Plainclothes Naked (27 page)

Buttoning up, he padded to his desk and leafed through his appointment book. Business, as usual, was slow. A bride-to-be from Pittsburgh in at two for a tattoo removal. (The IBM exec she was mar rying might not want to see
CRIPS BITCH
on her posterior.) Mayor Marge coming in for her monthly Botox. And Mrs. Fayton, the police chief ’s wife, who’d decided her ears were saggy and wanted a tuck. There was also a new patient, who gave his name as “Smith”—they all gave their name as “Smith”—stopping in for a transgender consulta tion. Roos had a dream of some day making Upper Marilyn as tranny friendly as Trinidad, Colorado, which the legendary Dr. Biber had single-handedly built into the Sex Change Capital of the World. If only this Carmella thing hadn’t happened. . . . Should word get out, it would put the kibosh on his dreams of Genital Reconstruction Glory. Right now, Roos still had to develop the film Detective Rubert dropped off the last time he’d popped in for codeine scrips. Which was another thing. The prescription situation was starting to get worri some. Though he had to admit, Manny had taken his share of risks for
him
. When he was caught shopping those she-male pix on the Net, it was Manny who convinced the FBI that he’d shut down his operations

and disappeared.

Roos was still going by Dr. Mayo in those days. (If a patient asked, he’d say, “Yes, as a matter of fact, my great-grandfather
did
start the Mayo Clinic!”) By way of saving his bacon, Manny led the team of feds

to an abandoned doctor’s office downtown to show them that the man they were after had vanished. An Air Guatemala schedule “discovered” under a phone book convinced the investigators their quarry would be too expensive to track down. Resources, apparently, were scarce. So Manny assured the agents he’d stay on the case for them: He even con fided that he had a personal stake, since the butcher they were after had given a girlfriend a breast enhancement that left her with mismatched Santa hats.

Since quashing the investigation, however, Manny had been demanding favor after favor. There were the painkillers, of course, and the fake affidavit claiming that some flake named Marvin Podolsky had come in for “throat reconstruction”—as if there were such a thing— after swallowing drain cleaner on four separate occasions. Manny never explained why he needed it, and even after Roos read about Marvin’s suicide, he still didn’t know why Manny needed the false report. Not that it mattered. He was in no position to balk at the detective’s requests.

Roos flipped on the lights in his outer office and sighed. He slept on a gurney in his examining room, just off the tiny reception area, and lately he’d been waking up every hour on the hour to take a stress pee. No doubt the estrogen had something to do with it. And Manny’s mounting demands weren’t helping, either. But what could he do? As long as his friend the detective was sitting on evidence that could put him away, he had to go along.

To his credit, Manny never asked for a penny. Sometimes Roos almost wished he would. Straight extortion might be easier. The doc tor blushed to recall the time he protested having to write so many prescriptions. When he complained that he could lose his license, Manny had smiled and reminded him that he didn’t
have
a license, so why worry about it? Until then, Roos hadn’t realized Manny knew he’d been asked to leave med school in Granada after the unpleasant indigent incident. (Roos had tried some practice sex-change surgery on a comatose homeless man. How was he supposed to know the fel low would wake up, three days later, and have a coronary when he saw a vagina between his legs?)

That was the thing about Detective Rubert: He never let you know

how much he knew, so you were always anxious that he knew more than he let on.

Dragging himself into the darkroom, Roos massaged his tiny breasts and checked on the photos soaking in the tray. He’d just set the timer for five minutes and slipped back to the examining room to stash his pajamas when he heard the office door open, and the unmistakable voice of the savior who was making his life hell.

“Willard, where are you?” Manny called. “We have business.” “Coming,” Roos called back, shutting the darkroom door behind

him. That was another thing about Detective Rubert. He didn’t like to knock, and he seemed to have a key to everything.

“Dr. Roos,
this is Tina. She’s working with me,” Manny announced, introducing a striking creature with the best cheekbones Roos had ever seen.

“Amazing bone structure,” he said. “I’d love to make a mold of your face.”

