Regiment of Women (7 page)

Charlie was pricked.

“At least I'm no rapist!” he cried.

“And I'm no ex-whore!” said Cornell, tossing his head in the style he had learned from TV and movies for the expressing of indignation. But it felt strange in these clothes. He must get back into his own, and go home, put on his rightie and drink his warm milk and swallow his pill, and wake up tomorrow morning in reality again—in fact, as a janitor.

“Get out of my house!” shouted Charlie. “I don't have to take that sort of thing.” He stamped his foot and looked as if he might burst into tears, revealing a petulant side of his nature that Cornell had never suspected. And he, Georgie Cornell, was supposedly the emotional cripple! He raised his eyebrows and flattened his mouth.

“You belong in the toilets!” Charlie added, his red, wet, corpulent face quivering with spite.

Cornell tore his purse from the knob, slammed the door, and marched furiously down the stairs. Well, that was the end of his friendship with Charlie! He had been a fool to drink so much. Reaching the ground floor and the trash-strewn entrance hall, he felt as though he might throw up, but a man was just coming in from the street, a pretty young fellow hardly more than an adolescent, and Cornell's competitive feelings triumphed over his queasiness. His hand went from his mouth to his hair—
and he felt the female wig, looked down and saw the woman's brogues and the cuffs of the feminine trousers
.

“Excuse me?” asked the young man, fluttering his false eyelashes. “Were you looking for some company?” He was obviously a cheap little streetwalker who took Cornell for a woman.

“No!” Cornell said in a near-screech. He turned his head and left the building, walking rapidly, awkwardly, in the heavy shoes.

His clothes! But he simply could not face returning to Charlie's apartment at this moment. He should not have drunk so much, true; but Charlie had behaved very badly. What a fraud Charlie was. The corduroys and bald head, the cigar and dirty pictures, were but the stage properties for a childish fantasy. Tell him a real story of the worm turning and see him blanch. Charlie was pathetic, but it would take a while to forgive him. Other men were so self-indulgent.

Terror time: two women turned the corner and came his way. He held his breath and attempted a woman's walk: square-shouldered, no undue tension in the calves, a coarse, preoccupied expression, and hands swinging.

They went by without a glance. He had made it! In exultation he looked back. They had stopped. A lighter flared. One sucked on a pipe. The other looked at Cornell, who quickly turned away, too quickly, flipping his hips.

“Hey, don't I know you?” called the one without the pipe.

Cornell began to scurry.

“Hey!”

Easy, easy
, Cornell told himself,
don't run. Play it smart
. It was the worst advice. He stopped, swiveled his head, and said: “Oh, hi.”

Within a few moments he was arrested as a transvestite by this team of plainclotheswomen. As irony would have it, they were off duty, on their way home from the prizefights.

G
ROVER
C
LEVELAND
, 1905

“I
T
WAS
THE
WALK
,” said Detective Elaine Stedman, as they took him to the precinct station.

“You're awful big for a woman, and then the walk,” added Detective Carol Corelli, who was herself a big girl, five-foot six or seven, with the weight to go with it. Cornell was five nine. “If you're going to go in for these kind of things you ought to get the walk down pat.”

“It's the first time I've worn this type of shoe,” Cornell said ruefully. “They're so heavy.” He tried to imitate the officers' long, flatfooted stride; not that it made any difference now.

“And for shit sake,” Corelli said, in the same not unfriendly tone, “there was some small chance you might have got away with it if you hadn't been swinging a purse!”

“Oh, Mary!” said Cornell. “I forgot about that.”

Corelli guffawed. Her arm was linked with Cornell's, and she jostled him.

Stedman was less jocular. “You pervs!” she said. “Maybe the doctors are right: you want to get caught, deep down.”

Corelli agitated his arm again. “This is just a job for us. Don't get the idea we like it”

“You've certainly been decent,” said Cornell. “Thank you for not handcuffing me.”

Stedman said roughly: “We ain't doing you a favor. That's policy now. The public might think we was collaring a real woman. How would that look?”

