Seven Suspects Read online

  “Good gracious, Bobbi,” she exclaims. “What a horrible thing to say to anyone!”

  I shrug. “It worked. He left.”

  “After he called you a cunt and a man with tits.”

  I shrug again.

  “Don’t you get it, Bobbi? You just alienated another person. You could have let him down easily. Or better yet, you could have left him in the bar. But you had to give him a verbal kick in the balls. That’s going to catch up to you someday.”

  As we talk, I keep my eye on Roberta with the attentiveness of a bodyguard. She’s been talking to another girl, and they’ve been moving on the fringes of a cluster of teens and preteens. Cecelia asks if I’m listening to her.

  “Of course I’m listening,” I say. “I’m multitasking. I need to be ready if someone tries to snatch Roberta. I’ll dismember them before they get to the stairs.”

  “You know you’re compensating, don’t you?” Cecelia is referring to my crappy post-Phil sex life, which consists of the occasional one-night stand with a man who just wants a quickie with a transwoman, to see what it’s like.

  “Yes.” I keep my eyes on Roberta.

  “Then why do you do it?”

  I shrug. “Because it feels good.”

  She shakes her head, like I’m a lost cause.

  “Really, Cecelia,” I say. “Think about it. The one benefit to feeling so bad about being rejected by Phil is, for a while anyway, sex is supercharged for me, and I don’t have to be picky about who’s on top.”

  Cecelia makes a disgusted face. I can’t help but laugh, which makes her realize I was just baiting her. She gives up. “Be safe, Bobbi.”

  Roberta and her chum have toured the walls of the room, still drifting with the gaggle of other kids. They’re standing near the stairs to the first floor—and the exit. My inner guardian is on high alert. I eyeball every adult who makes a move, especially the males. I know how easy it is to abduct someone. I’ve done it, and not with a child, either. I abducted a full-grown man in good shape. As I peruse the area looking for threats, I notice a man on the other side of the room. He’s been looking at us. A nice-looking man, fiftyish, wearing casual designer clothes, stately gray-streaked hair, nice shoulders. I wonder what Cecelia would say if he came over and started putting moves on me.

  “I’m worried about you, honey,” Cecelia is saying. She’s always been able to do female sugar-talk with the ease of a fifties socialite. When I do it, I feel like a truck driver at the opera.

  I glance at her for a split second. She has her worried face on. I start to respond, but she cuts me off.

  “It’s not just the sex. It’s who you’re becoming,” she continues. “You’re . . .” She thinks for a beat or two. “You’re rude.”

  I roll my eyes. “Only to people who are rude to me.”

  “But that’s not you. You’ve always been patient with people. You’ve become arrogant.”

  “I learned it from you!” I’m being defensive, but it’s true. Cecelia has always been able to wield arrogance like an avenging sword, slashing the egos of those who would dare try to belittle or dominate her.

  “But that’s who I am,” she answers. “Arrogance takes lifelong practice. Otherwise it just makes you stupid. You’re alienating people you don’t need to alienate. You’re heading for a bad fall.”

  “Like what, for example?” I’m a little miffed. I’d much rather be called a cunt than arrogant.

  “Like turning off clients. Like angering staff. Like getting one of your ape men mad enough to maul you.”

  Uncanny. Cecelia nails the big events of my recent life as if she’d been there. She wasn’t, and I haven’t told her about them. She has a sense about human nature and events that can be eerie sometimes. I stare at her, speechless.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  The question shakes me out of my trance. I nod yes and look for Roberta. She’s not where I last saw her. I scan the room. She’s not here. Panic rips at my chest. A vision of Cindy’s gorilla-sized boyfriend snatching her flips through my mind. The kids are still hanging out, but Roberta and her new chum are nowhere to be seen. I shoot to my feet and cast about. Cecelia sees my alarm, stands up with me. My heart is pounding hard enough to break my ribs.

  “You search this floor,” I tell Cecelia. I dash downstairs. Adrenaline courses through my body like a fever. If I catch the scum bastard who snatched Roberta, I will kill him right here and now. I don’t care how big he is. I’ll rip his eyes out, then rip his face off.

