Murder in the Collective (12 page)

“I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Oh god, where is she?”

Elena put her head down on the kitchen table and sobbed.

I
T WAS JUST AFTER
six when I dropped the kids off with Elena’s friends. Hadley had explained the circumstances on the phone and Jill and Marie asked no questions, simply unleashed Samantha and Garson into a herd of kids running around the back yard. We exchanged a few perfunctory remarks and then I was on my way again, driving Hadley’s truck. She’d said she’d just walk home from Elena’s and I could give it to her later. I started home for dinner, then abruptly changed direction.

I suddenly decided to drive up to Beacon Hill and see what Zee was doing.

Zee’s aunt’s house was a small neat one overlooking the freeway. The lot had recently been planted with a new lawn; there were stakes and strings all around and a fresh green was just coming up. The drapes were closed and the porch light was on, though it was quite early still. Otherwise the house was perfectly ordinary. I’d only been here once before, to drop Zee off. She’d asked me to come in and I’d stopped for a minute. Her aunt was a beautifully dressed, plump, black-eyed woman. In the Philippines she’d been married to a union lawyer who’d disappeared early in the seventies and was presumed dead. She too had been held for questioning, but had managed to leave the country. She had been in the States for six years and worked as a nurse at a large Seattle hospital. That day she’d offered Zee and me tea and cookies; when she’d gone to get them I’d seen she walked with a slight limp.

I knocked. There was no answer. Knocked again. Louder.

A neighbor woman next door poked her head out her window. She was Chinese, maybe Korean. “No there. Ladies no there. Go away.”

I thought for a minute she was telling me to move on and stared at her in surprise, but then I thought more about it and asked, “They went away where? Do you know where they went away to?”

“No here, no here. They go morning, they have bag. They go taxi. Go home.”

“Home? You mean, the Philippines?”

“No here, no here. Go away, go home,” the woman said and disappeared behind a curtain.

“Well, Detective Nilsen,” I muttered to myself. “What now? Check the passenger list for the morning flight to Manila?”

I looked more closely at the house. There was no doubt about it. In spite of the new lawn, the drapes were tightly closed and the house had that indefinable air homes get when their owners plan to be gone for a long time.

It was always possible, of course, that the two of them had simply gone off somewhere for a vacation. But the timing was a bit awkward, considering Jeremy’s demise, and there was also the fact that Zee hadn’t mentioned anything about a trip last night.

There was more to all this than met the eye—more than was meeting my suddenly sleepy eyes, for sure. I decided the very best thing for me would be a nap.

Sam and Jude were in the kitchen making dinner when I walked in.

“Penny’s asleep,” they told me.

“That’s just where I’m headed.”

“Don’t you want anything to eat?”

The fish stew smelled inviting but I was too tired to be hungry. “Save some for me. I’ll be up again in an hour or two.”

But once I lay down I was out for good. I hadn’t had more than a few hours last night and today’s sun as well as the feeling of deepening mysteries had knocked me out. I fell quickly into such a deep and dreamless sleep that it was a long while before I was aware that someone was shaking me awake.

“Pam,” my sister was saying. “Pam, come on, wake up. Something important. Wake up.”

“Ughnngh,” I groaned. “No, no.”

She kept shaking my shoulder. “Pam. Pam. Come on.”

“Goddamn it,” I said suddenly and clearly, my voice infused with the fierce and irrational anger that comes of being dragged into consciousness again. “What the fuck is it?”

“Zee,” she whispered.

“Zee what? I could use some more zees.”

“Shhh,” she said. “Not so loud. Zee’s here.”

“No she’s not, she’s taking a vacation, she went away,” I muttered. “What the fuck time is it, anyway?” I sat up. The room was dark and so was the window. I must have been sleeping for hours. I felt awful.

“It’s midnight,” she whispered. “I don’t want to wake Sam and Jude. Look, Pam, I need your help. Zee and Ray are here and she wants to tell us some things. She wants us to hide her.”

I was more awake with every sentence. “But she and her aunt left on a trip, the neighbor said….She’s here? With Ray?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Penny said patiently. “Now are you awake or aren’t you?”

