The Dog Collar Murders (7 page)

So much of the effect of a panel discussion lies in the order of the speakers. Miko, coming after Sonya and Elizabeth, was hard put to equal their quiet, passionate power. Starting off on the wrong foot by announcing that she too had once been afraid of and threatened by pornography, but that now she saw it as the way to her personal salvation, Miko went on to tell the audience many particulars of her sexual and creative life. But her nervousness made her appear off-key and strident instead of being a woman powerfully in touch with her eroticism. It wasn’t just my prejudice either. Miko, who so loved a public forum for her cultivated outrageousness, was definitely not in tune with the atmosphere tonight as she told story after embarrassing story of what her life had been like before and after she discovered the liberating power of making videos of women’s body parts.

“Who cares?” I heard June sigh, but when I snuck a glance at Hadley, she looked fascinated.

The discussion with the audience began with Miko and Gracie bearing the brunt of the attacks. One woman wanted to know how Miko could justify promoting pornography when innocent children were being abducted right and left. Someone from Radical Women called Miko decadent and then went on to say that Gracie hadn’t gone nearly far enough with her analysis of the capitalist and imperialist origins of patriarchy. Gracie managed to respond to her with civility and dispatch, but she didn’t stand a chance against a nasal young woman who wanted to talk about Julia Kristeva’s theories of female language. It was only when some of the audience began to protest that the speaker stopped droning on.

The protests started at the back of the audience and moved forward like the tide. It was only when the murmuring reached our row that I realized it wasn’t about Julia Kristeva at all.

“Something happened to Loie Marsh….” The tide broke over us and flowed on.

“What?”

“Loie—someone found her.”

“Who?”

“Loie. Marsh. She was…”

“Dog collar.”

“What?”

“They said she was strangled.”

“Loie Marsh was strangled by a dog collar.”

“Oh my god.”

The tide of rumor reached the stage, but couldn’t climb it. The panelists looked out, bewildered, at the sea of talk. For an eerie second or two there was a silence. Then someone screamed, very loudly, “You’ve all killed her.”

In the distance you could just hear the police sirens approaching.

T
HERE WERE TWO TYPES
of Monday mornings at Best Printing. The kind where everyone came in at exactly a quarter to nine, primed on caffeine or good spirits and ready to get down to work immediately, and the kind of morning we were having the Monday after the conference on sexuality.

June lolled on one end of the long sofa reading the newspaper and groaning softly. Ray sat on the other end, coaxing Antonia with a pacifier, an adoring, absent look on his face. Penny sat, most unlike herself, in a slumped position over her desk, trying to focus on a cup of coffee. Something about her strongly reminded me of our mother, maybe the way the oversize glasses sat on her small, sharp nose; maybe the way her dry, half curly hair stuck out. Once her short brown hair had been kept artificially perpendicular with mousse, now it had an indifferent perm and was parted on the side. Penny the svelte had gotten careless about her dress too and seemed to go about in stained sweatshirts that she could whip up at the sound of a cry.

She was definitely slowing down. The first week after having Antonia she’d been, if possible, even more efficient than before. She always seemed to have the baby in one arm, a satchel in the other and her car keys out and jingling.

June had said, “She’ll get over it. She’s just trying to prove that, unlike most women, having a baby has not changed her in the slightest.”

Now she leaned her head on the desk and tried to get the coffee into her mouth without lifting the cup.

Even Moe was uncharacteristically dreamy and stood by the big window looking out at the blue September sky. I wondered if he was thinking about Allen or about the life he’d left in San Francisco. The two of them had moved up to Seattle in July after two of their best friends had died the same week. Moe had been exhausted with grief, but for Allen it was worse. “He’s got survivor’s guilt,” Moe had said, “Except he can’t believe he’s really a survivor.” Allen had turned into a nervous hypochondriac, calling the doctor once or twice a week and constantly checking his body for signs of disease.

A neat quick man in his thirties, with lots of soft dark curls and blue eyes, Moe was a gem to have around the shop. He was the best cameraman and designer we’d ever had; he was far too good to be working at Best, he could have, and he had had, a very good union job. But he wanted to be out, he needed to be out at work, he said. Now more than ever.

