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  “It’s a damn good thing you’re cute, girlie, cause your music sucks.” Dante laughed and I shrugged it off.

  Tommy gave me a raised eyebrow and I shrugged that off.

  At the club we were ushered into a quiet VIP area. We crowded into a booth in the back of a dark, wood-paneled lounge with a professional billiards table. The seats were blood-red leather and the bar was lined in 50’s cherry Formica. I drank Grand Marnier and made jokes. I danced around the table while Cosmo read a poem he wrote for me:

  She breathes the mystery winds

  And dances on the ceiling.

  She’s a dangerous lady spinning

  black vinyl in the void.

  Flattered, I laughed and told him it sounded a little like The Cars’ “Dangerous Girl.” I guess he didn’t like the comparison, even though in my mind it was a compliment. He left the table and went over to shoot pool with Dante and Steve.

  I sat down next to Tommy. He looked way out of place with his spikes and leather in a club filled with Member’s Only jackets and velvet track suits, but he grabbed my hand and smiled. We talked quietly for a while and ignored the rest of the club. We laughed at the black light posters of Superfly and The A Team and enjoyed a bit of fun, flirty conversation. When he got up to make a phone call I joined Dante and Cosmo to do a few more lines and shoot some pool.

  I scratched on the eight ball, much to my friend’s chagrin, and headed to the bathroom. Dante and Cosmo followed.

  After freshening my lipstick and wiping the powder off my nose, I found them both outside the bathroom door. They asked if I wanted to do another hit and motioned me to the stairway door.

  “Sure, I’m up for it.” We went into the stairway. Cosmo put the powder on his hand and I snorted it from the web between his thumb and finger.

  “Thanks.” As I turned to go back Dante put his hand on my waist and spun me around.

  “You know . . . we been giving you blow all night. I think it’s time you give something in return.”

  “Sure, man. No problem. I have some coke too. Here. I got the next line.” I reached into my purse. When I looked up Dante was eyeing my chest with an evil grin and Cosmo was shuffling back and forth, a line of spittle pooled in the corner of his mouth.

  I wasn’t thinking straight. I blurted out “What’s up guys? Is there a problem?”

  Dante stood tall and his tone changed from friendly to menacing.

  “Yeah, DJ, my problem is . . . you out of your place up here. You been acting like hot shit and above it all night long. We brought you up here and all you been doing is sliding up next to that biker guy. You need to start sliding up to the ones that brung you. So . . . baby . . . this is what we want.” He smiled and bared his yellow teeth. “Take that skirt off and show us your cunt.”

  Cosmo laughed. “Yeah Tina, let’s go baby. Dangerous girl, show us what you got”

  Before I could react Cosmo reached out and grabbed the hem of my skirt. His hand grazed my thigh and ripped into my stocking. I pulled back and slammed my silver bangles into his shoulder.

  “What the fuck? You want what?!” Shocked, I screamed “MY CUNT! Who the hell do you think you are! How FUCKING dare you!”

  Cosmo smacked my face and pushed me into the wall. I felt the blood rushing to my head. I tried to get loose and he grabbed my arm and pulled me closer into him. We were face to face and his breath was horrifying. His poetry was shit and I was a fool to have ever come uptown with him. Damn them both to hell. If I had been packing a weapon those bastards would no longer be on the planet.

  I looked Cosmo dead square in his bloodshot black eyes.

  Maybe he felt my intent because he paused and looked confused for a second.

  Using that moment of confusion to wiggle free, I ran back to the club. The room was empty except for a couple of seedy guys at the pool table arguing over a missed shot.

  Dante and Cosmo sauntered in right after me, looking like nothing happened. They sat down at a table with Steve and began whispering and gesturing.

  Disheveled and stinging, my face flaming with pain and outrage, I put my hand to my cheek. This hot new club was just a Harlem bar full of druggies at 5:30am, and I was the only female in the room.

  Coke made me talkative, active, funny, and friendly. But it sure wasn’t having the same effect on my friends.

