by Wayne Purdy
When she rang the doorbell an attractive, middle aged man answered the door. Hazel put him in his early to mid 50s. He had brown hair, graying at the temples. His eyeglasses framed his mournful blue eyes. He appraised Hazel as she stood on the stoop, trying, and failing, to place her. “Hello?”
“Hello. Are you Mr. Mackenzie?”
He nodded his head yes. “Who are you?” He held his arms tight against his body and his eyes narrowed, assessing her. “Are you a reporter?”
“No. My name is Hazel Abe. I’m looking into the…” She didn’t know what to say here. Murder seemed too harsh and passing away seemed too gentle. “…death of your daughter.”
He looked at her with a blank expression, and then stood aside, inviting her in. “Thank you for saying daughter. So many people have referred to her as our son. She hasn’t been that in a very long time.” He sort of chortled. “I don’t suppose she ever really was.”
Hazel stood at the threshold, suddenly wary of entering this stranger’s home. This man’s home. She thought about Brent and that made her anxiety broil. He had invited her into his room once, and it nearly ruined her. Brent wasn’t so lucky. She pushed him from her mind. Mr. Mackenzie led Hazel into a living room and gestured for her to sit on a dark blue sofa. She did and began to relax. There was something about him put her at ease. Perhaps it was his sorrow, which he wore around him like a cloak. It made him seem safe, and Hazel trusted that he was.
He excused himself and disappeared down a hallway. Hazel looked around. It was a neatly furnished living room, nicely appointed. The furniture was newish and in good repair and everything was neat and tidy. There was a lemony scent in the air that Hazel recognised as a wood cleaner. She wondered if the house was always this clean or had the death of Sandra given idle hands nothing to do? A few moments later, Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie entered the living room. She was a head shorter than her husband, and matronly plump. She had auburn hair that fell sensibly to her shoulders and the same sullen eyes as her husband, except there was something else there too, a hardness. Mrs. Mackenzie had come to terms with her daughter’s murder. She probably hadn’t accepted it yet, but she had acknowledged it. It was the husband that puttered around the house, obsessively cleaning every surface.
“Ms. Abe?” This is my wife, Laura.” Laura Mackenzie shook Hazel’s hand. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so scatter-brained. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Matt Mackenzie. Sandra’s father.”
“I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” Hazel said.
“Are you a detective?” Laura asked. She looked at Hazel with her shrewd eyes.
“No. I’m investigating the story independently from the police.”
“Story?” Matt said, panic rising in his voice. “I thought you said you weren’t a reporter?”
“I’m not. I’m working with a man named Hector Collins. He was brought in by the police to help with the investigation. He has had some experience investigating this type of murder.” It was a white lie, but it put the Mackenzie’s at ease.
“What do you want to know, Ms. Abe?”
“It’s Hazel. Why don’t you tell me about Sandra?”
Matt’s eye’s lit up. “I’d love to. Where to start?” He paused, thinking. “I guess the beginning is as good a place as any.”
“She was our only child. We had a difficult time conceiving. I just couldn’t hold a baby to term. We had…several…miscarriages. I’d just about given up hope. Then our little miracle came.”
“When he was born, we named him Simeon,” Matt added. It was clear that this was going to be a tandem conversation. Both loved Sandra. Hazel could plainly see that. It made her heart swell. “He was named after Laura’s father.”
“Matt doted on him. He always wanted a son. What is it about men and protecting their lineage? It must be a primeval instinct. Some vestigial urge left over from our caveman days.”
“That’s true,” Matt said, picking up the conversation as though Laura had passed him an invisible baton, and he carried on the relay. “When he was first born, Laura was sleeping, and he was in that little clear tub they put newborns in, I stood over him and held his tiny, little hand. I swore to him then that I would love him no matter what.” Matt’s voice broke. “I did too. I always loved him. No matter what.”
Laura took over while Matt dabbed at his eyes with a tissue. “We knew something was…different…as he grew. He liked to dress in girl’s clothes. He liked to play with girl’s toys. He wished he was a girl. At the beach, he wouldn’t go swimming without a t-shirt on. He didn’t want to expose himself. We thought it was just a phase. We didn’t know any better. He would insist in being called girl names, Ariel, Aurora, Belle, or whichever Disney princess was popular in the moment. It was a confusing time, for all of us. At first, we tried to make him like boy things, but it made him miserable. One day, Matt came home with a dress-”
“It was a Halloween costume on clearance at Walmart. A fairy princess, complete with lacy wings. I hummed and hawed at the store, and then I remembered my promise. I realised my job in life was to make him happy, not the other way around,” Matt interrupted.
“Simeon became Sandra and we never looked back.”
“When did she transition?”
“We started at a very young age, and under the direction of doctors and psychologists. It began with her wearing more feminine clothing and the name changes. Once she started puberty, we started on hormone treatments, testosterone blockers, and gradually progressed from there.”
Matt shrugged. “We made mistakes along the way. Especially using the proper pronouns. It was so hard to use she instead of he. And the deadname!”
“What’s a deadname?”
