A Kind of Justice

by Renee James

  “Good morning to you, too.” I turn and let her close the door.

  “Aha! Did my anal-retentive sister worry her way through the night?” Cecelia says it in a teasing way as she throws her bag on the kitchen table and starts to work on the coffee. I have filled her in on the Detective Wilkins situation, along with all the other frustrations in my life. I sigh and sit in front of my makeup table again to finish applying a hemorrhoid cream to the bags under my eyes. The thought of putting something made for my ass on my face isn’t a pleasant one, especially for someone who spent part of their life as a gay man, but it works. And it works better than cucumbers or anything else I’ve tried.

  Cecelia sits next to me as the coffee drips.

  “You worry too much, Bobbi,” she pronounces. “But I’ve said that to you so many times you probably think that’s part of my name. Cecelia Uworrytoomuch.” She giggles at her own humor. I force a smile.

  “My worries are a lot like when I was a woman with a penis—it’s just not something you can get rid of right away.”

  Cecelia pats my hand. “Well, at least you don’t have that old thing to worry about anymore.”

  She fetches the coffee in two steaming mugs, then pulls a notepad and pen from her purse and scribbles something on the pad, tearing off the sheet with great fanfare and putting it in front of me.

  “What’s this?” I ask, squinting at the wild cursive on the paper.

  “It’s the phone number for Jose Vasquez.”

  I groan.

  “The man is an artist, Bobbi! Like you with hair. And he can get your mind off worldly matters.”

  We’ve had this conversation before. Only Cecelia would keep pitching it. Jose is an escort. A male prostitute. I haven’t met him, but Cecelia has shown me pictures. She has also regaled me with eyewitness accounts of his sexual prowess that are so glowing and vivid I have sometimes felt myself flush with arousal.

  Jose is a dark-haired, copper-skinned leading man with movie-star looks. Like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago, but a trifle more dangerous looking. To hear Cecelia tell it, the only thing more remarkable than the thickness and length of his male member is his ability to become aroused, whenever, wherever, and as often as necessary.

  Cecelia sees him once a month. He’s on her calendar, like her hairdresser and her psychologist. It’s like getting stagnant water out of the pipes after you’ve been gone for a long time, she says. Then she describes her wild orgasms, which, given her size and energy, must make the amorous Jose feel like he’s riding a volcano.

  I can’t bring myself to hire a sex partner. Yet. It’s not a moral issue, it’s just something I can’t settle for, though truthfully, I’ve fantasized about it a number of times, about being bedded by Jose and having one of Cecelia’s wild orgasms.

  The thought of Jose Vasquez stays in my mind all day. My endless fretting over a nasty cop and financial stress is shoved aside by a day-long sexual fantasy. I am so horribly repressed it’s pitiful.

  Late in the afternoon I have a ten-minute break and call Jose’s number.

  “Hi, I’m Bobbi Logan,” I say when he answers. “Cecelia gave me your number.”

  “Wonderful!” Jose interrupts my canned intro. “She’s my most wonderful client and she said she had a friend who might call.”

  I exhale a little. “So, how does this work?” I ask.

  * * *

  THURSDAY, JULY 11

  The host at Café Matin leads me through tables of late-night diners and drinkers, and Jose Vasquez rises gallantly as we near him.

  He smiles a warm welcoming smile. It doesn’t matter that he’s done this hundreds of times with hundreds of women. He makes you feel like you light up his life, like he’s so glad to see you.

  He takes the hand I offer and pulls me to him, kissing me softly on the cheek, an appropriate gesture in public made just a touch racy by following with a hug during which he exhales softly in my ear. He plays horny women the way great musicians coax heavenly sounds from violins and saxophones.

  We have met here because I wanted to squeeze in a quick dinner after a long workday, but I’m so nervous I’ve lost my appetite. I’m feeling pathetic. A slut who can’t get laid. If I was a real girl I wouldn’t be doing this.

