’s take a look.”

There were woods, and a clearing. The tracks continued in that direction, heading toward a tunnel by the Long Island Rail Road tracks. A commuter train roared by as they watched.

“Someone’s been having a party,” observed Michaels, pointing to some empty beer bottles and crack vials scattered around a fallen tree.

“Our boy, or just the locals?” wondered Carter.

“Who knows? This could be a nightmare. We got three street entrances, the whole woodland frontier at the back, four fields going simultaneously for however many games, one very dangerous and armed cop-shooter, and civilians everywhere. Child civilians at that.”

“Portillo spooks, there could be some bad headlines on Sunday,” said Carter. “Shoot-out at a Little League game. Won’t do anyone any good.”

“We’re gonna need a big team. Let’s talk to the captain.”

Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m., Michaels handed out satellite photos of the field that he had downloaded. “First games are at 8:30. Four fields going, and a new game every two hours until sunset. Every field will have two dozen kids, and three times as many family members watching. We’re looking for a phenom, a Latino pitcher called Junior, and when we find him, we narrow down on that location and look for his uncle. We got twenty-five cops here. I want a car at the two side entrances at Thornton and Alderton, four guys up in the woods near the old railroad tunnel, two cars at the main entrance, and the rest of us wandering the location. If you see him, just phone it in. We’ll grab him once he leaves. We don’t want him to start anything when there’s kids everywhere. Everyone got their cell phones charged up? We’ll be keeping them on walkie-talkie mode.”

“Won’t that look kind of obvious?” asked a cop.

“Every parent on that field is gonna be giving play-by-play to Grandma,” said Michaels. “We’ll fit right in.”

Sleepy six-year-olds wearing primary-colored jerseys and black pants over cups they wouldn’t need for several years waddled up the hill to the T-ball field. Older children warmed up on the larger fields while their parents unfolded a wide variety of collapsible chairs. The caretaker trundled the chalk spreader from field to field, leaving foul lines in his wake. The tiny green snack shed’s shutters opened, and the smell of coffee and hot dogs began to permeate the atmosphere. Michaels bought his first cup of coffee and promised to pace himself. There were going to be no bathroom breaks today.

International League. Pan-Continental League. Major League. Grandiose titles for small players, wearing their sponsors’ names with pride. T-Bone Diner. Hancock Law. Fast Break — that was the best name for a team, Michaels thought. A basketball team, but still. He wandered around, listening in on coaches’ instructions, looking for Junior.

“It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame,” came Carter’s voice over his cell phone. “Let’s play sixteen.”

A burst of Spanish chatter caught his attention. A family had settled in to cheer their daughter on. A young woman, a young man, an older woman. The man had a beard. In the brief glimpse he’d had of Portillo, he hadn’t seen a beard. He had a vague impression of height.

“Girls generally don’t get named Junior, do they?” he asked into his cell phone.

“I’d say not,” replied Carter. “Unless she’s a real Griffey fan. But Santos did say nephew.”

“Right,” said Michaels. “I’m hanging by Field 3, Mom. I’ll let you know when little Barney comes up to bat.”

There were bleachers along the third base line, but he chose to stand by the fence near first. Families were still coming in as the pimply teenager who was umpiring the game yelled, “Play ball!”

Michaels glanced over the crowd, then watched as the pitcher plunked the first batter with his first throw. The crowd oohed in sympathy, then cheered as the batter swallowed hard to keep from crying and jogged down to first base.

“Settle down, Danny!” shouted a mom. The pitcher ignored her, and hit the next batter.

“One more and he’s out,” said a man sitting on a lawn chair by Michaels.

“That’s the rule?” asked Michaels.

“Yeah, you can only hit two kids per inning. Safety thing.”

“I guess you save it for the ones you really don’t like,” said Michaels.

“Yeah,” said the man. “That’s my boy in left. Which kid’s yours?”

“Still on the bench,” said Michaels. “They’ll probably put him in halfway through.”

“Well, they have to, don’t they?... Hey, I know you.”

“Yeah?” said Michaels.

“Yeah,” said the man. “You’re a cop, aren’t you? So am I. Bill Stanley, 101st Precinct.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Michaels, shaking his hand. “Jim Michaels.”

“Michaels, right. Didn’t know you lived around here. And you got a kid my boy’s age? Small world.”

“Sure is,” said Michaels.

“Yeah, I remember, you were working Narcotics,” continued Stanley. “Still there?”

“Yup.”

“Huh.” Stanley’s eyes narrowed. He stood by Michaels, keeping his eyes on the game. The batter popped up to third for the first out. “You don’t have a kid, do you?” Stanley said softly. “Tell me you’re not on the job right now.”

“Sorry,” said Michaels.

“Jesus, what’s going down here?”

“Just looking for someone.”

“There are children here,” said Stanley. “What the hell are you thinking?”

“We’re not going to take him down here.”

“What if he freaks?” asked Stanley. “Did you consider that?”

“We did,” said Michaels. “This is our only lead.”

“Crap, crap, crap,” muttered Stanley. “Is he at this game?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Michaels. “We were told he’s got a nephew called Junior. Latino. A pitcher.”

“Junior,” said Stanley. “I don’t know any Juniors in this game.”

The next two batters struck out. Danny had settled down. The parents cheered, including Stanley. As the kids ran to the dugout, he motioned to his son, who quickly came to the fence.

“Billy, this is a friend of mine from the force. Jim Michaels.”

“How ya doin’, Billy?” said Michaels.

“Fine,” said Billy.

“He was wondering about a pitcher named Junior,” said Stanley. “Spanish kid. Know anyone like that?”

“Junior? He’s in Majors,” answered Billy. “This is Pan-Con.”

“Which team?” asked Michaels.

“Yellowstone Tires. He’s their best pitcher. I gotta go, Coach is yelling.”

“Thanks, Billy,” said Michaels.

The boy scooted away.

“Here,” said Michaels, handing Stanley two bucks. “Buy him an extra ice cream on me.”

“My son, the snitch. His mother will be so proud.”

Michaels walked down to the league bulletin board and studied the schedules. Yellowstone Tires was playing at 10:30 on Field 1, the big one by the street. He pulled out his cell phone.

“Okay, Mom, I gotta see Junior play at 10:30,” he said.

“You got him?” asked Carter.

“I don’t know any other Juniors, Mom. Do you?”

“Haven’t found any yet,” said Carter. “Which field?”

“Yeah, Field 1, Mom, that’s the nice one by the street.”

“Well, I think we got to keep covering the others, just in case.”

“You said it, Mom,” said Michaels. “I’ll call you when the game starts, give you a play-by-play. Put your feet up and go easy on the gin, okay?”

“If your mother is really like that, it goes a long way toward explaining you,” said Carter.

Michaels bought a pretzel from the snack shack. The first base foul line for Field 1 paralleled the street, where a pair of ice cream trucks had parked and were doing brisk business. An apartment building loomed beyond the clubhouse. Michaels picked up his cell again.

“We should have someone covering the entrance of that building,” he muttered. “Any Latino male coming out after the game ends should be tailed.”

“You don’t have enough people for everyone in Queens,” said one of the backups. “And they all seem to be here.”

Michaels sighed and hung up. A pair of three-year-olds ran screaming by him, their mothers following behind, chatting. No kid was being supervised, because every kid was safe. It was an oasis of security in the big bad city, and Michaels started hoping that he was wrong and Portillo was on his way back to wherever he was from.

The yellow jerseys of Yellowstone Tires began assembling by the field at 10:15, some tossing baseballs around, some cheering for their friends in the game winding down. There were several Latino kids on the team. A coach said something to one, and he nodded while a shorter, squatter kid dug a catcher’s mitt and a baseball from the equipment bag. They went over to the side of the field and began throwing the ball back and forth. The Latino kid threw two easy pitches to the catcher. Then he brought his left knee up close to his chin and uncoiled. The ball hit the catcher’s mitt dead center with a pop that echoed off the apartment building. Michaels pulled out his phone.

“I got Junior here,” he said. “And he’s got an arm, my friends.”

“Right,” said Carter. “Units 3, 4, and 5 to Field 1. The rest of you keep covering where you are, just in case we’re wrong.”

The early game ended, and the two teams lined up to slap palms in a display of ritualized sportsmanship. Yellowstone Tires and Wilco Hardware came onto the field to warm up. The parents of the Wilco kids gathered in the third base bleachers. Michaels grabbed a seat next to a woman who was surreptitiously reading a Harlequin romance.

“Which one is yours?” asked the woman.

“Oh, I got here too early,” said Michaels. “Gonna see my nephew play, but my idiot brother got the time wrong. So I got a couple of hours to kill.”

“That’s my Tommy playing second,” she offered.

“Good-looking kid,” he said. “Looks like you.”

“Are you one of those men who hits on divorced women at Little League games?” she asked hopefully.

“Nah, I only go for soccer moms. And they’re out of season. Who’s the kid pitching for Yellowstone? He’s got some pop.”

“That’s Javier,” she said. “His mom calls him Junior. He’s excellent.”

“Which one’s his mom?”

“I thought you only went for soccer moms,” she said, pouting slightly.

“Buddy of mine runs a travel team. He told me to scout for him while I was here. Javier might be a prospect.”

“That’s her in the yellow T-shirt,” she said, pointing to the other bleachers.

He pulled out a pair of binoculars and scanned the Yellowstone supporters. A Latino woman was cheering loudly with some other moms. There were no Latino men.

The Wilco pitcher took the mound and threw his warmups. The catcher tossed the last one to second base, and then the game began. Yellowstone scratched out a run in the top of the first on three singles, the last by Javier, who was batting fifth. Then he took the mound for the bottom of the inning. He struck out the side on eleven pitches.

“This kid is good,” said Michaels into his cell phone.

“You’re telling me,” said Carter. “Any luck on Portillo?”

“Haven’t seen Uncle. I’ll get back to you.”

He stretched and stepped down from the bleachers. His colleagues were wandering around, pretending not to notice each other. He walked down to the street and bought an ice cream.

“Little League sure kills your diet,” he said on his cell.

“It’s our lack of will power,” replied Carter. “I’m on my fifth hot dog, and I don’t even like hot dogs. Any prospects?”

“Not yet.”

