A Kind of Justice

by Renee James

  It dawns on me finally. “You think maybe you just want to fuck me because I’m trans? See what it’s like?”

  Phil nods. His face is filled with shame. He glances at me and glances away. “I can’t do that, Bobbi. Not to anyone, but especially not to you.”

  I take a deep breath and exhale. “Why on earth are you a cop, Phil? You should have been a priest or a rabbi. Or maybe an angel.” I gesture for him to sit again so I can finish his haircut before I have a heart attack or begin compulsively masturbating.

  “I don’t want you to hate me, Bobbi.” He glances up and we link eyes in the mirror. He looks like a puppy who just peed on the carpet.

  “I could never hate you, Phil. You’re the most decent guy I know. And just so you know, if we did it and afterwards you felt like you never wanted to do it with me again, it would be a lot like right now except I would have had a great orgasm to show for it.”

  If he blushed any redder, his capillaries would pop.

  After he leaves, I prepare for a nice bath. I am experiencing a wide range of emotions. Unfulfilled, certainly. And wondering if it will ever happen for me, romantic love. And I’m feeling kind of pathetic. I was kidding with Phil, but I wasn’t. I’d have been glad to be his tranny fuck tonight just to be the object of his desires for a moment in time.

  Before I step into the bath I dig out a CD to put in the stereo. It’s a digitized recording of an old Kingston Trio album a customer got me. I click forward to a song I’d been humming in my mind since Phil left. About a spinster woman so romantically hopeless her brother prays someone will take her out of pity.

  14

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17

  BARBI DANCER ANSWERS the door to her apartment wearing a G-string and a tiny top that just covers the nipples of her breasts. Behind her, loud music plays on the sound system. Stripper music. Wilkins stares at her body for a moment after she opens the door. She is not at all put out. She arches her back a little to add to her pose.

  “Come in, Detective,” she says. She walks into the living room, her butt swaying provocatively. “Sorry about the costume.” The tone of her voice says she’s not sorry at all. She turns off the music. “I’m practicing a new number,” she explains. She throws on a robe and sits down in a chair, gesturing for Wilkins to sit opposite her on the couch. The apartment is the second floor of a spacious brownstone in Andersonville. The living room has high ceilings, clusters of photos on the wall, many showing Barbi in various states of undress. The furniture is modern, new, in good condition. The colors are black and white, stark and modern.

  Wilkins tries not to stare. She looks like she could have been the model for the original Barbie Doll. He’s amazed at how perfect she is. He would never make her for a transwoman. Her voice is perfect, her feet and hands are feminine, her hair is Barbie-blond, and her eyes Barbie-blue. She has a tiny waist and a Barbie-perfect butt. She’s maybe five-nine, five-ten.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” he says, popping a couple of breath mints in his mouth. He offers her the package. She declines.

  “Rosa said you were a good guy, so I’m counting on that,” she replies.

  Wilkins goes through his standard introduction, then shows her the first photo. “Do you know this man?” he asks.

  She looks at the photo of Strand the way a society matron would look at a dead rat on her living room rug.

  “John Strand,” she says. “I knew him. He’s dead. His name is John Strand. Someone killed him five years ago.”

  Wilkins nods. “Thank you. That was just a formality. I understand you were seeing him? Socially?”

  “I was his bitch.” She looks away from Wilkins.

  “Can you explain what you mean?” Wilkins says it gently.

  “When he wanted to get laid, he came to me. When he wanted to get his friends laid, he came to me. When he needed to get his cock sucked, he came to me. When he needed to beat the shit out of someone, he came to me.”

  “Why did you see him?”

  She looks at him, her hard-boiled veneer giving way to vulnerability for a beat or two. She shrugs. “He could be real nice. He was handsome and sometimes he made me feel like a woman. Flowers. Sexy nighties. You could say we were using each other. He paid off the bill for some facial surgery, and he paid for my breast augmentation. He promised he’d pay for my GRS.”

  Wilkins cocks his head quizzically. “GRS?”

  “Gender reassignment surgery.”