  He senses my anxiety. It must happen a lot, even with genetic women. He initiates a conversation, recounting Cecelia’s stories about what a fabulous hairdresser I am. By the time we get to the celebrities I’ve done, I’m aware of how prepared he was for this meeting, how easy he is to talk to, and how warm I feel when I look into his gentle brown eyes.

  We finish hors d’oeuvres and Jose picks up his wine glass and proposes a toast to me. Then he asks what he can do to make my day perfect. I blush crimson. The perfect wine, his perfect gentlemanliness, the warmth of the place, the first time I’ve relaxed in ages . . . it all comes together in a flash. I make myself find ladylike words to respond, something to the effect I’d like to make love. But inside my transsexual mind, my thoughts are not nearly so ladylike. I’m thinking I’d like him to fuck my brains out. It will be my little secret, though I’m sure he’s heard the expression before, from Cecelia if no one else.

  * * *

  FRIDAY, JULY 12

  “Well?” Cecelia’s voice belies the smile she is wearing on the other end of the telephone line. “How was it?”

  I don’t have words in my vocabulary to describe how it was. All of my anxieties and fears and pent-up sexual fantasies were deliriously and deliciously exorcised from my body and soul over the course of an hour with Jose.

  “It was just like you said,” I reply.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Cecelia says. “I want a blow by blow. So to speak. Every golden minute.”

  I am drained and glowing and half asleep and still aroused. I’m still trying to believe that was me feeling those things, responding so recklessly. And I’m still feeling everything. It makes me smile and relax so deeply I feel like a puddle of warmth.

  “Oh, Cecelia,” I groan. “When I was a man I had no idea what a man could be. Good Lord, what a ride.” Cecelia says she’s glad I finally found God, chastises me for waiting so long. I tell her she was right about Jose and that I love her and I’ll see her tomorrow. For once, she lets me go on the first try.

  4

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 16

  MARILEE’S EYES WIDEN as I tell her about my brush with Detective Wilkins.

  Marilee is a psychologist, a wife, and a mother to three children—two she brought into the world, and me, whom she adopted years ago. Not formally, but she might as well have. We met when she was having marital problems and midlife crisis issues. I was in even worse shape, though I didn’t actually realize it right then. I was trying to figure out what kind of queer I was—kind of tragic but also exciting—and I was trying to get over a divorce from a woman I still loved and who still loved me.

  We have been each other’s confessor ever since. Marilee is a practicing Catholic but only because she believes in God. She regards the clergy as meddlesome middlemen to whom the only thing she would ever confess is her contempt. I’m an atheist and a lifelong holder of secrets, so we end up in the same place. She knows everything about me. Every anxiety, every fear, every burst of egotism, every period of self-loathing and shame, every embarrassing thought I had as I evolved from an All-American boy with a ticket to the top of the business world to a conspicuous transsexual hairdresser.

  I’ve shared things with some other, trusted people, but just some things. Cecelia knows plenty, even more than I tell her because she knows me so well, but she doesn’t know the dark stuff, the stuff I wish weren’t true, some of which keeps me up nights. And my transition shrink, the therapist who had to verify that I was ready for the permanent step of gender reassignment surgery, knew everything about my gender issues, including the fact that I was never really sure I was a girl, I was only sure I wasn’t a boy. But no one knows everything except for Marilee. For some reason, I can tell her anything. Maybe because I know
she’ll love me anyway, and she never passes judgment, even when I do something stupid.

  Like make a raging bully madder.

  “Why is he so sure you killed John Strand?” she asks.

  “Because he knows a lot of people in the community thought Strand killed Mandy, and because I’m big and ugly and he thinks I hate men.”

  “Stop with the big and ugly stuff, Bobbi. You don’t think like that anymore.”

  “I don’t, but he does.” I shrug. I’ve been on hormones for seven years and my features have become more feminine. I’ve also made an electrologist rich and put a plastic surgeon’s child through a semester or two of college with some feminization surgery. I still don’t pass as a woman, but I’m kind of pretty and I have large boobs, so some of the stares I draw are lustful. But some are hateful, like Detective Wilkins.”

