Murder in the Collective (21 page)

She busied herself parking while I thought about all this. When the engine was off she didn’t move to get out however. She motioned me to stay a minute.

“There’s something else I haven’t told you, Pam,” Hadley said. “I’ve been through this money stuff with three other lovers. It taught me a lot, but I’m not ready to do it again. I mean, get guilt-tripped. I know, at least, I think I know, that you’re not the type, but…”

I tried to look like I was not the type. Who knew? My life had been lived within the puritanical but comfortable boundaries of the small business family, until my consciousness began to change. But both Penny and I still had the American ethic close to heart—work and you will succeed. I was probably as awed by and as disrespectful of unearned riches as anyone.

“And another thing,” said Hadley, as if she were determined to get it all out at once, “because you’ll hear this from someone sooner or later. I was lovers with Fran for a year or so. It ended six months ago—around the time she met Elena.”

“You and Fran?” I couldn’t help bursting out in horror.

“You’ve never had a chance, or probably the inclination, to see Fran’s good sides,” Hadley said. She was still holding on to the steering wheel, gazing out the window. I knew this was making us late for the hearing, but it was too important to drop. I’d had enough trouble understanding the connection between Fran and Elena, but Fran and Hadley…and did that mean Fran had dropped Hadley for Elena?

“She’s really quite gentle underneath. She has this bar dyke exterior, this working class attitude, and it’s true she is working class—she grew up in Shelton, her father was a logger until he got his foot crushed…And she worked too, worked from the time she was fifteen, delivering pizzas, gardening, odd jobs. And then she joined the Army when she was eighteen. She was in for ten years, she was a sergeant. She’s been all over the world, you know. That’s just it. She’s really extremely cultured. She speaks a couple of languages, reads, her apartment is filled with books and things she’s collected…And then she got political, you know she helped start Mobi-Print, she’s really done a lot, Pam, she’s…”

I wanted to shout, I don’t care. But I felt too numb. Hadley was still in love with Fran, it was obvious. And it was obvious too that she’d been protecting Fran all this time, giving her the keys, making sure she didn’t have to talk to the police, pretending to believe her stories about having seen Jeremy at the shop, having seen Jeremy with two men…all this time, she’d been keeping me from getting at the truth because of a misplaced loyalty to Fran.

“I’m not sorry it’s over,” Hadley was saying. “I feel sorry for Elena. I don’t think she used to drink so much before she met Fran. She seems so unhappy now.”

“You didn’t drink with Fran?”

“Me?” Hadley startled me with an ironic smile and a flash of her turquoise eyes. “Haven’t you figured me out yet? I’m the rescuer, the one who tries to ignore it, who pretends everything’s all right, that I can help.”

“But you didn’t help Fran.”

“Actually, I did. For a while. It was very satisfying. It was the same satisfaction I used to get after an emotional encounter with my father, when I sent him off to yet another sanitarium…maybe this time!”

“What made you give up on your father?”

Hadley shrugged. “I had to live my own life finally. One day it just got to be too much.”

I didn’t think somehow that it had been that easy, the same as it couldn’t have been easy with Fran.

“One more thing and then I’m finished confessing,” said Hadley. “Three years ago, when I was giving my money away here in town, before I even knew Fran, before I worked at B. Violet, I gave my old friend Margaret $10,000 to replace the equipment in her typesetting collective.”

“Uh-oh.”

“It was a mistake,” Hadley said flatly. “Fran and Margaret have been fighting about it for years.”

“Fran never knew you were the one…?”

“No,” said Hadley. “She didn’t.”

But I wasn’t so sure. I remembered Margaret’s strange look of satisfaction as she inspected the damage done to B. Violet that morning. She must have realized that Fran had finally carried through with her threat to get back at Hadley.

We got out of the truck and started walking to the courthouse. I took Hadley’s hand. I felt it had cost her a lot to tell me all this, but that she didn’t have a clue as to how much she’d explained. She didn’t realize that one more piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

T
HE ARRAIGNMENT WAS BRIEFER
and less exciting than I had expected. It certainly had nothing on Hadley’s revelations in the truck. Or perhaps it was Hadley’s revelations that made it difficult for me to pay too much attention to the proceedings. I kept think of Fran, the working class enigma, and of Hadley’s mysterious eight years with her father in Houston and of a dozen things unconnected to Zee’s fate.