  “How long had you been seeing him?”

  “Oh, maybe six, eight months.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “That you don’t already know? Well, mainly, he couldn’t get it up with natal women. He tried. They were attracted to him, and he would try to make it with them but he couldn’t stay hard. It made him crazy. He could only make it with transwomen. Pre-ops. I think he lost interest once a girl had GRS. I don’t know that for a fact, but I do know he liked to do a girl in the ass. I always wondered about that, you know?”

  “You said he beat you? What would make him do that?”

  She shrugs, shakes her head, purses her lips as if reliving a bad moment. Wilkins registers surprise that such a hard-shelled person would show emotion, not that she wanted to. She fought it. “Anything,” she says. “Nothing.” She shakes her head again. “He liked to talk dirty in sex and sometimes he wanted me to talk dirty, too. But if I started talking dirty when he wasn’t in the mood, he’d go crazy. Sometimes after sex he’d just lose it, like I made him sick. Whatever set him off, when he went off, it was like I was some kind of disease. He’d hit me in the face, in the stomach. Squeeze my nipples until I cried. Sometimes he kicked me. He’d kick anywhere, but especially in the crotch. Very personal. I had a penis then and a scrotum. Not much left, but enough so it hurt. I’d fall on the floor, and he’d kick me some more.”

  “How often did that happen?” Wilkins asks.

  “Too often.” She looks at him. “You’re wondering why I put up with that. Because I’m an idiot. Because he’d always be really nice after that. He’d say he was sorry and he was working on his anger issues. And he’d give me nice things. The breast augmentation, the clothes. Money. I was a whore, Detective. I still am. I strip onstage, but I make my real money doing private gigs. I’m the girl who jumps out of the cake at a bachelor party and sucks a half dozen cocks. I’d rather be a brain surgeon, but you know higher education doesn’t really recruit T-girls and the only way to get enough money for college is to do what I’m doing, so really, Detective, what’s the point?”

  Wilkins clears his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  After a long silence, Wilkins speaks again, softly. “Were you with him on the night of April 27, five years ago?”

  “The night he was killed?” She asks it rhetorically. “Yes. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know that,” he says quietly. “Could you just tell me about that last night? It might help me find out who did kill him.”

  “The person who killed him made the world a better place.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “What about that last night. What happened?”

  “He called that afternoon. Wanted to meet that night. I said okay, I was going to a club with some girlfriends, should I cancel? He said no, he’d be running late, that he’d call when he got there. We did this a lot, meeting like this. He didn’t want to be seen with me, so he’d park nearby and call me, and I’d come running.

  “So he calls me around twelve, and I come right away. He didn’t like to be kept waiting, especially by a whore. I get to his car and the window is down so I say something to him, something like ‘how about a fuck, sailor,’ just being funny, you know? And when I get in the car he bashes me. Really hard. And he keeps hitting me.” Her lips form a thin, tight line, her face clouds in anger and shame. She stops for a moment.

  “He scared me. That night, I thought he was going to kill me. People s
aid he killed girls before. So I grab the door handle and try to run. He tries to yank me back into the car, but I pull away and go sprawling on the grass. My nose is broken. I’m bleeding, I have a black eye. I’m thinking he’s going to kill me now, right here, or maybe take me to his place and spend the night punching and kicking me. I scramble to my feet and try to run. I thought he’d catch me any second. I was in total panic. But I got away clean. I couldn’t believe it. I looked back when I got to Halsted, and he was in his car, driving away.”

  “What else did you see?” Wilkins asks.

  “Nothing, really. It was dark. The car was a half block away and moving in the other direction.”

  “Could you tell how many people were in the car?”

  “No,” she says.

  “How many were in the car when you first got in?”

  “Just John. I think. I didn’t really look in the back seat, but I would have noticed if someone was back there.”

  Wilkins makes some notes in his book, then takes out another photo. “Do you recognize this person?” It’s the photo of Logan as a man.

  She stares at it for a moment. “Not someone I know, no. Cute guy, except he might be a girl.”