  I run around the first floor like a crazy woman, checking every child-size female I see. Families waiting in line and dining at tables are alarmed by my panic. I dash out the door and check the drive-through, then over to Ohio Street and look east, dreading the sight of a child’s arm waving frantically in the back window of a car I will never see again. Nothing. I rush to the parking lot and run up and down the rows of parked cars. Nothing. I’m crying now, crying in terror. I can see Roberta being horribly abused by sick child molesters. I can’t even imagine telling Betsy. I can’t see how I could possibly live another day.

  I scurry back into the restaurant, hoping by some miracle that Cecelia found her, knowing there’s no chance of that. As I rush in, I scan the people in line to order one more time, then head for the second floor.

  Cecelia and Roberta are coming down the stairs.

  I go through the primary stages of parenting in a split second. Shock and shortness of breath. Elation and watery joints. Anger and heart palpitations. And unconditional love. I drop to my knees and embrace her as if she is the answer to a prayer. She is.

  “Aunt Bobbi!” she scolds me. She’s embarrassed to be greeted like this in front of her hip new friends.

  I stand and exchange glances with Cecelia, dabbing at my tears. They’re still coming. Cecelia puts an arm through mine and orders Roberta to take her other hand and she walks us outside. Roberta and her friend had been in the bathroom while I was having a heart attack.

  “God, Aunt Bobbi!” She says it with pitch-perfect martyrdom, an exasperated preteen whose knowledge of the world has a certainty no one my age will ever have again. In the privacy of my apartment, I try to explain why I was so panic-stricken when I lost sight of her at the restaurant.

  “It’s not like I’m a baby,” she says. She delivers the line like an actress on a Disney Channel show for older kids.

  I want to tell her what happens to young girls who get snatched by predators. I want her to hear the tragic life stories of women who survive such ordeals. I want to justify my terror, but I know she’s not ready to deal with the most sordid and disgusting realities of life yet.

  “I know you’re not a baby,” I answer. “You are a very smart and very beautiful young woman. Just, please . . .” God, what do I say that won’t sound stupid or alarmist? I’ve seen too much. “Please give me the benefit of the doubt, Roberta. I’m smart, too, so do what I ask you to do, and I’ll try not to ask too much.”

  She sighs and looks away. I’d like to strangle whoever wrote the script she’s following.

  “Do we have a deal?” I’m pressing the issue.

  Roberta looks at me and shrugs.

  An impulse overwhelms me. I wrap my arms around her, saying, “You can’t ignore me, Princess Roberta. I’m the tickle monster.” And I set on her, tickling her ribs and feet. She erupts in paroxysms of laughter, trying not to at first, then getting into it. She tickles me back, and I fake like I still have nerve endings that work and I laugh with her. We wrestle on the floor. My Princess is back, at least for the moment.

  5

  PHIL IS WAITING outside as I leave the salon. He doesn’t come to me for haircuts anymore—or anything else. In the old days, we would have had this conversation over lunch, or maybe just before a nooner. Now, he’s walking with me for a couple of blocks to the place where I’m having lunch. When we get there, he’ll have told me what he’s going to tell me, and he’ll hail a cab and go back to his office.

&nbs
p; “No one followed you this morning that we can see,” he says. No preamble. No hug. As soon as I join him we start walking and he starts talking. For him, it’s like a briefing at headquarters. For me, it’s the nightmare realization that this man who once felt like the summer sun to me now sees me only as a citizen.

  “The undercover says he’ll check you again at different times, and we’ll let you know if he sees anything.” Phil checks his little notebook. “The other thing is, I checked out the suspects in your rape case. One hasn’t been seen in years, and the other one, he’s in bad shape now.”

  “The mugger who got mugged?” I don’t try to mask the contempt I have for the man. He was a thug who worked for Strand and he was one of the men who raped me. His name was Andive, but I didn’t know it then, and I couldn’t make an identification that would stand up in court, so I couldn’t press charges. But I knew who he was—he kept following me, wearing the same jacket and hat. So, I took care of it myself. I hired someone to beat him to oblivion. It was listed as an unsolved mugging, though the detective who investigated me for the Strand murder figured I had something to do with it. So did Phil and Cecelia, maybe because he got mugged right where I got raped—not the smartest move of my life, but the symmetry was important to my self-esteem.

