The Dog Collar Murders (12 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

She said she’d walk out with me. On the sidewalk we stood for a minute. I felt I was towering over her. I never remembered her being as short as she was.

“Are you really doing all right, Pam?” she asked. “We could make an appointment for October. Or I could refer you to someone.”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “I have a lot going on right now, but some of it I just have to work out myself.”

“Okay,” she said, and touched my arm. “I hope I told you what you wanted to know about Loie.”

“Thanks,” I said, still with the strong impression she was hiding something.

I was back into Loie’s book when Hadley returned home. She was humming as she hung up her jacket, completely oblivious to all the outrages perpetrated on us, on womankind.

“Margaret and I saw a great movie,” she said, and named a romantic comedy-thriller that was currently very popular. “Really pleasant and old-fashioned: they meet, they fight, they reconcile. Very satisfying.”

I looked up sternly from my book. “It’s beyond me how you could enjoy a film that just reinforces the heteropatriarchy. I’ve seen the previews for that film. So what if the woman is a district attorney? It’s just a set-up to make it more titillating when the woman is saved by the jerky hero.”

Hadley looked at me in amazement and her wide mouth settled into a kind of frown. “Where’s this coming from?” She peered at the title in my hand. “Oh-oh—the wrath of Loie Marsh lives on.”

“It’s true what she says, you know. That men hate women—at every historical period, in every possible way.”

Hadley threw her long body onto the sofa across from me. “She makes a convincing argument, I’ll say that for her. That book had an incredibly galvanizing effect on people. But it’s outdated. For one thing she treats sexuality as if it were an unchanging paradigm: man screws woman in order to humiliate her. According to her men and women never act any differently. Whereas in fact there is an incredible amount of deviance from that model. Men fucking other men, women fucking other women, transsexuals, fetishists, celibates, bisexuals, women who dominate men and men who like being dominated. Loie left out all the interesting bits. She didn’t even put in lesbians, and she’s one herself. And even if you accept Loie’s main idea—men hate women—leaving aside the question of whether you can prove it or not—where are you going to go from there? If it’s always been like this and is always going to be like this, then what’s the point of trying to change specific things? You might as well kill yourself.”

“No, you don’t. You can fight back!”

Hadley sighed and examined her nails. “Yeah. Fight Back! Take Back the Night! Get Your Asses Out in the Street! To the Barricades, Womyn!… And then what? Not to sound a discouraging note, but politics, government and so on is slightly more complicated. I’m not convinced that the women who write some of these books would be my favorite choice as president. Or queen. I’m sure some of them would like to be queen.”

“But we need people who can make us feel how intolerable things are. Otherwise we just accept it.”

“Which is precisely the attraction of activists like Loie. They’re fine as long as they’re trying to inspire revolt and change—it’s when they get specific, if they ever do, about how they’re going to institute change that you realize that some of their ideas sound pretty feeble and/or fascist.”

My enthusiasm for the book was beginning to leak away slightly under Hadley’s criticism and I remembered my conversation with Pauline. Was a woman who stole someone else’s ideas and took all the credit for herself such a model for women of the future?

“I just don’t want to write off Loie’s sincerity,” I said finally. “It’s too easy just to see her as some kind of power-hungry fanatic who had a lot of enemies. But at her best she really cared deeply about women and she had a tremendous effect on the whole feminist movement.”

I looked challengingly at Hadley but she seemed to have lost interest in arguing.

“What’d you do tonight?” she asked and came over to sit next to me.

“I went to see Elizabeth Ketteridge. I had some questions about Loie.”

“Find out anything?”

“It’s the same thing everywhere. Nobody really seems to have known her in Seattle. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that Elizabeth knew something she didn’t want to tell me.”

“I’ve always liked Elizabeth,” Hadley offered. “Was it nice to see her again?”

“Yes,” I said. “Only… Hadley, sometimes it just comes back to me. Something sets it off and the whole thing just comes back. And in a way seeing Elizabeth is like that. It reminds me.” I couldn’t help it, I started crying a little.

