Beauty Queen

While he talked, one of the cats jumped on the desk and snatched the last piece of his hamburger.
    "Okay," said the kid. "I'll walk around and see what I can find."
    He left at a half run.
    Sam looked for the last of his hamburger, saw the cat eating it, shrugged, and swigged the last of his coffee. "Heard it a million times already. The kid goes on a trip west, right? Loans his car to a friend, right? The friend runs up all kinds of traffic summonses, right? Then the car is towed, right? The kid comes home and finds his car is down here, right? He told me he just paid six hundred in fines that his friend ran up. Heard it a million times."
    Mary Ellen looked at her watch. She was supposed to meet Jewel for coffee.
    "Sam," she said, "don't you sometimes wish you were seeing a little more action?"
    The phone rang, and he started toward it. He tossed his reply back over his shoulder.
    "Hey, sweetheart, if I was back on the street catching squeals, who would look after Miss Beautiful and her kittens?"
    As she walked back out the echoing passageway, Mary Ellen felt a stinging perilously close to her eyes. She had invited Sam to their apartment for dinner a number of times, but he had always found some excuse not to go. She was sure she knew why. It was not because Sam might have anything against lesbians. Sam was probably afraid he would feel depressed on visiting the home of a happy couple who were settled down. At least, that was her theory. Sam was tight-mouthed about his feelings, so it was only a guess.
    The atmosphere of the place overwhelmed her. The rotting pier settling into the harbor bottom, the patches of blue sky glimpsed through its rusted roof. And the outcast cats who lived there, thriving on society's leavings, proud, tough and free.
    She hurried out onto the street, gasping for breath.
    The sun was setting over the Jersey Palisades. Against the rosy splendor of the cliffs, the long hulk of Pier 36 rose dark and forbidding like an abandoned cathedral. Pure and white in the last rays of the sun, the gulls flew in slow circles over its roof.
    Lighted like a small city afloat, an Italian cruise ship was making its way up the North River toward the glittering new glass ship terminal at 59th Street, where the bands still played and the baskets of fruit still sat in staterooms.
    Jewel was already waiting for her in Murphy's Coffee Shop. She waved gaily, bouncing up and down on her seat a little, as if she were beckoning from the deck of a yacht.
    "Hi," she said as Mary Ellen sat down.
    Jewel was the most irrepressible person that Mary Ellen had ever known. She managed to make her crisp uniform look as giddy as high fashion, and her body language was so quick that she made her shield glitter like diamonds. This was curious, when you learned that Jewel was a dead shot, and very serious about her police work.
    Mary Ellen had known Jewel for two years before they had both entered the Police Academy, and if she had anything like a close friend, Jewel was probably it. Jewel had a master's in psychology and some social work, and a minor in English Lit, and had been having a hard time finding a job. An only child from a broken home, she was jittery about security. "I want a career that I can count on," she had told Mary Ellen, "and I don’t want to be in the military."
    "Then be a cop," Mary Ellen had told her.
    Mary Ellen had persuaded her to enter rookie training with her. Ironically, now that the police layoffs were happening due to the economy, the police force no longer looked so secure. Jewel had toughed her way through rookie school, but she shortly had to admit to herself that street patrol was not for her. Neither did she want to wind up at some dreary desk job. Then her flair for words came to the attention of Deputy Commissioner Kent and Sergeant Haskins, who were trying to revive the old police magazine, Spring 3100. They must have felt that a lovely and literate young policewoman would be just the ornament that Haskins' little staff of six needed. At any rate, Jewel was now Haskins' right-hand person, and she brought a life and a sparkle to the magazine that it hadn't had in years. Her crisp in-depth stories about problems and personalities in the NYPD had already earned her the sobriquet "the next Dorothy Uhnak." It was said she could have made old Al Seedman smile. The beauty of this observation was that Jewel never tried to make people smile, particularly men.
    Mary Ellen often wondered why she had