Murder in the Collective (7 page)

“That
is
low,” I agreed. I couldn’t deny, however, that I felt a little pleased. Jealousy isn’t good for the soul and that’s definitely what I’d been feeling last night upstairs with my three scoops of Swiss Almond Vanilla.

“So you went to a lesbian bar, huh?” said Penny.

I’d forgotten my little lie. “Uh, well, not exactly. They wanted to, but you know me, too chicken. We ended up at the Bar & Grill.”

“Too bad,” said Penny. “I’ve always wondered what Sappho’s was like.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Sure.”

Even your own twin can surprise you sometimes.

At Best we were greeted with attitudes ranging from loud scorn to apparent indifference. So we thought we could just stroll in any old time, did we? We were just lucky that it hadn’t been that busy. Before we told them about the sacking of B. Violet, I tried to notice whether any of them seemed different—more tired, more hysterical, more subdued, more guilty—and whether any of them had bandages on their hands. But if any of them were wounded, it wasn’t in obvious places. And even to my practiced collective eyes, everyone seemed much the same: Jeremy vague and spacey; June zippily cheerful; Ray irritated and concerned; Zee—but in some ways I didn’t feel I knew Zee well enough to see a difference, if there was one. She was gloriously turned out this morning as all others, in thin red-and-black-striped pants that were tight around the waist and ankles and full around the knees. With them she wore a short-sleeved red shirt and a black sweater knotted around the shoulders. With unusual silver earrings, many rings and bracelets, her smooth heavy black hair arranged faultlessly as ever, she looked as if she were working at
Vogue,
not at Best.

We told them what had happened. About the vandalism, about the cops and the fingerprinting and non-fingerprinting, about Fran being missing and Margaret’s cut finger. The only thing we didn’t mention and I don’t know why, was that Elena had found Fran’s car keys. And lost them.

“They must be feeling so bad,” said Zee quietly. “To lose everything. What will they do?”

“Well, I hate to say it,” said Ray, “but at least we don’t have to worry about the merger question anymore.”

He looked at me somewhat defiantly, but also in apparent innocence that these words might be taken wrongly.

No one contradicted him. No one seemed to be worried, or to find it odd that B. Violet had been destroyed just after a meeting to discuss a merger with us. Clearly they all thought it was an inside job, internal sabotage, either by Fran or by Margaret and Anna.

Well, wasn’t that what I thought myself?

Elena called later to say there’d been no word from Fran. She was still at Fran’s, having written a long letter, and was preparing to go back home to be there when her kids got home from school.

“I don’t think you can do anything more, Elena,” I tried to assure her.

“I think it would be better if I got angry,” she said. “I’m starting to feel like a fool.”

“Save it for when she turns up,” I said. “You have a right to be anxious now. Just don’t let it get you down.”

Hadley also called later and was to the point. “How’d you like to buy a light table, cheap? With a new top it’d be fine….That’s about all that’s working here. The rest of the stuff is junk. They even ripped up our accounts books.”

“You don’t think it was someone who owed you money, do you?”

“I’m sure we could have worked out some other payment plan,” she said in her long drawl, then she turned business-like. “If you’re free tonight I’d like to talk to you a little more about all this, get your ideas and bounce some theories around. I’d love to rule out the possibility that either of our collectives was involved, especially ours.”

“I don’t think anything can be ruled out until Fran turns up.”

“The more I think about it, the more I think that Fran couldn’t possibly have done it.”

“Even though her car keys were there?”

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“How about Margaret? Did you notice her onion breath?”

“Let’s discuss it over dinner tonight. We’ll hash it all out.”

“In that case I recommend a good hashhouse…Ever been to the Doghouse Restaurant?”

“No. I’ve seen it though. Over by Seattle Center?”

“Yeah. Bring your ten-gallon hat, Tex.”

