She came out of dreamless sleep to Andrea’s voice calling her name, and opened her eyes to the filtered light of an overcast morning framed between beige drapes.
Andrea, wearing an ice blue silken robe, sat gracefully on the end of the bed. She said gently, “You told me last night you had to get up at six.”
Kate rubbed her eyes, alertness quickly returning; she felt rested, and possessed of a deep relaxation which she recognized as the aftermath of sexual release. She remembered the hunger, the haste of the night before, then the enervation and helplessness which had prevented her from exploring Andrea in all the intimate ways she had wanted…
“I’m sorry I fell asleep on you, yesterday was just—”
“Will you please stop apologizing? I feel glorious this morning. You were completely and wonderfully satisfying to me.”
There was indeed a contentedness in Andrea’s face, Kate realized, a tranquil beauty she had not seen before. And as if to confirm that she was a woman fully gratified, Andrea sat a distance from her on the bed, apparently not in need or in want of her touch this morning.
“I’m fixing some breakfast,” Andrea told her, smiling. “Will you join me?”
“Coffee would be fine,” Kate said. Suddenly aware that she was ravenous, she added, “And whatever you’re having, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“I eat toast and melon in the morning, will that be all right?”
“Fine,” Kate replied, longing for bacon and eggs and English muffins. Everyone she knew these days, except for Taylor, was eating food that was light, healthy, and, as far as she was concerned, depriving.
Andrea rose; her floor-length robe swirling about her feet, she made her elegant way from the bedroom. Kate took a quick shower, helped herself to deodorant, made do with mouthwash, and pulled on her clothes. She seated herself at the table in the dining alcove off the kitchen and cheerfully and swiftly polished off a third of a cantaloupe and two slices of whole wheat toast, declining seconds, having decided that she would have a decent breakfast later with Taylor.
Andrea was talking easily about the changes she had made in this house since buying it two years before, and her pride and pleasure in it. There was a formality about her that Kate sensed she should not disturb; and she responded with anecdotes of her own experience as a homeowner, careful not to allude in any way to their communion in the night.
Then Andrea said, spearing her last chunk of cantaloupe, “I was never unfaithful to Bev the whole time we were together. Do you believe that, Kate?”
“Of course I believe it,” Kate said, finishing her coffee. “I was never unfaithful to Anne and we were together twelve years.”
Andrea smiled. “Yes, I can sense you’d be like that with a woman you loved. But after the way Bev was about my surgery… I don’t care how many times she tried to explain, or what she did or said she could never have been the first woman in my bed after my operation, do you understand that?”
“I still think you’re being a little hard on her,” Kate answered, refilling her coffee cup, not caring a whit about Bev.
“I was in the Nightwood Bar waiting for you,” Andrea said softly. “I didn’t know how long I’d have to continue going there till someone like you came in. Women approached me, but I was waiting for you. Just you.”
Kate stared at her, amazed and speechless. Andrea, regal in the clinging silkiness of the blue robe, had never seemed more beautiful to her.
“Maybe I willed you to me because of my need,” Andrea mused, her dark eyes distant. Then she looked candidly at Kate. “I needed a woman I admired and respected, a woman who was not just attracted to me, but who I found attractive, too.”
“Thank you,” Kate managed.
“No. I’m the one who owes all the thanks. For the first time in my life I needed validation as a woman. And I had to have it from you. Not from Bev, not from just any woman, but from you. When you wanted me last night and made love to me the way you did, you were everything I needed.”
Kate looked at her in quiet wonder.
Andrea continued in a sober tone, “And I enjoyed pleasing you, I enjoyed you, Kate.”
A silence fell between them that was delicate, cocoonlike; Kate felt unwilling to disturb it. She drank her coffee as Andrea glanced into a leather-bound appointment book presumably listing her real estate activity for this day.
Finally, Kate rose. Andrea took her arm, walked with her to the door.
Her hands gentle on Andrea’s shoulders, Kate kissed her forehead. “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” she said. “Will you be here this evening?”
