by Kris Ripper
“Shit. Sorry. You’re right. Fuck, you’re right, I’m sorry. And I know that. But her girlfriend’s leaving for college soon and I’m worried that she’s going to be totally isolated after that.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if I can switch pronouns outside of class, and I know for sure Merin would kill me if I tried to do it in class. Damn, this is complicated.”
“Well, I’ll keep my eyes open when I go down for this interview,” I said. “And whatever you’re already doing is good, Jaq. I’m sure this kid knows they can talk to you if they need to.” I wasn’t sure I’d have the balls to be out if I taught high school, but Jaq was not only out, she ran the Gay-Straight Alliance.
“I hope so, but I doubt it. Hell, I really am sorry for treating you like some kind of trans whisperer, Ed.”
I waved it off. “It’s fine. I’m not offended or anything. I just don’t have any big wisdom to share. Sorry.”
She leaned in to kiss my cheek. “Gotta go. I can see Hannah meaningfully up-ending her wineglass from here.”
“Have fun.”
“You too, kid. And don’t worry about Alisha. She will totally be back. Trust me.”
“Thanks.” God, now half the damn bar thought I was mooning over a woman I totally wasn’t mooning over.
I settled back in to drink my beer and pointedly not-moon.
Dark. Dark and humming. Hummm. Hummm. Wait, no, that was vibrating. What the hell?
I groped for my phone, which I always turned facedown at night so the notifications light wouldn’t keep me up. I blinked and aimed a finger at the green Answer slider.
“Hello?”
“Masiello. What’re you, sleeping?”
“Who is this?”
But when he laughed, I knew.
“Joe Rodriguez. Sorry, kid, did I interrupt a pleasant dream?”
“I think I was in a way deeper sleep stage than that. Uh. Joe, what’s up?”
“Potter said you want to do things that matter and I can feel free to use you, so I’m using you. Get your ass out of bed. There’s a body at the waterfront.”
There’s a body at the waterfront.
I scrambled out of bed, nearly dropped the phone, and managed to turn the lamp on. “A body?”
“Yep. And since you volunteered to do unpaid overtime in the interests of reporting the news, buddy, you get to be my assistant. Two creams, one sugar, and I’ll meet you in the parking lot. Be quick about it. I’m not waiting longer than five minutes.”
Click.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked my empty room. Last night’s beer weighed heavily in my limbs, but a quick impromptu drunk test assured me I was safe to drive (thank god). Still: what the hell just happened?
Also, if this was going to be happening more often, I’d need to have a work outfit and go bag ready at all times. The thought thrilled me a little, and I couldn’t tamp down the excitement, even when I realized it basically hinged on people dying. What else would get Joe Rodriguez out of bed at— Seriously? It was just before 5 a.m.? No wonder it was still dark out.
I tugged on jeans, shoved myself into a binder, and pulled a dark shirt over it. Black? Dark blue? I had no idea. I covered that with a sweatshirt (he’d said the waterfront, right?) and grabbed my keys.
One creamer, two sugars? Two creamers, one sugar? I couldn’t remember, so I stopped by the gas station and picked up one of each, then promptly forgot which was which. Fuck it. Joe could bring his own damn coffee if he wanted perfection.
For a second I thought I’d beaten him there, but when I pulled in to a space right outside the cop cars I saw him talking to an officer I didn’t know. Not that I knew a lot of La Vista cops or anything, but the handful of them who work the high school have nicknames like “Butt Pads” and “Carrot Top.” This was just some nondescript white guy, younger than Joe but older than me.
I walked up with the coffees in my hands, only at that second realizing I’d forgotten to bring my active notebook. Or a pen. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Hey, Ed. Officer Smith, this is Ed Masiello, one of our new guys.”
A year and a half and I was still a “new” guy. I withheld a sigh, handed one of the coffees to Joe, and shook hands with the cop. “Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, you too, kid. Stick with Joe, okay? And don’t look too closely at the body if you’re gonna puke.”
