Practice to Deceive

by David Housewright

  Sara turned back to her vanity and started applying black eyeliner on the lid of first her right, then her left eye.

  “I started cross-dressing when I was a kid,” she said, then turned to me. “I thought you might want to know but were too polite to ask.”

  I shrugged.

  Sara continued. “I was about twelve. Mom caught me trying on my sister’s miniskirt and sent me to a psychiatrist. The idea that I was nuts scared the hell outta me, so after that I worked real hard at being a macho boy: went out for hockey, picked a few fights, drank beer behind the Burger King. It must have worked, too, because I didn’t think much about cross-dressing until years later when I realized I was the only guy I knew who looked at the Victoria’s Secret catalog for the clothes. I would take binoculars to the Vikings game and scan the crowd. My buddies thought I was scoping out chicks. What I was really doing was looking at women to see what they were wearing, how they did their hair. I’d be in a club and I’d watch a woman walk by. My date would get all hot and bothered. ‘Why are you looking at other women?’ she’d want to know. I’d say I was just admiring her dress, or her shoes. My date would accuse me of lying, but I wasn’t.

  “Anyway, after Mom and Dad gave me my first computer, I began to surf the Internet and I found a news group devoted to cross-dressers. I started lurking, reading the messages they posted. After a while I realized I was one of them.

  “Eventually, I found myself,” Sara added. “It didn’t happen right away. I purged over and over again, throwing out all my clothes, every tube of lipstick, vowing never to cross-dress again. But like Popeye says, ‘I yam what I yam.’ And over time I became comfortable with it. It also became fun. A challenge. I began going out to ‘ladies’ night’ at the local bars to see if people could read me.”

  “Could they?” I asked.

  “At first, sure. But not so much after I became competent with makeup and clothes. A few of the more observant women will know I’m a man. Men almost never do. But kids? The younger ones always seem to figure it out instantly; I’ll be damned if I know how.”

  Sara pushed herself away from the vanity and returned to the suit she had tossed on the bed. She picked it up by the hanger and examined it carefully.

  “I’m not gay, I’m not a transsexual—very few crossdressers are,” Sara said. “I’m not a drag queen or a female impersonator. I’m just a guy who likes to dress in women’s clothing. What do you think of this?” she asked, holding the suit up for me to see.

  “I like it.”

  “You don’t think the skirt is too short?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “I used to wear a lot of short skirts,” Sara told me. “But then I started to think, Hey, I’m not a teenager anymore.”

  Sara pulled on a floral print skirt, roses on a peach background. The solid peach jacket was shaped-to-the-body and cut to her hips. The shoulders were padded, the collar was rounded and six covered buttons closed the jacket from her waist to her throat. Sara tousled her hair, then returned to the vanity for pearl drop earrings and a pair of strappy sandals with two-inch heels. With the earrings firmly attached to her lobes and the sandals on her feet, she moved to a full-length mirror. She turned this way and that, smoothing the skirt, adjusting the jacket, admiring herself. Then she turned to me.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  I couldn’t answer. My mouth was hanging open in disbelief. Backlit by the huge factory windows, beatified by the light shining through her golden hair, Sara resembled an actress in a beer commercial, the one where all the men stop and stare when she walks into the room. And the sight left me feeling both dizzy and slightly nauseous, like I had just ridden the double Ferris wheel at the Minnesota State Fair on an empty stomach. I couldn’t get past the idea that if I had not witnessed the metamorphosis myself, I would be just like the other dolts she deceived on ladies’ night, buying her drinks and claiming I had been looking for a woman like her all my life.

  While Sara hunted for a suitable handbag, I stood at the steel door, waiting. She stopped at her computer setup, opened a drawer, and withdrew a black cellular telephone.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the phone. “If you want to talk to me or make any other calls you don’t want traced, use this. If it rings, don’t answer it. If I want to speak with you, I’ll let it ring three times, hang up, wait exactly sixty seconds, then call again.”

