Practice to Deceive (7 page)

Steve slowly abandoned his bohemian ways—not as a repudiation of his privileged poor philosophy and certainly not because of any newfound maturity. As he had often told me, “I can’t do nine to five, man. No way.” He simply discovered that using his computer skills to collect isolated bits of information gave him more pleasure than just about anything else. And the primary employers of such skills—especially on a freelance basis—were big businesses. Big businesses did not hire flakes.

Besides, he liked the money; Sara had expensive tastes. So he started his own business. VanderTop Intelligence, Inc. “The timely collection, analysis, and dissemination of data for a company about its competitors” was the service he sold—at least over the counter.

He finished his program and came to where I was standing by his music collection, putting a Chet Baker reissue on the CD player. He sat on the floor and asked to what he owed the pleasure of my company.

“I need a hacker,” I told him.

“I am not a hacker,” he replied. “I am an intelligence research professional.”

“What’s the difference?”

“About a hundred and fifty bucks an hour.”

“Does that include industrial espionage?”

“No, that’s extra.”

“How much extra?”

“What have you got in mind, Taylor?” he asked.

“There’s this guy named Levering Field—”

“What kind of name is that?” Steve wanted to know.

I didn’t answer. Instead I told him about Mrs. Gustafson and what Field had done to her, I told him about my meeting with Field that morning, and I told him what I wanted done.

“I want his electricity turned off. I want him to get calls from his mortgage company asking what happened to his last three house payments. I want stores to confiscate his credit cards and cut them in half. I want his checking account to be suddenly overdrawn. I want to take this guy apart piece by piece until he cries uncle.”

Steve was lying on the floor now, his legs crossed at the ankles, his hands supporting his head, golden hair fanned about him—he looked like a saint in one of those early Christian paintings, a nimbus around his head.

“What you’re suggesting is illegal to the max,” he told me. He was staring at the steel girders that held up his ceiling.

“I know.”

“Why come to me? Why not do it yourself?”

“I’m not good enough,” I answered. “We didn’t cover these things when I was your pupil.”

I was just starting my PI firm when Steve and I had met in the record store. After exchanging occupations, I told him I needed to learn how to use a computer, needed to learn how to compile dossiers for clients by dragging databases for information. Steve had been happy to instruct me. He’d done his job well. But not that well.

“Do you realize what you’re asking, Taylor?”

“I do.”

“This isn’t waste retrieval, you know; sortin’ through some guys trash. Illegal use of a telephone access device, computer fraud. We’re talkin’ serious time, man. Federal time.”

“I know.”

“Gig like this, can’t leave no fingerprints. Gotta go in like the CIA.”

“Those amateurs?”

“And credit card companies, banks? Shit, man, they’ve got firewalls you can’t knock down with sledgehammers; strong passwords, cryptographic programs—some of them employ a posse, computer security experts whose only job is to track down anyone who even attempts a break-in.…” Steve smiled. “Sounds like fun. Count me in.”

“No, no, no,” I told him. “Think about it first.”

“Nothing to think about,” he said, rising off the floor. “I appreciate the challenge. Besides, the motive is pure.”

What was I going to do, argue with him?

“One rule,” I said. “No permanent damage. I don’t want to do anything to Field that we can’t undo after he pays off.”

“Not a problem.”

“What’s it going to cost me?”

“Gratis, man. No charge.”

“Cut it out.”

“Hey, I’m serious.”

“You’re going to risk going to federal prison for nothing?”

“It’s not the money, Taylor,” Steve said. “It’s the game, man. To pull this off is gonna take some killer apps. I can’t wait. When do we start?”

“Need anything besides the man’s name?”

“Nope.”

“Then we can start now.”

“Cool,” he said, looking at his watch. Then he wandered over to the clothes rack, removed the red dress, held it in front of him by the hanger. “What do you think?”

“Little flashy for my taste,” I told him.