  My paranoia rose to the surface, I watched their evil whispers and pictured the scene from Accused where Jodie Foster was raped by four guys on a pinball machine and everyone else in the room applauded.

  Tommy stood alone by the bar. I made my way over to him.

  He put his arm around me and whispered, “I think it’s time for us to leave now, yes?”

  Dante yelled, “You two best get on home now. Your girl’s up way past her bed time.”

  I leaned into Tommy as he directed me to the door and out onto the sunlit avenue filled with bodegas and beauty shops.

  I pulled my Ray Bans out of my purse and put them on with shaking hands, jarred into the early Harlem morning by the grinding of steel gates opening for business.

  MISSING DAUGHTER

  BY CHERA THOMPSON

  My daughter’s flight back to college was at seven tomorrow morning. She had to be at JFK by six, which meant she had to leave my sister’s New York City apartment by five-thirty. She was twenty, lived at school and had negotiated her way around Europe by train. Still, I worried about her standing alone in the middle of a New York City block to hail a cab before dawn, then ride by herself to JFK. I had to go with her. I set my alarm.

  “Mom, you don’t have to!”

  “It’s no problem, really.”

  “It’s crazy,” my sister said. “A round trip cab will cost you a fortune.”

  “Really?”

  “Look—just let her take my car service,” my sister said. “They’re good.”

  “Car service?”

  “‘I use them all the time.”

  “You sure?” I asked. Because this is my only daughter I’m entrusting them with.

  “Never had a problem.”

  “Well . . . I don’t know . . . ” Does she know the drivers personally? How do they screen them?

  “C’mon Mom! I’m not a baby!”

  “They’re very reliable,” my sister insisted. “Best in New York.”

  “For God’s sake, I’m twenty years old,” my daughter whined. “I was taking cabs all over Italy two years ago.”

  “With your friends, not by yourself,” I pointed out, defending my paranoia.

  “The doorman is down in the lobby twenty-four seven,” my sister said. “He’ll look out for her.”

  “Well . . . ”

  Maybe taking a cab round trip to JFK was a little over the top. My mind flashed back to my daughter’s first day of school when I followed the school bus in my car. No seat belts! My husband called me a helicopter parent . . . always hovering.

  I relented.

  “Okay,” I said. “Car service.”

  The alarm went off at four-thirty. I heard my daughter get up, then dozed off until she kissed me on the cheek. “Time to go,” she said. “I’ll wait for them downstairs.”

  “No, no—I’ll go with you.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to.”

  I hesitated. “You sure?”

  My sister yelled from her bed. “For God’s sake! The doorman’s down there!”

  And in that split second, something inside me gave in. Right there: In my nightgown, on the eleventh floor, at 5:15 a.m. In that split second I let go. Let go of being an overprotective, middle-aged mother from Ohio. In that split second I became a New Yorker.

  “Call me when you get to the airport.”

  “My cell phone’s dead. Forgot to charge the battery.”

  “Well, find a pay phone.”

  “Okay, okay.” She grabbed her suitcase, the door clicked shut and I sank back under the covers.

  Fifteen minutes later, the intercom buzzed. What did she forget? I got up, s
till groggy, found my way to the button. “What is it, hon?”

  “Car service.”

  “She’s down there,” I replied in a thanks-for-making-me-get-up, forced-hospitable sing-song.

  “No one down here.”

  “No, she’s waiting for you in the lobby. The redhead, the redheaded girl!”

  “Nobody here.”

  “The doorman,” I yelled. “Ask the doorman!”

  “I don’t see no doorman.”

  “Oh my God!” I screamed.

  My sister shuffled into the room and turned on the light.

  “No, no, no!” I shrieked, fumbling with the three locks on the door. I yanked it open and ran barefoot, in my nightgown, down the hall to the elevator.

  My heart felt like a jackhammer. I pounded the button, wailing. I waited an eternity for the elevator to arrive and it took an eternity to go down eleven flights—ten and nine and eight and seven and— . . .

