His client and the case keep tumbling through his mind for the whole drive south back to Chatham. He cannot shake the image of a woman in a red dress, dragging herself up a staircase. Singing. Closing her eyes. Was that all just an act or was there substance? It felt so real. So sad, really. How can you not be moved after such a show? There is a strange hollowness in his chest.
He remembers the voice of the Thai detective on his machine, “I understand you are Miss Aparecio’s lawyer. More than five years I am searching for her. Please call me. Perhaps you do not know who you are getting into here.”
Who you are getting into? What a Freudian slip. His head boils with questions. What is she hiding? If she did not kill Big Al, who did? Does she know? Who set the fire? Why? Why would someone frame her? What about this escort service he has read about in the police reports? How do Tuki and the victim fit into that picture? What does any of this have to do with Bangkok? And … if you get really lucky, pal, and score some answers, can you be of any help here? Or is the judge right? Will the D. A. eat you alive?
The questions are still rattling through his head when he shuffles up the outside stairs and into his attic pad to find a body on his mattress. He can see its contours in the light filtering into the room from the cone of yellow fog around a street lamp outside. He stands in the doorway, stares, tries to focus.
Suddenly, the body sits up, tosses off the sleeping bag that she had wrapped over her to keep out the summer dampness. “Hey, where you been?”
“Filipa?”
“Who did you expect?”
He says nobody, he thought she had to work tonight. She is interning this year at a women’s psych clinic in Cambridge, part of the practicum for her PhD.
She rubs her eyes, seizes a wine glass sitting on the floor next to the mattress, takes a sip. He can smell the Chardonnay.
“I got off. We were over-staffed. So I thought I’d surprise you. Traffic to the Cape was hell. Want some wine?” He shakes his head no. He cannot understand why she never remembers that he really does not like Chardonnay.
“You don’t sound too happy to see me.”
“No. No. Of course, I am. I’m just really beat, Fil. This case is messing with my mind, you know?”
He dumps his briefcase on the table, tosses his suit jacket on the back of a chair, heads for the fridge. A pain is starting behind his eyes. Four rum and cokes. Maybe there is still some fizzy water left.
“Provincetown is more gothic than ever. I swear it looked like The Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. And that’s just on the surface. I can’t even imagine what goes on behind closed doors. Guys dressed like girls, girls like guys. The whole lets-hold-hands gay thing. I saw a guy with a mustache dressed like Dolly Parton. And my client may be the biggest fruitcake of the—”
She grabs him around the chest from behind and hugs him while he is bent over staring into his fridge. He can feel her breasts warm his back, her pelvis presses against his hips.
“Do we have to talk about work?”
“Not if you keep doing that.”
He turns around. They kiss. Long, slow. Grinding bodies. Her hand feels for him. His fingers slide up under her skirt, slip along the smooth curve of her hip. In thirty seconds she has his pants down around his ankles and they are screwing each other against the open door of the refrigerator. She is petite. Her short legs struggle to clutch his hips to hers. He sucks on her neck, lost in a secret garden beneath her mane of thick hair. It is naturally dark brown, but she has dyed it a coppery red for him. Now she does not look like all the other Portuguese princesses who he grew up with in Nu Bej.
He goes off before her, tries a long, probing kiss to sustain his vigor for her sake. But his legs are melting as he drives her harder with each thrust against the refrigerator door.
“Ouch.”
“You okay?”
“Something’s biting me in the …”
He steps back from the fridge, eases her to the floor.
“Did you miss me?”
He rubs his open hands up under her jersey, feeling the peach fuzz as his fingers slide from the small of her back to her shoulder blades.
“You have no idea,” he sighs.
Just as he is about to nod off, she spoons up against his back and whispers. “I tried to call you about ten times tonight while I was stuck in Cape traffic on Route 6. Why was your cell phone off?”
“Not a clue. Maybe it was out of juice. Sorry. Was there a problem?”
