Always Kiss the Corpse (11 page)

“She moved after she took leave from the hospital,” Ursula said. “The house belongs to one of the nurses, he's in Rwanda for a year. Sandra got cheap rent by caretaking.”

“I think—” Brady paused. In the rear-view mirror, Kyra caught her glance at Ursula.

Who said, “Oh. It's all right, hon, they know about the sex change.”

“Did you tell them?”

“They found out by themselves.”

“Oh, okay then.” Brady continued, “She wanted privacy so she wouldn't run into somebody she knew. Till the change was finished.”

“That makes sense,” Noel admitted. “You liked her, eh?”

“Oh yes! We did a bunch of things together, movies and we had lunches. And sometimes we'd go shopping and we'd have the time of our lives. Like last October. The first time Sandra,” Brady's tone emphasized the name, “had gone out in public, you know, dressed as a woman. Some clothes I'd given her, and she looked pretty good. But she wanted her own stuff, and she was really nervous when she picked me up, like she was going to play with fire. She even asked me to drive.”

“Where'd you go, Oak Harbor?”

“Oh no. We went to Bellingham. To the big mall. Bellis Fair?”

“Of course.” Kyra disliked it well.

“She worried somebody from Bellingham would see her, her mother's friends.” Brady giggled. “But when we got into the clothes, she relaxed. She took to them like a duck to water.”

“What did, uh, she buy?” Hard to make that mental switch, Kyra thought.

“Oh, she had to have everything, underthings first. Lingerie, she called them. We had a great time. Masses of lace and frills. And some cute dresses, and skirts and tops. High heels, she must have tried on a dozen pairs for every one she bought, and she walked really well in heels, cool as a cucumber. All kinds of dangly earrings, and lots of makeup too. If I hadn't been along she'd have looked like a tart from a B movie!” Brady and Ursula laughed. A sadness tingled in their voices.

“Did she wear normal things? Jeans, T-shirts?” Kyra asked.

“Oh sure, but tight T-shirts, especially as her boobs swelled.” Brady stared out the window. “We went again. The January sales, before classes started. Sandra needed school things. That was real neat too.”

“Turn here,” Ursula ordered. Noel checked his map to find out where they were. Langley Road. Soon she said, “Turn here.” Log Cabin Road. And, “Here.” Storrs View Drive. They were just southwest of Clinton, near the bottom of Whidbey Island. Kyra pulled into a long driveway that wound past a ramshackle garage and a stretch of bushes. She stopped in front of a small cedar cabin. They got out.

A covered veranda ran along the front and down one side of the low house. They climbed two steps. Ursula unlocked the door. The veranda's roof cut the light to the windows so it was dim in the room they entered, only four-thirty. Two cats unravelled themselves from the sofa and attacked various legs, meowing about how dreadfully they'd been neglected. “It's just been two days,” Ursula informed them. “You're not so badly off.” She glanced across to the kitchen area. “Look. You still have food.” The cats, one orange, the other gray, wound around her legs as she filled the dishes with dry food from a bag under the sink. Then unfilled the litter box.

Noel stared at an aquarium against the far wall. He switched on the light. Various water animals glowed. He made out some brightly colored fish and two dull sea slugs. Snails clung to the glass. The room also featured a sofa, two armchairs, coffee table, two end tables and a desk holding a computer and printer.

Kyra opened a door to a bedroom. Neat, bed made, no clothes flung on surfaces, the pictures on the walls straight. In the closet she found a number of dresses and light suits, skirts and blouses. And a man's bowling shirt and pants, proclaiming sponsorship by Krawcyk and Sons Garage. High heels lined up on the floor beside a pair of sandals, two pairs of low heels, sneakers and bowling shoes. She rifled through again: no further male clothing.

The dresser, a standard man's highboy, held a vanity mirror. Garage sale issue, Kyra thought. In front of the mirror, a large silver tray contained more cosmetics than she'd owned in her whole life. She unscrewed a vial of cologne. Not bad.

Noel and Brady appeared. Brady opened a dresser drawer. “Here, feast your eyes, it's the lingerie Sandra bought when we went shopping.”

Kyra and Noel glanced in. Lacy, flimsy panties and bras, the sort that, the less fabric, the more they cost. Kyra smiled ruefully now at Brady's
B-movie tart
comment. What was Sandro wearing when the kid found his body?

