A Dish Best Served Cold Ch. 02

Chapter Two - The Two Steves

The events that transpired at the Eta Lambda Pi frat house caused Felicity Benson to permanently take possession of Francis Benson's psyche. Francis Benson couldn't deal with what had happened to Felicity but Felicity had the courage to process what had happened to her and drive the shame and bitterness deep inside her subconscious. Any self-doubt about Felicity Benson's gender had dissipated. She was and always would be Felicity Benson now and forever.

Felicity presented as female thereafter and after consulting with her doctor and psychiatrist she began the journey of gender transition. Both her doctor and psychiatrist were well aware that Francis Benson was gender dysphoric and were not really surprised when he stated that he wanted to reassign his gender.

Felicity Benson continued to perform as Felicity Goodnite on the campus theatre and began to appear at open-mic nights in comedy clubs and gay bars. She never told a soul about what had happened to her at the Eta Lambda Pi frat house and she deliberately altered her timetable and schedules to avoid the jocks who had assaulted her.

Felicity changed her major to Theatre and Performance and graduated near the top of her class. She was a brilliant performer who could act, sing, dance and had a genuine ability to deliver stand-up comedy. She had undertaken several surgeries to feminise a body that was already effete including breast augmentation but she had stalled when finally offered vaginoplasty. She decided that for now she was happy to present as a transgender woman without the need for a vagina.

Her parents knew that Felicity had struggled with gender dysphoria throughout her childhood and during puberty and were not surprised when she decided to live her life as a woman. They helped with the administrative headaches of getting her identity legally changed to female.

By the time she graduated, Felicity had supressed the memories of that fateful evening and worked hard at eking out an existence as a performer. She did the pageant scene, burlesque shows and worked the clubs and bars, singing, lip-syncing and performing biting stand-up comedy, becoming more confident and proficient as she built up a fan base that followed her online and came to her shows.

She was soon headlining at the Ride em' Cowgirl nightclub drag show every evening and also appearing at the matinee on weekends. A stint on the television show Drag Race where she 'sashayed away' at the end of the ninth episode after failing miserably in the sewing challenge brought her further notoriety and she began touring.

Felicity was smart enough to know that fame can be fleeting and she saved every penny she earned until she had enough money to buy out the owner of Ride em' Cowgirl which she renovated and turned into a swish venue with eclectic drag themed performances including a weekly beauty pageant on Sundays, a midweek talent show for up and coming drag artists, a burlesque show on Friday nights and variety shows on the other days. She often performed in the shows but her main role was as the MC.

Operating Ride em' Cowgirl was a full-time job but Felicity still liked to tour now and then so she took on a manager and a producer who also acted as the booking agent. The manager was a man named Mitch Freeman who was an astute businessman, very experienced in operating bar-restaurants and nightclubs. The booking agent was another queen named Panti Down whose legal name was William Russell. Panti booked the performers and produced the shows.

Ten years after the most traumatic night of her life Felicity Benson was living a comfortable lifestyle, moderately famous in the drag scene and financially secure. She had all but forgotten about that fateful evening at the Eta Lambda Pi frat house when Spencer Duvall walked into Ride em' Cowgirl.

Felicity was sitting at the bar having finished her MC duties. She recognised Spencer Duvall immediately. He was still fit and trim, wearing an expensive suit and the mischievous grin that had melted many a girl's heart. A grin that hid a mean streak that the girl whose heart he had melted was only likely to find out about later in bed.

He sauntered confidently up to the bar and stood only two barstools away from Felicity. She was frozen in shock, unable to move or speak. She waited for a biting retort or an insult but Spencer seemed not to notice her as he ordered a drink from the bartender. He turned around, leaned his back against the bar and surveyed the nightclub.

"Not sure I'm in the right place," he said to himself.

Panti Down was on stage dressed in a sequinned evening gown, lip-syncing to a Cher ballad, the waiters moving among the tables tending to the patrons were twinks dressed in black hotpants with red suspenders, white tank-tops and Doc Martin boots. The crowd was mostly young men dressed in gay fashion with a some accompanied by young women who were gay associates or young women out for a girl's night out. There was also the usual sprinkling of tranny-chasers.

"What is this place?" Spencer turned to face Felicity.

