The Girl From Nowhere (23 page)

It was as if, in having his identity revealed, he had forfeited his power. He just kneeled there on the wet tarmac, a beaten man. Suddenly the whole thing became obvious. Kavanagh owned a movie studio—had access to the world’s best makeup artists. He could have been stalking Sandy in a dozen different disguises. The biker leathers prompted me to ask myself whether he had also been that Tom-of-Finland character with the facial hair and the Doberman we’d had the run-in with outside my apartment. And there could have been any number of others.

“I know him,” said Sandy. “I mean, I recognize him. He would sit right up close to the stage, always at a table by himself . . .”

“I’m not Brady Kavanagh,” said the man at my feet. “You’re lying.”

And then a realization came to me. Here was a man famous for his ruthlessness, who had grown up in a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan known for its Irish gangs, yet he had found his way to business school at a top Ivy League university.

“The person who did you that big favor,” I said, “that was Joey Garofolo’s father, right? You were one of the Clinton Kids from Hell’s Kitchen who did dirty work for the Family. It was you who sliced open the face of that snitch, but Joey got the credit—that’s what earned him his nickname and a truckload of respect. That’s what you’ve got on Joey—he wouldn’t dare cross you. By rights that nickname should belong to you—Brady ‘the Shiv’ Kavanagh. Got a nice ring to it. It would look good in the
Wall Street Journal
. And Joey’s dad paid you off by putting you through school. He probably figured that that MBA would buy him a lot of future favors too—you’d be a big help when it came to laundering money and shit like that. I’m sure he didn’t expect you to become the big Gorgonzola you became, but you kept faith with him and with Joey, and Joey was able to help you out. Yari was around too, to take the kinky pictures, and Debereaux was willing to get involved because he’s the kind of politico who’ll take money wherever he can find it. It took Sandy to thwart your perverted plan.”

Suddenly his eyes lit up again.

“Who are you calling a pervert?” he said. “You’re the one who fucked her.” He said it with a leer. “You fucked her, and she betrayed me. You had no right to fuck her, and she had no right to betray me. She’s just a cheap whore!”

I should have kept my cool, but I lashed out at him with my knee, aiming for his balls. He parried the blow, then rolled away toward the pistol he had tossed aside earlier and that, in the confusion, I had forgotten about.

I yelled at Sandy to run. She hesitated. I yelled at her again.

“Go get help!”

By then Kavanagh had reached the gun and was about to grab it. I managed to kick it away, but only a couple of feet because Kavanagh had caught hold of my ankle. This brought me down on top of him. Sandy was running by now. I wrestled with Kavanagh, but had lost sight of where the gun was. Suddenly I heard it discharge and looked up to see Sandy fall. I felt a sudden surge of rage, and I swear I would have torn Kavanagh limb from limb, but the gun discharged once more and a goulash of blood and bone and brains exploded from the back of his head. As he slumped to the tarmac, I saw that the barrel of the gun was in his mouth.

“I can’t move,” Sandy told me.

“Where did it hit?”

“My back. My lower back. I can’t feel anything. Am I going to die?”

“No, no . . . You’ll be okay.”

She managed a smile.

“Yeah, sure . . .”

She was silent for a while, then said, “I wonder if it was all worth it?”

“If what was worth it?”

“All the treatments, all the surgery . . .”

“You’ll be fine . . . I promise . . .”

“Yeah? Maybe. Do you have any idea what is involved in becoming a woman? The scary procedures, the mood swings from the hormones, the fear of the unknown . . .”

“I can only imagine. Don’t talk. Don’t try to move—I’ll find help.”

“Do you remember how we made love? How I flinched when you touched my throat?”

I told her I did.

“I don’t know why, but that was the scariest procedure for me—shaving down the Adam’s Apple they call it—but the surgeon did a wonderful job, didn’t he?”

I told her that she had the most beautiful throat I’d ever seen. She thanked me and closed her eyes as sirens sounded in the distance.

TWENTY-FOUR

Sandy was in
rehab for months. I visited her as often as she’d let me, until she was released into a sort of halfway house for paraplegics. She’d been there only a couple of weeks when she disappeared. She left me a letter saying that she thanked me for everything and asking me not to search for her. I wouldn’t have known where to start, but by then I understood that our future was in the past. There were other letters, forwarded by an attorney with offices in the Metropolitan Life Building, a woman who represented a number of gender-reassigned and transgender clients. So Sandy was still the Girl from Nowhere. The nearest she came to letting me know where she lived is that it was somewhere between the Appalachians and the Continental Divide.

The last letter I received contained a snapshot of Sandy in her wheelchair in front of a handsome old clapboard house with a white-picket fence. There was a man standing alongside her—a pleasant-looking dude with thinning blond hair—and two kids, a boy and a girl. The letter told me the man’s name was Darryl—just plain Darryl—and that he was a widower. Sandy wrote that they were getting married, adding that she was sure I’d understand why she couldn’t invite me to the wedding.

Her letter reminded me that I still had the tux Charlie had tailored for the other wedding—the one that never happened. It was scuffed with dirt from the Shea Stadium parking lot, stained with Sandy’s blood, and one knee was badly torn. I’d kept it hanging in my closet for years. I tried it on and found it was a bit snug, but I could still squeeze into it, so I wore it to The Blue Mill for dinner. The waiters treated me with wariness, especially when I ordered two lamb chop dinners and a vodka sour as well as my usual Scotch and soda, and, after dinner, two cognacs. I thought of going uptown to see if the Hauptman was still there, or the Bunny Hutch, but instead I decided to hang around at The Blue Mill and drink some more cognac.

The next day, through my hangover, I saw that the Mets had a day game. I folded the tux and wrapped it in brown paper, then took a Number 7 train out to Shea. I bought a ticket for a box at loge level, right above third base, and deposited the parcel under the seat. It seemed like the right thing to do.

The Mets were trailing the Cubbies that year, but it was a pretty good game. A kid called Dwight Gooden pitched seven scoreless innings and Darryl Strawberry hit a monster home run to right center, giving the Incredibles a two-run lead. They blew it in the ninth.

I went home almost happy.

About the Author

Photo © 2012 Jonathan Mills

Christopher Finch was
born and raised on the island of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. He lived in London and Paris before moving to New York City in the late 1960s, the setting of
Good Girl, Bad Girl
. After working as a freelance writer and artist in New York for more than two decades, he moved to Los Angeles, where he continues to write and make art. Christopher has mounted one-man shows in both New York and Los Angeles, and his work has been included in museum exhibitions. He has occasionally written for television; his Judy Garland biography,
Rainbow
,
was made into a movie for television. He is married to Linda Rosenkrantz, who is an author and the cofounder of the website
nameberry.com
. They have a daughter named Chloe.