“It’s her birth name, the name she didn’t want to use anymore. I can’t tell you how many times I called her Simeon instead of Sandra. We got better and she was patient with us. It was new territory, and we did the best we could,” Laura said. Hazel was getting used to the cadence of their tag team conversation.
“And surgeries?” Hazel asked.
Laura looked at her husband who in turn looked uncomfortable. “She had top surgery, breast implants. Her voice box was shaved so her neck was more feminine, and cosmetic surgery was done on her face, to soften the angles.”
“What about her penis?”
“Sandra decided to keep it for now. She always joked that she had grown attached to it. Maybe someday down the road she would have made the decision to remove it, maybe not. The fact that some monster took that decision from her…” Her voice trailed off, unable to complete the sentence.
“And what about her sex life?” Hazel asked as delicately as possible. Laura blanched and Matt turned crimson.
“Honey, I’d like a cup of tea,” Laura told her husband. He looked at her blankly before nodding his head and shuffled off to the kitchen. Once she was sure he was out of earshot, Laura turned back to Hazel. “I don’t drink tea.”
“But why-”
“It’s a code,” Laura continued. “Matt has been supportive of Sandra’s journey. He was always comfortable in helping her achieve her sexual identity, but he has a hard time talking about her sex life. So, whenever a conversation heads towards the topic of her sexuality, I give him an out.”
“That’s very sweet.”
“Sandra has always attracted to men. Even before she transitioned. When she was a little boy, she would come home and say that she had a crush on another boy, a classmate. We thought he might be gay. We could deal with that easier. There was already a playbook. There wasn’t much information for trans children.”
“It must have been a difficult time.”
“I fell into a depression during her teen years,” Laura said. “I just didn’t know how to cope. I though that I was a failure as a mother. That maybe there was something wrong with me. All the miscarriages…maybe it was God’s way of telling me I shouldn’t have children. It took a lot of therapy and tears, but eventually, I came to understand he
r. I think that made it easier to support her. She was never gay. All the childhood crushes weren’t her questioning her sexuality. The whole time, she was trying to figure out her sexual identity. Not that the label matters much, but Sandra considered herself to be a straight woman.
“She had a hard time dating, especially when she was younger. Men either wanted to use her, like she was a perverse check on their bucket list, or they would withdraw once they found out the truth. Matt and I told her that she always had to be honest about herself, that she could never have an honest relationship with anyone if it was based on a lie. It was also safer. You don’t know how someone will react when the woman they are with suddenly has a penis.”
“Did she ever tell you if she wasn’t safe? Was she ever hurt?”
“Not really. She vetted her dates carefully and she laid out the ground rules ahead of time. If she ever got a creepy vibe, the date was over. End of discussion.”
“Did she have a steady boyfriend?” Hazel prodded.
“Not recently. She had a nice boyfriend, and they were getting serious, but they broke up.”
“Why did they break up?”
“He moved to Los Angeles. He just graduated and got a job in some hoity-toity law firm as an entertainment lawyer.”
“Was he in LA when she was killed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he even knows yet. It never occurred to me to reach out.”
“Can you give me his contact information? My partner will want to check out his alibi?” Laura said she would write it down before Hazel left. “What about other boyfriends?”
“Sandra was young. She decided that she wanted to play the field a bit before committing herself to a relationship again. She signed up for a dating app. There were a few men that she was seeing.”
“Was she having sex with any of them?”
Laura fidgeted. “Yes. Like I said, she wanted to play the field.”
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Women are allowed to enjoy sex too.” Hazel said, smiling.
“Thanks for saying that. I’m just so afraid that people will judge her harshly because she was sexually active or blame her for her own murder. There’s already rumours out there that she was a prostitute. That’s not what she was. That’s not what Sandra wanted to be. She was taking psychology classes, but the career options for trans people are limited. They become fetishized.”
Hazel thought about that. Was Sandra’s path so different from her own? They both wanted to better themselves. Sandra’s path cost her her life. Hazel realized that she may have more choices open to her than Sandra had, or any other trans girl. She tried to think of any instances of a trans girl that wasn’t involved in porn and came up short. There couldn’t be many. There were a few actresses that she could think of, Laverne Cox, Hunter Schafer, and Eve Lindley. She seemed to recall that both the Wachowskis, the siblings that wrote the movie The Matrix, had transitioned. She couldn’t think of one politician, CEO, lawmaker, or person of influence that was transgender. Not. A. Single. One.
“Do you know any of Sandra’s dates?” Hazel asked.
“No. Sandra was like a psychologist in that regard. She kept her secrets. Confidentiality was important to her. She would confide in me only in the broadest sense. The details she kept to herself. I think we both preferred it that way.”
“Do you know if she had any boyfriends from the military?”
Laura shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. She could have. Does this have anything to do with her murder?”
“I’m just chasing down leads.”
Laura paused, thinking. “She had so many boyfriends and they weren’t always about sex. Sandra never told me details, but she told me about her more memorable experiences.”
“Was there anyone pushing her to transition?”
“There was one man always asking when she was going to transition fully. Lose the penis and become a proper woman. She stopped seeing him. He was becoming aggressive and pushy. I always had the feeling that he was an Alpha male, like a cop, but I suppose a soldier would fit too.”
