Kate called Tora over to the table. The Chicana sat with her chair pulled back, arms folded across her red baseball shirt, her legs crossed so tightly the ankles were wrapped around each other. She watched Kate with resentful brown eyes. No, she didn’t know Dory Quillin very well. No, she hadn’t noticed anything unusual at the ballpark. Yes, she had arrived at the bar around five thirty, along with everyone else. No, she had not seen or heard anything unusual. No, she had nothing more to add about Dory Quillin or why this had happened.
Kate remembered Harry Johnstone, a grizzled sergeant who had befriended her when she first started her police career. “Thirty years a cop,” he had muttered to her at his retirement party, an arm heavily around her shoulders, his eyes red-rimmed with drink and the finality of leave-taking. “For what? For shit. The fucking people hate us. They like us when they need us. Otherwise they fucking want us out of their face.”
More than most she understood that instinctive recoil from the uniformed figure with a badge and a gun. It was not so much the sanctified authority to kill or maim but the power to subvert, to diminish and scar a life. Implicit in that power to arrest was the potential to exercise it for capricious, cruel, or even thoughtless ends. Small wonder that the cop was the personification of menace to many gay people already brutalized by contempt, whose lives testified to powerlessness without recourse.
One after another Kate called the patrons of the Nightwood Bar. Kendall’s hostility was no less obvious than Patton’s, but less overt. Ash was as close-mouthed as Tora, curt and impatient with Kate’s questions. Audie was not hostile but neither was she cooperative—she would not meet Kate’s eyes. Roz was so genuinely bewildered by the evening’s events that Kate dismissed her after a few perfunctory questions.
Kate looked over her notes. With one woman remaining to be interviewed, she had learned nothing useful about Dory Quillin or why she had died. Kate accepted a fourth cup of coffee from Maggie, and remembered her first visit to a lesbian bar.
It had been Julie’s idea to drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit that Saturday night—Kate’s twenty-first birthday. Kate could not afterward recall the name of the bar, only that it was in the vicinity of downtown, amid a war zone of defaced, scarred, graffiti-sprayed buildings.
The bartender, wearing army fatigues, her hair in a brushcut, had been so masculine that Kate would never have questioned her gender except in these circumstances. Other women in that bar were equally masculine—some clad in jackets and ties and wing-tipped shoes. They sat with frilly women who wore low-cut blouses and miniskirts and spike heels, gaudy jewelry and lacquered hairdos and bright lipstick with matching nails.
Sitting with Julie at a corner table in the dim smoky room, Kate added her own nervous smoke to the haze, and watched figures sway on the dance floor to the songs of Patti Page, Connie Francis, Jo Stafford, the Everly Brothers—as if this bar, in 1967, had been caught and held in the rose-hued romanticism of the fifties.
The masculine bartender circulated with a large tray of drinks, serving a fresh scotch and soda to Kate, a daiquiri to Julie. “From her,” she said, and jerked her head toward a blond young woman sitting at the bar in knee-high boots, a leather miniskirt, a fringed buckskin vest.
As Kate made a gesture of refusal the bartender growled, “Relax, okay? She’s a hooker. They come in sometimes, they like to toss their money around on women.”
Kate accepted her drink, and became absorbed in watching the woman. She had come in alone, and now sat with her back against the railing of the bar, surveying the room. She was soon approached by a dark-haired boyish woman in slacks and a shirt. Kate watched them dance through five songs, their steps and tempo the same regardless of the beat—slow, and increasingly sinuous. The women left together, the boyish woman’s arm around the other’s waist. Kate stared at the barroom door long after they had disappeared through it.
To meet a stranger, and not half an hour later to leave with that stranger and take her to bed…Kate savored the last of her paid-for-drink as if it were rare nectar never again to be tasted. The woman who had bought it existed in a world whose parameters Kate could not fathom.
She and Julie stayed on, drinking, watching other women drink and dance and play pool. Other people also sat and watched, couples—straight men and women—avidly staring. Kate felt inchoate anger—and humiliation.
Her curt rejection of Julie’s wish to dance was a refusal to be part of a freak show for these voyeurs. This place, charged as it was with music and noisy conversation and activity, was too much like the place which housed her grandmother—a ghetto of the exiled, of the classified hopeless.
