She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me Read Free

boyfriend no more.”
    â€œJust one little punch now and then?”
    â€œI said don’t go around exaggerating. Get drunk like a man. Or is there someone here on the street might offer a touch of companionship?” He pursed his lips and surveyed the terrain. “No more spirit of adventure in your present state of mind, seems like?”
    I was tuckered out, fit for nothing but swatting mosquitoes and pretty people and repeating my regrets to myself with the usual result in close concentration on the sounds of three A.M . on Potrero Hill. Now that mouthy person who had spent most of her life as a male and was beginning the adventure into her inner lady, with the aid of hormones, depilatory creams, Clairol, makeup, and one heck of a lot of optimism had swept up again and was listening to us. I caught her shaking her head and saying, “Some folks. I’m an RN, yet they hes-i-tate.”
    Alfonso didn’t mind my secrets getting told, plus a transsexual perspective on judgment. We’re together in the world, see, and it may be unpleasant, but acts have consequences. Alfonso lived by that. I was a slow learner despite his efforts to educate me.
    â€œGive it up,” Alfonso was saying. “Did you hear me? Give her up.”
    â€œYou don’t know.”
    Alfonso stood curbside at my vehicle. “Already told you maybe I don’t know. I got a boy someplace too. I had a lady I liked. A lunge just get you in deeper shit.”
    Alfonso helped me find police records, histories, little details a man in my career needed, but our friendship wasn’t built on that. I had similar help from the DMV, the Social Security Administration, a supervisor at the IRS; we thought of each other as clients, small business part-timers. I remembered them at Christmas and they remembered me all the year round when I was curious about a few details concerning someone’s goings and comings in the world. But record keepers didn’t necessarily become friends like Alfonso.
    â€œLet’s get moving,” he said. “You ready now?”
    â€œI guess.”
    The lengthened skin of a road-killed rat lay stretched in the gutter, just ahead of the plumper corpse of a cat with bits of fur looking like trampled slush. “Must have been a truck took them both out at once,” Alfonso said. “Died doing what they suppose to do—rat running, cat after him.”
    â€œWhat makes you think it’s a him?” I asked.
    â€œDon’t plan to look any closer, my man. Hey, you notice Janey’s horse—”
    â€œPony.”
    â€œâ€”was a boy or a girl?”

Chapter 2
    I protect. People may say I go around losing my temper, but in general I do not, and I’ll break the knees of anyone I catch saying it. I watch out for wives, kids, offshore accounts; folks bring me in to save their goods. I don’t do hubcaps.
    Heart and clients bedeviled by loss and regret is where I intervene.
    At present I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or anyone. Dan Kasdan doesn’t tell fortunes. Dan Kasdan preserves them.
    And how I love my wife and kid.
    Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, pink cheekbones, tired pink-and-yellow eyes—these things make me look like a healthy, aging philosophy professor from a pretty good university; or maybe, if only I knew how to dress, like the vice president of a socially aware insurance company based in San Francisco. The look is not too far off. I’m a private investigator in the Bay Area, which includes Berkeley, Oakland, parts of Marin, even as far south as San Jose if you’re willing to pay travel time. I use Murine, but it doesn’t help the pink, and I forget to take my doc’s advice to wash the eyelids with baby shampoo, scrubbing with Q-tips, because, oh, conjunctivitis isn’t all that bad. And I hate to stare at my face in the mirror, which you have to do in that Q-tip deal or else you’re going to jab