Beauty Queen

into something passionately tender and adult. Bending over her, Mary Ellen was the "artist." With one finger, she gently traced the outline of Liv's face, then her eyebrows, eyes, nose, Ups. Everywhere that she "drew," she left a kiss.
    Next, shifting down along Liv's body a little, she "drew" Liv's neck and shoulders, and finally traced her finger tenderly along Liv's arms and each of her fingers.
    Liv fondled Mary Ellen's head as she kept tracing and kissing.
    "Oh, draw me, looove," she said.
    "Draw me more."
    "Draw me, draw me."
    Afterward, Mary Ellen lay listening to the sound of deep gentle breathing as Liv drifted off to sleep, but she was too keyed-up to sleep.
    It would have been nice to describe the day's work to her father. She didn't give Liv all the details, as she never wanted to worry her. But her father would have smiled in appreciation, maybe even laughed at her imitation of the fugitive falling on his ass.
    Her father, Ed Frampton, had been the quintessential New York cop. An honest cop, too—never on the take, as far as she knew. More important, her father had raised her after her mother died, when she was ten. She had grown up at horse races and poker games and gun-club rifle ranges, surrounded by cops, sitting on her father's lap, listening to the men talk about hunting and fishing and guns and perpetrators.
    He taught her to shoot early—gun games at carnivals, clay pigeons, targets, you name it. He gave her a .22 rifle, later a Winchester .3030, and taught her the care and respect that goes with responsible gun ownership. Her father was a peaceful man, and in all his years as a cop, he had never killed a man. He was very proud of that. On summer days off, they would drive up to his little cabin on a wild ten acres in southwestern Massachusetts, and have fun shooting the Kentucky rifle and a few other fine old guns he'd pinched pennies to collect. The guns were still up there at the cabin, which was hers now. Her father had planned carefully—a neat will, money in the bank for estate tax payment. He was always saying that you never knew when lightning would strike. And strike it did, just one month before mandatory retirement, when she was a senior at NYU. A fleeing suspect, a junkie with a record, shot him dead on the sidewalk at 125th Street and Amsterdam.
    Laying in bed, Mary Ellen could feel the tears rising in her throat, and she swallowed them back.
    Ed Frampton's funeral had been one of the best-attended police funerals in recent years, and she had felt the weight of the officers' sympathy—they remembered her as the little curly-headed girl who had sat on his lap and cut the cards, and now they saw her as the motherless, fatherless daughter
    left to bury that flag-draped coffin and face the world, alone.
    She struggled through her senior year because she knew he would have wanted it. By then there was talk of sexual integration in the NYPD (Washington, D.C. and some other American cities already had women officers on street patrol). She applied to the Police Academy and was accepted. She was the first woman sergeant in Manhattan. One reason she had advanced, she was sure, was that she was Ed Frampton's daughter. Captain Bader had known her father pretty well.
    Her father had never known she was a lesbian. All that came after the junkie's bullet. But she was sure she could have told him, and she was sure he would have been finally able to accept it. His philosophy had always been: my daughter right or wrong. He had never pushed dating and marriage at her. The only thing he had pushed at her were education and a career—"neither of which your poor mother ever got," he'd add.
    Suddenly Mary Ellen became aware that Liv was lying with open eyes, looking at her.
    "Your thoughts are so noisy," said Liv, "that they woke me up."
    "Loud as sirens, huh?" Mary Ellen turned over and embraced her under the quilt.
    Chapter 7
    The next morning, Jeannie was not too surprised when she got a visit from the police commissioner of New York City.
    Benny Manuella, commissioner since 1976, was not a stranger to her. She had gotten to know him during her anti-pomo and anti-massage-parlor crusades. She knew that he had come up through the ranks. Above all, he was very protective of what he regarded as his underpaid, overworked police force. Up till now, Manuella had always been very cooperative with her reform efforts.
    That morning, however, he was visibly disturbed at the statements she'd made at the press