The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (15 page)

Gene nodded and Francine said
nothing.

The train whistled along, perceptibly
bumpier now, and there were voices in the hall running along
outside their compartment. Life went on all around them.

“
So, who was the lady in
the park, ah; is this the same guy, and why is he alone
now?”

“
Yes, sir.”

Francine made a noise which Gene
interpreted as agreement.

He gave her a look. She
shrugged.

“
It does appear to be the
same man.” That was as far as she was prepared to go.

“
So.”

“
That’s the real problem,
Inspector. The really neat thing about Mister Nettles is how he
seems to appear and disappear. He came out of the rave. If that’s
him, he did change his appearance. But. Did he go in? No record of
that. That’s what makes this sighting interesting. He gets in the
car. He gets out of the car. Then he disappears, completely off the
radar for the last day and a half so far. He paid cash for the taxi
and mentioned nothing of consequence.”

Gene nodded firmly.

“
Okay. I see your
point.”

A day and a half was a long time. At
home, in his apartment, that was one thing. But out in the world,
that was another.

“
Okay, Sergeant. I’ll have
someone interview the landlady at the Nettles address.” He wrote
that down as he still hadn’t gotten around to it. “I’ll have them
share any information that they get there with you.”

“
Ah, thank you.” Parsons
still had a series of assaults on the books.

His mouth curled a bit and Gene grinned
and nodded. The punks would forget about it soon enough, but
Parsons obviously sensed an opportunity.

“
And, uh, we’ll keep
working on this.”

“
Yes, sir.”

Gene sat back and hit the icon. Parsons
was gone again, although his inbox was lit up with something
additional from the sergeant.

His head twisted and he took in
Francine with a glance.

She nodded.

“
I’ve got a good feeling
about this one.”

***

“
Okay, Scott. Bingo.
There’s the doorman, right in front of you. One metre.”

He spoke up right on cue.

“
Excuse me. Is this the
Red Dog Saloon?”

“
Ah, yes, Ma’am. It sure
is. What can I help you with?”

Scott stood there, wavering a bit to
and fro. His hippie glasses dangled languidly from his left
hand.

“
It’s just that I’m blind
with these contacts. I’m waiting for my date.” Betty had applied
the makeup, and he had a wig and a small clutch type purse. “Nick
will be along soon…I hope.”

He positively tottered there on what
she said were patent leather high-heeled pumps. There were low
voices all around and yet he had avoided stepping on anyone. It
took fierce concentration to rule one’s emotions. Someone nearby
giggled. He hoped they were taking a good look. Time hung heavy,
and his pulse was still racing. He struggled to keep his breath
calm and smooth, blanking out a little and just going with it. A
cheap buzz, he thought.

That’s what I need right about now: an
anxiety attack. He gulped and tried to sort of purge the CO2 from
his system.

That’s what it was. It wasn’t the lack
of oxygen that killed you, it was the CO2. It was a good thing he
had the purse to hang onto. A revealing insight about women. They
at least had something to do with their hands when they got a
little nervous.

Listening to the chat about him settled
him down. No one had accosted him, no had remarked upon him. They
were just ignoring him, and he tried to locate them by sound as
best he could.

This was said to be the biggest bar in
the state, a real turnpike-style roadhouse, away from the city and
its satellites, and set in an unincorporated township. It was open
24-7 with continuous live entertainment of an eclectic nature. The
wine would flow and the blood did spill. It was like every state
had one these days. The dress, a little shorter on him than it
would be on Betty, would be ruined by the huge globs of sweat
running down from Scott’s unshaven armpits. His girdle was killing
him. It wasn’t so much about passing as a woman. It was about
passing for anyone, anything other than what he was.

“
Here I am,
Lover.”

Betty and Scott engaged in a quick
peck, Scott enjoying the fact that there was a small crowd hanging
about the entrance. Oh, the irony of it all.

“
Where did you
park?”

“
I found a good
spot.”

It was a short speech, strictly for
public consumption.

Scott nodded approvingly. They’d
actually walked the last three kilometres, with Betty hanging back
around the corner and Scott being talked into position, over the
last few yards, through the earpiece. This was all for the
eye-witnesses. All of this to get a hot meal and a drink. Scott
also wanted a bed for the night something awful. A bed and a
bath.

Betty had chopped her hair into
something more resembling a page-boy cut, and was clad, according
to her amused description, in a charcoal-grey zoot-suit, very
androgynous as she put it.

Somebody somewhere had made a good
sale.

They held hands as a couple ahead of
them murmured back and forth with the doorman. The people were
admitted, a blast of real sow-belly music coming out the door as
they went in. She gave a quick pull and Scott stepped forward
hesitantly.

Another strong hand grabbed his right
elbow and gently steered him into position.

“
You guys are next. You’re
lucky, it’s not so busy tonight.” Apparently, the bouncer was
talking to him.

Betty’s deep basso-profundo voice, put
on especially for this occasion, thanked him gravely.

Scott had been thinking about all of
those cameras.

If you couldn’t get away from them,
then maybe you might as well join them.

Or something like that, but he’d heard
of privacy freaks buying expensive masks and wearing them in any
public place they went. It seemed a bit much to him at the time,
hearing about it on the TV, but he could appreciate the point
now.

