Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

“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 Caffè 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.

“What school?”

“You never heard of it.”

When he asked what she did for a living, she said, “IT.”

“Aha, the IT Girl. Information technology for whom?”

“Freelance,” she said, eating an arugula salad. “I work for online database companies that locate people.”

“Like old sweethearts and schoolmates?”

“Yeah, and for estate lawyers looking for beneficiaries, private investigators looking for abducted kids and dead-beat parents, orphans who want to find their birth parents, bail bondsmen searching for bail jumpers, people who need criminal background checks on potential spouses or prospective employees.”

“Cool. How’d you get into that line of work?”

“Doing my family tree.”

“Fascinating.”

“Can be.”

“How do people find you?” he asked.

“I find them. I choose my own hours. But I’m gonna launch a website soon.”

“Awesome! Need any investors?”

“Nope.”

The more he probed, and the more evasive she got, the more intrigued he became. Everyone loves an enigma, she thought.

“So what brought you to Bayside?”

“Enough about me,” she replied, then asked about his family.

He poked at his branzini filet with lemon, garlic, and capers. “I’m an only child,” he said. “Lost both my parents when I was seventeen. Drowned in a boating accident.” He pointed out the window at the bay, where the lights of the 1800-footlong bridge reflected in the night waters. “Right there, under the Throgs Neck.”

“Sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Some things hurt forever.”

He nodded.

After she declined coffee and dessert, he invited her for a nightcap at his house, where she could see his menagerie of exotic animals.

“Nah.”

He seemed surprised. He asked if she’d like to join him for a midnight cruise through New York Harbor.

“Nah.”

“Cold Heinekens on board. Or Roederer Cristal champagne.”

“Cristal’s tempting but I never put myself in a hump-or-jump situation on first dates.”

He laughed. “Then how about on a second date?”

“Maybe.”

“How will I know?”

“I still have your card.”

Dr. Sheridan paid the bill in cash, like a man who didn’t want to leave a trail. Like a body-shaved man who wipes away fingerprints with Windex.

They left Caffè on the Green and walked across the sprawling lawn toward the parking lot, passing the duck pond that reflected the moon shining through the hundred-year-old willows. An ornate marble fountain burbled, and a thousand tiny white lights dotted the shrubbery like immortal fireflies. A frail breeze sighed off Little Neck Bay and Nikki imagined Rudy Valentino putting the make on some hot flapper here long before the Throgs Neck was even imagined.

Dr. Sheridan offered to drive Nikki home, but she declined. In the well-lit parking lot she thanked him for dinner and said, “Goodnight, doc,” then shook his hand. His palm was damp. He leaned in to kiss her and she backed away, sliding her hand from his, and before the valet could retrieve Dr. Sheridan’s Mercedes 450, she clacked her high heels off into the night, looping home through the dark drowsy side streets of eastern Queens.

Nikki watched Dr. Sheridan through the telescope for the next two weeks. She watched him jog along the Cross Island Parkway each day, ogling the female joggers, chatting them up, handing them business cards. He took a young woman on a boat ride just before sunset one evening. When he dropped her off at a small weed-shrouded fishing dock halfway between the Bayside Marina and Fort Totten after dark, Nikki saw her stumble up the jogging path to her car in one of Dr. Sheridan’s two parking spots. She collapsed into the driver’s seat and appeared to fall fast asleep.

An hour later, Nikki jogged up to the car, stopped, knocked on the window, and asked if everything was okay. “S’all right,” the glassy-eyed girl slurred. She asked the time while stifling a yawn. Nikki told her it was almost 10 p.m. The girl was astonished. She sat up, shook her head like a wet hound, and started her car. “My fuckin’ husband’ll kill me,” she said. Nikki asked if anything bad had happened to her on the boat. The girl blinked several times and said, “Boat?”

“Were you sexually compromised, hon?”

“Fuckin’ lesbo freak,” the girl shot back, powering up the window and squealing off onto the Cross Island.

At night during this period, Nikki sat in her Jeep Cherokee staking out Dr. Sheridan as he cruised the local bar scene on a mobbed Bell Boulevard. There were a dozen bars in this four-block strip that brought young people from all over Queens and Nassau County by car or the Long Island Rail Road. She watched Dr. Sheridan, big fish in a small, well-stocked pond, sample Uncle Jack’s, Bourbon Street, Sullivan’s, KC’s Saloon, Dempsey’s, Donovan’s, Monahan’s, Fitzgerald’s, No No’s, and The First Edition. On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Dr. Sheridan left with different young women each night. He spent the night aboard The Dog’s Life with each one, anchored under the Throgs Neck Bridge. No one’s that lucky, she thought.

On a Friday morning in the second week of June, Nikki received the results from Dr. Sheridan’s swizzle straw from the DNA lab. All that she’d suspected was now scientific fact. The DNA on the drinking straw confirmed everything that the woman named Eileen Lavin had contended long ago to her family, friends, church, and the authorities — and in her diaries.

Dressed in her jogging gear, Nikki sat down in front of her telescope with Eileen Lavin’s diaries and went over everything again. Lavin had told police that she went aboard a boat with a guy named George Sheridan who said he had some golden Labrador retriever puppies from which she might choose a mascot for the orphan kids she was working with as a novice in the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Eileen had finished three years at St. John’s University, lived in a convent in the Bronx for eighteen months, and had taken all the temporary vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. She had met George Sheridan when he attended a St. John’s swim team meet against rival Wagner College. That night, beautiful Eileen Lavin, who was on a full athletic scholarship, led the Johnnies to a major victory over the Seahawks. A series of photographs in the St. John’s Torch student newspaper showed young Lavin in a team bathing suit. She was gonna be a nun, thought Nikki. But she had a bubble butt.

George Sheridan was a St. John’s senior majoring in veterinary medicine. Eileen Lavin was studying social work, working toward her BA. She was also preparing for her final vows of sisterhood. Sheridan ate lunch with her at school several times. He cheered at her meets. Then one afternoon after school, Sheridan invited her aboard his boat. He said he would gladly take some of the poor inner-city orphan kids she was working with out for a day of fishing and sightseeing. He also told her about some pedigree puppies he had at home and said that he’d like to donate one to the orphanage. Late that afternoon, Eileen went out on the boat with Sheridan. Her diary said that he was a perfect gentleman at first and took her for a cruise around New York Harbor. On the way back to his home in Douglaston, he dropped anchor under the Throgs Neck Bridge. As the sun went down over Queens, he asked Eileen to pray with him for his parents who’d drowned in those very waters. Then he served popcorn and gave her a glass of lemonade before they were to head back to his home in Douglaston and select a puppy. The last thing she remembered were the lights of the Throgs Neck playing on the night waters of Little Neck Bay.