Queens Noir (6 page)

"What school?"

"You never heard of it."

When he asked what she did for a living, she said, "IT"

"Aha, the IT Girl. Information technology for whom?"

"Freelance," she said, eating an arugula salad. "I work for
online database companies that locate people."

"Like old sweethearts and schoolmates?"

"Yeah, and for estate lawyers looking for beneficiaries,
private investigators looking for abducted kids and dead-beat parents, orphans who want to find their birth parents, bail
bondsmen searching for bail jumpers, people who need criminal background checks on potential spouses or prospective
employees."

"Cool. How'd you get into that line of work?"

"Doing my family tree."

"Fascinating."

"Can be."

"How do people find you?" he asked.

"I find them. I choose my own hours. But I'm gonna
launch a website soon."

"Awesome! Need any investors?"

"Nope."

The more he probed, and the more evasive she got, the
more intrigued he became. Everyone loves an enigma, she
thought.

"So what brought you to Bayside?"

"Enough about me," she replied, then asked about his
family.

He poked at his branzini filet with lemon, garlic, and capers. "I'm an only child," he said. "Lost both my parents when
I was seventeen. Drowned in a boating accident." He pointed
out the window at the bay, where the lights of the 1800-footlong bridge reflected in the night waters. "Right there, under
the Throgs Neck."

ry.
"Sor "

"It was a long time ago."

"Some things hurt forever."

He nodded.

After she declined coffee and dessert, he invited her for
a nightcap at his house, where she could see his menagerie of
exotic animals.

"Nah."

He seemed surprised. He asked if she'd like to join him for
a midnight cruise through New York Harbor.

"Nah."

"Cold Heinekens on board. Or Roederer Cristal champagne."

"Cristal's tempting but I never put myself in a hump-or-jump
situation on first dates."

He laughed. "Then how about on a second date?"

"Maybe."

"How will I know?"

"I still have your card."

Dr. Sheridan paid the bill in cash, like a man who didn't
want to leave a trail. Like a body-shaved man who wipes away
fingerprints with Windex.

They left Caffe on the Green and walked across the
sprawling lawn toward the parking lot, passing the duck pond
that reflected the moon shining through the hundred-year-old
willows. An ornate marble fountain burbled, and a thousand
tiny white lights dotted the shrubbery like immortal fireflies.
A frail breeze sighed off Little Neck Bay and Nikki imagined
Rudy Valentino putting the make on some hot flapper here
long before the Throgs Neck was even imagined.

Dr. Sheridan offered to drive Nikki home, but she declined. In the well-lit parking lot she thanked him for dinner
and said, "Goodnight, doc," then shook his hand. His palm
was damp. He leaned in to kiss her and she backed away, sliding her hand from his, and before the valet could retrieve Dr.
Sheridan's Mercedes 450, she clacked her high heels off into
the night, looping home through the dark drowsy side streets
of eastern Queens.

Nikki watched Dr. Sheridan through the telescope for the
next two weeks. She watched him jog along the Cross Island
Parkway each day, ogling the female joggers, chatting them
up, handing them business cards. He took a young woman on
a boat ride just before sunset one evening. When he dropped
her off at a small weed-shrouded fishing dock halfway between
the Bayside Marina and Fort Totten after dark, Nikki saw her
stumble up the jogging path to her car in one of Dr. Sheridan's
two parking spots. She collapsed into the driver's seat and appeared to fall fast asleep.

An hour later, Nikki jogged up to the car, stopped, knocked
on the window, and asked if everything was okay. "S'all right,"
the glassy-eyed girl slurred. She asked the time while stifling
a yawn. Nikki told her it was almost 10 p.m. The girl was astonished. She sat up, shook her head like a wet hound, and
started her car. "My fuckin' husband'll kill me," she said. Nikki
asked if anything bad had happened to her on the boat. The
girl blinked several times and said, "Boat?"

"Were you sexually compromised, hon?"

"Fuckin' lesbo freak," the girl shot back, powering up the
window and squealing off onto the Cross Island.

At night during this period, Nikki sat in her Jeep Cherokee
staking out Dr. Sheridan as he cruised the local bar scene on a
mobbed Bell Boulevard. There were a dozen bars in this fourblock strip that brought young people from all over Queens
and Nassau County by car or the Long Island Rail Road.
She watched Dr. Sheridan, big fish in a small, well-stocked
pond, sample Uncle Jack's, Bourbon Street, Sullivan's, KC's
Saloon, Dempsey's, Donovan's, Monahan's, Fitzgerald's, No
No's, and The First Edition. On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Dr. Sheridan left with different young women each
night. He spent the night aboard The Dog's Life with each one, anchored under the Throgs Neck Bridge. No one's that
lucky, she thought.

On a Friday morning in the second week of June, Nikki
received the results from Dr. Sheridan's swizzle straw from the
DNA lab. All that she'd suspected was now scientific fact.
The DNA on the drinking straw confirmed everything that
the woman named Eileen Lavin had contended long ago to
her family, friends, church, and the authorities-and in her
diaries.

Dressed in her jogging gear, Nikki sat down in front of her
telescope with Eileen Lavin's diaries and went over everything
again. Lavin had told police that she went aboard a boat with
a guy named George Sheridan who said he had some golden
Labrador retriever puppies from which she might choose a
mascot for the orphan kids she was working with as a novice
in the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Eileen had finished three
years at St. John's University, lived in a convent in the Bronx
for eighteen months, and had taken all the temporary vows of
poverty, obedience, and chastity. She had met George Sheridan when he attended a St. John's swim team meet against
rival Wagner College. That night, beautiful Eileen Lavin, who
was on a full athletic scholarship, led the Johnnies to a major
victory over the Seahawks. A series of photographs in the St.
John's Torch student newspaper showed young Lavin in a team
bathing suit. She was gonna be a nun, thought Nikki. But she
had a bubble butt.

