“I knew it!” Jocelyn barked, pounding the cowering air in front of her Imperial chest. “You’re railroading one of us!”
“All I’m doing is canvassing every possible angle. It wouldn’t be the first time someone ran afoul of a dogmatic enemy within a political movement.”
“Feminism isn’t a political movement.”
“Social movement then.”
“It’s not that either. Feminism is the morally justified intra-gender reaction to women’s reality.”
“Joe …” Hirsch said.
“Stay out of this, Davida.”
Morally justified intra-gender reaction to women’s reality? DeClercq had once seen a news interview with a British Army officer stationed in Belfast. The man was questioned about the jail practice of stripping Irish prisoners naked and having them lean, arms stretched out and blindfolded, against a wall of speakers that blared white noise in their faces for hours as a prelude to the third degree. “How do you justify such torture?” the newsman asked. “Torture?” the soldier replied. “That’s not torture.”
“No?” the newsman said. “Then what do you call it?”
Straight-faced, the soldier’s answer was: “Deep interrogation with acute humiliation and distress.” Was Kripp his mealymouthed sister?
“If we can get back to the matter at hand?” DeClercq said diplomatically. A black Cossack sniffling from a cold placed a bowl of borscht and what looked like a sausage roll in front of him. “Did Marsh have any enemies who might—”
“Why? So you can take the pressure off the phallocentric war being waged against women? Against feminists?”
“Joe …” Hirsch said.
But Joe—it sounded like Jaws—was in a feeding frenzy and circling DeClercq’s boat. In self-defence, he threw a harpoon.
“I’m having trouble with your generalization,” he said. “By ‘feminist’ do you mean ‘virtuous person who genuinely wishes to improve the lot of women?’ Or do you mean ‘noisy, overall-wearing person who hates men indiscriminately?’ The word ‘feminist’ is a label, and labels are control mechanisms. They put a handle on you. That one now has such a range of meanings I don’t see how it can be used without subtitles. Do you mean Gloria Steinem feminist? Audre Lorde feminist? Germaine Greer feminist? Marilyn French feminist? Susan Faludi feminist? Sonia Johnson feminist? Naomi Wolf feminist? Madonna feminist? Camille Paglia feminist—”
“Why isn’t a woman in charge of this case?” Kripp snapped.
“Because I am.”
“Aren’t there any women in your testicular club?”
“Yes.”
“Then what right have you to investigate Brigid’s murder? What do you know about women’s reality?”
“The question is what do I know about tracking down killers.”
“The fuck it is. Let me tell you something about women’s reality. You want to know who’s afraid of the dark? We are, that’s who. We’re supposedly part of a generation that can be or do anything it desires, yet a woman can’t leave her home at night or walk through the woods in daylight without being constantly aware that she is taking a risk. If you take a stroll in Stanley Park, do you—”
“You’ve been to Vancouver?”
Kripp’s nostrils flared like a picador-stuck bull’s. “Sure, I killed her. Fuck … you … too. You have no idea how many restrictions we face every day. One, the elevator rule”—she held up her little finger—“if you’re alone in an elevator with a man and feel uneasy, get off. Two, the stranger-at-the-door rule”—she held up her ring finger—“if there’s an unknown man at the door and you aren’t expecting someone, don’t answer it. Three, the walk-down-the-middle-of-the-road rule”—adding her middle finger—“avoid places where men can hide. Four, the when-you-hear-footsteps-behind-you rule”—now her index finger—“look for the nearest public place, gauge how far it is to home, ask yourself is there anyone there to help, search for something you can use in defense, get ready to scream, what about your neighbors, or should you switch directions?
“Every fucking man you meet could be The One. That’s the most insidious fear of all. The One could literally be any male. He may be polite and helpful, setting you up. He may be your husband if you’re silly enough to marry. Day by day the paranoia eats at you, until inevitably you think like a victim. The smart woman learns to trust no man. Because she knows it isn’t irrational to be afraid of the dark. That’s the safe way to live. Being a woman …”
“… means being afraid.”
Kripp scowled.