Cornell's despair inhibited him from attempting to explain how he had come to this pass. And insofar as he had first put on the clothes voluntarily, he
was
a transvestite. If such practices were against the law, and they were, he deserved to be punished. He would surely do better to keep mute until he was formally charged, and perhaps even then as well, and at the trial throw himself on the court's mercy. He certainly could not implicate Charlie.

But he did not know how much torture he could endure. The police had a fearsome reputation.

At the station he was booked by a fat sergeant; his purse was emptied and the contents inventoried. He was given a receipt. Then he was fingerprinted.

“Here's another mistake,” Cornell said, holding up one of Cornell's pink-painted nails. She shook her swarthy, pockmarked face.

Cornell grimaced helplessly.

He was told to wait on a wooden bench against a dirty wall. He sat down between a wino with a purple face and green teeth and a youthful offender who suffered from acne. The latter wore a black-leather jacket studded in chrome; the former, a vomit-stained ex-Army overcoat. Because of the wino's stench, Cornell moved closer to the youth, who promptly spoke to him.

“Hey, girlie, you wouldn't have a butt on you?”

“No, and I don't imagine we are allowed to smoke in here anyway,” Cornell said primly, drawing his knees together.

“Mother's milk!” cried the youth, her sneer erecting her pimples. “You're a perv! Get away from me.” She shoved him towards the wino and shouted at the desk sergeant: “I don't wanna share no cell with a perv. I got my rights.”

The sergeant ignored this protest, but soon a uniformed officer came and took the juvenile through a door to the rear of the station.

“Knifed another kid,” said the wino, in quite a reasonable voice despite her infamous appearance. “That type of punk ought to be locked up. Crime against the person. That's bad. What
you
do don't hurt nobody.”

Strange where one found sympathy. Cornell smiled at the derelict, who showed some faint evidence of having once been a winsome woman; nor was she all that old. What was her story? But he knew better than to ask. He merely smiled at her.

“Don't get me wrong,” the wino said. “You're disgusting. I just say you're harmless.” And with that she passed out and fell towards him. He leaped up and gave her the rest of the bench.

“O.K., Georgie,” Corelli said, coming to fetch him. “Let's have a little talk.” She led him down a corridor and into a little interrogation room furnished with a plain wooden table and several chairs, on one of which Stedman was already seated, her jacket open and her holster showing.

No rubber hoses or thumbscrews were in evidence, and no spotlight to turn into one's eyes. Already Cornell had begun to understand that much of the legend about the police was exaggerated. These two detectives, for example. They were rather pleasant-looking women. Stedman might even be called handsome in a rugged sort of way. There was a glint of hardness in her hazel eye, but not, Cornell thought, anything like potential cruelty. And Corelli had a certain sweetness about her.

She put her hand on his wrist now, and said kindly: “Tell us about yourself, Georgie. Contrary to what you've probably heard, we really want to help people like you.” She unbuttoned her rumpled suit jacket and her tight collar, and loosened the tie.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, with an amiable wink. “It might turn
you
on to wear a tie, but I can't wait to get home at night and take mine off. Whoever invented that style for women ought to be sent up the river for life.”

The reference to imprisonment was, however, chilling to Cornell.

“I don't suppose you would believe,” he said quietly, “that this is the first time I've ever worn one.”

Corelli moved her heavy shoulders. “It's no skin off my ass. Tell us about it”

But Stedman broke in coldly. “Are you a fag, Georgie?” Cornell vigorously shook his head.

“Let me put it another way,” Stedman said, her eyes stern. “Do you have, or have you ever had, intimate sex relations with another man? Now we want you to think about that for a while. There's a pretty wide range, see. What about when you were in school? Think back. Many guys engaged in a little mutual masturbation when they were that age. Nothing really criminal in that, but it's indicative, see.”

“Never,” said Cornell. “Absolutely never. I never even much liked other boys and men. I've had few friends.”

