Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “Well,” said Elena again, nervously. “I don’t actually work here. I mean, I wasn’t coming to work exactly. But I got here around seven. About ten after seven, because I left my house at seven and it’s about a ten-minute drive away…”

  “You don’t ‘actually’ work here?” Officer Alice prodded.

  “Elena has been helping us out,” said Hadley, speaking for the first time, and in a firm voice. “She works with these women over here, in a printing business,” she gestured to me and Penny. “The two businesses are thinking of merging, and Elena has been doing some of the groundwork.” Hadley made it all sound quite normal and above-board.

  Officer Alice asked, “Do you think that someone…” her eyes flickered around the room, “might have been against this merger?”

  “It’s quite possible,” said Hadley calmly. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  I wished I could be as matter-of-fact as she was. My mind was racing with possibilities. Zee had dashed off to a meeting, she said. But could she have come here? What about Jeremy and June? Jeremy seemed far too wimpy for something like this, but who knew about June? Maybe she’d just been acting persuadable to fool us? Ray? I couldn’t imagine it. Yet he wasn’t in favor of the merger and I doubted he ever would be. I knew where Penny had been all night, Hadley was out of the question, and as for Elena—just look at her, how upset she was, she must be suspecting Fran too.

  Officer Bill had walked back into the typesetting room and was looking around again. His heavy boots echoed on the wooden floor. “I’m going to call another team to do the fingerprinting,” he said, and then, as if to himself, “Sure as hell looks like somebody went crazy in here.”

  Elena blanched, hearing him, and I knew she was thinking of Fran, wildly drunk, crashing and smashing her heart out here last night. That had to be the explanation.

  Officer Alice was getting our names and ages. I was surprised to find out Hadley was thirty-six. She looked younger in spite of her graying hair.

  “You can’t be twins,” Alice said when she came to Penny and me. “You don’t look a thing alike.”

  “It’s our hair…our glasses,” Penny and I said in unison. We were used to it.

  Margaret and Anna arrived about the same time as the fingerprinting team. The first thing I noticed was that Margaret had a band-aid on her index finger. Officer Alice saw it too.

  “That a recent cut?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Last night,” she said and looked around. “Goddamn, look at this place. Why wasn’t I invited to the party?”

  “She did it slicing onions,” Anna added. Anna seemed nervous, and not as surprised as she might have been, considering that her place of work had been put out of commission in such an ugly way. “God,” she kept saying, but not very convincingly.

  Well, and why not? I thought. Anna and Margaret had been vociferously against the merger last night; they may have felt that they had nothing to lose by wrecking B. Violet, if it would save them from working with us.

  The fingerprinting team were dusting and lifting off impressions around us. I could see Elena starting to twist and wring her hands. Hadley noticed her too, and asked if they could be excused for a moment. They went outside and sat on the curb. Hadley put her arm around Elena’s shoulders and I saw Elena break down in tears.

  Margaret said casually, “Where’s Fran? Why isn’t she here?”

  “Is that another member of the business?” asked Officer Alice.

  “The only founding member left,” said Margaret. “And she will lose it when she sees this place.” For some reason the thought seemed almost to amuse her. Anna looked at her and laughed.

  Elena and Hadley came back in. Hadley looked thoughtful. She said to Alice, “You know, we don’t want to rule out the possibility that we were vandalized by someone in the community who didn’t like our halftones, or even by some weirdo from the Moral Majority, but if this did happen because of the merger, then I doubt that we’d want to press charges. I think we’d prefer to work it out among ourselves.”

  “I hear you,” said Officer Alice. “But you know you’re goin’ to have to tell the insurance company something.”

  “Our policy lapsed last month. Fran forgot to renew it,” said Margaret, and there was that same smug amusement in her voice that made me look at her index finger and wonder all over again. Why would Fran have destroyed B. Violet anyway? She’d worked here for years; she wanted it to survive.