Steve returned the dress and started searching the rack. “We’ll start after lunch,” he said without looking at me. “You can buy.”

“Is Sara going?”

Steve took a woman’s suit from the rack and examined it. “You have a problem with that?”

“I was just wondering if I should take out a loan.”

Steve grinned, laying the suit across his bed. “She
is
a pricey vixen,” he said.

S
TEVE WAS TESTING
me. I had always known he was a cross-dresser. I figured it out the day he showed up at my office wearing a sweater and skirt. But this was the first time he dressed in front of me, showed me the process. I figured he wanted to know if I was willing to risk embarrassment for him if he was willing to risk federal prison for me.

He shaved twice, first with an electric razor and then with a straight edge. Then he put on a seven-hundred-dollar pair of breast prostheses from Denmark, attaching them to his chest with Velcro and adhesive anchors. After that he slipped on a white lace bra, pantyhose, and a white lace half slip. Not once did Steve look at me, not once did I look away—although I admit I wanted to. I had enjoyed watching Laura get dressed, especially when she was going all out for a night on the town. The same with Cynthia. It gave me a pleasure I felt deep in my lower extremities. But watching Steve become Sara made me feel creepy.

Sara began to emerge almost immediately. The way Steve carried himself, tilted his head, relaxed his posture, used his hands, became, well, feminine. His voice changed, too. It did not become higher, as you might expect, but deeper, throatier, and softer. I swear to God he sounded just like Lauren Bacall.

“There is a reason why I enjoy your company, Taylor,” Sara said as she smoothed into her skin a healthy dab of Nye Coverette foundation, the same foundation used by actors, concealing the red blotches from shaving and Steve’s inevitable stubble. “In the four, five years we’ve known each other, you never once asked, ‘What went wrong?’”

“Did something go wrong?”

Sara smiled. “There are those who think so.”

“Mom and Dad?”

“Mom and Dad and the rest of the VanderTop clan do not know about me,” Sara confessed. “Every time I see my father, he asks when I’m going to get a haircut. Can you imagine what he would say if I showed up wearing a Donna Karan original?”

Sara applied a Q-tip’s worth of Nye Coverette stage cream to each side of her nose, and magically it was narrower.

“Very few people know about me,” Sara continued. “It’s not because I feel ashamed or humiliated. It’s because I don’t want to deal with
their
shame and humiliation. The American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic Statistical Manual
lists transvestitism as a paraphilia or fetish. It claims people like myself derive abhorrent sexual excitement from cross-dressing. That is not true. I simply like to dress like a woman. Is that wrong?”

“It’s not for me to say,” I answered.

Sara turned and looked at me for the first time. “Yes, it is for you to say.”

I gave it a beat, then answered, “No, it is not wrong.” It wasn’t hard to do. I had expected the question and planned my answer the moment Steve started performing for me, doing a striptease in reverse. If Sara had caught me by surprise, I might have answered differently. Or maybe not. Truth is, except for an uneasiness I felt in Sara’s presence, I didn’t much give a damn. I try not to pass judgment on other people’s lives unless I’m paid for it.

Sara turned back to her vanity and started applying black eyeliner on the lid of first her right, then her left eye.

“I started cross-dressing when I was a kid,” she said, then turned to me. “I thought you might want to know but were too polite to ask.”

I shrugged.

Sara continued. “I was about twelve. Mom caught me trying on my sister’s miniskirt and sent me to a psychiatrist. The idea that I was nuts scared the hell outta me, so after that I worked real hard at being a macho boy: went out for hockey, picked a few fights, drank beer behind the Burger King. It must have worked, too, because I didn’t think much about cross-dressing until years later when I realized I was the only guy I knew who looked at the Victoria’s Secret catalog for the clothes. I would take binoculars to the Vikings game and scan the crowd. My buddies thought I was scoping out chicks. What I was really doing was looking at women to see what they were wearing, how they did their hair. I’d be in a club and I’d watch a woman walk by. My date would get all hot and bothered. ‘Why are you looking at other women?’ she’d want to know. I’d say I was just admiring her dress, or her shoes. My date would accuse me of lying, but I wasn’t.