T
HE DOGHOUSE RESTAURANT (
Max. Cap. 250) had been around since before WWII and hadn’t changed much in decor, menu or service since then. It had big soft booths you could lose yourself in and capable older waitresses wearing black skirts and vests and white shirts. The cocktail lounge had framed portraits of various canines all over the walls and Dick Dickerson nightly on the organ. It was probably the last restaurant in Seattle to still have plastic plants, toothpicks holding together the sandwiches, paperwrapped straws served with drinks, and Worcestershire, A-1 Steak Sauce and catsup on the table, every table. Both the placemats and a giant mural over the counter (with its towers of pie racks and constantly filled coffee cups, its smokers and its newspaper readers) displayed the motto “All Roads Lead to the Doghouse.” In one corner of the picture was a harridan with a rolling pin; in the other a sad-eyed pooch in the doghouse; and in between a hilly course strewn with signs that read “Matrimony,” “Blonds,” “Private Secretaries,” and “Boozers.”

Hadley was waiting for me, without a cowboy hat but still recognizable behind the tall menu, with her graying hair and slightly furrowed brow. No beauty certainly, but a solid sort of person. Dependable. Or so I needed to believe.

“Hey there, Pam,” she said, looking up, looking pleased. “This is quite the place.”

“Our parents used to bring us here on Sundays sometimes—as a treat.”

“They were nice, I bet. Your parents.” She said it factually, in a way that caught me in the chest. Yeah, they’d been alright.

“How about yours?” I asked, while skimming for form’s sake the menu. I already knew what I was going to have: a Bulldog, hold the onions. “My dad’s into oil and my mother’s into archaeology. She’s in Turkey now, I think, excavating.”

I tried to conceal my surprise. I wouldn’t have figured Hadley for a wealthy background. As if she read my thoughts Hadley smiled her one-sided smile and said, “Fran’s biggest dream was that the old man could be persuaded to bankroll the lesbian revolution.”

“Well, couldn’t he?”

“I’m thirty-six, honey. I’ve been away from home a long time.”

The waitress, a favorite of mine named Sally, came over. She wore harlequin glasses and a watch pin. “Long time, no see, sugarplum,” she told me, and then to Hadley, “I’ve known Penny and this little gal here since they were knee high to ladybugs.”

“I think it’s grasshoppers, Sal.”

“Never you mind those old ugly grasshopping things. Nice young ladybugs is what you and Penny are. Now, what are you and your friend having, Miss Pam?”

We told her and watched her go back to the kitchen with a swing in her step, a firmly-built woman in her sixties with a wigfull of auburn sausage curls.

“I’ve been wondering a lot about older women,” said Hadley, watching her. “My hair started going gray all of a sudden last fall. I don’t know what it was, maybe just the hair genes kicking over all at once, but it sure gave me some sense of what it’s all going to be like. Forty years of being called Ma’am and Mrs. Harper started last year.”

“You look good in gray,” I said, then blushed. But Hadley came back easily, “Thank you, Ma’am.”

“That’s Miss Pam to you.”

“You don’t fool me,” she smiled. “You’ve got a little experience under your belt too.”

I blushed again.

I was grateful that Sally brought our coffee just then. At some point I would have to explain to Hadley that I was straight, not at all wavering, and that I didn’t feel attracted to her, but just wanted her for a friend, even though I’d never had a lesbian friend before and had no idea if you even
could
…but fortunately we had other things to talk about now.

“If you had a list of suspects,” she said, “would they all be from B. Violet?”

I nodded and tried to defend myself. “Margaret and Anna seemed to hate the idea so much…and if you’d seen Fran drinking and how worried Elena is, after finding the car keys—well you’ve
seen
Elena. Fran
must
have been there.”

Hadley sighed. “And I have a disinclination to trust Ray and Jeremy, just because they said so little at the meeting—and because probably ninety-nine percent of the violence in the world is done by men.”

Bristling, I said, “Ray would never destroy anything…and Jeremy—he’s just a little wimp, if you knew him.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t. But he kind of gives me the creeps, the way he hems and haws all the time. It seems forced somehow. Is he really as young as he seems?”

“He’s twenty-five and wishes he were ten years older like all his heroes. I think he had older brothers and sisters or something who used to lock him out of the garage where they smoked dope and played Jefferson Airplane in the sixties. He’s spent his life trying to get in that garage.”

Hadley laughed. “There are some of us who’ve spent our lives trying to get out of it.”

“But he’s harmless, really, and he does care about politics; he’s learning to, anyway. I’ve been noticing that he’s getting involved with June. I think it will be good for him.”

“Tell me about her, tell me about all of you,” Hadley said, digging into the monstrous Chef’s Salad Sally had just brought.

