The Dog Collar Murders (15 page)

I felt every hair on my legs straining to get through the black tights.

Sonya graciously led me into the living room, where David Gustafson was waiting, then she vanished to the kitchen for coffee.

“No trouble finding the place, I hope, Randy?” David said kindly.

“Oh no… Thank you.”

I think I’d been expecting him to be booming and charismatic, like Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson. But his manner was almost gentle as he waited for me to sit down and sat down himself. He was on the short side, neat and compact in a suit and tie. His sandy hair was thinning; he still had boyish freckles and a lovable smile.

His voice felt like a handshake, pumping me up and down. How was I enjoying Seattle? Who was my friend and what was her church? What was my church down in California and what was the newsletter called?

I was sweating slightly by the time Sonya came back in. Before she could begin to ask me questions too, I took the enthusiastic offensive.

“I’ve heard so much about what you’ve done up here to wipe out smut and I really would like to hear all about it. Pornography is such a problem where I come from.”

“Yes, we’ve had real success here,” said Sonya. “Thank God times are changing. Part of it is AIDS and people at last beginning to understand that you reap what you sow, and part of it is the work that Christians have been doing. People seem to be turning away from the worst forms of pornography.”

“How long have you been involved in the struggle?” I asked, wondering if struggle was the right word. That’s what they said on the left; maybe Christians had another word for it—Christian endeavor?

David and Sonya looked at each other, and David took Sonya’s hand. He said, “I think it started when Sonya came home from the drug store one day some years back. She’d just been ignoring the magazines as usual, but on this occasion, our six-year-old daughter had got hold of a copy of
Oui
magazine and she asked Sonya what the lady was doing…”

“I don’t know what came over me,” Sonya continued. “I’d always been kind of a quiet person, very shy. If they didn’t fix the car right at the garage I never complained, and if the soup was too cold in a restaurant I always thought, well, I won’t tell the waiter, it’s too embarrassing and maybe he’s having a bad evening, and anyway, it’s not
that
cold. But when Dede held up that copy of
Oui
I saw red. I marched up to the counter and I said to the clerk, in a very loud voice, ‘Sir, since when is it the practice of your store to display pictures like this so that any child walking by can see them?’ And I opened the magazine and held up a photograph of a woman tied at the wrists to a bedpost, being beaten—artistically, of course. When they want to make something artistic they make the scene Edwardian.

“Everyone was shocked, especially the clerk. He started to mumble something about not knowing what was in the magazines, the wholesalers just came and filled up the racks. But I said that I wasn’t going to be palmed off with excuses, that I wasn’t going to rest until every porn magazine was removed from the shelves. And do you know what? The other women in line cheered!

“A week later, after organizing a letter campaign to the store’s manager and a boycott of the store, the porn magazines were off the shelves.”

“And that’s where it all started,” said David. “As Christians, we felt the best way we could demonstrate our faith would be to work against the sale and distribution of smut. We always say, ‘If every Christian, every time he or she went into a store that carries porn, complained and caused a fuss, then porn would disappear in a few weeks.’ ”

I murmured my admiration, and wrote it down while thinking that Sonya showed a grasp of direct action techniques that any anarchist could admire.

“David has concentrated more on the legal aspect of things,” said Sonya. “Trying to get existing obscenity laws enforced, working for new legislation, while I’ve done more community organizing, boycotts and fundraising.”

“ ‘Direct action is no substitute for work in the courts and halls of government,’ ” David quoted. “Martin Luther King.”

Well, he wouldn’t be the first conservative to have started out in civil rights or the student movement. Student movement—I wonder if this might be a possible lead-in to Loie and how they met…

“Most people,” said David, “don’t realize that there are laws on the books already about pornography. We’ve gotten so used to seeing the spread of smut since the seventies into our neighborhoods, libraries and stores that we think it’s legal. That we can’t do anything about it.”

Sonya added, “A lot of people have a problem with the definition of obscene. That’s where the ACLU and a lot of liberals have gotten tangled up.”