“I think so,” I said, getting up and stretching. “Unless I’m still dreaming.” I discovered, to my surprise, that I was dressed and ready to go. On my feet I didn’t feel so bad. “She wants us to hide her,” I suddenly said, taking it in. “From what?”

There was one lamp lit downstairs in the living room and Ray sat, black hair and beard glittering like tar, under its glow. Zee was shadowed in a corner, legs curled under her on the big chair, fingers twisting a button of her short-sleeved silk shirt.

“Zee, what’s this about?”

“I…”

Ray broke in. “Zee needs a safe place to stay for a while.” Irritable, concerned, a little too masterful, he was addressing himself to Penny rather than me. “This is the best place, I think.”

“Why not let her talk for herself?” I said. “Zee, what’s going on? Your next door neighbor told me you and your aunt went away, with suitcases, in a taxi.”

“My aunt has gone to stay with relatives in New York for a little while.” Zee’s face was composed now and she spoke quietly. “And no, it’s not a coincidence. But all the same, she wasn’t involved and shouldn’t have to answer any questions.”

“Questions about?”

“About me and Jeremy.”

I expected to see more of a reaction on Ray’s face. If not teeth-baring angry jealously, then at least wounded pride. But he was smiling at Penny, who had just yawned uncontrollably and wrenchingly.

“Then June had a right to be jealous,” I said.

“No, it wasn’t that way, it wasn’t that kind of involvement,” Zee said quickly.

“But you were planning to meet Jeremy last night at the shop for some reason.”

“That’s true,” said Zee. “I was.” She paused and looked at her feet, as if wondering where they had taken her. “I had gotten there early. I thought, if Jeremy hadn’t arrived perhaps I could do…something…on my own. We should have been meeting at eleven. I got there at ten and saw the police cars everywhere. I went into a doorway across the street and just watched. Finally I saw you leave and then they brought a stretcher out. That’s why I came to you last night, to find out what happened.”

“But you didn’t go to Ray’s afterwards.”

“No. I didn’t. I…had to go back to the shop.”

“To destroy something,” I suggested.

“No,” said Zee firmly. “To save some things.”

I looked at Ray. “Do you know what this is all about?”

“I trust Zee,” he said. “I think we’ve all got to trust Zee.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Penny yawning again and suddenly turned on her. “Are we boring you? I suppose you’ve already figured out the whole thing.”

She yawned again. “It’s physiological, dear, not a measure of my interest. And yes, I think I do have an inkling.”

“What then?”

“You were the one who suggested the idea to me. Noticing the negatives hanging to dry and also noticing that they’d been taken down the next morning. Zee asked about them specifically last night. Therefore, I deduce that both Zee and Jeremy had an interest in those negatives and probably a joint interest.” She paused and ran her fingers through her cockscomb hair. “I don’t necessarily deduce from that that Zee had anything to do with his murder.”

“But what were they—what were
you
,” I looked at Zee, “doing with the negatives?”

“Forging,” said Penny and Zee in unison and Zee continued, “We were forging documents for illegal aliens.”

She had met Jeremy, Zee said, through Best Printing, but she’d also seen him once or twice at a demonstration and once at a benefit for the anti-Marcos group she was involved with. She’d judged from that that he was a sympathizer. One day, over lunch, they’d gotten talking about the current situation in the Philippines. He was really shocked; he said he’d had no idea it was so bad there. He asked if there was anything he could do about it, anything to help out. Well, maybe Zee had confided more than she ought. She had said there was a big problem now with people like herself, students who had gotten involved politically or who came from politically inclined liberal families, and who were now afraid to go back home, who wanted to stay in the States. They couldn’t get papers to stay, most of them. Not for working, not for further studies. She already knew some who had gone back home and immediately been put in jail.

It was Jeremy’s idea, yes, he had suggested it. What kind of papers did they need, he wanted to know? Work papers, green cards, certificates. Wouldn’t it be possible just to make them? Duplicate them, fill them out, and sign them? After all, they worked at a print shop.

When did all this start? Six months ago, maybe seven. It had taken them a while to come up with the information and the best way of producing the documents. Now they met, had met, once every two weeks. The negatives on the line last night had been for some new forms the government had started using.

Over the course of half a year they had gotten new papers for twenty or thirty people.

