The Dog Collar Murders (21 page)

Mrs. Sandbakker was out working in her garden when I came by. She was thin and spry, her white hair neatly pulled back into a short braid. Loose gabardine slacks belted tightly at the waist and a heavy sweater gave her an elegant look in spite of her work; she was energetically raking leaves away from the beds of squash and cabbage.

She didn’t look terribly surprised to see me.

“I thought you’d be back, maybe,” she said, and handed me the rake.

“I have more questions,” I admitted. “And I’m hoping you might have some of the answers.”

Mrs. Sandbakker picked up a hoe and began to turn over the dark earth around one of the big spaghetti squashes. “Every family has secrets,” she said. “Some people in the family know them; others don’t know them; others know them but don’t want anyone else to know them.”

“Sometimes it’s better to tell secrets,” I said. “It can clear the air.”

“Your own secrets, perhaps. But what about other people’s secrets?”

“You’ve already mentioned several secrets,” I said, a little impatiently. “For instance, you said that Loie took David away from Hanna.”

“I think so,” she said.

“Because Hanna could act and Loie couldn’t, was that the reason? But Loie couldn’t have really been in love with him, could she? She left him. Why didn’t he marry Hanna then, instead of Sonya?”

“He and Hanna had already changed too much. David had gotten ‘saved.’ And Hanna really
could
act. Hanna didn’t want him anymore.”

“How do you know?”

Mrs. Sandbakker pursed her lips. “I just do.”

“Is that why Loie always felt so guilty towards Hanna? Or was it for other things—like for putting Hanna in a film?”

Mrs. Sandbakker shook her head. “I don’t know anything about any film.” She stopped hoeing and looked at me. “Which of us has the right to speak for another? How could Loie speak for Hanna, how could Loie tell Hanna’s secret?”

“Maybe it wasn’t just Hanna’s secret.” I was thoroughly confused now.

“It was all of our secret,” said Mrs. Sandbakker. “But if Hanna doesn’t tell you, then I can’t.”

“But…”

“I’ve said what I could,” said Mrs. Sandbakker. “And it’s very late.” She finished patting the earth back down around the squash and took my rake. “Good-bye, and good-luck.”

There was no way around it. I was going to have to talk to Hanna. However painful it might be to her, however hysterical it might make her, I was going to have to ask her about the porn film.

According to Penny she was in rehearsal for
Fool For Love
at A.C.T. I slipped into the dark theater, hoping no one would ask me my business. But the theater was fairly empty. On stage were only Hanna and a man. The director sat in the front row.

Hanna was wearing a denim skirt and a loose white tee-shirt. She stomped barefoot around the stage, which had only a bed and a table and chair. Her ash-blond hair was in disarray and she had a twangy accent. She talked about love and holding on and letting go. She shouted at the man, who backed down. Then they both threw themselves to the floor; the window of the motel was apparently in danger of being shot out.

The director stopped her a couple of times. Each time she broke off, listened, nodded her head and went on. There was an amazing sense of poise about her. She could travel so easily from thoughtfulness to furious abandon.

After half an hour the director called a break. Hanna sank into one of the front seats and began to read the script again. She seemed not to recognize me at first.

“Penny’s sister,” I reminded her.

“Oh. What do you want? I’m in rehearsal.”

“I haven’t been able to get you at home and I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?” She still had the twangy voice of her character. She sounded a little like Hadley in fact, when Hadley was “putting on Texas” as she called it.

“I’m interested in helping fundraise for the ambulances in Nicaragua.”

Hanna’s face softened and I felt a pang of guilt. I
would
help fundraise, I decided suddenly. Nevertheless it was definitely with ulterior motives that I persevered with my questions about how I could best help the cause. Finally, when I was sure she was no longer on guard, I asked sympathetically,

“All this has been really hard for you, hasn’t it? All this about Loie and Pauline and Nicky.”

“I feel bad about Pauline,” she admitted, now in her normal, velvety voice. “But she
was
the one who stole the manuscript…”

“Pauline said there was no manuscript, just an outline and notes.”

Hanna didn’t contradict me. “All I know is that someone broke in and took whatever Loie was working on and we know it was Pauline.”

