The Dog Collar Murders (16 page)

“My information came through books too,” said Hadley. “But they were a little more pulpy. Sarah Aldridge. Ann Bannon. Isabel Miller. A girl in high school turned me on to them. And then we all read
The Well of Loneliness
and
The Group
in college. And some people read Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, but it was hard to find anything particularly sexy in them.”

“So you never masturbated to pictures of naked women?” Allen pressed.

“Never,” I said.

“Well,” Hadley said. “A few times. It meant getting a copy of
Playboy
and then trying to hide it.”

Moe nodded. “So much of gay sex in the seventies when I came out seemed to be in direct response to the repression we’d all suffered as boys. You had thousands of gay men flooding into San Francisco, ready to act out things we’d only dreamed of. Porn was part of that, but it always seemed to me that porn was something you did when you couldn’t get sex. I spent weekend nights when my parents were out with a whole stack of male porn magazines when I was in high school. It felt so shameful. I even did it on Shabbes. But when I came to San Francisco the shame was over. There was this feeling of immense sexual joy….”

“That’s all gone now,” said Allen, picking at his chicken bones. “I suppose porn has come back more strongly to compensate.”

“There was never that sexual joy in the lesbian-feminist community,” said Hadley a little enviously. “Casual sex was frowned on, the idea of tricking was morally repugnant. Monogamy, even if it had to be serial, was the way to go.”

“But you’ve been together eight years or something,” I said to Allen and Moe. “So you’re a good example of a committed gay relationship.”

“Sure we are,” said Moe. “But we’ve never insisted on sexual fidelity either. We probably both fucked dozens of men, but that had no effect on our commitment.”

I tried to think how I’d feel if Hadley were out every night making love with other women. I just couldn’t imagine it working. But was that because of my repressed nature or because we’d never tried it or because women had a different history and a different set of expectations?

“Sex for lesbians is totally tied up in relationships,” said Hadley. “We don’t have a way of getting erotic needs met outside the relationship—unless we have an affair, which is another relationship.”

Was she saying that she had erotic needs I wasn’t meeting? Was she saying she was having an affair? She suddenly looked incredibly desirable to me across the table, in her red sweater, with round red earrings, her silvery hair tucked behind her ears.

“A lot of lesbians,” Allen said a little morosely, “haven’t been able to support gay men during the AIDS crisis because somehow they feel like gay men are being paid back for all that screwing around.”

“I remember when the AIDS epidemic first began,” said Hadley. “A lot of lesbians were very smug. It was as if those years of serial monogamy had paid off. Now they were being rewarded by keeping their health.”

“Be fair,” said Moe. “If it had only been lesbians who were getting sick there would have been even less of an outcry and far fewer resources, if only because so few women have money.”

I thought back to when I’d first heard of AIDS. I hadn’t been a lesbian then and I’d absorbed the news rather indifferently. It was just some kind of virus gay men who went to bathhouses in San Francisco got, kind of like Legionnaire’s Disease.

“I think lesbians have changed their attitude,” said Hadley. “The losses have been too great for anybody to ignore them.”

We were all silent.

“Oh dear,” said Allen, with forced cheerfulness. “Funny how that subject
does
have a way of rearing its ugly head.”

“It’s the question of the century,” said Moe. “Now that we know there’s sex without procreation, can we believe there’s sex without consequences?”

“Or sex without oppression?” I added.

“Or sex without chocolate?” Hadley asked, bringing out her surprise, half a Chocolate Decadence cake from the Dilettante cafe.

It was on the way home from Allen and Moe’s that we heard the news. In the midst of the radio babble, as Hadley was changing stations searching for her favorite song (Hadley was the kind of girl who still had favorite songs), it was announced that a woman had been found strangled this evening in Seattle.

His voice salivating so that we would realize that this was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill murder of a woman, the announcer said, “She was a Ph.D. candidate—and an exotic dancer at the Fun Palace.”

