Body Double

Must still be dreaming. I see her look up at me with those almond brown eyes, long celestial nose, high cheek bones, brown porcelain skin, long, luxuriant wavy chestnut hair; her broad smiling lips just begging to be kissed. I wonder who this beautiful woman is.

“What’s your name?” I ask. The woman mouths back the same words to me. I am being mocked! Then I bring my hands up to my face and she does the same thing. I realize I am looking in the mirror I am finally awake and remember what has happened to me during the last 24 hours.

In our morning detective meeting, Police Chief Davis had told us about an attempted murder. A man had taken two shots out his car window at a transgender woman standing outside a bar. He would have kept shooting, but he saw the lights of a police car approaching behind him and sped away. A bystander to the incident took a video, which we all watched in silence. A white van stops at a stoplight. The red-faced man with a crew cut pulls out a hand gun, points and shoots.

“We need to nail this guy. He might be the culprit in one of the three unsolved murders of transgender women on my desk right now,” the chief said, while turning up the lights in the room.

I want to stake out Chevy’s Bar where a lot of transgender people hang out. We already have a place for two sharp shooters to hide. All we need now is someone to lure the guy back to the spot. Someone willing to dress in drag.

Davis looked at me straight in the eyes. Me, out of twenty detectives in the room.

“Why are you looking at me?” I protested.

“The target of the shooter is tall, slender and Puerto Rican, just like you, Sánchez. You are the only detective that could pass as her body double. I will tell you ahead of time that if you accept this special assignment, there could be a month’s vacation time and a bonus for you.”

So that’s how I ended up getting made up by a police beautician every afternoon for the past four days, hanging out every night until two in the morning at Chevy’s, and sleeping in the transgender woman’s apartment who had been the target of the shooting. Her name was Syllvia with an accent on the i. She was told to stay in her apartment and not leave; I was made up to look like her and used her name in public. I bore a pretty good likeness to her, although she had a few more curves in the right places.

Every night I went through the same routine. The employees and regulars and Chevy’s obviously knew I wasn’t Syllvia but they played along with the charade. On the first night I was there, I spent most of the evening pacing up and down the sidewalk outside, keeping a constant eye out for the man in the white van and hoping the police sharp shooters had not fallen asleep. I was propositioned six times and each time one of the sex workers intervened and diverted the “customer” to someone else. A drunk man who called me a faggot and took a swing at me was dragged off by the bouncer. The next three nights were like reruns of the first.

At two in the morning every day I would return to the apartment and the real Syllvia would be waiting up for me. We had some late night talks and she told me how she had always known she was a girl even though she was born with male genitalia. She endured surgeries and hormone injections to gain her true identity.

After the surgeries, everything was going well. She got a receptionist job at a real estate firm and gave the company a good image with her professional dress and attitude. Then the boss found out she was trans and decided it would make customers uncomfortable if they found out She was fired.

With the rent due, Syllvia made cash giving hand jobs to guys in the alley behind Chevy’s. One guy had wanted more. He reached up inside her dress and tried to pull her panties down. Syllvia was a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and knew how to handle herself. The guy ended up getting tossed head first into a dumpster. He had suffered the ultimate humiliation of being beaten up by a trans woman and she was pretty sure this was the same guy who had taken a shot at her.

It was Thursday and the fifth day of the stakeout. The chief told us the operation was costing too much and this would be the last night. I was relieved in a way, because I was tired of the constant verbal abuse and the groping. It was a slow night and I was standing on the sidewalk alone, wrapping and unwrapping my purse strap around my fingers. Then I saw him. Instead of driving by, the unshaven, red-faced man with the crew cut came charging out of the alley, pointing his gun at me.

“Get your skinny ass into the alley. Don’t scream or I’ll shoot you right here.” His hands were trembling and I was afraid he might pull the trigger by accident.

He pushed me into the dark alley. Where in the hell were my sharpshooters? They were probably so focused on looking for a white van on the street that they didn’t notice us disappear into the darkness.

“Get on your knees and I’m going to show you what nine inches feels like. Try anything cute this time and you’re dead. My mind was racing. I decided to play along and wait for my chance to knock the gun away. He held the gun to my face and told me to undo his belt. I was on my knees when it happened. I discerned a figure in motion behind him. He sensed it too and instinctively turned to see what it was. What it was was a baseball bat hitting a home run on his face. As he staggered backwards, I knocked the gun from his hand and it fell harmlessly onto the ground. Better late than never, the two sharpshooters ran into the alley, handcuffed the guy and took him away. I looked around to find the person who had saved my life. It was Syllvia, my body double. I asked her why she had come. She said she was sitting around thinking about this creep and how he always followed the same pattern when she realized he always came to Chevy’s on Thursday nights. When she realized it was Thursday, she decided this might be the night and I might need some backup. Indeed I did.

I got my bonus as promised and Syllvia and I took a month-long vacation on the beach.