“That bad, Jay?” Joe asked.
“She’s pretty busted up, yeah. Nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“We’ll see you out there.”
The cop nodded and started walking toward the pier. I watched long enough to see him split off to the left, but Joe snapped in my face to get my attention. I was ready to be irritated, but he wasn’t smiling.
“He’s right. That’s a dead human being out there, and we’ll probably make indecent jokes about it later, because that’s what you do, but this is your first and he’s right, Ed. You don’t have to look. You got nothing to fuckin’ prove, not to me, not to anyone. Got it?”
I swallowed. “Got it.”
“Good. Thanks for the coffee, though I was joking.”
“I don’t mind stopping.”
“Can’t help but see you got no paper with you to write on.”
Shit. “I’m trying to keep more notes on my phone so I can use the computer to search for them later,” I lied. I hated digital notes. Everything made more sense when I could see it written down in my own handwriting.
“Whippersnapper.” He cuffed the back of my head. “Let’s go. Take a walk if you need to.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Sure, kid. That is what literally all of us say. Come on.”
I didn’t quite follow him. We walked side by side and I tried not to look like I was copying Joe’s moves exactly. He’d set his face in a deliberate, stiff expression, whether because we were walking out to see a dead body or because of the biting wind off the Bay, I didn’t know. I tugged my sweatshirt in tighter and tried to remember where I put the app on my phone that was supposed to be good for taking notes.
The Bay lapped at the rocks below us, inky dark still, and San Francisco was mostly an eerie glow of fog across the water.
Easy to tell where the body was. Cops were grouped around it and caution tape was already up, strung from the low wooden fence at the edge of the path all the way around some bushes, ending at the rocks. La Vista’s waterfront is far from a thing of beauty; they managed to maintain the jogging path pretty well, but years of litter and pollution showed on the rocks and sparse vegetation that separated it from the water. As we approached, a white plastic grocery bag snagged on a spindly branch, waving in the wind like a flag of surrender.
Then my eye was caught by something else, also white, also highlighted in the low lights of the parking lot, still visible in the distance, still casting a mute glow in the gloom.
A couple of the cops greeted Joe with “Rodriguez” or “Hey, Joe.” One of them said, “I didn’t know old men like you got up this early in the morning for work.”
“Well, I was pretty sick of boning your sister, anyway, so the timing was good, Johnson.”
“Ohhh hell no. You did not just say that about my sister.”
I tuned out the banter. We weren’t the only ones standing at the caution tape. A few people who looked like joggers, one or two other people dressed like I was, in dark clothes and hoodies.
I forced my eyes back to the white bundle on the sand, forced my brain to sort it into a person: those were legs, one foot missing a shoe, and that was an arm, and that—that must be a head, though it was hard to tell if the person was face-up or -down.
A free-standing light came on, and I saw her, not as pieces, but as a whole.
Honey. I knew that dress. I’d seen her a few hours ago, wearing a white wedding dress. I bit down hard on my tongue as a cop knelt beside her body.
“Think we have a bride here? Maybe too old, though.”
“Old people get married too, Bolshov!
”
“Christ, really? Murdered on her wedding night? I’m taking odds it’s the husband.”
“No fucking pockets, though.”
They rifled through her dress searching for identification, and I almost shouted at them to stop. They had to stop. Stop touching her! But I didn’t say anything, just watched their hands and the way she didn’t respond, the way she didn’t slap their hands away, the way a breeze picked up her veil and blew it back at a cop, making him scramble away.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder and I almost screamed.
“Look away.”
“No, I—”
“Damn it, Masiello, this isn’t a fucking competition. Don’t look if you don’t want to see it.”
“Her.” Could I be wrong? “I think I know her.”
“Jesus, Ed, you know a lady who got married last night and ended up dead this morning? Come on, man, I’m beginning to think this was a bad idea—”
“If it’s her, she has a heart tattoo on her ring finger.” I turned to look at him, keeping my voice as steady as I could. “Can I ask them?”