“Of course.”
Something about the tone rang oddly to Kate’s ear; she looked sharply at Andrea. But Andrea was smiling.
* * *
Kate sat at her desk in the Detectives Squad Room looking over the notes of her separate interrogations of the three young men arrested at the Nightwood Bar.
Perry Jerome Lee, the black youth, appeared to be solidly alibied; on Sunday afternoon and evening he had been in South Central L.A. playing pool in Jakey’s Bar; he claimed two bartenders would vouch for him. Robert Kenneth Johnson and Gerald Thomas Petrie had been “just hanging out” and could not or would not account for their specific whereabouts. Lee and Johnson had come to the Nightwood Bar at Petrie’s suggestion; Petrie, who lived in a furnished room on Sycamore, had heard “around the neighborhood” that there had been a death at “this weirdo bar for dykes” and wanted to “take a look at this weirdo joint and its weirdo customers.”
From there the stories diverged. Lee had been merely “trying to rescue a black sister, she had no truck at all with those perverts.” Johnson and Petrie’s story was as Kate had foretold: Audie had agreed to accompany them, and first the women and then Kate had interfered. In Kate’s presence Petrie had only once touched the bridge of his nose and the bruising along his cheekbones, then jerked his hand away; he did not mention his injuries.
According to Petrie and Johnson, they’d maybe had a few drinks, nothing more. Lee claimed with a straight face that he had accepted pain pills from a friend for a headache. The Pontiac had checked out clean…
During her intense questioning of each of the three, Taylor had been present but merely listened, a foot propped up on the interrogation room table, his silent, ominous presence drawing increasingly uneasy glances from each youth. Now Taylor was taking his own turn with them, working solo, bringing the suspects back one at a time to point up the contradictions in each of their stories.
Kate tossed her notepad onto the desk. Petrie—or perhaps both Johnson and Petrie—could be involved with Dory Quillin’s death, but instinct told her it was unlikely. They were both petty thieves and dopers, and the money and cocaine in Dory Quillin’s van had been left intact. Thieves could indeed be rapists, but they seldom crossed over into gratuitous killing. In any case they would have to be released; there was nothing to hold them on.
Amid the hum of conversation, the slamming of file drawers, the usual buzzing activity of the drab squad room, Kate heard her name over the paging system. She picked up her phone. “Detective Delafield.”
“This is Neely Malone.” The voice was high and soft. “I’m sorry, I’ve known for a few days that you wanted to talk to me, but I haven’t been in any condition to talk to anyone since Sunday night.” The words were spoken tremulously, but with the precision and enunciation of a well-educated woman.
“Miss Malone, I understand,” Kate answered, her elation at finally contacting this woman evaporating in sympathy for her grief. Whatever role Neely Malone had played in Dory Quillin’s life, hers was the first emotion she had sensed in anyone that seemed deeper than transitory mourning. “I’m truly sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. Thank you for your understanding. From what I hear about you, I know you do understand.”
Apparently the women at the Nightwood Bar had conveyed their trust in Kate, or their knowledge that she was a lesbian, or both.
“My partner and I would like to talk to you. Would it be convenient—”
“It would be convenient for me to come there,” Neely Malone said with polite firmness. “Would eleven o’clock be all right?”
“We’ll see you then, Miss Malone.”
At ten thirty Taylor sauntered back into the squad room and slid a hip onto the edge of Kate’s desk. He chuckled, and aimed a playful punch at her shoulder. “Petrie got real pissed when I asked about the marks on his face. Said it was none of my fucking business that he got in a scuffle with some dude—dude, you got that?—before he got to the Nightwood Bar.”
Kate smiled wryly. “Is that a fact?” Audie had refused to press charges because she was a lesbian, and now one of Audie’s assailants refused to claim excessive force—or to acknowledge any force at all—by a police officer because that officer was a woman.