Bottom of the second. Two more strikeouts for Javier, the batters flinching at each pitch. The last one swung late and hit a weak ground ball to the first baseman, earning a cheer from the Wilco parents.

Michaels sauntered over to the first base bleachers and took a seat in the top row, giving him a good view of both the game and Javier’s mother. She kept up an animated stream of Spanish with a woman next to her, interspersed with cheers for her son and the other children. She did not look anywhere else.

The pitcher for Wilco, while not at Javier’s level, was effective after the first inning, pitching in and out of jams without allowing another run. Javier struck out the side again in the fourth, and the crowd erupted in cheers.

“Do you realize that we’re watching a perfect game?” marveled Michaels.

“Don’t jinx it,” warned Carter.

“Lucky bastards,” said another detective. “The T-ball game is 18 to 4 in the second, and all the runs are unearned. I’m having flashbacks.”

Word traveled, and kids and parents who were not committed to other games drifted down to watch Javier. Reluctantly, Michaels started scanning the crowd again, looking for possibilities. The ping of a bat distracted him, and he looked back at the game to see Yellowstone’s center fielder racing toward the fence. At the last second, he stuck his glove out and the ball somehow landed in it.

Both sides and all the onlookers stood and applauded the effort, Javier as hard as anyone.

“Did you see that?” shouted Michaels into his cell phone.

“Unbelievable!” said Carter. “Game-saver right there.”

Michaels stretched as the fifth inning played out. Javier was beginning to look fatigued. His pitches no longer popped, but his control was still with him. The Wilco batters were putting the ball in play instead of striking out, although the Yellowstone fielders were able to keep the perfect game going.

Only one inning left, thought Michaels. Then he saw a tall Latino male standing outside the right field fence next to a Hasid who had stopped to watch the game.

“Hey, Mom, I think Uncle Phil just got here,” he said. “Down on the street side. I’m gonna go say hello.”

“Got your back,” said Carter.

He ambled over to the fence by where the Latino stood. Yellowstone did nothing in the top of the sixth. It was still 1–0, and Javier walked slowly to the mound, the crowd cheering him on.

“Good game,” said Michaels. “That Javier is some pitcher.”

The Latino man grunted.

“It would be a shame if something spoiled his big day,” continued Michaels. “Like seeing his uncle get arrested in front of everyone.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked the Latino man, turning to face him.

“Oh, sorry,” said Michaels. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Then who you talking to?” demanded the man.

“Him,” said Michaels, pointing to the Hasid. “And I suggest you give us a little space for a few minutes.”

The Hasid glanced at him with a quizzical expression, sweat running through his beard. Then his eyebrows raised slightly.

“You were the one coming through the door,” he said.

“That’s me,” said Michaels. “And I have friends all around you, so let’s keep it quiet. There are kids here.”

Portillo turned back toward the game, keeping his hands visible on the fence.

“Tell you what,” he said softly. “Let’s watch the last inning. Give me that, then I’ll go quietly.”

Birnbaum will ream me for this, thought Michaels.

“All right,” he said. “Hell, I want to see if he pulls it off.”

The first batter took a called strike. Then he glanced at the dad coaching third.

“Whadaya think, they put the bunt on?” said Michaels.

“Let him try,” replied Portillo.

The bunt was on. The kid bravely squared around in the face of the onrushing pitch. It was a chest-high fastball, and it caught the top of the bat and went straight up. The batter, the catcher, and the umpire looked at it, then the catcher took a step forward and caught it.

One out.

“He read the play,” said Michaels. “Smart.”

The next kid gritted his teeth and took the count to three and two. Then he fouled off three pitches in a row.

“He’s tired,” said Portillo. “Come on, Junior, one good one here.”

Javier brought his knee up high and whipped his arm around. The ball started chest high and broke down and to the left. The batter flailed. Strike three.

“I’m guessing he’s an El Duque fan,” said Michaels.

“Better believe it,” said Portillo. “He was so happy when the Mets brought him back.”

Wilco was down to their last licks. The batter, a muscular twelve-year-old, was the kid who had put the ball to deep center before. He swung confidently, then stepped up to the plate. He took Javier to a full count, then, like the previous batter, fouled several pitches off.

Portillo looked at Michaels and grinned through the fake beard.

“Gonna give him the hook again?” speculated Michaels.

“Just watch,” said Portillo.

Javier reared back and threw it hard, right down the middle. The batter swung and connected, a line drive up the middle. Javier stuck his glove in front of his face in self-defense and managed to catch it.

Perfect.

Javier’s team swarmed the mound and lifted him exultantly above them. His mother was screaming from the bleachers, and he pointed at her in triumph.

“Some game,” said Michaels.

“Yeah,” said Portillo, taking off the black hat and wiping his brow with his sleeve. “Okay, let’s go.”

They walked casually away from the field toward Thornton, the rest of the crew falling into place behind them. As they turned the corner, Michaels produced his handcuffs.

“Hands behind your back,” he said.

Portillo complied, and Michaels cuffed him. The prisoner van pulled up. A uniform patted him down. “He’s clean.”

“Strip him when you get inside, just to be safe,” said Michaels.

Portillo turned and looked at him as they put him inside. “Thanks,” he said.

“You want me to tell them what happened?” asked Michaels.

“Nah,” replied Portillo. “It’s the best day of his life. Can’t spoil those.”

They closed the doors of the van and drove off. Carter stood by Michaels.

“How on earth did you know it was Portillo under that getup?” demanded Carter. “He looked kosher to me.”

“See any Hasids up by the seminary?” asked Michaels.

“Well, no, as a matter of fact, I do not,” replied Carter. “Why is that?”

“Because it’s a seminary, not a synagogue. Seminary’s where you learn, synagogue’s where you pray. And it’s Saturday morning. Hasids are in synagogues, not at ballgames.”

“Damn. So what happened between you two?”

“We bonded,” said Michaels. “Baseball does that... What do you say we get some lunch? I have this strange craving for bagels and lox.”

The flower of flushing by Victoria Eng

Flushing

Let’s get this party started!” Lily calls out to me from across the street. She’s late, as usual. I’ve been waiting for her by the train station on the corner of Main and Roosevelt, breathing in the greasy aroma of hot dogs and frying noodles from various sidewalk carts. Sunlight washes over Main Street and its procession of festive store signs, all red and yellow with black Chinese lettering. As Lily approaches, the traffic lights change; cars brake at the crosswalk in succession, like they’re bowing to her. She smiles brightly and bumps her hip against mine. I roll my eyes at her and don’t bump back, but inside I’m relieved that she even showed up. Today is important: I’m determined to talk to my crush, Jimmy Lee, a junior at my school. I know he plays basketball at Bowne Park on the weekends, so I made Lily promise to come with me so that I could “run into him” there. We head down Main toward Sanford Avenue, weaving around weekend shoppers and double-parked trucks.

“Think he’ll be there today?” I ask.

“Who? Yao Ming?” she says, her dimples showing.

“Stop calling him that.” I poke her arm. “You know his name.”

“Hey, look! There he is.”

My breath catches in my chest. I look around without moving my head, hoping that he’s too far away to have heard me talking about him. We’re approaching the underpass of the Long Island Rail Road station and I expect to see him perusing magazines at the newsstand, or worse, walking right toward me. But Lily points to a store window with a life-sized poster of Yao Ming, the NBA player from China, and starts cracking up.

“Oh, reeeeally funny, Lil,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster. I exhale through my mouth, the tension in my neck subsiding. “You almost made me puke, you know.”

She’s laughing so hard no sound is coming out of her mouth.

“Um, maybe you’re the one who’s gonna puke. You okay?”

She nods and gasps. I’m tempted to tickle her sides to make her throw up — she’s always been sensitive like that — but I’m too anxious to get going.

Jimmy Lee looks nothing like the famous athlete, but he’s 6'2" — way taller than most Asian guys — and he plays on the basketball team. That was enough for Lily to make fun of him. It made no difference to her that he’s Korean.

“Really, quit calling him Yao Ming. Jimmy’s not even Chinese.”

“I know,” she sighs. “Well, he’s far from perfect. A jock. What’s he going to do for you? Buy you pom-poms?” She catches her reflection in the window of a café and runs her fingers through her hair.

Lily Tong is the kind of girl who makes heads turn. She’s only fifteen, one year older than me, but she looks at least twenty. She’s curvy like the women in the music videos, and she wears her makeup and hair like she’s one too. As usual, she’s dressed in something slinky: an expensive, cut-up T-shirt that keeps falling off her shoulder, low-cut jeans that hug her curves, and black pumps. Dangling off her arm is a new purse, its print of interlocking letters broadcasting its expense. Along the street, old Chinese ladies carrying plastic bags full of groceries pause from scrutinizing vegetables to shake their heads at her disapprovingly. Men gawk at her from the open backdoors of restaurants; one worker almost falls from his perch on an overturned bucket into the pile of carrots he’s peeling. As usual, Lily pretends not to notice, but she lifts her chin a little bit higher, and swings her hips a little bit wider.

I hold my head higher too, proud to be her best friend. At 5'5", I’m taller than Lily, but I look like a child next to her, in my maroon tank top and green Old Navy cargo pants. Even if I had the courage to wear the kinds of clothes as Lily, everything would just hang on me loosely. My hair falls straight down in stringy strands no matter what I do to it, so I never even bother curling it like Lily does. I’m glad that I chose to paint my toenails red instead of pink; at least my feet look grown-up.

As we turn onto Sanford, someone calls out Lily’s name. We both turn around and see Peter Wong getting out of the passenger side of a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade.

He walks up to us casually and puts his arm around Lily’s shoulders. The sun glints off the rock-star shades he’s wearing. He’s older, in his twenties or maybe even thirties; I don’t know what he’s doing talking to Lily, but I figure he must know her through her father, who owns one of the biggest dim sum houses in Flushing. As a big businessman, her father knows a lot of people.

“Dai Guo!” She smiles and kisses him on the cheek. She called him Big Brother, but the way he’s looking at her is anything but brotherly. His hand lingers on her hair as he releases her shoulder. He barely looks at me when she introduces us. I know he’s headed to the park too; he and his friends are always there.