  “Okay,” says Marilee. “I’ll accept that. As for the man-hating thing, maybe you should tell him the same story you just told me.” She smirks. I’d told her about my orgy with the male prostitute.

  “But the big thing is, he saw me take down that junkie in the salon with an eye gouge. He says Strand had an eye-gouge injury, too.” I say this with some anxiety. It’s not like this is any kind of evidence against me. But he’s the only cop who has ever linked me to that murder. There’s no rational reason for it. It’s just me being trans and refusing to cower before him. Hate like his is a powerful motivator, and I don’t see him stopping until he has ruined my life.

  I share this with Marilee and she nods in agreement. “Bobbi, it would be a good idea to retain a lawyer right about now,” she says. “I can ask Bill which trial lawyer he hates the most. That would be a good recommendation.”

  Marilee’s husband, Bill, is a cop. A decent guy who has even gotten used to me over the years. He used to be embarrassed when we met, sort of a macho guy not knowing how to be around a transsexual. Now we exchange polite hugs and hellos and life is fine. But I don’t want the kind of defense lawyer he would hate.

  “I think I’ll go through Cecelia first,” I say. “I don’t need someone to get me off, I need someone to protect my reputation. Wilkins can destroy me just by starting a buzz.”

  I talk about my vulnerabilities, the huge debt on the salon, a big mortgage on my building, and business getting slower and slower since the big financial collapse. A little bad publicity, a nasty rumor or two getting passed around the city’s elite—I could be broke and on the street in six months, leaving Roger and a lot of wonderful hairdressers in dire straits.

  My angst must show. Marilee reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. Her touch is soothing. “You’re going to be fine, Bobbi,” she says. Her voice is soothing, like the soft, warm drops of a perfect shower. “You’ve been through this before.”

  So true. When I began my transition at work, the bottom fell out of my world.

  “Do you ever think about who killed John Strand anymore?” asks Marilee.

  Only two people know what I know about the Strand murder—Marilee and my transition counselor, a wonderful therapist who thought she’d heard everything until I finally came clean with her.

  “I try not to,” I confess. “I worry I might betray whoever it was if I knew. I also worry that it wasn’t someone else. That I did it myself and the horror of it just sort of shocked it out of my memory banks.”

  “We’ve been through all that. It’s highly unlikely.”

  As she says it, I flash back to the intensive sessions, the hypnosis, the endless hours on my own reliving each moment in Strand’s apartment. I could even envision doing it, sliding the knife through his throat, seeing the blood. But I’ve never been able to recall actually doing it.

  Marilee reads my silence as doubt. “You didn’t do it,” she says. “I’m a better suspect than you are.”

  I glance at Marilee with a startle. I never thought about her or Betsy or any other genetic woman. I consider for a moment if it could have been her husband. Killing Strand would have been child’s play for a big strong cop. I drop the thought with disgust. He wouldn’t do something like that for anyone but Marilee. For the millionth time the faces of my closest friends flash through my mind, and I can’t conceive of any of them executing someone. I’m the only one I know who could do that and even though I remember not doing it, it seems like I must have. God, what a mind-fuck.

  “Well, how was it seeing Phil again?” Marilee asks. “I haven’t heard you mention his name in a long time.”

  I confess that he still makes me weak in the knees and that the eroticism I felt having dinner with him is probably what drove me to hire a male prostitute.

  Marilee laughs lightly. “I love you, Bobbi. I love your passion and your candor and your wit and your sweetness. I wish we were all a little more like you. This world would be a lot more fun and a much better place to live in.”

  We exchange smiles.

  “I’ll tell you something else, Bobbi,” she says. “I think your Officer Phil has a thing for you.”

  Her eyes are twinkling. I wonder if she knows something she’s not saying. Her husband and Phil are cop friends. In fact, I first met Phil at one of their parties. My heart cartwheels around in my chest. Wouldn’t that be something?

  * * *

  SUNDAY, JULY 20

  Cecelia stares at me like a raptor eyeing a rodent. I have asked her for an attorney referral, criminal court type.

  “Is this about Wilkins?”