“Taking on three assholes loaded on drugs, you should get a medal,” he growled. “It bugs me we gotta let ’em go, Kate. They’d have taken that woman and raped her out of her mind, they’re pure dogshit, you can smell ’em.” Taylor was jerking a contemptuous thumb repeatedly toward the interrogation room. “What really bugs me is Petrie. If he wasn’t too much of a macho man to admit he got taken down by a woman cop, you’d be in a hassle right now with Internal Affairs. That’s the shit that makes me want to grab the goddamn twenty-year pension and go raise goddamn avocados.”
Kate succumbed to his angry cynicism, adding to it her own vindictiveness: Petrie deserved much more than just getting his face smashed into the hood of a car. All three of the creeps did.
Yet, in the cold, objective core of her she knew she had been out of control in that parking lot. A police officer must always perform with poise—and while she had used force out of necessity, her rage as a lesbian woman had also been a major component. Just as well she did not have to explain and defend herself to Internal Affairs.
“Ed, those three aren’t so dumb they can’t figure out why they weren’t booked. They’ll go back up to that bar—”
Taylor crossed his arms. “I made a few suggestions to the three gentlemen.”
Kate grinned at him, knowing the tone, imagining him in the interrogation room, his bulk looming over each suspect, his face close to theirs as he spoke softly, politely. Taylor at his most polite was Taylor at his most menacing.
“So tell me, Ed.”
“I strongly suggested to Mr. Lee and Mr. Johnson that unless we have further questions for them about Sunday’s events at the Nightwood Bar, two-bit hoods like themselves should think very carefully before coming back into this division, that we would not be nearly so gracious and hospitable next time. I suggested to Mr. Petrie in particular that since he continues to smell up our division by living here, if he’s so hard up that he needs to go looking for lesbians, maybe his manhood needs further research—and the next time we pick him up I’ll see to it personally that he gets put in a certain detention cell where his masculinity will be thoroughly and exhaustively researched.”
Laughing, sitting back in her chair with her hands behind her head, Kate said, “Ed, by all means, let’s requisition that detention cell.”
“The assholes,” Taylor pronounced in final dismissal. “So what’s on the agenda for today, Wonder Woman?”
“Neely Malone will be here in a few minutes. Depending on what she tells us, we may have new leads to check out. Otherwise we finish up Dory Quillin’s john list.”
Taylor groaned loudly.
“Then we pick up a gasoline credit card for a trip tomorrow to interview the ex-gym teacher in Modesto.”
Taylor groaned even more loudly. “Hours and hours of nothing but looking at farmland and cows. Coming and going. Shit, Kate.”
* * *
Neely Malone sat in the straight-backed chair in the interview room and passed a hand over a modest and perfectly round afro with a streak of gray through it like the flange on a Roman helmet. Then she removed rimless glasses, reached into her purse and extracted a tissue and dabbed at her red-rimmed eyes, and replaced the glasses.
She looked at Kate. Her dark eyes, accented by a touch of burnt sienna eyeshadow and magnified by the thick lenses, seemed propelled out from her round face. “Please call me Neely,” she said in the high, soft, tremulous voice Kate had heard on the phone.
She was a rotund woman, her generous curves enhanced by her flowing, casual clothing. Kate liked the maroon tunic, the clay-colored loose trousers of very light crinkled cotton; the colors were rich against the honey-brown tones of her skin. But it was Neely Malone’s magnified eyes that were most arresting: they confirmed the intelligence Kate had heard on the phone, and they contained unmistakable softness and compassion. She appeared to be a woman of great warmth and givingness, and Kate was instinctively drawn to her.
Taylor came into the room, Kate introducing him as he settled in next to her at the blond Formica table. “Ma’am,” he said, “we’re very sorry, and sorry to have to trouble you.”
Taylor’s approach was unusually deferential, even to a tearful woman; and Kate saw that he was disconcerted. The motherliness of Neely Malone obviously did not fit into any of his stereotypical concepts of lesbians. She said to Neely, “Perhaps we could start by having you tell us when you last saw Dory.”
