Murder in the Collective Page 4

  But no one said anything. The meeting had suddenly slipped into that catatonic state that sometimes occurs after strong feelings have been expressed and before any progress has been made, when members of the group will acquiesce to any delaying measure, just so they can go home and regroup their forces.

  “I second Penny’s suggestion,” said Ray rather wearily, looking, for the moment, like a Samurai who’s just laid down his sword in the cause of peace rather than justice. “We won’t even know where we are until we have some kind of organized proposal.”

  Slowly Fran nodded her head. She, too, looked exhausted, even dazed. She glanced at Margaret and Anna, and seemed to draw some form of agreement from their lowered heads. “We’ll do it,” she said.

  “So, are we finished now?” Zee’s clear voice broke in. “I’ve got another meeting. An important one.”

  “Looks like it,” said June, getting up and exchanging glances with Jeremy. “Coming?”

  Penny looked at me. Was this something new? But suddenly all of us were on our feet. Chairs were pushed back, jackets and bags retrieved from the floor and the desks. Penny and Ray started talking about whether the new theater would accept our bid and how much credit we could give them; Zee ran out quickly, earrings flying, followed in short order by June and Jeremy, Margaret and Anna. I turned to say something to Hadley and found Elena at my side—Elena with her fluffy blond hair and soft, milk chocolate eyes.

  “How about going out for a beer or something, Pam?” she asked me.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hadley approach Ray and Penny and start talking. “Well,” I said to Elena, “I’m pretty tired.” But then both my conscience and my better judgment smote me. Not only did I want to find out what Elena’s role in this whole thing was, but I’d better find out, if things weren’t to get completely out of control. “Sure,” I said, “sounds good.”

  “Great,” she said and then called over to Fran, who was already standing by the door. “Pam’s coming too.”

  5

  SHARING A PITCHER WITH Fran was not my idea of an enjoyable end to the evening, but there was no way to get out of it now. Fran drove Elena in her VW wagon and I drove myself in my ’67 Rambler to the University Bar & Grill. It was a pretty upscale place but I liked it because of its lack of hassle.

  Fran had suggested Sappho’s but had dropped the idea when I asked what it was.

  As soon as I’d said it I realized it must be a lesbian bar. Sappho was a lesbian, right? I felt both stupid and defensive. Hey, it’s not my scene, Fran, okay?

  “Anyway,” Elena had said quickly. “It’s too noisy there. The Bar & Grill’s fine.”

  Driving alone now I wondered what Sappho’s was like. Dimly lit tables, a dance floor filled with bulky women like Fran, in jeans and flannel shirts, or silk blouses with plunging necklines and tall boots maybe, the way Elena had been dressed once when she’d been going out after a meeting…gyrating under the strobe lights or pressing close together in the dark.

  My hands sweated lightly on the steering wheel and it wasn’t just the warm evening. I felt a mixture of attraction, revulsion and fear, with the latter predominating most recognizably. Girl, I said to myself as I parked my Rambler, for someone whose scene this isn’t, you sure are worked up by the thought of it. But why, all of a sudden?

  I met Elena and Fran outside the bar and let them go in front of me. I observed them closely, in the interests of scientific investigation, and observed how they were observed by others.

  I’d always thought Elena an extremely attractive woman. Conventionally pretty of face, she had more than a conventionally good figure: slim legs, narrow waist, full breasts. She wasn’t tall but she moved as if she were, confident and upright. I tried, with others’ eyes, to place her: an executive, a professor, a suburban housewife, a shop steward, a construction supervisor…she looked sure of herself, at any rate, and she fit in well with the crowd in the bar. There was nothing particularly “lesbian” about her, I thought, watching the appreciative glances she received.

  Fran was a different story. She looked every inch the traditional dyke, with her flannel sleeves rolled up, her big, unbound breasts propped up on her full stomach. She strode through the room with the toes of her hiking boots turned outward and her arms swinging away from her sides; she was handsome but far too powerful somehow for the Bar & Grill, and I felt the trendy people turn away a little, amused or discomfited. For the first time I had an inkling of what had given Fran that prickly attitude of hers.

