Queens Noir (5 page)

"He's mine," Nikki whispered, before hurrying out of the
apartment and down the sixteen flights of stairs to work up a
good sweat before jogging out into the Bayside streets, passing the old colonials, the Queen Annes, the Tudors, and the
gruesome McMansions and boxy two-family condo units that
looked to her like they had been designed by shoemakers.

She huffed east on Thirty-Fifth Avenue and over to the
secret little emerald called Crocheron Park. Nikki ran past
a fraternity of dog walkers who let their pets chase taunting
squirrels through the underused meadows. She legged past
the fields where a father in a Mets jacket towered fly balls to
his son who wore a Yankees hat. She nodded to three chunky
women joggers who gasped counter-clockwise on the onemile inside roadway and watched a tennis volley between two
seventy-something men wearing white designer shorts with indoor winter tans. They stopped the volley to ogle Nikki.
Since Viagra, seventy is the new seventeen, she thought. She
slowed to a walk as she approached the southern-most of the
two gazebos stationed on the steep leafy hill overlooking the
jogging/bicycle road parallel to the humming Cross Island Parkway. Through the budding trees she would momentarily clock
Dr. Sheridan making the southbound leg of his run.

It was 9:17 a.m. now. She knew his moves better than he
did. Glistening with sweat, her red headband securing her long
dark hair, she gulped some Poland Spring water, then poured
out all but an inch from a twenty-ounce bottle. Through the
verdant trees she saw him, running hard, like someone fleeing
from his own footprints.

Nikki bounded down the long stone steps from the park
to the Cross Island overpass. She leaped from step to step in
a graceful ballet, her body taking blurry flight between footfalls. She cut over the six lanes of the Cross island, busy with
Mother's Day travelers, about half of them on their way to
visit Mom now living in some old person's orphanage, with
a name like Shady Acres, after having been abandoned by
the very ingrates she had brought into the world. Nikki gazed
right and here came Dr. Sheridan hoofing toward her just as
she bounced down the final ramp onto the jogging path, her
breasts heaving, sweat lashing off her face in a spray of tiny
sunlit diamonds.

They exchanged glances. Dr. Sheridan smiled. Nikki didn't.
A lifetime of running had kept his forty-five-year-old body as
trim as Nikki imagined it had been when he was twenty. She
pivoted, sprung, and ran ahead of him, ham muscles bunching
in the damp white Spandex like sins waiting to be committed.
Her thigh muscles rippled as she passed fishermen in rubber
suits standing hip deep in the tame bay where swans and geese and mallards and ducks looped around the sailboats. A spotted hawk circled and a pair of fat black crows exploded from
the wild reeds into the high trees of Crocheron.

A lone whooping crane stood on one leg on a sand spit,
bleating like a traffic cop. Nikki watched a pair of young lovers, a pretty Asian girl and a skinny white boy with moussespiked hair, sharing the two earplugs of an iPod and strolling
hand-in-hand as if never wanting this song, this walk, this
morning to end. The girl gave her companion a gentle bump
of her left hip in the first movement of their ephemeral dance
of spring. Love him till it hurts, Nikki thought. She knew Dr.
Sheridan was behind her undressing her with his eyes.

Up ahead she saw the sun gilding across the long steel
bones of the Throgs Neck Bridge. A cabin cruiser grumped
beneath it. Nausea rose in Nikki like a dirty tide. She contained it with her sense of mission. She was gonna make a bad
thing right.

Nikki knew Dr. Sheridan would shower and change in the
luxury salon of his boat before hopping in his two-door silver BMW Z4, with the MEOWI vanity plate that he kept in
one of his two rented parking spots by the marina-the second spot was for babes who spent the night on his boat. Then
he'd drive the five minutes to work at his Menagerie Animal
Clinic across the street from the Bay Terrace Shopping Mall.
There, even on Mother's Day, he would give comfort to the
daily parade of heartsick pet owners, most of them womendivorcees, young and single, widows, unhappily married and
happy to cheat-who came whenever Fido or Fluffy so much
as sneezed, just to hear the soothing timbre of Dr. Sheridan's
deep voice. Observing him over four months, from winter until spring, Nikki had deduced that Dr. Sheridan didn't mix
business with pleasure. He mixed pleasure with more plea sure, she thought. Never with friends or clients. Only with
strangers.