“What do you mean by Alpha male?”
“You know, a manly man. Macho. The type that is used to getting his own way.”
Hazel thought she understood. A colonel was certainly used to getting his way. “Did you get his name?”
“No. Like I said, she kept her secrets.”
“When did she stop seeing him? This Alpha male?”
Laura’s eyes looked inward as she worked out the timeline. “It was sometime around the new year. At Christmas he offered to pay for bottom surgery as a gift. She turned him down and he became angry. I’m guessing it’s been four, maybe five, months.”
“Is it safe to come in?” Matt called from the kitchen.
Laura looked at Hazel, and Hazel nodded. She didn’t think she had any more questions about sex. Matt entered the living room carrying a matching ceramic tea service. He placed it on the table in front of the two women. Laura looked at him and smiled sweetly. He took one cup and Hazel took the other. “Tea’s ready,” he said.
“Thank you.” Laura said, patting him affectionately on the forearm.
Hazel took a sip. She spotted a thick stack of envelopes tied together with a ribbon. Matt followed her gaze. “Ah. Those are condolence letters and cards from Sandra’s friends. We haven’t had the heart to read them yet.”
“They will be nice to read later. When you’re ready,” Hazel said.
“That’s what Katherine said too,” Laura said. Matt reached over and picked up her cup, taking a sip.
Hazel froze. “Katherine? Katherine Chosuk?”
Matt looked up from the stack of unopened letters. “That’s right. Do you know her?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure. I’ve been trying, but she’s difficult to get a hold of.”
“She’s very busy. She’s been a godsend to us though,” Matt said.
“How so?”
“When Sandra first began transitioning, Katherine took the time to visit with us. She walked-us through the process, warned us about common pratfalls. She even helped me get past some of my own hang-ups, at least a bit,” Matt smiled sheepishly. “There’s still lots about it that I’m uncomfortable with, but I learned that I just have to take a step back, and let Sandra live her own life.” He paused uncomfortably, probably realising that, despite trying to do the right thing, she still hadn’t been allowed to live her own life. A monster took it from her.
“Do you have a contact number for Katherine?”
“No,” Laura chimed in. “She’s something of a Luddite. Doesn’t own a cell phone and won’t give out her number. The only way to reach her is through the agency, Rainbow Bridges. They’ll relay a message to her, and she’ll get back to you when she’s got the time.”
“What sort of relationship did Katherine and Sandra have? Were they friendly?”
“Katherine was like a second mother to her. She probably knows more of Sandra’s secrets,” Laura said without any sadness. “Sometimes its easier to confide in someone that isn’t related to you. I was just happy that Sandra had her. It was good for her to know that other people cared about her, not just her parents.”
“Did Katherine care for her?”
“Without question,” Matt said. “She has this fierce lioness vibe. Very protective. I know she always carries a knife. She told Sandra that she should too. Sandra decided against it. She didn’t want to live her life always looking over her shoulder. Maybe if she had…”
Hazel put a sympathetic hand over Laura’s, “I don’t think it would have made a difference. Whoever did this knew her. Sandra probably wouldn’t have had a chance to use it.”
Laura retrieved a tissue from a box on the coffee table and dabbed her eyes. “That’s what Katherine said too.”
“Sounds like Katherine really cared. I’ll wait for her to call.” She finished her tea and said goodbye. Hazel took the subway home and tried to organise her thoughts during the
commute. One of Sandra’s regulars was an aggressive, military-type man and he wanted her to lose the penis. On the surface, it seemed like a good fit. She felt like they were closing in on the killer, even if his identity eluded them. But not for long. She had a hunch that Katherine Chosuk had the answers they needed.
Hazel checked the time on her phone. It was getting late, but she decided to look for Katherine Chosuk once more before going home. Her parents would be bringing Jaimie home soon, and she knew that she had to be there when they did, or she would never live it down. She could already see the disapproving look on hr mother’s face. When she thought of Sandra Mack’s parents, it made her ache. They seemed to move heaven and Earth to make their child happy and feel loved. Hazel would have done anything to feel that from her own parents.
She got off the Subway at the Gay Village. Rainbow Bridges was just down the street, and she decided to walk. On the way, she passed the alley leading to the field where Sandra Mack had been killed. A makeshift memorial had been built. There were flowers, stuffed animals, and little rainbow flags. The gay community rallied behind the murder, demanding answers. Hazel believed they were entitled to them. She hoped she and Heck would be able to provide them. There was an outcry at the lack of a police investigation. If the victim was a CIS woman, the police would have done more. They weren’t wrong.
She glanced around the field. It was innocuous. There were no signs that a brutal murder had ever taken place there. There was no blood, no missing penis, nothing. She was ready to leave when she spotted a tall, powerful man standing in the mouth of the alley, near the impromptu memorial, and looking at the field. His arms hung limply at his sides, his face was ashen and dark circles formed under his wet eyes. His hair was dishevelled, and in need of a comb. The man bent toward the memorial and reached for one of the weather-beaten photographs of Sandra Mack before quickly pulling his hand away, as though he’d just burned it on a stovetop.