“Free,” she said. “Call me Free.” She drank her drink and said, “You have a lot of nerve, showing up here.”
I shrugged. “Free country, Free.” I put down six bucks and got three PBRs. “If you don’t want yours, I’ll drink all three. They’re free, Free! To Conner Kiernan!” Free just glared at me. Perez found the selection of booze on the bar back very interesting.
“So really, is this what happened: someone transitions, and a lesbian vigilante takes him out? That’s murder, and for reactionary reasons. Forget the cops; the community would tear this place apart and salt the earth.”
“You’re an idiot,” Free said. “I thought you were smart.”
“Yeah, college girl. The Great White Hope, smashing up downtown Oakland, like you even live there,” Perez said. “You ever even talk to a person of color before wrecking their neighborhood and bringing the cops down on ‘em. You ever talk to a cop about what you make us do?”
“You and I spoke twice,” I said. “If you hate me that much, you should have brained me when you had the chance.”
“You’re not the only one I should have brained,” Perez said, into her drink. She had a gimlet. Free was almost done with a ridiculous-looking cosmopolitan.
“So, Guy Fawkes was a woman. You know she wasn’t me. And you know who it is. So, who are you protecting?” Free threw a look at me. “You know who it is too,” I said to them both. “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.”
Perez snorted. “You’re paranoid. ‘Lesbian vigilantes.’ Is that what you learned at Smith College?” She got me. For a second, my mind spun. Was there a file on me, was my Facebook not locked down sufficiently well, did the cops—
“I went to Smith too,” Free said. So much for my poker face, two beers into the night. “I saw your name in the alumnae magazine, when did they did that article about Hotquilt.com.”
“Hey, I love Hotquilt.com,” the bartender interjected, leaning over the bar with a leer.
“Another cosmo, please” Free said. The bartender scowled but went to work at the other end of the bar.
“Sometimes detective work is easier than you think,” Free said.
“And sometimes it’s harder, because the answer doesn’t even fucking matter,” Perez said. Was she tearing up?
Perez knew Guy Fawkes, but couldn’t arrest her. So she was either a very powerful woman, or Perez would expose herself somehow by bringing the woman in. Or both. Conner Kiernan—he’d come from money. Guy Fawkes was a woman. That night…
“Okay,” I said. I opened the third PBR. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I have some issues of my own to work out. Internalized misogyny and sapphophobia. Sapphobia. Is that a word?” I covered my mouth and burped a bit. “Sorry, a little drunk. Here’s what I think happened now.
“Officer Perez…” I was surprised to hear myself saying officer. And even more surprised a moment later when I actually twitched my fingers into air quotes—another thing I usually hate. “You’re a ‘good cop.’ Why else does a Latina queer put up with OPD bullshit? You even help the ladies out during a riot, pretending to beat the shit out of them so they can get away, or regroup, or at least spend the night in jail without bleeding into their hands and begging for a doctor.
“But not everyone’s so good as you, eh? You did you bippity-boppity-bomp trick on the wrong person. A woman, a tall woman like me. She wasn’t there to rio—protest though. She wanted to kill Conner Kiernan.
“Conner was trans. And rich. And living on the street. Abandoned by his parents, cut off from most of the money, except a trust fund or something. Or maybe one parent sent him a little money. One who lived far away and didn’t even know he was in transition. Ain’t that right, Free?”
We all waited a second for the bartender to return with Free’s new cosmo. She took a sip and said, “Yeah, I was the one who told you that.”
“And why does someone go masked at a demo? To keep from being easily identified. But clearly, if our fine upstanding police officer here had encountered Guy Fawkes, she just would’ve cracked his head open. So when you saw her, she wasn’t wearing her mask. Because she was trying to find someone. So you let her go, and then you move on to me, and then to some other girls that caught your eye, and she sees her target—Conner Kiernan—and slips on the Guy Fawkes mask. Not because she’s worried about being IDed by the cops. Hell, she practically was depending on being recognized as a law-abiding middle-class citizen, so she could wander through the protest unmolested. But she didn’t want Conner to recognize her.”