“It’s my mother, Michael. She was calling me all day, bugging me with thirty different things about the wedding. Her latest thing is that the bridesmaids’ dresses clash with the rugs in the church. She wants to buy a new carpet. Damn her. If the invitations hadn’t already gone out, I’d ask you to elope with me, you know?”
The mattress muffles his response. He is trying to will himself into a dream about fishing out on Georges with his father. But his mind keeps picturing a girl in a red robe standing over a burned and bloody body on the beach.
TWELVE
She finds him standing outside the screen door of her bungalow. It is ten o’clock on Monday morning. The sun is burning off the last of the fog. From her doorstep, here on a steep hillside, you can see Cape Cod Bay in the distance, spreading out to the west like a sea of sapphires. She lives in one of the studio-style guest cottages at a compound called Shangri-La in tony Truro to the south of P-town. “I thought you were going fishing.”
“I’m back,” he says. It is true. Yesterday he and Fil went fishing for striper with some of her old friends from college who summer in Bass River. He hooked into a forty-five-inch monster. Landed it, tagged it, let it go. It’s amazing the focus and high he can get from fishing.
“Are you still my lawyer?”
“You still need one?”
She is silent, thinking. Remembers all the raw emotion she saw on his face at the end of her show. Finally she opens the screen door for him to enter. She is wearing a deep blue kimono with little red and gold dragons stitched over the breasts. Her hair, with its sun streaks and kinky braids, is exploding around her face. No makeup. He likes the look. He thinks that if you put her in normal clothes like a pair of Calvins and a simple cotton top, no one would ever suspect her gender secret. Maybe it is just the wackiness of Provincetown that makes him feel all itchy inside, not Tuki at all. Or maybe he has just gotten used to her, started folding at least one drag queen into his vision of world order.
They sit at a little breakfast table that looks out through a picture window to the bay. He opens his briefcase and pulls out a tape recorder.
There is a delicate white chrysanthemum in a red fluted vase in the center of the table. She picks up the vase and lifts the flower to her nose and inhales. Then she pours them each a cup of green tea.
“Where do we start?”
He has been thinking about this since yesterday morning, wondering what his dad, the great fish hunter, might do. Now he has a little bit of a plan. He has decided to stay away from talk about the night of the murder and the fire for a while, avoid talking about her relationship with Al Costelano. He is not going to ask her again about the Thai dick whose call he has not yet returned. He wants her to trust him, drop her guard, tell him everything that crosses her memory. He knows that sometimes it is the most seemingly insignificant, peripheral details from way before the time of the crime that will make your case.
“Why don’t you tell me some more about Bangkok?”
Klaus, a sailor from a Dutch ship, reminded the girls of River Phoenix the first time they met him at a food stall in the park. He was all over her beloved best friend Ingrid. Between her thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, she grew about five inches taller and ventured into wearing her mother’s minis and makeup. She started going out on the town looking like a stand-in for Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Everyone was always looking for a piece of her candy. And as far as sailor boy was concerned, Ingrid was throwing a fire sale.
These days, she has al
l but disappeared. On the few occasions that Tuki sees her, the girl’s eyes are rolled halfway back in her head like she has been smoking opium or something. So Tuki is alone for the first time in years. At first she hangs at home in the theater, rips through books like toilet paper, watches about two movies a day, listens to Lionel Richie tapes—doing her “Tuki the Sponge” thing big time.
And she’s having body problems of her own, but not the good kind like Ingrid. The spaces beneath her arms and below her bellybutton are suddenly sprouting thick, dark hair like crazy. Shaving large parts of her body and plucking her brows has become a lifestyle. Brandy and Delta see what is happening, but they figure as long as she still has to wear a uniform to school, and students have a “no jewelry” rule, things cannot get too out of control with Tuki.
