The Dog Collar Murders (18 page)

“Yes please.”

She sighed and gave me the number. “If it doesn’t work out, Pam, please call me.”

“Thanks, Elizabeth. Bye.”

Hadley and I sat down to dinner.

“How’s the investigation going?” she asked.

“It’d be easier if things didn’t keep happening. Hanna called today and said Loie’s manuscript had been stolen, her manuscript and half her notes. I’ve been trying to think all day who could have taken it and why.”

“Pauline of course.”

“But that’s so obvious. She’s the first person anyone would suspect. I’m sure Hanna has told the police about Pauline and Loie.”

“Maybe Hanna took the manuscript herself and is trying to pin it on Pauline.”

“Too obvious again, though an interesting theory. I’ve also thought that one of the anti-porn women might have stolen it, just to make sure it got published. Or even,” I blushed a little, “Gracie London. She’s writing a book on the same subject, maybe she wanted to scope out the competition.”

“I thought she could do no wrong?”

“Well, it’s not as if I think Gracie would actually kill Loie or Nicky….”

Hadley let my hesitation hang there a moment before she laughed. “No, Gracie seems more subtle than that. So what else have you found out?”

“Miko and I went to see Oak,” I told her. “Did you know Miko and Nicky had gotten involved—or anyway, they got it on once—after the video screenings last week?”

“Humph,” Hadley said noncommittally.

“Miko thought Oak might have killed Nicky out of jealousy. Miko said Nicky had told her she wanted to leave Oak. But Oak made it sound as if the whole thing had been staged for her benefit. I wonder if that was just something Nicky said, about wanting to leave Oak, or if she meant it?”

“I don’t know. But it sounds as if Oak and Nicky were non-monogamous.”

“Miko was furious,” I said.

“She’s more romantic than she comes across,” Hadley said. Her voice sounded strained. She forked a carrot but didn’t eat it.

“Hadley. What aren’t you telling me?”

She put down her fork and flipped her hair behind her ears. “Well, I suppose I had to tell you sometime.”

“Oh no, Hadley!”

“Calm down. Nothing happened. It’s just that—at the conference, Miko got me aside and asked if I’d consider sleeping with her. I admit it, I was attracted to her. Not lots, but enough to make the idea seem interesting. I didn’t say no. I said I’d think about it.”

I waited.

“I did think about it. I thought about it for a week or so. Remember our conversation at the Copacabana?”

I nodded.

“Well, I was about to tell you then. But after we talked I realized how much it would hurt you. You wouldn’t think of it as a little fling, which is all I wanted. If I did sleep with Miko either I’d have to tell you or Miko would go around blabbing it so you’d find out. Either way,” Hadley sighed, “it would have probably been the end of our relationship.”

She picked up her fork again. “And then we went over to Moe and Allen’s and talked about tricking and I just realized it would never work out.”

“How do you know that?”

Hadley looked at me in surprise. “I thought you’d be happy when I told you I’d decided monogamy was best.”

“I want you to be in a relationship with me because you love me, not because you’re afraid of hurting me.”

“I do love you,” she said. “I thought that was the point.”

I got up from the table, no longer hungry. “Well, what if
I
want to be non-monogamous?”

“With whom?” she demanded.

“Nobody. Just in theory. I mean, after the romance dies down…”

“Oh, so now the romance has died down, has it?” Her long legs pursued me into the living room, where I’d flopped into a chair. She wasn’t angry, just bewildered.

I felt a little bewildered too. It was as if the houseboat had suddenly become unmoored and we were drifting around in unknown seas.

“Well, you have to admit we don’t have sex as often as we used to,” I said. “And we always do the same things.”

“It has gotten a little boring,” Hadley admitted. “Much as I like your body. And sometimes I worry you’re going to flip me over the side of the bed if I make too sudden a movement.”

“Oh, that was one time, that was months ago. No, the problem is, we’ve grown set in our ways. And we know each other too well. We can’t act out strange fantasies with each other.”

“What strange fantasies?” she asked interestedly.

I began to turn red. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“No, really. What’s the most taboo thing you can think of?”

“Well,” I said. “Sometimes I still think about men—you know—sexually….”

I waited for her to be revolted.

