Murder in the Collective Read online

  “Let’s start by going over the events the night of the murder. Can you tell me first what you were doing earlier in the evening and then what you saw when you arrived at the shop?”

  “Well, I worked at the shop until about six, along with Ray Hernandez. He was there too. Then I left…”

  “Was Mr. Hernandez still there?”

  “…Yes, he said he’d close up later.” I tried to sound firm rather than hesitant. I’d forgotten Ray was working on a job he wanted to finish. “So, anyway, I went and did a couple of errands—dropped something off at the cleaners, picked up some film I’d had developed—and at seven I met Hadley Harper for dinner at the Doghouse Restaurant. Sally Gassett, the waitress, will remember.”

  He was writing all this down in shorthand. He asked me, “Ms. Harper is a friend of yours?”

  I nodded. I didn’t feel like going into the merger business any sooner than I had to. I continued, “So we ate and everything, and then about eight-thirty we came by the shop. I wanted to borrow ten dollars from the petty cash. I, we, saw a red light from the darkroom and went in. Jeremy was lying on his back, but sort of crumpled, on the floor. He had a hole in his temple, there was some blood.”

  “So this was about eight-thirty?”

  “Around then, maybe a little later.”

  “The call to the police came at 9:02.”

  “Oh well, it must have been later…I didn’t have a watch.”

  Lieutenant Detective Parker’s eyes flicked automatically to my wrist. If he’d lifted the watch face he would have seen skin that had never been touched by sunlight. Never lie to the police, I’d heard over and over again. But I didn’t want to tell him about Fran, to have to get into that whole thing—she and Elena and the merger—it was too messy.

  Lieutenant Detective Parker said only, “There was no one else in the shop? No one else came in after you?”

  “No,” I said. There it was. Perjury or whatever they called it.

  He switched the subject. “How many employees at Best Printing?”

  Hadn’t Penny set him straight? Or was he just testing me? “We don’t have employees. It’s a collective.”

  He didn’t write that down, I noticed.

  “The papers are in your and Penny Nilsen’s name,” he said.

  “Yes…but we all share the profits and the work.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Didn’t Penny tell you?”

  He just looked at me, neither patient or impatient. “It’s only a formality—to ask different people the same questions.”

  I bet, I thought. I was beginning to sweat a little. He no longer seemed quite the innocuous friendly fellow he had at first.

  “There are, were, seven. Ray Hernandez, Zenaida Oberon, Penny, me, Elena Perrault, Jeremy and June Jasper—you must know June, she was pulled in that night for questioning.” I got angry thinking of it, but Parker just nodded.

  “Can you tell me about their movements that evening?”

  “No, I don’t know where any of them were.”

  “What can you tell me about Jeremy himself? What kind of person was he? Is there anything he was involved in that might have contributed to this…event?”

  “I’ve heard,” I paused deliberately. “That he was an FBI informer.”

  Lieutenant Detective Parker didn’t raise an eyebrow. “Oh, that’s interesting…You think he might have been killed because he was informing on you?”

  “Well, I didn’t say that. I don’t know for sure either. You should be able to find out from the FBI though.”

  “It’s not always that easy.” Parker gave me a surprisingly frank smile. “Informers go by aliases, and sometimes report to just one man…we’ll see what we can find out though….So you don’t think it was a lover’s quarrel,” he changed the subject abruptly. “No jealousy, nothing like that? What was his girlfriend so mad about?”

  I shook my head. “June would never murder anybody.”

  “Except her first husband,” Parker said smoothly.

  I bit my lip with anger, but I had to admire his technique. Ever since he’d come he’d kept me constantly on edge. I had no idea what he really thought.

  “What about the others?” asked Parker. “Zee, Ray, Elena? How did they get along with Jeremy?”

  “Fine,” I said, a little dully. “Jeremy was really very easy to get along with. A little scatterbrained but likeable. As long as he had his stereo earphones on he was happy.” And his daily joint.

  “We’ve had a hard time tracking down any friends or family,” Parker said.

  “Oh, he’s got a family, parents, brother, sister, he was always talking about them. They’re in southern California someplace. He was planning to go visit them soon. Fullerton, I think.”

  Lieutenant Detective Parker wrote that down. “Thank you, Ms. Nilsen. That will be all. We’ll contact you if we need any further information. If anything else springs to mind,” he glanced at my watch, “don’t hesitate to call me.” He gave me his personal card.

  I was surprised somehow that he was leaving. I had expected to be challenged, at least to have him ask if I had any ideas about who murdered Jeremy. He hadn’t asked who told me that Jeremy was an informer or what he would have been informing on. Was he stupid, or was I?