They continue walking together, Lily between us so I can’t hear most of their conversation. He calls her Xiao Mei — Little Sister — and coos at her as if she’s a baby. She’s all giggly with him, which I think is gross. Still, I wonder what it would feel like if a guy like him paid so much attention to me, if I were that beautiful. He tells her about the kinds of things he can get for her from his “connections.”

“I already have a Prada bag,” I hear her pouting. “Can you get me a Louis Vuitton?” She pronounces it Loo-iss Voy-tahn.

As we near the entrance to the park, we can hear people on the basketball court, the slap of rubber on cement followed by occasional grunts and metallic dunks. The park, or Bowne Playground as it’s officially called, is divided into sections separated by chain-link fences: The basketball court takes up the most space and is flanked by a kiddie playground and a treelined yard where old men pass their retirement days on its benches, reading Chinese newspapers or feeding pigeons. I scan through the trees for a glimpse of Jimmy, but I can’t recognize his voice over the faraway laughter of children.

We reach the yard first and I see Peter’s friends there — four guys and three girls. Most of them go to my school, seniors reputed to be gangsters. They have claimed the concrete chess tables set in the corner, but instead of chess pieces, there are mah-jongg tiles. Despite the heat of the day, the guys are in black and have spiky hair like Peter, and the girls wear their hair long and carefully frozen into voluminous curls. They’re all smoking cigarettes; I wonder how smart that is, given all the hair spray in the air. Snippets of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujianese rise from their conversation.

I recognize one of the guys from my algebra class. He’s a few years older, but he’s in my class because he doesn’t speak much English. We’ve never talked to each other, so I just kind of nod at him. He gives me a strange look, as if he recognizes me but doesn’t know why.

To my dismay, Lily follows Peter to the girls’ table, where a new game of mah-jongg is about to commence. It’s hard to look away from the mesmerizing whirl of pink and green, as pretty manicured hands shuffle and stack the jade tiles expertly.

“You play MJ?” Peter is actually addressing me as well as Lily.

“Uh, not really.” I learned how to play from watching my mom and aunts, but I couldn’t see myself doing it, here, with them. It strikes me as just so Chinese. I mean, sure, I’m Chinese, but not the same way they are, or even the same way Lily is. I was born and raised on Thirty-Ninth Avenue, but my neighbors were Dominican and Jewish, not just Chinese. My parents work in Manhattan’s Chinatown and commute from Flushing on the dollar vans, my mom to a doctor’s office and my dad to a TV repair shop. I grew up hearing almost as much Spanish as Chinese, whereas Lily’s parents made sure that she stayed immersed in Chinese culture and cultivated friendships only with Chinese kids.

Lily nudges me and answers that of course we play. Peter motions for one of the girls at the table to make room for us as he goes to join the guys at the other table. One of the guys hands Peter something wrapped in a crumpled paper bag, from which he takes a swig. The girl, a senior I don’t know, scoots right over and starts resetting the table, scowling at Lily. She’s not the only one scowling, but Lily isn’t fazed.

I look through the chain link to the other side of the park and finally spot Jimmy on the ball court. His brow is furrowed with intensity, his muscular arms outstretched as he motions for Eric Martinez, another junior, to pass him the ball. Eric responds, twisting away from his guard and whips the ball to Jimmy, who in one smooth motion catches it and shoots it into the basket for a three-pointer. Despite myself, I cheer along with the folks on the other side of the fence, which gets me strange looks from my seatmates, Lily included.

I lock eyes with Lily and talk to her under my breath.

“Are you coming with me or not?” I tilt my head ever so slightly toward the court.

“No! I’m staying here.” She presses her lips into a fine line and whispers, “You should stay too. Forget about Jimmy. This is cool.” She accepts a Newport cigarette from a spiky-haired senior whose name I still don’t know.

“Fine. I’m going to go watch the game.” I get up, nod at the table, and walk away. There’s a large enough crowd over there that I feel comfortable heading over by myself. I take a seat at the edge of the bleachers. By now I’m so irritated with Lily that I don’t even have time to get nervous when Jimmy plops down next to me. He has a towel wrapped around his neck and his cheeks are flushed.

“Hey! What are you doing here?” He is speaking to me. He knows who I am.

“Oh, you know, just visiting a friend.” I look down and tuck my hair behind my ear. If I were Lily I would look up at him through my eyelashes and flirt. But I’m not, so I focus on how red my toenails are.

“You mean those gangsters over there are your friends?” He jerks his head in their direction. A few of the guys are talking with some Latino kids from the neighborhood. They all stand stiffly in a semicircle, menacing expressions on their faces. Peter seems to be negotiating with their leader, a dark, stocky guy with a shaved head and an oversized basketball jersey. They all relax when Peter and the guy shake hands, which they do in a hip-hop sequence: fists up, they grasp each other’s hands as if they’re going to arm wrestle, yank themselves toward each other, and bump chests. As their palms separate I catch a glint of light off little plastic bags.

“Those guys? Nah. I’m here with my friend Lily.” Who is over there with those gangsters, I’m thinking. Lily is studying her tiles, but even across the park I can tell she’s watching me from the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t know you were going to be playing here. You’re really good.”

“Um, thanks...” He’s pulling the ends of the towel, rubbing it back and forth over his neck. “I uh... I’m glad you’re here.”

Before we can say anything else, he’s called back into the game. The sun feels good on my face.

And now, a couple of hours later, the sun is starting to set. The basketball game is winding down, without him for the last hour — Jimmy ended up leaving the game to come back to me on the bleachers, and we just talked about everything. He told me he thinks I’m the most mature sophomore he’s ever met. I played it cool and did not tell him how I’ve been practically stalking him.

Eric yells to him that it’s time to go, and as he turns to leave he bends and quickly kisses me on the lips.

“See ya at school!” He grins at me, then heads toward Union Street. I am too stunned to reply, so I just smile weakly at him.

But as the two of them walk off with some of the other ball players, one of the spiky-haired guys struts up to him and bumps him with his shoulder, hard enough not to be an accident. It’s my algebra classmate. Eric looks at him as if to say, What the fuck? but once he realizes who it was that bumped him, he just mumbles, “Excuse me.”

“Why you bump into me, man?” Algebra says. His voice is louder and shriller than I’ve ever heard it, but then again, he hardly ever speaks in class.

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” Jimmy has his hands up the way basketball players do when they’re trying not to foul out. Behind him, Eric Martinez and the other guys who were on the court stiffen. Smiles disappear as fists tighten. Jimmy backs away, holding his arms out from his sides to keep them at bay. His friends back off too. They’re not stupid.

“What’s your problem? Get the fuck out of my face!” Algebra is clearly drunk and enjoying the moment of power, but he doesn’t push it any further. He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger out, and pretends to shoot Jimmy in the head.

Back at the chess tables, Peter and his friends are chuckling amongst themselves. The mah-jongg tiles have been packed up and the table is littered with several more of those paper bags.

An unfamiliar emotion washes over me as I watch Jimmy leave with his friends, who are no longer laughing and joking. My eyes burn with tears and the words come to mind: fear, shame, anger. There was just no reason for that, I’m thinking to myself. And this is what Lily thinks is so cool? I look over at her, now leaning languidly against Peter’s arm. Her fingertips are at her lips and I can tell that she’s as shocked as I am, but she’s trying to hide it, to look grown-up and still perfect.

“Let’s go, Lil.” I don’t even want to make eye contact with anyone else. She nods and reaches for her bag, but as she slides away from Peter, he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him in a gesture that’s meant to look gentle but isn’t.

“Don’t leave me, Little Sister. It’s early. We’re going to a party. I want to show you off.” He looks me up and down. Without his sunglasses his eyes look dead serious and kind of scary. “You can go home.”

“No, Tina’s my best friend. I can’t go without her.” Lily shakes her hair as if to clear her head of cobwebs. “Where are we going?”

“There’s a party at Kuo’s place, the Tulip. It’ll be fun. We’ll make a karaoke video.” His voice is too sweet when he speaks to her.

A lump forms in my throat. Even I’ve heard of that nightclub, the Yellow Tulip. It’s always in the news; it’s been raided several times for prostitution and there’s a shooting there every other weekend. Of course, I can’t say any of this. These are probably the people who do the shooting.

“Isn’t that a bar?” I ask innocently. “Lily and I can’t go. We’re not twenty-one.”

This makes everyone laugh. Except for Lily, who is staring at me as if I should spontaneously combust.

“What? They know how old you are,” I whisper to her.

“No they don’t,” she hisses. She pulls me aside as darkness descends on the playground. Most of the group staggers out of the park, but Peter lights up a cigarette. His cell phone blares an electronic waltz and he answers it, leaning against the gate. The streetlights cast a shadow of the chain-link fence, crosshatching Lily’s face.

I whisper to her: “Lil. You can’t be serious. Isn’t he like thirty? He knows your dad, so he’s got to know you’re only fifteen. He’s not someone you should be messing with.”

“Look. If you want to go out with a nobody, that’s your problem. I think you can do better. But don’t you ruin this for me. I really like him.”

“You mean, you like ‘Big Brother’s’ connections.” I point at her expensive purse. “By the way, it’s pronounced Loo-ey Vee-tawn.” Her face twists, and she looks like she’s going to cry. I’ve pressed her button. Her dad didn’t always own his restaurant; he started out in the business as a dishwasher. “I’m really sorry. It’s just—”

“It’s just that you’re jealous,” she states flatly. “They chased your little boyfriend away and now you don’t want me to have any fun. Well, I’m sorry if they want me at the party and not you. Maybe we’re just too different. Maybe you’re not my best friend after all. Maybe you’re nothing.” She steels herself for a fight. The defiant set of her chin makes me think of her mah-jongg partners.

It’s the liquor talking, I tell myself. I imagine what would happen if she were to go with them to the Tulip. Peter Wong and the drunk, sexy, teenaged daughter of his business associate. Algebra shooting invisible bullets with his thumb and forefinger. I imagine her beautiful hair splayed out across a dirty, beer-soaked stage.

With a grace worthy of a professional athlete, I reach under her arms and tickle her. At first she looks at me as if I’ve gone crazy, but as she begins to giggle she realizes what I’m doing, and her laughter turns intense, and then furious. She tries to fend me off but she’s too drunk and I’m too quick, having trained myself since childhood to know her weak spot. Laughing and sputtering uncontrollably, she can’t even turn away from Peter when a stream of vomit erupts from her mouth and all over his Bruno Magli shoes. The look on Peter’s face as he studies his sopping shoes, before he turns and walks away, says it all.

