The Dog Collar Murders (20 page)

Added to this was the scurrilous suggestion that Loie and Nicky had been in a porn film together. But what was the name of the film and what had happened to it? And even if I managed to locate it what were the chances it would tell me anything I needed to know? It wouldn’t have mattered particularly to Nicky if Loie had talked publicly about the film. Loie was the one it would hurt.

I left the library and went out to my car. Red Square was filled with students on their way to evening classes, walking in groups, carrying books. I felt transported for an instant back into my own student past. It was funny how strong emotions were then, how much we assumed we knew everything. Our relationships were intense and they seemed as if they’d last forever. I still had that feeling about some of the people I knew from that time.

I wondered if the murderer did too.

B
Y THE NEXT DAY THE
papers had managed to dig up a good angle on Pauline’s arrest. Suddenly
We Took Back the Night
was a modern feminist classic and Loie Marsh the martyred heroine of the anti-porn movement. Pauline was so far not talking to the press from jail, but the newspapers still had managed to find out a lot about her. It was essentially the same information Pauline had given me, but it sounded worse by the time it appeared in an exclusive story in
The Seattle Times.
Pauline was suddenly “an untalented hanger-on,” Loie’s “live-in lover” who was “furious at being abandoned.”

Mrs. Marsh was quoted several times, as were some prominent feminists and activists in the anti-porn movement who said that Loie’s murder was just an example of the lengths people would go to shut up the voice of truth. Ignoring the fact that it was actually a sister anti-porn activist who was accused of murdering Loie, one prominent New York feminist spoke bitterly of “the backlash of sexual liberalism” and the gains of the women’s movement being “viciously eroded.”

I supposed it was pedantic to ask how an erosion could be vicious.

Hanna, meanwhile, had removed herself from the fray and was refusing to speak to anyone from the media. She was staying with her father and rehearsing for a new production of a Sam Shepard play.

We talked about her on Wednesday night when I arrived at Penny’s and Ray’s to fulfill my baby-sitting promise.

“When did Hanna get involved in politics?” I asked Penny as she dressed in the bedroom.

“Oh, she’s been active for years. In one thing and another. But I think going to Nicaragua was a real catalyst for her, as well as for us. It’s one thing to read about an economic boycott—it’s another to see everything rigged together with wire and string and bits of this and that because they can’t get parts to fix anything. Hanna has been fundraising non-stop ever since our group came back. Mainly for spare parts for ambulances.”

“Do you think she’s working herself too hard?” I suggested. “You said you thought she was highly strung.”

“Certain things can set her off,” Penny admitted. “But she’s not some kind of temperamental artist.”

“Did she ever talk about Loie to you?”

“You mean in Nicaragua? No. Other people would sometimes talk about their relatives; it made you realize how fragile life was when every day you met people who’d lost family. But Hanna never did.”

Penny looked at me. We were both remembering our parents, and how we found it so difficult to talk about them. There never seemed to be the right moment. We never made the right moment.

We didn’t make it now either, but went into my former bedroom, which had become Antonia’s. It was hardly recognizable for all the duckling-printed curtains and pictures of animals on the walls. The room was packed with the paraphernalia of babydom: diapers, blankets, bottles. From the seriousness with which Penny began to explain how it all worked you would have thought they were planning to go away for six months rather than three or four hours. But in the midst of it all Penny suddenly stopped and said, “Remember I told you I couldn’t remember what set off Hanna’s outburst that first night in Managua?”

“Yes.”

“It’s come back to me. One of the men in the group was a real admirer of Hanna’s. He said he’d seen all her plays. She was very sweet about it; she said a couple of times that he probably hadn’t seen everything, because she’d done a considerable amount of work in Minneapolis at the Guthrie Theater over the years. He was kind of a pathetic jerk really. I suppose he thought he was flattering her, because he went on and on and finally he said he’d seen her movies too. At first Hanna very politely said she hadn’t made any movies and then when he insisted, she flew into the kind of hysterical fit we saw after the funeral. I think she was just overtired and the prospect of having some idiot around for six weeks who was going to make her life miserable was too much. We all talked to the guy and the next day Hanna was fine. She even apologized to the poor schmuck.”