Several of the masculine women, requesting Kate’s permission, asked Julie to dance. Kate watched Julie in their arms without resentment or jealousy or emotion of any kind, wondering at her own passivity and emptiness, and why it seemed so suddenly obvious that her life had always been like a compass without direction.
The next weekend when Julie again wanted to leave campus and return to the bar, Kate refused with granite finality. “Then I’ll go by myself,” Julie had declared.
Soon Julie was gone from the University of Michigan and from Kate’s life, captured by one of the women in that Detroit bar.
In her last year of college Kate had listened to a Marine Corps recruiter who ventured on campus in the teeth of the Vietnam uproar. She understood only in retrospect that enlistment was her own protest—her first significant defiance of a peer group which had dictated too many aspects of her life. And four years later she had met Anne—and in the precious years afterward her life had expanded in meaning and impact. Never again had she set foot in a lesbian bar…
Kate looked up from her notes and beckoned to the last remaining patron in the Nightwood Bar.
The woman Maggie had called Miss Deep Freeze took a seat opposite Kate. Under the lights, close up, her dusky skin acquired glossiness and an umber tone. She looked at Kate with remote, wounded dark eyes. Her beauty contained a poignance that touched Kate in an interior place as she remembered Maggie’s speculation about “lover trouble.” She herself shared with this woman a similar loss—she too had been deserted, abandoned to life by the precious lover who had left her for death…
“May I ask why you’re staring at me?”
Kate started. “I’m sorry. Could I risk offending you further and ask your racial origin?”
Miss Deep Freeze did not change expression. “Most people don’t ask—they just stare. Spanish and Jamaican on one side, English and Japanese on the other.”
Kate nodded. “I thought it was perhaps something like that. You make me think that in a totally integrated world we would all be very beautiful.”
The woman smiled, her teeth strong and even. The faint scent of musk reached Kate.
Kate asked, “What’s your name?”
“Andrea Ross.”
All that ethnicity and a simple American name—it was almost comical. Kate returned her smile and said, “Finally, someone with a last name.”
“It’s simple paranoia, you know.” The voice was low and musical, from deep in the throat. Andrea Ross gestured with graceful fingers toward the bar, as if the women Kate had dismissed were still sitting there. “They think they’ve come out because they’re at a lesbian bar. But they’re scared like all of us. They still want to control who identifies them, they don’t want to be exposed on their jobs or to their families or whatever. And they sure don’t want to be involved in this.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“I’m sure I should be.” Andrea Ross pushed up the sleeves of her oversize shirt and picked up her drink, a screwdriver.
“What do you do for a living, Miss Ross?”
“Miss Ross sells real estate.” She sipped her drink, the small full lips curving upward before they touched the rim of the glass.
Kate smiled again. “I’m sure Miss Ross does very well.”
“Not spectacularly well, but she manages to get the bills paid. Is the detective ready to drink something stronger than coffee at this late hour?”
“Not while she’s on duty,” Kate replied, quite willing to play the game. “She thanks you for the consideration.” She added, “You’re refreshingly nondefensive compared to the other women here.”
Andrea said somberly, “I’ve listened to them complain about their lives, the way the world treats them. The way I see it, this world may be rotten but it’s the only one we have and I can’t see how anyone can hope to make a difference by trying to leave it. But that’s what Patton and these women mostly talk about when they talk their politics—they dream of separation.”
Andrea was speaking easily, in an assumption of understanding. Kate wondered if her statements were cooperation with the police or simply conversation with another lesbian. Again remembering Maggie’s assessment of the woman sitting before her, Kate chose her next words carefully. “Still, you give the impression of being somewhat…bitter.”
Andrea shrugged. “You can be bitter about things that have nothing to do with gay politics.”
The statement, the flat tone of the voice, did not invite further comment or question. “Dory Quillin,” Kate said. Now that she had established rapport, however tenuous, she redirected the conversation. “Did you know her?”
“I knew her by name, by sight, by reputation. She came on to me once. After that she said hello to me. By your definition, did I know her?”