The party is over.

Crazy Jill saves the slinky by Stephen Solomita

College Point

When the over-muscled hulk in the studded leather jeans smacks the fat guy in the polka dot sundress, the eight patrol officers gathered around the small TV in the muster room cheer loudly. The body builder is a prostitute, the fat guy a prominent New York politician. The video is evidence discovered in the apartment of an extortionist.

Groans and cat calls greet the white guy’s flabby thighs and flaccid penis when the hulk tears off his dress. When the fat guy turns to reveal a cotton-white ass the size of a watermelon, the boys nearly fall off their chairs.

I’m the only woman in the room, Officer Jill Kelly, and I feel sorry for the fat slob in the dress. I wonder what it’s like to be a City Councilman, a Catholic, a husband, a father, a transvestite in a hotel room with a leather boy. The truth is that I can smell his desperation. The truth is that some cop’s gonna leak the tape and the fat guy’s life is gonna drop out from under him like a body through the trap door of a gallows.

“Jill? The captain wants to see you.”

“Thanks, Crowley. I need to get away from this.”

Bushy enough to conceal small game, Sergeant Crowley’s eyebrows rise to form lush semicircles as he jerks his chin at the TV. “I woulda predicted this was right up your alley.”

Captain McMullen’s office is another world altogether, a quiet, clean world-unto-itself. Instead of peeling green paint, the captain’s walls are lined with expensive paneling. Instead of scuffed linoleum, his floor is covered by a Berber carpet flecked with beige and gold. His walnut desk is big enough to land helicopter gunships.

I close the door behind me, shut out the squeals of the fat politician, the mindless comments of my peers. Captain McMullen is nowhere to be found, but the man seated behind his desk is very familiar.

“Whadaya say, Uncle Mike?”

Deputy Chief Michael Xavier Kelly offers a thin smile. He has a very narrow face with a prominent jaw that dominates veal-thin lips, a button of a nose, and blue glittery eyes that rarely blink. Uncle Mike is Deputy Chief of Detectives and heads the Commissioner’s Special Investigations Unit, an attack-dog bureau far more terrifying to ranking officers than Internal Affairs.

“Jill Kelly,” Uncle Mike squawks, “in the flesh.” Thirty-one years ago, as a rookie on foot patrol, Uncle Mike took a bullet that passed from left to right through his neck. Now he can’t raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. “Take a seat, Jill. Please.”

I do as I’m told. “So, how’s Aunt Rose? And Sean?”

“Fine, fine.” Uncle Mike walks his fingers across the desk and over a bulging file. “I hear the boys have taken to calling you Crazy Jill.”

“I consider it a compliment.”

My admission evokes a raspy laugh, immediately followed by the most somber expression in his repertoire. “I came here for a reason,” he announces. “Tell me, do you believe in redemption?”

Ah, right to the point. I was a naughty girl, a girl in need of punishment, but now I can make it up. Just do Uncle Mike this unnamed little favor — which will not turn out to be little — and retrieve my working life. Uncle Mike will pluck me out of the 75th Precinct in the asshole of Brooklyn. He’ll restore me to the Fugitive Apprehension Squad and the SWAT team. I only have to do this one little favor.

It was last August and blazing hot. I was in an uninsulated attic, looking out through a window at the house across the way. The man in the house, George Musgrove, had butchered his ex-wife, then taken his three children hostage, naturally threatening to kill them as well. At the time, I was part of a SWAT team assigned to eastern Queens, a sniper, and my orders were to acquire a target a.s.a.p., then notify the boss. The first part wasn’t a problem. When I came into the attic, George was standing in a bedroom window, completely exposed. He wanted out by then, but didn’t have the balls to kill himself. That’s what I figured, anyway. Just another suicide-by-cop.

I had my partner call down to the CO and explain that I was thirty yards away with a clear target, and that I couldn’t miss. But Captain Ed McMullan — known to his troops as Egg McMuffin — turned me down flat. The hostage negotiator, he told my partner, was confident. Musgrove would be talked out eventually. There would be no further loss of life.

All through this back-and-forth, Musgrove stayed right there, right in front of the window with a cordless phone pressed to his ear. And I started thinking, Yeah, most likely he’ll give it up without hurting the kids. Maybe even nine out of ten times he’ll surrender. But when you consider what happens if he ends up in the wrong ten percent, a hundred percent is a lot better than ninety. I was in a position to guarantee those kids would survive and I exercised my options.

If Uncle Mike hadn’t intervened, I would have been charged with disobeying a direct order, and might have faced criminal charges. But that was Uncle Mike’s way. Clan Kelly first became prominent in the NYPD a hundred years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt was Acting Commissioner. Clan Kelly is still prominent today. This was especially relevant to Uncle Mike, who fully expected to become the next Chief of Detectives. Obviously, the Kelly name could not be besmirched. We were a self-policing family and a Kelly could be punished only by another Kelly. Thus, at Uncle Mike’s behest, my gold shield was taken away and I was exiled to the Seven-Five, there to languish until he needed a favor.

As for me, I want back on the SWAT team and the Fugitive Apprehension Squad. I want both of those things and I want them bad enough to play along.

“Anything I can do for you, I’m ready,” I finally say. “You know that.”

“It’s about your cousin, Joanna.”

“The Slinky?”

“Pardon?”

“That’s what I call her, Uncle Mike. The Slinky.”

He bursts out laughing. “Yes, I can understand why you’d say that.”

Joanna Kelly embodies the concept of slender. Her fingernails are slender, her elbows, her teeth. On those rare occasions when I’m with her, I feel like the Incredible Hulk.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, Uncle Mike, if she didn’t wear those dresses.”

He nods agreement, his narrow smile widening slightly to indicate genuine amusement. “Ah, the dresses.”

Joanna likes plunging, short-skirted designer frocks. When she attends family gatherings, male attention drifts her way like dust to a vacuum cleaner.

“So what about Joanna?”

“Paulie assaulted her last night.”

“I thought Paulie was in prison?”

“He was paroled a week ago.”

“So pick him up and violate him. What’s the big deal?”

Paulie Malone is Joanna’s ex-husband. He’s an all-around knucklehead and he pretty much beat Joanna from the earliest days of their marriage until she finally called down the wrath of Uncle Mike and the rest of the Kelly clan. Then, within hours, Paulie was off the street, his bail denied, his lawyer made to understand that no plea bargain would be forthcoming. A short trial was followed by a conviction and a three-year sentence, the max for second-degree assault.

“I could have him picked up eventually,” Uncle Mike concedes, “but I’ll tell ya, Jill, if he hasn’t gotten the message by now, he’ll never get it. He’s incorrigible.”

“So what exactly do you want from me?” The words have an air of defiance, but my tone is resigned. Do it, or else: That’s how I understand the offer.

“Your cousin needs protection.”

“Only if you let Paulie stay on the street.”

“Okay, I won’t argue. Joanna needs protection until Paulie is taken into custody.”

“You’re telling me Paulie’s not to be found?”

“He never reported to his halfway house or his parole officer. His whereabouts, as we in the policing business like to say, are unknown.”

I look out the window at a nondescript street in a nondescript neighborhood. The stores on the other side of Pitkin Avenue survive from month to month. A barber who makes book, a candy store that hawks cigarettes smuggled in from Virginia, a cop bar named Melvin’s Hideaway.

“Jill?”

“I’m still listening, Uncle Mike.”

“Then I’m still insisting. Joanna needs twenty-four-hour protection.”

“And you want me to do the protecting.”

“I think Joanna would be more comfortable with a woman, and you’re the only woman I trust to do the job.”

The rumor in the Kelly family is that Uncle Mike continued to offer Joanna his support long after Paulie went to prison, that Joanna found a suitable way to express her gratitude. I’d never cared enough to check it out, but now it begins to make sense. Under no circumstances would Uncle Mike allow his main squeeze to be locked in, 24/7, with a male cop.

“Am I gonna do this in uniform?”

“Sad to say, the job doesn’t provide bodyguard protection to battered women.” He shakes his head. “I’ve arranged for you to take your vacation. Later, I’ll make it up to you.”

I’ve got a big mouth and I say the first thing to enter my mind. “Ya know, I really wanna tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Uncle Mike leans forward, his blue eyes twinkling, “Well, darlin’,” he croaks, “don’t waste your breath. If I could, I’d already have done so.” He gets up, comes around the desk, and offers me his hand. “Let’s take a walk, Jill. I feel the need of some fresh air.”

He’s right about the fresh air. Spring has penetrated the steel-and-concrete heart of the city. Tight buds crown every twig, and weeds push up through cracks in the sidewalk. For a few minutes, I keep pace with Uncle Mike, who walks with his hands behind his back as if pondering some weighty matter. Then, mostly because I’m getting bored, I decide to give him a break.

“You want me to kill him, Uncle Mike? That what you want?”

“That’s harsh, Jill.”

“If you were gonna bust him, send him back to the joint, you could just make Joanna disappear until Paulie surfaces.”

He bares his teeth and grips my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks. “The Kellys don’t run,” he announces. “Never.”

The effort to raise his voice makes him sound like a spooked chicken, but the point is clear enough. Paulie Malone has defied the Kelly family for the second time and he’s not gonna get another warning. The other part, about taking him into custody, was pure bullshit.

“That makes Joanna the bait.” When he doesn’t respond, I add, “And me the executioner.”

“Well, it won’t be the first time, will it?” That said, Uncle Mike shifts gears. “Sooner or later, Paulie’s going to kill her. We both know that, Jill. You may not like Joanna, but you can’t deny that she has a right to her life.” He takes a deliberate step, then another. “The sad truth is that I wouldn’t trust anyone else in the family to handle this.”

I ignore the flattery. “What if he shows up without a weapon, Uncle Mike? You want me to shoot him down, maybe go to prison for the next fifteen years?”

