by Renee James
7
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24
BETSY AND ROBBIE and I are strolling through Brookfield Zoo. It’s Sunday, late morning, and the place is starting to fill up.
My niece is having a glorious time. She is fascinated by the animals, especially the giraffes and the polar bears. And she regales in the freedom to run and scream and get picked up any time she wants by her mother or me.
The weeks since Don’s car accident have been difficult for her. She’s too young to comprehend death. She only knows that her daddy isn’t coming home anymore. She tells me this every time I visit, which is frequent.
Betsy is grieving for Don and for her fatherless child, and she is terrified of what the future holds for them. The worst part of her grief is the occasional thought that she didn’t love Don enough. She has poured her heart out to me several times and it always includes the confession that she didn’t love him enough, that she took him for granted, that she didn’t find him especially arousing as time went on.
These are not things I offer advice or counsel about, though my suspicion is that we all get to a point in a long relationship where we take our partner for granted to some degree, and I know for sure that sex changes a lot with familiarity. But when Betsy unloads, I just listen. The only assertive intervention I make is to insist that she was a wonderful wife to Don, and if he were here right now, he’d say so. I say this with the conviction of someone who can see two people who can’t always see each other.
Betsy sees a therapist, but I’m not impressed with what she tells me about the woman. Her approach is very clinical, maybe even disinterested. I’d feel a lot better if she would see Marilee, but Betsy feels Marilee is too close to me. “It would be like asking my mother-in-law for help,” she said.
We are making plans for next weekend. They will be coming into the city to stay with me overnight on Saturday. They’ll go see the sights while I’m working, then we’ll go to dinner and catch a set or two at Jazzfest. As much of it as Robbie can tolerate, anyway.
Betsy is actually excited about the idea. She loved living in the city and she misses it. We’ve been doing everything at her suburban castle and it’s getting boring. Time to get back to civilization.
When I get home tonight I will start readying my extra bedrooms. Before I became the holder of a business debt bigger than Fort Knox, I managed to buy a roomy two-flat in Lakeview, not far from Boystown. I live in the first-floor unit and rent the other apartment to a tenant. The neighborhood is nice and the brownstone is to die for—solid brick, roomy, high ceilings, big rooms. It was rehabbed a year before I bought it, so it’s beautiful. I have the ground-floor apartment, three bedrooms, a bath and a half, a space-efficient kitchen that is separated from a large living area by a breakfast bar. I use one of the extra bedrooms to do hair for friends. It has a twin bed that I have set up like a couch, plus a stylist chair, special lighting, large mirrors, and a portable beautician station bristling with my beauty tools and supplies.
The other extra bedroom is a guest room and office. It has a desk and my computer station, and a double bed and bedroom furniture.
As Betsy talks to Robbie about the tigers across the moat from us, I am thinking that I’ll put Betsy in my bedroom, Robbie in the guest room, and I’ll take the salon room. If Robbie has trouble sleeping in a new place, she can snuggle with her mom.
I share these thoughts with Betsy as we walk to the car an hour later. Robbie is sound asleep in the stroller. Betsy smiles and puts her hand on mine. I let go of the stroller with that hand, and we walk a few steps holding hands, exchanging appreciative small squeezes. I realize how much this time with Betsy and Robbie means to me. The wild dashes to the suburbs and back to work should be exhausting, but instead I feel a sort of exhilaration. Like I’m someone who is important to someone. It’s different than having friends you love and a lot different than being successful in business. It’s better. And it’s addictive. I try not to think how wonderful it would be if Betsy and Robbie stayed. I try not to fantasize how perfect it would be for Betsy and I to raise Robbie to adulthood together, sisters bonded in love and a common goal.
It can’t happen, but I can’t help dreaming about it.
* * *
TUESDAY, AUGUST 26
Wilkins watches from a café table as his photographer friend joins the melee in front of L’Elégance across the street. The big tranny queer is doing a hairstyling demonstration on the sidewalk in front of the salon. Her tight black dress bulges with cleavage on top and leaves most of her legs exposed. Her hair sways and bounces as she works and falls like a curtain around her face when she bends.
She still disgusts him, but she draws a crowd. Her and the two women working with her. They’re all in sexy outfits, selling the sizzle.
The photographer takes a position in front of the chair. He speaks to Logan. Wilkins can’t hear him, but he knows the man is asking permission to shoot some photos. His cover story is that he’s a freelance photographer and hopes to sell the photos to one of the Chicago dailies.
The tranny queer smiles and nods her head yes, her hair bouncing and flouncing, making Wilkins sick. The photographer works the scene for twenty minutes, shooting different angles, working in close-up portrait shots of Logan using a zoom lens.
Later today, the photographer will begin Photoshopping the photos to give Logan facial hair and a male haircut and put that head atop a male body. The photographer will try to sell the originals to a newspaper, along with a short item about the plucky beauty salon using sidewalk demos to kick-start business. And Wilkins will have some photos of a male suspect to show anyone in Strand’s neighborhood who saw a man walking the streets in the early morning hours after the murder.
* * *
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27
Lisa and her friends stop talking as Officer Phil and I enter the room. The buzz-kill is as sudden as if a switch had been flipped.