T
HE LOCAL NEWS MEDIA
had had kept a wary distance from Loie Marsh. Whatever the unsavory details of her death, much of her public life had been spent fighting violence against women, and in Seattle, at least, that was something to respect. Possibly more to the point, her family was obviously good, decent Scandinavian stock. Soon, no doubt, a reporter was bound to pick up some of the things I’d learned and use them in a profile that would smear her memory while pretending to be sympathetic, but so far it hadn’t happened.

Nicky Kay’s murder didn’t get the kid glove treatment. The papers interviewed her professors at Stanford; the TV cameras focused on the exterior of the Fun Palace. Even Djuna Barnes,
Nightwood
and the twenties in Paris were thrown into the story. It was everything that the media loves. “The Double Life of Nicky Kay.” “Student’s Secret Life.” In reality there had been nothing secret or double about Nicky’s life. She’d been one of the more upfront people I’d ever met in my life.

On the other hand the media helped me piece a few things together. From the two papers and the local TV station I found out that Nicky had been a brilliant student at the University of Washington, had gone to Stanford first for a Masters, then a Ph.D. in English. She had apparently worked in a strip joint in the North Beach. Three years ago she’d returned to Seattle to work on her thesis. Her advisors and professors were uniformly “shocked.”

All in all they managed to dig up lots of dirt on Nicky as a sex worker. But further than that they didn’t go. Either the mention of sadomasochism was unthinkable for family TV and newspapers, or they didn’t have a clue. If they’d wanted they could have splashed the papers with lurid accounts of Nicky’s speech at the conference and hinted at all sorts of rude and nasty goings-on, but there was no reference anywhere to Nicky’s sexual preference or predilections or to her relationship with Oak. And though they said Nicky had been strangled, the media didn’t link her murder with Loie’s. Did that mean Nicky hadn’t been found with a dog collar around her neck?

Or did it mean that the police were keeping that bit of information to themselves?

I decided to call up the one person I knew who was even remotely connected to the world of journalism, an old political cohort who had once worked on the alternative, now defunct,
Northwest Passage.
Sandy had recently become the Washington State governor’s press secretary.

As I expected, she wasn’t particularly delighted to hear from me. For the last couple of years she’d been trying to put some distance between her and her more radical past.

“No Pam, I am not going to call up my ‘reporter friends’ and ask them what ‘implement’ was used to strangle this exotic dancer.”

“But Sandy, the newspapers aren’t saying and I can hardly call up the police department and ask them myself.”

“Pam, I can’t abuse my position.” She was patient. “Do you know how many people are constantly trying to worm information out of me about the governor’s policies? This is a good job and I don’t want to lose it.”

“This isn’t to do with the toxic waste bill, hon. It’s just a simple murder case. For old time’s sake? Remember Satsop?”

I was pulling on her heartstrings. We had once been in the same affinity group that had gotten lost in the woods attempting to occupy the site where the Satsop nuclear power plants were to be built. By the time Sandy and I and a woman named Colleen had finally staggered onto the site it was twilight and everybody else had already been arrested. We almost had to beg the sheriff to take us in too, just so we could be sure we’d get home before dark. It’s ignominious moments like that that either destroy or eternally bind friendships.

But Sandy wasn’t moved. “Colleen tried that one on me last month,” she said crisply, “Wanting to know if the governor was going to support the low-income housing bill.”

“Oh well,” I sighed. “Maybe when I have something really important to ask you….”

A half hour later she called me back. “Nicky Kay was strangled by a thin cord of some sort, probably leather or plastic,” she said with some repugnance. “She wasn’t choked by the dog collar that was found around her neck. The detectives think that the same person also may have murdered Loie Marsh, but they asked the media not to reveal the m.o. yet for fear of copycat murders. That what you wanted to know?”

“Sandy, you’re a pal.”

She laughed. “We did have a good time back then, didn’t we?”

Penny didn’t come into work on Monday. She called from Group Health to say Toni had an ear infection, that that’s why she’d been screaming. It wasn’t serious and had already started to clear up. Ray came in but he was so tired from being up all night that he spent most of the morning lying on the office couch. Moe, June and I finally got tired of tiptoeing around him and made him go home.

“They’re too old to have kids,” June clucked. “That’s the problem.”