At first she was unable to speak. She was paralysed and mute. But then she realised that he didn't recognise her. Why should he? It had been over ten years since the incident and from the rumours she had heard, hers had just been one of the countless encounters where Spencer and his frat-buddies had taken their pleasure with female students either willingly, coerced or... best not to think about it.

Felicity just nodded with her chin to the neon sign behind the bar. It was a huge handmade artwork taking up the whole wall. It was a girl in a cowgirl costume consisting of a vest, skirt, bandana and belt and of course she was holding out her cowboy hat. She was straddling something but that part of the artwork was indistinct and left to the imagination of the eye of the beholder. The girl's skirt had flicked up exposing her panties which appeared to be bulged out at the front.

"Well that leaves a lot to the imagination," Spencer commented and raised his drink and drank it in one swallow.

"Let me buy you one," he smiled at Felicity.

Her instinctive reflex was to run away, to leave this man to his own devices, to let him realise that he was in the wrong place and to leave. But the fact that he didn't recognise her not only made her curious, it infuriated her. How could he not remember defiling her? Was she that worthless? Was she that faceless?

"Sure. I'll have a Jack Daniel's neat," Felicity studied Spencer Duvall's face, waiting for him to make a connection but he didn't.

He sidled up and took the stool beside her.

"May I?" he asked, giving her that sweet smile.

"Looks like you already have," Felicity replied knocking back her drink.

How could he not recognise her? Sure she had dyed her hair blonde and had it styled differently, she'd had her nose straightened, her hairline moved to create a smaller forehead, her lips and cheekbones augmented, and her jaw and chin reshaped and resized but she didn't look that different? Did she?

"So what is this place?" Spencer asked again.

"It's a bar and nightclub that caters to the LGBTI community but isn't exclusive to them. We offer entertainment featuring drag artists," Felicity motioned for the bartender to refill their glasses.

"LGB what?" Spencer grinned stupidly.

He thought he was being funny but he was being insulting.

"I don't think this place is for you. The drinks are on the house. Sorry you came to the wrong place," Felicity slipped off the stool and made her way to a table she kept reserved for herself at the back of the club.

She was seething with anger. She remembered how lying under the coverlet in her cheap flat the day after she had been defiled that she had sworn that she would get her revenge. Was now her chance? Was she too cowardly to follow through? Was she really worthless and faceless?

An image materialised out of nowhere. She was bent over the couch in the frat hose and Spencer Duvall was buggering her, holding her down while he slammed his cock in and out of her ass. Three of the other youths were cheering him on, one of them filming it. When Spencer ejaculated inside her he pulled her buttocks hard against him, holding Felicity by her thighs as she too had ejaculated. She was crying when she orgasmed but she still relished the feel of his swollen manhood pressing on her prostrate, the feel of his fingers digging into the delicate flesh of her thighs, tearing her pantyhose.

She shook the image away and picked up the drink that the waiter had delivered unbidden.

Spencer pulled back the seat beside her and instead of railing on him she smiled at him.

"I guess you changed your mind?" she gave him a beatific smile.

The rest had been easy, almost too easy and she was sure that she had made mistakes. She had gone back to her office and found the stash of Viagra she kept hidden. Over the course of the evening she crushed four of them and slipped them into his drinks.

She'd taken the package of holdup stockings with her; her intent was to change into them to make it easier for him to fuck her. As it was they became a convenient murder weapon.

Felicity plied Spencer with alcohol and when he invited her back to his apartment she'd encouraged him to snort his stash of cocaine and to drink even more. Fuelled on cocaine and Viagra he had maintained a rampant erection that wouldn't go away. By then he knew that she was transgender but far from repulsing him it turned him on. She fellated him on the couch and then led him to the bedroom.

She'd fucked him wearing only her pantyhose and high heels. She had blown her load over him twice, using his rampant erection for her own pleasure. He was sore; he had ejaculated at least three times and the priapism was becoming agonising. He was begging for her to uncuff him. It was his idea to introduce the handcuffs into the game and it was his undoing.

Felicity had taken the stocking from her purse and mounted Spencer again, riding him, using the stocking to cut off the supply of oxygen to his brain and then releasing it.

"Oh my god!" Spencer had screamed as he ejaculated once again.

