A Kind of Justice Read online

  A KIND

  OF

  JUSTICE

  Also by Renee James

  Transition to Murder

  A KIND

  OF

  JUSTICE

  A NOVEL

  RENEE JAMES

  Copyright © 2016 Renee James

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-213-0

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Dedicated to Katie Thomas,

  friend, mentor, role model

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WRITING IS SUPPOSED to be a solitary profession, but as I contemplate how this story progressed from a first draft that only a friend would read to a manuscript a prestigious publisher would consider, there are enough people to fill a crowd scene in a Hollywood blockbuster.

  Many thanks to my esteemed beta readers: Mary Whitledge, Katie Thomas, Brenda Baker, Lisa Coluccio, and Jonnie Guernsey.

  Thanks to consulting editor Chris Nelson and my wonderful agent, Tina Schwartz. Thanks also to Windy City Publishing, for getting me started in this business, and Oceanview Publishing for daring to read this book in the first place, then for taking on the challenge of publishing it.

  Thanks to the many writing groups who helped me on the way, including especially the Wisconsin Writers Association’s Novel-in-Progress Bookcamp, the Chicago Writers Association, and the Off-Campus Writers Workshop. Thanks also to John Truby, whose seminar on plot structure was incredibly helpful.

  And many thanks to the transgender pioneers who have delivered us to a time when we can be heroines and heroes in books and movies. A special thanks to the National Center for Transgender Equality, and to the many groups in Chicago who have made our city so livable for transgender people.

  A KIND

  OF

  JUSTICE

  1

  THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2008

  PEOPLE MILL AND mingle and bathe in Chicago’s moment of late-spring perfection, a last touch of Eden before the heat of summer sets in, a sun-drenched, breezy, shirtsleeves and sandals day. Pedestrians walk with a bounce. Motorists have their windows open. People caught indoors look out and curse their captivity.

  But for Wilkins, sipping coffee at an idyllic sidewalk café, it’s just business. For Wilkins, sunlight is only the appearance of happiness and the flower-scented air is only a sugarcoating for the stench that lies just under the sweetness. Murderers and rapists and psychopaths and thieves walk the streets on days like this, just the same as when the snow’s flying or the summer sun is turning exposed skin into melanomas.

  He’s on business, but not official business. Yet. More a get-reacquainted visit. He wants to learn everything he can about the queer in the shop across the street. See who goes in. Get a sense of the area. Get a sense of the quote woman unquote who got away with two violent crimes and made a fool out of him in the process.

  He finally has the time to make things right. That’s the one good thing that came from the divorce. No more restrictions on his time. There’s only an empty apartment to go home to, a dark empty place that feels like a mortuary and smells like dust. He hates the place. Dreads it like he dreads dentists and doctors. He loathes it like he loathes crooked politicians and soft judges. The only good thing about the fairy queen is, she gives him a reason to keep out of the apartment.

  He had forgotten about her until the divorce left him standing there with a suitcase full of shattered dreams, wondering what to do with himself. It was when he reviewed his open case files, looking for cold-case projects for his spare time, that he saw what the investigators missed in the Strand investigation, the ones who came after he’d been pushed off the case. They never connected the other crime to the Strand murder, the strange case of a small-time thug getting savagely mugged but not robbed.

  A motion at the edge of his peripheral vision takes Wilkins’ attention back to the street. A youngish man, midtwenties, dressed wrong, moving too fast on the sidewalk. Way too fast. He pushes people aside to pass them. He is almost running. His face is so tense Wilkins can see the sinew of his jaw muscles. He’s wearing filthy jeans with holes in them. Not designer trash, the real thing. Junkie clothes. His t-shirt has dirt smudges and hangs askew. He’s crazy thin. Like a speed freak.

  Wilkins drains the rest of his coffee and leaves as the junkie bursts into the beauty salon across the street. Something interesting is going to happen.

  * * *

  Marilee is chatting about her first grandchild, a doe-eyed waif who is nearly as cute as Marilee thinks she is. I’m doing a curling iron set on her hair and enjoying the social hour. It’s like a vacation, a leisurely service filled with easy conversation, time with someone I love. My friend. My surrogate mother.

  I’m coming off a brutal week. Ten-hour days in the shop to tend to my clients’ needs, then four days at a hair show, doing breakfasts with sponsors every morning, platform shows all day, and the mandatory party circuit every night. Eighteen-hour days.

  It’s not fun anymore.

  And I have other things on my plate now. I’ve been managing this salon for several months while Roger tends to his partner who is in chemo for pancreatic cancer. He wants to retire and have me buy the place from him. I’ve done the due diligence, talked to the bankers, hired an attorney, but I’m dragging my feet. This is no little ma-and-pa business. It’s a big, upscale hair salon in the high-rent River North neighborhood. It carries a price tag that makes my heart pound. I try not to think about it, the debt, the risk, the pressure. Dealing with the flighty personalities of our hairdressing staff. Handling bitchy clients. Getting sued.

  And I worry about not having time for my niece. The child I have been talking to since she was an embryo in her mother’s womb. The child whose face often appears in my mind before I fall asleep each night and whose happy smile and infectious belly laughs bring a gladness to my world beyond anything I can imagine.