  But also, perhaps, what Elena was drawn to.

  We sat down and ordered a pitcher. Fran also asked for a shot of Jim Beam and when she got it, tossed it off in two gulps. Immediately she looked more relaxed.

  “So, do you think it’s all a lost cause?” Elena asked me, chewing on a finger. The air of confidence she’d worn crossing the crowded room had vanished. She watched Fran as if looking for cues.

  “Probably,” I answered as frankly as I dared. “I could see Penny and maybe June coming over to the idea with a certain amount of persuasion—it does make some business sense after all—but not the rest.”

  “But with you and Elena, that’s four, that’s a majority,” said Fran. Her voice, after the bourbon, was husky, confidential, intimate. Her dark-edged light hazel eyes were warm now and she had a droplet of beer in the faint dark moustache over her full, well-formed lips. Her bulk and height gave her a presence that was hard to resist.

  I said, with some stiffness, looking at the glass in my hand, “I haven’t said what I think—that’s the first thing. Second, we don’t decide anything by majority but by consensus. I think it’s important to realize, in the third place, who we’re talking about: a couple of men who feel threatened and three people of color, all of whom have doubts….”

  “We’re not racists,” protested Fran, knocking back her beer and pouring herself another. “And as for the men, I don’t think it would be that much of a problem, if we had separate work spaces. Hell, the typesetting would be separate anyway.”

  “I liked what you said, Pam,” Elena broke in, “about maybe not merging collectives, but sharing some facilities. Maybe that’s the way we should be going.”

  “Margaret and Anna certainly don’t seem too pleased with the idea. Either way, merging or sharing,” I observed.

  “Margaret and Anna can go to hell,” said Fran suddenly, pushing aside her second empty beer glass and calling the waitress over to order a double Jim Beam. Her voice had thickened still more, gone a little slurred. “I’m really getting sick of the way they treat Elena. I’m not going to stand for it much longer.”

  Elena looked at her nervously but laughed and poured herself another beer. “Margaret thinks I tried to become the star of the local lesbian scene. Anna’s suspicious of me for working in a mixed collective. Hadley…” she glanced quickly at Fran. “But we can probably work it out.”

  I said, as gently as I could, “I don’t think they’re going to change their minds somehow—or Jeremy or Zee or Ray either.”

  Elena shrugged, drank, chewed on her finger. “Who knows?”

  The waitress brought Fran’s double. “We’ll take another pitcher,” Fran said. “Here. And keep the change.”

  Fran’s face was flushed and her hazel eyes very bright, a little unfocused. Her voice was losing its intimate growl, becoming belligerent. It was happening very fast. Why didn’t Elena stop her? But Elena was finishing off the first pitcher, pouring them both another beer. I put my hand over my glass.

  Fran said, “I’ve always wondered, how come you don’t have more lesbians in your collective? There are a lot of dyke printers, you know. Dykes go in for printing. I’ve been a printer myself, used to be anyway.”

  I shook my head. I felt the young professional couple at the next table looking at us. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t give Pam a hard time, Fran,” Elena said. “She could ask you the same kind of question. Where are the women of color in B. Violet?”r />
  “They’re in short supply,” Fran laughed. “The ones who are out are in big demand. Black lesbians, Asian queers, Chicana dykes, everybody wants one to put in the display case.”

  “I don’t much like that kind of talk,” I said. “Even as a joke.”

  “Sorry,” said Fran with a sneer. “I guess we’ve all got our sensitive spots.”

  I began to make motions to leave. “I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow, guess I’d better…”

  “No, wait,” Fran said. “You think I’m getting drunk, but before you go I want to say something to you.”

  Elena reached out an unsteady, apprehensive hand. “Fran, maybe this should wait.”

  “Quiet,” Fran said majestically to her. “My dad was a logger, not a professor like yours. I can hold it. And I want to say just one thing to Pamela Nilsen, that I know exactly what she’s thinking when she looks at me, and when she looks at me and you. I know exactly what’s going through her mind, her thinking I’m a fat, bad-tempered old dyke, and what do me and Elena do anyways, Elena who doesn’t even look queer.” The couple next to us were whispering and staring; I felt paralyzed. It was true what she was saying, but it still was all wrong.

