Barbie’s smile evaporated and she looked down in disgust. “Damn feet,” she said. “A dead giveaway. Feet, calf muscles, hands. But what can you do? Hasn’t kept me from getting dates.”
Suddenly it came to me in a blinding flash:
The impossibly tiny hips.
The muscled legs.
The gravity-defying butt.
“You’re a he!” I said, gaping at Barbie, even as the burning in my side increased.
“I’m in transition,” she said. “I think it’s politically correct to refer to me as she.”
“Ms. . . . Sergei Pavlov?”
Barbie nodded, the tip of her tongue poking through her teeth, and she gave me a sick little giggle.
Terry and I looked at each other, dumbfounded.
“But you have no accent,” Terry said.
“Do I need one?” Barbie cooed in her dolly voice. Then she pitched it low with disdain. “I’ve been in this country since I was ten, stupid.”
“But, Tatiana—”
“Is fresh off the boatsky . . . Backstabbing little user. She dumped me like a hot potato when I got arrested.”
“I don’t think you can talk about using, Barbie,” I said in a low voice, risking her wrath in the hopes of throwing her off-balance psychologically. “Nor about stabbing. You used Hattrick to give you a new identity, then you killed him. You used Binion to keep you out of prison, and then you killed him, too.”
“Oh, good guess,” Barbie said. “Give the girl a cigar!”
“Jesus,” Terry said. “What did Janice do to deserve her fate?”
“I used her to get to you, obviously. Poor thing didn’t want to do it, but I had her by the short hairs. Too bad I didn’t give you enough morphine to do the job—but as you probably know, I don’t have any real medical training.”
“You killed Mario, too?” I said, desperate to keep Barbie occupied until I could conceive of a method of escape.
She smiled at the memory, licking her frosted lips. “I called him, pretending to be Tatiana. I asked him to meet me at her apartment for a little cerveza. He was so hot for her, I knew he’d walk right into my trap.”
“Men are so predictable, aren’t they?” I said, forcing a sardonic laugh.
Barbie’s smile faltered—had she just been insulted?
“Why did you kill Suzie Magnuson?” Terry asked her, before she could react to the insult.
Barbie blinked and shook her head. “Suzie Magnuson? Who the hell is that?”
“Didn’t you steal the Bacon?” I said, amazed that I bothered to ask in light of the slightly more pressing issue of a knife in my gut.
“You’re going to die and you’re asking me about bacon?”
Terry and I looked at each other, baffled.
“Look, if we’re going to die, you could at least tell us why,” Terry said.
“As if you don’t know!” Barbie said. “Just tell me where it is!”
“Where what is?”
“Don’t play innocent!” She slammed me against the wall again and poked the blade in another millimeter. I cried out and sucked in my abs, flattening my internal organs against my spine. “Lenore had it and you worked for her,” she said, scowling at me. “You’ve been snooping around ever since she died. Were you going to try to blackmail me with it next?”
“Please,” I begged, “if we knew what you were looking for—”
“The skin!” Barbie screamed. “And don’t talk to me about pigskin!”
“What? Football?” Terry said, now utterly confused.
Barbie rolled her eyes. “You idiots. My skin. The trimmings Janice took from my cosmetic surgery and gave to your little friend Lenore, who tried to blackmail me with them!”
“Ohhhhh.” Terry slapped her forehead. “That’s the mystery object?”
“They threatened to go to the FBI with it. The DNA is the only way anyone can identify me.”
“Wrong, Barbie,” I said evenly. “They can identify you with fingerprints.”
She ran a smooth finger down the side of my cheek. “Don’t have any. Hattrick burned them off.” She dug the tip of her nail into my skin.
I saw Terry edging sideways out of the room.
Barbie saw it, too. “Don’t get cute!” she yelled, and in a flash, she’d moved around and grabbed me from behind, pressing her rock-hard breasts into my back. Her left hand was across my chest, the blade of the knife against my right jugular vein. “One more step and I’ll slice your sister’s neck!”
