Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

I caught him as he began to fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I placed him on the black bench, arranging the body so that the Mets fans exiting the next trains would think that he was just waiting to board. I took his wallet, card case, and BlackBerry so that the cops would have the always popular and distracting motive of robbery to think about. I put the Post from my back pocket in his lap so that Jack appeared to be reading the sports page with Pedro on the cover. I left the ice pick there with no prints and no trail back to me. I was halfway down the stairs before the next train pulled in.

When I came up on the Manhattan side of the platform, the young couple were still at it hot and heavy and wouldn’t have noticed me if I had shot Jack with a.45. Standing in the evening breeze, I could see the body on the bench. The latest trainload of fans was hurrying down the puke-green stairs to get to the game. No one was giving him a second look. The starting lineups were about to be announced.

Jack’s mistake was thinking with the head between his legs, not the one on his shoulders. People with assets worth in excess of eight figures don’t care who or what you fuck so long as you are discreet. When the details of your sex life appear on the disapproving lips of some dried-up matron whose name is in the Social Register, or in a blind item in a sordid tabloid gossip page, those people might take their assets to another investment boutique. But that’s just money. There is always more money to be made somewhere.

It becomes trouble when whispers and innuendos reach the ears of your boss. It becomes real trouble when, after a little snooping and a little window peeping, he learns you are screwing his college freshman son. It becomes big trouble when you tell your boss that you are the only thing that keeps his firm from being a comical relic on The Street and that, if he continues to interfere in your personal life, you will take his business and his son. Blood and money are very personal. That’s when, through a middleman or a cutout or a guy who knows a guy, I get a call.

But who knows? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake to fall for the kid. If they had baseball in common, that would have been plenty for Jack. His error was not how he used his mouth with the kid, but opening his mouth to the father. It was the blow-up, not the blowjobs. My mother often said: Be careful because a big mouth will always get you in trouble.

A Manhattan-bound local pulled in and I got on. Below me, a young man waited outside of Shea Stadium with two tickets for tonight’s game that wouldn’t be used. Probably wearing a brand new Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

Jenny put a Guinness in front of me while NY1 played on the plasma screen over the wooden bar at my local Woodside pub. I could see some reporter standing with Shea in the background, but with the sound low and the jukebox blaring Bono, I couldn’t hear anything. Because it was the top of the hour, I figured he was not reporting on the outcome of the game.

“Can you believe it?” Jenny said. “They had this story on before. Some poor guy is going to a ballgame and gets stabbed to death. You can’t ride the subway anymore without some wacko trying to kill you with a knife. First that kid from Texas gets stabbed in the chest. And I get the creeps just thinking about that poor guy and the handsaw. I’m taking buses everywhere from now on.”

“More importantly, love, did the Mets win?”

She slapped my hand playfully. “You’re bad.” She walked to the other end of the bar where a couple was signaling for a refill.

Yes, tonight I think I am.

JFK Airport

Read. Just keep reading. She had to try to lose herself in the story. Let it block out the shaking and shuttering. She gripped the book with sweating hands. She rubbed her knee. There was no way in this cramped space to ease the throbbing.

The man in the seat next to her was sleeping. He had changed places with a Hasid who had refused to sit next to a woman. When this new guy first sat down, he had scared her. He looked like an Arab. His pockmarked skin gave him a sinister appearance, and she had tried not to think of him in such a prejudiced way. He had a nice smile. But hijackers could smile.

“Are you going home or do you live in the UK?” She had worked up her courage to question him while she waited behind him in line for the loo. She kept saying “loo” now, after a week with the people in the London office.

“Home,” he had said. That smile again. It did look kind of threatening. “I’m from the Bronx, and I can’t wait to get back.”

The accent was unmistakable. Bronx, for sure. He was probably Puerto Rican. “Me too. Riverdale.” She tried to smile back at him. The last word came out sounding apologetic. People from the real Bronx hated Riverdale; she was sure of that. It shamed her to have suspected him. He seemed so benign now. He could be a victim, not a terrorist.

The plane touched down with a jolt that woke him.

She wiped her palms on the rough fabric of the seat. Rivulets of rain ran over the window glass.

“Welcome to JFK,” an intimate and humorous voice began over the loudspeaker. “If I hadn’t just spent nearly eight hours cavorting with all of you on this plane, I would think we were still in London, given this gloomy weather.”

Friday. The traffic would be awful. And she had her car in long-term parking. The Triboro Bridge would be backed up. And the rain would make it worse.

She got her black rolly down from the overhead bin and waited in the aisle to get off the plane.

“Thank you for flying Virgin Atlantic,” they said by way of goodbye.

The walk to Passport Control went on forever. The specter of having to drive over the bridge haunted her. Suppose she got stuck in traffic in the middle of the bridge with her heart beating out of control. She would have to get off. She would have to. This started back in October of 2001, returning from Washington on a Sunday night — at dusk on a misty evening, driving along, sipping the latte she had picked up at the rest stop. The bottoms of her feet had gotten sweaty when suddenly there was the Delaware Memorial Bridge — the double span sticking up above some light fog. It would have looked pretty, if it hadn’t frozen her heart. She couldn’t drive up there.

She had moved behind a blue Volkswagen Passat in the middle lane and hung onto the steering wheel for dear life. She had stayed behind that car and couldn’t look left or right until they got through the toll on the other side. Heart still pounding, she had pulled over at the first opportunity. It was almost an hour before she could get back on the road.

A few months later, she had gotten lost trying to get back to Manhattan from Newark without driving on the Pulaski Skyway. Worse and worse. Two weeks ago, she had driven down through New Jersey and gone through the Lincoln Tunnel and back up to the Bronx, just to avoid the George Washington Bridge. So ashamed, she hadn’t even told her sister. But when she finally mentioned it to Roger, who was hardly a close friend, he immediately asked, “Did this start after 9/11?” The idea had shocked her.

“Go to line twenty-seven.” The short, sharp-faced African-American woman at Passport Control jabbed a finger in the direction of a booth.

The officer’s face was round and kind, but he looked at her with hard, searching eyes. She handed him her passport. He scanned it and watched the screen, then handed it back with a perfunctory, “Welcome home.”

The baggage was slow. The rain, she guessed. The Hasidic guy stood near her, waiting. The rainy weather made her knee worse. She tried to keep her weight off it.