Phil is wearing an expensive, elegantly tailored suit that fits his athletic body like a glove, making him look like a movie star. His short hair is brushed back and glistens with a gel I recommended to him. He is ruggedly handsome and gentle at the same time. The hetero girls in the room are experiencing heart palpitations, like me, and even the lesbian girls must be wondering why a gorgeous hunk like Phil would associate with an ungainly old transwoman like me.
I keep my face neutral but give my brain permission to gloat.
Phil is here to talk to a congregation of young transsexual women at TransRising about interacting with the police department. He is masterful in the role, speaking without notes, encouraging spontaneous questions and comments.
Many of the young women in attendance have lived on the street and some still do. Their feelings about the police are complex and often negative. Several issue sharp criticisms of the Chicago PD and one is outright confrontational. Phil fields their barbs gently, his voice and face filled with compassion. The confrontational girl issues an obscenity-laced tirade about how the police treated her when they arrested her for stealing money from a john when in fact the first crime was the john stiffing her on payment after she serviced him. Phil doesn’t point out that the first crime was actually prostitution. Smart. To a kid whose alternative is going hungry and sleeping in a doorway, prostitution is no more of a crime than breathing air or drinking water.
Instead, Phil talks about what sets off cops in those situations and how a citizen can conduct herself in a way to take the edge off. He tells cop stories about dealing with violent altercations and cops getting shot, stabbed, or beaten when they try to do the right thing. He paints a vivid image in our minds of what it’s like to be a cop, walking cold into a confrontation, having no idea who is right or wrong, or who is dangerous, and trying to restore order without making an arrest.
At the end of his forty-minute presentation, most of the girls in the room are in love with him. God knows I am, but that’s nothing new.
Lisa leaps from her seat to take control of the meeting. I
t had to be agony for her to surrender the podium to me to introduce Phil, but she didn’t know him. She thanks Phil, asks him to wait a moment, then closes the meeting. She and her friends cluster around him, offering thanks, cooing approval for his presentation, batting eyelashes. I can’t help thinking Phil is going to get laid tonight by the beautiful young woman of his choice.
After a polite period of time, Officer Phil thanks the girls, says he would love to do this again, says he is late for a date with a gorgeous redhead. As he says it he walks to me and offers me his arm. I am overwhelmed. He called me gorgeous. And even though he didn’t mean it, he left several truly gorgeous young women standing there, watching me lace my arm through his and leave with the man of our dreams.
Phil takes me to a wine bar near the Loop. I thought he was just using me to shake free of my adoring sisters, but it turns out he had hoped I’d be available. Be still my heart!
We order glasses of red. I cross my legs as daintily as I can. We are sitting on stools at high tables and there is just enough room for a six-foot woman to get one leg over the other without dumping twenty dollars of red wine on her host. I try to pull the hem of my dress lower. I was doing sidewalk demos today so the dress is short, top and bottom. I’m showing a lot of leg and enough cleavage to make Phil’s eyes roam. I know he’s not interested in me, per se. It’s that wonderful testosterone effect. Even gay men have to look.
After several minutes of small talk, I try to find out why we’re here.
“You know you left a trail of broken hearts at TransRising tonight. When you walked out with me. All those beautiful young women.”
Phil’s eyes arch in feigned surprise. “Really?”
“Don’t play innocent with me.” I laugh. “You know every girl in that group wanted to leave with you.” Phil is trying to be modest and polite.
“If you say so,” he says.
“So why did you leave with me? You had your pick of younger and prettier girls.” In the back of my mind I’m thinking maybe Phil is gay and just doesn’t want to talk about it. That would explain his preference for me. I’m not insulted, but it would be nice if something about me made him crazy with desire.
“They are young and pretty and I like them all,” he says. “But I . . .” He stops for a moment, searching for the right words. “I like your company, Bobbi.” His eyes take an involuntary tour of my cleavage, then back to my face. He blushes a little.
I look at him and smile, then lift my glass for a silent toast. We are sitting side by side at a small round table, just large enough to hold our wine glasses. After we tap glasses and sip, his eyes rake over my exposed legs. I avert my gaze modestly only to see what seems like swelling in his crotch—he’s sexually aroused, by me!
“What do you like about my company?” I ask it hoping for some ego stroking or maybe a confession of deep-seated desire for intimacy.
“You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re easy to talk to. You’re . . .” There he goes again, choking back the word he was going to say, looking for a different one. I would clean his house for a month to know what he was going to say.
“You’re sexy.” He says it in a rush and looks me straight in the eye.
He catches me off guard. My breath catches. For moment I don’t know what to say.
“What does that mean, Phil?” My heart is pounding. I want him to whisk me out of here and into the nearest bed and have his way with me.
He stares at me. I can see that his mind is working a million miles a minute. He is trying to decide whether or not to take the next step. Seconds pass. He blinks, averts his gaze to the table.
“I want to tell you something, Bobbi.” His voice and body language tell me the golden moment has passed.
“Feel free to talk dirty.” I make it sound like a joke, but really I’m pandering like the village slut. I’d be disgusted with myself if I wasn’t so aroused.