Felicity came with him, only a few feeble spurts dribbling onto his belly because it was her third orgasm. She was surprised at how powerful she felt. She had Spencer totally under her control, cuffed to the bed, pleading with her for sex until it became too painful for him, torn between the agony of priapism and the ecstasy of ceaseless sexual arousal.

"Do you remember me?" Felicity leaned down so that her face was inches from his.

Spencer shook his head, his face a mask of fear.

"Please stop. Please let me go," he had begged.

Spencer had never even asked her name, even when he offered to take her home with him.

"Felicity Goodnite... Eta Lambda Pi," she hissed into his face.

His face became a mask of horror and alarm when he suddenly recognised who was straddling him.

Felicity pulled the stocking as tight as she could, leaning back, straining against the weight of his body. She watched Spencer's eyes bulge and his tongue swell as he writhed beneath her in his death throes. She thought he might have ejaculated again when he died but there was so much semen inside her already that she didn't really know.

Felicity climbed off Spencer's corpse and started to clean up. She touched up her lipstick and then she got an idea. She began to write on the wall above the bed with her lipstick.

*****

Penelope Bishop and Silvia Bickle returned to Spencer Duvall's townhouse and removed the police tape from the door so they could enter. The CSI Team had left behind the usual detritus of used latex gloves, hairnets and fingerprint powder, most of it confined to the bedroom.

Penelope began searching there whilst Silvia searched the rest of the house. They met in the kitchen about an hour later.

"You first," Silvia said.

Penelope emptied the contents of a cardboard box onto the kitchen table; most of the items were bagged and logged as evidence. There was an assortment of sex toys including dildos, vibrators, a fleshlight, a whip, a cane and assorted panties and other lingerie and two more sets of handcuffs. There was even a strap-on penis.

"Bob told me I'd find this in the bedroom dresser drawers. CSI examined the sex toys with luminol and there is no evidence of recent use so they left them in situ. What did you find?" Penelope asked.

"Over there on the couch. Some fetish clothing but everything else in the house is what you would expect to find in a bachelor apartment. He has two pay-for-view cable pornography subscriptions and subscribes to most of the cable sports channels, the fridge is full of beer, wine and gourmet deli meats and cheeses, he has a home gym set up in one of the spare bedrooms which he used frequently by the look of it," Silvia summarised what she had found.

"It's exactly as Cynthia Duvall described it. It's a man-cave for a rich former jock with a sex addiction," Penelope sighed and just then her phone pinged.

She read the message and turned to Silvia.

"Alice Leasingham has got into Duvall's devices. She'll meet us at Police Plaza after lunch," Penelope looked up at Silvia.

Silvia nodded and they put the evidence bags back into a cardboard box and took it out to Silvia's service vehicle. They stopped for lunch downtown.

"You know I kinda miss the Penelope who used to eat a rare burger and steak fries for lunch and wash it all down with a chocolate shake," Silvia waved a fork at Penelope's salad and diet coke.

Silvia was eating a Ruben sandwich and drinking an ice tea.

"Yeah but you don't miss the slug of Jack I used to lace my shakes with," Penelope countered.

"You workin' hard on maintaining that fine body bitch; I hope Bradley is treating it with the respect it deserves," Silvia goaded her friend.

"Speaking of, isn't that fine specimen of man-flesh due home today?" Silvia raised her brows.

"Brad is driving home this afternoon and taking me out to dinner tonight, hence my light lunch," Penelope countered.

"I get it. You goin' to be getting' the meat tonight so you taking it easy at lunch," Silvia chuckled.

"You know for a card-carrying lesbian, you certainly display a lot of interest in my love life," Penelope stirred her fork in her lettuce, secretly dreaming of the rare burger that Silvia had described.

"Hey, I've never let a flesh and blood penis get anywhere near my fine cooch but that doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by the mechanics of it all," Silvia grinned.

"As you well know, I don't have a cooch per se so my boyfriend has to use the back door," Penelope grinned back at Silvia.

"TMI bitch! TMI!" Silvia screwed up her face.

"And another thing... why does your Texas drawl suddenly change to street ghetto when you're needling me?" Penelope baited her partner.

"Just sounds better that way. Come on Penny let's go see what Alice has got for us," Silvia wiped her mouth with her napkin and dropped a tip on the table.