“Anyway, after Mom and Dad gave me my first computer, I began to surf the Internet and I found a news group devoted to cross-dressers. I started lurking, reading the messages they posted. After a while I realized I was one of them.

“Eventually, I found myself,” Sara added. “It didn’t happen right away. I purged over and over again, throwing out all my clothes, every tube of lipstick, vowing never to cross-dress again. But like Popeye says, ‘I yam what I yam.’ And over time I became comfortable with it. It also became fun. A challenge. I began going out to ‘ladies’ night’ at the local bars to see if people could read me.”

“Could they?” I asked.

“At first, sure. But not so much after I became competent with makeup and clothes. A few of the more observant women will know I’m a man. Men almost never do. But kids? The younger ones always seem to figure it out instantly; I’ll be damned if I know how.”

Sara pushed herself away from the vanity and returned to the suit she had tossed on the bed. She picked it up by the hanger and examined it carefully.

“I’m not gay, I’m not a transsexual—very few crossdressers are,” Sara said. “I’m not a drag queen or a female impersonator. I’m just a guy who likes to dress in women’s clothing. What do you think of this?” she asked, holding the suit up for me to see.

“I like it.”

“You don’t think the skirt is too short?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I used to wear a lot of short skirts,” Sara told me. “But then I started to think, Hey, I’m not a teenager anymore.”

Sara pulled on a floral print skirt, roses on a peach background. The solid peach jacket was shaped-to-the-body and cut to her hips. The shoulders were padded, the collar was rounded and six covered buttons closed the jacket from her waist to her throat. Sara tousled her hair, then returned to the vanity for pearl drop earrings and a pair of strappy sandals with two-inch heels. With the earrings firmly attached to her lobes and the sandals on her feet, she moved to a full-length mirror. She turned this way and that, smoothing the skirt, adjusting the jacket, admiring herself. Then she turned to me.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer. My mouth was hanging open in disbelief. Backlit by the huge factory windows, beatified by the light shining through her golden hair, Sara resembled an actress in a beer commercial, the one where all the men stop and stare when she walks into the room. And the sight left me feeling both dizzy and slightly nauseous, like I had just ridden the double Ferris wheel at the Minnesota State Fair on an empty stomach. I couldn’t get past the idea that if I had not witnessed the metamorphosis myself, I would be just like the other dolts she deceived on ladies’ night, buying her drinks and claiming I had been looking for a woman like her all my life.

While Sara hunted for a suitable handbag, I stood at the steel door, waiting. She stopped at her computer setup, opened a drawer, and withdrew a black cellular telephone.

“Here,” she said, handing me the phone. “If you want to talk to me or make any other calls you don’t want traced, use this. If it rings, don’t answer it. If I want to speak with you, I’ll let it ring three times, hang up, wait exactly sixty seconds, then call again.”

I took the phone, examined it, and slid it into my jacket pocket.

“How …?” I asked.

Sara looped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and stepped through the doorway. “I commandeered a few cellular phone circuits that I use on special occasions.”

“Sara,” I said, “you scare me.”

“You don’t know the half of it, darling.…”

S
ARA TOOK IT
easy on me, ordering the lobster salad instead of the lobster. Several men swiveled in their chairs as she walked past, gave her the once-over as we ate, and smiled at her. I wondered if they could read her, wondered if they could read me. After lunch we parted on the sidewalk just outside the restaurant’s door. I offered Sara my hand, but she hugged my shoulder instead. I don’t know what I would have done if she had kissed me.

“I’ll see you later,” she said smiling, fluttering her fingers in good-bye.

When I turned, I found a cabbie leaning against his blue and white, watching us. He nodded with approval.

“What the hell are you looking at?!” I wanted to know.

FIVE