Night vision

CHAPTER 38

She had been born Robert Simon, she said.

She laughed. "Bob. Let's throw the ball, Bob. Do I seem like a Bob to you? I should have changed it to something more feminine. What do you think of Melissa?"

"Bobbie's just fine," I said.

"I always wore dresses and jewelry and my hair was long and beautiful," she said, running a hand through the layered shag. "My mother used to brush my hair."

"Your mother wanted you to be a girl."

" I wanted to be a girl. As long as I could remember. She didn't object when I used her cosmetics or learned to sew or dressed in her underthings."

"What's your earliest memory?"

"Sleeping with Mother. She would curl herself around me. I remember how warm she was, her bare breasts pressing into my back.

She would tuck her arms and legs around me, holding me tight. So womblike. Every night until my teens."

"And your father?"

She had pulled the shoulders of the dress back up and was leaning on my kitchen counter. I was displaying my culinary skills by boiling a pot of water, two tea bags cleverly dangling inside waiting mugs.

"You expect me to say he wasn't there," she said.

I shrugged.

"He was there but not there. He'd leave for work before I awoke and come home after I was asleep. On weekends he'd lock himself into his workshop and cut and hammer and saw, making all sorts of useless things. He had his hands on wood and sheet metal far more than on my mother."

"You wanted to be like your mother."

"So very much. But I'm not a fetishist, you know. I didn't just want to dress in women's clothing."

I thought of Stephanie, the man-killing transsexual, mocking transvestites. No weekend cross-dressing here.

"I wanted breasts like Mother's," Bobbie continued. "I wanted to dress like her. I wanted to be rid of my penis. Do you know I never, never peed standing up. Not once. Not then, not now."

The pot threatened to boil over. I poured the steaming water into the mugs. "You have the breasts."

"Hormones. Lovely breasts, don't you think, though not so large as I would like. And a beautifully pitched voice. But I still have the ugly thing."

She pointed to her crotch. "I didn't pass their tests, so they wouldn't cut me." She imitated a supercilious doctor: "'Mr. Simon, you don't unequivocally believe yourself to be a woman.'"

"Because you still have sex with women."

"Partly, I suppose, though is that any worse than hooking, selling yourself to men? Many TS's do that to pay for the operation, you know. You'd be surprised how excited men get when they're with a woman who possesses both breasts and a penis. They don't know what to grab first."

"Telling themselves it's not really a homosexual experience because she looks like a woman."

She shrugged and sipped the tea. "I could show you things, Jake, take you to heights-"

A little light bulb flashed. "That's how you met Max, wasn't it? You were raising money for the operation that never came."

"He loved me, took me out of a filthy room on South Beach. You don't know what I've been through."

I thought I did. "I'll bet if we ran the name Robert Simon, we'd come up with a few busts, wouldn't we? What you did for love. And money. Maybe rolling some johns who would never file charges. Maybe jail time for soliciting."

"Is it a crime to fulfill my destiny, to be what I was meant to be?"

"What are you, Bobbie?"

She shook her head. "Something. Nothing. Something stuck between here and there. I don't know anymore. I lust for you because I'm a woman. I lust for Pam and I hate myself for it."

Little bells were ringing. What was it Stephanie had said? When I need a woman, it comes over me in waves. My passion inflamed a thousandfold. Then she had whispered something else. And hate her for it, for making me the male beast.

"Who do you hate, Bobbie?"

"I told you. Myself, for my weakness, my own lack of total identity with my femininity."

"Maybe, but you also hate her…"

"Don't start playing shrink with me. That's what she does."

"Do you hate Pam for that, too?"

"You're nuts!"

"Man is the hunter," I said.

"Sure, sure. And woman is his game."

" You're the hunter, Bobbie."

"No! The game."

"You want to be the game. Or part of you does. Part of you is shamed to be a woman and another part shamed to love a woman."

She closed her eyes. "I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.'"

"Yes, that's it, isn't it?"

"'Weakness to be wroth with weakness! Woman's pleasure, woman's pain. Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain.'"

