With a scream I let out all my feelings in the privacy of a gender-neutral bathroom: a forest fire in my stomach, which at first I thought was disgust until it migrated down into my crotch where it burned like a motherfucker and I wondered—
((Holy shit, did I enjoy that?)) I thought back to my emotions as I did that to him, and though they were all a blur I was able to pick out moments of triumph and satisfaction and… arousal. ((I got nothing from the stimulation itself, of his tongue and mouth on my toes—but manipulating my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, the man at the top, the chief himself, into obeying the unspoken command to bring himself down low, below the level of even the lowest of his underlings, to get down on all fours and lick her filthy foot clean, and with such reverence, such religious passion, was… positively exhilarating, and the only reason I didn’t try to fuck him halfway through was my state of mind, a singular focus on giving him exactly what he wanted so that I could slip my collar ’round his neck and teach him to do my bidding unquestioningly…))
It was no different from holding down Judy and fucking her and bragging about the child support she’d be paying, except… there was no involvement of genitals. I got off with the chief without us touching each other’s erogenous zones. Without us taking off our clothes.
I got off with the chief.
It was a stunning realization. The idea to indulge his cake fetish had popped into my head and taken control, unchallenged, until its mission was complete, and now I was having feelings that discomforted me deeply—no, I should say that they disturbed me.
“I enjoyed it though. So it should be okay, right? It wasn’t weird. It was a normal exchange of sexual favor for work favor. Nothing more than a little quid pro quo. It’s okay. Yeah, he’s the chief, but—oh God—”
I rushed to the toilet and vomited. Not very much, but enough to get the idea that something about this situation was improper. No—it was unholy. He wasn’t the kind of man I was interested in. Older, yes, that was my type, older than Tom, older than Diane, older than Judy—
“Whatever you did with that cheesecake had to be weird, though. I thought you were just gonna eat it with him, I bailed when I realized it was some freaky shit with your feet.”
I wiped the corners of my lips before hugging her. “You picked a helluva time to show up. But I wasn’t thinking of you.”
“Maybe you did, but subconsciously. You feel icked out, and that’s one of the few emotions I’ve helped you with in the past that your girlfriends haven’t. Or they aren’t here for you, in this room, right this moment, so you reached further, for dear old Shosh.”
“Oh. It’s probably one of those. So can you help?”
“The only man I’ve ever been with was older than me.”
Until that moment, she had never talked about him, had never volunteered information about him, had never dropped hints, had never given up intel when interrogated. But now, after all these decades… she was dangling a nice juicy steak in front of my face and telling me to go ahead and take it. Carefully—fearing that anything might happen to ruin this moment—I asked, “How… much… older?”
“He had to be about 40.”
My heart was racing. “Where—did you—meet?”
“I snuck into a bar. Pretty guy caught my eye. Green eyes and light brown hair, almost as curly as ours.” I had never known how to picture him. ‘Light brown hair, almost as curly as ours’ was practically a library of 35-millimeter film capturing every angle of their time together, compared to the single blurry frame of half-burnt celluloid she had shared with me in life: ‘You look more like me than like your father.’ “Very handsome. I found him at a bar a couple days after I ran away, and he bought me a few drinks. I don’t remember most of the conversation, but he said he was a detective, which I found very mysterious because I had never heard or read much about them.”
I was on the verge of breaking down from toxic levels of happiness that she was actually, finally telling me about him. “Because you were trapped in your community.”
“I spent most of my childhood inside the eruv—that’s a sort of symbolic wire strung around the community that makes all of it a semi-shared space and enables… certain activities to be done that would otherwise be prohibited on Shabbos.”
She had also refused in the past to tell me about her childhood, so I very eagerly asked, “Which activities are prohibited?”
“We’re straying off topic.”
“Right, back to my father.”
“After 3 or 4 or maybe 5 drinks, I blacked out. I woke up in a strange bed the next morning with a headache and a spotty memory of the night before.” ((Oh. Oh no. Oh, Christ, no. I don’t want this to be how… how I was conceived.)) “I had no idea what had happened between taking my last drink and waking up. He made me eggs and bacon—I’d never had bacon, but as soon as he served it, I ate it in an act of defiance of God’s mitzvos forbidding unclean foods, and I washed it down with a glass of milk for good measure.” She ‘ha!’ed forcefully. I was devastated. “He gave me his phone number, and I told him goodbye and spent the last of my money on a taxi back to my hostel. When I told my bunkmate about the friendly drinking and the fun flirting and the eggs and bacon the morning after, she explained to me that—he’d—well—” She fell silent.