Ursula appeared. “All that soft clothing. Sandro, before Sandra, kept saying how important it was for him to go the other way. He did everything he could to move himself the other way.”

Sandro owned more lacy little things than Kyra did. He must have felt mighty different from what his male image had projected.

Noel said, “Rudy Longelli mentioned that Sandro had a daughter. Do you know if he'd made a will?”

“No, I don't,” Ursula said.

“Very few thirty-year-olds make wills,” Brady observed. “I'm twenty-nine and I don't know anyone who has one. You haven't, have you, babe?”

“No. And,” she added, “I'm thirty-seven,”

Kyra thought, I haven't either, and looked at Noel.

“I made one when my partner got sick. We both did. But mine leaves everything to him and he's dead.” He grimaced. And Brendan had left everything to Noel, so Noel never had to find gainful employment again. “But we'd better look. Where did Sandro keep his papers?”

Ursula and Brady shrugged.

They trooped back into the large room. The no-longer-complaining cats were grooming themselves. Noel opened the desk's top right drawer. Paper, disk-holder, a few pens.

“Sandro was left-handed,” Kyra reminded him.

In the top left drawer a cardboard folder with a Velcro flap held Sandro's documents: birth certificate, graduation from high school, nursing license, vaccination certificate, medical plan, address book. No will. Papers back, the lower drawer. A photo album. Pictures of Sandro, the first with a beard and wearing only jockey shorts, the second with no beard but still in men's undershorts, then the rest—Noel riffled through—Sandra in lacy lingerie. A record of how his skin was smoothing, facial hair disappearing, breasts swelling. “Have you seen these?” he asked Ursula and Brady.

“No,” Ursula said.

Brady thumbed through. “All the photos have the same background.” She looked around, “Like that wall there.”

“He's in the same position in each photo,” Kyra ob-served.

“It would be like Sandra to keep a record of her changes,” said Ursula. “She was fastidious and methodical.”

“Who took the photos?” Noel wondered.

“Maybe she did,” Kyra said. “Maybe there's a Delay button on the camera. If the camera stood on that bookcase up against the wall, that'd work.”

“That'd work,” Brady repeated.

“May we take them to show Mrs. Vasiliadis?” Noel asked Ursula. “To convince her it was her son in the coffin.”

Ursula shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Good.” To Ursula and Brady: “We'll be responsible for the photos. We'll leave the album with Mrs. Vasiliadis or get it back to you.” Noel realized he was explaining his actions to the keeper of the house key; Ursula wasn't in charge here. Should they really show Sandro's mother these pictures? Could she handle the images? Would Sandro/Sandra have wanted Maria to see them?

Noel and Kyra glanced into the bathroom and the other bedroom. Both neat. In the closet Noel located a camera. It did have a self-timing device. He turned it on and flashed through the memory. No images.

Kyra went back to the bathroom. A sink. On the right a hairbrush and comb, on the left a glass, toothbrush and paste. You learn a lot about people from their medicine cabinets, she believed. Here the usual nail files and clippers, tweezers, scissors, Band-Aids, antiseptic cream. And three little bottles of medications, two prescribed by Richard Trevelyan, M.D. She called Ursula in. “What are these?”

Ursula glanced at the labels. “Strong painkillers. New.” She read: “'As needed.' Hmm.” Another vial. “Hipoperc. Never heard of it. Which doesn't mean much. ‘Five drops twice daily.' Interesting. Not dispensed by a pharmacy. Come on, we better go.”

Noel turned off the aquarium light and scratched the orange cat's head. The gray one slept.

≈  ≈  ≈

Terry Paquette clicked the light switches. The lab went dark. But not black. The fish tanks glowed with green or blue or yellow lights, according to the needs of their inhabitants. Her last function every evening was to walk the four sides of the room, one final glance at each of the eighteen tanks. She didn't need to do this, the kiddies would be fine until morning, but she enjoyed the stroll. Peace hovered here. Among her kiddies she preferred, because they moved with such grace, the caridean shrimp. Though she'd never breathe such a preference in front of the midshipman tank or close to her sixspot gobies or the parrotfish. Her second favorite were the saddleback wrasses from Hawaii, and as she passed their tank she whispered their Hawaiian name,
hinalea lau-wili
. The syllables humming from her lips, she felt the kiss of warm breezes and soft lapping water. No matter how raw the Whidbey weather, her mood would be smiling all the way home. It was nonsense to prefer one or another species—aesthetic choice made no difference in the work. In the long run, likely the molluscs would prove most valuable and they had no personality whatsoever. But the wrasses gave her stability.