  “Well then,” said Officer Alice. “I think you still might be glad to have the report and the fingerprints on file down at central. You never know. All the talking in the world doesn’t bring back your equipment.”

  “We got the fingerprinting down,” said Officer Bill, coming back into the front room. “Now if we can just get yours, too.”

  “No,” we all said in unison, perfect children of the seventies. “No fingerprints.”

  Officers Alice and Bill looked at each other.

  “I get the feeling it’s internal, Bill,” said Alice.

  Only Anna laughed.

  7

  HADLEY, MARGARET AND ANNA stayed at B. Violet in order to assess the damage and see if there was anything that could be salvaged from the mess. I hoped that Hadley was planning on having a serious talk with Margaret and Anna.

  Penny and I took Elena home with us for breakfast. We probably wanted to see how much she really knew about what had happened too.

  But all she wanted to discuss was her relationship with Fran, right from the beginning. We got her to wait until we’d at least had a cup of coffee and then, while Penny broke eggs into sizzling butter and I made toast, we prepared ourselves to listen.

  It had been when Elena was fighting her firing from the high school that they’d first met—six months ago. Fran was somebody’s friend and Elena hadn’t paid her much attention. One of those people you just see around, say hi to.

  “I was actually a little put off by her,” Elena confided. “She really seemed butch, I mean, she’d been in the Army and had never been to college, worked at odd jobs, driven trucks, had a motorcycle. A real bar dyke. And who was I? A teacher, a housewife, a mother, living in Bellevue, realizing that I was turned on by the woman next door. And the salesclerk at Safeway. And some of my students. If I hadn’t been so idealistic and told my husband I couldn’t live with him anymore, if I hadn’t become a raging lesbian-feminist when he told me he was taking me to court for custody of the kids…I’d probably still be back in Bellevue, taking off my clothes with the woman next door, but enjoying all the privileges associated with class and heterosexuality…I’m talking privilege.”

  Penny flipped the eggs indifferently. “So what brought you two together then?”

  Elena was animated now, drinking coffee, gobbling toast as if she were starved, and with each bite gaining new strength. “It was the kids! Garson and Samantha latched on to her right away. It was really funny. We were all at someone’s house, in a big discussion about the court case or something and I say, ‘Where’s Sam and Garson?’ and find them upstairs, in the middle of some complicated game, string and cards, and having a wonderful time. With this woman I hardly knew, and was slightly afraid of…”

  “Let me guess,” said Penny, serving the eggs. She gave me a glance as if to say, How long are we going to have to put up with this Love Story business, but I was oddly moved and interested. For one thing, the image of Fran, child-friend, didn’t jell with the Fran I knew: drinker, bruiser and possibly crazy.

  Penny’s sarcasm was lost on Elena, who was leaning into her coffee cup with a dreamy expression. “They just love her, the stories she tells them, the jokes. When she’s over it’s like a party, it’s like family, the way it should be. We watch TV and make popcorn, play games. On weekends we take them places….” Elena trailed off and then came back to reality. “I can’t tell you the number of women I’ve been involved with over the last three years—as friends or lovers—who’ve thought that children were nothing but a big, fa
t drag. ‘Can’t you leave them at home?’ ‘They just make a mess….’”

  I looked away guiltily. My sentiments exactly.

  “So what’s the problem then?” Penny asked, wiping up her plate and leaning back in her no-nonsense way. Even with her big purple glasses and short, shocked hair, she still managed, at times, to look like the vice-president of some multi-national corporation—ruthless, suave, impatient.

  “Class,” said Elena. “It’s a class difference between us.”

  I thought about Fran’s S&M hint last night and the way she laid into the Jim Beams and beers and wasn’t so sure. “Do you think Fran might possibly have a drinking problem?” I asked.

  “We’re all the same, we all lay down our middle-class values and expect everyone else to follow them….Fran’s accustomed to drinking a lot. It doesn’t bother her. I mean, it doesn’t affect her in the same way it does you or me.” She paused, and I recalled that she’d had her fair share last night too—trying to keep up, to prove that she wasn’t a nice housewife anymore?