“I’ve seen the slogans,” DeClercq said.
“You want a taste of women’s reality? Imagine yourself trapped on an island where every move you make is fraught with death. How has violence against women ever affected you? You can have no idea. So you shouldn’t be on this case.”
When DeClercq spoke, his voice was cool and collected. He looked Kripp directly in the eye. “I accept the rational parts of what you have to say. I’ve seen the results of hundreds of rapes and sex murders. I lost my kind, intelligent, passionate wife Kate through violence to women. She gave me the sweetest, most loving child ever born, and I lost her to violence against women. I had the fortune to marry another intelligent, confident, humanitarian named Genevieve, and lost her to the same plague. So don’t you tell me I can have no comprehension of the effect of violence against women. I live with it every minute of the day. Someone you cared about was strangled, stabbed, skinned, and strung up like a piece of meat. I’m going to find who did it, and I’m going to find out why. Now either you help me, and are part of the solution, or you rant on about ‘women’s reality,’ and help them get away. The choice is yours. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Give him the file, Joe. Or I will,” Hirsch said.
* * *
The file was a thick spring-folder crammed with notes, newspaper clippings, photos, letters, book reviews, and sundry other research materials on Brigid Marsh’s life. There was a sheaf of backlash letters from penis-threatened males, basically misogynist rants that rivaled Kripp’s misandry, but what interested DeClercq was how Marsh came to person the barricades of right-wing feminism. What a route!
The pictures of her as a young girl were all sugar-and-spice. Daddy’s girl without a dad, but with a doting mom. Here was little Brigid in the grade one play, the cutest little sprite you ever did see. Here was little Brigid as a “sunny skipper” in ballet class, fluffy green tutu and rouge spots on her cheeks, curtsying for the camera like the next Shirley Temple. And there was mom in the background, egging her on. No doubt about it, little Brigid would be a star. A big Hollywood star. The Fifties. California.
Marsh’s high school graduation was a prom queen’s dream. If you hold the view it’s what’s up front that counts, little Brigid wasn’t little any more. Her figure was 35-22-34, the yearbook said, and in several of the photos of her you could almost see the lapdog boys licking their peach-fuzz lips. In a time when teenage life reflected the Archie comic strip, Brigid was Betty, the “girl next door,” not that tramp Veronica. No doubt about it, folks, here was the next Sandra Dee. Punched from the same cookie cutter that made all Gidget and Tammy clones. It even said so in the cutesy-wutesy bio on her, the one beneath the grad picture of a plucky ingénue whose every-strand-perfect “flips” were cemented in place with industrial-strength hairspray:
This vivacious grad is bound for Tinseltown! Watch out Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon! How to stuff a wild bikini! Va-va-va-voom! Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, with which of our boys to the prom will she go? Lift those bumpers, guys.
So Gidget went Hollywood.
Brigid secured a nonspeaking part in Presley’s Girls! Girls! Girls!, basically a jiggle and eye-flutter role. Those were the dying days of the studio system, when actors were cattle branded and contracted to a single baron. Brigid was signed and touted as the next virgin wet dream, with stories placed in all the Hollywood rags, and feted at a studio party akin to a debutante’s coming-out. T
he party was champagne, tickle your fancy, and pass the “powdered muff” (the term in the trade) around, which was crashed unobtrusively by Gene Brickman, the has-been cowboy star, then a booze-loving ladies’ man more of a roué swordsman than Errol Flynn in his final days.
Gidget got tipsy and boned.
In these days of abortion, when a woman’s right to choose is under no threat, it’s hard to believe there was a time when if you fell from grace you suffered the consequences, you filthy slut. The studio was heavily hyping DELILAH COY—the stage name the publicity department hung on Marsh—when an “urgent family matter” brought things to a halt. But within a year Delilah was back and the hype was being shoveled again, when one of the tabloids was given a tip to visit a wooded retreat in rural Oregon. There, by tele-photo lens, a photographer caught Delilah trimming the hair of a towheaded boy sitting in a high chair. The child’s name was Samson, discreet inquiries learned, so the photo ran under the blaring cutline Samson and Delilah!
