Murder in the Collective (23 page)

“But he didn’t get punished or discharged or anything,” said Karen eagerly. “He just got a reprimand. He knew somebody, you see…”

“Karen,” warned Don. “This is just family stuff, we don’t want to tell them Jeremy’s life story—because he finished with that drug business a long time ago. He learned the hard way.”

Karen looked less convinced but she kept silent. I was thinking—a reprimand? In exchange for what? For supplying information? It was a far-fetched idea. How could they have known he’d be useful?

“When did Jeremy move to Seattle?”

“Well, pretty soon after the Navy,” said Karen. “Couple, three years ago I guess.”

“And you’ve seen him since then?”

They both looked uneasy.

“Once or twice,” said Don. “I don’t live in Fullerton anymore.”

“Don lives in Riverside. I live in Ventura,” Karen explained, once again apologetic. “We have families.” She paused. “We never met the girl he married. Heard about her from Mom. Course no one ever knew he got married.”

Don’s face had turned dark red. “She’s the one behind all this. And now she’s going to pay for it.”

“She’s not guilty,” Ray spoke up. “It’s some kind of mistake, man.”

Don looked at him as if Ray had just crawled out from under the sofa. “The cops don’t make mistakes,” he said contemptuously.

The magnitude of this error silenced us all temporarily. Then Karen spoke up, with quiet urgency, “But if you think, if he was a dope dealer or something, that maybe one of his customers…”

“These people are the ones who are probably dope dealers,” said Don. “Come on, Karen—they don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re the ones who hid that girl in their attic.”

Karen looked further apologies at all of us but got up and followed him out of the room and out the front door.

“Anyone want a good deal on some really fantastic Colombian?” asked Penny.

“They’re going to be great in court,” I said. “I can see it now. They’ll blow the photo of Jeremy and the horse up to life-size. ‘Of course I haven’t seen him for fifteen years, but I know in my heart he was the same sweet boy he always was.’”

“Do you really think he was into dope dealing, Hadley?” asked Ray. “Is that the explanation?”

“Anchovies,” she said. “Black olives, tomatoes, onions.”

“
Half
anchovies,” I amended.

“We haven’t had dinner either,” said Penny enthusiastically. “Don’t forget the green pepper and pepperoni.”

“And sausage, chorizo if they’ve got it,” said Ray. “But do you really think that, Hadley?”

I noticed that for the first time he was addressing her as a real person.

“I think I’d better get two pizzas,” she said. “That’s what I think.”

H
ADLEY STAYED WITH ME
that night, or rather, with us. It didn’t feel to me that I was alone with her in the house where I’d grown up and where I’d come back to live. Too many ghosts. Ghosts of my parents who wouldn’t like it; ghosts of male lovers who would be titillated but disapproving; even the ghost of Ray, who was now a live presence on the other side of the upstairs hall.

I was overly conscious of every sound louder than a murmur that Hadley made. She was all bones and joints and she couldn’t seem to touch me in the right way. She herself came with about a fingertip of pressure and immediately went to sleep.

I lay there, itched and brooded.

The name of Fran hadn’t come up again, but it was in the air, less a ghost than a scent of something wrong. Hadley had said that money was attractive, but swaggering, working class toughness was attractive too, at least to women who’d grown up with money like Hadley and Elena. I thought about Fran’s strong, bulky build, her handsome face with its light hazel eyes fringed with black, her black white-streaked hair. I wondered what it would be like to be with a woman that big who didn’t (I glanced over at Hadley) sometimes feel like a barely carpeted staircase. Not that I was attracted to Fran. I’d never seen her in anything but the worst light. But I wanted desperately to understand what Hadley had seen and still saw in her.

She saw enough in Fran to want to protect her, to
have
protected her throughout our little investigation. Had she stopped to consider the real possibility that Fran was more involved than she let on? Why should Fran be immune from questioning? Why shouldn’t she be pressed to give up any information she had?
She
was the witness to Jeremy’s sabotage of B. Violet;
she
was the one who’d come up with the spying theory after seeing him being passed something by two men. Those were the only two motives possible. Either Jeremy had been murdered in revenge for what he did to B. Violet or his killing had something to do with the forging and possible spying ring he’d set up within the Filipino community.