Kate looked down at her notes. This woman was stylish, intriguing, disturbing. “You knew her by sight. What were your impressions?”
“A heartbreakingly beautiful child.”
“Who came on to you,” Kate said, hardening her tone.
“This particular beautiful child was desperately needy, very troubled, totally messed up. I didn’t need a psychiatrist’s report—those things were very obvious to me. I’m only thirty-three, but just the thought of all that neediness in bed quite frankly exhausted me.”
Kate chuckled. Andrea looked at her expressionlessly, then took a sip of her drink. She said, “She fascinated all the women here. But they were leery of her, there was something too reckless in her. They speculated about her all the time, wild things—”
“What wild things?”
“Drugs, women, men, Mafia, orgies—whatever their minds could conjure up. Dory didn’t belong here. Most kids her age hang out at Peanuts or the Palm, or the bars in the Valley. Obviously she was looking for something else. A mother-lover.”
Andrea looked away from Kate and continued in a tired voice, “Gay women like to think we have more enlightened attitudes about age difference in our relationships. But I suspect sometimes we’re just trying to get back to a safer time when we were our mothers’ daughters. Back to when we were children and had no knowledge of men and how much they would control our lives.”
Kate nodded, willing to sit there as long as Andrea Ross was willing to talk.
“The women in here use alcohol but not illegal chemicals—they disapprove of them. They’re down on what they don’t understand, anything they’re half-scared of. They’re too far removed from someone like Dory Quillin.”
Kate asked casually, “Was Dory Quillin into drugs?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
Kate waited.
After several moments Andrea said, “Let me put it this way. She asked me to come back to her van, she offered me some coke if it was to my liking. I don’t think she was talking about the stuff in cans.”
“And you didn’t go?” Kate prompted.
“I wasn’t into her and I don’t do drugs. Which has nothing to do with generation gaps or virtue. My brother OD’d when he was seventeen.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate offered.
Andrea’s shrug was a habitual gesture, Kate saw, a method of temporizing until she gathered her thoughts. “Tony was trying to find a way to kill himself from the time he was ten—I’ll never know why.”
Kate studied her. “You had the same feeling about Dory Quillin? Is that why you avoided her?”
Her eyes distant, Andrea turned her glass slowly in slender fingers. “I felt inadequate, that’s why I avoided her. I’d have felt that way about anyone. Right now I need everything about myself for myself.”
Her eyes cleared; she looked at Kate with a directness Kate found disconcerting. “I never thought she was self-destructive. Exactly the opposite. There seemed to be something very healthy in her, struggling to get out.”
Kate made a note of the assessment, finding it both comforting and saddening. “I know you’ve been coming here only two weeks—” She broke off as Andrea raised both eyebrows. “One of the women told me. Any investigation is made possible only because half the world gossips about the other half.” She phrased her question with care: “Do you happen to know if any of these women here tonight was involved with Dory in more than a casual way?”
“Patton.”
Kate heard this with disappointment, then a stirring of surprise. “Patton,” she said, her mind filled with the image of the blond child in the parking lot. She murmured, “It seems such…an odd pairing. To me.”
“From the way the other women teased Patton about it, apparently it was very brief. My guess is, she took Dory on as an indoctrination project—Patton’s just the type. I know some youngsters Dory’s age are susceptible, but I can’t see her being much interested in political rhetoric. To me, her needs seemed much more basic…” Andrea drained her drink and set the glass down with finality.
Kate could think of no other questions for Andrea Ross, other than personal ones that were inappropriate. She said, “I appreciate your help.”
“One more thing,” Andrea said. “Someone was in here maybe two weeks ago, early evening. A black woman, fortyish. I heard the women call her Neely, they talked about her when she left. She was Dory’s lover for a while—I don’t know for how long.”
“Was she looking for Dory?”
“I don’t know. I understand she used to come in all the time, but not after Dory was staying here.”
“Thank you.” Kate handed Andrea one of her cards.
Andrea turned the card in her fingers. “Detective Kate Delafield,” she said. “So you’d like me to call you.”
She did not look at Kate; the meaning was clear in her voice.
If you think of anything more to tell me about this case, was what Kate must tell her, was required to tell her. Instead she answered, “Yes.”