But at night when her mothers are performing, or on dates, she starts spending hours working on her eyeliner, lashes, and lipstick. She roots through her mothers’ boxes of costume jewelry, but she cannot find big enough earrings to suit her or enough brass bracelets. She begins wearing Delta’s black bras even though she has nothing to put inside except tissue paper. She tries on her mothers’ clothes, puts her hair up in a French twist, steps into a pair of Brandy’s pumps. At first, she just listens to Lionel Richie on the cassette player and practices walking in those shoes. Eventually, she is singing along and doing her own routines to Mary Wells, Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, and songs from Flashdance in front of a dressing mirror. She imagines men falling in love with her, sending flowers, buying her presents after they see her perform.
Then one summer night before her fourteenth birthday, she decides to hit the streets. Yes, she is an Asian girl by day and just about everybody in the Patpong knows her. So it is time to try perfecting the skill that will keep American immigration agents guessing for five years. For her debut as a W-O-M-A-N, she goes black. She wants to be her own girl, not some hand-me-down thing from Brandy and Delta. So she goes shopping. As the Thais say, Kai ngam phro khon. A chicken is beautiful because of its feathers. But of course, she is as poor as a roach, so other means than Thai baht must be used to procure the costume to transform her into a sex machine.
For the first time in her life, Tuki wants things she cannot afford to buy. So she steals. It is not pretty. And you will not hear her making any excuses, except one: she only steals from the rich and she always leaves something beautiful in return.
This kind of stealing is actually quite easy. Walking home from school alone, she discovers that every day the Montien Hotel on Surawong Road throws out a lot of flowers. She takes the best and makes bouquets. Then she goes around to the fancy shops on New Road and offers flowers for sale. She is most successful in early evening when people are getting out of work and stores are very crowded with shoppers. She is a cute little luk sod with big round eyes and almost a meter of silk hair down the back of her school uniform. When she goes into a shop, smiles prettily, and offers her bouquets, the sales people usually say they will buy flowers for their wives or girlfriends or husbands or mothers. But she must wait because they are busy with customers.
So she smiles a lot, wanders around the store. Eventually the clerks get so distracted by their business that they forget about her. That is when the size-four dress rack, the wig collection, and shoe display get a little emptier, and her school bag gets a little heavier. That is when she leaves flowers in a pretty place like the top of a jewelry case … before disappearing in the crowd.
Pretty soon—with the stealing—she has her own wardrobe. Now she is dressing to kill in a little black silk dress, black hose, gold heels, plenty of jewelry, a light touch of dark makeup, and sassy ruby lipstick. Her own hair is pinned up under a stocking cap, and she is wearing a shag wig, teased up into a funky nest. The wig is streaked with blonde, like the one she saw Tina Turner wearing in a video. She grabs a little patent-leather purse, pulls on a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, and sneaks out into the streets.
She has given herself a new name, “Tennille,” as in the Captain and Tennille who sing “Do that to me one more time; once is never enough …” Now she is going to show Miss Licorice Cheesecake what a real honey pot can do. Like, yeah, Big Mama, we cool!
When Tennille cruises Surawong and Silom Roads, men chase her like hungry rats. At first she pays no attention to the whistles and calls and funny noises. She hides behind her dark shades, keeps on trucking. But after a few nights, the glasses come off. Now she makes eye contact, smiles at cute ones, throws some body language into her strut when she passes women. Pretty soon everyone knows Tennille can strut her stuff. She even goes into some of the clubs on Patpong Road, Number One, Soi Superstar. But she does not stay long because men start getting the wrong idea, and the regular B-girls give her looks that singe her hair. Still, she is having fun.
Once she runs into Ingrid and her sailor boy coming the other way down the street. Tuki all at once hates Ingrid, and wants to be her. Girlfriend, then wife, then mother. Ingrid will have that life soon, Tuki knows. She turns Lionel Richie way up in her head, raises her chin, and walks on by.
Ingrid tries not to notice, but she is checking out Tennille’s new black leather mini out of the corner of her eye. After she passes them, she stops and turns halfway around. Sure enough, sailor boy is watching her over his shoulder, until Ingrid jabs him in the ribs. Tennille gives her a little smile, like gotcha back.
THIRTEEN
“Want to get out of here, la?”