Tsk Tsk. No more “powdered muff.” Brigid was “soiled goods.” The “girl next door” couldn’t have a thought of sex in her airhead, the role being that of baby blues above a set of boobs, lust being the right of the crewcut boys in the audience who nudged each other in the ribs. Nor could she move down the line and play the tramp. Her tits weren’t big enough.
Gidget got the bum’s-rush out of Hollywood.
And surfaced months later in Amazonia.
The Sixties.
California.
“How’d she end up there?” DeClercq asked.
“She met me,” Kripp said, chin thrust forward as if to say what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it-mister-man?
“Amazonia was a commune?”
“We owned a hundred acres in northern California.”
“A gathering of women? Early feminists?”
“There have always been feminists,” Kripp said with contempt. “You forget the suffragettes? You forget the—”
“Let’s quit mincing words. You know what I mean. What sort of women?”
“Dianics,” Kripp said.
“What’s a Dianic?”
“A witch,” she replied.
The word launched another humorless diatribe by Jaws, which DeClercq suffered as patiently as he had Moby Dick, waiting for that word-bag Melville to get to the bloody whale.
“Witches have a sexist bad rap,” Kripp complained. “That’s because witchcraft is rooted in women’s history and represents the feminine nature of the divine. Wicca isn’t about bubbling cauldrons, pointed hats, and pacts with Satan. We don’t believe in the Devil—unless it’s man. Women are the creative force in the universe, so Wicca is devoted to worshiping Mother Earth as the Great Goddess. The Goddess combines fertile youth with the wise old crone to fashion a nurturing, sustaining metaphor. We’re not just Adam’s rib. That’s why we’re hated. And why, between 1450 and 1700, eight million were put to death in the Women’s Holocaust. The Burning Times.”
“Eight million?” said DeClercq.
“More like 120,000,” Hirsch interjected. “Perhaps as high as 400,000.”
“The Witch Hunt was male bigotry in action,” said Kripp. “Men projected their collective anxieties onto us. Women still bear the brunt of the Burning Times, for much of the violence against us now originated then.”
“Men are witches, too,” said DeClercq. “How do you rationalize that with female hegemony?”
“Some pretenders link the Goddess to a Horned God so they can sit around naked and diddle each other with their minds. That’s not witchcraft. That’s not Wicca. Dianics seek to reclaim the wisdom and power of the witch as female healer, mystic, midwife, and nurturer. To do that it’s necessary to shut out men, so Dianic covens are for women only.”
Joe smiled for the first time.
“We’re witches without the warts.”
And so began Brigid Marsh’s militant Amazon phase. She and her son spent the next three years at the commune, out of which came her call to arms Mannequin. Getting fucked-over from getting fucked does things to your mind, so misandric anger sizzled on every get-even page. Her theory was men are sex-driven ogres who consciously choose to subjugate women for their own gratification, and nothing would change until women as mothers conditioned the next generation of males to think and behave in a proper feminist manner. The “war against women” had to be turned into a “war against men” if their misogynous plot was to be foiled. And the battleground was their sons.
No more Gidget.
Gone was the mannequin.
The file contained pictures taken at the commune. Hard-faced from years of abuse, you could see the hatred of men in the Earth Mothers’ eyes. And standing among them were several young boys. Including the towhead Samson.
Staring at the witches of Amazonia, Robert wondered how you condition a boy to think and behave in the proper feminist manner? Being a mother was surely one of the two most powerful careers on Earth. Be a good boy and you get the tit? Be a bad boy and you get the hairbrush or the enema syringe? Or was it more forceful than that?
If the Dianics of Amazonia were all like Jocelyn Kripp, he didn’t want to meet the third-stage-male who came out of their Frankenstein’s lab.
Male sexuality is nitroglycerine.
DEADMAN’S ISLAND
Coal Harbour, Vancouver
2:00 P.M.
“A murderer is hiding in this list,” Franklen said. “And fifty thousand dollars is riding on your choice.”
