They left him talking to himself, muttering curses at the floor.
“How’re you gonna threaten him? Tell him you’re gonna put him in jail?” Sloan asked as they walked back through the parking lot.
Lucas glanced back at the penitentiary. It looked like an old Catholic high school, he decided, inside and out, until you heard the steel doors open and shut. Then you knew it couldn’t be anything but the joint . . . .
Johnson called Sloan’s number a little after six o’clock. Burrell would talk and he’d meet Lucas at Penn’s Bar, on Hennepin. Johnson would come down, to introduce them.
“Um, I got some shit to do at home,” Sloan said.
“Hey, take off,” Lucas said. “And thanks.”
They shook hands, and Sloan said, “Don’t take no wooden women.”
Penn’s bar had a sagging wooden floor and a thin mustachioed bartender who poured drinks, washed glasses, ran the cash register and kept one eye on the door. A solitary black hooker leaned on the bar, smoking a cigarette and reading a comic book, ignoring a half-drunk, pale-green daiquiri. The hooker picked up Lucas’ eyes for a second, saw something she didn’t like, and went back to her comic.
Farther toward the back, four men and two women stood around a coin-op pool table. Layers of cigarette smoke floated around them like the ghosts of autumn leaves. Lucas walked past the bar to the back, past the pool table, past a beat-up pay phone hung in an alcove next to a cigarette machine. He looked in the men’s john, came back, walked around the crowd at the pool table. The men wore jeans and vests, with big wallets chained to their belts, and looked at him sideways as he went through. Johnson wasn’t there. Neither was anyone who might be Burrell.
“What can I do you for?” the bartender asked, drying his hands on a mustard-stained towel.
“Bottle of Leinie’s,” Lucas said.
The bartender fished it out of a cooler and dropped it wet on the bar: “Two bucks.” And then, tipping his head toward the back, “Looking for someone?”
“Yeah.” Lucas paid and sat on a stool. The back-bar mirror ended before it got that far down, and Lucas stared into the fake walnut paneling opposite his stool, hitting on the beer, trying to straighten his schedule out.
If he didn’t find Burrell quick, he’d have to stay over a day. Then he’d miss the early flight to Atlanta. Instead of getting into Charleston in the morning, he wouldn’t make it until the afternoon and probably wouldn’t get out until the next day. Then he’d have to think of an excuse for the New York people.
The hooker rapped on the bar with her knuckles, nodded at the daiquiri, got a new one. She wore a pale-green party dress, almost the color of the drink. She caught his eyes again, let her gaze linger this time. Lucas didn’t remember her. He’d known most of the regulars when he was working, but he’d been off the streets for months now. A week is forever, on the streets. A whole new class of thirteen-year-old girls would be giving doorway blow jobs to suburban insurance agents who would later be described in court documents as good fathers . . . .
Lucas was halfway through the beer when Johnson walked in, out of breath, as though he’d been running.
“Jesus, Davenport,” he said. “Missed the bus.” He looked down the bar at the hooker as Lucas swiveled on the stool.
“Where is he?” Lucas said.
Johnson’s face lit up. “What’d you mean, where is he? He’s right there.”
Lucas looked past the hooker to the back of the bar; all the pool players were white.
“Where?”
Johnson started to laugh, lifted a leg and slapped a thigh. “You sittin’ next to him, man.”
The hooker looked at Lucas and said, in a voice an octave too low, “Hi, there.”
Lucas looked at the hooker for a second, rereading the features, and closed his eyes. Transvestite. In a half-second, it all fell into place. Goddamn Bekker. This was
how he got close to the women and the tourist males. As a woman. With the right makeup, at night, with his small, narrow-shouldered body. That was how he got out of the New School . . . .
God damn it.
“Did you tell Bekker how to . . . do this?” Lucas asked, gesturing at the dress. “The dress, the makeup.”
“We talked about it,” Thomas said. “But he was a sick motherfucker and I didn’t like talking to him.”
“But when you talked about it . . . was he real interested, or did you just talk?”
Thomas tipped his head back, looked up at the ceiling, remembering. “Well . . . he tried it. A couple of things.” He hopped off the bar stool and walked away from Lucas and Johnson, moving his hips, turned and posed. “It ain’t that easy to get just the right walk. If you forget halfway through the block, it ruins your whole image.”
The bartender, watching, said, “Are you guys gay?”
“Cop,” said Lucas. “This is official.”
“Forget I asked . . .”
“I won’t forget, honey,” Thomas said, licking his lower lip.
“You fuckin’ . . .”
“Shut up,” Lucas snapped, poking a finger at the bartender. He looked back at Thomas. “But did he do it? The walk?”