“How do you define obscene then?” I asked, pen poised.

David had it on the tip of his tongue. “Any matter or performance is obscene if 1) The average person, applying contemporary community standards, finds that the matter or performance, taken, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, and 2) the matter or performance depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, and 3) the matter or performance, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

I smiled brightly. “Average person? Community standards? Don’t those vary?”

“Not really,” said David confidently. “Statistics show that eighty percent of Americans oppose pornography. We have to assume then that it’s still around because there is a small percentage of sex addicts encouraged by an atmosphere of decadence and supported by rich pornographers and their lawyers. But we believe that pornography is only present in a community if citizens allow it. Once decent people become aware of its pervasive filth and realize that they can fight it, pornography disappears.”

“Of course there will always be sexual perversion,” said Sonya. “But at least we don’t have sadomasochism, homosexuality and other forms of bestiality shoved down our throats in public and displayed openly to our children.”

Homosexuality and other forms of bestiality? I began to sweat a little more violently in my jacket.

But David had gotten back to M. L. King. “We can’t make people love what is right,” he said earnestly. “But we can make them
obey
what is right. That’s what laws are for. It’s just like you can’t end racism legally. You can’t make whites care about black people, and love them as their sisters and brothers. But you
can
make them obey civil rights laws.”

“That sounds like what Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon have been saying, when they drafted the ordinance in Minneapolis.”

“That’s right,” said Sonya. “We support that ordinance; we’d like to get one like it passed here.”

“You must have known Loie Marsh then?” I rushed on. Time was getting short and I wanted to get out of here. “The woman who was killed in Seattle last week?”

“Well,” said David, apparently at a loss. But Sonya carried on smoothly, “She and I were scheduled to be on a panel that evening, the evening she was… unfortunately…”

“I just thought maybe you knew her. Your ideas are similar, about pornography… aren’t they?”

David’s sweet face had been darkening through my artless speech.

“A woman who was a known—a flagrant-homosexual had no business lecturing other people about smut.”

“Oh, my goodness!” I said, trying to look shocked. “Loie Marsh. Why, I believed—I think someone told me—she was married. Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“Davey,” said Sonya. “I’m sure Randy could use another cup of coffee and this pot is cold.
Could
you? Thanks, sweetie.”

When he was out of the room she hurriedly turned to me and said, “I’m afraid Loie Marsh is rather a sore subject for my husband. You see, when he was quite young, in college, he made a mistake. The fact of the matter is… you see, he was married to Loie for a brief time. It was quite a miserable time for him. She was older and rather… fast. I believe even then that she had sinful leanings and that she tempted him on several occasions.”

“Oh my goodness,” I said again, though I was dying to ask what the sinful leanings and temptations had consisted of.

“Yes,” Sonya seemed thoughtful, “considering Loie’s past, it’s a mystery to me how she ever got involved in the anti-pornography movement. I would have liked to have given her the benefit of the doubt and considered her an ally, in spite of her homosexuality—I’ve always thought that it was important to make coalitions with the anti-pornography feminists, after all we really want the same thing—but David was always adamant that we have nothing to do with her. And since she died the way she did, I guess he was right.”

I wanted to say that being murdered wasn’t exactly an expression of personality, but instead I asked, “So he never saw her again—after they got divorced?”

“Not as long as we’ve been together, which has been fifteen years. He doesn’t like to talk about her—he feels very bitter.”

I shook my head, as if I were wondering at the strangeness of the world, and tried one last question, “Isn’t it funny about college romances. I remember one boyfriend I had who turned out to be a member of the Communist Party.” (That was true, actually, but at the time I thought it more romantic than reprehensible.) “However did they meet?”

Sonya smiled and gently stroked the pillow beside her. “David was quite the budding actor once. I believe he met Loie because he knew her cousin through acting classes. Or maybe it was Hanna’s roommate, Nicky. I knew them slightly too. Even then Hanna Sandbakker was quite a fine actress.”

“Did you say Nicky?”