We were late too, which made it more confusing. We slipped into seats on the side row in back and I watched more than I listened for a good ten minutes.

The courtroom was fairly crowded, mostly with Filipinos, twenty-five or thirty of them, and a few whites, most of them probably reporters. The Filipinos were wearing summer dresses or loose barong shirts; the whites were wearing utilitarian shirts, slacks and skirts, except for Penny, up in front, and Hadley and me, all of whom were wearing jeans.

Ray was sitting with Penny, and Benny and Carlos were next to them. Benny was barrel-chested and muscular, with a hooded intelligent look to his black eyes and a slight moustache on his smooth ochre-brown face. Carlos looked younger, more sensitive; he had a beautifully shaped mouth and a full-cheeked cozy softness. Everything about him was warm and brown. They were both paying close attention to the arraignment but while Benny had a suave almost contemptuous air, Carlos merely looked eager and worried. I could see him constantly giving gentle, reassuring glances over at Zee.

Who, in spite of being dragged out of the attic in her least glamorous clothes, without jewelry or make-up, and in spite of having spent the night in jail, seemed poised and intent, listening to the charge “…that on the night of June 8, 1982, you killed your husband, Jeremy Maurice Plaice.”

Maurice?

I suddenly saw Marta Evans up in front, plump, with glasses and frizzy orangish hair that never quite settled, wearing a suit with padded shoulders and some sort of political button on her lapel. There was always something a little frowsy and comfortable about Marta, as if she were the mother of nine kids who somehow managed to have enough time for each one. The kind of mother who bustled and scolded and then turned on you a dazzling smile of understanding. Then went back to her work or put on glasses, picked up the paper, off in another world. A little like our mother had been, in fact.

But Marta was forty and married to a man who worked with Indochinese refugees and as far as I knew she didn’t even have a cat. She was talking in a low voice to a man next to her, a thin young man wearing a dark lawyer’s suit. That he was Zee’s defense lawyer became apparent when he stood up and went to the lectern, to move that the indictment be dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence. It was a dramatic move but not a dramatic moment; somehow it sounded like he was asking the judge to hold the mayo on his BLT. I decided I didn’t like him or the judge either.

I spaced out again, staring around at the audience—did you call people in a courtroom an audience? I wondered how many had had papers forged for them, what their lives had been like back in the Philippines, what they thought of the white women in the room, Hadley, Penny and I, so easy in our privilege, and actually the cause of all this…But then, Zee couldn’t have gone on hiding in our attic forever. The cops were on to her; they must have found a marriage certificate, some record, something. Was that why Jeremy’s apartment had been a mess? Had the cops been looking for something like that?

Or had Zee herself?

The judge denied the motion to dismiss the indictment as if he were the waiter muttering “no substitutions.” There was sufficient evidence for a trial, he felt. He read the murder charge again in a flat, calm voice and asked Zee how she pleaded.

“Not guilty.” Her voice was just as calm, steely even. After she spoke I saw her turn infinitesimally towards the crowd, as if looking for someone. I smiled, in case it was me, but she didn’t smile back. Whoever that person was, he or she wasn’t in the courtroom.

The judge set her bail at $75,000, based, he claimed, on Zee’s disappearance after the murder and her “foreign connections.” There was a rumbling of disgust in the courtroom; everybody knew who was supposed to be foreign here. If you’re not white, it doesn’t matter how long you live in America, you’re still an outsider. Of course no one was particularly pleased at the amount of bail either. Penny nodded over to me; I knew she meant she wanted to put our house up as collateral, and I nodded back firmly.

The judge adjourned the proceedings. Zee was taken off until bail could be arranged, and we all rose as the judge retired to his chambers. The court didn’t clear immediately. Penny began talking excitedly to Marta and the other lawyer. Ray turned to Benny and Carlos; three black and brown heads bent close.

Then I saw her.

“Mrs. Reyes,” I called to the woman at the back of the courtroom. “If you have a minute…”

Zee’s aunt was, like Zee, a startlingly beautiful woman. She was simply dressed in a straight white crepe skirt and a red silk blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. Her eyes were heavily made up and as black as the dyed hair that had been pulled into a soft bun at her nape. She wore a red hat.

