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 inside 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.
“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.