The smell of food, real food, wafting
out from the saloon, more of a head-banger, speed-metal,
family-style bar and grille by the sounds of it, was driving him
nuts.

More of a short putt, as someone had
once said.

Chapter Eleven

“
There are no guarantees
in this life.”

Scott sat in what felt like a dentist
chair.

Not used to being touched or handled in
any way, his recent relationship with Betty notwithstanding, it was
oddly arousing in the physical sense. It gave him someplace to put
his thoughts. The young woman went on.

“
It’s a good thing you
have somebody to help you.” She had shaved his skull, and pulled a
tightly-constricting latex mask over his head.

Now she was applying putty and makeup
around the edges, after lifting the cheeks and putting small pads
of putty in strategic locations.

“
His face seems a bit
lopsided.” Betty was right there with him.

Hopefully no one would notice the
slight bulge in his pants.

“
No one’s face is truly
symmetrical.” The technician hummed softly as she
worked.

He and Betty had been expected,
somehow. Upon their arrival at the Red Dog Saloon, she, in her
temporary disguise as a retro-metrosexual, led him to the bar. He
heard her exchange brief words with someone.

A few minutes later, the result of some
signal which he didn’t quite catch, she took him by the arm and led
him to what must have been the hallway where the restrooms were
located. The smell was a dead giveaway.

“
So?”

“
If you get caught, it’s a
hundred-thousand dollar fine for obstructing the course of
justice.”

A hundred grand! For wearing a mask.
The world had certainly become a crazy place. Scott wondered if it
was worth it sometimes.

A recent news story, the typical horror
story put out by the mainstream media, had documented a case where
someone had gotten an illicit nose-job. The lady didn’t have the
money for the medical fees and the permit required from Motherland
Security. She had faked the documents (badly), vanity being what it
was, and the self-objectification of women being what it was…she
was caught, inevitably it would seem.

Now she was doing fifteen years in a
work camp. She would get out of jail by the time she was
thirty-five. This was one of the northeastern states, as he
recalled. Down south she’d be doing three life
sentences.

Scott hoped it was worth it to her.
License fees for cosmetic surgery were a major source of revenues
for the state. One of many new sin, or as Scott called them, vanity
taxes. Harsh penalties were an incentive to save one’s pennies—and
pay your fees.

“
Huh.”

Her deft fingers smoothed the putty
around the edges of the mask. Fine sable hairs tickled his face, as
she applied some kind of powder to blur the lines where skin met
rubber.

Scott had never really thought about
it, but he pondered the question. What about women and their
makeup?

What about the female penchant for new
hair styles? What about people who changed their clothes, every
day, what about people who got a hair cut, or wore
sunglasses?

But apparently the programming was
sophisticated enough to recognize these changes, for according to
the published theories—Scott called them ‘justifications,’ the
facial recognition algorithms were only a part of the
picture.

Biometrics included height, weight, eye
colour, body type, silhouettes, and a person’s characteristic walk.
Sociometrics included daily habits, the PPP, known associates,
family circle, place of residence, work, license plates, make,
model and colour of vehicle…social and employment status. They knew
who you were when you walked past a scanner and the machine read
the chip. When in doubt, suck some blood and run it for
analysis.

It was all about digital
characterization from records and constantly-updated documentations
in the course of one’s daily peregrinations.

Nowadays crime could be predicted, even
intentions could be predicted—hopefully Betty and he stood some
kind of a chance. Even this present situation could be predicted to
some extent, although he had the feeling he was a few steps behind
Betty every inch of the way. Hopefully they were one or two steps
ahead of the cops.

Much food for thought there. If only he
knew where to begin.

“
So, what about the
I.D.?”

“
Everything’s going to be
fine, Scott.”

Betty was reassuring, although she was
in her own chair and her own technician applied himself to the job
at hand. His voice was soft and yet deep when he spoke, but that
one kept the talk to a minimum.

His girl wasn’t much more
talkative.

He might have been wrong about
that.

“
What do you think of the
Mets this year?’

“
Not much.” Scott rarely
listened to baseball.

“
You’re not a
fan?”

“
Not for many
years.”

Not since he’d lost his vision and
therefore most of the pleasure in watching a game. While aware that
people had listened to baseball, football and other sports on the
radio, going back a century or more, those people were of course
not aware that they had missed anything.

In a subconscious habit, Scott turned
his head towards Betty.

“
So. Who are you going
as?”

There was a chuckle.

“
Your mother.”

He laughed, a sour laugh but a laugh
none the less.

He hadn’t seen his family in ages. It’s
not that they had abandoned him. Far from it. It was just that he
had felt like a burden. In the early stages of losing his vision
they were all in denial.

There was some kind of blame-game going
on there, an unspoken one, one where they kept asking stupid
questions.

Isn’t there something somebody
somewhere can do?

And the trouble was that there wasn’t.
Not that they were in any position to go looking for treatment.
They couldn’t deal with it any better than he had.

The lady was speaking.

“
Okay, I want you to lean
back and open your eyes very wide.”

Scott complied, blinking uncontrollably
as she dropped liquid into his eyes.

He gasped.

“
What’s that?”

“
Okay. We’re just putting
some drops in there.”

“
Ah…ah.” In for a penny,
in for a pound. “What…?”