  “Pam probably thinks I beat up on you and maybe we’re into S&M or something.” Fran laughed loudly. “You know, whips and chains….”

  Elena was on her feet before me. “That’s enough, Fran. We’re going. You should go too, you know.” In spite of her obvious anger there was a certain pleading tone to her voice.

  “Forget it,” said Fran. “Go on, get out of here, traitor.”

  Elena and I headed for the door. Someone I knew called out, “Hi Pam,” but I ignored her. I wouldn’t be coming back here for a while.

  “Can you drop me by my house?” Elena asked when we got outside, adding miserably, “She’s not really like this.”

  I said nothing. I felt shocked and pitying. I steadied Elena’s shaking gait. She wasn’t anywhere near as drunk as Fran but she was definitely on the way.

  “She doesn’t beat me and we’re not into S&M,” Elena said. “She’s just trying to make me mad. We had kind of a fight earlier.”

  I wished I could believe her.

  We got into my car and I turned on the ignition. I repressed the urge to make her confess. “You know, Elena,” I said after a minute. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, but I don’t think this is going to work, this merger thing.”

  Elena was sitting straight up with her hands in her lap, her hair a pale basket of flower petals in the refracted light from the street. I don’t think she heard me.

  “You should see her with my kids,” she said. “They love her.”

  I got home to find our roommates Sam and Jude and Penny and the resurrected Doug sitting around the dining room table, having ice cream with Amaretto. They were laughing and talking about going hiking the coming weekend if the good weather held. Sam and Jude, like the sporty Doug, were big on wilderness. Much as I generally enjoyed their company, tonight the sight of all four of them put me in even a worse temper than I was.

  Couples. Heterosexual couples. It was bad enough that we had to live with this happy pair, who’d been together for some outrageous length of time like ten years. But here was Penny with that creep Doug, planning to jump right back into the same maelstrom of love and hate as before.

  “You want to come with us this weekend?” Jude asked. She was the bookkeeper for a number of alternative ventures, an orderly and idealistic person. Next to Penny she was my oldest friend and I usually felt I never got to see nearly enough of her. But I certainly didn’t want to go traipsing off into the wilderness with all four of them.

  “No thanks,” I said, going past them into the kitchen and pulling the Swiss Almond Vanilla out of the freezer.

  “Where’ve you been tonight?” asked Sam in an overfriendly voice. There had been a significant pause before he spoke. I could sense them all looking at each other, wondering what was wrong with me. I didn’t care. I was still shivering over the scene in the Bar & Grill, but I was damned if I would tell them about it. I dumped two scoops into my bowl and then, judiciously, a third.

  “Consorting with the enemy,” I said, before Penny could. I came back through the dining room on my way to my solitary bedroom.

  “So where’d you all go? The Bar & Grill?” Penny asked.

  “No. To Sappho’s. The lesbian bar, you know. Nah,” I said, considering them coolly as I swept past the table and on up the stairs, “I guess none of you would.”

  6

  PERHAPS BECAUSE OF THE late-night sundae I slept badly that night, and my dreams were filled with dancefloor floozies who were the very opposite of the politically correct lesbians I knew, but who were quite provocative in their own way, with ruffled, deep-cut blouses and tight short skirts. I remember thinking in my dream, well if this is what goes on here what’s the big deal? And being both disappointed and somehow cheered.

  I’d turned off my alarm clock in my sleep and probably would have overslept if I hadn’t heard the telephone ringing downstairs. I didn’t feel able to get up to answer it, but it did have the effect of waking me up. I managed to struggle to a semi-sitting position as I heard someone’s steps pound down the stairs.

  I was still semi-sitting, pondering my dreamlife, when there was a knock at the door and Penny came in. She was wearing her own peculiar form of nightdress—tee-shirt and socks—and her spiky hair stood up like a fence on her head. I was about to remark that she’d better dip her snout in the shower before she let Mr. Olympic catch sight of her, but something in her face stopped me.

