Murder in the Collective (9 page)

“Why the fuck did I have to say that, put my foot in it? I can’t believe it, I’m so stupid.”

“It’s my fault. I should have told you on the phone that he’d been killed. It just seemed so brutal.”

Penny finally remembered Marta Evans, the lawyer who’d worked with us some years ago on restructuring our business.

“Murder?” Marta said sleepily. “You said someone was
murdered
at Best Printing?”

“It was Jeremy, no, you don’t know him, but he was shot in the head in the darkroom—and they’ve taken June Jasper in for questioning.”

“Goddamn. What time is it? Okay, okay, I’ll do something. I’ll call them or go down there.” She paused, trying to remember. “Isn’t June the Black woman?”

“Yeah. And Marta…June accidentally shot her husband four years ago. And she was involved with Jeremy…”

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

Penny and I looked at each other in relief. “Now,” I said. “You’ve got to tell me what June said to you.”

“Well, first of all, did you ever know June and Jeremy were involved?”

“Only suspected it a couple days ago.”

“They’ve been hanging out together for a month.”

“Now that’s discreet. In our collective too.”

“They wanted it that way. After what happened between you and Ray…”

“Hey,” I said, nettled. “I didn’t plan it.”

“Well, June just said they both wanted it quiet. That’s why they got on each other’s backs at work all the time.”

“And I just thought they disagreed,” I said, ready as usual to twit Penny, but suddenly choking on the thought that Jeremy, laid-back, good-intentioned Jeremy wouldn’t be around to disagree with any more. “Go on.”

“They’ve been more or less living together, June said. And that’s how this argument started. He wanted to give up his apartment and move in with her. That or else give up everything altogether and get out of town. Travel.”

“Travel?” I sputtered. “June and her kids? And what about us, Best?”

“That’s what June said. She didn’t want to go anywhere. And she didn’t want him to move in. She only liked him living there, being around all the time, as long as he still had his own place.”

“Good thinking.”

“I guess they’d been discussing it for a while and then June just couldn’t take it any more and told him to fuck off last night, to clear out and go travel somewhere, to Antarctica, the farther away the better. You know how hot-tempered she can be. She says she threw a cup at him or something. And all of a sudden Jeremy just erupted. She’d never seen anything like it. Screaming that he didn’t need her fucking attitude any longer—she wasn’t the only scene in town. And anyway, things were changing for him, he was on a good streak but he was running out of patience, he didn’t have to stick around listening to her shit and on and on…”

“Jeremy…” I stopped. I couldn’t believe it. But I couldn’t not believe June either. I didn’t know what to believe. And suddenly I thought of Fran’s story that Jeremy was the one who destroyed B. Violet. I’d thought she was lying, but now…and what the hell had Jeremy been doing with hundreds of dollars in his pocket? He wasn’t that big a dealer.

“Penny, there are a few things I haven’t told you. Like…Fran. Fran was there tonight. She came in just after we found Jeremy, she came rushing in and flung herself down, thinking he was Elena—the hair, I guess. And she told us that Jeremy had sabotaged B. Violet last night. That she found him there.”

“She did what?” exclaimed Penny. “She found him at B. Violet and she didn’t say anything? Why didn’t she stay around for the cops tonight?”

“Maybe because she made that up about Jeremy,” I said. “She may have had some kind of alcoholic black-out and destroyed it herself.”

“Or,” said Penny calmly, “she realized that her motives for offing Jeremy would look too good to the law.”

“Or,” I said, but didn’t finish. The possibility that Fran had actually offed Jeremy became real to me for the first time.

“But if she didn’t,” said Penny, “who did?”

There was a hushed but persistent banging at our front door. My heart mimicked the sound instantly.

“I’ll go look,” I said. I sneaked up to the peephole and announced, “It’s Zee.”

Zee was, for the first time since I’d made her acquaintance, less than perfectly turned out. Her sculpted black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, leaving her wide-angled, rather flat face as free-floating as a light gold balloon. She was dressed simply in jeans, running shoes and a dark sweatshirt, and she was out of breath.

“Penny, Pam, let me in,” she was whispering urgently to the doorknob when I opened the door. She bounced in and grabbed each of us by an arm. “Something awful has happened. At the shop. There were policemen carrying out a body.”