“Last thing on my mind.” He reaches into his pocket, comes out with a battered .38, holds it up for my inspection. The grip, hammer, and trigger guard are wrapped with cloth tape. “I’ll be able to control the post-shooting investigation. You just make sure this is laying on the ground next to Paulie and that you call me first.” Suddenly, he takes my hand and grips it hard. His fingers are bony and cold. “Do this for the Kellys, Jill. Do it for us.”

Repulsed, I pull my hand away. “So where’s Joanna living these days?”

“She has a little house in College Point.”

Again, it makes sense. I got to know the small neighborhood of College Point well in the two years I worked at the 109th Precinct in Queens, my first assignment out of the Academy. The Point’s white working-class population is protected on one side by the East River, on the others by a solid wall of industry. The Asian explosion in Flushing, only a few miles away, has barely made a dent in the community’s ethnic makeup. To Joanna, who was raised in Howard Beach, the mix of Irish, Germans, Italians, and Jews must seem like home.

But I know that Joanna’s comfort is a secondary concern to Uncle Mike. Far more important is getting to and from her bed without being spotted by anybody who knows them.

Uncle Mike fancies himself the Kelly patriarch, and his authority goes unchallenged for the most part. Even as a Deputy Chief, he still has the ability to grant favors and deliver punishments. So the clan doesn’t object to his relationship with Joanna, as long as he doesn’t throw it in his wife’s face.

“Yes or no,” Uncle Mike finally declares. “I need an answer.”

I take the .38 and shove it into my pocket. Though I haven’t decided what, if anything, I plan to do, I don’t have the cojones to refuse outright. I don’t have the balls to seal my fate.

“Yes,” I tell him.

Joanna has a right to her life, small and miserable though it may be. It’s the only part of Uncle Mike’s argument that holds up. It doesn’t matter that a minute after I walk through the door, Joanna tells me I should let my hair grow out and change the color. Or that she wears a slinky jogging suit that cups her breasts and butt as though paying homage. Or that her arms and legs are firm without being muscular and she’s so perfectly made up, the black-purple bruises on her face look as if they’re part of the overall design. Joanna has a right to her life.

After a perfunctory air-kiss, Joanna leads me into the kitchen, where she evaluates my potential as if I was a coat on a rack. “So, you seein’ anybody?” she finally asks. When I don’t respond, she says, “I could fix you up, but you scare the kind of guys I know.”

“Actually, I’ve got a boyfriend, Joanna. Joey Kruger. He’s hung like a horse and he can hump all night. What more could I possibly ask from life?”

As usual, my words, no matter how crude, have no appreciable effect on Joanna. Instead, she opens a cabinet next to the refrigerator, withdraws a can of Colombian coffee (the one with the likeness of the grateful peasant), and fits it into an electric can opener. I note that her arms appear boneless, then turn away.

“I’m gonna go outside, take a look around.”

Ten minutes later, I’m back in the kitchen, hoisting a cup of coffee. “When did the fence go up?” I ask Joanna.

“Three months ago.”

“What about the outdoor lights? When were they installed?” “The same time.”

“And the window bars on the first floor?”

Joanna glances into my eyes, the gesture sly, then looks down at her coffee. “Me living here by myself, Uncle Mike thought it would be a good idea. For my security.” She rubs the back of her hand across her brow, as if to erase the lie. “It’s getting warm in here. Do you think I should turn on the air-conditioning?”

Instead of answering, I lower the metal blinds, then set tables and lamps in front of as many windows as possible. When I finish, I’m nearly certain that Paulie won’t be able to see into any room. Then I go back through the entire house, including the basement, checking every lock on every window and door. As I work, I become more and more pissed off by the obvious fact that Uncle Mike set this up months ago, that he knew Paulie was coming out, that he made his preparations well in advance.

When I reenter the kitchen, I find Joanna touching up her nail polish. I lay Uncle Mike’s taped .38 on the table, say, “If Paulie gets past me, you’re gonna have to use this.”

Without looking up, Joanna asks, “How’s he gonna get past you, Jill? I mean...”

What she means is that I’m a trained sniper, that there’s not a cop in the city who can shoot with me. What she means is that the way Uncle Mike arranged things, Paulie’s gonna have to come through the front door and he’s gonna make a lot of noise in the process. What she means is that if I do my job, if I decide, mercilessly and without warning, to execute Paulie Malone, she won’t need the .38.

Joanna inspects the nails on her right hand, then blows softly across the drying polish. Her fingers are as supple as her arms and shoulders. If she has knuckles, I can’t see them.

“From here on out,” I tell her, “I want you to stay upstairs as much as possible.”

“Fine by me. I was gonna go up and change for dinner anyway.”

“Joanna, it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” I glance at the stove. “And you haven’t started cooking yet.”

The corners of her mouth pull down and she rolls her eyes. “I’m gonna take a bath,” she announces. “I need to calm my nerves.”

I wait until Joanna’s in the tub, then toss her room. Beneath a pair of lime-green panties in her second lingerie drawer, next to a .32 caliber automatic and a box of ammo, I find a small bundle of letters written on prison stationery.

It only takes me a few minutes to read through them. Like every wife beater, Paulie is both contrite and optimistic. He knows he’s done the wrong thing, but now he’s straightening himself out. He’s in therapy. He goes to Mass every Sunday. His shrink loves him. Father O’Neill loves him. Even the warden loves him.

None of this interests me very much because I saw a lot of domestic violence when I worked patrol. Once you put them in cuffs, wife beaters are always remorseful. But what does capture my attention is Paulie’s reference to a note sent by Joanna: Your letter gave me hope for the first time. I know I don’t deserve another chance, but when you wrote that you never stopped loving me...

I slip the .32 and the ammo into the pocket of my blazer, scatter the letters on Joanna’s bed where she’s sure to notice them, and finally go downstairs to open the blinds on a window in the living room. From a chair set back in the shadows, I can see most of the front yard. I note that there are no trees and no tall shrubs between the house and the seven-foot fence. The newly mown lawn is a killing zone.

By the time Paulie Malone opens the gate, steps inside, closes it behind him, I’m sure of only one thing: I’m not gonna whack him before I give him a chance to mend his ways.

I understand the implications. This means that I have to speak to Paulie close up. It means a dedicated knucklehead with two years in prison behind him might decide that I’m the enemy and beat me to a pulp. But as I rise from the chair and head for the front door, I know I’m just gonna have to take the chance. My one consolation is that if Paulie gets past me, he’ll probably murder Joanna, who’s still in the bathtub.

I meet Paulie just as he reaches the top step of the little porch. He jerks himself to a halt, but neither of us is willing to be the first to speak. I drop my gaze to the middle of his chest and wait. Two seconds, then three, then four, then ten, until there’s nothing left to us but violence. I watch his torso rotate slightly, then I grab his balls, drop to one knee, and yank down as hard as I can. When his body naturally follows his jewels, I snap my head up and catch him flush on the mouth.

He goes over backwards, slams his head into the porch railing, and drops, facedown, on the floorboards. I pull my Colt and jerk the slide back to draw his attention to the bottom line, his miserable life. He pulls himself to a sitting position, then leans against the railing and brings his hand up to his bloody mouth. Finally, he raises his eyes to look at me.

I have to blink twice before I can meet his gaze. Paulie Malone has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen, a fact that a moment before completely escaped me. Now I remember him when times were better, at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Even in the best of moods, even laughing, the pain never left his eyes.

“You comin’ back here, Paulie? Huh?” I center the Colt on his forehead. “Because if you do, I’m gonna personally serve you with the only order of protection that really matters.”

But my words don’t penetrate the wall of his obsession, and Paulie responds by listing his grievances. Although he once made forty bucks an hour working the high steel at construction sites, Joanna spent every penny and more. She openly flirted with men, even with family members, even in his presence. She not only refused to cook, clean, or do laundry, she wouldn’t lift a finger to augment the work of a weekly housekeeper. Worst of all, though she’d known how much he wanted children, she’d had an abortion without his permission or knowledge.

Nice, right? But not relevant. I lower the Colt and shake my head. “Shut up for a minute, Paulie.” When he quiets down, I continue: “Look, I don’t like Joanna either. But I handle it by avoiding her as much as possible. Whereas you, Paulie, you keep comin’ back. What’s the point? You can’t win.”

I squat down about six feet away and lean against the front door. While it’s nearly 6 o’clock and the sun has dropped behind the house, the air is still warm enough to caress my neck and face. From down the block, I hear children arguing, the echoing clang of a basketball against a hoop. “What’s the point?” I repeat.

Paulie strips off his T-shirt, wads it up, and presses it to his mouth. “I can’t let her go.”

“Why not, Paulie? It’s not like she’s the only game in town.”

“I know she loves me, Jill. The letters she wrote... She always said she loved me.”

“The letters were a setup. You understand that? Joanna doesn’t love you because she doesn’t love anybody except herself.” When he doesn’t respond, I push his buttons again. “Joanna was your punching bag for eight years. You can’t get her back. You’ll never get her back. I’ll kill you first.”

After a moment, Paulie opens up. “I don’t understand it,” he admits. “When I was with my counselor or with Father O’Neill, it always seemed easy. Turn my back, start over, there’s a new life right around the corner. But at night, after the final count, Joanna would march into my brain like a storm trooper. It was an invasion, Jill. I’d try to throw her out, think about something else, but she stuck to me like a leech. You ever get so mad you felt as if you were gonna fly apart?”

“Recently, Paulie. In fact, just this afternoon, when I saw what you did to Joanna’s face.”

He pulls the T-shirt away from his mouth and stares down at his own blood. “Something’s wrong with me,” he says, “and I can’t fix it. When I think about losing Joanna, I feel like my heart’s gonna fall out.” He probes his ribs, as if checking for leaks. “I came here yesterday sure that Joanna really wanted me back. I thought she was gonna give me another chance. When she wouldn’t let me in the house, I was just blown out of the water. I asked her about the letters, what she’d written, and she told me she wrote them because she was bored. She said, ‘I shouldn’t have done it. Like I’m sorry, all right?’ Jill, I went nuts. I couldn’t help it.”

Any sympathy I might have felt dropped away with the last bit: I couldn’t help it. That’s what all the wife beaters say. I couldn’t help it. She made me do it. It’s not my fault.

“There’s still a way out, Paulie. Go to your parole officer, tell him what you just told me, get yourself violated. That way you’ll have some time to think it over.” I’m wasting my breath. I can see it in his eyes, see the pain marching back through a hundred lifetimes.