“You’re going to, anyway,” Terry said with regret. “Might as well salvage something of the gene pool.”
Barbie dug the blade in deeper. I felt warm blood trickle down my skin.
“Terry!” I yelled. “Quit messing around!”
She froze in place.
“Where is the skin? I promise I’ll let you go,” Barbie said seductively, “if you tell me where it is.”
Terry stared at Barbie for a moment, then shook her head, moving toward us with her hands tensed, menace flaring in her eyes. “No you won’t, Barbie. You can’t afford to let us go. You’ve killed everyone who knows who you really are, and now we know, too.” She gave Barbie a disgusted sneer. “And you’ll like doing it, won’t you? You love butchering people. You’re a ruthless, psychotic, killer bimbo!”
“I am not a bimbo,” Barbie snarled. “I’m a babe!”
“Gonna kill Tatiana, too?” I said, picking up on Terry’s accusatory tone, trusting that she had a plan. “Going to destroy all that beauty just because she rejected you?”
A pitiful wail escaped Barbie’s throat.
“She left me just when I needed her most. Faithless bitch!”
“Who’s the bitch now, Sergei?” Terry said, advancing on us with her eyes locked on Barbie’s. “Tatiana fell in love with a man. She married you as a man. And you cut off your manhood to escape prosecution!”
“I’m still a man!” Barbie shrieked. “Still a man in the only way that counts, the rest of it’s reversible!”
It was suddenly clear to me what Terry had in mind.
“So you’ve still got your package!” Terry yelled.
I swung up my leg in a balletic lift to expose his groin, and in a seamlessly choreographed move, Terry whipped her boot up between Sergei’s shapely legs and kicked his nuts all the way into his throat.
He howled in pain, the knife jerking away from my neck, his arm releasing my chest. I dived away from him and tried to run, but he was right behind me. He grabbed my jacket and yanked me back. I brought my heel scraping down on his shin and he cried out, falling backward to the floor, releasing me as he went.
Terry and I both raced to the front door. Terry fumbled with the lock, then threw open the door and catapulted herself onto the porch. I tried to follow but Sergei grabbed my ankle. I tripped and slammed down hard on the concrete, breaking the fall with my hand. I heard my wrist snap and screamed as excruciating pain shot up my arm.
I tried to drag myself forward with my good hand. Terry grabbed my arm and pulled, while Sergei tried to stab at my leg with the knife, missing me by centimeters. Finally Terry sprang forward and clambered across my back, having no other way to get to Sergei, and before he could stand up, she hauled back with her boot, kicking him square in the face.
His head jerked back with a sickening cracking sound, and he let out a cry like a wounded animal.
Clutching my broken wrist to my bloodstained shirt, I managed to stumble off the porch. Terry raced to my side and I fell into her, dazed and unsure what to do next. Then I heard movement behind me and turned around to see Sergei, wild-eyed and grimacing in rage. He held the knife in the air as he lunged toward us through the door, screaming, “Yahhhhhhhhh!”
I froze. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I heard someone yelling, “Freeze!”
Little pleaser that I am, I tend to follow orders without thinking—especially those shouted by someone in uniform.
The someone in uniform was Dinah!
I looked up and saw the knife gripped in Sergei’s hand, coming straight for my heart. I tried to unfreeze, to lurch away from the steel blade, but my legs were locked in terror.
There was a concussive blast next to my ear. A gunshot.
Blood spread like paintball splatter on Sergei’s chest.
The world of motion slowed to a crawl as he hung suspended in air, knife held aloft for endless seconds . . . then time sped up again and he collapsed on the grass, his startled blue eyes staring up into mine.
“Tattttiiiii—” he moaned, expelling his final breath.
And Sergei Pavlov died from the bullet that had pierced his saline breast.
We remained in shock for several moments, our adrenaline-drenched brains trying to bring things into focus. Dinah was the first to speak.
“That was close!”
I was the second.
“Jesus Christ!”
