The Dog Collar Murders (24 page)

“Why didn’t you suspect David or Sonya?” asked Hanna. Her voice was mild, considering that I’d just said I’d believed her capable of murdering two people. She sounded interested in the fact, as if talking with a director about her interpretation of a play.

“I did suspect David, but I also didn’t think his feelings about Loie ran as strong as yours. After all, he hadn’t seen Loie for years. As for Sonya—I realize now she was the woman in the video, the ghostly one. But even if I’d seen her I suppose I wouldn’t have thought she’d kill Loie and Nicky because of it. She was afraid that Loie was going to say something on the panel.”

“How could Loie think that was going to help the cause against pornography?” Penny asked. She was beginning to look more normal now, after the shock of coming home to the houseboat to find, first, no one there and then, her dripping sister clutching a very unhappy baby driven up in a police car. The baby in question was sleeping an exhausted sleep on the lap of her father.

“She told me when she came to Seattle that her book was going to expose the damage that porn did to people,” Hanna said. “I said I’d sue her if she mentioned me. But it was the… family stuff I was worried about. Knowing Loie she would have made a big deal about it. The video tapes I could have dealt with I guess.” She shuddered a little. “Though it pissed me off that as usual Loie wasn’t actually in the scenario, but somewhere outside, in this case directing.”

“Then it wasn’t you at the conference trying to talk Loie out of her confessions?” I asked.

“Nicky was the one who tried to talk to Loie and warn her against making the past public,” Oak said. “She told me during dinner, she said Loie was as pig-headed as ever.”

“So Loie told Nicky that she was going to talk about the video. And who did Nicky tell?” Hadley asked.

I remembered back to the conference, to Nicky talking to someone outside the auditorium. “Sonya,” I said. “The person she joked was trying to save her.” Sonya must have come inside with the crowd after Grade’s speech. It was all starting to fit together now.

“It was Sonya in the audience who Loie saw,” I continued. “Sonya who made a date with Loie on campus before the evening panel. She must have gotten the idea of strangling Loie with a leash from Nicky. She saw Nicky take off of the dog collar when they were talking and put it in her jacket pocket. She followed Nicky to the Ethiopian restaurant and stole the dog collar and leash from the jacket, got back in time to surprise Loie by throwing the leash around her neck and strangling her.”

“Didn’t Nicky realize that Sonya had murdered Loie?” Hadley asked Oak.

“I think she suspected Sonya,” said Oak. “But it was her dog collar that was used. She didn’t want to get dragged into it.”

“How could Nicky have thought she was safe from Sonya?” Hanna wondered. “We knew what Sonya was like way back then. Willing to wait for what she wanted, but ruthless somehow. She wanted David and when Loie left him she was there to pick up the pieces.”

Oak couldn’t help it, she began to cry. “Then that was why Nicky had to die? Just because Sonya worried Nicky might connect Loie’s murder to
her
?”

“There’s something I never thought to mention,” said Miko. “Sonya was at my workshop. That’s when she first saw Nicky with the dog collar and leash. Maybe that’s where the notion came of making it look like Loie’s murder was done by someone into S/M.”

“Sonya must have also heard Nicky denounce Clea Florence,” I said. “And realized that Nicky was capable of denouncing her.”

“What I can’t forgive myself for is putting you in danger, Pam,” said Hadley. “Last night when Sonya called and asked for Randy Potter I told her she had a wrong number. She got quite interested when she heard it was the Hadley Harper/Pam Nilsen residence.”

“But how could she have known who I was?”

“I told her, I’m afraid,” said Edith Marsh. “I called Sonya to thank them for the wreath. I’m afraid I said something about being invited to Pam Nilsen’s on Sunday evening for coffee. I said you’d been very supportive around Loie’s death… There’s something else I must confess,” she added and looked ashamed, “I lied when I said I’d called Pauline Saturday night after Loie died. I didn’t want her to come to the service. Later it didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t called her.”

“So David probably didn’t know anything about this,” said Hanna. “That’s not surprising, I guess. He was always so passive.”