She'd need balance this evening. Richard, on the phone, had sounded shaky. He was taking Vasiliadis' death hard. As if he were questioning his career. Well, she was sad about the death too. She hadn't known the man, let alone the woman he was becoming, but she'd followed his progress over the last months through the team's reports. It was the medical part that bothered her most—he'd overdosed and died so no way of following through on what seemed to be evolving into a successful reassignment. Overdosing: an absurd accident. Richard had wondered if Vasiliadis had purposely killed himself. If any of the team could be faulted it was not knowing Vasiliadis had been shooting heroin. If anyone was to blame, really—she avoided such notions in scientific matters—it would be Gary. Gary had done the psychological analysis and declared the client a good subject. If he was unbalanced, Gary should have caught that. Still, she wasn't about to blame Gary. Vasiliadis couldn't be brought back, the clinic had to move on.

Except Richard wasn't moving on. Yesterday he seemed to be controlling his so-called guilt, but this afternoon he sounded anguished. She said she'd be home by six. She rolled her chair to the shrimp tank and watched the kiddies flick themselves through the simulated seagrass meadows as the water's slow waves gave the grasses a smooth undulation. Pretty little beasts. Too bad they all had to die.

She sat for five minutes. Okay, get along now, Richard needed her. As she needed Richard. They'd been everything for each other since they married, over twenty years ago. He'd been a man given to dramatic guilt then, and he hadn't changed. They met when, at Johns Hopkins, he'd heard a paper she was giving; he was impressed, they talked, discovered they had research concerns in common, and stayed in contact.

Best be gone. Again she wondered about the lab, why it comforted her so. Three rooms of the large space had been transformed into individual offices, hers, Lorna's, and the other that the lab technicians used. On contracts the lab was known as The WISDOM Laboratory, but someone had taken a lead from that acronym and called the lab WIRED, Whidbey Island Research in Endocrinal Development.

Terry locked the inner door, opened the alarm panel, activated it, and locked the outer door. Before WISDOM acquired the building it had been a Navy laboratory, but its security wasn't as state-of-the-art as even her own computer. The locks were okay and the alarm adequate, but the six-foot iron mesh fence with eighteen inches of cantilevered-out barbed wire was a joke. Even she, at fifty-three, could find a ladder, climb up, cut the wire—not electrified—and scramble over. Now she unlocked the gate, got in her car, headed out, locked, drove away. She worried sometimes that their sham security gave people the wrong idea—it looked so impressive surely some national secret had to be hidden inside.

The drive north to Coupeville took fifteen minutes. Richard's black Prius sat on his side of the driveway. She found him behind the house, contemplating the early miniature irises. He held an elegant martini glass, half full. She kissed his cheek. “You're ahead of me.”

He smiled at her. “By two.”

“That bad?” She took his arm. “Want to go inside?”

“Okay.”

They walked up to the deck. Richard slid open the floor-to-ceiling door. The living room glowed with warmth. “Nice fire. You've been home a while?”

He poured her a martini from the shaker and refreshed his own. “Since just after we talked. I couldn't stand being there any more. I cancelled my patients.”

They sat in two floral-covered, overstuffed armchairs, facing the fire. Terry leaned forward. “You didn't kill the patient. Okay?”

“Technically.” He took a swallow of ice-cold martini. “Technically Sandro killed himself either accidentally or on purpose. But I gave him the hormones that must have tripped his brain.”

“Gary diagnosed his brain and didn't catch a tripping point, and Stockman agreed with Gary. Anyway, it was Lorna and I who balanced and tested those interrelated hormones. The same series that worked perfectly for two others. To both of them you're a hero.” She got up, leaving her martini, knelt beside him and took his hand. Limp and sweaty. “Something in Sandro's chemistry was different. We'll find out what.”