Hadley held me. She’d held me before and would keep holding me for a while, I hoped.

J
UNE AND I WENT
to sit in a nearby park for lunch the next day and as we unwrapped our tuna sandwiches, I told her about reading Loie’s book and talking to Elizabeth.

“Hadley’s skeptical, but sometimes I think Elizabeth and Loie may be right. Pornography is about male power. It’s very harmful to its audience and to the people who pose for the photographs and make the movies.”

“A blow job is better than no job, as Margo St. James once said.” June chewed on a pickle. “Seriously, Pam, I probably feel just as put off by porn as you do. I know Eddy used to look at it. We had a discussion and he stopped, but I wonder sometimes if he still does. It’s such a male activity. That bothers me. You get the feeling that you’re living in another universe. But I try to keep it in perspective. If this country has a national problem, it’s drugs, not porn.”

“Maybe they go together.”

“Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. They’re about money, that’s for sure. And some people are making a fortune off them.”

“True,” I said, thinking of the prices of magazines and videos at The Vault, which certainly didn’t reflect the cost of the materials and labor that went into producing them. “Make something illicit and you can charge what you want for it. High prices only make people think it’s more desirable.”

“You ever think that’s why some of these feminists are publishing sex magazines? They’re defending our civil liberties all the way to the bank.”

We finished our sandwiches and sat watching the waterfall in the corner of the little park. It was the first of October but the afternoon sun was very warm. June was sensibly dressed in a bright orange tee-shirt that brought out the coppery tones of her skin. I was sweating in a long-sleeved shirt.

June said, “I don’t really feel the anti-porn movement has had much to say to the black community so far. They just use us when they want to compare censoring racist material to censoring porn.”

“But what about Alice Walker and Audre Lorde? They’ve spoken out against S/M.”

“Maybe because S/M is an especially hard issue for black women. When you’ve got a history of slavery in the not so distant past you’re not real thrilled about the idea of pretending to be slave and mistress. It cuts too near the bone to be thinking about wearing leg irons—or even putting leg irons on somebody else.”

We sat in silence a moment, then June said, “So, are you any closer to figuring out who killed Loie Marsh?”

I shook my head. “I’ve run through everybody in the panel in my mind. I can’t believe that any of them had a reason to kill her. I see them all so clearly waiting to go on stage, they couldn’t have been out in the bushes with a dog collar. Gracie and Miko were talking, Elizabeth was sitting there with her lover…”

“What about Sonya?”

“I guess I didn’t know what she looked like before she came on stage. She could have been late. Nicky was also late, I remember. But we’d seen her and Oak in the restaurant. How would they have had time to kill Loie? That leaves Hanna, Loie’s cousin, who also came in late, but with her father.”

“Well?”

“But what would any of their motives be? The only one I can see who had a really obvious motive is Pauline, her ex-lover. Loie had left her and had taken all the research materials for a book they’d worked on together. But Pauline wasn’t in Seattle the night of the murder. She was in Boston because Mrs. Marsh talked to her.”

“What about people you don’t know?”

“That’s the trouble, I don’t know any of her friends or enemies from Boston… and she had an ex-husband too. And all of a sudden everyone looks and sounds suspicious to me. For instance, I heard Loie and someone arguing after Loie’s workshop. I don’t know who it was, but it sounded as if Loie was planning to reveal something that the other woman didn’t want her to reveal. I didn’t recognize the voice—it could have been anybody.”

June stood up and stretched. “I’m supposed to go over and see Gracie tonight,” she said. “Maybe you want to come with me? You could check her out, maybe ask her some questions. But she’ll talk your ear off, I’m warning you.”

Before going to Gracie’s however, there was something else I thought I should do, and that was stop by a planning meeting for the Loie March, as some people were already calling it. This was to be an enormous Take Back the Night march in honor of Loie and her fight against pornography. All the staunchest anti-porn activists were going to be there and I thought this might be an opportunity to ask a few more questions.

It was being held at the downtown YWCA. June declined to accompany me and I agreed to pick her up at nine to visit Gracie.