  I took the phone, examined it, and slid it into my jacket pocket.

  “How …?” I asked.

  Sara looped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and stepped through the doorway. “I commandeered a few cellular phone circuits that I use on special occasions.”

  “Sara,” I said, “you scare me.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, darling.…”

  SARA TOOK IT easy on me, ordering the lobster salad instead of the lobster. Several men swiveled in their chairs as she walked past, gave her the once-over as we ate, and smiled at her. I wondered if they could read her, wondered if they could read me. After lunch we parted on the sidewalk just outside the restaurant’s door. I offered Sara my hand, but she hugged my shoulder instead. I don’t know what I would have done if she had kissed me.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said smiling, fluttering her fingers in good-bye.

  When I turned, I found a cabbie leaning against his blue and white, watching us. He nodded with approval.

  “What the hell are you looking at?!” I wanted to know.

  FIVE

  I RETURNED TO my office, made a pot of French almond roast with the Mr. Coffee that sits on top of the small refrigerator I keep stocked with Summit Ale and Dr Pepper, and poured a healthy cup. It was one-thirty by the time I powered up my PC and began the tedious chore of dragging Levering Field’s name through the various data banks that were available to me, compiling a dossier that would help in my assault on him.

  Turned out he’d attended the same high school as my wife—Irondale in New Brighton. So had his wife, Amanda, only her last name was Meyer back then. He’d been cocaptain of the football team; she, homecoming queen. Figures. They graduated the year before my wife enrolled; he went on to the University of Minnesota, and she attended the all-female College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. They were married two years after receiving their degrees. Two years later they had a child, Emily Elizabeth. She was sixteen now.

  I kept searching: employment history, credit history (thirteen credit cards? Wow!), residences (they went from a $90,000 house to a $450,000 house in one jump), criminal record (none), medical records, school records (she was summa cum laude and a Phi Beta Kappa; he was lucky to have graduated), reading habits (she was a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club and The Literary Guild; he had subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Business Week).

  It was pushing four when I called it a day. By then I knew more about Levering and Amanda Field than I did about myself—more than enough information to proceed. God knew what Sara could add. I went back to the Mr. Coffee, warmed my cup, and while I sipped, I gazed out the window.

  Down on Hennepin Avenue a school bus was unloading senior citizens into an asphalt parking lot. The lot was all that was left of “Block E,” formerly the most notorious chunk of real estate in Minneapolis, a place of disreputable businesses, rough-and-tumble bars, peep shows, and sex-oriented bookstores and theaters that accounted for nearly twenty-five percent of all the crime in the city. It’d had everything: pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, strung-out addicts, and tourists, plenty of tourists, driving by with windows rolled up and car doors locked, trying to catch a glimpse of the dark side, “seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go,” as Paul Simon might sing.

  Block E had been a blight on the fair name of Minneapolis, the City Council claimed. Besides, they reckoned they were losing a shitload of convention business. So they did what any self-respecting, civic-minded governmental body would do. They bought all the buildings facing Hennepin Avenue between
Sixth and Seventh Streets and took a wrecking ball to them. Block E was reduced to a pile of rubble. And the businesses that had thrived there? They relocated to other parts of Minneapolis and her suburbs, redistributing sin throughout the greater metropolitan area, giving every neighborhood its fair share.

  Oh, well. I drained the coffee cup. That’s when I noticed the two window washers working out of a gondola suspended over the side of a building—Levering Field’s building.

  “Let the games, begin,” I said, smiling.

  WE WERE ON the roof. The window washers were stepping out of the gondola, securing their equipment. They were surprised to see me up there; they rarely get visitors fifty floors above the earth. I flashed them a phony badge and ID card I had made up. “Parker, IRS,” I announced.

  They looked at each other, then at me.

  “We didn’t do anything,” one of them said. The other shook his head.

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Then, what do you want?”

  “Gentlemen, let me buy you a beer.”