“Shit. Hey, Baker.”
One of the cops glanced over, an older black guy with broad shoulders. “Busy, Rodriguez.”
“My colleague wants to know if she’s got a tattoo on her ring finger.”
That got his attention. He stalked over to us, and I didn’t let myself feel intimidated by his looming since he was doing it so deliberately.
“Who’s this?”
“Ed Masiello, Tony Baker.”
I shook his hand, barely feeling the sensation. My fingers were numb. “That looks like Honey Jansen.”
“This Honey have some reason to be in a wedding dress?” he shot back, and all the cop shows I’d ever watched hadn’t quite prepared me to face a real cop, with a real question.
“It was— There was— There’s a club, on Steerage. Club Fred’s. It ran a theme night last night and Honey came in a wedding dress. As a . . . costume. Kind of.”
“The gay club,” he said, staring me down.
Fuck. Not that I was in the closet, exactly, but that my queerness no longer lined up with people’s expectations. “Yeah.”
“So this Honey’s a lesbian?”
“No. No, she’s trans.” I held his gaze, wishing like hell I didn’t have to explain. Wondering what the hell Joe was thinking right now.
“Trans. As in, she used to be a man and now she’s a woman.”
Probably this wasn’t the time to get into an argument about the permanence and retroactive nature of trans identity. “She transitioned like twenty-five years ago.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last night.”
“What time, Masiello?”
You see people on those real-life police shows stumble over their words and you think maybe they’re on drugs, or maybe it’s a sign they’re hiding something. But I wasn’t hiding anything and I was completely sober, and I still had trouble getting my brain to count back in hours to figure out when I’d left Fred’s, and when I’d last seen Honey.
“Right after midnight. That’s when I went home, and I said good-bye to her before I left.” Oh god. I’d said good-bye to her. She’d kissed my cheek and told me she just bought a few skeins of yarn that would look fantastic on me and I should look forward to getting a scarf from her before winter.
I took a step back, forgetting about Joe, and Detective Baker, and my job. Honey was lying there, tangled on the rocks. Her heavy dress rippled in the wind, but her veil blew up into the air in a way that was so undignified it was almost offensive. She’d kissed my cheek. I could still feel the warm imprint of her lips, and smell the Elizabeth Taylor perfume she always wore.
“If it’s her, she has a tattoo on her ring finger of a heart,” Joe said.
Baker grunted and moved toward the body. I watched him crouch on the rocks, watched him lift her left hand toward the light. She was stiff but still movable, so rigor mortis hadn’t made her into a grim statue yet. Which meant she’d only been dead a few hours.
I knew by the way he looked up at me that the hand he was holding had a heart tattoo on its ring finger. A heart that Honey had once confided belonged to her first love, a man who’d died in the AIDS wards in the eighties, holding her hand.
This time I did turn away, abruptly sad. Sad for the man whose heart that was, sad for Honey, who’d died without anyone holding her hand.
“All right, drink your goddamn coffee. It helps, Ed, drink.”
I raised the cup mechanically to my lips and sipped. No longer scalding, but too sweet. I sipped again and wondered if I was going to cry, or if I even could.
Honey, with two skeins of yarn at home that would never become a scarf.
“Good friend of yours?” Joe asked, and this time when he slammed his hand roughly on my shoulder he left it there.
“No. Not exactly. It’s hard to explain.” Friend? Maybe. Mentor, more like. Honey, who’d been trans back when it meant you could be institutionalized for it, who’d said doing drag was the worst thing she’d ever done because it was like being pressed up against the window of womanhood without ever getting to go inside. “I didn’t know her that well, but she . . . took me under her wing, I guess.” Why was I saying this to Joe? I’d presented as male the entire time I’d been at the Times-Record, and I was pretty sure no one remembered me from when I interned there in college, or at least they hadn’t put the pieces together.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Sorry I called you for this.”