  The elevator doors opened. The driver stood alone next to an empty front desk.

  “Oh God, oh God! Where is she?” I whirled around the room. “Where the hell is the doorman?”

  As if on cue, the doorman sauntered through the side door carrying an empty garbage can.

  “Did you see my daughter?” I screeched.

  “No,” he said. He put the can by the door.

  I grabbed his arm. “The redheaded girl with the suitcase?”

  He sighed. “No one’s been here.”

  “How do you know?” I squeezed his arm tighter. “Where were you?”

  He yanked his arm away. “I took out the garbage. I was only gone five minutes.”

  “No! No!” I shook my head.

  These are the five this-is-how-it-always-happens minutes. The I just went out to . . . break in routine that allows the kidnapping, the rape, the murder. The five missing minutes in the air-tight alibi, the detective crime novel, the never-again wonderful life.

  I turned and ran out into the street, screaming my daughter’s name. Garbage cans and mounds of plastic bags lined the curb. My beautiful girl could be among them, her tortured, twisted and mangled body stuffed into a plastic bag. Waiting for me to identify the slender fingers that loved to draw, the green eyes so calm and assured, the fair Irish skin.

  I staggered back inside crying and pounded my fists against the glass door of the building. “Oh, this goddamned city!” I moaned, pounding, wanting to break the glass. Wanting the shards to stab my veins so I could bleed to death and the doorman could drag me out to the curb with the rest of the garbage. Me, the lazy mother who wouldn’t ride down ten flights in an elevator and wait with my daughter for fifteen minutes even though I had guided her every move for twenty years.

  My sister, the doorman and the driver tried to calm me down. They made phone calls to sort things out. I fell in a heap, banging my head on the floor, wanting to knock myself unconscious, or better, crack my head open so I could bleed out this nightmare and they could mop it up with my nightgown, then lug me out to the curb.

  Oh, New York: The city that never gave you a break. Never gave you a five minute time-out from its horrid, vile, beating, shredding, stabbing . . .

  “Stop it!” My sister shook me with one hand, balancing her phone in the other “Stop! They found her. She’s all right. She’s on her way to JFK.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “The car service sent two cars. I never heard of that happening before, but that’s what happened. She took the car that got here first. The dispatcher called the driver and she’s in it.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, lifting my head, sniffing and wiping my eyes. “Make sure. Ask the driver if the girl has red hair.”

  “I did. It’s her.”

  The world stopped spinning. Everything rewound and fell back in place.

  I pulled myself off the floor. The doorman stared at me with pity in his eyes. Pity for my Walmart nightgown twisted around my feet, pity for my racing heart, my swirling mind.

  “I’m so sorry. So sorry,” I sobbed, hugging him.

  My tears dampened the shoulder of his navy jacket.

  “You see, I’m from Ohio! And, well . . . ”

  Ohio! Where kids run free across unfenced lawns, not road-rage traffic. Where they ride in mini vans that say baby on board, not subways splattered with pornographic gang graffiti. What could he possibly know of Ohio?

  “Please forgive me.” I looked him straight in the eye.

  “I understand,” he said. “I have two girls myself.”

  My cab pulls up to my sister’s building. I haven’t stepped foot in New York City for six years. I walk into the lobby and there he is: The same doorman! Thinner. Smaller. Older. He must have seen thousands of people since the last time we spoke.

  “Hello,” I say. “Remember me?”

  He doesn’t blink. “Missing daughter.”

  The city forgives all. It’s in the doorman’s eyes. We smile.

  A MOMENT OF WRONG THINKING

  A Matthew Scudder Story

  BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Monica said, “What kind of a gun? A man shoots himself in his living room, surrounded by his nearest and dearest, and you want to know what kind of a gun he used?”

  “I just wondered,” I said.

  Monica rolled her eyes. She’s one of Elaine’s oldest friends. They were in high school together, in Rego Park, and they never lost touch over the years. Elaine spent a lot of years as a call girl, and Monica, who was never in the life herself, seemed to have no difficulty accepting that. Elaine, for her part, had no judgment on Monica’s predilection for dating married men.