With his handsome and gray-only-at-the-temples good
looks, a multimillion-dollar bay-front home, his own luxury
boat, a Beemer and a Benz in his driveway, a lucrative veterinarian clinic, and membership in the local community board,
Dr. George Sheridan possessed one of the most sought after
naked left ring fingers in eastern Queens.

Fat chance, girls, she thought. For on Thursday night, Ladies'
Nite, when Cosmopolitans were free for babes in most of the
crowded bars along Bell Boulevard, Dr. Sheridan could usually
be found at the three-deep mahogany bar in the ambient bordello lighting of Uncle Jack's Steakhouse, dressed in an Armani
or Hugo Boss, with open-necked shirt, Botticelli loafers, no
socks, sipping Grey Goose and tonic through a swizzle straw.

When he met the right hot chick, never older than the
French formula of half-his-age-plus-seven, he'd buy her drinks.
After two rounds he'd ask if she was hungry and then treat her
to the famous crab cakes, shrimp the size of mandolins, and
the porterhouse steak that he insisted was as good if not better
than the ones served at Peter Luger's over in Brooklyn. "Meal
whores," Nikki had overheard Dr. Sheridan call his prey to
other middle-aged men on the prowl on Ladies' Nites.

Dr. Sheridan always paid with cash when he left and usually had one of the Cosmo'd babes plopping her bubble butt
in the leather bucket passenger seat of his Beemer on his way
home to Douglaston. But Nikki knew-as did he-that those
consenting adults in high heels were as much on the make
as Dr. Sheridan. He wanted to get in their pants; the ladies
wanted to get on his left ring finger. It was a game, though he
was the one who stacked the deck.

In the mornings after, through her all-revealing telescope,
Nikki had seen many of those young women stagger out of
Sheridan's house, or the salon of his boat, still dazed and
woozy. He'd drive them back to the cars they had left on Bell
Boulevard the night before.

Of late, however, with spring prickling the air, Dr. Sheridan was fond of taking his lady friends for a nightcap at the
elegant, brilliantly lighted Caffe on the Green overlooking
the Throgs Neck Bridge, a high-end restaurant that was once
home to Rudolph Valentino and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
And then for a moonlight cruise on his $300,000 luxury Silverton, replete with living room, salon, wide-screen satellite
TV, quadraphonic sound system, full-service kitchen, elegant
dining room, master bedroom with queen-size bed, and smaller
guest bedroom. Nikki would watch him drop anchor under
the Throgs Neck Bridge, where he and his young dates would
spend the night rocking in the tide.

Nikki knew his routine. A month ago, she had positioned
herself alone at the bar of Uncle Jack's so that Dr. Sheridan
would spot her wearing her skin-tightest jeans, high spaghettistrap heels, and matching tight red leather waist jacket. He offered to buy her a drink and she asked for a bottle of Heineken,
no glass. As she drank the beer, she watched him sip his Grey
Goose in careful measures through the swizzle-stick straw.

"Real guys don't suck straws," she said, pulling it from his
mouth.

He laughed. She clinked her bottle against his glass and
he drank from the lip.

"Real guys offer to buy beautiful women like you dinner,"
he said.

"Maybe some other time. I just stopped off for a cold one
before work."

"Where do you work?"

"Queens."

"Queens? Queens what? Queens Hospital? Queens College? Queens Supreme?"

She slugged more beer. "Nah."

He laughed. "Okay, doing what?"

"My job."

She wanted him to remember her. Nothing makes a rich
man remember you like a little bit of mystery and declining a
dinner invitation, she thought. Go to dinner, fuck his brains
out, and tell him your life story ... and you are as memorable
as yesterday's Dow index. Turn him down, keep your pants on,
tell him nothing, and he'll never forget you.

He wrote his cell number and his private e-mail address
on the back of his embossed business card and handed it to
her. She opened her pocketbook and stuffed the card into her
wallet, then discreetly slipped the swizzle stick in a clear plastic bag. She finished the beer, said thanks, and left for work.

The job consisted of sitting in her dark-blue jeep Cherokee
with tinted windows, parked up the block on Bell Boulevard.
Three hours later, after bar hopping along the same street, Dr.
Sheridan left a place called The First Edition accompanied
by a gorgeous wobbly blonde with a bubble butt and pants so
tight they looked like they hurt. Nikki figured her fake ID said
she had turned twenty-one the day before.