Back at Police Plaza Alice Leasingham was waiting for them. She had plugged Spencer Duvall's laptop and his mobile phone into a sixty-inch video screen.

"Most of the activity on his laptop is related to sex. His internet favourites are all porn or online dating sites. He has multiple profiles on multiple hook-up sites. I've checked the history and there is no record him arranging an encounter for the evening he was killed," Alice explained.

"Doesn't mean he didn't meet up with someone he had been with before," Silvia commented.

"True, but I've checked his phone and there are no text messages arranging a meet on the night in question. There are several texts over the previous days where he had arranged liaisons with women, either from the dating sites or from escort agencies. I've emailed you soft copies and printed them out for you," Alice pointed to a folder on the desk.

"I've checked his movements on the night in question by triangulating hits on the cell towers. Before he went home he spent most of the night in the bar and nightclub district of Balwyn. He made no phone calls nor received or sent any texts after six PM," Alice continued.

"I ran his credit cards. On the night of he used it to pay for dinner at Jimbo's Steakhouse and then he made a cash withdrawal at an ATM on Spence Street. There are no records of him using his cards to pay for hookers or callgirls so I'm assuming he uses cash so there is no permanent record. A man in his position could be easily blackmailed I guess," Alice surmised.

"We are going to have interview a lot of people," Silvia sighed.

"I saved the best till last so to speak, although what I'm about to show you is hardly what any right-minded person would think of as 'the best'. On a hidden folder in his laptop I found a number of short video clips which I believe were taken with hand held mobile devices, most likely cell phones. I'll need to check the metadata but I can tell you that some of these clips are years old but a couple are more recent," Alice clicked a few keys and the screen suddenly filled with video.

Some of the clips were filmed at the Spencer Duvall's townhouse but most appeared to be filmed in a sleazy hotel room except for one which was taken in the back of a car.

In all of the clips women and girls were being subjected to sex by multiple partners. It appeared to be the same five men although not all five of them appeared together in all of the clips. What was disturbing was that some of the women appeared to be drunk or drugged and some of them appeared to be cooperating under duress. In some of the clips there was more than one woman engaging in the sex.

Alice stopped the video after a minute or two.

"There are twenty four of these edited clips. I went through his photo gallery and used propriety software to identify the men in the clips," Alice clicked a key and five pictures appeared on the screen.

"Benjamin Roach, Carl Huntley, Jamaal Washington and William Turner. They were college buddies, they all played on the football team and they were all pledged to the Eta Lambda Pi fraternity.

"Ties in with what Cynthia Spencer told us," Silvia commented.

"Great work Alice. I want to see if you can identify the woman in the most recent video and I want you to date it and tell me where it was taken if that's possible," Penelope said.

"This is the latest clip chronologically as far as I can tell. It was edited last week. I'll find out when it was taken and I'll run the woman's picture through the system," Alice pointed to the screen.

A scantily dressed red-headed, pale-skinned, Rubenesque woman was lying on what appeared to be Spencer Duvall's king-size bed. She was being fucked by a black man who had his back to the camera whilst Spencer Duvall was feeding his penis into her mouth. Another man was kneeling on the bed masturbating, watching the proceedings.

"Remove that image from the screen please," Silvia Bickle said; her voice cold.

All three women had experience in sex crimes and had seen a lot worse but seeing the woman on the screen being used by the three men in high definition colour was distasteful to say the least.

"Spencer Duvall was a scumbag and his buddies no better but he was murdered and our job is to solve murders. We're going to need more people on this. The list of possible suspects is going to be huge," Penelope said to Silvia and Alice.

"If you're putting together a task force I'd like to be on it," Alice blurted out.

Then she blushed and turned away.

"We're going to need fulltime forensic expertise on this. I'll talk to Bob Tanner and see if he'll second you. I don't see why he would say no. Welcome to the team," Penelope gave Alice a wry smile.

*****

Penelope was as excited as a schoolgirl when she heard Bradley Wilson's car pull into the driveway. She was dressed in a black cocktail dress and heels wearing full makeup, ready for Bradley to take her out to dinner. She had made a booking at their favourite restaurant and envisioned an evening of fine dining, engaging conversation and sexual tension followed by several hours of torrid sex when they got home.