George Sheridan was a St. John's senior majoring in veterinary medicine. Eileen Lavin was studying social work,
working toward her BA. She was also preparing for her final vows of sisterhood. Sheridan ate lunch with her at school
several times. He cheered at her meets. Then one afternoon
after school, Sheridan invited her aboard his boat. He said he would gladly take some of the poor inner-city orphan kids she
was working with out for a day of fishing and sightseeing. He
also told her about some pedigree puppies he had at home and
said that he'd like to donate one to the orphanage. Late that
afternoon, Eileen went out on the boat with Sheridan. Her
diary said that he was a perfect gentleman at first and took
her for a cruise around New York Harbor. On the way back
to his home in Douglaston, he dropped anchor under the
Throgs Neck Bridge. As the sun went down over Queens, he
asked Eileen to pray with him for his parents who'd drowned
in those very waters. Then he served popcorn and gave her a
glass of lemonade before they were to head back to his home
in Douglaston and select a puppy. The last thing she remembered were the lights of the Throgs Neck playing on the night
waters of Little Neck Bay.

Then, according to her diary, total blackout. When she
awoke in the predawn, she was sitting on a bus stop bench
down the road from her Novitiate House. She was groggy and
very sore between her legs.

Years later, after an exhaustive Internet search, Nikki had
found the old police report and Eileen Lavin's Family Court
records. She had tracked down Eileen s father, a broken old
man who still lived in Bayside. She told him who she was, and
he had let her read his daughter's diaries. Eileen s mother had
since died, never really recovering from the scandal, shame,
and sorrow her daughter had brought upon the family with the
out-of-wedlock pregnancy, expulsion from the convent, withdrawal from St. John's, and then her suicide.

The diary entry recounting Nikki's boat trip with George
Sheridan said that she had bled most of the next day. She
didn't want to believe that she had been drugged and raped by
the kindly schoolmate. She had no memory of any such mon strous thing happening and she had woken up fully clothed.
She was not beaten or bruised. She had no memory of seeing
any puppies. She called Sheridan, but he didn't return her
calls. She had no proof that she had ever been with him, in his
car, his house, or on his boat. Never mind his bed.

Afraid she would be punished, or asked to leave the Novitiate, she kept her dark fears of having been raped to herself.
She did not go to a hospital or to the police right away. Instead,
she prayed. She did a Novena and the Stations of the Cross.
She lit votive candles. She worked with orphan children who
had more problems that she could ever know. She went to
confession in Manhattan where no one would recognize her.
She kept a diary for her and God's eyes only.

The diaries revealed that after the night on Sheridan's
boat, Eileen missed a menstrual cycle. Then a second. After
three and a half months without a period, she confided in
her Mother Superior that she feared she was pregnant. That
she'd been raped. The stern, skeptical, no-nonsense head sister who'd seen many a young novice surrender over the years
to the weakness of the flesh before taking final vows asked
why Eileen hadn't told anyone till then. Eileen said she'd been
afraid.

"You were afraid of going to hell," Mother Superior said.

"I wasn't sure I was raped. Or even pregnant. Until now."

"The alternative being that you are the second coming of
the Blessed Virgin?"

"I was afraid! Afraid of you. Afraid of the shame to my
parents. Afraid of God."

"And so now, three months later, you blame a young man,
a good Catholic boy from St. John's studying to be a veterinarian? You aren't even sure he ever laid a hand on you. You have
no memory of any such thing. No evidence. Yet you accuse him and bring shame on him, upon a great Catholic university,
to make up for your own weakness? Your own mortal sin?"

"You have it all wrong. I was a virgin when I stepped on
his boat!"

"You've violated your vows," Mother Superior said.
"You've committed the sin of fornication. You are bringing
a child out of wedlock into the world. Stop pointing fingers
at others. Go home and point the finger at the dirty girl in
the mirror."

When she was four months pregnant, Eileen Lavin was
told she could not take her vows of sisterhood. She had not
kept her temporary vow of chastity. She'd sinned, covered up
that sin, compounded the sin by lying about the original sin,
and now she was carrying a bastard child. "There is no room
for untruthful, unwed mothers in the sisterhood," Mother Superior said.

The diaries revealed that when Eileen finally contacted
the police, they asked why she'd waited four months to report
a rape. They asked why she hadn't gone to a hospital. Why
she hadn't contacted police right away. They asked why any
woman would give birth to a rapist's baby. She explained that
she was a devout Catholic, and could never abort any baby.
The skeptical detectives from the 111th Precinct made a cursory call on Sheridan. He denied ever having Eileen Lavin
aboard his boat or in his house. He invited them to dust for
fingerprints. He said the woman was delusional. That her
nickname was Sister Psycho.

The cops believed Sheridan. They apologized for bothering him. "We cannot indict a man on the word of a defrocked
nun with no memory of the alleged crime," said the Queens
District Attorney's office who investigated the case in 1982.
"There's no proof the baby is Sheridan's. A blood test could only eliminate him, not identify him." There was no definitive
DNA test in 1982.

Eileen's devout, old-world, immigrant Irish Catholic parents ostracized her. They had been shamed by a whispering
campaign in their Bayside parish where they had previously
bragged about their pious daughter going into the convent.
Eileen had become just another unwed, knocked-up college
slut. Gossip swirled. Neighbors snickered. Friends didn't return her calls. Because of the pregnancy, she lost her swimming scholarship. She was forced to drop out of her last year
of St. John's and had the baby shortly after she turned twenty.
Her mother refused to have anything to do with the child. Or
Eileen. After the baptism, Eileen reluctantly gave the baby up
for adoption.