  “By the way,” he said, as I showed him the door. “We haven’t been able to locate Ms. Oberon. The neighbor said she and her aunt had gone away. Any idea where?”

  His eyes were suddenly piercing straight through me. I was totally unprepared.

  “An emergency,” I stuttered. “I don’t know anything, just a note.” I stopped. What had Penny told him, not told him?

  He waited a moment for me to continue, then smiled pleasantly. “I’m sure we’ll be contacting you again, Ms. Nilsen,” he said as he went out the door. “Good-bye. And have a nice day.”

  “Bye,” I nodded miserably.

  Bastard. Well, you haven’t found out anything yet.

  I waited a good ten minutes to be on the safe side and then went back up to the attic door and tapped. Zee let me in.

  “Who was it?”

  “A cop. A detective.”

  “A detective.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t keep looking guiltily upstairs. But…”

  “What?”

  “He is looking for you. He just wants to ask you some questions. The same as the rest of us.”

  “What did you tell him?” Zee was pacing back and forth across the one cleared patch of floor, hands in her jeans pockets.

  “Nothing much. I certainly didn’t make his job easier, that’s for sure. He’ll probably be back. God, why did this have to happen? Who killed Jeremy, Zee? And why? Could it have been someone you know? Someone Jeremy was blackmailing or something?”

  “No,” she said. “It was all done through me. They didn’t speak to Jeremy.”

  “But he knew who they were, didn’t he?”

  She looked unhappy.

  “The detective didn’t seem all that surprised when I said I’d heard Jeremy might be an FBI informer. How do you find things like that out, I wonder? Write and request our files?”

  “Be careful, Pam. Please be careful. It’s maybe more dangerous than you think.”

  She had stopped pacing and was now standing with her back to me, staring out the window. An eerie impression that we were in a kind of prison, a cell, passed over me, disappeared.

  I said suddenly, “Zee, what really happens to people who go back to the Philippines, people who’ve been active here?”

  She turned slowly, as if pulling herself out of a trance. “I could tell you about Benny’s brother. He went back. You know Benny, Benito—yes?—the boy working with me on the newsletter? Yes. Well, he and his brother, Amado, were both in the student movement in the Philippines. Amado was one of the leaders of a demonstration, an illegal one, some years ago. Then he came here to school. He was going to the University of Washington for a civil engineering degree
. He was also active here. He was the one who started the newsletter—and he traveled around talking some. Well, one day this spring he finishes his degree and says he must go home. He says maybe it’s dangerous, but he’s never been bothered by anyone in America, so maybe they don’t know much or anything about his activities here and they don’t remember what he was doing in the Philippines before…”

  Zee was sitting on the mattress again with me and had taken one of my hands. Her own were very cold and soft. It was as if by the force of her will she wanted me to understand the exact significance of what she was saying.

  “Benny said, we all said, don’t go. But we didn’t really know what goes on there in the Philippines anymore. Sometimes all of a sudden there would be an easier time, you know, like a warming up. Not so many arrests, maybe some promises, a little more hope. It was that way when Amado decided to go back. You see, Marcos had said martial law was over last year.”

  Zee’s beautifully shaped lips curled bitterly.

  “Can you imagine that any of us would be taken in like that? But we were, we wanted so much to believe…And so Amado went back, in April, I think, April fifth. We had a party for him. A week later Benny got a telegram: Amado is dead.”

  Her hands closed like cold iron vises on mine. I couldn’t speak.

  “He was tortured, his body was found…no, it’s awful. Benny, he couldn’t believe it. He went around like a crazy man, he wanted to go there and murder Marcos personally. Such a waste, Pam, to think of Amado killed like a dog and thrown out on a pile.”

  “But what did they arrest him for? How did they know?”

  Zee wasn’t crying, but her pale ochre face had gone paler; her black eyes were filmed with grief. “We don’t know, we never know how they know us, why.” she said.

  “But that’s why we don’t want to go back.”

  17

  I DECIDED, AFTER ALL, not to go in to the shop, but to work on the garden in the afternoon. With the recent hot weather and lack of attention, things were starting to get out of control among the kale and the lettuce. The garden, at least, was one place I could have an effect that counted. I was badly shaken by what Zee had been telling me; one more country in the world to worry about; one person dead there, how many others?

  I hoed and weeded, watered and thinned. After a couple of hours I began to feel better, my bare feet digging deep in the brown earth, my fingernails black, sweat on my forehead and back. I breathed in and out the smell of green, overwhelming green, until I was dazzled by it and had to sit down.