“I suppose they paid pretty well for the documents,” I said, thinking of the roll of bills in Jeremy’s pocket.

Zee looked surprised. “Not much,” she said. “Jeremy and I didn’t take anything, just the cost of the materials and a little bit more. It was for political reasons.”

I said slowly, “Elena today suggested that Jeremy was an informer, that Fran told her she saw him accepting money or something….Maybe he was spying on B. Violet, she said.”

Penny snorted, “Elena is one of those half-baked lefties who always think they’re being infiltrated. Jeremy’s been with Best for almost a year and this merger idea only came up last week. How could he have been investigating B. Violet? How come he wasn’t investigating us?”

“Maybe he
was
investigating us,” Ray said.

I
T WAS THREE IN
the morning before I got to sleep again. I’d spent an hour hearing the whole story from Zee and another two thinking it out for myself. Penny had fixed up a bed for Zee in the attic and Ray had finally gone home.

I lay in bed watching the street lamp through the window and realized that my attitude toward Jeremy had changed drastically in the past forty-eight hours. Before his murder I’d had only pleasant, if sometimes impatient, feelings about him. He had called out the familial in me, rather than the romantic, even though I acknowledged his good looks. He was too skinny, too pretty, too young; he wore too many earrings, smoked too much dope. Yet it had been fun to horseplay with him sometimes, to shake my (elderly) head over his naive remarks. I’d always been more lenient with him than with any of the others; I’d made jokes about his spaciness but had still accepted it with an “oh well,” a shrug. Jeremy’s forgetfulness, his slow tentative smile as he asked you to repeat something or as he apologized, they were just his way.

But what if they hadn’t been “his way”? What if Jeremy’s sweet boyishness, his puzzled vagueness had been all put on? What if the real Jeremy was the one who told June she wasn’t the only scene in town, the one who had hundreds of dollars in his pocket, the one who forged identity papers—the one who was an informer—for someone—about someone?

It was hard to believe. I thought back to the day Jeremy had come by the shop last year. Kay had been doing our camera work then. She’d been a hard person to get along with, testy, with a flaring temper, and in recent months there’d been a lot of fighting. She’d finally announced she was leaving. Fine, we said, while wondering what to do now. That same afternoon a young blond man with earrings and ringlets had stopped in the doorway.

“What’s all this? Oh wow, a collective printshop. What a great idea, far out. Hey, I studied printing and camera in California. You don’t need anybody, do you?”

An FBI informer would never have had such good luck. An FBI informer would have been seen through months before. An FBI informer wouldn’t waste his time on Best Printing. It wasn’t like we were some ultra-left group fomenting revolution. We just did printing.

Automatically, memories of different jobs passed through my mind. Benefit posters and flyers for bookstore collectives, for food and bike co-ops, pamphlets for anti-war groups, brochures for feminist businesses, a few books every year on subjects like rape, racism and cultural genocide…it was true that almost every leftist feminist or progressive group had dealt with us at one time or another….

A sudden chill passed over me and I huddled deeper under my covers. It had just occurred to me that a print shop might be the ideal place to keep tabs on the various groups in town. No need to go and hunt them down, they would come to you, flyer copy in hand, earnestly explaining their politics. You’d know of every benefit before it was announced, read every bit of literature before it appeared in the mail. Aside from that you could hear a fair amount of gossip as well—which group wasn’t speaking to which group, for instance; the ins and outs of various party lines; who was coming to town, who was leaving, who was here.

And what a bonus being in the darkroom, able to develop all those negatives—one for you, one for them—not to mention the photographs you could take—with your secret camera—of everyone who came to the shop.

It was a nightmarish thought and one which, I stubbornly continued to feel, was impossible. Not Jeremy, not Jeremy. We would have known.

And yet, what had we really known about Jeremy? He talked freely—but about nothing in particular. He lived in a small apartment by himself in the University District, he had a few friends who called him up from time to time, he’d had a girlfriend once, I remembered…had those people suspected? Had they been FBI agents or informers too? And what would the FBI do now that he was dead? Would they be investigating? The very thought was enough to make me scrunch up into the tiniest ball I could. I hadn’t frightened myself so thoroughly since the day after my parents died.