  Phil nods.

  “I heard he was crippled after the mugging.”

  “I guess it’s worse than that now,” says Phil.

  I nod silently. The only thing I regret about the destruction of that lump of fecal coliform is that I had to have someone else do it. When he dies—if shit like that actually dies—I will be tempted to open his grave and drive a stake through his heart, then hire some guy to urinate on him. It’s hard to do that as a girl.

  “What about the other guy?”

  “We’ve never gotten an identity on him. I think he got out of here when Andive got mangled and Strand . . .” His voice trails off. Strand got his throat slit, an event we’d both like to forget, even though it made the world a better place.

  “So,” I say. We’re nearing the deli. Time for Phil to fly off and me to get my mind in order. I glance at him. I don’t want to, but I do. I demand that my mind stay focused on business, but my body can feel his embrace, as soft and gentle as the first warm day of spring. The sensation is so real I can feel my face get flush. It’s like an amputee feeling the missing limb.

  “One other thing,” he says. “That junkie you, uh, subdued?” Phil pauses a beat. The memory is vivid. A speed freak burst into the salon one morning to abduct his girlfriend and tear the place apart in the process. I took him down with a curling iron and an eye gouge. Not very ladylike, but I doubt the queen was going to have me over for high tea anyway.

  “He’s been in and out of the system,” says Phil, “but he’s out now. If someone’s following you, it could be him.”

  We stop and Phil offers a handshake. We say good-bye as though we had never whispered vows of love in each other’s ears. I watch him jump in a cab and disappear into traffic, then I go in the deli, trying to remember what the junkie looked like and trying to forget how it felt when Phil made me feel like a woman.

  IF IT WASN’T for my smartphone, lunches would be a torture. My large, masculine body has gradually evolved over the years to a slimmer, weaker, feminine body. By watching my diet like a fashion model and working out almost every day, I’ve managed to get my weight under 160 pounds and keep it there while the bulging muscles of my former self gave way to more feminine attributes. I’ll never get where I want to be, but I look pretty good for a middle-aged woman.

  To stay that way, I limit my lunches to a salad, no dressing, and a cup of soup. It takes all of five minutes to consume this lunch, but I need to be away from the salon for a half hour to recharge my batteries. So I return e-mails, update the salon Facebook page, and check the news.

  Today’s Facebook post is the photo of the vivacious young intern whom I promoted to New Talent Stylist. We’re very careful about what goes on our Facebook page and our website. I have a professional photographer come in for photos like this one because we’re after a certain look. We want all our employees to exude style and sex appeal in a fashion-forward kind of way. The new stylist’s photo is perfect—it shows a cute young woman with a nice figure smiling as she performs a blow-dry on a client with beautiful hair. The stylist looks pretty, friendly, and chic, and so does the client. When you see the photo, you’re supposed to feel like this is a house of elegance and you will be welcome here and you will leave feeling beautiful.

  When I look up from my electronic labors, the waiter is bringing my check. I give him my credit card and sit back, letting my eyes wander for a moment. It’s early, so the lunch crowd hasn’t really started to roll in yet. Only two other tables have patrons. One is having breakfast, the other is nursing a cup of coffee. Lite rock plays softly on the sound system. Sunlight beckons from the front, reflecting off the worn hardwood floor, revealing the age of the place, which I find comforting.

  After I settle up with the waiter, I begin to make my way to the door. When I stride by the coffee drinker’s table, my purse snags on the empty chair that faces him. I stop to unsnag it. I lift my eyes to the man’s face and apologize for disturbing his reverie. He looks familiar. Fiftyish, gray-streaked hair, a nice face, friendly more than handsome, blue eyes, good shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Oh, no need to apologize,” he says. He sees the recognition on my face as I try to place him. He smiles and squints his eyes curiously. “Have we met?” he asks.

  “You seem familiar,” I say.