  “What’s wrong?” Since we were both here and our parents were both dead, I knew no immediate family member had come to grief, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other people who might be in trouble. “What happened?”

  “That was Elena,” said Penny. “She’s down at B. Violet. She came there looking for Fran because she didn’t come home last night.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Elena doesn’t know. She says she found something that shows Fran might have been there, and there’s a little blood or something, but what’s happened is…” Penny suddenly sank down on my bed. “The place has been completely vandalized.”

  “What?”

  “The two machines are smashed, and the copy ripped into shreds. The negatives cut up. A hammer through the big light table. Everything.”

  We sat staring at each other.

  “Who could have done such a thing?” Penny said.

  I kept thinking of Fran sitting at the table in the Bar & Grill. The suppressed violence in her voice. If she’d continued to drink, could she have, for some reason, gone back to B. Violet and smashed everything? In anger at Elena, me, herself?

  “I just hope to God it wasn’t anyone from our collective,” said Penny.

  I stared at her open-mouthed. That possibility had never even occurred to me.

  Penny and I said little on the way to B. Violet. Any conjecture was far too frightening. We arrived to find a cop car out front and two cops, a man and a woman, in the doorway, along with Hadley and Elena. Anna and Margaret were on their way, Elena said, but there was no sign of Fran. Elena seemed glad to see us but otherwise she looked awful, with ashblue rings under her eyes and a haggard, dustmop-against-the-floor look to her blond curls.

  Hadley, on the other hand, just looked confused, like any late-sleeper somehow set on her feet before the gears are clicking. She kept stumbling, which actually wasn’t so odd, considering the amount of stuff on the floor now.

  B. Violet occupied a pleasant storefront in North Capitol Hill, on a street that was more residential than business. It consisted of three rooms: the office/waiting area, the typesetting and design room, and the tiny darkroom. But everything was in shambles now; it looked like the set of a TV sit-com after a free-for-all scene. The office wasn’t so bad—just a chair or two knocked over, some files pulled out and strewn around. But i
nside the second room there was complete havoc. The tabletop Compugraphic was on its side on the floor; the freestanding one had its screen dashed in and gummy rubber cement poured through the keyboard. The big light table had been shattered by some sharp object so that the glass top swirled out in fern patterns; the smaller light table had been pushed to the floor and part of its glass was missing. Scattered over everything, like wet black leaves in autumn, were cut-up bits of phototype fonts and negatives. In the darkroom there were more torn negatives and plates, and the plastic bottles of developing fluid and photographic fixer had been opened and overturned. The smell was lethal.

  “Don’t anyone light a match,” Penny muttered to no one in particular.

  Otherwise, no one could say much of anything for a minute. Even the cops seemed overwhelmed by the viciousness of the attack.

  Then the male cop spoke. “Any idea who did it?”

  “You said on the phone you found some blood,” added the woman cop. According to her tag her name was Officer Alice Hawkins. She was a well-muscled Black woman with skin like shiny walnut wood and the heavy, wide-legged walk of the holstered cop.

  Elena nodded and, not quite trusting herself to speak, led the way to the office. In a dark corner was the missing glass from the light table, sharp as a surgical knife. Along one side was a line of coagulated blood; there was a small stain of it on the carpet as well.

  “I saw it when I went to the telephone to call,” said Elena, in a shaking voice, fumbling in her pockets like an old cigarette smoker for some comfort, and then catching herself.

  The boyish, husky male cop, Officer Bill Rives, pulled out his pad. “What time did you get here to work this morning, Ma’am?”

  “Well, I…” Elena half-searched her pockets again and darted a quick look at me and Penny. For the first time I began to see how complicated this could be—not just in the usual ways that dealing with the law is if you’re “living an alternative lifestyle” (“How many people live in this house, did you say? And what is their relationship to each other? And you say you all work in an ice cream collective?”)—but complicated also in that none of us knew exactly who was involved in this and whether we should be trying to protect anybody, or in what way.