  “What made you finally decide to give up platform work?” Marilee asks. She’s a shrink and my mother confessor. I’ve been talking to her about it for a while.

  I tell her about an exhibitor party last week. “It was late. I was beat. I started seeing things that were terribly depressing. The drunks. The false gaiety. Then a couple of models staggered out of the bathroom with cocaine eyes, and I just got this overwhelming sadness about what’s ahead for them. A wasted life. A bad death. All of a sudden it wasn’t glamorous anymore. These were not beautiful people, the partying was desperate, and I was so tired I could sleep on the sidewalk.”

  I lock eyes with Marilee in the mirror. “You know, I had to ask myself, what do I love about this? And the answer is, doing hair. Which I can do here.”

  Marilee begins to say something when a terrible crashing sound fills the salon. A wiry, crazed-looking man has flung open the entry door and crashed into a display case, sending bottles and cans of hair products flying through the reception area. The receptionist is frozen in terror, standing with hands to mouth, eyes the size of pancakes.

  The man stands at the threshold of the work area, his eyes wide
and lit up like demonic coals. His soiled jeans and t-shirt suggest street person, but street people don’t terrorize beauty salons. His face is twisted in pain and hate. He looks like death.

  “Where’s my bitch!” he shrieks. “Where’s my fucking bitch!”

  All movement in the salon stops dead. A wave of horror fills the room, sucking the oxygen out of the place. Hairdressers and clients alike gape. I can’t move any part of my body and I can’t get my mind to comprehend what’s happening. Who is this person? What is he doing in a beauty salon?

  “Trudy! Get your cunt ass out here! Now!”

  His voice thunders through the room, powered by a high-pitched desperation. Murderous desperation.

  Trudy is a junior stylist. She’s only been here for a few months. She comes out of the break room. A hair dryer clicks off, then another and another. The last sound. Silence and stillness grip the salon as though we are all frozen in ice.

  “Joey, go away!” Trudy’s voice is taut. It sounds far away. Her face is a road map of fear and mourning, a picture of someone caught in a terrible vision they can’t get out of.

  The power of movement comes back to me in small bits.

  His face is a portrait of some distant human emotion boiling in a pot of bile. He is seeing her through the veil of his own demons, a hideous lens of chaos that crazes his eyes and shreds his features with silent claws that turn his skin into deathly folds and creases.

  What do you say to someone burning with a rage that is not of this world?

  “Sir, this is a beauty salon.”

  Brilliant.

  I step toward him, putting my body between him and Trudy. Stupid. I’m a transsexual hairdresser and even though I’m six feet tall, I’m less intimidating than a poodle. My hands are shaking and my heart is fluttering. My mouth is so dry I can barely make words.

  He looks at me, confused. Like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. I get that a lot, even from people who aren’t on some kind of chemically induced trip.

  “Who the fuck are you?” His tone is caustic, taunting. A warning. I’m a bug about to be crushed.

  “I’m the manager of this salon. I’d like you to leave at once.” My tongue is sticking to the roof of my mouth as I speak. It sounds like I have a speech impediment. I want to say more but I can’t.

  It doesn’t matter. This man is listening to a different voice. Maybe lots of them. His lips curl back in a vicious sneer. His muscles flex. He is outraged that I would speak to him at all, let alone order him from the room.

  I call to the receptionist. “Samantha, please call the police.” She already has the phone to her ear and is speaking in a furious whisper into the receiver. To the man I say, “The police will be here in a few moments. Please, let’s take this outside so you can avoid trouble.” It’s not the Gettysburg Address, but I manage to say it without squeaking, without my tongue getting stuck to the glue that coats my mouth.

  “I want my bitch, you ugly freak!” he says. His face is as red as a stoplight.

  He yanks a pistol from behind his back and starts toward Trudy, raising the gun as he goes. I step into his path. My curling iron cord pops out of the power socket as I reach the end of its length. Another male figure appears behind him, just entering the salon. Something about the new person looks familiar, but I don’t have time to think about it. The maniac swings his pistol in a backhanded motion toward my face. It’s an arrogant gesture, meant to break my jaw and knock me senseless. He doesn’t need to waste a bullet on a sniveling queer like me.

  I would have agreed with him about that, but he didn’t ask and my reflexes take over. I bob under the arc of his hand the way a boxer dips under the wild hooks of an amateurish opponent. Before he can recover to swing again, I stab him in the solar plexus with my curling iron.

  It’s hard enough to take his breath away and as hot as a branding iron. He wants to scream but can’t because he can’t breathe. As he tries to suck air, I gouge my left thumb deep into his eye socket. Years of self-defense training in action.

  The madman drops like he was shot and writhes on the floor gasping for air with lungs that are frozen shut, both hands held to his eye socket. For a moment I worry that he’ll die, then he takes a short breath. A new problem. He’ll recover in a moment, and we’ll start all over again.

  I kick his pistol in the general direction of the receptionist and bind his hands behind his back with the cord of the curling iron, then tie a salon cape over his face. The cape thing is bizarre, but it works with some wild animals, maybe with him.