“Couple times, a few times, I guess. You know, we
did
talk about it, when I think back. Not so much about how good it feels, but how to do it. You know, gettin’ the prosthetic bras and like that. He’d make a good-lookin’ girl, too, ’cept for the scars.”
“You think so?” Lucas asked. “Is that a professional opinion?”
“Don’t dick me around, man,” Thomas said, flaring.
“I’m not. That’s a real question. Would he make a good woman?”
Thomas stared at him for a minute, decided the question was real: “Yeah, he would. He’d be real good at it. ’Cept for the scars.”
Lucas hopped off the bar stool, said thanks, and nodded to Johnson: “We owe you. You need something, talk to Sloan.”
“That’s all?” asked Thomas.
“That’s all,” Lucas said.
Lucas called Fell from the pay phone at the back of the bar. When she answered, he could hear the television going in the background, a baseball game. “Can you get to Kennett? Right now?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him we’ve figured out how Bekker is doing it,” Lucas said. “How he’s staying out of sight on the streets, getting out of the New School.”
“We have?”
“Yeah. I just talked to his former next-door neighbor at the Hennepin County Jail, name of Rayon Thomas. Nice-looking guy. Good makeup. Great legs. He’s wearing a daiquiri-green party dress. He gave Bekker lessons . . . .”
After a moment of silence, she breathed, “Sonofabitch, Bekker’s a woman. We’re so fuckin’ stupid.”
“Call Kennett,” Lucas said.
“You haven’t talked to anyone?” she asked.
“I thought you’d like to break it.”
“Thanks, man,” Fell said. “I . . . thanks.”
Bekker could count the drops, each and every one, as the shower played off his body. The ecstasy did that: two tiny pills. Gave him the power to imagine and count, to multiply outrageous feelings by ineffable emotions and come up with numbers . . . .
He turned in the shower, letting jets of water burn into him. He no longer used the cold water at all, and the stall was choked with heat and steam, his body turning cherry red as the old skin scalded away. And as he turned, his eyes closed, his head tipped back, his hands beneath his chin, his elbows close together, on his belly, he could count all the drops, each and every one . . . .
He stayed in the shower until the water ran cold, then, shivering, blue, annoyed, he leaped out. What time was it? He walked to the end of the room where he’d fitted a black plastic garbage bag over a barred basement window, and peeled back a corner of the plastic. Dark. Midnight. That was good. He needed the night.
Bekker walked back toward the bed, felt the stickiness on the soles of his feet and looked down. He needed to
wash the floor. The sight of the dried blood on the floor reminded him of the cut. He looked at his arm, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. The cut was painful, but the ants were gone.
He caught sight of himself in a wall mirror, his furrowed face. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, grimacing at the sight of the scars. They were in long jagged rows, raised above the soft skin around them. The gunsight cuts had been sewn closed by an emergency-room butcher, instead of a qualified plastic surgeon.
He thought of Davenport, Davenport’s teeth, the eye-teeth showing, his eyes, the gun swinging, battering . . .
He sighed, came back, shaken, staring at his face in the mirror. He put the makeup on mechanically, but carefully. Cover Mark to hide the scars, then straight, civilian makeup. Max Factor New Definition. Cover Girl nail polish. Suave styling spritz, to pull his blond hair down to cover his jawline, which was a bit too masculine.
The lipstick was last. Lipstick the color of a prairie rose. Just a touch. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a harlot . . . . He made kisses at the mirror, smoothed the lipstick with his tongue, blotted it with toilet paper. Just right.
Satisfied, finally, he went to the chest, picked out underwear, got the prosthetic bra and sat on the bed. He’d shaved his legs the night before, and they were just getting prickly. Bekker was fair-haired, fine-haired: even if he hadn’t shaved, his legs wouldn’t have been a problem. But he did shave, to capture the feel. Rayon had said that was important, and Bekker understood—or he’d understood at the time. You had to live the part, feel the part. He flashed. A woman hurrying behind him, afraid of the dark parking ramp. Live the part . . .
The panty hose slid smoothly up his leg; he’d discovered the technique of gathering them, slipping them up piece by bit-bit-bit. When the hose were on, he stood and looked at himself in the dressing mirror; he looked like a fencer, he thought, bare chest and tights. He posed, turning sideways. A little full in the front. He reached into the panty hose and arranged his penis, pushing it down and under, tight, pulling the hose up to hold it in place. Posed again. Good.
The bra was next. He disliked it: it was cold and awkward, and cut into the muscles of his shoulders. But it gave him the right look and even the right feel. He snapped it in back, and again checked the mirror. With his soft blond hair, falling naturally now to his shoulders—no more wigs—he
was
a woman. Whitechurch had certainly been convinced. Bekker flashed: the look on Whitechurch’s face as the
realization
came to him, and the gun came up . . .