“Hmmmm,” I said, rather distracted by the sight of Antonia beginning to fidget. “I thought you told me she was going to sleep the whole time?”

“Yes, yes, she
is
asleep,” said Penny, moving hastily to the door where Ray was waiting. “I’ve left you our number, but she should be fine. See you in a few hours. And thanks, Pam!”

I approached Antonia gingerly. Our neighbor Mrs. Mortensen had claimed she looked exactly like Penny and me when we were small. I didn’t see how you could tell—it had been years and years and besides, she had very black straight hair and Ray’s almond-shaped eyes. Maybe there was something familiar about the round little chin; there wasn’t enough of it to judge.

She was so tiny, midget hands, miniscule ears. I had a great longing to pick her up and hold her close. It made me feel a little mawkish. I didn’t want to have children myself, I’d never really wanted to. Still, the thought of Antonia looking a little bit like me and at the same time being a separate person with her whole life before her, was very touching. It brought back shivery sensations of what it must have felt like when I was a baby. Had my fingernails really been that pink and fresh? My skull that fragile? I thought of the casual way Penny and Ray had taken to throwing her around. Had our parents treated us like that? And not like vulnerable little dolls? My first memory had been of my sister’s face, of somehow realizing she was different from me.

I’d brought along a book Gracie had lent me,
The History of Sexuality
by Michel Foucault, but I didn’t read it. I sat in that bedroom and watched Antonia sleep for three hours.

Who said being an aunt was hard?

It wasn’t until I was on the way home that the significance of what Penny had told me about Hanna sunk in. Oak had said that Loie had been in porn films and had gotten Nicky to appear in them too. But Nicky was Hanna’s roommate and it seemed clear that Nicky and Loie met through Hanna. Wasn’t it likely then that Hanna had also been in a porn film at some point and that was why she was so upset about the well-meaning guy in Managua? She probably lived with the fear of being exposed someday. Yet if that was so, why would she be afraid of Loie exposing her? Loie had more to lose than Hanna if it came out she’d acted in porn films. Or was it Nicky who had planned to expose both of them?

It was difficult to try to trace events that went back so far, especially when two of the main characters were now dead. That their deaths had something to do with past events I was pretty sure, but I wasn’t sure what course to take next. I could look for the evidence—the porn films themselves—yet even finding them might leave unanswered questions. Had Miko been lying when she said Nicky wanted to leave Oak, or was it Oak who wasn’t telling the truth. Was Pauline just an innocent who’d been done wrong or had she calculated exactly what she was doing? I thought I might have ruled out a few suspects, but new suspicions surrounded everyone who was left.

When I got back home Hadley said that Gracie London had called again and left no message. It was too late to return her call, and when I tried the next morning I got her answering machine again.

I had decided to try to sneak up on the problem by visiting Pauline in jail, both to decide for myself whether I thought Pauline had killed Loie, if not Nicky, and to discover if Pauline knew anything more about Loie’s past. She’d been genuinely surprised and upset that Loie had been married and clearly Loie had never encouraged Pauline to come to Seattle, where she might have discovered another Loie than the one Loie had presented. Still, Loie might have confided something.

Pauline hadn’t been able so far to meet her bail and she hadn’t yet decided on a lawyer to represent her. She’d been taken into custody at the motel where she was staying and charged with Loie’s murder based on her possession of the manuscript and notes for
We Took Back the Night
and on the time of her plane ticket to Seattle. I assumed it was Hanna who had tipped off the police. If the detectives who arrested her had found anything else suspicious among Pauline’s possessions, a dog collar and leash, for instance, nobody was saying.

She came into the visitors’ area to greet me looking better than I’d ever seen her. Either she was relieved to have been found out or else life in the King County Jail agreed with her. The pinched look around her eyes and mouth was gone and her hunched shoulders were relaxed. The crumpled ball of paper was unfolding; even her voice was less adenoidal.