After a struggle, Paulie manages to stand upright. He limps across the yard, through the gate, and out into the street. When he releases the gate, it snaps back into place so hard the fence quivers on either side. “I came,” he calls back over his shoulder, “to tell Joanna how sorry I am. I came to make it up to her.”

Joanna comes down at 6 o’clock to throw a pair of frozen dinners into the oven. She’s wearing navy slacks over a pale blue top, an outfit that not only complements her jewelry and her eyes, but the sheen in her inky-black hair. She keeps her back to me as she unwraps the dinners and sets the timer on the stove. “You want a drink?” she asks.

“I want,” I tell her, “to get so drunk I aspirate my own vomit.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“It means no.”

She fixes herself a stiff one, three fingers of Wild Turkey and a splash of ginger ale. “Are you gonna tell Uncle Mike about the letters?”

“He doesn’t know?” It’s the first time Joanna has ever surprised me. Before this moment, I’d always assumed that her brain and body were equally free of angles.

“Uh-uh.”

“Tell me why you wrote him, Joanna, if Uncle Mike didn’t ask you to. Make me understand.”

“I don’t know. Paulie sent me a couple of letters and, like, I was bored.”

“Then why’d Uncle Mike secure the house? If he didn’t know about the letters?”

“Uncle Mike knows about some of Paulie’s letters because I showed them to him.”

“But not all of them?”

“Not the ones that said about me writing back.”

“And if he finds out, he’ll make you wish you were still living with Paulie. That about right?”

Joanna’s crimson lips fold into a childish pout. The effect is nearly pornographic. “I’m not like you, Jill. You can’t expect other women to be like you.”

“Yeah? Well, answer me this, Joanna. How come Uncle Mike didn’t arrange for your protection before Paulie knocked on the door yesterday? How come he waited until after you took a beating? You think maybe he used you to set Paulie up? Or do you think he forgot to check his calendar?”

That night, long after Joanna has gone to bed, I’m lying awake on the living room couch. I’m not worried about Paulie getting past me. By the time he breaks through the door, I’ll be ready. No, it’s Joanna who keeps me awake, Joanna and Michael Xavier Kelly.

I slip into a T-shirt and jeans, then walk out onto the porch. The quiet eases over me, comfortable as an old sweater, the one you only wear in the house. A few fireflies, the first of the year, dance above the lawn, and I can smell, very faintly, the lilacs blooming in a neighbor’s yard. There are no nightclubs in College Point, no theaters, no after-hours bars. The locals are committed to work and church, to the small, neat yards that surround their small, carefully maintained homes. There’s not a lit window anywhere.

A few blocks away, MacNeil Park leans out into the East River. I ate more than a few meals in the park when I was stationed at the 109. I liked the sullen odor of the sea on summer nights and the slap of the waves against the bulkhead. The view, on the other hand, is less than spectacular. No glittering skyline. No ladder of bridges. Across the river, the South Bronx is a jumble of low-rise warehouses and isolated tenements. To the left, the many jails of Rikers Island rise into the night. They do glitter, those jails, because the lights are on 24/7. But they somehow lack the panache of Manhattan.

Suddenly I find myself wondering what, if anything, Joanna feels when she undresses for Uncle Mike. Does she pretend she’s somewhere else? With someone else? Uncle Mike is past sixty and Joanna’s still four years short of thirty.

Maybe, I think, I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe she basks in his approval. Maybe she can see it all in his eyes: admiration, gratitude, even worship. Maybe she likes what she sees.

But what I can’t imagine is Joanna being aroused in any way, and I know that sex is a chore that brings out the actress in her. I know that she squeals in the right places, urges him on, groans with delight, screams when he comes. And then she defends herself by saying, I can’t be like you, Jill.

So what am I gonna do? I’m as bad as Paulie now. I can’t get Joanna Kelly out of my mind.

I fall asleep somewhere in the early morning hours and wake up at 8 o’clock when Joanna comes down. She’s wearing a gray terry cloth robe and plaid, down-at-the-heels slippers. No makeup, no jewelry. Maybe this means she’s in a sober mood. For her sake, I hope so.

Without a word, I rise, head upstairs to the bathroom. When I come back down, Joanna’s sitting with her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her palms. Her eyes flick toward me, then back to the tabletop. “What a mess,” she announces.

The coffeemaker emits a final burst of steam, then goes quiet. I fumble through the cabinets until I find cups and saucers, spoons, and sugar, then set the table. Joanna leans back in the chair and crosses her legs.

“You think about what I told you last night?” I ask as I fill the cups. “That Uncle Mike’s risking your life? Because one of these times, Paulie’s gonna come to kill you. It’s just pure luck that it didn’t happen the last time.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Joanna explains, “it’s gotta stop.”

“Maybe it’s gotta stop,” I say, letting the words drop like wet sponges into a dirty sink, “but I’m not gonna be the one to stop it.”

Joanna nods, as if at something she figured out a long time ago. “Tell me what to do.”

I reach down into my pocket for Uncle Mike’s throwaway and Joanna’s .32. I put the throwaway on the table, then eject the .32’s magazine and the round in the chamber. Finally, I hold up the .32.

“Did Uncle Mike give you this weapon?”

“Yeah, for protection.”

“He show you how to use it?”

She takes the .32 from my hand, grasping the butt with two fingers like the weapon is a shit-filled diaper she wants to be rid of in a hurry. “First, you push this thingy here...”

Suddenly, I’m tempted to reach across the table, grab a handful of Joanna’s hair, slam my fist into her mouth. Suddenly, I’m Paulie Malone.

“Jill?” Joanna’s lower jaw is hanging open. “It scares me when your face gets like that.”

“Yeah.” I force my shoulders down, take a deep breath. “I was just trying to demonstrate what happens when you get emotional.” I press the automatic’s grip into her palm, force her to grab the handle, flip the safety, curl her index finger through the trigger guard. “I scared you, right?”

“Yeah,” she admits.

“Good. Now point the gun at the center of my chest.”

“What?”

“Do it, Joanna. Point the gun at the center of my chest and pull the trigger.”

She wouldn’t be Joanna if her hand didn’t tremble, if she didn’t say in her precious little-girl voice, “Jill, I can’t.”

“You better. Because if you don’t, I’m gonna kick your Slinky ass from one end of the house to the other.”

Joanna’s pupils go flat, as if they’ve suddenly decided to absorb instead of reflect light. Her mouth tightens into a sneer and she yanks on the trigger.

Clack.

The principle established, I take the .32 back and hold it up for her inspection. “Now, this gun, it’s really small, Joanna. That’s good because it won’t jump out of your hand when you pull the trigger.” My goal is to keep it simple, and I wait until she nods her head. “But it’s bad, too, because one shot won’t necessarily stop a grown man. So what you have to do is center the gun on Paulie’s chest and keep pulling the trigger until it’s empty.”

“How will I know that? I mean, when it’s empty?”

I consider this for a moment, then say, “Put the gun in your mouth and give it one last pull. If you’re still alive, it’s empty.”

“Very funny.” Joanna glances down at her hands. Her mouth works for a moment, before she speaks. “You really think I can do this, Jill?”

“Tell you the truth, Joanna, I don’t see as you have a lot of choice. But you might wanna think about this: If Joanna Kelly shoots Paulie Malone, Uncle Mike’s never gonna be sure that at some point Joanna Kelly won’t shoot Uncle Mike. It’s an edge you can use to your advantage.”

Joanna thinks it over, then says, “Now I know why they call you Crazy Jill.”

I ignore the comment. “Two things to remember. First, this gun with the tape on it? Put it somewhere close to Paulie’s hand. Second, call Uncle Mike. Not 911. Uncle Mike.”

She looks at me for a second, then mutters, “Uh-huh.”

“Now, I’m going outside to sit in the sun before it gets too hot. If Paulie shows up, I’m not gonna stop him. I’m not even gonna slow him down.”

Joanna’s tongue slides over her lips. She raises her hand and flicks her fingers in a little wave. As I open the door, she finds her voice. “Jill,” she says, breaking into a heartfelt smile, “I just want you to know. If I ever decided to go to bed with a woman, I’d pick you.”

I expect Paulie to charge up the walk, but when he comes through the gate he’s limping noticeably and his swollen mouth is the color and texture of chocolate cookie dough. Still, his features are twisted with rage and the sledgehammer he grips with his right hand makes his intentions abundantly clear.

By the time he sees me, Paulie’s halfway to the door. He stops abruptly and throws out his chest as though offering a larger target. But when I circle him, heading for the gate, he becomes confused. He glances toward the front door.

“Whadaya doin’?”

“I’m going home, Paulie.” I want to add something about him maybe doing the same thing, but I find that at the moment I don’t care what happens to him. Or to Joanna. I step through the gate, turn right, and start walking. Maybe, I think, I can get away before it happens, though I’m still short of the neighbor’s yard when Paulie crashes the sledgehammer into the front door. A moment later, I hear him shout, his tone still defiant, “What are you gonna do, Joanna? What are you gonna do with that gun? You gonna kill me?”

I count the gunshots, one through nine. They come faster toward the end. Paulie cries out once, early on, a short choking moan that ends almost before it begins. Then silence and, very faintly, the acrid stink of cordite through the open door.

Bye-bye, Paulie.

I drive to a gas station on College Point Boulevard, pull up at a pay phone at the back. There’s somebody using it, but I don’t mind. I nod to the jerk on the phone when he flashes an apologetic smile. I even thank him when he finally hangs up.

I take my time getting out of the car, searching my pockets for a quarter. I feel there’s no hurry, that Joanna will shut her mouth until Uncle Mike arrives, that Uncle Mike has no choice except to keep me out of it. I punch Joey Kruger’s number into the keypad, wait as it rings three, four, five times. I know Joey’s been working the late tour for the last week and he’s most likely still asleep. I realize, too, that I have no idea what I want Joey to say when he eventually answers. I have no idea until he finally says it.

“Baby,” he whispers, his voice dulled by sleep, “when are you coming over? I’ve been dreaming about your ass all night.”

Last stop, Ditmars by Tori Carrington

Ditmars

“I want you to find my husband’s killer.”