“A week ago today. She came over for dinner. She called the next night, and that was the last…” She dabbed under her lenses with her tissue, then took the glasses off and tucked them away in her purse. “She dropped in for dinner whenever the spirit moved her, I was always glad to have her. She went her own separate way from me ten months ago.”
The words had been spoken calmly, without bitterness; there was no attempt to cover up who had left whom. Kate studied her a moment longer before asking, “How long did you know her altogether?”
“She lived with me not quite eleven months. I met her almost exactly a year before that, I—”
“So you knew her from the time she was what, seventeen?” Kate interrupted, wanting to complete these figures in her notes before Neely continued.
“Only in a manner of speaking. I was going to say met her for the first time at USC County General. I’m a nurse, I work graveyard in the psychiatric ward.”
Neely intercepted Kate’s glance of amazement. “Drugs,” she said succinctly. “She did cocaine mixed with God knows what, I don’t remember, heroin in all probability. She went beserk, they brought her in in restraints. Young people, they put any sort of junk into themselves, the stories I could tell you…” She raised her hands in a gesture of futility. “The drugs she took brought her to some terrible, terrible place.”
Her eyes were distant, narrowing with the pain of memory, filling with tears that spilled over. “That night I held her as much as I could, restraints and all, and talked to her. It did seem to help. Her poor little body jerked and twitched, she was moaning so…” Neely paused to swab the tears from her cheeks. Kate could easily imagine her plump figure in a white starched uniform, could visualize her bringing comfort to the agonized Dory Quillin with her warmth and calm, motherly strength.
Neely shook her head vigorously, as if to cleanse it of memory. “Sometime that next day she straightened out—or at least she was gone from the ward my next shift. The next time I saw her was a year later. I broke up with a lover and went out to the bars again, and I saw her at the Horn—that’s a club in the Valley that draws older, more established women. I learned later that she needed a mature woman, someone she could trust. She was eighteen by then, and, of course, I’d had no idea she was gay. I didn’t think she would possibly remember me—but she did. She came home with me that night, and didn’t leave.”
“During that time—” Taylor cleared his throat; Kate knew he was phrasing his question with care. “During that time she wasn’t doing drugs or…plying her other trade?”
“Wrong,” Neely said crisply. “She still did coke once in a while. But selling her body—that happened much more often.”
“Did it bother you?” Taylor asked.
At least once every interview, Kate thought in disgust, Taylor had to be an idiot at least once every interview.
“Bother me?” Neely uttered the words as if examining excrement. “Would it bother you if your wife was a hooker?”
Taylor, writing in his notebook, did not reply. Neely spoke directly to Kate. “She couldn’t see why selling her body to men mattered, even to someone who loved her. Because it meant nothing at all to her. Her body was a commodity attached to nothing else about herself, she could sell it at a good price—so why not? And you couldn’t convince her it was degrading because she was so totally contemptuous of her johns that she thought they were the ones who were degraded.”
“Eleven months,” Taylor said. “If she was so hopeless, why’d you stick with her even that long?”
“She wasn’t hopeless. And while I was trying to help her I grew to love her very much,” Neely said simply, and Kate believed her.
Neely continued, “I had to be extremely careful with any attempt to change her behavior. It was all a matter of approach, of challenging her. I accused her of abandoning school because she lacked the courage to continue. That infuriated her, she went out and passed the high school equivalency test, she enrolled at L.A. City College.”
“She ever attend classes?” Kate asked, smiling at Neely’s deviousness.
“She took introductory courses in psychology, sociology and philosophy,” Neely said proudly. “I’ve still got the textbooks, her notebooks too. She’d just enrolled for—” She broke off; her eyes teared again.
“Neely,” Taylor said, “why did she leave you?”
She reached into her purse for another tissue. “Everything fell apart when Mama had her stroke. It was a terrible time, I had terrible money worries… All of a sudden between my job and worrying over Mama I had almost no time to give Dory…”
Neely blew into her fresh tissue. “Then what happened was even worse. Mama’s medical bills were just—” Neely gestured with a palm extended high over the floor. “Dory offered money. Twenty-eight hundred dollars cash, most of it hundred dollar bills. I couldn’t take it—I couldn’t. Because I knew how she got it and—I mean, how could I take that kind of money from her, how could I?”