  Wilkins asks her to explain why she thinks that. She reads the facial hair as fake, the head hair as a wig, the butt kind of feminine for a male. Wilkins nods, impressed.

  “How about this person?” He produces the photo of Logan as a woman.

  “I don’t know her, but I know who she is. Her name is Bobbi something. She’s a big-time hair stylist and she’s active in one of those transgender groups for older people.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “She’s supposed to be nice. She does things for trans people. Contributes money to TransRising. Things like that.”

  “Was she ever involved with Strand?”

  “Strand never mentioned her.”

  “No rumors?”

  “Come on, Detective. We gossip about everything. Of course there are rumors.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like she was the one who did Strand. But don’t take it seriously. There’s a rumor that I fuck horses and sell the pictures and another one that the mayor has a boyfriend.”

  Wilkins reviews his notes. “Anything else you can tell me about that night? Did you see anyone else on the street? Someone walking? A car going by?”

  She starts to shake her head, no, then stops, looks up at the ceiling, closes her eyes. “When I was running up to Halsted, a car pulled away from the curb just as I ran past. It scared the shit out of me.”

  “What do you remember about the car and the driver?”

  “I never saw the driver, but I think the car was one of those expensive sedans. I think it was a BMW, but I had other things on my mind. It was black.”

  Wilkins studies her, surprised a girl under such duress would notice a car.

  She fills the silence with her own thoughts, far from his. “BMW was my dream car back when I was a miserable queer everybody hated,” she says. “I used to dream that I’d wake up a woman and meet the perfect man. We’d get married, and he’d buy me a BMW and treat me like Cinderella for the rest of my life, and I’d feel like Cinderella every time I drove that car somewhere. Stupid, huh? Bet you didn’t expect to hear that from a whore.”

  Wilkins doesn’t know what to say. Her sweet dream had descended into a bleak reality, even with the nice apartment. He thought of Candice, the ex-hooker he interviewed what, six weeks ago? A lifetime? Twenty-one and just finishing high school. HIV positive. Trying to make a life on ten dollars an hour, trying to break into the corporate world. Trying to get past a family that threw her out, an adolescence spent sucking men’s dicks and sleeping in wretched places.

  Barbi’s life had more glitz, but just below the shine was the same grim truth.

  “You’d look good in that BMW, Miss Dancer,” he says, “but you need to get out of the sex trade. It’s tearing you down.”

  “I can’t make this kind of money waiting on tables,” she says, gesturing toward her sumptuous apartment.

  “You’re smart. You can think of something.” Wilkins stands as he says it.

  Barbi is motionless for a moment, staring at him, a stunned look on her face.

  Wilkins gives her his business card at the door. “Call me if I can help you sometime. I owe you one,” he says.

  Barbi puts a hand on his arm. “You don’t look like it, but you’re a good guy.” She hugs him. “Thank you, Detective.”

  “For what?”

  “You treat people with respect. It means a lot.” Her eyes are misty. Words don’t come to Wilkins so he nods to her as he leaves.

  As he walks to his car, he gets back in cop mode. Black sedans keep coming up in this case. Logan didn’t own a car, but what about her friends? His mind skips to the rich loudmouth transwoman . . . he pictures her in his mind, tall, blond, arrogant. Swenson. Her name was Swenson. She drives a black Caddie now. He’d see what she had back then. What if she and Logan did Strand together? They’re friends. It could happen. Wouldn’t that be something?

  * * *

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17

  I flinch when I hear the quiet tap on the door. I’m in the bathroom, removing makeup and cleansing and moisturizing my face after a long day at work. I’m also naked, taking inventory of my body as I tend to my nightly ritual.

  Before I can promise to hurry, Betsy enters. “Mind if I pee?” she asks, big smile on her face. She doesn’t wait for permission. She pulls up her nightgown and plops on the toilet. A tinkling sound follows. She looks up at me. I am still blushing and self-consciously trying to cover my bare breasts and womanhood.

  She grins at me. It’s her wise, big sister look, which has been missing for a long time. “Relax, Bobbi. Sisters do this.”

