Beauty Queen

of cat chow. He went outside and poured the chow into several hubcaps that were sitting around on the greasy ground. At the sound of chow tinkling against metal, cats erupted from among the cars. In a minute, each hubcap had a dozen animals crouched around it, growling, intent, crunching chow in their teeth.
    Sam stood watching them for a minute. He pointed at the bobtail cat. "The end of Mr. Ugly's tail finally dropped off. It was all dead."
    Only when he was sure his cats were all eating well did he come back and rummage appreciatively in the sack for his hamburger. His mind was still on the couple who had just left.
    "They never," he said, "have any idea that you've heard all the stories before. They always think it's worth a try."
    Suddenly he said, "Hey, I found Miss Beautiful's kittens. Wanna see them?"
    "Sure," she said.
    He put down the wrapped hamburger without opening it, reached for his flashlight, and they left the office.
    Together they walked down one of the aisles between rows of cars. Pinshafts of sunlight shone through the rusting metal roof high above, which looked like it had been riddled by machine-gun fire. Along the walls, water reflections sometimes played through holes in the walls. The cars lay lined up like bodies in a mass grave, tilted by flat tires, their batteries dead. They bore license plates from New York State, Tennessee, Arizona, Massachusetts, Oregon, Connecticut, everywhere. They had been abandoned by owners on long vacations, owners who were in legal trouble, owners who owed thousands in traffic fines, owners who had amnesia, owners who had died. The dirt floor reeked of oil.
    Halfway down one of the center rows, Sam bent and shone the flashlight into the front seat of a 1973 black Cadillac with wheels and motor gone, that must have been abandoned on a parkway. One of the vent windows was open.
    Curled in somebody's tweed coat on the front seat was a longhaired gray cat with white paws. Her three little kittens lay in a neat row, their heads pillowed against her belly, their round eyes gazing solemnly out at Sam and Mary Ellen. They were white with gray spots. It was a shock to see such clean creatures in this filthy place.
    "Aren't they bee-yoo-ti-ful?" said Sam. "They must be about ten days old. Eyes just opened. Pretty soon they'll be out hunting rats like the rest."
    "What are you going to do with them?" Mary Ellen asked.
    "Dunno," said Sam, his brow furrowing with worry. "The other guys are talking about taking them to the SPCA. I'd take 'em home with me, but I've got three cats already and my landlady would scream bloody murder."
    The mother cat made no move to come to the open car window and be petted—Mary Ellen knew she was as wild as all the other pier cats. But there was trust in her eyes, and in the eyes of her kittens, as they all gazed out at Sam Rauch, their protector.
    As she and Sam walked back to the office, she thought about Sam.
    The tow-truck men and the other cops who worked shifts here made a little fun of him behind his back. They called him the Cat Man because he had adopted the Pier 36 cats. But they never failed to bring him coffee and hamburgers, and they never failed to bring food for the cats. Bags of chow, leftover steak, even Kentucky Fried Chicken arrived regularly at the pier. Those cats lived like kings. If they got sick and Sam could catch them, he took them to the Animal Medical Center. Sam had been very upset when his favorite, a black battle-scarred tom named The Panther, was seen with a huge swollen leg after a fight. Sam tried to catch The Panther, but couldn't. The Panther disappeared—probably crawled off in a hole somewhere and died of septicemia. But by and large, the cats were healthy, and when Sam talked about the size of the rats they caught, he spread his hands like a fly fisherman describing a record-breaking trout.
    Mary Ellen didn't know much about Sam—he was close-mouthed about his life. But she could read between the lines. He was close to retirement age, a widower who had lost his wife to uterine cancer ten years ago, and now lived alone in a little railroad-style second-floor apartment on East Eleventh Street. He was Jewish, but not (as he admitted to Mary Ellen) a very "Jewy Jew." He didn't smoke, drink or gamble. Neither did he go to temple. He read every page of the police magazine, Spring 3100. He had worked in many different divisions, knew the city like the back of his hand, and loved to tell stories about the good