it.”
“Have you ever heard of sexual reassignment?”
“You mean the medical change of a man into a woman?”
“Exactly. There have been half a dozen notorious cases and several thousand that the public never hears about. Now you take our Angel here. A rather small, delicately built man, not a homosexual, decides that he’s a woman in a man’s body. Some authorities feel it’s a fixation. Others that it’s a genetic error at birth. He goes to Denmark or France-or even up her to Stanford-where they’ve been doing it lately.”
“Just what do they do?” Masuto asked.
“You want the whole thing?”
“Yes.”
“All right. It begins with chemotherapy procedure. There are two families of hormones that play a major role in determining who is a man and who is a woman, the androgens and the estrogens. Both are present in both sexes, but in a man the androgens predominate and in a woman the estrogens predominate. The first step in sexual reassignment is to reverse the role and put the man on massive doses of estrogens. That starts a biochemical process of change. The male functions cease. The growth of the beard slows, the hips become rounded, then the entire musculature takes on a feminine aspect. Even the breasts begin to increase.”
“Just from the hormones?”
“You’re damn right, just from the hormones. But that’s just the beginning. Electrolysis takes care of the beard. That’s permanent. Then we go into the operating room. Silicone discs are implanted in the breasts. And then they do something called a bilateral orchiectomy, which, without going into details, mean, the changing of a man into a woman through operative procedure, removal of the testes and the conversion of the penis into an artificial vagina-and that’s what you have lying there on my table, a woman who was once a man. Would you like to have another look?”
Masuto nodded, and once again Baxter removed the rubber sheet that covered Angel Barton’s body. Even after having listened to Baxter’s detailed lecture, Masuto found it hard to believe that he was not looking at the body of a beautiful woman. Watching him, Baxter said, “You start with a very handsome young man, you get a beautiful woman.”
“Could she have intercourse?”
“After a fashion.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s altered. That doesn’t make her a whole woman. We’re not God.”
“Then eventually Mike Barton would have known.”
“Unless he was a total idiot.”
“Poor fool in a kingdom of fools,” Masuto muttered. “The idol of millions married to a man who became a woman-his terrible secret. What clowns we are. That was his word. The only word. The proper word. How could he let the world know?”
Baxter covered the body. “Not a bad day’s work. As for our movie star. He danced-and he paid the piper.”
“I would appreciate it if you could sit on this for twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll be delighted to cooperate,” Baxter said. His victory had almost mellowed him, but he could not resist adding, “I regret that I haven’t handed you the killers on the same silver platter, but the city does pay you gentlemen for service.”
Masuto departed without replying. His car was parked behind the hospital in the lot, but he felt a need to walk, and as he walked, circling away from the hospital and toward Sunset Boulevard, he once again contemplated the ridiculous anomaly of a Zen Buddhist policeman in Beverly Hills. Why did he go on with it? Why did he continue? What kind of karma brought him to this ultimate barbarism which was also the glittering crown of a monied civilization. These were questions he had proposed a hundred times before. They always remained unanswered.
He walked back to his car and drove to his home in Culver City. It was only one o’clock, and Kati was both alarmed and delighted.
“This is my spiritual and physical nourishment for today. I have eaten wretched food, and tonight I shall not be home before midnight. I have a half hour, dear Kati. Can you prepare something?”
It was a sudden descent and an imposition. She had just fed her two children and sent them back to school, and now she was in the midst of her ironing. The nisei women in her consciousness-raising class, which she had begun to attend a full year ago, would have voted to send Masuto out to a lunch stand. But since none of them were witness, Kati embraced her husband, and after she had assured herself that no injury or other tragedy had sent him home, prepared the tempura from the night before with amazing speed.
She sat opposite him, watching him eat. In spite of her consciousness-raising class, it was her pleasure to watch him eat.
“We live in a wilderness,” he said.
“It’s those terrible murders. I was listening to the news this morning, after the children left for school.”
“Death is always terrible. But this is a sickness.”
“Why do they do it, Masao?”
“Money, hatred, revenge.”
“It frightens me so,” Kati said. “Not because I expect anything to happen to me. I’m not afraid of such things. I wasn’t afraid of that skinny Chicano boy who was such a foolish burglar. But because I lose my faith in the whole world.”
“One should neither have faith nor lose faith. What is faith? This is the way things are.”
“But why? Why are things this way?”
“Because we lose touch with what is real and then we invent what is not real.”
“That’s Zen talk,” Kati said with irritation. “I don’t understand it.”
“Perhaps I don’t understand it myself,” Masuto said gently. “I need a few minutes to myself, a few minutes to sit and meditate.”
But Kati’s food helped more than the meditation, and driving back to Beverly Hills, he felt better, reflecting on what a primitive thing a man is, that a bellyful of good food could color the whole world differently. When he entered the police station, Beckman was waiting for him.
“Bingo,” Beckman said to him. “Do you want to hear about it?”
“In a few minutes. First, where’s Wainwright?”
“In his office. I got something for both of you to hear.”
In Wainwright’s office Masuto closed the door and faced Beckman and Wainwright.
“You’re getting them tonight-all of them,” Wainwright growled. “And so help me, Masao, you’d better come through!”
“Ah, so,” Masuto said. “Would the honorable captain listen and stop shouting at me?”
“Not if you give me that shogun crap.”
“I am trying to inject a note of lightness into a very miserable affair. I have been to All Saints Hospital, and I have been lectured to by our Dr. Baxter. It would appear that the Angel was a heroin addict. The glass of whisky that was handed to her when she returned was laced with chloral hydrate-”
“A Mickey,” Beckman said.
“Exactly. And when she passed out, someone came into her room and shot her full of heroin.”
“That would do it,” Beckman agreed.
“More to come. The Angel was a man.”
When Masuto had finished giving them every detail of Baxter’s story, they still were unwilling to accept the facts.
“I just don’t buy it,” Wainwright said. “You can’t turn a man into a woman-yeah, maybe into some kind of freak, but the Angel was no freak. She was one of the most beautiful dames I ever saw. She’s been photographed and interviewed.”
“She was stacked,” Beckman said. “Those weren’t falsies. Hell, that dressing gown didn’t half cover her. She was all woman and built like something out of a
“And she started out as a man. We may hate Baxter, but he’s no fool. I saw the autopsy. So let’s not waste