  The truth of what she says washes over me like an awakening. The sex fantasies that dominated my young male mind have given way to a rich variety of fantasies as a middle-age transgender woman. One of the most prolific genres is all the girl things I missed growing up male. Pajama parties, doing each others’ hair, talking about boys, and having friends you could touch in an intimate but nonsexual way. The burgeoning subset of that genre has been fantasies of sisterhood with Betsy, of moments just like this, intimate, humorous, trusting. A warm sensation surges through my body and I smile at her.

  “I just thought we need to lighten up a little,” she says. The impish grin remains.

  “Good idea,” I say, my mouth dry. I slowly let my arms and hands fall to my side, exposing my bare body, as nervous as a young virgin. This wasn’t in my fantasies. I was always clothed in my fantasies, nothing more risqué than a bra and panties. Try as I might, I remain self-conscious about my body and my femininity with Betsy since we became roommates. I keep my body covered whenever I’m in our shared space and I try not to leave my lingerie around for fear it will offend her in some way. This is completely irrational, but it’s where I’m at.

  “My goodness, Bobbi, your boobs are bigger than mine!” she exclaims. She is assessing me as I stand at the sink, blushing. I want badly to put on my nightgown or at least wrap myself in a towel. “And they’re so perky.” She’s still talking about my breasts.

  “You’re a very sexy lady,” she says. “But you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

  I struggle to find something appropriate to say. “No one else is going to say it,” I tell her. “Plus, when you say it, I can hear bands playing.” I’m trying to be humorous. It’s what I do when I can’t be brave.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Her smile widens. She knows I’m not. Her gaze falls to my pelvis. Her body language radiates curiosity. Straight people are obsessed with transsexual plumbing, even women. She wants to inspect it but is too much a lady to say so. I understand her curiosity. I understand that it’s not sexual. I understand it is not because she is reviled. She’s just curious.

  “Why don’t you take a look,” I offer as I step toward her.
>
  She blushes and sits back, protesting, apologizing.

  “It’s okay, Betsy. Sisters do this. If we had grown up together we would have compared body parts many times. Have a look. We’ll get it over with and move on to other things.”

  Her impish smile comes back. She examines me closely, starts to touch, pulls her hand back as though singed by a hot flame. “It’s okay,” I say, and use my own hands to brush back pubic hairs and open my labia. This was never part of my daydreams, but I am surprisingly calm, perhaps because Betsy is so nonchalant. Her scrutiny lasts only a few seconds.

  “Wow,” she says, sitting back. I pluck my nightgown from its hanging place and put it on. Betsy stands, flushes, comes face-to-face with me. “You’re beautiful, Sis.”

  “Does it seem anatomically correct?” I punctuate the question with my own smile.

  “I think so,” she says. “Really, though, unless you’re a doctor, who ever gets a good look at an adult woman’s vagina?”

  I look at her questioningly.

  “Well, I don’t have a great angle to see mine, you know?” she says. “It’s like, just because you own a car doesn’t mean you know how to fix the engine.”

  She kisses me on the cheek and we leave together.

  I hope this is one of those pivotal moments where everything that happens afterward is so much easier than before. Our first two weeks of living together have been good, but not easy. I haven’t cohabited with anyone in a long time, and Betsy’s marital years were far different than having a roommate. Not to mention the awkwardness of us having been spouses once. I have obsessed on anticipating every need, making sure the apartment is perfect at all times, and monitoring my every action to make sure nothing I do upsets, offends, or frightens Betsy. I think my inhibitions make Betsy nervous, and she’s focused on being a good roommate, too, keeping out of my way, helping with stuff. I think our good intentions are the source of more stress and tension than if we were already at the taking-each-other-for-granted stage.

  We’re still establishing our routine chores like cooking and cleaning. Betsy wants to do everything because she’s not working, and I want us to share everything because I want a sister, not a housekeeper. It’s not the worst problem to have. We chat for a moment each night about the next day’s schedule, who will be home when, who will cook, who will stop for food, what other chores need to be done.