Neely blew her nose again. “I’ve had psychological training, I knew why children become prostitutes, I knew the pattern of Dory’s life, I knew not to be judgmental or punitive because that’s exactly what she’d run away from. But that’s what she saw.”
“Excuse me,” Taylor said, getting up. The door of the interview room was ajar, and Taylor was being paged. “Please go on,” Kate said to Neely.
“I knew Dory would leave someday, I knew that. But she needed caring for, and safe shelter until she was ready.” Neely shook her head. “Anyway, she bought her van and that was that. I thought the Nightwood Bar wasn’t the worst place for her to stay. Maggie’s a good woman, I knew she was keeping an eye on her. I didn’t go there except once in a while, I had to let my wounds heal.”
“Neely, do you have some notion of what her current life was like, her associates? Whether she had any enemies?”
“Enemies?” Neely shrugged. “You know maybe even better than I do how dangerous it was—that young girl with those strange men. But she never talked about them, except to laugh and sneer. Whenever she came over to see me she talked about women she met at the bars, or about her classes, or books… And, of course, her parents. I assume you know all about that.”
Kate said carefully, “We’ve been trying to put together an objective picture of Dory’s life, but they haven’t been too helpful.”
Neely smiled faintly. “I imagine not. A couple of weeks after Dory was with me she claimed they wanted to meet me. The little liar,” she murmured, smiling softly as she remembered. “She claimed they knew she was a lesbian, and, of course, by then I didn’t have nearly enough of a picture of her life with them to know everything that was going on…so it was a bizarre new version of guess who’s coming to dinner, except we got only as far as the living room. Her father ordered us out, I thought her mother would have a heart attack. I was mortified.”
Neely erased any impression of mortification with a chuckle so infectious that Kate responded to it with a grin of her own. “I was so furious with Dory,” Neely reminisced, “but later I understood why she did it—she wanted to force her mother to face reality just once, to see and to believe something about her.”
Taylor had returned to his chair, and Neely addressed both detectives: “You do know her father molested her?”
“Neely,” Kate said, “we really can’t discuss the information we’ve put together. But we’d like to know anything you can tell us about that.”
Neely said quietly, “If I’d known about Roland Quillin before I met him, I’d have vomited all over him. And Flora Quillin too. With all her denying, she’s just as bad. Both parents denying even the existence of the damage they’d done—”
“Do you think,” Taylor asked, “or did Dory think they were responsible for her turning out the way she did?”
Neely winced at the question, then said forcefully to Taylor, “What do you think? They denied sexual abuse, they rejected her as a lesbian, as a person—”
“So why didn’t she just reject them right back? If they were my parents I’d have told ’em exactly where to get off.”
“No way,” Neely said heatedly. “You’re telling me you could just walk away if someone committed a crime against you?”
Fat chance, Kate thought.
“Dory couldn’t walk away from that any more than you could. She couldn’t have them not matter to her, she was obsessed with extracting some kind of acknowledgment from them.”
Then Neely’s shoulders slumped, and she sighed. “She even took it into her head to sue. And she was serious.” She said to Taylor, “Imagine thinking you could sue six years after a crime, when you’ve already accused an innocent teacher of a similar crime, when you’ve concealed from a psychologist what really happened, when you’ve been making your living as a prostitute.”
“Not a chance,” Taylor said.
“Exactly what I told her.”
“This business with the father,” Taylor said, tapping his pen on his notepad. “If she made it up about the teacher, then why not the father?”
Neely Malone fixed her dark eyes on him. “She could have sex freely with men she despised, but when it came to the lovemaking she really wanted—she froze. I happen to have firsthand knowledge. She told me what he did to her, but I knew anyway because of what she couldn’t bring herself to do with me. First he’d fondle her between her legs, then he’d masturbate while he was performing cunnilingus on her. During school term he did it whenever he could get her alone away from her mother. During summer vacations he did it daily, sometimes several times a day. And he did it from the time she was five.”