  “So do you,” he answers. “Maybe you turned me down for a date once. So many beautiful women have done that it’s hard to keep them all straight in my memory.”

  I’m beautiful! His syrupy line is transparently phony, but I allow myself an inner glow anyway. In my world, even lies about my attractiveness are rare and the few that come along are often vulgar. This man’s line is so artfully expressed that I receive it as a gesture that a nice-looking man wants to say something nice about me.

  “You’re a skilled flatterer,” I say to him. I notice he’s not wearing a wedding ring. I can feel my face blushing. I’m in my midforties. You’d think I’d have more poise by now.

  He smiles. “Can you join me?” He gestures for me to sit down. “Maybe we can figure out where we’ve met.”

  I’d love to join him. He has a gentlemanly flair and he’s not bad looking to boot—several levels higher on the food chain than the kind of men I’ve been seeing lately. But I have a jam-packed afternoon of clients and I have to leave early to get Roberta.

  “I’m afraid duty calls,” I say.

  “Perhaps another time?” he asks.

  “That might be nice.” I return his smile.

  He asks for my phone number. I give him a business card. “I own the beauty salon down the street. L’ Elegance.”

  He studies the card.

  “We do men,” I add.

  “That sounds exciting.” He smiles widely.

  “I didn’t mean it quite that way,” I say. I’m smiling, too. I could mean it that way and we both realize it.

  As I walk back to the salon, I think he probably won’t call.

  Roberta and her friends are in the back of the room again when I arrive to pick her up. Yesterday’s laughter and snickers have been replaced by whispers and knowing smiles. I don’t wait for Roberta to come to me. I don’t even pause to sign the register. I walk straight to the group, six of them, four girls, two boys. As I approach, all but two of the kids get startled looks on their faces and assume shy, submissive postures. One of the girls keeps her nose in the air and watches, a small, nasty smile on her face. One of the boys wears a cocky smirk and looks me in the eye with the defiance of a Hitler Youth.

  “You must be Paul,” I say to the smirking boy. He nods his head yes and smirks wider. He’s clad in a football jersey, a handsome kid with buzz-cut hair and a fake wholesome boy-next-d
oor presentation.

  “And you must be Meredith,” I say to the sly girl. She has long hair that’s been hot-ironed into cascading curls. She’s pretty, the kind of pretty that makes other kids want to be her friend, and she’s the kind of pretty who enjoys inflicting emotional pain on others just to verify her own majesty.

  “I’m Roberta’s Aunt Bobbi. I understand the two of you have a lot to say about me.”

  Roberta is red-faced and squirming. So are a couple of the other kids. Paul and Meredith stand their ground. If belligerence had an odor, I’d need a gas mask about now.

  “What would you like to tell me?” I ask them.

  Paul gives me a sarcastic smile. “Nothing.”

  “Meredith?” She’s still giving me the sly, I-know-I’m-safe smile. She shakes her head, no.

  “From now on, if you have something to say about me, say it to my face and leave Roberta out of it. Tell your parents the same thing.”

  Not exactly the Sermon on the Mount, but at least I served notice. I take Roberta’s hand and lead her to the sign-out desk. She must be horribly embarrassed, but at least I didn’t swear. The teacher at the sign-out desk regards me with saucer eyes. I try to keep my hand from trembling as I sign. “Have a nice day,” I tell her. My voice sounds cool enough, even though my digestive tract is churning, and I’m cursing myself for not saying something that would put the fear of God in those little bastards. What that would be, I don’t know.

  I glance back at them as we turn to leave. The group is silent, even Meredith, the bitch-in-training, and Paul, future sociopath. I wonder if my confrontation with them, anemic though it was, rocked their boat a little. Not likely. Their parents probably give them trophies for bullying.

  My sense of outrage gets me about halfway to the El station. The second half of the walk is spent wondering how Betsy is going to feel about me terrorizing the school’s Lady and Lord Snot and giving Roberta notoriety.

  I don’t really look at Roberta until we’re standing on the platform, waiting for the next train. She looks a little shocked, but she’s not crying or hysterical.