  I nod my head yes. Her encounters with him go back as far as mine, though somehow he chose to hate me a lot more than he hates her. He tried to bully her during the Strand investigation, too, but she dismissed him like yesterday’s garbage and got away with it because she’s rich and connected and she’s had a lifetime of practice putting pompous fools in their rightful places. All she got from him was a face full of bad breath and disapproval. He saved the rest for me.

  “He still thinks you killed Strand?” She shakes her head in wonder, though I have no idea why. Wilkins suspected me from the get-go, and for that matter, Cecelia herself has generously shared her suspicions about me being the murderer several times. She sits back in her chair and thinks for a moment.

  “Let’s face it,” she says finally, “You make a good suspect.” I start to react. She holds up a hand, gesturing to let her finish. “Well, you knew Mandy. You were friends. You’re a big, strong girl. You’re very pretty and you have nice tits, but you are also big and strong, especially back then. And you did those kung fu classes all the time. It could have been you.”

  I sit mutely. What do you say when your best friend says she thinks you murdered someone?

  “Don’t get mad at me, Bobbi. I’m just saying. You know? It’s not so surprising a cop would think like that.”

  “What about you?” I say. “You knew Mandy. You were the one who kept accusing Strand of killing her. You’re big and strong. You’re pretty and you have huge tits, but you’re big and strong, too. You don’t take self-defense classes, but that’s because you don’t need to. See what I mean?”

  “Are you asking me if I killed John Strand?” she asks.

  “No, are you asking me?” I respond.

  “Heavens no!” Cecelia’s hands fly to her mouth in horror. “I don’t want to know that you didn’t do it because I love the fantasy that you did. And I don’t want to know that you did do it because the police might question me about it someday.”

  “You’d rat me out?”

  “Of course not. But I’d rather not rat you out by telling the truth than by lying. Though I’m willing to do either.”

  She’s trying to break the tension. I smile at her humor, but I keep staring at her face, looking for some kind of telltale. Cecelia is more than just a bold, outspoken woman. She was a very successful corporate politician for many years, so she knows how to run a bluff, keep her thoughts and opinions hidden, distract those getting too close to the truth. Talking about me as the murderer could be a ploy to keep us from talking about her as the m
urderer.

  I stare too long in silence. Cecelia stares back, a questioning look on her face. “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, dropping my eyes. “Sorry. I got lost in thought. Can you help me get an attorney?”

  Cecelia nods, her face in a prune-like grimace as if to chastise me for even asking.

  The waiter arrives with our salads. We exchange one more toast to each other’s health, then begin our meal. We’re in a tony café in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, well north and west of the more famous Lincoln Park area. Lincoln Square still has remnants of its old ethnic roots, just like Boystown, where I was reborn. The buildings are low and many are old. The residences are two flats and brownstones, most rehabbed to immaculate condition. The stores and restaurants on the square are diverse, independent, lively.

  Not many trans people live in this neighborhood, but one of the city’s great independent bookstores, The Book Cellar, is located here and it draws people from all over the north side to the area, including LGBT readers. So we are not an oddity, two large transgender women having lunch in a nice café. We are noted, then ignored by our fellow diners. Just like everyone else.

  Cecelia gives me the name of an attorney and promises to email contact information to me later, along with another name or two. Then she changes the subject to TransRising.

  Cecelia and some other LGBT leaders launched Chicago TransRising three years ago to tend to the needs of the scores of dispossessed young transgender people living on the streets. They had been scourged from their families and their neighborhoods for being trans, and a lot of them turn to prostitution or drug dealing or petty crime to stay alive. They gravitated to the north side location of Chicago’s LGBT Center because it’s a safe neighborhood and they could come in from the cold there, during the day at least. But the Center couldn’t handle all their problems. Chicago TransRising was organized to do more. The organization put together corporate donations and public and private grants to purchase a building that houses sixteen residents upstairs and classrooms and meeting places downstairs. Cecelia and her friends are working on funding for more space for residents, while TransRising administrators are working on preparing residents and walk-ins for winning jobs and leading successful lives.