"You believe it, don't you, Bobbie?"

"No. Just words. Just a man's words. It isn't me."

"You had sex with Mary Rosedahl the night she was killed."

"Yes."

"And you were the male, weren't you? You had vaginal intercourse. It's your blood we've been after."

"Yes, but-"

"And the same with Priscilla Fox. You had sex with both of them and left your borrowed poetry behind."

"Yes, yes."

"And then strangled them, the sleek and shining creatures of your chase."

"No. I'm a woman. I want to be loved by a man. I want to change."

"You hunt them for the beauty of their skins."

"No, no!"

"The rest of the stanza. Say it."

She turned away and hugged herself, hunching over, the fragile blades of her shoulders delicate as the wings of a bird. "Or shall I do it?" I asked. In a whimper, she recited the verse:

"' They love us for it, and we ride them down.

Wheedling and siding with them! Out! For shame!

Boy, there's no rose that's half so dear to them

As he that does the thing they dare not do,

Breathing and sounding beauteous battle, comes

With the air of the trumpet round him, and leaps in

Among the women, snares them by the score

Flattered and flustered, wins, though dashed with death… '"

"Bobbie, you're not a woman…"

Great sobs racked her body. "I am, I am."

"You're a man and you blame them for it, hate them for it." She whirled and brought her hand toward my cheek. Her slim-fingered boy-girl fist wouldn't have hurt, but it held a Miami Dolphin mug half-filled with hot tea. The mug glanced off my forehead, and the tea splashed square across my face. I yelped and hopped backward on my one good leg. My eyes were half-closed, but I sensed her bending over, and something black was in her hand. I tried to pivot, and if my left leg had held the weight, I would have dropped her with a straight left hand. But it couldn't and I didn't, and the leg collapsed, and as I fell without help from anyone she bashed me square on the skull. It felt like a hammer, and great gongs went off as I crumpled to the kitchen floor. I started up and she hit me again, this time at the base of the skull. The world lit up and I lay down.

I took a futile stab at a leg as she stepped over me, and as she stepped away I saw the blurry image of her shapely calves and stockinged feet. In each hand she held a stylish black shoe with a stiletto heel.

I was woozy but awake. I had not been out long.

The kitchen floor was cool and sticky against my face. I looked for my own blood, would maybe send some to Nick Fox. But there was no blood. Last week's spilled beer, tacky on my skin.

I touched my face. Raw skin that would blister from the hot tea. I felt my head. Two bumps with round dents where the metal-tipped heel had jolted me. I pulled myself up with my good leg and totaled the score. I figured I was the first guy to be KO'd on consecutive days by Mr. and Mrs. Max Blinderman. Even if the missus was nearly a mister, it would not look good on my resume.

The cobwebs were clearing and I picked up the phone. First I called Nick Fox, who didn't believe me and wanted to know why the hell I hadn't delivered my blood and my gun. I yelled at him to shut up, then told him about the hermaphroditic nature of Robert Simon aka Bobbie Blinderman.

"You touched it?" he asked, incredulous. "You really touched it?"

"Listen, Nick. She or he is the killer. Get somebody to the Sunset Beach Hotel right now. Pam Maxson's suite."

He was still skeptical but said he would take all necessary precautions. I hate the way politicians talk.

I called the hotel, hoping Pam Maxson was there.

Her laugh was filled with derision. "Are you trying to tell me you just learned of her sexual identity? I find that hard to believe, though it's not surprising she was at your house. Tell me, were you doing her or vice versa?"

"What are you talking about? Do you think I-"

"You and that promiscuous creature…"

"Pam, if you're jealous, let me assure-"

"Jealous! Of her, of you? Do you think either of you means anything to me?"

"Pam, listen to me. I'm trying to tell you she's a killer. She wants to kill you."

"Rubbish. She's had sadistic fantasies quite normal among transsexuals, and she's as slutty as the rest of them, but-"

"Pam, I'm telling you she's coming over there."

"I know that. She called from the lobby a minute ago. I would expect that's her at the door just now."