Murder in the Collective by Barbara Wilson

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.

7
    H ADLEY, MARGARET AND ANNA stayed at B. Violet in order to assess the damage and see if there was anything that could be salvaged from the mess. I hoped that Hadley was planning on having a serious talk with Margaret and Anna.
    Penny and I took Elena home with us for breakfast. We probably wanted to see how much she really knew about what had happened too.
    But all she wanted to discuss was her relationship with Fran, right from the beginning. We got her to wait until we’d at least had a cup of coffee and then, while Penny broke eggs into sizzling butter and I made toast, we prepared ourselves to listen.
    It had been when Elena was fighting her