“June? She’s always been a little more Penny’s friend than mine. June likes danger, and so does Penny, in her rational way. They’ve done some amazing things—Whitewater rafting, kayaking, they go skydiving together if you can believe it. As for me, I’m a total physical coward…anyway, June’s about the same age as Jeremy, but
what
a difference. She grew up in Seattle, went to Garfield High and got married right after. To a nice guy, I guess, a really nice guy. But he was shot, in one of those weird freak accidents. June says a bunch of them were fooling around, they were still teenagers, someone had an ‘unloaded’ gun and somehow it went off. I think June was holding it, though she’s never been able to say it.”

“Christ.”

“There wasn’t a trial, just a hearing. No one was blamed…but June was left with a one-year-old and then found out she was pregnant again.” I paused to take a bite of my burger. “She worked days, went to school nights and did a printing course. She’s been working with us for three years, almost since the beginning.”

“Well, count June out of the sabotage. Zenaida too. I can’t imagine her wanting to scratch her fingernail polish.”

“Don’t underestimate Zee. She’s a cool character. Sometimes I wonder if she hasn’t got more guts than any of us. But she’s working with the anti-Marcos group and has more important things on her mind. She wouldn’t have time to think about B. Violet.”

“She’s got a thing with Ray, am I right?”

I nodded without saying anything. I still didn’t find it easy to talk about somehow, but Hadley didn’t notice. She said, “What about him? He’s definitely physically capable of wreaking havoc. Where’s he coming from?”

“Straight from the arms of pacifism. His parents are both doctors for the Red Cross. His mother’s Japanese, her parents died in Hiroshima. His father’s Mexican-American, but one of those people without a strong national identity anymore. They moved around a lot, Ray with them sometimes, in school in California other times. I know he’s got a temper, but he’s heard enough about violence and destruction to last him a lifetime.”

“He didn’t want a merger though.”

I tried not to remember Ray’s comment earlier about ‘Now, at least, we don’t have to merge,’ and defended him. “You heard his reasons. It wasn’t misogyny, but the racism issue, the starting all over again with a bunch of white women. He’s had to do a lot of educating—he likes having Zee and June there…”

Sally filled our cups for the fourth time with the dark, bitter brew. I was beginning to get a nervous, unpleasant buzz—a reminder of why I didn’t seek out the Doghouse more often.

“I hear you,” nodded Hadley. “I guess I don’t really suspect him, but then…?”

“There’s always me and Penny.”

“Or Elena.”

“Elena was the one who suggested the merger in the first place. And Fran’s her lover. You could never get me to believe that Elena would destroy B. Violet.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Hadley, but without conviction.

“But Margaret and Anna could have,” I persisted.

“Now let me do my defender bit,” Hadley smiled. “I’ve known Margaret for about six years. We’ve worked on a lot of issues together, put out a newsletter once for two years, lobbied for gay rights in Olympia, spoke on lesbian topics all around town. Margaret is absolutely true blue. Sarcastic sometimes; bad-tempered occasionally, but not violent. It’s impossible, I can’t picture her touching anything at B. Violet.”

“But isn’t she, aren’t she and Anna, you know, separatists?” I asked, wading into dangerous water. “I mean, more than you?”

“Me?” Hadley laughed, mocking a southern belle. “Why, I just
love
men, honey.”

I pursued it doggedly. “That’s what’s behind this whole thing somehow. That’s what I think. Margaret and Anna might have preferred to wreck B. Violet rather than merge. To punish Elena and Fran maybe.”

“They’d only be punishing themselves.”

“Why did they seem so gleeful then this morning?”

Hadley shook her head. “I wouldn’t exactly call it gleeful. I mean, it’s true they and Fran have had their differences, but…”

She still hadn’t addressed the issue, I felt. My urgency increased. “Well,
aren’t
they lesbian separatists? Don’t they just want to work with women?”

Hadley wasn’t smiling now. “Your voice is raised, Miss Pam. Very unbecoming. I also detect a note of hostility to your own sex—maybe even lesbian-baiting—also rather impolite.”

We stared at each other, neither willing to risk a further exchange. I felt sure that she was hiding something, protecting Margaret in some way. I didn’t know what she thought, but there was a distance between us that hadn’t been there before.