Nikki followed Dr. Sheridan's BMW to the Bayside Marina,
where he and his date boarded The Dog's Life. Later, Nikki
watched them through her telescope from her condo window
as he pulled the boat under the Throgs Neck Bridge. After
one glass of bubbly, the young woman got up from a deck chair
and staggered sideways. Dr. Sheridan helped her into his salon
and closed the door.

Hours later, Nikki watched him come up on deck wearing
only boxer shorts, gabbing on a cell phone. The second time
he came up he was completely naked, spraying Windex and
wiping off the railings and deck furniture. Nikki turned away,
but then felt compelled to look back with the zoom lens because something seemed odd. A close inspection through the
telescope revealed that Dr. Sheridan was a man completely devoid of body hair. Shaved from neck to ankles, like a toy poodle
in summer. Nikki could think of nothing less sexy than a completely hairless naked man doing housework. Retch-ro-sexual,
she thought, suppressing a wave of nausea.

The girl never reemerged. Not until morning when Dr.
Sheridan had to help her off the boat on her wobbly platform shoes. Through the telescope the woman appeared to be
dazed, confused. He stroked her hair, shook his head, kissed
her, and patted her cheek, as if reassuring her that nothing
sexual had happened. Then he tapped his watch and helped
her into his Beemer, and drove her back toward Bell Boulevard where she would have left her car the night before. Some
hangovers you never recover from, Nikki thought.

Now, on this sun-filled Mother's Day, Nikki jogged just ahead
of Dr. Sheridan along the wooden planks of the Bayside Marina, knowing he was watching her. She slowed to a sweaty,
panting walk. Asian and Latino fishermen crowded the end
of the marina, casting their lines into the dark waters. A bride
and groom stood posing for pictures that would keep them
forever young, even when married life got old before they did.
Nikki nodded to a grizzled dock hand running the boat-rental
concession and entered the snack shop at the end of the pier,
opened the soft drink refrigerator door, grabbed an ice-cold
bottle of Poland Spring, and approached the cashier. She pat ted her hips as if just realizing she didn't have her jogging
pouch with her.

"Damn it," she said. "Forgot my money." She turned to
return the bottle, counting: One Mississippi, two Mississ-

"Let me buy it for you," she heard Dr. Sheridan say in
that soothing, deep voice that sounded like a priest giving
absolution.

She looked up. "Nah, thanks anyway." She opened the
refrigerator door.

"C'mon, don't you remember me?"

"Sorry?"

"Uncle Jack's? Several months ago. You said I looked gay
sipping a straw."

She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. "I didn't say
you looked gay. I said that real guys don't suck straws."

"Dr. Sheridan ... um, George. I'm a veterinarian. I offered
to buy you dinner."

He paid for her water and bought some for himself.

"Yeah, well, thanks for the water, doc." She turned for the
exit.

"You said you'd have dinner with me some other time."

"I'm positive I said maybe."

"Touche. Is maybe still an option?"

She smirked. "Look, I don't date married guys and you
look like the married ty-"

He held up his bare left hand. "Never."

She cracked open the water bottle, took a long gulp, her
neck muscles and veins bulging, her face and pronounced
clavicle bones gleaming with a patina of fresh sweat. She rolled
the cold plastic bottle on the back of her neck. "Italian?"

"Caffe on the Green?"

"Promise not to suck straw?"

He laughed and nodded. "Promise."

She swigged more water. "When?"

"Tonight? Eight? I'll pick you up. Where do you-"

"See you then."

"Hey," he called out, "I don't even know your name . .

But she was already on the hoof, buns bunching, hair flapping in the wind off Little Neck Bay. Got him, she thought.

Over dinner at a window table in the spacious Caffe on the
Green, decorated with polished Italian marble, Oriental carpeting, lustrous mahogany, looking out on the glittering Throgs
Neck Bridge, Dr. Sheridan asked Nikki dozens of questions.
"Why won't you tell me your last name?"

"I only give my last name to people who pay me. Friends
call me Nikki."

"Like Madonna? Or Cher? You a singer? Or fugitive or
something?"

"Something."

"Family?"

Nikki told him that she had no siblings. That her mother
had died when she was young. That her father had never really been in her life. That she had fended mostly for herself
since moving to New York after college.