Probably that was why Hadley was so keen on linking Jeremy’s drug problems in the Philippines with his eventual role as a forger and probable agent in Seattle. If she could establish that the FBI or some other secret group was involved in Jeremy’s murder, then Fran would be clearly off the hook.

The only problem with the two widely different motives is that they didn’t rule each other out. Jeremy the forger, the spy, could have still been killed because he destroyed B. Violet. It was that simple.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep too well that night.

In the morning there was a lot of polite traffic in the bathroom and the kitchen. It was strange to see Ray in his kimono again, after all these months, making huevos rancheros for breakfast; it was probably just as strange for him to serve them up to his ex-lover’s new lover. At one point he and I exchanged a wry look of complicity that was just this side of forgiveness; it gave me a little hope that we’d all be able to like each other sometime not too far in the future.

It still somehow didn’t make the morning go any easier. Penny and Sam got into an acerbic exchange about some economic issue in the morning paper: prime rate, interest, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund—it escalated rapidly and ended with Penny denouncing Sam as a closet Republican and Sam counseling Penny to go back and do a little homework. Jude meanwhile was trying to interest Hadley in every conceivable kind of food and beverage, as became the self-appointed hostess of the household who was not going to be put off by some glum lesbian saying over and over, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

“For Christ’s sake, Jude,” I said finally. “She doesn’t eat a lot of breakfast.”

Jude looked at me with eyes that accused, So why didn’t you ever tell me you were getting involved with a woman, huh? I’m supposed to be a good friend of yours, one of your best friends, I even live in the same house, but no, I have to find out like this, in front of everybody, no explanations, just expected to go along with it…

I excused myself from the table and went out to the garden for a little vegetable relief. After five minutes or so Hadley joined me. By common, unspoken agreement we did not discuss murders, roommates, former lovers or sex. We went over the pros and cons of organic gardening, for instance what to do when the tomato bugs used your supposedly lethal hot chili solution to make enchiladas. Did you have to go right on to DDT?

After a while the house got quiet; everyone had gone to work. I knew we should head out for Best as well—there was a lot to do there—but I didn’t feel too motivated. I was tired, the sun was hot, and the earth was giving off rather suggestive vibrations of fertility and fecundity.

We necked instead.

I was just about to suggest that we go inside to remove a few of these bothersome garments, when footsteps came crunching up the gravel drive and around the side of the house. Goddamn reporters, I thought, hastily straightening my clothes and hair.

“We rang the doorbell,” said Benny, and Carlos nodded. They were both wearing cool white shirts with rolled up sleeves, and chinos. Their hair was freshly combed and they both smelled a little of aftershave. I felt Hadley and me to be panting, disheveled sex maniacs in comparison. I hoped they didn’t notice.

I invited them in for some iced tea.

“It’s about the newsclippings you have,” Benny said. “Zenaida said you found some clippings at Jeremy’s room that have some familiar names underlined.”

“Yes. Would you like to see them?” I pulled the stack out of the pocket of my jacket hanging in the hall.

Hadley brought out glasses and a pitcher of tea. It wasn’t exactly cold, because it had evidently just been made up before Jude or Penny left, and there were no ice cubes, but it would have to do. We all sat down at the dining room table.

Benny’s hooded, intelligent black eyes skimmed the clippings quickly. A slight but sharp intake of breath told me he’d found his brother Amado’s name. Carlos read more slowly, his round, sweet face bent worriedly over the newsprint. He said something in Tagalog, something that sounded like a long curse.

“Did you ever suspect Jeremy of spying on you?” Hadley asked.

“Not a white boy, no,” Benny said, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. I wanted to trust him, because he was Zee’s friend, if nothing else, but I felt a certain ruthlessness about him, under his suave manner. I didn’t like him smoking in my house either.

“We know there’s been some infiltration in the city,” said Carlos. “Seattle is a place where there would be. It’s where decisions get made about hiring for the Alaska canneries; there are a lot of Filipinos here. We naturally think there are Marcos agents around.” He spoke English more slowly than Benny but with a better accent. I recalled Zee telling me that he was studying physics at the university. Somehow that didn’t fit with his youthful plumpness, though why it shouldn’t, I didn’t know.