I squeezed her. “He ‘took advantage’ of you.”
She nodded subtly.
“This is why you never wanted to talk about him.”
“Yes. Because I didn’t want you, or anyone, to know that—that was how you were made.”
I held her tightly for some time while I tried to find a way to cope with this old news. “At least… Now I know he isn’t worth my time. And I appreciate you considering the stigma in your decision not to tell me, and maybe… maybe it’s for the best that you waited until I was old enough to wrap my head around this without letting it affect me too much.”
“I wish I could have told you about how awful he was, but awful he wasn’t. Most of my time with him is a blur or missing completely, and everything I can remember is pleasant, even dreamlike. But… even if you don’t want to get to know him, I could give you his name and address so you could go punch him in the face. Would you like that?”
“Hm… Not unless that’s what you want.” I gave her a squeeze.
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I want. Whether you decide you want to meet and bond with him or break his nose, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth the trouble of tracking him down and whether you’re willing to risk disappointment or assault charges.”
((Maybe I do want to meet him. Even if he’s been buried or cremated. Maybe I do want to give him hell for what he did.)) “Did you… consider abortion?”
“No. My life wasn’t in immediate danger, physical or mental or emotional, and by the time I realized I was pregnant—two weeks after conception—it was long past the cutoff for halachically-permitted abortion. And, besides… (hmm…)”
“Knowing that you didn’t have a choice doesn’t really hurt, I’ve always figured there was a good chance you didn’t want me, if it wasn’t the most likely explanation for you having me…”
“Esti, I was overjoyed to be pregnant, I wanted to have you! Even though what he had done to me was despicable, maybe even unforgivable, he had also…”
“Had also…?”
“It’s never a good thing. It’s horrifying to have it be done to you. But for me… the thought that I had something—something that had the potential to someday become a human being, growing inside me, demanding a love I wanted to give, that I wanted to give enthusiastically… Do you know that feeling?”
“Uhm… Yeah. I do. It’s been there, buzzing around in the back of my head, ever since me and Judy… you know.”
Her face screwed up in confusion. “You’re thinking about adoption?”
“No, uh… she… was born with a penis.”
She processed this news for a few seconds. “She’s… a guy.”
“No, she’s definitely a woman, but… when she was born, everyone thought she was a boy. Then she figured out she was a girl, at some point.”
“Oh. So…” She resumed processing. “She’s… not a man. But she has… a shmekl.”
“A what?”
“A shlang. A penis.”
“Right. Yes. A woman with a… a ‘shmekl’.”
“I see.”
“She’s a trans woman. Transgender woman. The T in LGBTQIA-pl—… I mean, in LGBT. Old folks say ‘transsexual’.”
“Ohhhh! She’s a transvestite!”
I winced. “No… she’s just a woman. A woman with a penis. That’s all. Please don’t call her a crossdresser.”
“Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m behind the times.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll catch you up when we have some time.”
“So… she, um… you two… got to know each other, biblically.”
“Yes. And I got to know a couple of guys, too.”
“Oh. Oh…”
“I love them. I would be just as happy to have their babies as to have Judy’s.”
“Oh—kay. And you’ve been thinking about pregnancy.”
“Constantly.”
“So you know what it’s like to want a baby.”
“Yes.”
“So when I say that… that for me, being pregnant with you was more good than… y’know… bad, I hope you don’t hear me trying to say that I could ever forgive him even though— Maybe I could put it like this: if I could go back and warn past-me so that she could avoid it… I… wouldn’t interfere. I would let it happen to me exactly how it happened. I’ve always wanted you. You have been my best friend in pregnancy, in motherhood, and in death. I could never give you up.”
“You think it was a good thing that he did it to you.”
“It feels wrong to put it that way. I just want to emphasize the undeniable fact that I have loved you ever since I knew you had entered my life, that I was excited to have a friend for the rest of time.”
I breathed to keep my throat from tightening too much—though I could only contain most of my emotions. “Do you think our need to have children is genetic?”
“My parents loved me from the moment my mother found out she was pregnant, just as much as I’ve loved you since the moment I found out I was pregnant.”
“Yep, that tracks. I’ve been doing just about everything I can do to become pregnant.”
