Beauty Queen

for you, Jeannie." Police believe that the note refers to Jeannie Colter and her campaign against the homosexual-rights bill recently voted down by the city council.
    Numbly, she threw the newspaper into the next city trash
    can.
    As she walked on down the street, toward her waitress job, her mind played a strange trick on her.
    It seemed like she was back in the precinct station house, still a cop, and she was seeing and hearing the reactions of the police officers all around her.
    She had to read the report that one of her own squad members had made—they had been given the radio run for the "unconscious person" on 21st street. At roll call, she was not given a "wanted" to read regarding Danny's assailants, as there had been no witnesses. The only thing the police had to go on was the scribbled note.
    The atmosphere was strange. Had Danny not been found near a gay bar, with the telltale leather cap beside him, the station house would have been seething with the usual rage when a cop—even a laid-off cop—is killed. As it was, everybody was talking about it—but no one was showing emotion, either out of fear of showing sympathy or out of lack of sympathy altogether.
    "Just goes to show you," one PO said in Mary Ellen's hearing, "those queers can fool anybody. Look at Danny, the most masculine kind of guy you could imagine, and he turns out a crud, a real skell . .
    Mary Ellen's need to keep quiet almost choked her. She still had her own cover to think about, her own job to protect.
    She wondered how many other closet gays on the force were feeling as she was.
    Finally she was out on the street with a new partner, driving west on the first blocks of her patrol.
    Suddenly the emotion burst the iron bands that had wrapped around it. She sat at a stoplight, her chest heaving spasmodically and violently under her uniform jacket, her mouth open, her eyes blurred. A thread of saliva was dripping from her chin. She didn't care whether her new partner saw her cry or not.
    She was dimly aware that she was crying all over again for her father.
    And then she was dimly aware that she was not sitting in her squad car at all. She was walking down the street to her waitress job. She was crying openly on the street, where everybody could see, just like one of those typical New York psychopaths who talk to themselves on the street.
    That was when she realized that they weren't psychopaths at all. They were just human beings whose last protective layer had been peeled off bloodily, and who were transmitting the noise of grief that could not be shut off.
    Bill sat glumly on a heap of old tires in the large immaculate downtown garage where Marion always serviced his car.
    No more Formula One racing cars for Marion. He didn't even test-drive cars for Rolls. And his personal car was a rather sedate sports model, a new one, manufactured by the company he worked for. The Rolls 100 was up on the lift, waxed and polished to a fault, and Marion, wearing a crisp blue grease-monkey suit with only a couple of smudges on it, was doing a wheel-balancing job. The whole garage was brightly lighted, scattered with assorted foreign cars in varying stages of repair and so clean that you could have done open-heart surgery there.
    Bill had just finished telling Marion about the death of the police officer, Blackburn. He had arrived at the garage just before noon, and he and Marion had adjourned to the comer beef 'n' burger joint for some lunch.
    There, in a comer booth, over hamburgers deluxe and fries, while the waitresses clattered all around them, Bill had talked compulsively, and Marion had listened without saying a word.
    "Maybe if I'd come out, years ago, I could have educated her about all this, when her mind was more pliable. Maybe even if I'd come out to her when she started doing all this campaigning I could have put a stop to this whole thing. Maybe if I hadn't given her that money ... maybe that kid would be alive today . . .
    "Maybe," said Marion. He seemed curiously unsympathetic.
    "I suppose," Marion added, "that you feel guilty enough to go to the funeral."
    "That's the sad thing," said Bill. "It was in the papers this morning that his parents aren't even going to claim the body. It's still at the morgue."
    Marion stopped eating, and leaned his forehead into one hand, and closed his eyes. His lips seemed to form the word "God."
    "In other words, his parents aren't too pleased," added Bill. "Apparently they never had an inkling. They're