  I didn’t press her, though perhaps I should have. Instead I asked, “You think there’s any chance that she ran amuck at B. Violet?”

  “You said this morning that you thought she’d been there, that there was something…” remembered Penny. “What was it?”

  Elena put down her toast and I could almost see a half-chewed piece of it sticking in her throat, unable to go down. “It’s so hard for me to believe,” she said. “I know there must be some explanation. She’s not like that, even when she’s drunk. Verbally hostile, but not destructive. She loves B. Violet; she’s worked there six years. She helped start it.”

  “What was it you found of hers?” Penny pushed.

  Elena gave up. “Her car keys.”

  “Maybe they were an extra pair.”

  “I know she only has one pair. And we drove together to the meeting at Best. And you drove me home, Pam. So unless something is totally crazy, I guess she must have been at B. Violet last night.”

  There was a long silence. Elena put her head down on her arms. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, muffled. “I had her car keys in my hand, but somehow I lost them.”

  “Just now? I mean, at the shop?”

  Elena nodded. “Now you’ll never believe me.”

  I couldn’t figure out whether she was trying to protect Fran or to accuse her. “If the keys are there someone will find them.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Elena said.

  It was after ten-thirty by the time we got to Best Printing. Elena wasn’t with us; she’d decided to go back to Fran’s apartment to see if she turned up. I told her to call if she needed moral support and she pressed my arm gratefully as she got out of the car.

  “So what are you now? The Lesbian’s Home Companion?” asked Penny.

  “Knock if off, sis.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s that jerkface Doug. In a way I’m just as glad the phone rang and everything happened this morning. Kept me from thinking about him. He didn’t stay the night, you know. There we were, having ice cream and everything. Sam and Jude had gone upstairs and things were getting cozy. ‘What time is it?’ he says all of a sudden and jumps up. ‘Why? Got a date?’ I say. And you know what? The asshole did. Shit, was I pissed. You don’t do that to people, eat their ice cream—Haagen-Dazs is expensive you know—and get them all horny, then leave to go sleep with someone else.”

  “That is low,” I agreed. I couldn’t deny, however, that I felt a little pleased. Jealousy isn’t good for the soul and that’s definitely what I’d been feeling last night upstairs with my three scoops of Swiss Almond Vanilla.

  “So you went to a lesbian bar, huh?” said Penny.

  I’d forgotten my little lie. “Uh, well, not exactly. They wanted to, but you know me, too chicken. We ended up at the Bar & Grill.”

  “Too bad,” said Penny. “I’ve always wondered what Sappho’s was like.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Sure.”

  Even your own twin can surprise you sometimes.

  At Best we were greeted with attitudes ranging from loud scorn to apparent indifference. So we thought we could just stroll in any old time, did we? We were just lucky that it hadn’t been that busy. Before we told them about the sacking of B. Violet, I tried to notice whether any of them seemed different—more tired, more hysterical, more subdued, more guilty—and whether any of them had bandages on their hands. But if any of them were wounded, it wasn’t in obvious places. And even to my practiced collective eyes, everyone seemed much the same: Jeremy vague and spacey; June zippily cheerful; Ray irritated and concerned; Zee—but in some ways I didn’t feel I knew Zee well enough to see a difference, if there was one. She was gloriously turned out this morning as all others, in thin red-and-black-striped pants that were tight around the waist and ankles and full around the knees. With them she wore a short-sleeved red shirt and a black sweater knotted around the shoulders. With unusual silver earrings, many rings and bracelets, her smooth heavy black hair arranged faultlessly as ever, she looked as if she were working at Vogue, not at Best.

  We told them what had happened. About the vandalism, about the cops and the fingerprinting and non-fingerprinting, about Fran being missing and Margaret’s cut finger. The only thing we didn’t mention and I don’t know why, was that Elena had found Fran’s car keys. And lost them.