“Well, it doesn’t look good for Seattle,” said June gloomily from the sofa, throwing down the paper. “Nobody appreciates you while you’re here, so you go away to get famous, you come back and they kill you.”

“Hanna must be in shock,” said Ray. “Have you tried to call her, Penny?”

Penny rolled her head on the desk: No.

“We could go over there later,” Ray suggested. “She might like some support.”

I was thinking aloud: “But why then? Why was Loie killed
then
, between her closing speech and the evening panel? And why was she strangled with a dog collar? Of all the offensive weapons to use, that had to be the absolute
most
offensive to someone like Loie.”

“I don’t understand,” said Ray.

Moe and I looked at each other. “You tell him, dear,” I said.

“The dog collar wasn’t made for a
dog
, Ray,” Moe explained. “I mean, it wasn’t just someone who was out walking their dog and decided to put Loie on a leash instead. Dog collars are used by sadists on masochists to denote ownership and dominance in the S/M ritual. And since Loie was one of the most prominent opponents of S/M, it seems like it may have been an attempt to discredit her.”

“Poor Loie,” Penny said, “to have fought so hard against pornography, and then to die like that.”

“Unless,” I said slowly. “You don’t think… No, not Loie… But wouldn’t that be a scandal!”

Penny called up Hanna eventually and, over her protestations, went to see her with Ray and Antonia that afternoon. She came back alone; Ray had taken Antonia to the doctor for a check-up.

“The cops had just left when I got there. They’d been asking Hanna questions all morning and then they’d gone through Loie’s things. It’s all been really terrible for Hanna. I mean, she hadn’t seen Loie since Loie went off to Boston, not for
years
, then a couple of weeks ago Loie calls up and says she’s coming to Seattle. She’s broken up with her girlfriend and needs to get away and a quiet place to work on her book—what could Hanna say? They’re cousins after all, they were practically brought up together. So Loie turns up with all this stuff, boxes of notes and newspaper clippings, and just moves in. It’s all been really upsetting for Hanna, and I’m sure it’s going to be upsetting for everyone. How are they going to find the person who killed Loie? What do the police know about the anti-porn movement or about lesbian sadomasochists?”

“Well, we don’t know for sure it was anyone from the S/M community,” I said. “It could just as easily have been someone who didn’t like Loie personally and just decided to play a very cruel joke on her.”

Penny looked at me with some interest. “Are you going to follow this up, Pam?”

“Me?”

“Why not? We know for sure the police are going to make a botch-up of the whole thing. Think about Hanna. They’ll probably suspect
her—
in fact, I’m sure they suspect her already.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Start with the dog collar.”

After work I went up to Capitol Hill to meet Hadley. The Espressomat, quite naturally, was fizzing with the murder, and gossip being the expansive gas that it is, all sorts of details had been added and elaborated on. Some people were saying that Loie had been found handcuffed, bound and gagged; others said that she was a hypocrite, that “everyone knew” she was into S/M.

It was all pretty revolting. It wasn’t that I’d been particularly drawn to Loie, but I’d believed—and I still believed—that she had a lot of integrity. She might have had secrets, even sexual secrets, but I didn’t think the practice of sadomasochism was one of them.

Start with the dog collar, Penny had said. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to do a
little
checking around. Where did you buy those things, anyway? Since it appeared that Hadley was going to be here for a while longer, I decided to go down the street to the alternative General Store.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask for what I wanted at the main counter, so I went back to the hardware section and cornered Abby, a friend of mine who worked there.

“Abby, hi,” I whispered. “Do you have any dog collars?”

“I didn’t know you had a dog, Pam. Or are you getting a dog, what kind of dog?”

“No, I don’t have a dog,” I said, still trying to convey by my whisper that we should keep our voices down. “I’m, uh, not looking for
that kind
of dog collar.”

“Ohhhh,” she said appraisingly. “Sex life starting to drag a little? You’d be very surprised how many people come in here looking for stuff like that. Yeah, the other day a guy came in here and asked if we had chain link. I told him where the roll was—when I came around the corner to see how he was doing, darned if he wasn’t down on his knees with a length of it around his neck. He said he was measuring it for his dog.”