“Hello Pamela,” she said as we sat down beside her on the bench, recognizing me at once but without any apparent interest.

I introduced her to Hadley. They shook hands. Mrs. Reyes’ was practically gold-plated with rings and bracelets.

“I thought you were on vacation,” I blurted.

“I was,” said Mrs. Reyes. “I got a phone call and came back. I am Zenaida’s closest relative here in Seattle.”

She sounded as if she were talking about the funeral of someone who’d died unexpectedly.

“Did you know…about she and Jeremy being married?”

“I knew—after they’d done it.” She was composed but bitter. “She shouldn’t have done it, an irreversible thing like that. He wasn’t even Catholic. But what could
I
say? It was done, she was in love, she…”

“She was in love?” Hadley repeated, incredulously.

Mrs. Reyes stared at her. “They were married, of course they were in love.” She paused and added cautiously, “At least in the beginning.”

“Why didn’t they live together then?”

“It was his family,” said Zee’s aunt. “He was afraid of what they might say.
I
always thought that was the cause of some problems between them. They went down to California to meet his parents—not to tell them they were married exactly but just to introduce Zenaida and start getting them used to the idea. Zenaida came back first and wouldn’t talk about it. After that Jeremy would still call sometimes but he didn’t come over and they didn’t see each other so much.”

“When was this? When did they get married?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Reyes, considering. “It must be, well, yes, August, September, it must be almost two years ago now.”

“Two years ago! But that was before Jeremy started working with us.”

“I believe she told him about the job,” said Zee’s aunt, moving down the bench to the commiserating embrace of another Filipina.

“‘She sat there in shock,’” said Hadley. “‘Mind reeling with a thousand possibilities, a thousand questions.’” She shook me gently. “Hey, snap out of it.”

“But Hadley, don’t you see? This means that…” I stopped, mind reeling with a thousand possibilities, etc.

“It just means that it’s more complicated than we thought.” She paused and said, “I think it’s about time for that phone call to Fullerton, don’t you?”

Had Zee and Jeremy been in this together? Had Zee been informing on the Filipino community as well? Two years they’d been married and not a whisper of it to anyone. Zee had told him about Kay quitting and he’d just been able to stroll in and say ‘Got anything for someone with camera experience?’ How stupid we’d been to believe it was a wonderful coincidence. But who would have thought otherwise? Certainly not from the way Zee and Jeremy had acted. Jeremy friendly and vague, Zee so preoccupied with politics. Had Jeremy been blackmailing her? Had he been jealous of Ray? Had she been jealous of June? Maybe she had killed him. Who knew what had gone on in that darkroom before Hadley and I arrived? Maybe she really had killed him and was lying to all of us, using us as a cover…

We were suddenly in front of a phone booth and Hadley was being very efficient in finding the Plaice family phone number from the directory operator and charging the call to her home. Too efficient. I hadn’t had time to prepare my story when Hadley handed me the receiver and a woman’s querulous voice came on the line:

“Yes, yes, can I help you? Who is this?”

“This is Pamela Nilsen, a friend of Jeremy’s from work. Is this his mother?”

“Yes.” The voice went tentative. “Yes?”

“I worked with Jeremy,” I repeated. “At Best Printing. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

I heard her begin to cry and felt a hypocrite. How did these hard-boiled-egg detectives do it? I couldn’t possibly get any information out of her without feeling like a heel. I saw Hadley outside the booth look at me inquiringly and I turned my head away, deciding only to sympathize and to offer help and to hang up.

“…I knew the first time I saw her that that girl wasn’t right. A Philippines girl, how could Jeremy marry her without telling us. It isn’t right for two different races to get involved, I told him. I told him the problems the kids have in school, being mixed-like, how they’d get laughed at. And then you get all their relatives asking for money and wanting to come to America too. And you can’t get a good job when they find out you’re married to a foreigner. But Jeremy just said, don’t worry, Mom, it’ll all work out. But he never mentioned another word about her after they left, so…It was him being in the Navy did it. It’s disgusting the way they let those young boys go to prostitutes—he was only eighteen—and then they develop a taste for it that spoils them for nice American girls…”