“No, it’s okay.” I made myself turn toward her again. Not Honey, but her body. “Maybe it’ll help them figure out who did this if they know her name right away. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, kid. Listen, I gotta stay here, but you should head home. Take a shower, throw a little whiskey in your coffee, take it easy, all right? Hey, Baker! Ask Ed your questions so he can leave.”
I wanted to argue with him, but it was easier not to. Baker sent Smith over, and word was getting around, because Smith didn’t meet my eyes as he asked me about Honey. Did he know she was trans? Did he suspect I was? Probably that was paranoid. Maybe I shouldn’t have said how long ago she’d transitioned. That was random. Cis people don’t keep track of stuff like that.
I gave him her phone number, told him I thought she’d lived in the nicer part of the east side, but I wasn’t sure where. I gave him Zane’s and Jaq’s numbers too, so they could start narrowing down the timeline of when Honey left the club. I listened to my voice and paged through my phone contacts and I must have been functioning, processing his questions, but I couldn’t remember them seconds later.
When Joe Rodriguez shoved me in the direction of the parking lot with one final pat on the shoulder, I went without a backward glance.
I shouldn’t have been able to sleep with all that coffee in my system, and the lingering afterimage of Honey’s body in my brain, but maybe unconsciousness was the way my mind tried to protect me from feeling it too much. I climbed into bed after taking off shoes and pants, leaving my hood tightly pulled over my head, and crashed hard.
Hours later I woke up. The room was bright. I was sweating in my clothes. It took an entire minute and a half to remember about Honey.
I stayed in bed the rest of the weekend.
Monday morning Togg posted a long, in-depth exposé-flavored article about how La Vista PD was hiding a killer who chose trans and gender-bending targets. He covered Honey, and the drag king Mistah Olmes, and went on to cite a history of local cops dismissing, mocking, or allegedly assaulting trans victims of violent crimes. When he was done nailing the police, he broadened his scope to include the media, news outlets, and queer community itself, which he accused of “ignoring at best and smothering at worst the complaints of our most vulnerable members, especially when they aren’t photogenic or unthreatening.”
It was a brutal piece, and I read it with a sick lump in my gut. Not because I disagreed with it
, but because so much of it was true. The cops did regularly harass trans people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—pass as cis. The community that arguably should have protected and nurtured its trans members was often scornful or pitying, with some of it going so far as to start a petition to drop the “T” in “LGBT,” as if they could divorce themselves from us by a slight change in branding. As if straight people would like them more if we weren’t lingering on the fringes, complicating matters.
Togg’s words were aggressive, his tone imperious, his disdain riding the surface of something that felt a lot more like rage. I didn’t think he was trans. It took my breath away that he’d even noticed all of this shit going on around him if he didn’t have to. I couldn’t escape it; a stranger who called himself “the original gay guy” probably could have gone his whole life without sparing a thought for people like Honey. Or me.
The comments section was, as expected, a clusterfuck. I didn’t know why I was reading it except that I wasn’t done with my coffee yet, and Caspar was late to work, so I didn’t have to worry about being jeered for reading trash.
Togg’s comments sections are often the kind that keep good people from opening their mouths, but this article had already gathered, in the six and a half hours since he’d published it, some real doozies.
SoHomo argued that “the trans minority should just shut the fuck up and be happy anyone’s paying attention to them at all.” He further theorized that Togg himself must be trans “or why the fuck do you care?” Which I would have found offensive, if I hadn’t had basically the same exact thought.
SoHomo annoyed me for about fifteen seconds, until I hit a few way more horrifying comments along the lines of “she probably looked like a hooker and deserved it” about Honey, and “Olmes was a dick and had a beating coming to her” about Melissa Loren.
Jesus Christ. People were sick.
I should have quit there, but I didn’t.
On the other side of the coin, a few people claiming to be trans wanted to make it clear that “transgender” and “drag” were not the same things, and criticized Togg for his apparent misunderstanding. Even though he’d gone out of his way to point out that the nuances of gender, while at least acknowledged by people inside the community, would be less clear to someone targeting it from outside.