Queens Noir

by Robert Knightly

  "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.

  "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."

  ry. "Sor "

  "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 Caffe 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 fourblock 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 g
olden 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.

  Then, according to her diary, total blackout. When she awoke in the predawn, she was sitting on a bus stop bench down the road from her Novitiate House. She was groggy and very sore between her legs.

  Years later, after an exhaustive Internet search, Nikki had found the old police report and Eileen Lavin's Family Court records. She had tracked down Eileen s father, a broken old man who still lived in Bayside. She told him who she was, and he had let her read his daughter's diaries. Eileen s mother had since died, never really recovering from the scandal, shame, and sorrow her daughter had brought upon the family with the out-of-wedlock pregnancy, expulsion from the convent, withdrawal from St. John's, and then her suicide.

  The diary entry recounting Nikki's boat trip with George Sheridan said that she had bled most of the next day. She didn't want to believe that she had been drugged and raped by the kindly schoolmate. She had no memory of any such mon strous thing happening and she had woken up fully clothed. She was not beaten or bruised. She had no memory of seeing any puppies. She called Sheridan, but he didn't return her calls. She had no proof that she had ever been with him, in his car, his house, or on his boat. Never mind his bed.

  Afraid she would be punished, or asked to leave the Novitiate, she kept her dark fears of having been raped to herself. She did not go to a hospital or to the police right away. Instead, she prayed. She did a Novena and the Stations of the Cross. She lit votive candles. She worked with orphan children who had more problems that she could ever know. She went to confession in Manhattan where no one would recognize her. She kept a diary for her and God's eyes only.

  The diaries revealed that after the night on Sheridan's boat, Eileen missed a menstrual cycle. Then a second. After three and a half months without a period, she confided in her Mother Superior that she feared she was pregnant. That she'd been raped. The stern, skeptical, no-nonsense head sister who'd seen many a young novice surrender over the years to the weakness of the flesh before taking final vows asked why Eileen hadn't told anyone till then. Eileen said she'd been afraid.

  "You were afraid of going to hell," Mother Superior said.

  "I wasn't sure I was raped. Or even pregnant. Until now."

  "The alternative being that you are the second coming of the Blessed Virgin?"

  "I was afraid! Afraid of you. Afraid of the shame to my parents. Afraid of God."

  "And so now, three months later, you blame a young man, a good Catholic boy from St. John's studying to be a veterinarian? You aren't even sure he ever laid a hand on you. You have no memory of any such thing. No evidence. Yet you accuse him and bring shame on him, upon a great Catholic university, to make up for your own weakness? Your own mortal sin?"

  "You have it all wrong. I was a virgin when I stepped on his boat!"

  "You've violated your vows," Mother Superior said. "You've committed the sin of fornication. You are bringing a child out of wedlock into the world. Stop pointing fingers at others. Go home and point the finger at the dirty girl in the mirror."

  When she was four months pregnant, Eileen Lavin was told she could not take her vows of sisterhood. She had not kept her temporary vow of chastity. She'd sinned, covered up that sin, compounded the sin by lying about the original sin, and now she was carrying a bastard child. "There is no room for untruthful, unwed mothers in the sisterhood," Mother Superior said.

  The diaries revealed that when Eileen finally contacted the police, they asked why she'd waited four months to report a rape. They asked why she hadn't gone to a hospital. Why she hadn't contacted police right away. They asked why any woman would give birth to a rapist's baby. She explained that she was a devout Catholic, and could never abort any baby. The skeptical detectives from the 111th Precinct made a cursory call on Sheridan. He denied ever having Eileen Lavin aboard his boat or in his house. He invited them to dust for fingerprints. He said the woman was delusional. That her nickname was Sister Psycho.

  The cops believed Sheridan. They apologized for bothering him. "We cannot indict a man on the word of a defrocked nun with no memory of the alleged crime," said the Queens District Attorney's office who investigated the case in 1982. "There's no proof the baby is Sheridan's. A blood test could only eliminate him, not identify him." There was no definitive DNA test in 1982.