  We retired to a pub down the street. I sprung for three Summit Ales, my favorite beer, brewed in St. Paul, my hometown.

  “This is good,” the one named Sid announced. He had never tasted it before, usually going with a less expensive brand.

  “What’d I say?” asked the window washer named Bob. “Top-of-the-line brew. I buy it all the time when I go to the Saints baseball games.”

  “You a St. Paul Saints fan?” I asked.

  “Damn right. Seen every home game since they started the Northern League. Got season tickets right behind home plate, about halfway up. You like your baseball, you gotta go with the minor leagues; forget those spoiled brats in the bigs.”

  As much as I loved the Show, it was hard to argue with him. Especially since the strike. I changed the subject.

  “Tell me, gentlemen, how much money do you make a year?”

  Again they looked at each other, then back at me.

  “I made twenty-seven thousand last year,” Sid confessed.

  “Twenty-seven thousand?” I was genuinely surprised.

  “I made about the same,” Sid added, on the defensive now. “People think we make a lot of money, because we work high. But we only get thirteen dollars an hour.”

  Thirteen dollars an hour? You couldn’t get me up there for less than a thousand. “Gentlemen, you are grossly underpaid,” I told them.

  “Then why pick on us?” asked Bob. “We’re just little guys. Why don’t you pick on some big guys for a change?”

  “Yeah,” Sid added.

  I put my hands up, showing that they were empty—the universal sign for peace.

  “That’s why I’m here. There’s a millionaire named Levering Field with an office on the thirty-fourth floor of the building you’re working on. We want to put some pressure on him, send him a message.”

  “Yeah?” Sid asked.

  “How would you two like to make five hundred dollars doing a small job for your government, two-fifty each?”

  THE NEXT MORNING Levering Field found the word REPENT painted on the outside of his office window. Of course, from his side of the glass it was spelled TNEPER, but what the hell.

  THE MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN behind the counter read the ad back to me:

  PROFESSIONAL

  Corporate SWM 45 offers emotionally mature, affectionate, attractive, sensuous woman a relationship of mutual respect and physical pleasure. I am kind, handsome, financially secure, and extremely generous.

  #11789B

  “Sounds good,” I admitted.

  “The first twenty words are twenty-five cents each, the rest are fifty-five,” the woman explained. “That comes to nine dollars and forty-five cents. Now, Mr. Field, we can hold the responses in a PO box here for you to retrieve, or we can forward them to your home for the cost of mailing.”

  “Send them to my house,” I said, giving her Levering Field’s address.

  “YEAH, THIS IS Levering Field,” I said, speaking through Sara’s cell phone. “Levering, yeah … LEVERING … Huh? … Problem is I got mice all over the fucking place. When can you send out an exterminator?… No, I can’t hang around my house all day, I work for a living.… Saturday’s good.… No, I don’t mind paying extra as long as I get rid of these goddamn rodents.… See you Saturday, then.”

  LEVERING FIELD LIVED two blocks from Eastcliff, the residence of the president of the University of Minnesota, located in a posh neighborhood on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi River. His was a tall redbrick house on a corner; the front door faced one street, his garage the other. Ivy grew on the brick. The lawn was green but spotty; it hadn’t recovered yet from the winter. On a thin stake pounded into the lawn was a sign. I read it carefully with a pair of Bushnell 7X25 binoculars I keep in the glove compartment of my car. The sign said THIS PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY TOTAL SECURITY, INC. I cursed. Unlike most home security firms, these guys actually knew what they were doing. Oh, well. I hadn’t planned on B and E anyway. Instead, I sat in my car across the street with a universal remote garage door opener, working the code, trying to find the right combination that would open Field’s door and set off the burglar alarms.