“What do you mean, June?” Moe asked. “They’re only thirty or so, aren’t they?”

“You want to have all that baby stuff over by the time you’re twenty,” June said sagely. “My girls’ll be out of the house before I’m forty. Then I’m going to live.”

Around mid-afternoon Hanna called, asking for Penny and sounding very worked up.

I assumed she was upset to have heard about Nicky. After all, they had been college roommates. But Nicky seemed to be the furthest thing from her mind.

“Loie’s manuscript has been stolen!”

“What? The new book she was working on? How do you know?”

“A detective came over this morning asking to look through her papers again. I thought everything was in a couple of boxes, but when I pulled them out, one of the boxes was half empty.”

“How do you know that’s where Loie kept it? Had you ever seen the manuscript before?”

“Of course I’d seen the manuscript,” said Hanna. “She completely took over my study with her papers. She had two file boxes for the project. One labeled
We Took Back the Night
and the other one
Notes.
And now the manuscript and half the notes are gone.”

“Who do you think could have taken them?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve got to get them back!”

“Why? Now that Loie’s dead the book will never be finished. It will never be published, will it?”

With an effort Hanna took control of herself and said, “No, that’s right. It won’t be published. I suppose I’m more upset that someone’s been in the house. Whoever murdered Loie wanted that manuscript—and they broke into my house to get it.”

“I’d be upset too,” I said, and I told her to call Penny at home.

By the time we said good-bye Hanna was composed again. I wondered if, as an actress, she had learned to calculate the effectiveness of her outbursts, or whether they came upon her unawares, and uncontrollably.

The Espressomat was not its usual lively self that evening. In spite of the steady hum of steaming machines, there was a kind of stillness at the heart of it. It had only been a couple of weeks since I’d sat here wondering whether I should go to the conference. What had been mildly intriguing and provocative had turned sour. There was someone in Seattle who was sick with fear or revenge, someone who had needed to make sure Loie couldn’t speak on the panel that evening. Someone who for some reason had also needed to kill Nicky. According to what Sandy had told me it was the same person, but what was the link?

If Loie had been involved in sadomasochism there might have been a reason to kill her. It wasn’t absolutely impossible. Look at the TV evangelists. The more they talked about the evils of leading an immoral life, the more they ranted against pornography and prostitution and homosexuality, the more they secretly felt compelled to act out their fantasies and engage in extramarital fornication. Jimmy Swaggert said he’d been fascinated by pornography since he was a boy. Being an ultra-right-wing Christian fundamentalist had been both a cover and a prop for him. He may have struggled against his tendencies only to be drawn irrevocably back to them. Perhaps Loie had too. Perhaps she and Nicky had been lovers years ago when they were both students. Maybe they’d taken up again when Loie returned to Seattle. And Oak had found out….

It was difficult to keep Oak out of my mind. She was big and she was a proclaimed sadist. Those great forearms would have no trouble tightening a dog collar or a leash around someone’s throat. But even if Oak had killed Loie and Nicky in a vengeful love triangle, why would she have stolen the manuscript? It didn’t make sense.

Hadley took a break and came over. “I should be ready to go soon,” she said apologetically. “Amanda went home sick today. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that being an employer was a little like being a school nurse?”

I asked her sympathetically if I could bring her a cup of coffee or something, and she vaguely shuddered. “An orange juice would be nice,” she said. “Thanks honey.”

While I was up at the counter getting it for her I saw Miko come in. She was far from her flamboyant self. Instead she slipped in like an animal looking for shelter.

“Hi Pam,” she said in a flat subdued voice.

“Hi.” It was strange to see Miko looking so vulnerable. “Come and sit down with us if you want, after you’ve got your coffee.”

She looked almost pathetically grateful. What was with her? Surely it couldn’t be Nicky’s murder? She’d hardly known Nicky.

Hadley picked up on it too. “How’s life in videoland these days?”

Miko shrugged. “All right.”

“I thought that evening at your studio last week was really interesting,” I volunteered, with a vague feeling I was repeating myself. To my horror Miko’s eyes began to fill with tears. She wasn’t the crying type—somehow that made it worse.