“I can’t believe you don’t know,” she said. “I thought everybody knew about Stewart’s.”
“Well,
I don’t!” I shrieked. My patience wasn’t wearing thin anymore. It was officially worn-out.
“Shhhh! Keep your voice down. You’re making a scene.”
“You’re making me make a scene! And if you don’t tell me everything you know about this place right now, I’m going to jump on the table and hoot like a monkey!”
“Do monkeys hoot? I always thought of them as screechers, not-”
“Abby!!”
“Okay, okay!” she finally relented, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a whisper. “Here’s the dirt, Bert: Stew-art’s Cafeteria is known in these parts as Queer Central Station. You dig my meaning? It’s where all the fairies meet and greet. See the fellow sitting at that table over there, staring out the window? He’s probably a queer looking for company. And see the sidewalk right outside this row of windows? They call it the chicken run. That’s where all the chickens strut up and down and back and forth, flouncing their feathers and flexing their muscles, angling for potential… um… boyfriends. Or, in some cases, modeling jobs.”
“Chickens?”
“Yeah,”Abby said, smiling. “You never heard that term before? It’s what the older homosexuals call the younger, more attractive ones. The chickens are the handsomest, most well-built, most sexy guys of all. A lot of them live in the Village and a whole flock of them live right here on Christopher Street. They’re always prancing by these windows on their way to and from one place or another.
“On normal days,” she went on, “there’s a constant parade out there. And all these chairs and tables here, right inside the windows? They’re like the bleachers. On normal days they’re packed with enthusiastic… uh… spectators.”
“What do you mean by normal days?”
“I mean days when it isn’t over a hundred goddamn degrees in the shade. And when it’s not the Fourth of July weekend. The bleachers and the runway are deserted today because every homo who has two nickels to rub together is out on Fire Island. And all the others are tucked away at home, sitting naked in front of the fan and soaking their feet in ice water.”
Or being grilled about a murder by a hotheaded homicide detective, I brooded, thinking of Willy.
Abby started chowing down again. “So, what’s your excuse?” she asked between mouthfuls. “Why did you want to come here? You certainly aren’t in the market for a homosexual lover. Or a male model. And don’t give me that crap about how it looked like a nice place to eat, either. Because it doesn’t. And it isn’t. The food stinks to high heaven,” she said, forking a huge pile of gray string beans into her mouth.
I nibbled on my roll and took a sip of iced tea. “It was something Willy said,” I told her. “He mentioned that Gray had been bussing tables here. I thought I’d check the place out and see if that was true.”
“It was true all right.
I could have told you that. Jeez, Paige, why didn’t you just ask me? I would have given you the dope, and then we wouldn’t have had to come here to eat!” She took another bite of meatloaf and chomped it eagerly.
“So you knew that Gray worked here?”
“Of course I did. This is where I met him. I was about to start working on a new illustration, and I needed a new model, so I came here to check out the chicken run. But then I saw Gray clearing the tables, and I really dug the way he looked, so I skipped the whole sidewalk show and asked him to pose for me. I had just landed a cover assignment from
Real Men magazine.”
“So what did he say? Did he accept?”
“In a flash.”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, a couple of years ago. Right after Gray moved from Brooklyn to the Village. Both of his parents were killed in a car accident, so he packed up his meager belongings and moved to the city to start a new life-to pursue the acting career his parents had never approved of. He was working as a busboy just to pay the rent while he took acting lessons and went on auditions. When I offered him ten dollars to pose for me, he pounced on it like a hungry tomcat.”
“Ten dollars an hour? Wasn’t that a little high for somebody with no modeling experience?”
“Well, yeah, but Gray was so gorgeous he was worth it.” Her eyes lit up and her lips curled into a sinful smile. “He was worth it in other ways, too.”
Oh, brother, I groaned to myself. Doesn’t her libido ever take a nap?
“Other ways?” I said, widening my eyes in imitation innocence. “What other ways do you mean?” Though I knew all-too-well what Abby was hinting at, I wanted to make her say it. That way, she couldn’t get mad and accuse me of making snide remarks about her sex life.
“Oh, shut up, Paige!” she snapped. “You know exactly what I mean. And your cute little Shirley Temple act is getting on my nerves.”
Curses, foiled again.
“I slept with Gray once or twice,” she went on, “and that’s all there was to it. He was a good lay and a great model. We didn’t stay lovers for long, but we did remain friends. He kept on modeling for me, too.”
“So, Gray wasn’t a homosexual?”
“No way, Doris Day!”
“But he worked here at Stewart’s,” I said, wondering about the coincidence. “And he lived on Christopher Street, too.”
“So what? Not every man who works and lives here is gay. Just some of them are. And you can take it from me, babe, Gray didn’t belong to the club.”
“Then why was your affair with him so brief?” I asked. “Did you dump him for somebody else?” (This wasn’t an impertinent question, I swear. It was fair and perfectly reasonable. Abby was so beautiful and voluptuous and smart, no man ever willingly broke up with her. Whenever there was dumping to be done, she had to be the one to do it.)
“Nobody dumped anybody,” Abby insisted. “Gray simply decided to commit himself to just one of his flames and stop shtupping all the others. I was one of the others.”
“How many of those were there?”
“How the hell should I know? I didn’t ask him for an itemized list!” She was getting touchy again. She ripped her roll apart, swiped a piece of it through the leftover gravy in her otherwise empty plate, then poked the gloppy morsel in her mouth.
I took one taste of my canned fruit and Jell-O mold, then shoved the warm, half-melted mess aside. “Do you know who Gray’s chosen mate was?” I asked. “The one he finally committed himself to, I mean?”
“No,” she said, eyeing the gooey remains of my gelatin salad. “I never met her, and he never told me her real name. I only saw Gray when he was posing for me, you dig, and he didn’t talk about his girlfriend much at all. And the few times that he did bring her up, he just called her Cupcake.” Abby stretched her arm out over the table and picked up the plate of oozing Jell-O. “Are you finished with this?” she asked.
“Unconditionally,” I said. “Have a party.”
While Abby was polishing off whatever edibles were left on the table, I sat back in my chair and smoked a cigarette, silently watching the ghost-white fumes vanish in the gyrating air. I probably looked quite serene and relaxed, but my mind was spinning faster than the ceiling fans above. I smelled something fishy, and I knew it wasn’t just the food.
Chapter 7
“WANT TO GO TO THE MOVIES?” ABBY asked as we stood up from the table and headed for the cafeteria exit. “
Dial M for Murder is still playing at the Waverly. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”
I wouldn’t have objected to seeing the clever Hitchcock mystery again, either, but at the moment my thoughts were focused on a different murder. “Two killings in one day?” I said. “That’s two too many for me.”
“I guess you’re right,” Abby said, growing sadder by the second. “I just thought it would take our minds off-”