Kate felt as if she were caught in a pool of silence containing only herself and Taylor and Neely Malone. Finally she said, “Dory took a trip up to Central California a few days before she—” She fumbled for words. “—before it happened.”
“I know,” Neely said. “Or at least I know she went somewhere. She called last Thursday night, she had something to do up north, she’d be over to see me with some news soon after she got back. I remember she sounded very quiet on the phone, kind of strange, and I asked what was wrong, where was she going. She just repeated what she’d already said.”
“Do you think she might have gone up to see the teacher she accused?”
“Him? I don’t believe she ever knew where he ended up. But maybe she found out, maybe that’s exactly where she went. To see him, explain. It never stopped bothering her, you know.”
From a folder on her desk Kate extracted and held up a photocopy of the figures she had found in Dory Quillin’s van.
S285
S288
S290
“Does this mean anything to you?”
Neely glanced curiously at the figures. “No. Should it?”
“We believe Dory was working on this shortly before…the time of her death.”
Neely reached for the paper, spread it over her lap. A tear splashed onto the page. “Oh my God, look what—”
“It’s all right,” Kate said. “Take your time, Neely.”
“I can see Dory was agitated… The numbers look so… powerful,” she murmured. She examined the figures for some time. “I have no idea what it means,” she finally said. Running her fingers over the paper, she asked huskily, “Could I possibly have this to keep?”
“Of course.”
Kate watched Neely’s hands fold the paper and tuck it carefully in the side pocket of her purse, the hands large and capable and yet soft-looking, the hands that had held and loved Dory Quillin…
“Thank you for your help,” she said, thinking that while Neely had succeeded in bringing the dead young woman with the blond hair and silver-blue eyes more fully to life for her, Neely had brought her no closer to finding Dory Quillin’s killer. Leads had now reached the vanishing point.
Again Taylor was paged; with a mutter of apology he trudged from the room to answer his phone.
“Do you know—” Neely’s voice faltered. “The Quillins, do you know what arrangements they’ve made about…Dory?”
“No I don’t,” Kate answered softly. If the Quillins felt no obligation to identify their daughter’s body, would they wish to claim it for burial?
“Dory loved the water so,” Neely whispered. “I know she’d want her ashes scattered at sea. Do you think you could get the Quillins to do that? Or to maybe release the body to me? I’d find the money somewhere, I’d just have to.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Neely, I’ll see what I can find out.”
“I’ve been thinking the past three days and nights why I loved her so much,” Neely said. “I know part of it was because there was so much child in her, so much mother in me. She was the child I always wanted—in my day you couldn’t have a child and live as an independent lesbian like some of us do today. But Dory was every bit a woman, too, and so beautiful, you know… Smart as a whip, bright and quick…and sweet and tender… One minute she’d be arguing over some passage in her philosophy book, the next minute she’d be crying over a dead bird she found in my garden. She was awkward as a colt in some ways, you just wanted to hug her all the time. There’s a phrase from somewhere in Shakespeare I remember from high school, it’s been running through my mind these past days—‘Life’s bright fire.’”
Aching with sympathy for the woman across from her, Kate sat quietly, unmoving, while Neely dabbed again at her eyes.
“Most of us are gray people who just make our way through life,” Neely said. “And then some of us are like Dory. I know she’s what Shakespeare thought about when he wrote that phrase—she was life’s bright fire.”
Gently, Kate said the words Andrea had spoken last night about Anne: “She was lucky to have you for the time that she did.”
Neely Malone nodded, put her glasses back on, gathered her purse, and rose. She took the card Kate handed to her, then looked at the case file on the table, at the yellow pad with Kate’s notes of this interview. “To be filed away in the records of a police station—I guess that’s more immortality than most of us will ever have.”