I couldn’t help shuddering. We’d turned away from that last horrible sight.

“I know,” I said, as gently as I could. “It’s, it was Jeremy.”

She burst into frantic tears, grinding her eyes with the balls of her hands. Her body was trembling like a fish out of water. Penny put her arms around her and I stroked her hair. It was heavier than it looked, stiff and shiny as a lacquered basket.

We led her to the sofa and Penny asked, “How did you happen to see it, Zee?”

At that she only cried more hysterically. Penny rocked her back and forth, murmuring “Now, now,” but I couldn’t help thinking, What was Zee doing in Pioneer Square so late at night? She didn’t have a car and she lived way up on Beacon Hill. For that matter, what was she doing in our Ravenna neighborhood at midnight? Why hadn’t she asked the cops what was going on? Why had she come here instead of calling us to find out, and why had she been sure we’d know what had happened?

I pushed these thoughts away temporarily and got up to make us all a pot of tea. When I got back from putting the kettle on, Zee was a little more coherent.

“Thank you Penny and Pam, now I am better. I’m sorry I was so crazy. Now I think I’ll go, now.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Penny with surprising firmness, turning her cradling movements into restraining ones.

“Please, I’m just going to Ray’s house in the next few blocks.”

“Let him sleep, for god’s sake,” I said harshly, and Penny gave me an irritated look. “I mean, don’t you want to know what happened to Jeremy?”

“Yes,” said Zee slowly, almost reluctantly. “I want to know.” She half-sat up; her pale ochre face was splotched with red, her thick hair fell into her eyes. “What happened…to him?”

I told her how Hadley and I came to find him in the darkroom, and how Fran had burst in thinking he was Elena. That fact didn’t seem to register with her.

“He was working in the darkroom,” she repeated. “He was developing something?”

“Yes.” I remembered the small negatives hanging up to dry. I hadn’t bothered to look at what they were. Now it struck me that they couldn’t have had anything to do with Best Printing. I took a stab in the dark. “Were you supposed to be meeting Jeremy there, Zee? Say around ten or ten-thirty?”

Her jaw dropped, then snapped closed again as tight as if it were stapled. Penny looked at her, surprised and worried. “Zee, was something going on between you and Jeremy? You can tell us, we won’t tell Ray.”

The staples flew apart like magic. “With Jeremy, with that little weasel? I wouldn’t be caught dead, I mean…how could you ever think of me and him…No, only for one reason was I going there, the same reason as always…”

She stopped, stared wildly at us and jumped up. “I’m going to Ray’s, I don’t care. Ray will understand, Ray isn’t like you! He trusts me!”

And with that she was out the door. Penny and I let her go. The teakettle was whistling. From upstairs came a weakly irritated cry, “Turn that fucking thing off!”

Penny and I went into the kitchen and complied.

“Well,” she said, “I’m not sure I’m cut out for the amateur detective business. At what point do we call the number they gave us at the station?”

“Who are we going to point the finger at?” I asked glumly. “They’ve already got June there. I suppose it’s possible she followed him down there and shot him, but I find it really hard to believe.”

“What if Ray did it?” tried Penny. “Found out about Zee and Jeremy and with typical Latin passion…”

“No macho herrings, please. You can’t honestly be thinking of Zee and Jeremy getting it on in the darkroom, can you? The thing she was interested in was the negatives…why?”

Penny pumped the tea ball up and down in the pot before removing it. “But Fran. Why was Fran there? She was the one with the motive, of course.”

I sipped my tea carefully. “I’m not ready to tell the cops anything yet. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

Penny nodded wearily. “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one night.”

“More than enough,” I agreed.

The clock was striking one when something clicked in me. “What if,” I said excitedly, “just what if it wasn’t Jeremy they meant to kill at all?”

“What are you talking about, Pam?”

“What if, because of the red light…and because Jeremy had his head bent, rinsing the negatives, they couldn’t see his face?”

“Who else could they think he was?”

“Elena, of course. Elena.”

T
HE MOST IMMEDIATE PROBLEM
the next morning was to make sure June was out of the clutches of the police. Penny and I woke up early, called the station and got the run-around. They’d either never heard of her or she’d been released sometime during the night.