  As I worked the switches, I caught a glimpse of a St. Paul Police Department squad car in my rearview mirror. It was approaching fast from behind. I was seized with panic for a moment, but started to breathe again when the squad sped past me, pulling into Field’s driveway. The car contained a single officer and a woman. The officer opened the back door, and the woman slid out. She was young, I figured about sixteen, and very attractive beneath her grunge-style clothes—dark eyes, auburn hair. I looked at her through the binoculars. It was the teenager in the picture on Field’s desk. My research had told me her name was Emily.

  Immediately, the back door of the house opened, and another woman ran out, rushing to the car. She was an older version of the teenager—same height, same color hair, but prettier by my way of thinking. I assumed she was Levering’s wife, Emily’s mother, Amanda.

  “What happened? Are you all right?” she asked the teenager. I read the words off her lips more than heard them. Emily pushed past her and went into the house, slamming the door behind her. That I heard loud and clear.

  Amanda turned to the officer. She kept shaking her head as he spoke, finally holding it in both hands and turning away. The officer laid a hand on her shoulder and spoke some more. She nodded, smiled, offered her hand in thanks. The officer shook it, then retreated to his squad car. I ducked down when he backed out of the driveway and drove off. Amanda returned to the house. The sky was darkening, and she turned on several lights. I watched her move from one window to the next, then she disappeared. Finally, a light on the top floor was lit, but it was behind a translucent curtain that I could not see beyond.

  I continued to work the code until I hit upon the correct combination. The garage door opened slowly, rose halfway, then stopped. I pressed the button a half dozen times, but the door would not budge. Then I noticed the lights in the house were off.

  “Sara,” I said aloud. “You’re beautiful.”

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN completely when I reached my home in Roseville. I turned on my inside garage light to see by and rummaged through the clutter that had accumulated on my work shelf. It took a few minutes to find what I was searching for—a Havahart trap. I wiped away the cobwebs as best I could with a rag and left the trap on my picnic table. I unlocked the back door of my house and went inside. A moment later I returned with a handful of apple chunks I stole from my pet rabbit, Ogilvy. I put the fruit inside the trap and set it in the center of my backyard.

  Usually at this time of year my yard would have been covered with snow. But the Twin Cities was currently experiencing its warmest March in decades. Temperatures were hovering around the mid-fifties, and all the snow had melted. Still, only a visitor would mistake it for an early spring. The natives fully realized we could be back to freezing temperatures in no time; few of us were con
fident enough to put away our snow blowers.

  I went into the house, cooked up some New England clam chowder, fed Ogilvy—carrots, not chowder—and watched hockey on ESPN2. I debated calling my father, giving him a status report, letting him know how much he was in to me for expenses, but decided against it. He could wait.

  SIX

  THE NEXT MORNING I called a buddy who works out of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department to ask him if he could get Levering Field’s license plate number and the make and model of his car from DMV. I could have done it myself, but it would have taken twenty-four hours, and I didn’t care to wait. He called me back with the information fifteen minutes later, and I made a note to send him twenty-five bucks—in cash, of course.

  I took the chance that Field had a contract with the parking ramp beneath his building. He did. I found his BMW on the third level between two pillars. He’d probably picked the spot so no one could ding his doors. I drove beyond the BMW to the first empty stall, parked, opened my trunk, and withdrew the live trap. The squirrel inside the trap was not happy.

  I carried the trap to the BMW as nonchalantly as possible and ducked down behind the pillar on the passenger side. I used a rubber wedge and a “slim jim” to pop the lock. Opening the door, I freed the squirrel in the back seat and closed and relocked the door. I was back in my car and heading for the exit in three minutes flat.

  I WAS ON Sixth Street, heading east toward the I-94 entrance ramp when the cell phone startled me by ringing. It rang three times then stopped. One minute later it rang again.

  “Yes?” I said tentatively

  “Hi, Taylor, it’s Sara.”

  “Sara, my love,” I said before I realized I was saying it. “How are you this fine day?”

  “Swell, thank you. And yourself?”

  “Great. Hey, you turned off Field’s electricity. That was wonderful.”