“Yes, I’m sure she did it,” I said firmly. “Though I don’t see what connection there could be between Nicky and Loie.”

Hanna’s lovely eyes slid away. “Maybe there is none.”

“You knew Nicky, didn’t you?” I tried to sound indifferent.

“Yes. We were roommates our first year in college. We used to get on really well. But our lives went in different directions. I’m sorry she’s dead.” Hanna had started out slowly, searching for words, but by the end her comments sounded rehearsed. I wished I knew a way to get under her control.

“It’s funny,” I said, still indifferently, “how Pauline seemed convinced when I talked to her that nothing had ever happened to Loie personally to make her so anti-porn. Pauline said she and Loie spoke on
behalf
of victims, that they weren’t victims themselves. But I was talking to a therapist I know—Elizabeth Ketteridge—and she said she felt Loie was probably a tormented person inside, that it’s possible she might have been abused in some way or involved in porn as a…”

Hanna interrupted me. “All her life Loie believed that she had the right to speak for other people, to use other people’s experiences for her own purposes. No, nothing ever happened to Loie. It would have been better if something had.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

Hanna had been getting more and more agitated, but her outburst was one I didn’t expect. “It was
her
father,” she said. “Why did he have to pick on me? I suppose because I was always the little one, the one who couldn’t defend herself. Loie was always so big and outspoken. She would have told somebody immediately. I didn’t feel like I had anybody to tell—my parents were divorced and my mother had gone away with some guy and my dad was completely grief stricken. And then instead of being a steady adult in my life, Uncle Jake took advantage of me. Not of his own daughter—but of
me
.”

“How do you know he didn’t take advantage of Loie as well?”

“Because I finally told her. After Uncle Jake died. I wanted to find out if it had just been me. And it
had
!”

Hanna was shaking with anger and grief. I tried to comfort her but she shook me off. “And she had the nerve, she had the
nerve
to say she was going to write about me in her book. She was going to use me as a fucking
example
.”

I stood there helplessly, hands extended in a futile gesture of comfort. The director came over and very matter-of-factly observed that I was upsetting Hanna and that I should probably leave. I did then, even though I didn’t feel I’d gotten answers to some of the questions I’d come with. This was all turning out to be much more complicated than I’d imagined. The ties that had connected, and still connected Hanna and Loie, were complex and hidden. Had Loie become an anti-porn activist out of guilt? To make up for not having protected Hanna at an earlier age? But why had she married Hanna’s boyfriend then? Why had she gotten Hanna involved in porn films? Or had it been Hanna who got Loie involved?

I said good-bye to Hanna, feeling terrible that I’d opened up this wound for her again. Though at least, I realized as I left the theater, I now knew which client Elizabeth had been trying to protect.

I
T WAS DARK BY
the time I got to Oak’s house. She came to the door with a beer in her hand.

“Oh hi,” she said, and seemed almost glad to see me. “Come on in. I just got home.”

She led me into the old-fashioned living room.

“Where
did
you get all this stuff?” I couldn’t help asking.

“My grandmother left it to me, along with the house. I kind of like it—it seems familiar somehow.”

I had a quick pang for the Ravenna house. If I did sell my share to Penny—and I still wasn’t sure I was ready to—at least I had to have some of the furniture.

Oak sat down across from me in an armchair with doilies on the arms. She was wearing jeans again and a soft blue shirt the color of her eyes. I found it hard to believe that she could enjoy whipping anyone; I thought of Clea’s story and wondered if she’d just been unlucky with her lover, if they’d gone too far, or if that was always how it was. Had Oak been battering Nicky? I just didn’t think so, but maybe that was my own naiveté.

“I can’t help thinking about her all the time,” Oak said. “It’s like, any minute she could come walking through the kitchen door telling me some story. Or I could come in and here she’d be reading on the couch.”

“Have you heard anything from the police?”

“No. I guess eventually they’ll get to me. I went by her place, but it had a seal on the door. I didn’t stop.”

“Oak,” I said. “Remember you told me that Nicky had been in a porn film with Loie?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like to find those films. I think they could help tell us who killed both Loie and Nicky.”