There was no answer either at June’s or at Marta Evans’s. This wasn’t altogether surprising. It was only seven; anyone who’d been up all night might not be inclined to answer the phone.

Sam was up too and, while we ate granola and he drank what he called a pep drink—milk, yeast, lecithin, eggs, strawberries, yogurt and honey, along with his usual four cups of coffee (he liked to cover all bases)—we filled him in on the recent events.

“What does the group think of all this?” he finally asked. He always called the Best collective “the group,” an old-fashioned hipsterism that made me feel like we were a jazz ensemble. I was fond of Sam, but he got on my nerves the way Jude never did. Without her around he always seemed a little dull and technical, with a helpless air of never knowing how to respond. The recent studies of male/female languages were direct illustrations of Sam’s conversational skills. He was perfectly enthusiastic when discussing a topic he’d brought up—floppy disks for instance—and to the extent that Jude’s feminism had influenced him, he was civilized enough to listen, without interrupting, to you spouting off about your own passions—the overthrow of the white capitalist patriarchy, for example—but as far as giving off any little reassuring “umms” or “oh reallys” or showing any sort of facial reaction while you talked—you could forget it. He’d listen to you with the politeness of a doorknob and then, after a silence just long enough to disconcert, he’d come out with a question that missed the point entirely with its innocuous brevity. Thus, “What does the group think of all this?”

“You mean the plot to knock of all the men in the collective?” I said, “Well, I’ve heard Ray is hiring a bodyguard.”

Penny gave me a look. She didn’t have the same reaction to Sam. She thought of him as a “very sincere guy.”

“We’re the only ones who know, Sam,” she said in a hushed voice.

“June knows,” I pointed out. “And Zee. And Zee must have told Ray when she went over there. Jeremy, of course, doesn’t need to know. So that just leaves Elena. I guess we’d better call her before she gets down there.”

Penny nodded. “What about the Bee Vee’s? Let ’em read it in the paper—or on a warrant?”

“Hadley was with us,” I reminded her. “I’m sure the topic will come up.”

“Oh god,” Penny suddenly started crying. “We’re talking about it in this flippant way—as if it didn’t really happen, as if it weren’t Jeremy who’d died.”

I felt tears springing to my eyes too, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t liked him more, that I had so many new suspicions of him, that I even had the fleeting queasy feeling he may have done something to deserve it.

“Well, see you,” said Sam, getting out while he could. “Uh, hope you find the murderer.”

“We’re not the ones looking,” I said through my weeping. “Thank god.”

But of course we were.

At eight there was still no answer at June’s, so Penny and I decided to make a personal visit. In the meantime, Jude had come downstairs and had compensated for Sam’s lack of response by a positive waterfall of questions and humming, clicking and ohing. I realized more than ever what had made her develop this almost exaggerated mode of urging other people’s words out. In the beginning of her relationship with Sam she must have had to use a pick and hammer. Strange how you never noticed it when they were together—they’d perfected a pattern between them.

Hadley also called.

“How’re you doing?”

“Sleepy, sad in a way, thinking about Jeremy.” I almost told her about Zee’s late night visit, but decided to save it until I’d thought about it further. “Have you seen Elena…or Fran?”

“Elena’s here with me now. No sign of Fran.”

Hadley seemed as constrained as I. Elena was probably listening. I wondered if I should mention that Elena could have been the object of the bullet. Last night it had seemed like a revelation: this morning it just seemed stupid. Besides, if Elena were already completely freaked out about Fran and the destruction of B. Violet, how would she react to a suggestion that she may have just escaped being murdered?

“Tell Elena,” I said, and paused. Tell Elena what? To lie low for a few weeks? To leave the country until it all blew over? “Tell Elena that she shouldn’t come in to work. No regular business hours today. Penny and I are going over to June’s now to see what she knows, if anything.”

“Okay,” said Hadley. “Call me later, okay? Maybe we can get together.”

“All right. See you.”

And suddenly, I really wanted to.

No one seemed to be at home at the apartment where June lived with her kids on Capitol Hill. A sixties-built block on stilts with parking underneath, the whole place had a somewhat deserted air. Curtains were drawn and windows were closed, even though it was the beginning of another hot day.