Manhattan Is My Beat

her hands and spread it back between the domes of rye.
    “Okay,” he said dubiously. “Well. That’s interesting.”
    But when she handed him the sandwich he ate enthusiastically. For a skinny boy he had quite an appetite. He looked
so
French. He really
had
to be François.
    “So,” he asked, “you going with anybody?”
    “Not at the moment.”
    Or for any moments in the last four months three weeks.
    “Half my friends are getting married,” he said. He went through his beer-can ritual again, his long fingers beating out a hesitant rhythm on the top of the can, then opening it and pouring the beer while he held the glass at an angle.
    “Marriage, hmm,” she said noncommittally.
    Where was all
this
headed?
    But he was on to a new subject. “So what’re your goals?”
    She took a big bite of rye bread. “To eat dinner, I guess.”
    “I mean your life goals.”
    Rune blinked and looked away from him. She believed she’d never asked herself that question. “I don’t know. Eat dinner.” She laughed. “Eat breakfast. Dance. Work. Hang out … Have adventures!”
    He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. “You taste like Hunan mayonnaise. Let’s make love.” His arms encircled her.
    “No.” Rune drained her second beer.
    “You sure?”
    No …
    Yes …
    She felt herself pulled forward, toward him, and she wasn’t sure whether he was actually pulling her or she was moving by herself. Like a Ouija board pointer. He rolled on top of her. They kissed for five minutes. Growing aroused, that warm water sensation flowing up her calves into her thighs.
    No … yes … no.
    But she was saved from the debate by a voice shouting, “Home!” A woman’s head appeared up the stairway. “Zip it up!”
    A woman in her late twenties, wearing a black minidress and red stockings, climbed up the stairs. High heels. Her hair was cut short in a 1950s style and teased up. The hair was black and purple.
    So the roomie’s date hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped.
    Rune muttered, “Sandra, Richard, Richard, Sandra.”
    Sandra examined him. She said nothing to him but to Rune: “You did okay.” Then turned toward her half of the room, unzipping her dress as she walked, revealing a thick white strap of bra.
    Rune whispered. “She’s a jewelry designer. Or that’s what she wants to do. Days, she’s a paralegal. But her hobby is collecting men. She’s slept with fifty-eight of them so far. She has the score written down. Of course she’s only come twenty-two times so there’s some debate on what she can count. There’s no
Robert’s Rules of Order
for this sort of thing.”
    “I suppose not.”
    Richard’s eyes followed a vague reflection of Sandra in the window. She was on the far side of the cloud wall, stripping slowly. She knew she was being watched. The bra came off last.
    Rune laughed and took his chin in her hand. Kissed him. “Darling, don’t even think about it. That woman is a time bomb. You get into bed with her, it’s like a group grope with a hundred people you don’t know where they’ve been. Christ …” Rune’s voice grew soft. “I worry about her. I don’t like her but she’s on some kind of weird suicide thing, you ask me. A guy looks at her, and bang, it’s in the sack.”
    Richard said, “There’re ways to be safe….”
    Rune shook her head. “I knew a guy, a friend used to work at one of the restaurants I tended bar at. I watched his boyfriend get sick and die. Then I saw my friend get sick and die. I was at the hospital. I saw the tubes, the monitors, the needles. The color of his skin. Everything. I saw his eyes. I was there when he died.”
    An image of Robert Kelly’s face came back to her, sitting in the chair in his apartment.
    An image of her father’s face …
    Richard was silent and Rune knew she’d committed
the
New York City crime: being too emotional. She cleaned up the remnants of dinner, kissed Richard’s ear, and said, “Let’s watch a movie.”
    “A movie? Why?”
    “Because I have to catch a killer.”

CHAPTER TEN
     
    She’d already seen
Manhattan Is My Beat
once but watching it this time was different.
    Not because she was on a quote date unquote with Richard, not because they were lying side by side in the loft, with hazy stars visible overhead through the peaks of glass.
    But because when she’d watched it before, it had just been a movie that a nice, quirky old man had rented. Now it was the rabbit hole—a doorway to an