I knew what words the woman would say even before she said them. I knew the instant she spotted me, said goodbye to the man she was talking to at the counter of the Acropolis Diner, and headed straight for my table. She was dressed all in black, her mascara smeared because she’d been crying. I figured that since she was only two days into her new role as widow, she was entitled.

I sat back in the booth, considering her where she had taken the seat across from me. I’d also known what she was going to say because I knew her. And had known her husband. Mihalis Abramopoulos had owned and operated the Acropolis Diner on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, for the past thirty years. Ever since he’d come over from Greece in the early ’70s. Not unlike many of Astoria’s Greek population that had been trying to escape military coups and martial law and were looking for a safe environment in which to raise their kids. Hey, my parents had done it in the ’60s, before the colonels had staged a military junta in Greece and taken over control of a country that was still trying to get its shit together after the civil war. I’d been seventeen at the time, but I’m told I still speak like I’d just arrived on the last plane over the Atlantic. Usually after I’ve had one too many glasses of Johnnie Walker Black and was trying to figure out the mystery of my life rather than one of the many cases on my desk back at the agency.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. My name’s Spyros Metropolis and along with my silent partner, Lenny Nash, I run Spyros Metropolis Private Detective Agency, which is located on Steinway Street halfway between Broadway and Ditmars. While most of my family gravitated toward the Broadway end of Astoria, I preferred Ditmars. Mostly because my family gravitated toward Broadway. I didn’t live in the rooms above the agency, partly because they’d need extensive restoration to make them livable. Mostly because I preferred to keep my business life separate from my personal life.

I eyed the widow across from me. So much for that philosophy.

Then again, being a twice-divorced P.I. with alimony and child support payments, where else was I to take my meals if not a diner?

“My condolences, Kiria Abramopoulos.”

Hermioni blanched, possibly tired of like sentiments even though her husband wouldn’t be lowered into the ground until the day after next, when the M.E. officially released the body. “Can you do it? Find my husband’s killer? I’ll pay your going rate.”

Probably she didn’t know what my going rate was. Probably she would change her mind if I told her. “Kiria Abramopoulos, I’m sure the police will find your husband’s killer.”

And I had every confidence that they would. Not because I was a big fan of the NYPD, but because I used to count myself as one of them.

“The police have their hands full with the blackout. Mikey’s death is a low priority.”

The blackout. Over 100,000 Queens residents had gone without power for almost two weeks, predominantly in the Astoria area. LaGuardia Airport had been closed down, parts of the subway, and even Rikers Island’s jails had to rely on backup power for the duration. Many businesses were forced to close their doors. But the diner had remained open, Mike relying on propane burners and a grill set up out back to offer a short menu of items, and a generator to operate a couple of fans and a cooler.

The blackout had coincided with a heatwave that left residents scrambling to find someplace with air-conditioning or sweating it out. And all my good shirts bore sweat stains to prove it.

Then the night before last, the lights came back on. Revealing Mike Abramopoulos lying on his diner floor in a pool of his own blood. The floor I was looking at filled now with white orthopedic shoes as Petra, the young Albanian waitress I’d come to know since she hired on eight months ago, approached to top off my coffee cup. I noticed her smooth alabaster arms as she poured, as well as her other fine parts; she was a very attractive kid. She asked if Hermioni wanted coffee. The widow waved the girl away.

There had been a rash of restaurant robberies in the Astoria area of late, perhaps blackout-driven, perhaps not. Chances are, Mike was a random victim. Greeks worked hard for their money and were loathe to give it up. Especially to a masked man who would make in two minutes what it had taken the Greek all day to earn. It was the principle of the thing.

It was also what tended to get Greek business owners into heaps of trouble.

Hermioni covered my hand with hers where mine held my coffee cup, a damp Kleenex between her skin and mine. I grimaced and pulled my arm back and pretended to fix the right cuff of my white long-sleeved shirt that I had rolled up to my elbows. My wardrobe was limited to white shirts, plain ties, and dark slacks in the summer, and varied little in the winter except for the addition of a black trenchcoat and hat. My appearance had never been a priority for me beyond staying neat. I’d been cursed with a Greek nose that my brother said you could see turning a corner at least half a minute before I did. And the march of time on my hairline couldn’t be stopped with a lifetime supply of minoxidil.

“Please, Spyros. I... need to know who killed my husband. I need justice.”

Dishes and silverware clanked where Stamatis, the busboy, cleared the table behind Hermioni. The widow slanted him a glance that told him he could have picked a better time. I agreed. Stamatis ignored us both.

I drew my attention back to Hermioni. “Did Mike have any enemies?”

“No, no.” She smiled feebly. “Aside from me, of course.” An attempt at humor. “But you know I could never do that to him.”

Did I? Over the course of my career, I’d seen a lot of things I’d originally thought were impossible. Learning that Hermioni did away with Mike so she could take over the diner and move in with an Ethiopian half her age would rate somewhere on the less-shocking end.

“So you’ll take the case then?”

I told her my going rate.

I had to give the old gal credit. She didn’t even blink.

“I’ll bring the retainer by the agency this afternoon,” she told me.

My intention had been to scare her away. Instead, I’d just let her in the front door.

Murder cases didn’t make up a large percentage of my caseload. Mostly because they were best left to the boys in blue and it wasn’t a good idea to get in their way when you were a P.I. But those I had worked had taken a great deal of detective work that rarely included any fancy crime lab results. Fact was, a lot of evidence was contaminated and untraceable. And the results on most of the potential evidence they collected was slow in coming. New York’s forensics labs were so backed up that a suspect on a case stamped low priority could have skipped to a foreign country and started a new family by the time the authorities caught up with him.

As far as I was concerned, solving any case almost always came down to pounding the sweltering NYC pavement and examining a few rocks to see which way the moss grew, in order to find the answers.

Later that afternoon, I stopped on the corner opposite the diner and lit a cigarette. Whereas before I might have taken a seat in the restaurant opposite to watch the joint, now New York City law had chased me outside. Oh, a lot of places had smoking areas. Usually outdoors in the back surrounded by neighboring buildings and glass. But I didn’t particularly like the feeling of being walled in, put on display like a smoking turtle in a terrarium for the other diners to stare at as they ate. Which was probably a good thing, because I didn’t smoke half as much as I used to. But I wasn’t going to admit this to anyone that mattered.

I drew deeply on my cancer stick and slowly released the smoke, watching as Petra updated the chalkboard propped outside announcing the dinner specials. I had half hoped that Hermioni Abramopoulos wouldn’t come by the agency. But she had, putting down the retainer I’d asked for. Which meant I was pretty much in this till the end.

Inside the diner I could make out at least seven regulars. Whereas before I might have viewed them simply as fellow diners, now each and every one of them was a suspect.

Could a customer have been upset at his burned steak — earlier thrown out of the house by his wife, fired from his job — taking his rage out on an unsuspecting Mike? Or, in the case of the young couple holding hands in the first booth and sharing moussaka, could an argument have grown loud, causing Mike to intervene and become victim rather than mediator?

At any rate, I didn’t have many resources to dedicate to this case. Sure, Hermioni was paying me. But I was in the middle of a sticky job that commanded most of my attention.

Since Mike had been a friend of sorts, however, and a fellow Greek, I figured I could give him at least a fraction of the time I’d spent eating at his establishment.

I looked up and down the street. To my left, Ditmars Boulevard would take me toward the East River and Astoria Park, the Hellgate Bridge looming as a reminder of history in a city full of history. To my right, the street would take me to LaGuardia Airport.

But it wasn’t the river or the airport I was interested in now. I turned and walked east, crossing 31st Street, the squealing brakes of the N train announcing its arrival at Ditmars station, the last stop on the elevated line, a regular sound that blended with the din of cars and airplanes sweeping down from the northwest. I stopped and bought a fresh peach from the Top Tomato on 35th, then walked further up still, to the only spot I’d been able to find in this parking-challenged area. I climbed into my old Pontiac and pointed the car in the direction of the 114th Precinct on Astoria Boulevard at 34th Street.

A little while later, I sat opposite Detective Sergeant Tom McCurdy, who I’d learned was the guy in charge of the case after a quick call to my NYPD mate, Officer Pino Karras. If the files littering Tom’s desk were any indication, Hermioni was right: It might be some time before anyone got around to finding out who had killed her husband.

Of course, I hadn’t ruled Hermioni out as a suspect yet. Call me jaded, but there was something about the human condition that allowed some folks to believe that if they hired a private dick, it deflected suspicion away from them, no matter how damning the evidence. One of my former clients had learned the hard way that guys like me weren’t wired to look the other way. While I wasn’t a cop anymore, the basic principles that had led me in that direction were still very much intact.

Besides, I knew enough about life to know that you took order where you could find it.

Tom McCurdy finished a phone call, sighed, and then nearly dumped the contents of his coffee cup over the files covering his desk as he reached for a pen.

“Looks like you’ve got your hands full,” I remarked.

“That ain’t the half of it. That goddamn blackout has us backlogged two weeks. We’re investigating every death until we can rule out those that were heat-related.” He fingered through one pile, then began on another, pulling out the file on Abramopoulos. “I thought you might be by for this. Ugly case, this one. Steak knife to the neck. Real mess.”

I’d known Mike had been stabbed. Only I hadn’t known where or with what. “You wouldn’t happen to have handy the list of the vouchered evidence and crime scene photos, would you?”

“Probably. But you know I can’t let you see them.”

I crossed my arms over my brown tie and grinned. “I don’t think I have to remind you that you owe me.”

Tom frowned, plainly remembering the hit on a prominent Greek politician I’d helped him thwart a year ago. “I think you just did.” He squinted at me. “The widow hire you?”

I indicated she had.

He swiveled in his chair and pulled out another file. The evidence itself had been collected by the Crime Scene Unit and was probably at the NYPD lab waiting to be tested. After that, it would be sent to the prosecutor’s office, once a suspect was named. I looked over the list Tom handed me and the photos. One shot was of a steak knife, the blade coated with blood. Another showed a short-sleeved blue shirt stained with blood in a pattern I guessed was consistent with a neck wound. I squinted at the third shot.

“The knife was still in the side of his neck.” Tom tapped a spot near his left carotid artery.