He picked out a medium-blue blouse with a high collar and the remnants of shoulder padding, a conservative, midcalf-length pleated skirt, and dark gym shoes with thick walking soles. With the breast prosthetics and his narrow shoulders, he had the figure of a woman, but his hands and feet might yet give him away.
They were simply too big, too square: he wore size ten men’s shoes. But when he wore dark women’s gym shoes, the size was not so obvious. As a woman he was taller than average, but not awkwardly so. And people expected blondes to be tall. Hiding his hands was a bigger problem . . . .
When he’d finished dressing, he looked in the mirror. Fine. Excellent. The big shoulder bag was something he might keep dressier shoes in, wearing the gym shoes to walk back and forth to the parking ramp. Yuppie. He
added a necklace of synthetic pearls, picked up a bottle of Poison by Christian Dior, dabbed it along his throat, on the inside of his wrists. The perfume was too flowery, and he deliberately used too much. Perfume, Rayon told him, was a feminine, psychological thing. The odor of perfume alone might subliminally convince, in close quarters . . . .
There. Ready. He touched himself at the pit of his throat, and remembered that he’d seen his late wife do that, touch herself there, a sort of completion. He stepped to the mirror again, to take in the whole ensemble, and spontaneously laughed with the joy of it.
Beauty was back.
Beauty stepped carefully through the weeds to the lean-to garage, careful not to snag the hose. He left the car lights out, drove it to the gate, looked up and down the street, unlocked the gate, drove through, relocked it behind himself. He sat in the car for a moment, trying to think.
The parking garage at Bellevue was locked in his brain. Bellevue. He reached across the floor to his purse, found the bag, shook out a greenie: PCP. Popped one, two. Folded the bag and dropped it back in the purse, turned left. Careful. Bellevue? The hands on the steering wheel took him there, rolling through the dimly lit streets, precisely, evenly. A woman? Yes. Women were smaller and handled more easily, after they’d been taken. He recalled the struggle with Cortese, wedging the deadweight into the backseat of the Bug.
And women, he thought with sudden clarity and some curiosity, lasted longer . . . .
The guard nodded. He recognized the attractive blonde in the old Volkswagen Bug. She’d been there before . . . .
Bekker took the car to the top floor, which was virtually deserted. A red Volvo sat in a corner and looked like it might have been there for a couple of days. Two other cars were widely spaced. The garage was silent. He got his bag from the passenger-side floor, with the tank of anesthetic and the stun gun.
Bekker flashed: Cortese, the first one. Bekker’d hit him with the stun gun, had ridden him like a . . . No image came for a moment, then a hog. A heavy, midwestern boar, a mean brute. Bekker had ridden him down in the alley behind the Plaza, then used the mask. The power . . .
A car door slammed somewhere else in the garage; a hollow, booming sound. An engine started. Bekker went to the elevator, pushed the down button, waited. A sign on the wall said: “
REMOVE VALUABLES FROM CAR
: Although this ramp is patrolled, even locked cars are easily entered. Remove all valuables.”
The first hit of PCP was coming on, controlling, toughening him, giving his brain the edge of craft it needed. He glanced around. No camera. He walked slowly down the stairs past the cashier, around the corner toward the main entrance of the hospital. The sidewalk that led to the entrance was actually built as a ramp, slanting down between the parking ramp and a small hospital park. Bekker walked down the ramp, paused, then went left into the park, sat at a bench under a light.
Outside, the night was warm and humid, the smell of dirty rain and cooling bubble gum. A couple on the street were walking away from him, the man wearing a straw hat; the hat looked like an angel’s halo at that distance, a golden-white oval encircling his head.
Then: A main hospital door opened and a woman
walked out. Headed toward the ramp, digging in a purse for keys. Bekker got up, started after her. She paused, still digging. Bekker closed. The woman was big, he realized. As he got closer, he saw she was too big. A hundred and eighty or two hundred pounds, he thought. Moving her would be difficult.
He stopped, turned, lifted a foot so he could look at the sole of his left shoe. Watch women, Rayon had told him. Watch what they do. Bekker had seen this, the stop, the check, the look of anger or disgust, depending on whether a heel was broken or she’d simply stepped in something, and then a turn . . . .
He turned, as though he might be going somewhere to fix whatever he was looking at, walked away from the heavy woman, back down into the park. He might be waiting for someone inside, might even be grieving. There were cops around, nobody would bother him . . . .
Shelley Carson was a graduate nurse. She ran an operating suite, took no crap from anyone.
And she was just the right size.
Bite-size,
Bekker’s brain said when he saw her.
At five-two, she barely reached a hundred pounds when she was fully dressed. Aware of her inviting size, she was careful about the ramp. Tonight she walked out with Michaela Clemson, tall, rangy, blonde and tough; a lifelong tennis player, both a nurse and a surgical tech. They were still in uniform, tired from the day.
