New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  They headed over to the subway platform. I saw Clayton pull out his MetroCard and go through the turnstile. Then he handed his card back to Vito, who went through after him.

  What the fuck?

  I stopped walking and stayed where I was in the middle of the ramp leading to the turnstiles. The two men were about a hundred yards in front of me but they had their backs to me. There wasn’t anyone else on the platform.

  They started raising their voices. I couldn’t hear what was being said. There was wind and a big airplane with its belly low against the sky. Then the sound of an oncoming train and a blur of movement. A body falling down onto the tracks just as the train came. I braced myself for some sort of screeching of brakes. There wasn’t any. The train charged into the station. The doors opened then closed. No one got on or off. The train pulled away. There was just one guy left standing on the platform. He was staring down at the tracks.

  My fingers were numb.

  I slowly walked up the platform. Found my MetroCard in my coat. Slid it in and went through the turnstile. I walked to the edge and looked down at the tracks. There was an arm separated from the rest of the body. Blood pouring out of the shoulder. The head twisted at an angle you never saw in life. I wasn’t sure how the train conductor had failed to notice. The MTA has been very proud of its new One-Person Train Operation system that requires just one human to run the entire train. Maybe that’s not enough to keep an eye out for falling bodies.

  I felt nauseous. I started to black out and then he steadied me, putting his hands at the small of my back.

  “He was talking about you,” said Clayton, staring down at Vito’s big mangled body. “Said you were going to blow him in exchange for him getting rid of me. He was just trying to upset me but it was disrespectful to you. I wanted to scare him but he fell onto the tracks.” Clayton spoke so calmly. “He was talking shit about you, Alice,” he added, raising his voice a little.

  “Well,” I said, “that wasn’t very nice of him, was it?”

  Clayton smiled.

  He really wasn’t a bad-looking guy.

  NECK BRIDGE

  BY DENIS HAMILL

  Bayside

  Times change, she thought. People don’t.

  Nikki reread the last of three diaries written by a dead woman named Eileen Lavin, took a deep breath, and spied Dr. George Sheridan through the Zhumell Spotting Scope mounted on a tripod in front of her sixteenth-floor window in her Bayside condo. He was leaving his luxury shorefront home over in Douglaston.

  It was 8:55 a.m. on a sunny Mother’s Day in Queens. Dr. Sheridan was dressed in his blue and white Abercrombie & Fitch tracksuit and Nikki’s zoom lens was so powerful that even clear across the half-mile of Little Neck Bay she could see the double-G imprinted on his $375 dark-blue Gucci sneakers. She knew from watching him since New Year’s that he wore a different tracksuit and rotated his designer sneakers every day.

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” Nikki whispered, knotting her yellow cotton tank top at her sternum and tying the laces on her New Balance sneakers, sweat socks bunched at the tops. Her white spandex shorts could not have been any tighter, accentuating her twenty-five-year-old ass that she’d slaved to sculpt into bubble perfection on the butt buster, StairMaster, and at the aerobics dance classes in the gym in the Bayview condo complex where she’d rented an apartment for six months.

  Two things she’d noticed about all the women Dr. Sheridan chased—all were in their twenties and all had bubble butts.

  Several minutes later, Nikki peered through the telescope again. The sun twinkled on the blue eye of Little Neck Bay as Sheridan boarded his forty-two-foot Silverton bearing the name The Dog’s Life at his private dock behind his modernized Queen Anne–style house on a cul-de-sac off Shore Road. He climbed to the fly deck, fired up the twin engines, and aimed straight at Bayside Marina a half-mile across the water. Nikki knew Dr. Sheridan would moor The Dog’s Life there before moving down the marina walkway to the jogging path. He would run south to the end of the asphalt path at Northern Boulevard, then make a U-turn and jog three miles north to Fort Totten, where he’d turn and head back to the marina to complete his daily six-mile route along one of the most idyllic stretches of waterfront in New York City.

  “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 MEOW1 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 Terrac
e Shopping Mall. There, even on Mother’s Day, he would give comfort to the daily parade of heartsick pet owners, most of them women— divorcées, 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 pleasure, 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 Caffè 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 patted 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.”

  “Touché. 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?”

  “Caffè 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 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.