“I’ve had stranger propositions,” Tina replied, taking in the dismal reception area and the nerdy little man in the lab coat who stood rub bing his rib cage before them. Some kind of very old vegetable soup stained the carpet—at least she hoped it was vegetable soup—and what had to be a pound of moth carcasses were visible in the light fixtures overhead. The only magazines on the filthy glass table were
Modern Brides.
By way of decoration, the doctor had taped up calendar pictures of frolicking kittens. But somehow, in this context, even kittens looked sleazy.

“I guess you know why I’m here,” said Manny, noting the doctor’s exceptional squirreliness. Roos was always the jumpy type, but now he looked like he’d shot up strychnine.

“I...I didn’t know this would happen,” Roos blurted. “After the first operation, I realized I used too much erectile tissue to construct the outer lips. That was a mistake, I admit. Whenever Carmella got aroused, her labia got hard. It was . . . embarrassing. She came in for her appointment very upset, and I don’t blame her.”

Roos wiped his forehead with the tail of his lab coat. “Go on,” Manny said.

“Well, naturally, I told her I’d do the reconstructive surgery for free. I removed the tissue and performed an ileum loop. I’ve done them before. You take a piece of intestine, leaving it attached to the blood supply, and divert it to make a vagina. It’s fairly routine. But something went wrong. The patch of intestine continued to digest food, which meant that it secreted enzymes. At first it was just a mat ter of smell.”

“Oh my God,” said Tina, covering her mouth while Manny remained silent. Expressionless. Roos was confessing to something. Stomach-churning as it was, whatever he let slip could be used to squeeze him later.

“The odds of something like this happening are one in a million,” Roos blabbed on, wiping his face with his coat again. “But it hap pened. She began to experience some leakage.”

Tina groaned. “Leakage?” It was like listening to Don Knotts chan nel Joseph Mengele. But Manny held up his hand to quiet her, to let Roos talk.

“Feces,” the doctor explained shakily. “Not a
lot.
But, of course, she was very concerned.”

“Concerned?”
Tina rolled her eyes. “I’m surprised she didn’t come back and cut
yours
off !” Manny had to signal her a second time to stop interrupting.

“I brought the lady in for a third operation. No charge,” Roos wanted them to know. He rubbed himself nervously. “This time I gave her a temporary shunt, to make sure there was no chance of peritoni tis, then I went back to my original tissue construction. But one side of her vagina developed swelling. Toughening. So the final result was more...
uneven
than we would have liked. There were also some hair issues. Though, I assure you, when all was said and done, Carmella Dendez could perform like a woman.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Absolutely!” Roos directed his appeal to Tina, unable to face Manny’s ungiving stare. “Many females are naturally asymmetric. Among the Maori, it’s actually considered a sign of beauty. And I think, at least I
pray,
by the end, even Carmella was satisfied.”

“Who told you she died?” Manny asked casually. He’d bullied Fay-ton into keeping her death out of the paper for a day, so the news had

to come from elsewhere. It was important that Roos keep squirming under the belief that he’d botched the surgery. That he’d killed her.

“Who told me? A friend, at the motel. He said you found her body.”

“Right. And do you know how she died?”

The doctor pawed at his chest, his gaze shifting back and forth from Tina to Manny. “Well, aren’t you here to ...I mean, I just assumed there were complications. I often send patients to the Pawnee Lodge to recuperate. So when I heard, I naturally thought. . . .” He began kneading his chest more vigorously, with both hands, then caught him self and stopped.

“You have to believe me! She never even called. I swear to you, I would have been there to help out!”

“Sounds like you helped her plenty. I found your phone number in her hand,” Manny lied, “and I don’t think it’s ’cause you were selling her Special K.”

“You know I got out of that,” Roos injected, his skin jellied with perspiration.

“Whatever. You’re just lucky I got to the motel first, so I can cover your ass. You owe me big-time,Willard. Even more than before. More than you even know. Just one more question.”

Roos touched his chest.
“What?”

“Are my pictures ready?”

The doctor wilted. “Oh God. . . . They should be. If you wait here, I’ll check.”

“That’s all right, I’ll come with you. Be right back,” he said to Tina and started off behind the stunned surgeon. Manny knew he had to stay with him, in case he decided to try something drastic. Nobody was more dangerous than a coward in a corner. And Roos had that trapped mouse look in his eyes.

