Beauty Queen

now.
    She drove fast down the West Side Highway. She parked in front of Pier 36's gloomy doorway, and walked in. As she came up to the office, the usual alarm shattered the air. A strange officer came out.
    Her heart sank.
    "Miss, we close at four o'clock," he said.
    "I'm a PO," she said, pulling her shield and ID out of her pocket. "I'm a friend of Sam Rauch's. I usually bring him coffee."
    "Oh," he said. "Well, Sam's not here."
    "Is he sick?"
    "Nope," said the officer bitterly. "Laid off."
    Deeply depressed, Mary Ellen drove back home and phoned Sam's house. He was there, of course.
    "So they told you, huh?" he said.
    "Sam, how could they do this to you? You're only two years from retirement."
    "Well, I gotta say, they are retiring me at full pension. But you know what worries me? I went by there to get some personal stuff and say good-bye to the cats. And the daytime guys, they had moved the car that the kittens were in. Miss Beautiful was looking all over for them. There's a thousand cars in that dump, she'll never find them herself. They're still little, and they need her. They'll die . . .
    Mary Ellen closed her eyes. The cats were Sam's personal variety of tunnel vision.
    "Sam," she said, "there's two sisters and a brother been laid off, and I'm one of them. You understand, Sam?"
    "You mean the others are . . .
    "That's right."
    "Well," said Sam dubiously, "I'm no activist, I got my pension and everything, so why should I beef already?"
    "Sam," she said, "come over to our place. Please. It's a moment when we all need each other. And maybe I'll get your kittens for you."
    "Okay," said Sam. "I'll be over."
    When she hung up, Mary Ellen went down to the building's basement and found a stout J&B whiskey box. She and Liv cut a few little air holes in it. Then Liv stayed behind in case the others came, and Mary Ellen got into the car again, and drove back down to Pier 36.
    "I just talked to Sam," she said to the officer on duty. "I was going to adopt those kittens that are around here
    in one of the cars. Would it be okay if I took them?"
    The officer looked at her thoughtfully, and for a moment she was afraid he would say the kittens were city property.
    Finally he said, "I guess it's okay. The guys was talking about sending them to the SPCA anyway. You know which car they're in?"
    "It's a stripped black Cadillac, license plate 598GBO," Mary Ellen rapped out.
    The officer checked his ledger. "It's way down at the end, in one-thirty," he said.
    They walked down there in the dark, playing a flashlight beam along the cars. Finally the light picked out the number 130 painted crudely on the wall, and the rusty Cadillac back against the wall, behind a Volkswagen bus. Then the light played on the white kittens who were frantically jumping around inside, yelling with hunger. When Mary Ellen opened the door, the kittens scurried under the seats. It took her ten minutes to pry them out. The kittens, half-wild, made little spitting noises, like tiny firecrackers going off.
    She drove home in triumph, with the kittens yowling and scratching and scrambling frantically in the box.
    Danny arrived, held up by Armando. Then Sam came. His face lit up when he saw the box and heard the kittens screaming.
    "You're a doll and a sweetheart and a damn nice woman," he said to Mary Ellen.
    They were a curious group—three women, three men, and four screaming kittens in a box. Liv made coffee for all, and Danny sobered up a little. They turned the TV on, and the six o'clock newscaster talked soberly about the 500 cops that had been laid off, and the Policemen's Benevolent Association's objection to same.
    The cupboard yielded some powdered milk, and Sam
    mixed it up nice and thick. He said regular milk would give the kittens diarrhea. In their box, the three tough little pier kittens crowded around the dish, lapping, slurping, sneezing, blowing bubbles, till their sides bulged out.
    "Aw-right," said Sam, "what do we do with these little monsters?" He glared around at everybody. "These here kittens are not going to the SPCA."
    "We'll take one," said Liv grandly.
    "Okay, I'll take one, too," said Armando.
    "What the hell," said Jewel, "I'll take one. Isn't this hysterical? I've never owned a cat."
    The group sat around the table and talked about their situation. Danny and Mary Ellen were sure they had been fired because they were gay. "They must have known all the time," Danny said.
    Jewel and Sam were not so sure. "The rumors of layoffs were