He shakes his head. “It’s about Wilkins.”
My erotic bubble pops and I’m back in reality. Shit.
“Oh?” I say.
“He says he’s found people who saw a six-foot person walking in Strand’s neighborhood in the early morning hours after he was murdered.”
“That’s like saying someone saw an oak tree in Oak Park, Phil.”
“His theory of the crime is that the six-footer was a woman, a transwoman, disguised as a man. Wearing false facial hair, a male wig, male clothing.”
I shrug. I try to seem nonchalant, but the truth is, this is scaring me. For a moment my brain conjures an image of me in court, my salon going bankrupt, losing everything even if found not guilty.
“Why are you telling me this?”
His turn to shrug. “Same old same old. I like you. I admire you. I root for you. I want to make sure you don’t do anything to give him an excuse to get your fingerprints or DNA or anything. This man is relentless.”
“Do you think I killed Strand?”
There, it’s out. A direct question, finally. I dread the answer. So does he. He squirms.
“I’m a PR guy, Bobbi. What I think doesn’t matter. Me, personally? I know you didn’t. I know you couldn’t. But let’s just be honest here. If I didn’t know you, I’d think it could have been you. You had issues with Strand, I don’t know all of them, but I know you figured him for the murder of your friend. You’re smart and strong and you have incredible willpower.”
He stares at me when he says this. I drop my glance. As somber as this conversation is, I see myself asking him to bed me before they haul me to jail, kind of a transwoman spin on the young soldier asking the virgin to sleep with him before he goes off to war. Phil misunderstands my smile.
“I’m serious, Bobbi.”
“I appreciate that, Phil. My mind just wandered for a moment.”
We sip wine for another half hour making small talk, me wondering if maybe he just can’t let himself have sex with a transwoman. Lots of men are like that. Gays because they see us as women. Straights because they see us as men. Maybe it’s better that way. If gays saw us as men and straights as women we’d have so many romantic overtures we’d all be arrogant.
8
THURSDAY, AUGUST 28
WILKINS SITS FORWARD and places a file folder on the coffee table. He swishes two breath mints in his mouth to make sure he doesn’t alienate his audience. Opposite him is the bleached-blond queer and his boyfriend on the couch. They are holding hands, which would be disgusting if Wilkins let himself think about it.
“Thank you for seeing me,” he says. “I want you to think back to the night you saw that person walking on the street, the night that man was murdered. I want you to think about what that person looked like, everything you can remember, every detail. Then I want to show you some pictures and you tell me if they resemble that person or not.”
“Okay,” the blond man says. “But it was dark, the light wasn’t good.”
“I know,” Wilkins says. “And don’t worry about that. I just want your reaction to the photos.”
The man closes his eyes for several seconds, opens them, nods to Wilkins.
Wilkins produces an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo showing a man walking on a sidewalk in gray light. It is a Photoshop creation, Bobbi Logan as a man, seen from a short distance, wearing the clothing and facial hair Pretty Boy described to Wilkins earlier. The face is Logan’s with a VanDyke, mustache, sideburns, and longish male hair. The body is Logan’s but in male clothes, and without breasts.
“Does this look anything like the person you saw that night?”
The man studies the photo. “That could be him. I mean, it could be a lot of people, but it could be him.”
“Do you see anything that doesn’t look like him?”
The blond man looks at him questioningly.
“Look closely and tell me if there was something you saw that night that you don’t see here, or something you see here that doesn’t belong. The guy’s too fat or too short or his head is too big or too small
. . . like that.”
The blond man studies the photo. “No, I don’t think so.”
“What specifically reminds you of the man you saw that night?”
The blond man blushes, nods his head yes, smiles self-consciously, holds his boyfriend’s hand again. “It’s his ass. The man I saw that night had a really cute ass. Not to be graphic, Detective, but not many men have curvy butts.”
Wilkins should be revolted but he isn’t. His adrenaline surges. It’s not anywhere close to a positive ID. All he’s done is keep Logan in play as a suspect. But he can feel it. He’s right about this. He just has to keep digging.
“Thank you, sir,” Wilkins says, putting the photo back in the file folder. “Just one more thing. Will you look at this photo and tell me if it looks like the person you saw that night?”
He produces another eight-by-ten photo, this one a portrait of Logan with a van Dyke beard and mustache, and male hair falling to mid-ear.
“That looks like him, I think, but I didn’t see his face very well—just a quick glance. Although . . .” His voice trails off in thought.
“Although . . .” Wilkins coaxes him.
“Well, I’m pretty sure he had longer sideburns. There were a lot of shadows, but I thought his sideburns went to the bottom of his ear, maybe even lower.”
Wilkins nods appreciatively and makes notes in his notebook, another on a sticky note that he attaches to the photo.
“Thank you, sir,” he says to the blond man. “Thank you both.” They shake hands. “You’ve been a great help to me and the department.”
* * *
FRIDAY, AUGUST 29
“Hi, Bobbi! It’s Roger.” He’s calling from Florida. Probably baking his brains out in the tropical heat. I wouldn’t live in one of those hot redneck states for anything. Well, maybe if Officer Phil was moving there and wanted to take me along as his concubine.