“You like hearing yourself talk a lot more than I do,” Perez said. “Get on with it.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “So who would Conner recognize, and be surprised to see at a demonstration? And what woman would be tall enough to maybe spell me… except someone maybe the same height as Conner was. He was about my height too. Something they had in common. Oh, and her boots. They were very nice. So a tall woman, not at the riot for political reasons, trying to hide her identity from Conner, so she could kill him.”
Both Free and Perez turned and stared at me.
“Guy Fawkes was Conner’s mom, was it?” I asked. “She killed him. Maybe even with some bullshit psychological theory like ‘Conner killed my daughter. I’ll kill him.’”
“I don’t know about any psychology,” Perez said. “All I know is that if I pursue the case, all she has to do is tell her white-shoe lawyer that I let her by, that I pretended to hit her with my baton so that she could find her son, and kill him. Hell, I’m practically an accomplice. I conspired with her.”
“‘You conspired with me.’ That’s what was written on the back of the picture she sent the OPD,” Free explained. “When I saw that you were interested in Conner… I figured that maybe you could do something that wouldn’t involve us.” She shrugged. “You know, something anarchish.”
“Or that I’d make a good fall guy,” I said.
“Don’t blame her,” Perez said. She was looking at the barback again, and her reflection in the dozen bottles of booze, all warped shards that made up something less than a whole. “That was my idea. Either I’d have a perp, or I’d scare you off.”
“Yeah, thanks for the false arrest. That was an awesome experience for me. And good job, protecting the murderer of a transperson.”
“Either way, I get to keep my job, my life.” Perez said. Free gave her the side-eye at that, but said nothing. Then she looked at me, and shrugged again. I hated shruggers.
“I could write it all down,” I said. “I could tell the whole world. Name names. Everyone’s names.”
“Go ahead,” Free said. “Who’d believe you over Conner’s mom? Worst-case scenario, she gets off because she’s rich, and white, and attractive, and Conner was a trans street kid, and five years from now this is all on the Lifetime Movie Channel.”
“And she gets the Hollywood money. No crime, no time,” Prez said.
“Best-case scenario, they get you for something,” Free said to me. “It’s not like you don’t break the law constantly.”
So that was it. Conner’s mother did it. Maybe out of some sort of transphobic rage. Maybe because of money issues with Conner’s father. Hell, maybe she just liked her fancy house up in the Berkeley Hills so much that she would gladly sacrifice her own child to cast the movement into disarray and disrepute. Conner’s murder was still front page news, and Twitter fodder, a week later. And he hadn’t even been outed yet. Fox News probably thought doing that would make him less sympathetic. She was untouchable. Officer Perez couldn’t help but end up working for her with every swing of her baton, even as she tried to side with us. Wheels within wheels, that is the system of the world.
I finished my third beer, swallowed a burp. “You’re right. But one day…”
“One day what?” Perez said.
“One day things will be different.” And I slid off my stool and walked out of the White Horse, onto the street, right on the edge of two cities. The traffic lights on the corner
flipped from red to green, through there were no cars on the street. The system maintains itself without human help. I walked into Berkeley, and turned my hoodie inside out, from baby blue to deepest black. My lighter fell from my pocket, but I caught it before it hit the ground. It’d come in handy. I found a broken piece of concrete and hefted it in my other hand. It felt good. The air was rich with ozone—like I could sense all the electricity in the air, from cell phones, satellites, fifty-trillion dollars worth of financial transactions a second, every second, wrapping around the world. Or right before the sort of lightning storm we never get in the East Bay. I started walking to the Berkeley Hills, up toward the mansions.
© 2014 Nick Mamatas.
About Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including most recently Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other venues, and his reportage and essays on radical politics have been published in Clamor, Village Voice, and In These Times.
The Big Click: November 2014 (Issue 17) Page 6