  We don’t find out. The police arrive before he recovers enough to resist. Two uniforms tend to the maniac, another asks me what happened. As I answer, I see the mystery man just over the shoulder of the cop. A thick, powerful black man who is staring at me with palpable malice. He looks vaguely familiar.

  I give my statement and the cop moves to Trudy, then other witnesses. Other cops take the maniac away. Trudy is in shock, gray-faced, blank-eyed. She moved out on him a week ago, sick of the drugs, the beatings, the low-life friends. Stayed with one of the other stylists and kept a low profile. Joey is dangerous. Slugs, slaps, punches. Scorns. Mr. Wonderful. His brutish personality is blended with the intellect of a carrot. It took him a week to figure out he could find her at her place of work.

  It amazes me how often a beautiful girl like Trudy gets involved with a doper or pusher or gangster or one of the other breeds of low-life men. My friend Cecelia says it’s a low-self-esteem thing. They only respect men who don’t respect them. A lot of them get into drugs themselves, or booze, or dehumanizing sex. It kills me. I’d give anything to have been put in Trudy’s body. I’d pay any price and I’d do anything to keep body and mind whole. And here she has it all and pisses it away on a scumbag like Joey.

  Slowly the salon evolves back to doing hair. I instruct the staff to comp all the clients in the salon during the scene and I personally apologize to each of them. Some of them look at me like I’m some kind of hero. John Wayne in a miniskirt. It’s kind of funny, but the humor hides a more somber truth: I’m one transwoman who doesn’t play the victim anymore.

  The police finish their interviews. The last one to leave pauses to talk to the mysterious black man who is still in the reception area, sitting now, still staring at me. Even from a distance I can see the anger on his face. Not quite the mask of hatred Joey brought in, but the same genre.

  He looks familiar, but I can’t place him. He can’t be a customer. What little hair he has is cut almost flush with his scalp. Whoever he is, whatever his issues, I decide to confront them head-on. I approach him and ask, “Can I help you, sir?”

  He stares at me as though I have insulted his wife. He stands, his face inches in front of my face, scowling, breathing through his mouth. His breath reeks. He holds a badge in one hand, beside his face. That and his hate-filled eyes, his wide nose, his powerful shoulders bring back the memory. The badge reads “Detective Allan Wilkins.” I remember him as Detective Hard Case. He wanted to implicate me in two violent crimes in the transgender community when I was transitioning. He hated me because I was a man with tits, a freak, a simpering queer who wouldn’t acquiesce to his bullying tactics.

  “Great work.”

  He’s talking about my takedown of the crazy man. But he’s not really admiring it. He speaks in a voice only I can hear, but he manages to convey hatred and anger with great efficiency.

  “You know how to handle yourself,” he says. “You act like a big fairy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But you showed who you are just now. You’re a violent pervert and you get off on hurting men. You did that poor sap in the alley and you did John Strand, too. You thumbed him in the eye, just like you did this asshole, and then you slit his throat. I’m on your trail, Cinderella, and I will get you this time.”

  The poor sap in the alley had raped me. He and a buddy. A bloody beating followed by a first-class rape. Wilkins was one of the cops who figured I had it coming. Fingering me for the mugging the r
apist got months later speaks eloquently about where transgender women sit in his legal priorities.

  “Get out of this salon right now. Don’t ever come back, or I’ll report you to the DA’s office again.” I say it in a furious whisper, my eyes boring right back into his. Getting lip from a transsexual drives him stark raving mad, but I couldn’t care less. He’s not fazed by my little reminder that the last time he tried bullying me, he got censured by the LGBT advocate in the DA’s office. No matter, that was my promise to him, not a defense mechanism. I’m not on this earth to take crap from bigots.

  “I just responded to a call with my brothers in blue,” he says, flashing a mirthless grin. “That’s my job.”

  “I insist you leave immediately.” I say it loud enough for the receptionist to hear me. She has been watching since I approached him.

  Wilkins’ lips widen into a menacing leer. He nods. Leaves. I’m supposed to be scared and intimidated. I am, but I have news for Wilkins. I’ve gotten rid of him before and I can do it again.

  The first morning of the rest of my life. An omen.

  2

  THURSDAY, JUNE 12

  THIS WORKDAY ENDS in a unique way. A cluster of hairdressers linger to talk after we close, not like us at all. In our shop, when your last customer leaves, you do a station cleanup and get out the door. Tonight, everyone wants to talk about the wild event of the morning. And the aftermath. They vent their emotions, recall where they were when it happened, what clients or other stylists said or did. They replay my heroism, especially Samantha, our receptionist. “You may not be a man anymore, but you sure know where to hit one, Bobbi,” she says.

  I’m transsexual and my friends’ lighthearted repartee and joking about it in the shop keeps the edge off. Many of these people went through my transition with me. It was a difficult time for all of us. They had to get used to me in a dress and makeup, and not looking quite right, a woman in male proportions. I had to get used to me, too. It was hard. I’d like to think we’re all better people for having gone through it. I know for sure we’re closer.