The room was packed with a combination of long-time activists with many agenda-setting and task-division skills and a crowd of women, many of whom were in tears of fury, rage and abandonment over Loie’s death. They were the women who had read and discussed
The Silenced Heart
in their Women’s Studies classes; they were the generation who had come out as feminists and lesbian feminists at a time when the Women Against Violence Against Women movement was burgeoning and consciousness about rape, incest and sexual harassment was at its peak. These women didn’t see Loie as human, but as their hero, their martyr. They didn’t just want a march in her honor, they wanted to rename a downtown street for her; they wanted to dedicate a park or a building to her memory; they wanted to pull down the statue of George Washington on campus and put up one of Loie instead.

“Let’s just start with the march for now,” suggested Elizabeth Ketteridge’s lover, Nan, who was chairing the meeting. “Now, who can make posters?”

“I think we should occupy the Mayor’s office,” interrupted an earnest woman in jeans and a checked shirt. “Until there’s a full-scale investigation of Loie’s murder. Obviously there’s been a conspiracy and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

“It’s exactly what Loie always talked about,” someone else said. “Women who resist are murdered.”

“It’s because she was writing a new book!”

“That’s right! Where is that book? We’ve got to make sure it’s published before they suppress it.”

“Or censor it,” someone else said. “The sexual liberals are always screeching about censorship, but they censor us all the time.”

“They’re just worried about having access to their own little sex fantasies. They don’t care about the voices of real women talking about sexual abuse.”

“Has anyone actually read her new book?” I put in. “Does anyone know what she was planning to say?”

There was a silence and then a woman said, almost reverently, “I believe she was planning to go much much further than she had in
The Silenced Heart
.”

Several people nodded intensely.

“Further in what direction?” I persevered.

“Loie Marsh was writing her history,” the woman said. “And not just her history. Our history.”

“What history is that?” I inquired, but the discussion was channeled by Nan into a suggestion that a self-appointed task force see if parts of the manuscript could be read at the march.

I wasn’t a meeting person and I began to lose interest as the tasks were divided. I couldn’t understand it. Not one of these women seemed to see Loie as a real person, with possibly some real pain in her life that had driven her to see pornography as the thing to be fought at all costs. Loie Marsh wasn’t writing history; as far as they were concerned she was history.

But it was the woman I was interested in, not the symbol. I regretted that I hadn’t approached her at the conference, that I had been too awed to talk to her directly. Maybe if I had, I would have had a better idea of what kind of person she was, what motivated and possessed her.

“Now, is there someone who knows a printer who would be willing to donate the printing of the poster and flyers?” Nan asked, looking straight at me.

I nodded involuntarily. How had I managed to forget Meeting Rule Number One? Never go to a gathering of this sort unless you plan to come away on a committee.

I escaped before I could agree to anything else.

Gracie London lived in Madrona, a neighborhood of big old houses near Lake Washington. Her house was set back from the street and surrounded by tall evergreens dripping with rain. The sunny day had vanished in stormclouds during the afternoon.

We walked into a living room so filled with bookshelves that it was like looking at woven rugs, all color and pattern, lining the walls. This seemed to be Gracie’s study too; a computer terminal stuck its head out of a book-and-paper-piled desk like a groundhog in spring. Next to the desk were two file cabinets and stacks of clippings and copies to be filed.

“I need a secretary,” groaned Gracie. “Or to be less interested in world events. Sometimes I get my daughter to do it.”

It surprised me again what an attractive woman she was. From my seat in the audience she’d looked brilliant but remote and professional. Now in the lamplight her crisp salt and pepper hair shone and her face was warm and welcoming. She was wearing black wool pants and a purple light wool shirt, with gold jewelry. She was just my height.

“So what do you want to know?” she asked me after she and June had discussed their business and we’d all had some tea. “June said she brought you along for some reason.

I didn’t really lie. I said I was making some inquiries into Loie Marsh’s death. Purely as a friend of Hanna’s. I’d come to Gracie because I felt that she, more than most people, had a grasp of the pornography debate and the passions that fueled it.