“Then you heard what he said? He said, ‘Pick it up and put it where I told you to in the first place,’ like I was some kind of child. I am definitely going to complain . . .” Clemson was saying.
Bite-sized Shelley Carson encouraged her: nurses were not less than doctors, they were members of a
different profession. They should take no shit. “I’d certainly go in . . . .”
“I just can’t ignore it this time,” the blonde said, building her courage. “The asshole is a bad surgeon, and if he’d spend more time working on his surgery and less time trying to pull rank . . .”
Bekker slid in behind them. They saw him, peripherally, but neither really looked at him until they started into the ramp together, and then up the stairs.
“I definitely would,” the small one was saying. Her dark hair was cut close to the head, like a helmet, with little elfin points over her ears.
“Tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock I’m going to march in . . .” The blonde looked down at Bekker, then back up at her friend. Bekker climbed behind them, one hand on the stun gun.
Halfway up, the blonde said, “Tomorrow, I go for it.”
“Do it,” said the elf. “See you tomorrow.”
The blonde broke away, stepping into the main part of the ramp, peering out. “All clear,” she said. The blonde started toward a Toyota. Bekker and the dark-haired woman continued up, Bekker’s heels rapping on the stairs.
“We have an arrangement,” the elf said, looking down at Bekker. “If one of us has to go out alone, we watch each other.”
“Good idea,” Bekker squeaked. The voice was the hard part. Rayon had said it would be. Bekker put a hand to his mouth and faked a cough, as though his voice might be roughed by a cold, rather than forty years of testosterone.
“This parking garage, somebody’s going to get attacked here someday,” the woman said. “It really isn’t safe . . . .”
Bekker nodded and went back to the purse. The elf looked at him, a puzzled look, something not quite right. But what? She turned away. Turn away from trouble. Bekker followed her out at the top floor, heard the Toyota’s engine start below. Brought the stun gun out, got the tank ready in the bag. Heard the hiss. Felt the action in his feet . . .
The woman saw him moving. A fraction of a second before he was on her, she took in the violence of his motion and started to turn, her eyes widening in reflex.
Then he had her. One hand over her mouth, the other pressing the stun gun against her neck. She went down, trying to scream, and he rode her, pressing the stun gun home, holding it . . . .
She flapped her arms like the wings of a tethered bird. He dropped the stun gun, groped for the tank, found it, flipped the valve and clapped the mask over her face. He had her now, his hair a bush around his head, his eyes wide, feral, like a jackal over a rabbit, breathing hard, mouth open, saliva gleaming on his teeth.
He heard the sound of the Toyota going down the ramp as the bite-sized woman’s struggles weakened and finally stopped. He stood up, listening. Nothing. Then a voice, far away. The little woman was curled at his feet. So sweet, the power . . .
Bekker worked all night. Preparing the specimen—wiring the gag, immobilizing her. Taking her eyelids; he held them in the palms of his hands, marveling; they were so . . . interesting. Fragile. He carried them to a metal tray, where he’d collected some others. The others were drying now, but kept their form, the lashes still shiny and strong . . .
Shelley Carson died just before seven o’clock, as silently as all the rest, the gag wired around her skull, her
eyes permanently open. Bekker had crouched over her with the camera as she died, shooting straight into her eyes.
And now he sat in his stainless-steel chair and gazed at the proof of his passion, eight ultraviolet photos that clearly showed something—a radiance, a presence—flowing from Carson as she died. No question, he exulted. No question at all.
Dink.
The intercom bell. It cut through the sense of jubilation, brought him down. Old bitch. Mrs. Lacey got up early, but habitually slumped in front of the television until noon, watching her morning shows.
Dink.
He went to the intercom: “Yes?”
“Come quick,” she squawked. “You have to see, you’re on the television.”
What?
Bekker stared at the intercom, then went quickly to the bed, picked up his robe, wrapped himself, put fluffy slippers on his feet. The old lady didn’t see very well, didn’t hear very well, he could pass . . . and he still had on his makeup. On television? As he passed the dresser he slipped two tabs off the tray, popped them, as brighteners. What could she mean?
The first floor was dark, musty, a thin orangish morning light filtering through the parchmentlike window shades. The second floor was worse, the odor of marijuana hanging in the curtains, a stench of decaying cat shit, the smell of old vegetables and carpet mold. And it was dark, except for the phosphorescent glow of the tube.
Mrs. Lacey was standing, staring at the television, a remote control in her hand. Bekker was there on the screen, all right. One of the photos that had plagued him,
had kept him off the street. But in this photo, he was a woman and a blonde. The details were perfect: