Seven Suspects

by Renee James

  “And they said I couldn’t be in their group.”

  “Are you okay with that?” It seems like that would be devastating for a precocious eleven-year-old.

  “Of course,” she says. “I’m still the king of me.” There it is again. My eleven-year-old princess sounding like a high school senior, or maybe a Barnard valedictorian.

  “Have you been listening to Sheryl Crow?” I ask.

  “Mom and I listen to her all the time. She’s the best.”

  We talk about it some more over dinner. The long and short of it is, she didn’t really like Meredith and Paul. They were too mean to everyone. Plus, she and her mom think Aunt Bobbi is the greatest.

  I’m so impressed. I think I could get to where she got, not when I was eleven, but now, in my forties. But there’s no way I could get there without swearing.

  7

  ROBERTA AND I start our morning dash for the El station, but as soon as we hit the sidewalk, I can feel a menacing presence. It’s not my imagination. I’m not having a psychotic episode. This is so palpable, it’s like being hit by a bus. I can feel a rifle sight being aimed at my neck. My heart rate skyrockets, I begin to hyperventilate. I stop.

  “Roberta,” I say, “take a look around. Do you see anything funny?”

  I look around, too, but maybe she’ll notice something I don’t.

  There’s nothing. No one else is on the street. It’s completely silent. A slight breeze ripples the leaves of the maples and oaks. The leaves are starting to turn color. In a few days, the street will light up with yellows and oranges, as if a bonfire were flaring in the treetops.

  “What am I looking for?” Roberta asks.

  “I don’t know,” I confess. “I just have this feeling someone is watching us.”

  “I don’t see anyone,” says Roberta.

  “I don’t either,” I concede. We set out at a brisk pace, Roberta probably wondering if Aunt Bobbi has gone batty, me trying to get my mind off paranoid fantasies and focus on another day of beating the clock.

  It doesn’t work. Yesterday’s pornographic art brought back all the nightmares from my nightmare year of transition. Not just the rape. There was also the Strand murder. Especially the murder. Those nightmares woke me up a half-dozen times last night.

  We get to Halsted and walk south for a half block. I grab Roberta’s hand and hang a hard right mid-block to pass through a narrow gap between buildings. It’s barely wide enough for one person to walk through, and protected by a gate that isn’t locked. It’s dark as night between the buildings, and eerily quiet. Roberta stops, startled. I can’t blame her. It feels like we’re stepping into the gaping jaws of a giant, flesh-eating creature.

  “Aunt Bobbi!”

  “What?” I answer, like I traverse dark, narrow passages all the time.

  “The sign says ‘Private Property’.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll explain in a minute.” I pull her into the gloomy niche and make for the light a block ahead, my heels clicking like gunshots on the concrete.

  “This is scary,” Roberta complains.

  I want to say, “You don’t know the half of it,” but I keep my mouth shut. Halfway to the next street, I stop and look behind us.

  “This is how to see if someone is following you,” I tell Roberta.

  She wrinkles her nose. “Seems pretty dumb, if you ask me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because if someone’s following you, this is where they want to catch you, don’t you think?”

  From the mouths of babes.

  “Aunt Bobbi, can we get out of here?”

  Roberta’s question snaps me out of my focus on the Halsted Street pedestrian traffic. “Yes, Princess,” I respond.

  We rush west to Clark Street and head south again. I stop abruptly in front of a store window and point to it, saying, “Did you see this?” I pretend to look at Roberta, but I’m canvassing the street, first north, then south.

  “Why would I care about a dry cleaner?” Roberta asks. She’s doing that thing with her nose again, like I’m off my rocker.

  “Well, someday you will,” I promise. We continue south to Belmont, Roberta complaining that we’re taking the long way.

  The El station on Belmont spans over the street with a full view of the city life below. I race Roberta up the escalator and stand huffing on the platform, peering below, looking for followers. The pedestrians look like the usual assortment of morning people, mostly white-collar types making their way to work. Just as I start to leave, I see a burly man a half block east on Belmont. He’s walking this way at a rapid pace. I can’t see his face, but his body has the thick, powerful character of a thug. Maybe Kong, maybe some other vicious beast I’ve managed to offend.

  I control my heart rate and breathing, and whisk Roberta onto the departing train. If he is my stalker, I’ll deal with him when Roberta is somewhere else, safe.

  The feeling of being tailed evaporates as soon as the train leaves the station and stays gone all the way to Oak Park. Roberta is giving me attitude again, acting like I’m a nutcase, but I think maybe she’s scared and trying to compensate.

  As we walk to her school, I try to calm the waters.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you, Princess,” I say. “It’s just that, when you’re older, sometimes you have to be careful about people trying to follow you.”

  “Men, right?”

  “Yes.” I’m trying to figure out how far to go with this. Betsy would shave my scalp if I left this child shaking and afraid.

  “Once in a while there’s a man who comes on to a woman inappropriately,” I explain. “We have to protect ourselves against them.”

  “Couldn’t you just wear longer skirts and cover your boobs?” It almost knocks me over. I’m not sure whether it’s her knowledge of sexual attraction or her indictment of me, but I’m speechless for several steps.

  “Yes, Roberta, I could,” I say, finally. “But I dress like this for business, and I dress like this because this is how I express myself. I have that right.”

  “Even if it gets you attacked by some lunatic?”

  “Yes. Lunatics don’t have the right to attack people. Period. But if I’m smart, I won’t get attacked by a lunatic or anyone else.” If only I really believed that.

  “Alex says you’re over . . . over . . . overcomsonsating.” Roberta has trouble saying the word.

  “Overcompensating,” I say. “The word is ‘overcompensating.’ He means that because I was born a man I feel compelled to be super-feminine as a woman.”

  “Well?” says Roberta.

  “Well, he’s probably right, but that doesn’t mean I can’t cut off his tongue for saying it.”

  Roberta chides me with a chorus of “Aunt Bobbi”s! as we enter the Little Lord Fauntleroy School for the Rich or the Brilliant. Its real name is less interesting than that, but that’s the school’s demographic makeup. Rich kids and genius kids with probably less overlap between the two than the rich parents would like to think. Roberta is one of the genius kids, here by the grace of a partial scholarship, an education fund I’ve been building since she was born, and a mom who sacrifices everything to get her daughter the best education she can get.

  On the way back to the salon, I review the list of stalking suspects I’ve got so far. I’m thinking if the burly guy I saw on Belmont is the stalker, he’s probably Cindy’s boyfriend. Of course, I didn’t see his face, and Kong might not have been following me, but he’s number one on my list. His words ring in my mind. The streets belong to me. His body looms in my vision, a muscle with arms and legs and quivering with angry tension, ready to rip me to pieces.

  Unfortunately, his isn’t the only name on my list. I’ve been thinking about it, and Cecelia is right: there is an embarrassment of possibilities, including a couple of former sex partners. It’s not that they ended like the confrontation with Lover Boy, but the two I’m thinking of wanted to bang me because I’m trans, just to see what that’s like. So
metimes, after they’ve shot their wad and they start thinking with their brain again, those kind of men get really disgusted with themselves and with the transwoman, not necessarily in that order. It’s like, they think they’re gay because they made it with a transwoman and liked it.

  If one of those guys is having some kind of psychotic guilt episode that can only be erased by erasing me, I’m in real trouble. I only remember their faces and I never got their last names.

  But former lovers are only one category of possible stalkers. There’s the speed freak Phil reminded me about, Joey something, a hoodlum wannabe. And the various transphobes I’ve given lip to. A former tenant. Garden-variety bigots on a God-hates-fags rampage. When I think of scary people, I think of the rapist, Andive, and I think of the other Strand thug, the one who got away. The couple of quick glimpses I got of Andive’s accomplice were blurred by the nylon stocking he wore over his face. It made him look like a nightmare—dark, with distorted features, like a fiendish zombie from hell. I know he was strong, and he was merciless. If Strand had told him to kill me, he would have done it without a second thought.