  She was with the current one that evening. The four of us had gone to a revival of Allegro, the Rogers and Hammerstein show that hadn’t been a big hit the first time around. From there we went to Paris Green for a late supper. We talked about the show and speculated on reasons for its limited success. The songs were good, we agreed, and I was old enough to remember hearing “A Fellow Needs a Girl” on the radio. Elaine said she had a Lisa Kirk LP, and one of the cuts was “The Gentleman is a Dope.” That number, she said, had stopped the show during its initial run, and launched Lisa Kirk.

  Monica said she’d love to hear it sometime. Elaine said all she had to do was find the record and then find something to play it on. Monica said she still had a turntable for LPs.

  Monica’s guy didn’t say anything, and I had the feeling he didn’t know who Lisa Kirk was, or why he had to go through all this just to get laid. His name was Doug Halley—like the comet, he’d said—and he did something on Wall Street. Whatever it was, he did well enough at it to keep his second wife and their kids in a house in Pound Ridge, in Westchester County, while he was putting the kids from his first marriage through college. He had a boy at Bowdoin, we’d learned, and a girl who’d just started at Colgate.

  We got as much conversational mileage as we could out of Lisa Kirk, and the drinks came— Perrier for me, cranberry juice for Elaine and Monica, and a Stolichnaya martini for Halley. He’d hesitated for a beat before ordering it— Monica would surely have told him I was a sober alcoholic, and even if she hadn’t he’d have noted that he was the only one drinking—and I could almost hear him think it through and decide the hell with it. I was just as glad he’d ordered the drink. He looked as though he needed it, and when it came he drank deep.

  It was about then that Monica mentioned the fellow who’d shot himself. It had happened the night before, too late to make the morning papers, and Monica had seen the coverage that afternoon on New York One. A man in Inwood, in the course of a social evening at his own home, with friends and family members present, had drawn a gun, ranted about his financial situation and everything that was wrong with the world, and then stuck the gun in his mouth and blew his brains out.

  “What kind of a gun,” Monica said again. “It’s a guy thing, isn’t it? There’s not a woman in the world who would ask that question.”

  “A woman would ask what he was wearing,” Halley
said.

  “No,” Elaine said. “Who cares what he was wearing? A woman would ask what his wife was wearing.”

  “A look of horror would be my guess,” Monica said. “Can you imagine? You’re having a nice evening with friends and your husband shoots himself in front of everybody?”

  “They didn’t show it, did they?”

  “They didn’t interview her on camera, but they did talk with some man who was there and saw the whole thing.”

  Halley said that it would have been a bigger story if they’d had the wife on camera, and we started talking about the media and how intrusive they’d become. And we stayed with that until they brought us our food.

  When we got home Elaine said, “The man who shot himself. When you asked if they showed it, you didn’t mean an interview with the wife. You wanted to know if they showed him doing it.”

  “These days,” I said, “somebody’s almost always got a camcorder running. But I didn’t really think anybody had the act on tape.”

  “Because it would have been a bigger story.”

  “That’s right. The play a story gets depends on what they’ve got to show you. It would have been a little bigger than it was if they’d managed to interview the wife, but it would have been everybody’s lead story all day long if they could have actually shown him doing it.”

  “Still, you asked.”

  “Idly,” I said. “Making conversation.”

  “Yeah, right. And you want to know what kind of gun he used. Just being a guy, and talking guy talk. Because you liked Doug so much, and wanted to bond with him.”

  “Oh, I was crazy about him. Where does she find them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I think she’s got radar. If there’s a jerk out there, and if he’s married, she homes in on him. What did you care what kind of gun it was?”

  “What I was wondering,” I said, “was whether it was a revolver or an automatic.”

  She thought about it. “And if they showed him doing it, you could look at the film and know what kind of a gun it was.”

  “Anybody could.”