“Abby,” I whispered furiously. “Would you lower your voice a little, please? This isn’t what you think. I’m just interested—because of Loie. It has nothing to do with my sex life.”

“Well, you won’t find what you’re looking for here. Just little blue puppy dog and kitty cat collars here. And lots of flea collars. Tell you where to go though. The Vault.”

“The Vault?”

“It’s not far away. It’s a sex shop—mainly gay male, but lots of leather, B & D stuff too.”

“B & D?”

“Bondage and Domination.”

“Oh.” Why didn’t she feel embarrassed saying words like that aloud? I did. “Well, thanks, Abby.”

“Sure Pam.” She called after me, “I didn’t
think
you’d suddenly got a
dog
.”

I went back to the Espressomat. Hadley was still in the thick of it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Lynda had to leave early today for an appointment with her iridiologist and the place is packed. Probably because of the conference and Loie. If you want to go on home, I promise I’ll be there by seven-thirty. Morgan is starting her shift at seven.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make some dinner.” I didn’t go straight home though. I decided to stop by The Vault.

It was a seedy looking place and I couldn’t help scouting the street before I ducked inside. Once in it took me a minute to accustom myself to the layout. I wasn’t sure where to look. At the front were innocent love orgy oils and skimpy underwear. At the back were racks of videos and magazines. But I headed first to a side wall festooned with a lot of black leather. Before I got there, however, my attention was arrested by four or five shelves of vibrators and dildos. It was like a forest of off-pink flesh, with occasional black trees and roots.

Astounded, I stopped and looked more closely. Some of these things were huge, three feet long, five inches thick, some of them with two heads. How—and where—did people fit them into such orifices as they possessed? I was more amazed than judgmental when I turned away to face the wall. Off it hung black leather caps, vests, pants with buttocks or crotches cut out, gloves. The only thing that was missing was black leather socks.

I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it. Why was it all leather, why was it black? All it reminded me of when I looked at it was Nazi Germany—I wondered if it was supposed to. Inside the glass cases in front of the wall were smaller objects, all labeled. Butt plugs, hand and leg cuffs, tubes to encase the penis, cock rings and nipple clamps. Ouch! On top of the cases were more of the things I’d been looking for: whips of different lengths and strands, leashes, studded jock straps and, aha, dog collars. Big thick ones with spikes, like the kind Nicky Kay had worn, like the kind I presumed had strangled Loie.

A man with a pleasant smile came over and asked if he could help me find anything.

I blushed beet-red, and squeezed out, in a tiny voice, “Oh no, just looking.” But before he moved off, I managed to ask more firmly if I could possibly try on one of the dog collars.

I glanced around before I slipped it on my neck, to make sure no one I knew was in the store. No, just some men perusing the magazines.

“Now you don’t want it too tight,” the man cautioned.

But that was just what I did want. I tried pulling one end of the collar through the buckle. As the clerk looked on in bemusement I felt my eyes popping a little and my breath being choked off. Still, you’d have to be pretty strong to choke someone who was struggling. The end of the collar was quite short for trying to pull it. And Loie was a big woman. If she weren’t cooperating it would be hard to get her to stand still to pull the end of the collar, much less to slip it around her neck in the first place.

And if she were cooperating? I shook the idea out of my head.

“Is it working for you?” the man asked sympathetically.

I hastily pulled the collar off, and said I didn’t think so, that I’d just look around a little more.

I investigated the videos first and then the magazines. I’d never been in a store like this one before, and after I got over my initial timidity and shock, was more curious than offended. The main thing that had struck me so far was how incredibly expensive everything was. No wonder the porn industry turned over eight billion dollars a year when they charged ten or fifteen dollars for a magazine and asked a sixty dollar deposit to rent a video. But as I looked further I began to feel other sensations.

I remembered something Mona had said during her workshop Saturday on sexist images. “All the anti-porn movement is protesting is nudity and violence and all they want to do is remove the images of women that are most offensive and blatant. Most of us go along with that, accepting their word for it. But how many of us have ever really taken a good look at what’s available in the pornography marketplace? How do we
know
that most of what’s sold as pornography is really more offensive than a typical issue of
Cosmopolitan
or an episode of
Dynasty
?”