“That’s not so strange,” she scoffed. “So do I sometimes.”

“But you were never heterosexual!”

“So? I slept with a few guys in college. Besides, the point of fantasies is that you don’t have to act on them. You can just have them.”

“Then what’s taboo for you?” I moved over to the sofa where she was and put her huge bony feet, endearingly shod in socks with little red Christmas trees, on my lap.

“I’d like to be a prisoner in a harem,” she said dreamily.

“What? With a sheik?”

“No dummy. With forty women all in various states of undress. All different colors and sizes and shapes of women, doing nothing all day except perfuming themselves, listening to Bessie Smith records, bathing in bubble bath and eating Belgian chocolate ice cream bars. I’d be a prisoner there and at first I’d try desperately to get out. I’d almost succeed, then they’d capture me again. They’d take my clothes away. And gradually I’d get to like it there….”

“That’s a good one,” I said admiringly. “I’ve always wanted to do it in a plane or a train or something. With a lot of people around, but all of them asleep. Though we wouldn’t know that for sure. Someone could just pretend to be sleeping.”

“I did it once in a plane,” Hadley said, putting her enormous Christmas-treed toe into the crotch of my jeans and starting to move it up and down. “I was on a night flight from New York to Houston during spring break in college. I was seated next to this classy older woman. At least she seemed a lot older—she was probably only thirty-five, if that. I was twenty-one. We started talking—she was a buyer at Neiman Marcus and she asked me a lot about Vassar, especially about the crowd I moved in—and we had some wine with our dinners, and the lights went down, and the blankets came out…. We were still talking, and all of a sudden she was playing with the palm of my hand. Really slow, with her thumb. It went on for ever. She didn’t want to kiss, maybe that would have been too obvious if a stewardess came by. Instead, after about an hour of this thumb massage, and wriggling around and starting to touch each other through our clothes, she suddenly pulled up her dress, pulled down her pantyhose and put my fingers right down
here
.” Hadley increased the pressure of her toe. “I’ll never forget it, the woman wasn’t wearing anything under her pantyhose.”

“Really?” I said. “Good god, and she was a buyer at Neiman Marcus.”

“Strange but true.”

We devoted ourselves to pleasure for a while and then I said, raising my head for a breather, “Why is the idea of anonymous sex a turn-on?”

“I beg your pardon? This is Hadley, remember me?”

“I was speaking more theoretically. I was thinking about what it would be like to go into the backroom of a bar and….”

“I think some lesbian bars now have backrooms, at least in Berlin.”

“I don’t think I could do it. Even in Germany. Am I really such a prude?”

“Maybe you just like to keep your fantasies in your head, where they’re free and accessible. You haven’t even told me what they are, by the way.”

“I’ve had this one,” I said dreamily. “Maybe it comes from living in the Northwest and being cold and wet a lot. Anyway, in this fantasy I’m lying on a beach. I’m alone, maybe listening to some music, baking under the hot sun. I’m sweating and applying suntan oil. I can’t quite reach the middle of my back though, and suddenly I hear this very sultry voice saying, ‘Let me help you reach the hard spots,’ and then her hands are all over me.”

“Your bathing suit has mysteriously vanished by this time,” Hadley suggested.

“I don’t think I was ever wearing one.”

“Well, I just hope you remember the hole in the ozone layer and don’t stay out there too long.” Hadley laughed and pulled me back down.

“This evening reminds me of one of the workshops I went to at the conference,” Hadley said later.

“It was a hands-on workshop?”

“No you fool—I mean the talking not the other. It was that boring lecture on Edward Donnerstein’s research. But during the discussion period a woman got up and said some really interesting things about erotic romance novels. I haven’t ever read any, but apparently there are millions and millions of them being read by women and apparently they’re no longer the Barbara Cartland “I was a fragile blond secretary and he raped and brutalized me but I love him” variety, but many of them present sex in a very passionate woman-centered way. Telling the guy what to do, getting on top of him, making sure she gets hers. Anyway, one of the interesting things this woman said was that these books prove the theory that women get turned on with their brains, whereas men tend to get turned on with their bodies. She quoted some anthropological study that suggests that primitive females had to maintain their sex drive beyond estrus in order to keep men around to help with the kids, so they evolved brains that could release hormones to keep them horny. So, unlike men, who have a purely reflective response, women’s road to sexual arousal proceeds through the brain. Hence the popularity of fantasy for women…. Pam, honey, are you still awake?”