Sitting behind the pilot in the floatplane bumping the dock, a hail of rain drumming the metal fusilage overhead, sheets of rain slapping the porthole window to his left, darts of rain pocking the swells that rocked and rolled the pontoons, Zinc ran his eyes down the photocopied list.
Lou Bolt
Zinc Chandler
Sol Cohen
Luna Darke
Glen Devlin
Elvira Franklen
Stanley Holyoak
Alexis Hunt
Al Leech
Pete Leuthard
Barney Melburn
Adrian Quirk
Colby Smith
Wynn Yates
Uncapping his pen, Zinc struck Zinc Chandler off the list. And Then There Were “Thirteen,” he thought, cribbing Agatha Christie.
“Did you solve it?” A voice to his right.
“Hardly,” Zinc said, laughing. “I just got the list. Have to meet the suspects first. I’m new to this.”
“I mean The Judas Window” the man beside him said, indicating the novel in Chandler’s lap. “Undoubtedly the best locked room Carr wrote. And since Carr owned the field, the best locked room ever.”
Zinc eyed the mystery he had borrowed from Miss Deverell’s bookmobile back in Saskatchewan. “Carr’s Carter Dickson?”
“Same guy,” the old man replied. “As John Dickson Can-he wrote about Dr. Gideon Fell. As Carter Dickson about HM, Sir Henry Merrivale. For my money, the finest who and howdunits written.”
Elvira Franklen sat in the seat behind Chandler, impatiently watching the shore for the last stragglers to arrive. One plane had already departed for wherever they were going, a secret known only to the pilots of Thunderbird Charters. The airborne plane was banking west over Stanley Park.
“Wynn’s the genre’s authority on locked rooms,” Franklen said. “He wrote the definitive study, which won the Edgar at last April’s Mystery Writers dinner.”
“Congratulations,” Zinc said, shaking Wynn’s knobby hand. “I hope the puzzle this weekend’s not a locked room, Elvira? If it is, game’s over, and we can all go home.”
Wynn smiled sheepishly. “I still get stumped.”
Wynn Yates was a shriveled-up little guy whom Chandler instantly liked. His face looked like unoiled leather baked in the sun for most of a century. Like Elvira, he was in his eighties. On the ride in from the airport, she’d given Zinc a thumbnail sketch of his “rival sleuths.” Yates was born in Alaska in 1911. His father, who made a career of failure, went bankru
pt several times. At ten, Wynn ran away to join the rodeo. At fifteen, he sailed around the world. For fifty years he toiled as a journalist in Washington State, starting as a sports reporter and working up to editor emeritus of the best Seattle paper. For fun he wrote the gardening column, which is how he met Franklen, the green thumb queen of B.C.
Watching their body language, frail though it might be, Zinc detected subtle hints of something romantic between them.
Elvira, you sly fox.
Wynn, you libertine.
On retirement, Yates had turned to mystery criticism, penning The Sex Life of Ellery Queen, The Gray Cells of Hercule Poirot, and The Mean Streets of Philip Marlowe. The Locked Room Unlocked was his latest.
“Didn’t solve it,” Zinc said, of The Judas Window. “The howdunit got me. The whodunit I’m still reading.”
“No one solves it,” Yates said, “though the answer is maddeningly simple. In your line of work such puzzles must seem unrealistic. In our line of work they’re the purest form of crime. The first detective story was a locked room. Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ 1841. Death by throttling in a seemingly inaccessible room.”
“An ‘Ourang-Outang’ dunit,” Zinc said, thanks to his stakeout with Caradon in the Ghoul case.
“The most famous Sherlock Holmes story is also a locked room. ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band,’ 1892. Death by fright in a locked bedroom.”
“A ‘swamp adder’ dunit,” Zinc said, proud of his trivial pursuit so far.
“Tricking the reader often involves a fiendish array of death traps and diabolical machines. A prime example,” Yates said, “is Wilkie Collins’s ‘A Terribly Strange Bed,’ 1852. The canopy topping a four-poster bed is lowered by means of a ratchet to smother the sleeping victim.”
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