“We knew Jeremy as Zee’s friend,” said Benny. “Then later she told me her secret, that she’d married him to stay in the country. It’s not uncommon.”

“
I
didn’t know about the marriage,” Carlos added, looking a little wounded. “But I did not have anything against Jeremy. It was a good idea it seemed like he had, about making the documents.”

“Were you part of it?” I asked.

“No. Yes. Only to help some people. If we knew a name we would tell Zenaida. She and Jeremy did the work, she said it was safer for her.”

“So it all went well at first,” Hadley said. “Then things began to happen. A few people caught, deported…”

“Yes,” said Benny. “And then my brother. He was so determined to go back to the Philippines. He took precautions, he had some forged papers to go back under a different name, because before, he had been known, he was known as a student leader, as you see here.” Benny stabbed a finger at the pile of newsclippings. “But as soon as he got home, they knew. They found him and took him; some days later my family got a phone call, ‘Go to the trash dump and see what you find.’ His body was there, broken up, the fingers gone, and the toes, no penis anymore.” Benny clenched his fist, his mouth tightened. “If Jeremy was here in Seattle to watch us, if he knew about my brother, and he did know because he helped with the papers, he could have told them.”

I had the same feeling of unreality I’d experienced up in the attic with Zee. For these people the torture and death of those they loved was a fact of life, something that had to be understood, even if it could not be understood.

The question was, were Benny and Carlos only now beginning to think of Jeremy as an agent, after seeing the newsclippings, or had they realized it last week, or even long before, and made the decision to kill him because of it? And if they had killed Jeremy because he’d caused Amado to be tortured and murdered, who was I to be investigating and looking for justice? Perhaps justice had already been done. Not by the sweet-faced Carlos, who would never let Zee take the rap, but by the more ruthless Benny, smooth, moustachioed, wreathed in smoke.

“Any possibility Jeremy was blackmailing anyone?” Hadley asked. “He had a lot of money in his pocket when he died.”

“If he was, we never heard,” said Benny. “He wasn’t blackmailing us, he wasn’t blackmailing Zenaida.”

Carlos looked less sure. “I had felt a change in Zee just lately. A little like she was maybe afraid of Jeremy, or maybe a little afraid of what they were doing. It was after Amado was killed this spring. She said she was worried about the documents, that maybe it was too dangerous for us to be involved in.”

“Zenaida would not have killed Jeremy,” Benny stated categorically. “It would neither do her nor the Filipino people any good. It is not doing us good this stuff in the newspapers. The trial will be a farce. It’s a racist plot to pin the blame on her.”

Hadley had risen and wandered over to the mantle. She suddenly turned and said, “Both of you were seen in Jeremy’s apartment on the night of his murder, handing him a package. What was in that package?”

It was a bold stroke. If it had been me, if the idea had even occurred to me that these might be the two men Fran had described, I probably would have flubbed it by asking them if they ran and what had they been doing running in the U District when they lived in the South End?

Benny’s hooded eyes took on a darker, more threatening cast. “What do you think?” he asked scornfully.

“I think it must have been money. Money to keep Jeremy quiet about what he knew, money not to turn any more names over to the Marcos goon squads. I think that after your brother was killed, that Jeremy came to you and told you just what would happen if he didn’t get regular payments from the illegal aliens and the rest of them whose names he knew.”

“You’re crazy,” said Benny. “We would never let ourselves be blackmailed.”

“Benny,” Carlos said urgently, “let’s…”

“It was dope, if you want to know,” Benny continued, lighting another cigarette with a steady hand. “Good strong marijuana, grown by Filipino farmers in Eastern Washington. If you knew anything about Jeremy you knew he was a dealer; he had a deal going with us. So much marijuana in return for so many documents. No,” he said, with a sarcastic twist to his mouth and faint moustache, “We wouldn’t let ourselves be blackmailed. It was purely an economic exchange, the kind the U.S. government has with its client states—international capitalism, the exchange of natural resources and profitable agricultural products for pieces of paper. Tit for tat. Tit for tat,” he repeated, as if the phrase gave him pleasure.