  The more I think about it, though, it’s hard to believe that guy would come back to Chicago and, even if he did, he wouldn’t have issues with me. He got what he wanted.

  In fact, the more I think about my suspects list, the more I think no one’s stalking me. Kong was just trying to impress his girlfriend, and the porn in the deli was a random act, some jerk’s idea of a practical joke. I’m just having a sort of midlife crisis brought on by a broken heart and maybe some residual guilt about sleeping around too much.

  My moment of relief is short-lived. As I near the salon, I see a police cruiser and an unmarked cop sedan in front, the cruiser’s lights flashing. There are people moving around inside the salon, maybe a half-dozen of them. This is all very wrong.

  A uniformed cop stops me at the door. I explain who I am, and he lets me in. A cluster of people are gathered at my workstation. Two of them look like plainclothes cops, a third is shooting photographs. Jalela is behind them, talking to a uniformed cop, all of them looking at my mirror. I join them and gasp in horror.

  Someone has covered my mirror with words and images smeared in red lipstick. The letters and images are so poorly drawn it takes a moment to decipher everything. The words come first. Bitch. Cunt. Queer. Three of my favorites. A crudely drawn knife stabs the word Cunt. An overt threat. The drawing below shows a stick figure bent at the waist, being penetrated from behind by a dildo with an arrowhead for a tip. Another overt threat, this one really personal in a bone-chilling kind of way.

  My combs and brushes decorate the floor, along with the shattered pieces of my blow-dryer and several other bent and broken tools.

  As I comprehend the scene, tears start. Jalela puts an arm around me and murmurs something I can’t make out. One of the plainclothes cops says he wants to ask me some questions.

  “What is this?” I wail. My first instinct is masculine—to be stoic and let my anger shove aside all other emotions. But I’ve been a woman for a long time, and a tangle of emotions boils to the fore.

  “How could this happen?” My voice is incredulous.

  “That’s one of the things we wanted to talk about, Miz Logan.” The cop says it as he flashes his badge and gives me his name. All I hear is Detective something.

  “Does the store have an alarm?” he asks.

  “Of course,” I say. “That’s what I mean. How could someone get in here and do this without the alarm going off?”

  “Show me the alarm,” the cop says. Jalela takes him to the control panel. I’m frozen in place, unable to accept the destruction of my personal items.

  The detective and Jalela return. “The door was unlocked and the alarm was turned off when I got in this morning,” Jalela says.

  Jalela gets phone numbers for the two stylists who closed last night for the detectives while I check my office for damage. It has been trashed as savagely as my workstation, desk drawers ripped out, contents flung across the room, the drawers shattered to splinters. My personal knickknacks have been hurled against the walls, some of them destroyed, and my pictures lie in torn fragments near their ruined frames.

  It takes several minutes to control my convulsing heaves and sobbing. This is a lot like being raped. They didn’t get my body this time, but they got my security, my self-esteem, and my sense of belonging. I should be afraid. A normal woman would be afraid. But I am gripped by two other emotions. Part of me wants to lie down and give up. My life is hopeless. I can never get what I want. I’m not a real woman and I’m not a man and people hate me.

  The other part of me wants to take bloody, unrelenting revenge on the sick coward who did this. I know this is my male side, the one I’m not supposed to have, the one that was supposed to go away along with the testosterone that made me strong and hairy and inclined to violence. This feeling reveals me as a fraud, a hopeless queer with no real gender, but just now, I don’t care. The anger feels right. The determination to defend myself feels right. The willingness to kill or maim this villain feels good.

  The motherfucker who did this is going to pay.

  I answer the detectives’ questions as best I can, but nothing I say helps them. The questions about my love life are a little nerve-racking for me, but I tell them the truth without confessing my wanton ways: I’ve been dating around, but there haven’t been any breakups with any more anger than usual. The embarrassing part comes when they ask for names and I have to confess the relationships didn’t get that far. The detectives seem to take this in stride.

