Beauty Queen

place down, and the world was never the same after that."
    Mary Ellen left the church feeling a little happier than she had in days, feeling that Sam had at least made a start on finding his niche.
    But when she got home to the empty apartment, the small glow about Sam faded.
    Liv was at the post office. Mary Ellen puttered around the apartment, washed the breakfast dishes, gathered some
    laundry to go to the laundromat. She even went up to the rooftop garden and busied herself picking faded blooms off the petunia plants. She didn't have to go to work at the restaurant till six.
    Suddenly wave after wave of memories of her father assaulted her.
    She remembered his passion for playing the horses. On nice Sundays like today, they would take the bus out to Aqueduct or Belmont, and her father would sometimes parlay fifty dollars cash into several hundred by the end of the day. He said he had figured out a very original system for beating the track, and he didn't make too many bets for fear the track would find out. During the week, he sometimes went to one Off-Track Betting office, and sent Mary Ellen to another OTB office to place another bet. In their apartment, her father had stacks of computer cards sitting around. He didn't have a computer, so he did all the calculations himself. The worst thing you could do to her father was knock over his stacks of cards. Whatever the system was, it worked, and over the years her father put away a nice nest egg. He paid taxes on it scrupulously, because "it's for my little girl," he told Mary Ellen. The racetrack money had gone to pay the estate taxes on the place in Massachusetts. It was now hers, and she had not visited it since his death. For the first time, she felt the wish to go there, almost a wish to reopen the infected wound of her father's death and let it bleed healthily.
    Oh, those happy larcenous Sundays with her father at the track, sitting in the cheaper seats, yelling their horse home, celebrating with steak and eggs if they won.
    She sat on the edge of the velour bed, and sobbed as if she were still at his funeral, seeing his brother officers carry his coffin out of the church.
    The anger rose up between her teeth like a sour black
    vomit, from somewhere in her guts that she still didn't know.
    Slowly the anger was taking her over, like some raging demon with a long Hebrew name, straight out of the Bible.
    Chapter 10
    It was the Fourth of July weekend, just a month after Jeannie Colter had made her first speech against the gays. The time was a little past midnight on Saturday night—a hot sultry summer night with a threat of sudden rain in the air.
    Danny came out of Armando's apartment feeling so good that he wasn't ready to go home and go to bed yet. He didn't have to worry about being fresh for police duty anyway. For the moment, he was living off his small savings, and reading job ads in the newspapers—and he was having a good time.
    Danny Blackburn, ex-cop, had come out.
    The shock of having lost his job was starting to wear off. When he was a kid, he had been a bad boy over there in Queens—one of the bad boys of Howard Beach. He had done a lot of things that the cops had never caught him at, like smoking dope and shooting speed and taking joyrides in cars he didn't own and even a few small burglary jobs.
    But finally he had realized that all those small-time punks he knew were going nowhere. Ten years from now, they would still be hanging around in the same bars and poolrooms, or in the same parking lots, looking to cop a hit of methadone from the same tired small dealers. Danny had realized that being a cop, like the ones who chased them, was a way he could better himself.
    So he had decided grandly to be a cop, and give the police the benefit of all his knowledge of bad boys. But now the cops didn't want him. Okay, that was cool. He would find something else to do with his life. He wasn't sure exactly what, at the moment.
    Meanwhile, since his layoff, he was busy burning all his bridges behind him.
    The NYPD might offer him a corrections officer job. They might even invite him back on the force—a few laid-off officers had been reinstated in the past. But Danny was beyond caring about this. The hell with them. He was getting his first taste of total freedom.
    He had visited every bar, bath, and after-hours place in Manhattan—anywhere that the big strong men hung out. He had not gone to these places at noon, when they were half empty, but at the