It was probably the most attention she’d gotten in years.

She said, with some relish, “It’s been horrible, of course. Eventually they’ll find out I didn’t do it, but it’s going to take time. I’ve tried to explain over and over that I only took what was rightfully mine. If they’d only look, they’d see that most of the notes are in my handwriting. That’s all I wanted. For justice to be done. The book was as much mine as hers and now she’s dead, who else but me could carry on the work?”

“So you’re not saying that you didn’t break into Hanna’s?”

“It wasn’t hard,” bragged Pauline. “The bathroom window was wide open. I just crawled in and found the boxes Loie had left.”

“And all that was in the boxes were notes and clippings?”

“What else could there be?” Pauline was sharp—or protective?

“I don’t know—magazines, video cassettes…”

“I recognized everything in the box—I’d collected most of it myself, and the notes were in my handwriting.”

“How far had Loie gotten with writing?”

“An introduction, well, notes for an introduction—an outline really. She didn’t mention
me
at all.”

“I thought there was a manuscript, Hanna and everyone have talked about a manuscript.”

“Loie
would
call what she had a manuscript,” Pauline said scornfully. “
I’d
call it a four-page outline. She’d probably written it for the agent and that was as far as she got.”

“Did she talk about anyone else? Nicky for instance? Oak? Her family?”

“No,” said Pauline, “at least not what I read.” She suddenly looked frightened. “I never expected them to arrest me for
murder.
You can’t possibly think that I would kill Loie, can you?”

“There seems to be a little circumstantial evidence,” I suggested, but mildly, as if to show I didn’t believe a word of it.

“I
never
told anybody at the service that I’d just arrived in Seattle from the airport. It was a conclusion they jumped to from seeing my flightbag. If I was going to kill Loie why would I fly to Seattle under my own name? And I certainly wouldn’t choose to strangle her in the bushes of Seattle University. I’d had millions of opportunities in Boston. Why would I want to do it in Seattle?”

“Because you didn’t want her to speak on the panel?”

“I came to Seattle because I wanted to hear what she was going to say in public about the book,” said Pauline. “I couldn’t risk coming to the workshops, but I could risk the crowded auditorium at night. I decided, you see, that if Loie said anything negative about me I was going to fight her for the book. I wasn’t going to be ignored any longer.”

“But when I first met you you said that nobody had told you about Loie’s murder. You said that Mrs. Marsh hadn’t called, that nobody had called except Hanna to tell you about the memorial service.”

“I was calling my answering machine to hear the messages. You just assumed I was in Boston. I got a message from Hanna on Tuesday about the memorial service. I never got one Saturday from Mrs. Marsh.”

“Are you sure you weren’t in Seattle earlier in the afternoon, when Loie gave her closing speech at the conference?”

“No… why?”

“Because there was a point when Loie seemed to look straight at someone in the audience and change what she was going to say.”

“It wasn’t me. My flight didn’t get in until four.”

She would have had time to get there if she’d come directly from the airport. I remembered the crush of people who’d come in after Gracie’s speech. Pauline could easily have been among them. I persisted, “Loie seemed about to say something about women who had been forced to undergo degradation. Someone had suggested to me that Loie might have acted in a porn film when she was younger.”

Pauline neither denied or accepted it. “Loie found it easy to put herself into the place of victims of pornography. Sometimes she seemed to know a lot about what actually went on in pornography. But she’d done a lot of research, talked to a lot of people.”

“Didn’t you ever ask her about her own experience? Weren’t you concerned that she might have suffered as a victim of pornography herself?”

“We spoke on behalf of pornography victims, we weren’t victims ourselves,” Pauline said, almost defensively. “Though obviously, any woman can be victimized.”

“But did she ever talk about names of films she’d been in or about the people who acted in them with her? Did she have copies?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Pauline said angrily. “Are you suggesting Loie was blackmailing people?”

“I’m not saying that,” I protested, as the warden signaled to Pauline that the period was over.

I watched Pauline as she was led away, wondering once again about Loie’s family. Maybe I needed to take another trip to North Seattle.