“Yes. Why?” said Sonya, giving me a sharp look.

I fumbled. “It’s just that Nicky is my son’s name… and for a moment I thought… silly of me… co-ed education didn’t go quite that far….” I gave a little laugh to show I was just a pleasant sort of nitwit and Sonya relaxed.

David returned with fresh coffee and a calmer demeanor. We spent another five minutes discussing Seattle and Bellevue and then I took my leave.

That evening Hadley and I had dinner with Moe and Allen at their place. The four of us had gotten together a few times over the summer, mainly for a movie and coffee afterwards. This was the first time we’d been over to their apartment, which was small but spectacularly situated on the western side of Queen Anne Hill. We sipped glasses of lemon-flavored Calistoga while we watched a hot mango sun slip down behind the sharply etched slate gray of the Olympics.

Allen looked better than I’d seen him looking in some time. His face had filled out and his eyes were beginning to lose that haunted quality that had been so apparent when he first moved to Seattle in July. He talked animatedly about a new job he’d just gotten, as a waiter for a small new lakeside restaurant in the Leschi neighborhood. “It’s been fabulous to get out among people again,” he said. “It’s just done me so much good. And since I only work four nights a week, Moe and I still have a lot of time together.”

Moe gave him an affectionate look. “It’s fun to see you dressed up with a bow tie again. It’s a very fancy restaurant—and the leftovers are great!”

Allen had prepared one of the recipes from the restaurant for us—chicken in a puree of raspberries and crème fraîche, braised fennel and a salad of warm wild rice and vegetables. We ate appreciatively and talked about everything except the bus tunnel. Gradually the conversation swung around to Loie and her violent death.

“It’s been a week since it happened,” said Moe, pushing his plate away and patting his slightly rounded stomach. “You’d think they’d have found some clue.”

“Maybe they have,” I said. “Maybe they’re working away at it right now, infiltrating the local S/M community with trained personnel. Maybe right this minute Officer Mary Catherine O’Malley has got someone in her clutches and is torturing her to get at the truth. Strangling her with rosary beads or something.”

“Who do you think did it?” asked Allen.

I shook my head and returned to finishing my salad. Pauline was the obvious choice if it weren’t for the logistics. But I’d picked up so many funny vibrations from others, among them Elizabeth Ketteridge, David Gustafson, Nicky Kay. I had the feeling all of them knew things about Loie Marsh and her past that they weren’t, for various reasons, terribly eager to share. I thought of Mrs. Sandbakker’s cryptic comment about Loie maybe having deserved it, and Hanna’s outburst when reminded by her mother that Loie had saved her life. I still thought from time to time of the therapist who’d once been into S/M. If I thought about it, I could be suspicious of everyone I’d met, even of Gracie London claiming she was just a harmless professor.

But it wasn’t my job to be suspicious. I was just curious, that’s all. Sometimes I thought it all had to do with my parents, this odd need to pursue the causes of people’s deaths. If I could find a reason for a murder, maybe there was a reason for an accidental death as well. Following a line of investigation was an active response anyway. You didn’t just sit there, stunned with sorrow, you asked questions, you demanded answers, you looked for motives, causes, a pattern.

And sometimes there
were
answers, sometimes there
were
causes, sometimes there
was
a pattern. My curiosity was justified, my grief, temporarily, assuaged.

“I really don’t understand this obsession in the feminist movement with pornography,” Allen was saying. “There’s been porn in the gay community for years and it hasn’t hurt us. Most of us grew up on it, it was the only way we had of forming a positive response to our sexuality.”

“Maybe if there’d been lesbian porn—produced by lesbians for lesbians—when we were growing up then we’d have a different response to porn too,” said Hadley tartly.

“Then where did you get your information about sex when you were growing up?” Moe was curious.

“I got all mine from my sister and the girl down the block,” I said. “But it
wasn’t
about lesbian sex, it was all girl-boy stuff. I guess I gradually became aware through some books I read, Colette, de Beauvoir, that there were lesbians. It was definitely connected with France for a while.”