I looked down at my blood-soaked shirt and started to snivel. Shaking, the tears coming, I grabbed at the front of it, trying to rip it from my body. I suddenly couldn’t stand the sight of blood, even though it was my own. I tore it off, buttons flying, and threw it to the grass.
Dinah took off her down vest and put it over my shoulders. I tried to thank her but my teeth were chattering so hard I thought they would splinter. My wrist was swollen to three times its normal size. I couldn’t stop shivering.
“You girls okay?” Dinah said, checking us over with practiced eyes.
“Yeah,” Terry said, putting an arm around me.
“I think my wrist is broken,” I managed to say.
“Help is on the way,” Dinah said.
Then she ran into the house to call the cavalry.
The paramedics came and shot me up with something that made me feel warm and at peace. And happy, quite happy to be sitting inside the ambulance being attended to, while I experienced my own kaleidoscopic version of reality.
Time became flexible. It stretched out and contracted as the events of the past few days swirled in front of my eyes, merging with the current moment in a kind of impressionistic foreign movie.
One minute I was shrieking at Dinah’s cleaver, then the EMTs were putting a temporary splint on my wrist. I zoomed in on an image of Hattrick with hypodermic needles poking from his eye sockets, then pulled back to a wide shot of Dinah draping a blanket over Terry’s shoulders.
I looked at Sergei’s corpse as they took it away and felt a surge of compassion for his ruined body, his wasted life. That had to be the drugs—how could I feel any human emotion for such a monster?
That’s what makes you human, said a voice inside my head.
But I had believed Dinah was the monster and I was so, so wrong. Where was she, anyway? I heaved my butt off the back of the ambulance and stumbled around looking for her. I had to thank her for saving my life.
I saw her deep in conversation with a handsome black man in street clothes. Maybe a detective, or a plainclothes cop.
I weaved my way over to them.
“How are you feeling, Kerry?” Dinah said. She pointed to the man. “This is my boyfriend, Dale.”
Her boyfriend? Now I knew I was hallucinating!
Terry appeared at my side. “Yeah,” she said, “we didn’t get to meet Dale earlier tonight because he was on duty at USC Medical.”
I gaped at the smiling man. “You’re a doctor?” I said, looking down at his size-ten running shoes.
“Pediatric nurse.”
“Oh.” I blinked a few hundred times. I think I may have drooled. Probably the drugs, but then again, it might just have been me.
“Dale and Dinah have been together since Tulsa,” Terry explained.
“We met at Oral Roberts U.,” Dinah said. “But we had to get away. They’re not too open-minded about mixed marriages in Oklahoma.”
My jaw started working seconds before any sound came out of my mouth. “You’re . . . married?”
“No, but he finally popped the question about ten minutes ago. I guess there’s nothing like a close call to bring out the commitment in a guy,” Dinah said, smirking. “And I owe it all to you two. Want to be my best maids?”
“Sure,” Terry said, speaking for both of us. “We’d be honored.”
I turned and saw her giving me a wry grin.
It occurred to me then that most people don’t ever really know what they look like. Oh sure, they see themselves from the same angle when they look in the bathroom mirror every morning, and sometimes they get a glimpse of themselves from the back in a dressing room mirror or at the beauty shop.
But only an identical twin knows for sure what she looks like from every possible angle, every moment of the day, in every state of dress or undress, with every conceivable facial expression.
Only an identical twin knows what it’s like to see her own face mocking her with her own smile. Her own eyes telling her that she’s been a complete horse’s ass.
Well you thought she was gay, too! I beamed to Terry.
“Too bad your family won’t be at the wedding,” I said, turning to Dinah. “How did Jonah die, anyway? Did he die as a baby?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Nah, he wrapped his pickup around a telephone pole about three years back. Drunk driving incident. Fortunately, he didn’t take anyone else with him.”
“I thought it was probably something like that,” I said.
But I didn’t give Terry the satisfaction of meeting her eyes again.
I heard later that Boatwright showed up after we’d left. He’d been at the scene of another homicide, and by the time he got to our house I’d already been taken to the hospital. They transported me in the ambulance and I begged them to play the siren even though it wasn’t an emergency. The driver finally relented and the Wheeeeeeeee! ricocheted insanely off the inside of my skull.