“Hadley,” I said. “Are you telling me that you made up that story about the buyer from Neiman Marcus?”

“Actually,” said Hadley, “she was a countess with tawny tresses and a lavish bosom barely restrained in a torn buccaneer’s shirt and she was in flight from her dreadful husband the count and she was so grateful to me for saving her that…”

The phone rang, and I reluctantly got up to answer it. I thought it might be Gracie returning my call, but it was Penny again.

“Did you see the Eleven O’Clock News?”

“No, why? What happened?”

“They arrested Pauline for Loie’s murder. Oh Pam, it was terrible. The reporter didn’t know how to put it, so he said she was Loie’s former roommate in Boston and her literary rival. Apparently she’d stolen the manuscript of the book Loie was working on.”

“You’re right,” I told Hadley. “I guess Pauline wasn’t worried about being obvious.”

“P
OOR PAULINE,” I COULDN’T
help exclaiming several times the next morning. Each time I did, someone reprimanded me, “Poor Pauline! She killed Loie Marsh, remember?”

I had to agree. There didn’t seem to be much doubt. According to Penny, who got it all from Hanna, not only had the police found Loie’s manuscript and notes in Pauline’s motel room, but they had conclusive proof in the form of an airline ticket that Pauline had arrived in Seattle the afternoon of the conference. The flight bag at the memorial service had been nothing but a cover-up.

There was no doubt at all… and yet there were several things that bothered me. One was that, strictly speaking, it wasn’t just Loie’s manuscript and notes. If one were to believe Pauline, then the notes and probably the manuscript were more Pauline’s than Loie’s, so it was no wonder she felt she had a right to them, and that she had tried to get them back. It didn’t have to mean that Pauline had killed Loie to get them back. Secondly, even if Pauline had killed Loie, why would she have killed Nicky? Pauline had only been arrested for one murder, yet, according to Sandy’s reporter sources, the detectives thought the same person had killed both women.

There was always the possibility that Nicky had seen Pauline kill Loie, but if so, why wait so long to kill her?

The evidence of the plane ticket was damning, obviously, but again, there might be another explanation. Why shouldn’t Pauline have wanted to be at a conference where she suspected Loie might try to claim all the glory for herself? But clearly after Loie was murdered there was a good reason for Pauline not to say she’d been there incognito.

I found it curious that Hanna had claimed Edith Marsh had called Pauline to tell her about Loie’s murder and that Pauline had denied it. But if Mrs. Marsh had actually talked to Pauline, then that meant Pauline had to have been in Boston, not here. Could someone else have set Pauline up for the murder by using her name to buy the airline ticket. Someone who knew how much Pauline had come to hate Loie?

I didn’t think it would hurt to drop by Edith Marsh’s house for a short visit, but first I wanted to pay a visit to Clea Florence. I didn’t want to give up on the S/M angle without some further investigation. Without much difficulty I made an appointment with her for three o’clock and left work early, telling Penny I had a headache.

Clea Florence was thin, with dark olive skin and sharp white teeth. She could have been Italian, but her tan may have also been the result of too many hours at the electric beach. She had honey-colored hair and pale hazel eyes. She was wearing a brightly colored green and pink tunic and a great deal of turquoise and rose crystal jewelry. She had a small calico bag on a string around her neck, and a unusual half-medicinal, half-earthy smell seemed to emanate from it.

“Hello, hello,” she greeted me at the door of her living room and made me comfortable on a pillow. The room was dim and filled with pillows and photographs. There were no books on her shelves, only stones and rocks.

“So?” she said, when we were settled. I saw she meant to be kind and welcoming, but the abruptness of the question unnerved me a little. I had a feeling that she worked very hard at giving an impression of strength and calmness, but in her eyes was the tensed look of a cat watching a catnip mouse swing back and forth.

“Well,” I said. “Uh. Maybe you could give me a some idea of the kind of therapy you do.”

“It depends,” she said. “What you want help with. Is it a relationship, family, old memories?”