“Never the friendly squeeze of a pecker? Come on, Georgie. It'll show up eventually anyway. Might as well get it over with.”

“Nothing whatever,” Cornell insisted. “I don't care how far back you look, you'll find I'm clean.”

Stedman slammed her open hand on the table. “Well, you're not clean now, are you? You dirty little pervert!”

The loud report caused Cornell to hop in his chair. Corelli touched his wrist again.

“Calm down, honey,” she said almost affectionately, and then to Stedman: “Elaine, maybe I should talk to Georgie alone for a while.”

Stedman got up and pushed back the chair with her calves. “Don't take any shit, Carol. You're too easy on these slime.” She left the room.

“Elaine's a little nervous,” Corelli said. “The way I look at it, we hold all the cards. Once we bring somebody in, he don't have a prayer unless he cooperates. Most guys have sense enough to see that sooner or later.” She sighed. “Me, I'm the patient type. I got all the time in the world.” She chuckled. “You're the one with the problem. Not me.”

“I certainly want to cooperate,” said Cornell. “You caught me redhanded.” He put his hand piously between his breasts. “I will just have to take my punishment like a man.”

Corelli's smile broadened. “Bullshit,” she said.

Cornell raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

Corelli pulled her left earlobe. She still wore her felt hat, just as detectives did in the movies, and now she put one forefinger up and pushed it off her brow.

“Listen, Georgie,” she said. “We know you're a sardine. We're after the big fish. One little secretary in drag ain't worth our pay. Get me? Where'd you pick up these threads?” She reached across the table and fingered the lapel of the sports jacket. “Better material than I can afford, even if I resell the apples I steal!” She guffawed and explained. “You'd go crazy in this job without a sense of humor.”

Cornell had had no practice at deception. He extemporized desperately. “From a guy,” he said. “A little dark guy in a plaid skirt and cardigan, a clothes-pusher I guess you could call him, hangs out on a corner near where I live.”

Corelli had her notebook out and employed a pencil on it, but when Cornell looked he saw only what seemed to be aimless doodles.

Cornell sucked his lip. “I think his name is Artie.”

Corelli finally took her hat off and laid it on the table. Her hair was cut to simulate the kind of pattern baldness natural to Charlie's head and revealed when his wig was off. This style had been fashionable three or four years before, during the administration of President Alice Womrath, along with baggy trousers and bow ties. Corelli wore the former, but her solid blue necktie was a four-in-hand.

She stared genially at Cornell.

“Georgie, I'm going to be fair with you. I'm not going to pull the cat-and-mouse act you probably expect if your idea of a police investigation is from TV. I don't care about ‘Artie,' if there is such a person. I don't even care about those clothes.” She widened her eyes. “No, I don't. That surprise you? Well, it's true. I can foresee a situation in which me and Stedman find we made a little mistake in pulling you in, so we take you to the door, pat your behind, and send you home.”

Cornell did not quite believe what he heard, but allowed himself to feel some relief anyway, and in so doing was for the first time concsious of how scared he had been. He clasped his hands and relaxed his diaphragm, and at that moment of utter vulnerability, his face was slapped viciously by Corelli.

He yelped, and Corelli's hand came back the other way and got him again.

The detective leaned across the table, supporting herself on one fist, her fat, ugly face in his, and shouted.

“Or we might snip your balls off, fella!”

The door opened and in came Stedman, saying: “Take it easy, Carol.”

Corelli pushed herself up and swaggered from the room.

Stedman told Cornell: “She works too hard.”

Cornell realized that the detectives were playing on his emotions, being bad and good guys alternatively. He had heard of such techniques. His face smarted terribly. He refused to cry, but he did not know how long he could continue to protect Charlie.

Stedman was carrying a long sheet of paper, its end ragged as though it had been ripped from a machine. She held it up for Cornell's benefit.

“Just came in off the ticker,” she said. “Let me tell you about yourself.” She began smugly to read from the paper. “Bom 2003 in Birth Facility 1097, Los Angeles, etcetera, etcetera….” She skipped down several inches.