“No,” said Mrs. Sandbakker, “you’re wrong that he didn’t suspect. Just before we were leaving tonight for Pam’s, I got a phone call from David. We’d kept in touch from time to time ever since the early days. He wanted to tell me that Sonya had told him she was planning to meet Loie just before the panel discussion to discuss the possibility of forming a coalition to pass an anti-pornography bill in Bellevue. Afterwards Sonya said that Loie hadn’t come to their meeting. David hadn’t questioned her, but he was worried. And when Nicky was murdered he began to think that Sonya might have had something to do with both deaths. He told me on the phone that Sonya had insisted on going to this woman Randy Potter’s alone. He feared the worst. He wanted to call the police but he couldn’t do it to his own wife. He asked me to call them. I did.”

“I thought it was too much of a coincidence that two squad cars just happened to be cruising along Fuhrman Ave,” Hadley said.

“Sonya must have felt the net closing in,” I said. “She’d killed twice to protect her secret, and she was ready to kill again.”

“She didn’t know that you couldn’t even see her on the video,” said Miko. “That’s the irony.”

“What I don’t understand,” said the cop to me, “is what you thought you were doing, getting everybody you suspected here like this. Didn’t you know that at least one of them might be dangerous? Why didn’t you call the police?”

“The police had their suspect,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d convince you unless I had a confession that had been witnessed by a whole group of people. And anyway,” I said. “Hercule Poirot did it. Lots of times.”

It was one of those fall days when the weather actually seems better than spring or summer. Spring may be exciting and summer may be luxurious, but at no time other than October is there such a feeling of fullness and completion. The leaves were falling thick and fast but the trees showed hardly any sign of diminishing. All around us were fiery maples and golden horse chestnuts and they blazed against the china blue sky. The scent of the sun on dry leaves was intoxicating.

“Look Toni, a leaf,” I said, holding up an especially fine specimen of a burgundy-colored Japanese maple.

She reached for it eagerly and took hold of it with that curiously tenacious baby grip of hers. I’d been spending more time with my niece and the strength of her tiny fingers was familiar to me, especially when it involved my hair.

“I think she wants to eat it,” Penny remarked. “Get that out of your mouth, dear.”

We were sitting by the side of our parents’ grave at the cemetery not far from the family house. It was so near we hadn’t been here for exactly five years, not since the day of the funeral.

Sig and Louise Nilsen. Born in Seattle in the thirties, died in Seattle in the eighties. They had both attended Ballard High, then Louise had gone to secretarial school while Sig had gone to fight in Korea. He’d written Louise letters home, letters we still had, that always started out, “My darling honey.” They’d lived through the economic boom of the sixties, built their printing business up, bought an older house and fixed it up, raised twin daughters and seen them through college and part of graduate school.

They would have seen a lot more if they’d lived, and maybe they wouldn’t have liked some of it. Maybe they would have, though. I’d never know.

“I loved the way Dad would make us popcorn and read us stories on the nights Mom went to her weaving class,” Penny said.

“He helped me get my bike back once after Joey Perkins at school made me give it to him after losing a bet. And he never even yelled at me.”

“We complained about the print shop, but I used to love going down there and playing.”

“Remember when Mom first showed us how to run the little Multilith? How everybody at school was jealous of us because we printed the class newsletter ourselves.”

“I think they were happy together,” said Penny. “If they had to go, maybe it’s better they went together. They hardly ever used to fight—they were very… harmonious somehow.”

“Except that one time, remember? When she locked him out of the house?”

“And we kept asking, Are you going to get a divorce? I think we’d just seen Hayley Mills in
The Parent Trap
and thought we might be separated, one with each parent.”

“You would have gone with Dad,” I said without rancor.

“You were Mom’s favorite.”

“I’d have liked to have known Dad better.”

Penny nodded; she couldn’t speak for a moment. Then she took Antonia in her arms and said, almost fiercely, “We should have done this a long time ago. Come up here, I mean.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s time we started remembering.”

The fall leaves swirled around us and were gone almost before they touched the earth. But Antonia, who had her whole life before her, held out her hands and laughed delightedly.

Six weeks later, in early December, when the leaves that had seemed as if they would never fall from their branches had practically vanished, Hadley and I had our housewarming.