“I inferred as much.” Her eyebrows popped up. “I might be a grandmother someday.”
“Maybe.”
“Wow.” She smiled and sighed. “So, about your father…”
“I don’t want to know anything more about him, I’m done searching for him in my dreams, I no longer feel like solving the mystery of that half of my heritage. The sun has set. I can finally rest.” My throat cinched. “Thank you, Shosh.”
“You’re welcome, Esti. So, you absolutely do not want to know his name?”
My face scrunched in frustration. ((God damn it.)) “Urgh… Okay. Fine. Yeah. I might change my mind later and punch him. And I don’t know when… or if you’ll ever again be in the mood to tell me.”
She nodded solemnly. “Good point. Alexander Coen.”
I turned just about catatonic. “(Alexander Coen,)” I mumbled. “I know his name, at last.”
“Lemme guess: you’ve already changed your mind.”
I nodded. “Yeah… I… gotta meet him now.”
She smiled. “That’s what I figured.” She stepped back and mussed up my hair. “I didn’t want you to know because I was afraid you meeting him might be disappointing or even heartbreaking. But in my last moment of consciousness I wanted you to know his name, because I thought that leaving you with no family to help you through your grief was cruel. But then, after I figured out I was somewhere between alive and dead, I became afraid that you would adopt him as my replacement or something if you ever met him. Since I died, I’ve been flip-flopping between telling you or not telling you—until now.”
“What made you finalize your decision? Was it what happened at the club?”
“You said withholding his name was the only way I ever fucked you over. I’ve always wanted to be the perfect friend… the best mom.”
I desperately wanted to share the identity of my father with my wives. “Well, you’ve certainly…” She disappeared before I could thank her. “…unfucked… (God damn it,)” I hissed.
I returned to my desk and dialed Intelligence.
“Detective Beltran.”
“Hey, Detective Beltran, it’s Detective Bachman.”
“Ah. You requested a GIS dataset.”
“Yes. I know I haven’t waited very long, but I was wondering if it might be ready.”
“Give us 5 minutes to verify none of the properties have changed hands since we started our research.”
“Great, thanks, I’ll swing by to pick it up in a bit.”
“It’ll be in your CaseCloud when it’s ready.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.” ((Old fashioned.))
As soon as the Intel GIS file was in my vault, I imported it into LEGIS Maps and felt my way through the application’s capabilities (with the help of the user manual and several forum posts) until I had generated an aesthetically pleasing interactive map of Santa Virginia where each property’s address was plotted and labeled with its title holder, tenant, purchase date, market value and business purpose, with the fill color of each property polygon determined by who held the title.
The result was a shotgun blast of data that I couldn’t make sense of—so I filtered out all the properties where neither the title holder nor tenant were listed as ‘Gunther & Sampson’, then set the property polygon line color based on whether G&S was the titleholder or the tenant, and the fill color of each polygon ranging in shades from green for the highest cost per square foot to red for the lowest. An obvious pattern emerged immediately. The map showed that G&S had 376 properties spread throughout the city, of which only one—the old Fitzsimmons warehouse on Jefferson Avenue, the reddest property—had no tenant assigned to it.
More curious, though, was the coincidence of the warehouse being located less than half a minute by foot across the old train tracks from the Torrey Pines Hotel.
I felt my blood pressure spike. “No. Fucking. Way.” Four abandoned train tracks separated the southern edge of the abandoned Fitzsimmons warehouse (the facility’s rail docks) and the Torrey Pines’ private train station on the hotel’s northern edge. Our kidnappers didn’t need to transport Alex across town by car, they could have simply carried him a few dozen yards across the tracks—out one back entrance, in the other.
Finding Alex had proven to be shockingly straightforward—notwithstanding having to teach myself how to use LEGIS. The hard part was coping with my inability to save him in time.
—No. The hard part was going to be telling Geraldine I had failed her, that I had promised her something I couldn’t actually give her: her husband, alive.
I had to keep my upper lip rigid as granite. And if I couldn’t tell her, there were plenty of people who could do it for me. Judy, Diane, Koko, Doll—actually, she probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with Diane or Doll or Koko because they were (or had been) cops, just like I was, and she might not like that Judy was in a polycule with the same cops.
There was no point in ruminating over Geraldine’s hatred for me. If ever there was a way to change her mind, it would be bringing him back alive. I went home and had some of the chili I had started on the stove a couple days prior.