Beauty Queen

the police."
    Humph, Mary Ellen thought. Probably too piss-elegant to talk to a common cop. But I know I've seen him. I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night and remember where it was.
    As Bill left, the men from the morgue were coming up the worn stairs with a stretcher. By now, two police cars and the morgue wagon were parked in front of his magnificent brick arched doorway.
    He got in his car, deeply upset, and drove on down South Street into Battery Park He was so upset that he hadn't even been able to respond to the good looks of Officer Blackburn.
    Finding a dead man in his future home was a bad omen. As a man of God, he shouldn't believe in omens. The Bible condemned all manner of sorcery as an abomination. Maybe prophecy was a better word. The Bible allowed prophecy.
    Finally he parked the car near Battery Park, and tried to calm himself by walking around the area.
    Ever since he started operating in Manhattan, he had spent whole days—years, now—of his life walking around down here. This was the original New York, the real New York, still defying the steel-and-glass coldness that was freezing other areas. With a passion he loved the few old churches that were left here, the few Dutch and Federal houses, the few little parks, the few little cemeteries. In his head he carried mental pictures of all the monuments that had been tom down—oh God, so many! Such a loss!
    If it weren't for the greed and haste that had always marked Manhattan's growth, this part of town would now rival London for the richness of its antique glories—it would be all church steeples and pillared facades and shuttered windows and tiny parks and paved streets and savory little shops and old piers, and maybe a whole fleet of tall ships standing at anchor forever like at Mystic, Connecticut. It was imperative to save the little that was left. He wanted to humanize New York, and he wanted to humanize the society that now inhabited it.
    Suddenly, as he stood in Battery Park, looking out at the harbor through the sycamore trees, he felt the painful constriction in his chest again.
    America had acknowledged all the immigrants who had come pouring up that channel, past the Statue of Liberty, through the now-decaying buildings at Ellis Island—all the immigrants but one. America had never honored the homosexual. The gay sailors who haunted the first waterfront bars, the lesbian governesses who taught the first children of the rich straights. Gays too had come over on the Mayflower, had first glimpsed New York Harbor from the decks of the Half Moon.
    That day he walked and walked, looking at all the old buildings that he had loved, but peace would not come.
    He walked down Broad Street. He admired the view of Trinity Church down the long tunnel of Wall Street, its sooty steeple dwarfed between the glass and stone monoliths around it.
    Walking was how he had gotten to know New York, and how he had gotten to know himself. Cora, and later Jeannie, had accepted his lonely walking tours as part of his business, as a fit activity for the mad genius of Laird & Laird. He always returned with his notebook full of notes and sketches, and they understood the connection between those notebooks and the money he made. Nevertheless, he had always had the creepy feeling that Cora knew he used those walks for other purposes also. And she was right. They had been his cover.
    On his walks he had been free to acquaint himself— intimately yet anonymously—with the gay world, which was so heavily established in the downtown area. On his walks, he had first browsed in gay literary magazines at the Oscar Wilde Memorial bookstore on Christopher Street. Browsing in the Mattachine Society's library on Christopher, he had found a copy of America's first gay novel, Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend, published in 1870. It was on one of his walks that he first ventured into a waterfront leather bar, and found that the bartender hesitated at first about serving him the glass of wine he'd ordered because he wasn't wearing jeans or leather. Finally the bartender said gruffly, "Well, you look butch enough for me," and served him. It was on his walks that he made his first shy, fumbling attempts at sexual overtures.
    On his walks, he passed comers where hustlers hung out, and found himself backing off from them with a feeling of outraged dignity. How can my society and my religion and my Bible force me to look to prostitution for the only emotional