Oak looked up at the shelf of cassettes. “Well, Nicky kept all her video stuff here, because I have a VCR and she didn’t, but I never saw anything that old. I mean, did they even have video then?”

That was a good question. I didn’t know. “Maybe we could just look through the cassettes?”

“Okay.”

They were jumbled together. Hollywood action pictures along with pornographic films. Lots were in cases with no labels or in cardboard boxes. “We bought a lot of bootleg tapes,” said Oak. “And people copy them, trade them.”

She had hundreds. Like most people have books. But I went through all of them, opening up all the cases and the boxes.

Finally I came to an oblong book-shaped box fitted in among the others. When I opened it, it didn’t have the usual cassettes inside, but small reels of tape in a plastic bag.

“Can you put these on your video machine, Oak?” I asked.

She took them out of the bag and looked at them. “I don’t see how. They’re not in a cassette. They’re reels. That’s funny, I haven’t seen them before. What’s the box say? Nothing.”

“Would you mind very much if I borrowed these?” I asked her.

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Take them to someone who I hope can play them,” I said.

Miko held up one of the reels I’d given her. “Where’d you get these?”

“At Oak’s. They were in a little box. We couldn’t play them on Oak’s VCR, so I thought you might be able to do something with them. They might be the porn films we’re looking for.”

“If they are, they’re strictly the work of amateurs,” said Miko. “They look like they might be early videos. Maybe Portapak videos.”

“What’s that?”

“In the late sixties Sony introduced the first video recorder and camera for consumers. It was reel to reel, not cassette. You could get about twenty minutes on a single reel. Black and white, half inch. We had a Portapak in my high school drama department, that’s why this looks familiar. It was always breaking down because no one could figure out how to thread the tape through the spools.” She held up one of the reels. “I’ll take this in to work tomorrow and see what I can make of it.”

We were in her studio; I’d come straight here after leaving Oak’s. I hadn’t gotten a good look at it at her screening; now I began to walk around, noticing the Japanese feeling about the place—advertising Japan rather than simple, elegant Japan. There were pages torn from magazines on the walls, movie stills, big posters. A lot of it represented sex.

“The Japanese have a long tradition of pornography,” said Miko, watching me investigate her studio. “I was shocked—yes, even me—when I was in Tokyo a few years ago and saw how sex was used to sell everything. Women’s bodies, that is. It gave me very mixed feelings. On the other hand, Japanese rape statistics are supposed to be among the lowest in the world… Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, please.” I continued to walk around. There were tiny paintings made of silk, fascinating old photographs of women, shelves full of art books, Vermeer as well as Hokusai.

“Surprised?” she asked, when I stopped at the bookshelves. “You think of me as a pretty crass person, don’t you, Pammie?”

“You can say some fairly alarming things,” I admitted.

“Don’t be fooled,” said Miko, putting a round ceramic pot and two cups on a low table and gesturing me over. “I’m really quite a wimp. I suppose that’s one reason I was drawn to Nicky. She called herself a sexual outlaw and that’s what she was. She pushed boundaries, she crossed limits. She was in pursuit of something. I don’t feel as courageous. I suppose I’m still rebelling against my parents.”

“Maybe Nicky was too,” I suggested, but Miko went on:

“My mother was a Japanese war bride, my dad was in the service, your basic redneck sergeant. He used to knock both of us around. I grew up hating him and being ashamed of my mother. Ashamed of anything Japanese. I hated my face, hated my body. I was overweight, I had acne. Kids used to call me Fat Jap and Slanty-Eyes. That was suburban Tacoma in the fifties and sixties. I went to Pacific Lutheran University—did I forget to mention we were good Christians?—for a couple of years, then I couldn’t take it anymore. I was a real slut in college. I drank and smoked and slept around.”

Miko sipped her tea, looking back into the sorrow and excitement of those years. “I’ve always wanted to start a support group for women like me. Women Who’ve Fucked Around, I’d call it. Or maybe Sluts Anonymous. It wouldn’t be a survivors’ group or anything like that—it would be to really talk about, really understand what it was like. How it was sometimes fabulous, sometimes wretched and a lot of times it meant nothing at all.”