“Houses-warming,” Hadley said, though that was something of a moot point. It was both one house and two.

In the course of her real estate search, Hadley had run into a house in the Wallingford district that had been divided into upper and lower apartments. We decided to buy it together and to live separately.

That didn’t in the end turn out to be such a hard decision. It was harder to decide who was going to live where. “If you wouldn’t keep calling it ‘top’ and ‘bottom’,” Hadley said, “it would be easier.”

“Just think of it as a flow of energy,” I said.

“Yeah, from the downstairs to the upstairs. Upstairs apartments are always cheaper to heat.”

We compromised by agreeing to share the utilities and I took the upstairs with its view of Lake Union. Hadley got the downstairs deck surrounded by rose bushes.

“No loud parties now,” Hadley warned.

We had separate mailboxes, separate telephones and separate entrances, none of which were, of course, proof against spying. Still, they did offer a small buffer against too much togetherness.

“Nice!” Miko said when she turned up at the housewarming. She had brought each of us a small Japanese print. Hadley’s was a chaste landscape, but mine showed a woman masturbating with a mirror in one hand. I had to admit I found it somewhat arousing, “But where will I put it?” I wondered, already thinking of Antonia coming to visit.

“Pam, you’re hopeless,” Miko said, giving me an affectionate hug.

Ray and Penny gave me a saucepan set and Hadley an iron. “Weren’t these wedding presents to them?” I asked Hadley suspiciously.

“Now, now,” said Hadley. “This is the nearest
we’ll
get to a wedding, I can tell you.”

It was a little bit like the wedding reception two months ago. Not as many old neighbors and relatives, but more of the people we counted as friends and family. Moe and Allen, June and Eddy, Beth and Janis, all the employees of the Espressomat, looking in radiant health for once. Elizabeth, newly delivered of a baby boy, was there with her lover Nan and the rest of their children. She and Ray stood around having an animated talk about daycare in more advanced countries.

Penny was dancing with Allen; Hadley was dancing with June; Hanna was dancing with Eddy.

I drifted out to the deck in back and Gracie London followed me. She was looking fabulous in a green silk shirt and viridian copper earrings, but we met as friends, nothing more.

“You never told me you were so close to solving Loie and Nicky’s murders!” she exclaimed. “One minute we’re drinking coffee at the B & O and the next you’re fighting a sea battle in Portage Bay from what I hear.”

“I didn’t really solve the murder,” I said, with more honesty than modesty. “It’s my old problem of making the final argument I suppose. I can’t summarize and resolve things. The nearest I seem to get is making everyone so nervous with my questions that I precipitate events. I admit, I really never took Sonya seriously. She was so well-groomed! I should have remembered she believed in direct action.”

Gracie laughed. “Have your ideas about porn have changed since all this?”

I had to think. “I guess,” I said slowly. “I’m not so ready to judge as I once was. In the first place I hardly even knew what porn was or how people felt about it. It used to be a monolithic subject. There was porn and there was no porn, kind of like matter and anti-matter, and either you liked it or you didn’t. Either you thought it should be abolished or you thought it should be sold everywhere. There wasn’t room for contradiction, for your own contradictory feelings. But Loie Marsh’s idea of porn wasn’t David Gustafson’s or Nicky Kay’s. My idea of porn isn’t yours and yours isn’t Miko’s.”

“What
is
yours?” Gracie asked.

“I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life finding out. And once I’ve figured it out it will probably change again. All I know is you can’t speak for anyone else. And you can’t let anyone speak for you.”

“Well, I think that there has to be a lot more talking about it—or no more talking,” Gracie said.

“I want a two-year moratorium while I fundraise for Nicaraguan ambulances and learn how to sea kayak,” I said. “I think I’m kind of talked out for a while.”

“What kind of a feminist are you?” said Gracie. “You can’t be talked-
out
!”

But I was listening to the music from within the house. It was something wild and wonderful from a place in the world where they knew how to get down and enjoy themselves. It had heavy drums and a sax like a ripcord and a voice that shouted seductively through the rhythm, rich and gravelly.

Hadley was in the middle of a seething mass of bodies, rocking like a crazy fool. From across the room she saw me and grinned.