I waved out the back window to Terry. She was following in Dinah’s off-duty Nissan with Dinah, Dale, and the dogs. They were using the ambulance to run interference as we gunned it through red lights and past the cars that were stopped respectfully by the side of the road.
My wrist was X-rayed and set, the wound in my abdomen cleaned and stitched. The nice ER doctor gave me some pain medication to tide me over until I filled his prescription, but when we got outside, I opened up the vial and tossed the pills into the gutter.
“Are you crazy?” Terry said. “That’s gonna hurt like a mother later.”
“I’ll see what I can do with aspirin,” I said.
“Yeah, you talk big now.”
Dinah and Dale dropped us off at Reba’s at three o’clock in the morning. Reba and Robert had waited up for us, greeting us like conquering heroes despite the late hour. Reba broke out the Cristal Rosé ’95 and even poured a little for Robert, although he declined. He was still on his health kick, and he looked pretty good, considering.
He hadn’t had a heart attack, as it turned out, but had fainted from overexertion on the back lawn. He had some bruising on his chest from Sven’s resuscitation efforts, but was otherwise fine. The hospital had released him in the afternoon after giving him a few precautionary workups.
We told our story, and I think Robert was the most amused of all.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You, Kerry, suspected the lovelorn lesbian cop, who was in fact engaged to a black male nurse with size-ten feet, and you, Terry, suspected the Russian prescription drug kingpin, who unbeknownst to you was now a trannie named Barbie, who lunged at Kerry with a knife and was shot to death by said lady cop, who’d followed you home because she thought you were behaving suspiciously.”
“Right,” Terry said.
“And the extortion, how did that come in?”
“Lenore, Rini, and Mario were co-conspirators, blackmailing people in Beverly Hills,” I told him.
“But they weren’t very good at it,” Terry said. “They were still hard up for cash. Lenore was a patient and a customer
of Dr. Hattrick’s, and somehow she found out about his work on Sergei. So she leaned on Janice, who had assisted illegally during the operations, to take some of Sergei’s cutaway flesh. The doctor wouldn’t have noticed anything, he was way too stoned.”
“Had Sergei, you know . . . ?” Reba scissored two fingers through the air. “Snip, snip?”
“No. A lot of them never do,” Terry said knowledgeably. “They say they’re women trapped in men’s bodies, but when it comes right down to it—after they’ve gone through the breast augmentation, the electrolysis, the cheek implants, the shaving of the Adam’s apple and all of that—they don’t go for the cruelest cut. Can’t imagine life without their pal, One-eyed Jack.”
“So that was the ‘it’ Sergei was after?” Robert asked, wide-eyed. “His own tissue?”
I nodded and picked up the narrative. “Lenore and Mario had decided to go after this big fish, one big job that would send them to France in style. They put the screws to Sergei, threatening to expose his true identity to the FBI. He killed Mario right away and he probably would have killed Lenore, if she hadn’t saved him the trouble by having an aneurysm.”
“And why was Hugh Binion killed?” Reba asked.
Terry shrugged. “Probably because he knew Sergei’s true identity. Binion had sent him to Hattrick to get his face and gender changed in order to evade the authorities.”
“And how did Binion know Dr. Hattrick?” she wanted to know.
“Binion had represented Hattrick in an investigation by the medical board. He was probably in on the drug business, too. I guess it will all come out sooner or later.”
“My, what busy little bees!” Robert said. “Drugging and dealing and hacking and blackmailing!”
We all laughed.
“So who broke into Lenore’s?” Reba said.
“The selfsame drug lord, no doubt,” Robert said, “looking for his moltings.”
“Well,” Reba said, “I’m glad it’s all over. Though it’s been a most invigorating piece of business.” She winked at Eli who grinned back at her, completely besotted.
He lifted his champagne flute. “To Kerry—the best investigator I ever trained—and her baby sister!”
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 29