  Jalela tells them about the confrontation with Cindy and her boyfriend. We do a little better there—at least I can give them Cindy’s name and contact information.

  The stylists who closed the salon last night come in for an interview. They locked up and set the alarm last night, no doubt about it. They tell the same story—one set the alarm, the other watched, they left together and threw the dead bolts.

  As they finish up, the detectives tell me they will consider this a possible hate crime. This is supposed to make me feel good, because, if by some miracle, they catch the bad guy, he’ll get a longer sentence. I don’t have much faith in law enforcement, though. Experience has taught me to take care of things myself. So as they leave and we clean up the mess, all I’m thinking is, the man I’m looking for—it has to be a man, a woman wouldn’t do this sort of thing—knows how to pick locks and beat alarm systems. The other thing I know about him is, he hates me with a violent passion.

  8

  IT’S A LIGHT morning schedule, thank goodness. The police are gone and the mess cleaned up before the rest of the staff arrives. Only two customers saw the carnage and they didn’t give it much thought—break-ins happen in the big city. I told the staff we had an intruder overnight and the police would be watching the place closer for a while. No big deal.

  The only one who knows the ugly facts of the matter is Jalela, who deals with it as just another situation to overcome. She grew up in the Taylor Homes, one of the meanest neighborhoods in America, a six-foot, two-inch girl with a boy’s body. She never hid who she was. She wore dresses and skirts wherever she went and when her parents took them away, she stole new ones. She started turning tricks before she was sixteen and was disowned when she was seventeen, living on the streets of Lakeview, taking her chances with HIV and gonorrhea to get away from the gunshots and beatings of the projects. She’s seen it all, and even though she’s a mellow and charming young woman in the salon, there’s an inner toughness to her that would make a football player flinch. Which is why she’s not shaking and sobbing about what happened this morning.

  I’m not shaking and sobbing, either. Growing up middle class, white, and presumed male, I’m not as tough as Jalela, but I make up for it with an inner homicidal rage that boils to the surface when someone messes with me. Like now.

  “You okay, boss?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I nod and smile a little
when I say it. She learns more from my body language than from what I say.

  “You want me to watch your back?”

  “No, sweetie,” I answer. For some reason, I can use the sugary references on her. Maybe because she’s young and I was one of her mentors back when she tried to find a place for herself in the civilized world. Also, I love her. I told her once I’d be proud to have her as my daughter. It surprised us both, but it was true.

  “No, Jalela,” I repeat. “I need you to watch the business. I’m going to be gone more than usual for the next couple weeks.” My tone is grim. I hate having to rely on someone else to run the shop, but I have to take care of this, and sooner rather than later.

  “You got it, boss.” She flashes her beautiful smile. It puts me at ease. The salon will open and close on time. We’ll see about the rest.

  I only have a few clients in the morning, so I’m out the door by eleven to buy new styling tools and figure out my next step.

  On my way back to the salon, I stop at the deli for a quick salad. I call Cecelia while they put it together and tell her about my little morning surprise.

  “Bitch, cunt, queer? In that order?” she asks. It’s a rhetorical question.

  “I know,” I say. “You’d think they could start with ‘cunt’ once in a while.”

  “I suppose if they were considerate they wouldn’t have trashed your stuff in the first place.” Cecelia is trying to keep the tone light, but there’s an edge in her voice. Mine, too. This is serious.

  “I was wondering if you might watch my back when I leave the salon this afternoon,” I ask.

  “Okay.” Cecelia draws out the word. “What does that mean, exactly? Do I need a gun?”

  I laugh. “No guns. Just see if anyone’s following me. And if you see someone suspicious, make a note of what they look like.”

  “I could take a picture on my phone.” Cecelia is being funny again. She is one of the last people in the civilized world to get a smartphone, but since she got it, she’s been like a religious convert—she can’t talk about anything else. She posts a new selfie on Facebook every day, along with photos of everything from the mailman wearing shorts to a dog whizzing on a fireplug.