Alone in the waiting room,Tina leafed through a
Modern Bride.
She was trying to block out the visuals of what happened to Carmella and let her eyes rest on a splashy ad. Beneath a full-page spread of some Doris Day blond in the arms of a doltish hunk, the caption read “Hon eymoon jitters? Don’t let menstrual cramps spoil your stay in paradise!” Could this be what Roos’s customers thought they were getting when they bought vaginas? A life where the biggest romantic worry was

whether or not Captain Blood was in town? Then again, ex-men prob ably didn’t menstruate, so they wouldn’t
have
to worry about it. Or did they? Maybe for an extra thousand, the twisted little sawbones could make them bleed.

No doubt the doctor had his own reasons for restricting his waiting room reading to bridal magazines. The whole subject made Tina want to spray her brain with Lysol. And yet, on some level, she understood the torment that drove a person to endure what Carmella endured. Her late husband had a theory that capitalism instilled humans with the sense that they weren’t enough, that there was somebody else they were supposed to be. If they didn’t believe this, according to Marvin, they’d never buy anything and the economy would disintegrate. The world would be overrun with happy, liberated idiots and chaos would ensue. The reason for advertising, in Marv’s view, was to keep people feeling so creepy about themselves that they spent all their money on items which, deep down in their psyches, they believed could trans form them into divine versions of who they really were. “We don’t
need
shoes,” he used to say, “we only wear them because we want god-feet.” No doubt, if he were still around, her husband would tell her that a faux vagina was the ultimate consumer good, right up there with Lexus, Rolex, and a top-of-the-line Sony PlayStation.

Tina threw the magazine on the table, convinced all over again that, even if it was half an accident, things had gone the right way with Marv. “Things happen for a reason,” he used to say. Wherever he was, she hoped he still felt that way. In any event, she’d no longer have to listen to his endless theorizing, which was almost as unendurable as his nose hums. Still, in this case, his notion of people wanting to be other people sounded on the money. Carlos needed to be someone else so badly he paid to get gelded and become Carmella. Now
that
was des peration....

The scary thing was, Tina could relate to it. She just didn’t know what she was desperate
for.
Although, after a hot five minutes in the Impala with Manny, she had a pretty good idea. Any man who’d keep one foot on the brake in the middle of an intersection while he kissed her all the way to her panties was amazing enough. What was more amazing—and she sighed just remembering—was that he was so into it, it never occurred to him to just pull over. Which meant, she sup

posed, he was either mentally challenged or the most passionate bastard in captivity.

Before she could chew on that, Manny himself slammed back in the room waving a stack of still wet photographs and grinning.

“Check these out,” he said, slapping the eight-by-ten glossies on top of her
Modern Bride.

Tina leaned in to take a look and blanched. “Romantic,” was all she could think to say. She picked the first one up by the edge to take in the details: a black man built like a midget wrestler sodomizing a rangy white guy bent over a desk chair. The black guy bore an incred ible resemblance to Dean Martin, and the white guy, when she squinted, looked like a pissed-off knucklehead version of the batty Mrs. Zank from Seventh Heaven. The same beady eyes and sour mouth. He also looked like he’d chewed through a plate glass window.

“So who are these lovebirds?” she asked.

“Nobody special,” said Manny, taking the photographs back. “Just the two psychos who are trying to kill you. This picture might be exactly what we need to get ’em off your back.”

Tina shook her head. “You know, until I met you, I thought this town was normal.”

“It is. That’s the funny part. You ready to go?”

Manny helped her out of the dirty vinyl chair, then stopped and snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot.” He turned just as Dr. Roos, looking, if possible, even clammier than he had earlier, shuffled into the reception room. “Oh, Doctor, I have something I want to show you. I want to know what I can get for it on the Internet.”

Manny reached in his jacket and pulled out the manila envelope, the one Tina’d yanked from under Dolly Zank’s mattress. He carefully removed the photograph and showed it to Roos. The shock brought the sex doctor back to life. “Is that who I think it is?”