Beauty Queen

was the short-barreled .32 automatic that she was required to carry off duty, in case some emergency might require her to act as a police officer. But, devoted as Mary Ellen was to her job, she liked to draw a fine clean line between her on-duty self and her off-duty self. Here in the West Village, far from the boundaries of her East Side precinct, she could be herself.
    Mary Ellen had always worried a lot about running into police officers from her precinct while she had her arm around Liv. Only three of her colleagues knew she was a lesbian. One of them was her partner, PO Danny Blackburn, who was gay himself. She knew about PO Blackburn because she had run into him at a Metropolitan Community Church coffee hour. Their first reaction to each other was deep suspicion—each thought the other could be a "shoofly," or police internal-security agent. Then after a little spirited kidding around during which they threatened to bust each other on moral charges, there was a tacit agreement to keep each other's secret. Danny became her partner on patrol. With time, Mary Ellen grew to feel a deep bond with Danny. He was like a kid brother and she had never had a brother. He was among the very few men that she and Liv knew well and trusted, and invited to their home for socializing.
    Now Mary Ellen and Liv strolled west on Christopher Street, looking into the windows of shops, admiring a book cover here, a leather vest there.
    Then, in front of a small antique shop, Liv stopped and gave a little cry of delight. Sitting amid dusty Wedgwood plates and small junky andirons was a small primitive oil painting of a cat, unframed. The cat was a dignified solemn tabby, with round yellow eyes like an owl's, sitting up very straight. Liv liked to collect antique cat things, though her $183 a week made it hard to afford anything made before 1930.
    "You like that, huh?" said Mary Ellen.
    "I loooove it," said Liv. She had a way of saying loooove that always tore at Mary Ellen's heart. "It is Kikan, no?"
    "Sure looks like Kikan."
    "It knew I would be walking by," said Liv. "It was in another store, and it flew here so I would see it."
    They went into the shop. A few minutes later, they came out again. The painting was circa 1800, and the shop owner wanted $750 for it. Liv had a small tear in her eye, and she looked at the painting again before they walked on.
    Mary Ellen hugged Liv against her side, trying to comfort
    her.
    "Someday we'll be filthy rich," she said, "and I'll buy it for you. Because at the price that perpetrator is asking, it's still gonna be there ten years from now."
    She hoped that no shoofly had seen her hug Liv. But life wasn't worth living if you had to be that scared.
    At the station house, she had cultivated the image of a super-cool young woman who gave her all to her job and didn't entertain at home. The straight officers had never visited her apartment, and they knew only that she lived with another working girl—a thing so common in New York that it didn't arouse suspicion in itself. On top of that, she and Danny let them think that they were dating each other.
    Often the two of them were convulsed with laughter when the men in the locker room and the women at desk jobs hinted fondly that they were waiting for wedding bells to ring for PO Frampton and PO Blackburn.
    Chapter 2
    Her scarf snapping smartly in the wind, Jeannie drove north on Route 684, at seventy-five miles an hour. Her left elbow stuck tensely out the open window of her white Lincoln Continental, and she drove skillfully with her right hand. A love of driving fast was one of the things she shared with her father, and she often eschewed chauffeurs to indulge in it.
    It was possibly just a little un-Christian to drive so fast. On her way out of the city, Jeannie had weaved and shot her way along the East River Drive, then the Major Deegan Expressway, like a salmon fighting its way upstream. But she always drove fast. She was always in a hurry—had been in a hurry all her life, gulping down her food as a child, rushing off to church, to school, to her marriage, to beauty contests and acting school. She couldn't help it. "I was born going seventy miles an hour," she liked to say, referring to the fact that her mother had delivered her in exactly three minutes. "And," she'd add, "I'll get a speeding ticket on the way to Heaven."
    Now she was safely out of that city that sometimes terrified her with its sinfulness and violence. Out here, as the car