“Any idea if the attacker approached from the front or the back?”

“Nah. Still waiting on the M.E. for that. But this guy was a fighter. Scooted at least ten feet toward the telephone on the wall before he blacked out. Hit the left carotid head on. There ain’t no bigger bleeder in the body.”

I nodded, my gaze catching on a small, blood-caked item featured in the third shot. A dime had been placed next to it to indicate scale.

“Don’t know what in the hell that is yet,” Tom said. “Maybe after the guys scrape the blood off we’ll get a better clue.”

I already had a good idea what it was.

“What’s your take on who did it?” I asked.

“Cash register emptied, hour late. Robbery gone bad, is my best guess.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say.”

I again looked through the photos that had been printed out on regular paper. Not very good detail. But with digital cameras and computers nowadays, there was very little need for hard photos, unless you wanted to make a point with a jury. Needed to know something? You used a computer to zoom in on it.

While originally I had been reluctant to add the new technology to my inventory, in the past few years I’d become quite proficient, updating my software every year and a half or so to make sure I had the latest.

I held up a photo. “Prints on the knife?”

“Only those of the victim. Probably he tried to take it out. Made a real mess of things. Which is why he bled out.”

“How about footprints in the blood?”

“Only those of the victim.”

“Was the knife clean or dirty?”

Tom grimaced. “Do you mean, did someone use it to cut a steak or something before burying it in Abramopoulos’s neck?” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I eyed a shot of the entire diner and then handed him back the photos. “Thanks.”

“That’s it?”

“I’ll be in touch,” I said over my shoulder, heading for the door.

I sat back in my office chair, staring at the notes I’d made. Was Tom right? The killing the product of a robbery gone bad? Mike was the kind to resist.

Hermioni had provided me with a list of the staff — names and Social Security numbers; I’d checked them out. Nothing but minor traffic violations. Hermioni had also told me about a customer Mike had argued with the morning before he was killed, but she didn’t have a name, so I’d have to ask around if I was to pursue that lead.

I personally knew of other strange regulars who kept to themselves. But to spotlight them was like shining an unflattering light on myself.

Was Mike the victim of some psycho agitated by soaring temperatures and the blackout? No, I didn’t think so. The problem with that as the scenario was that while Astoria — the entire city of New York, for that matter — hadn’t always been safe, now it was a nice place to raise a family, the Manhattan skyline near enough to appreciate across the East River, but far enough away to escape the problems of too many people crammed into small spaces.

Yet the real reason I rejected all the theories was because I was pretty sure I knew what had gone down that night in the Acropolis Diner.

I grabbed my notepad, purposely leaving my pen behind, and decided it was time for dinner.

Mayor Bloomberg and I didn’t agree on much, but our take on Greek diners was in sync. He’d said in a recent interview in the Times that if he had to eat at only one New York restaurant for the rest of his life, it would be a Greek diner, because the variety of food was impressive and the ingredients fresh.

I concurred. And it wasn’t just because I was Greek. Having been single for the better part of my life, I’d come to appreciate the range my compatriots offered up. While tonight I’d ordered only yemista — rice-stuffed tomatoes — that could rival my own mother’s, since I ate at diners every day I often mixed it up with meatloaf and fried chicken. While none of the meals would win any awards, they were pretty close to what Mom would make, if, indeed, Mom made these dishes.

My mother had been living with my younger brother Pericles and his wife Thalia ever since the old man had cashed in his lottery ticket for a big exclusive condo in the sky. She still cooked, but rare were the times when I got to enjoy it. Call me a coward, but I didn’t like the way she looked at me across the table even as she told me about some distant cousin or other from the Old Country who she could fix me up with.

Of course, my life probably would have been a whole hell of a lot simpler had I just taken her advice from the beginning. Instead, I’d married two American women who had thought me exciting and exotic in the beginning, plodding and boring at the end.

The topic of marriage brought my brother Pericles’s oldest daughter, Sofie, to mind. She’d just announced her engagement to a good Greek boy, much to the family’s delight. She’d done some odd jobs for me on and off over the years whenever she got fed up with working in my brother’s restaurant or her maternal grandfather’s café, both on Broadway. I remember thinking she would make a good P.I. That is, if wedding cakes, color swatches, booking good bouzouki bands, and trying to be a good Greek girl weren’t what currently populated her list of priorities.

Personally, I thought she could do better.

I finished my food and pushed my plate away, craving a post-meal cigarette. But I just sat back and waited for the waitress to take my plate and offer me coffee.

When she popped up like clockwork, I motioned toward the empty seat across from me. “Sit with me a minute, please, Petra.”

Her movements slowed and her expression was pinched. She glanced around as if seeking an excuse to refuse my request. But I’d purposely come into the diner just before closing, so there were no other customers to be waited on, aside from an old man at the far end of the counter who was reading a newspaper and nursing the same cup of coffee he had been for the past hour.

Petra reluctantly sat down.

“You know that Mrs. Abramopoulos hired me, don’t you?”

She looked down at where she had her hands tightly clasped on the table in front of her, then nodded.

I took out my wirebound pad and pretended to consult notes that didn’t exist even as I looked in my pockets for a pen that wasn’t there.

Petra removed a pen from her apron pocket and held it out to me with her right hand. Her wrist was not only minus the Greek evil-eye charm that had been covered with blood in the crime scene photo, but the bracelet that had held it too.

“Did you lose your bracelet?” I asked, taking the pen.

Her face burned bright red. She nodded again.

I took a sip of black coffee. “There were times when you and Mike didn’t get a long all that well, weren’t there?”

Big green eyes looked up into mine.

“Yeah, I saw it. The old man making passes. The swats on the ass.” I shrugged. “Kind of hard to miss.”

“Mr. Abramopoulos was a nice man,” she said quickly.

Of course she would say that. Since I hadn’t been able to dig up much on her, I’d guess that Petra Ahmeti was illegal. Chased from a struggling homeland like the Greeks had been a generation earlier. Mike had paid her in cash, and since she was good worker, she took home good tips. Better than the other two waitresses who would just as soon dump your plate into your lap as serve you.

Maybe the night Mike was killed he had pushed things beyond an ass-swat with pretty Petra. And paid for it in spades.

A price exacted not by Petra, I was sure.

“When did you lose your bracelet, Petra?”

She began rubbing one of her thumbs hard against the other. “I didn’t. Lose it, I mean. I...” She appeared to be searching for the right words, as any non — native speaker might. But I guessed her hesitation grew more out of her not wanting to tell me what she had to say than her limited English.

I heard the sound of a tub of dishes being put down heavily on the table behind me.

“She gave it to me,” the busboy said. “So just leave her alone.”

Bingo.

You see, Petra had never been on my radar as a suspect. She was just too gentle. Someone had killed on her behalf. And it was a sure bet that the guy was Greek. Because while it wouldn’t be unusual for an Albanian girl to be wearing a Greek evil-eye charm on her bracelet, I’d gotten the impression from the way I’d seen her play with it that it had been a gift. From a Greek guy. And since Mike hadn’t been the gift-giving kind, that left one other Greek guy in the diner.

Stamatis came to stand next to my booth, his hands fisted at his sides. “What do you want with Petra? Why are you asking her these questions?”

I kept my gaze on Petra’s pretty face. “Sweetheart, why don’t you go in the back and see if you can scare up a piece of fresh baklava for me. Not the pieces that have been in the display all day.”

She briefly met my gaze and then scooted from the booth, disappearing into the back of the diner.

“How long you been working here, Stamatis?” I asked the kid as I peeled off a twenty from my clip.

The question was rhetorical. I already knew how long he’d been working there. Exactly eight months. Hired on the day after Petra, after the previous busboy had met with a hooded mugger in a dark alley.

Now, you might say that was just a coincidence. Then I would have to remind you of Rule #2 in the P.I. handbook: There are no coincidences. My inquiries had revealed that Petra worked at another restaurant in Jackson Heights prior to coming to the Acropolis. And so had Stamatis. And through NYCIS, that the young man also had two priors, violence-related. A name-check by my buddy McCurdy had produced that tidbit. Of course, being illegal, Stamatis had no Social Security number.

Enter Mike Abramopoulos, restaurant owner, husband, father of three, and pretty much harmless, if a bit lecherous. Being of the male persuasion myself, I knew that many of us appreciated the value of a pretty girl. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying that a man’s primal desire to spread his seed is, well, it is what it is.

As for the steak knife, it was an even bet that the forensics lab might discover that it had been used for its normal intended purpose — even though the photos of the entire diner post-murder had shown the tables and counter cleared of all plates, glasses, and utensils. Stamatis may have cleared the tables for some reason after using the steak knife to stab Abramopoulos.

A crime of passion, and a mundane weapon ready to hand.

Then he may have emptied the cash register to make it look like a robbery gone bad.

I noticed that Stamatis hadn’t answered my question, and his fists were still clamped tight at his sides.

I pushed from the seat, tucking a copy of the Queens Tribune under my left arm. Stamatis had to either back off or make good on his unspoken threat. I wasn’t sure how he’d play it. But he blinked.

I eyed the kid. A shame, really. He was all of nineteen and had his whole life ahead of him.

A life that would now include a sojourn at Rikers before a long stretch upstate.

“Tell Petra I changed my mind about the baklava,” I said, putting the twenty on the table and heading for the door.

A little while later, I watched from the opposite corner as Sergeant Tom McCurdy and his partner pulled up in front of the diner and went in to arrest Stamatis. While no confessions had yet been extracted, nor solid evidence produced, I’d suggested to Tom on the phone that a little pressure applied just so would get him both.

The homicide detectives led the kid out in handcuffs and nodded in my direction. I nodded back and then took a long pull off the cigarette I’d just lit. I coughed, stared at the burning end, let it fall from my fingers to the pavement, and ground it out under the heel of my shoe. As I turned to head to my car, the N train squealed to a halt on the elevated tracks a half a block up on 31st. I didn’t have to hear to know that inside the train the announcement was: Last Stop, Ditmars.

And for Mihalis Abramopoulos, Ditmars had been his last stop.

I looked at the sea of people coming down the platform stairs on their way home, and others out on the warm night with families and friends, gathering in cafés and restaurants and Astoria Park. For other immigrants and locals alike, Ditmars represented a beginning...