  Eileen's devout, old-world, immigrant Irish Catholic parents ostracized her. They had been shamed by a whispering campaign in their Bayside parish where they had previously bragged about their pious daughter going into the convent. Eileen had become just another unwed, knocked-up college slut. Gossip swirled. Neighbors snickered. Friends didn't return her calls. Because of the pregnancy, she lost her swimming scholarship. She was forced to drop out of her last year of St. John's and had the baby shortly after she turned twenty. Her mother refused to have anything to do with the child. Or Eileen. After the baptism, Eileen reluctantly gave the baby up for adoption.

  Then, the diaries showed, Eileen went into a period of deep and prolonged depression. She reapplied for the Novitiate a year later, but Mother Superior said she was psychologically, morally, and spiritually unfit for the sisterhood. She had no family to turn to. Her religious dreams were shattered. She tried in vain to retrieve her baby from the adoption agency. The Queens Family Court refused to restore custody of her child because she was too emotionally and financially unstable. In thorough despair, Eileen ventured out onto the Throgs Neck Bridge one summer night and jumped 120 feet into the inky waters where she had lost her virginity on George Sheridan's boat.

  On a Friday morning in the second week of June, a quartercentury later, Nikki spied Dr. George Sheridan through her telescope as he left his house in Douglaston for his morning run. She timed it so that she ran into him twenty-two minutes later while descending from the Crocheron overpass of the Cross Island. He undressed her with his eyes so blatantly that she feared he'd leave a stain. Then he sidled up and ran alongside her toward the Bayside Marina.

  "What are you doing on Sunday night, doc?" she asked.

  "I'm free."

  "Thought I might take you up on that moonlight cruise."

  "Fabulous. Want to eat somewhere first?"

  "I'll pack dinner."

  "I'll pour you champagne. Where do I pick you up?"r />
  She told him she'd be waiting at 8 p.m. sharp at the little fishing dock alongside the Cross Island between Bayside Marina and Fort Totten.

  "Date," he said.

  She promptly jogged up the ramp of the next overpass and he headed on toward the Throgs Neck Bridge.

  On Sunday night, Dr. Sheridan showed Nikki how to start, stop, and steer The Dog's Life as they cruised back to Little Neck Bay from their tour of New York Harbor. Nikki wore black Spandex clam-diggers, a black halter top, a black Mets jacket, and a black Mets cap, which she tilted up when they sailed under the chilly shadow of the Throgs Neck. Sheridan cut the engines and suggested they go down on deck to "eat, drink, and be silly."

  "Okay," Nikki said.

  He dropped anchor under the bridge as Nikki opened the picnic basket and served chicken and broccoli tossed in a cold penne with olive oil and thinly sliced red bell peppers, seeded Italian bread, and a tomato and basil salad. He walked into the salon and she watched as he poured a flute of champagne from an already opened bottle of Roederer Cristal chilling in a silver ice bucket. He made himself a Grey Goose and tonic. They headed back out of the salon and he handed her the champagne as The Dog's Life lolled on the night tide.

  "You aren't having champagne?"

  "Real guys drink Grey Goose," he said. "From the glass."

  She smiled and they sat down and started to eat. She watched champagne bubbles rise in the flute glass, each one like a long buried corpse popping to the surface.

  "You like it out here?" he asked.

  "Nah."

  "Why?" •

  She stood and carried her glass to the railing. She leaned over it and swept her free left hand across the Throgs Neck as she carefully poured her champagne into the bay with her right hand, out of Dr. Sheridan's view.

  "Too beautiful a place to die," she said, her back to him, lifting her empty glass and pretending to guzzle her champagne. She turned to him and forced a belch into her fist.

  He said, "Die?"

  "You told me your parents drowned here under the Throgs Neck."

  He ate a bite of pasta, took a sip of his Grey Goose, and leaned back in his deck chair. "You have a very good memory."