  “They must be feeling so bad,” said Zee quietly. “To lose everything. What will they do?”

  “Well, I hate to say it,” said Ray, “but at least we don’t have to worry about the merger question anymore.”

  He looked at me somewhat defiantly, but also in apparent innocence that these words might be taken wrongly.

  No one contradicted him. No one seemed to be worried, or to find it odd that B. Violet had been destroyed just after a meeting to discuss a merger with us. Clearly they all thought it was an inside job, internal sabotage, either by Fran or by Margaret and Anna.

  Well, wasn’t that what I thought myself?

  Elena called later to say there’d been no word from Fran. She was still at Fran’s, having written a long letter, and was preparing to go back home to be there when her kids got home from school.

  “I don’t think you can do anything more, Elena,” I tried to assure her.

  “I think it would be better if I got angry,” she said. “I’m starting to feel like a fool.”

  “Save it for when she turns up,” I said. “You have a right to be anxious now. Just don’t let it get you down.”

  Hadley also called later and was to the point. “How’d you like to buy a light table, cheap? With a new top it’d be fine….That’s about all that’s working here. The rest of the stuff is junk. They even ripped up our accounts books.”

  “You don’t think it was someone who owed you money, do you?”

  “I’m sure we could have worked out some other payment plan,” she said in her long drawl, then she turned business-like. “If you’re free tonight I’d like to talk to you a little more about all this, get your ideas and bounce some theories around. I’d love to rule out the possibility that either of our collectives was involved, especially ours.”

  “I don’t think anything can be ruled out until Fran turns up.”

  “The more I think about it, the more I think that Fran couldn’t possibly have done it.”

  “Even though her car keys were there?”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “How about Margaret? Did you notice her onion breath?”

  “Let’s discuss it over dinner tonight. We’ll hash it all out.”

  “In that case I recommend a good hashhouse…Ever been to the Doghouse Restaurant?”

  “No. I’ve seen it though. Over by Seattle Center?”

  “Yeah. Bring your ten-gallon hat, Tex.”

  8

  THE DOGHOUSE RESTAURANT (Max. Cap. 250) had been around since before WWII and hadn’t changed much in de
cor, menu or service since then. It had big soft booths you could lose yourself in and capable older waitresses wearing black skirts and vests and white shirts. The cocktail lounge had framed portraits of various canines all over the walls and Dick Dickerson nightly on the organ. It was probably the last restaurant in Seattle to still have plastic plants, toothpicks holding together the sandwiches, paperwrapped straws served with drinks, and Worcestershire, A-1 Steak Sauce and catsup on the table, every table. Both the placemats and a giant mural over the counter (with its towers of pie racks and constantly filled coffee cups, its smokers and its newspaper readers) displayed the motto “All Roads Lead to the Doghouse.” In one corner of the picture was a harridan with a rolling pin; in the other a sad-eyed pooch in the doghouse; and in between a hilly course strewn with signs that read “Matrimony,” “Blonds,” “Private Secretaries,” and “Boozers.”

  Hadley was waiting for me, without a cowboy hat but still recognizable behind the tall menu, with her graying hair and slightly furrowed brow. No beauty certainly, but a solid sort of person. Dependable. Or so I needed to believe.

  “Hey there, Pam,” she said, looking up, looking pleased. “This is quite the place.”

  “Our parents used to bring us here on Sundays sometimes—as a treat.”

  “They were nice, I bet. Your parents.” She said it factually, in a way that caught me in the chest. Yeah, they’d been alright.

  “How about yours?” I asked, while skimming for form’s sake the menu. I already knew what I was going to have: a Bulldog, hold the onions. “My dad’s into oil and my mother’s into archaeology. She’s in Turkey now, I think, excavating.”

  I tried to conceal my surprise. I wouldn’t have figured Hadley for a wealthy background. As if she read my thoughts Hadley smiled her one-sided smile and said, “Fran’s biggest dream was that the old man could be persuaded to bankroll the lesbian revolution.”