He can tell from the scratchiness in her voice that she has had enough talking for a while. It will almost be noon. There is a hot southwest breeze blowing. The sky is powder blue.
“Sure.”
“The beach? You have a swimsuit?”
He smiles. Man, is he prepared. When it is summer on Cape Cod, you should always carry a swimsuit and a beach towel in your ride.
It is only when he has slipped into the faded pair of red surfer’s jams in her bathroom that he wonders what she is changing into for the beach. A woman’s suit must be out of the question for a queen.
He is sitting in a hammock outside the bungalow, swinging, sunning himself, wondering if any of this Vietnam and Bangkok stuff is relevant to his case when he hears the padding of her feet and turns to look.
“Jesus!”
“Something wrong?”
She is standing in front of him wearing big tortoise-shell sunglasses, lipstick. Not much else. Yards of flesh are showing above, between, and below a lime-green Malia Mills bikini. It is high waisted like support panties, but the side panels are cut out so that he can see every inch of her long legs. On the top end she is wearing what looks like a sports bra. In one hand she swings a purple beach towel, and in other she dangles a Kenya bag with street gear folded neatly inside. Her hair is up off her neck in that outrageous ponytail again, a fountain of black and gold curls.
“You look unbelievable.”
She smiles. It is a cute, almost bashful smile that he does not expect.
“I won’t embarrass you?”
He shakes his head no. Hell no, he thinks. You look like a million bucks.
“Good. Then we can drive back over to P-town. I want to take you to the Slip. It only has a beach when the tide is out. But there is a great deck. We can talk more there, by the pool. I must be crazy, la. But I feel so … so free today. You gave me this. You freed me, Michael.”
Yeah, for about twenty-eight more days, he thinks.
During the ten-minute drive to P-town, he keeps quiet, but she feels his eyes flashing over at her.
“Okay. You are a little curious, am I right? You want to know how I hide my secret.”
He feels himself blush. Well maybe, sort of.
She says that in places like Japan, China, India, Thailand, where males have been impersonating females for five thousand years in the theater, drag queens form closed societies. And there are certain tricks that the old queens pass on to the little princesses when they begin to reach a certain age.
“Old queens
are always on the lookout for, you know, princesses—young boys who look like girls or little boys who wish they were girls or a little girl trapped in a boy’s body.”
He nods, guesses he can understand that.
The young princesses keep the family, the “house,” thriving. It is the budding little princesses who bring the money into the house, either through traditional theater, burlesque like the Follies, escort services, or straight-out prostitution. And the children come. Some are street kids with no homes, some get bonded to the house by poor parents, some grow up in the house, like Tuki.
“Whatever. When the princesses’ bellies begin to sprout hair, the queens teach them the trick of pushing their jewels back up inside their bodies and out of the way, la. Over the years this little trick becomes possible even after the princess’s jewels have … well … you know. I do not think any more about getting tucked in the morning than I do about brushing my teeth.”
For a second the Jeep swerves off the road, kicking up sand. He has a look of pain on his face. He is trying to imagine tucking his own … Christ! He arches his shoulders back to clear his mind.
She says that the word on the street is that drag queens take female hormones—estrogen shots. That part is only really true for real TS, as in transsexual, types like her. She uses electrolysis and estrogen to slow the growth of face and body hair down to a trickle. After a couple of years of use, female hormones, taken in combination with an antigen to block testosterone, softened her voice, made her breasts and butt swell.
“But, here is the total truth: no safe amount of estrogen will shrink a princess’s chaang back to the size it was before she grew up. The old Asian solution to all of this is string.”
He squints his eyes, cannot picture what she is talking about. Not sure he wants to.
“We call it a gaff, la. You can make one or pick one up at any drag shop. The ones you buy look sort of like an eye patch of triangular black cloth with a loop of elastic cord around either side. You wear it like a G-string, and after you tuck the jewels and pull the pinky back between your legs, the cloth holds everything in place. Some girls make their own by threading a loop of old pantyhose—for the string—through the cutoff cuff from a pair of jeans—for the patch.”
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery) Page 5