  The phone had rung twice that afternoon but I hadn’t let myself be interrupted. Around four, however, after a shower, I decided it was time to answer it. Hadley, of course, how had I forgotten about her?

  “Hi,” she said. “What’s new?”

  “Not much. I was interviewed by a detective.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Fred?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wanted to ask if he’d caught her on the time, the mysterious lapse between 8:30 and 9:02, or if she’d mentioned Fran, but caution prevented me from using Fran’s name on the phone. For the same reason I didn’t want to mention Zee. And then, too, Zee had said not to tell anyone.

  “But that’s not what I called about,” Hadley continued.

  “Oh?”

  “Nah. I called to see if you want to see some softball tonight. My team’s playing.”

  “Sounds great. What do I wear? My old song girl’s outfit?”

  “Don’t tell me. The baton-twirling twins of Roosevelt High?”

  “Just kidding. We were both ugly and studious.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Not at the time. Where and when?”

  She gave me the details, then I started dinner. It would be a vegetable medley tonight, fresh garden produce, sautéed in sweet butter and herbs over rice.

  I put the rice on, cut up the vegetables, then went up to check on Zee and to bring her a pitcher of iced tea. The attic was sweltering now. Zee lay on the mattress in her bra and pants, surrounded by newspapers.

  “Someday we’re going to recycle those,” I apologized.

  “They make interesting reading,” Zee said. “It’s sometimes incredible to me how things get reported in the American press. They are so open about some things, so closed about others, always judging. It’s what I never understand about the U.S., I guess.”

  “What?”

  “The selfishness, like babies have. You don’t ever realize that the rest of the world is obsessed with you. The Manila papers, since I learned to read, are full of editorials—every day—on what America thinks, what America does, what is our relationship to America. It is like a love affair, you know, or something—we hate you when we feel rejected, we love you when you look at us, like you take us seriously. Imelda and Ferdinand, they live from day to day like wives, or really like prostitutes, highly paid ones, you know, who pretend they are free, that they have someone in love with them—when in fact they are being used. Like the rest of us.”

  The attic was as close and hot as a sauna, painfully pressing on my sunburned skin. I took off my sandals and mopped my tender brow, trying not to hyperventilate. My Norwegian ancestors had only passed on genes to withstand freezing temperatures while digging potatoes or herding reindeer. I’d never make it in Manila.

  “Yes, whores!” Zee continued. “The U.S. uses the Third World like a man uses a prostitute, did you ever think of that? Flirts with her a little, you know, pretends she is human, maybe spends a little money on her to make her pretty, then, when he has got what he wanted—the natural resources, control of the economy, a dumping ground for useless commodities, complete subservience, in other words—he treats her like a whore and pretends to feel sorry for her while he kicks dirt in her face and makes sure she can never get up from the ground. And all the time the woman hates him but she still wants him to marry her, hopes that he might…

  “Do you know how many women in the Philippines are prostitutes?” Zee asked. “How many thousands live in tiny little rooms outside Subic Bay and Clark Air Force Base? They come in from the country, you know, their families have no money—maybe they’ve had their land taken away by some relatives of Marcos, who knows? They start out as hostesses, in Manila maybe, in the high rise hotels, with the businessmen from all over the West. Six months or a year later they are dancing topless at a lousy bar near one of the bases. They fall in love with a sailor who says he will marry them, they have a baby. He goes home without saying good-bye. They give the baby to their parents, they go back to work, maybe at not such a nice place, maybe just on the street somewhere….”

  I felt as if I were going to faint. “Zee, why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you are a feminist, aren’t you? An American feminist. You should know how the rest of the world lives, how the women live. If they are not being used for their sex they are pushed into factories and ruin their eyes looking through microscopes, making computer chips for Hewlett-Packard, IBM; they are making thirty–forty cents an hour, you know, and then they are laid off when they are twenty-five because they are old, they are blind, they might want more money or cause trouble…And you should care, you should care, because it is your country doing this and it is women who are suffering.”

  I was hyperventilating now, not just with the heat however, but with the suffocating feeling of being responsible. And I didn’t want to feel responsible; it hurt too much, it wasn’t comfortable. I could hear myself almost gasping for breath. So many times I’d sat in pleasant surroundings, watching films or hearing speeches on the horrors and sins of imperialism, nodding like a little marionette when the right strings were pulled. Oh terrible, so awful. Here’s a dollar for the hat and let me put my name down on the petition, the mailing list. And then out into the evening air again, for coffee, for dessert, the brief moment of guilt and acknowledgement quenched. There was a painful justice now in being so physically uncomfortable. I didn’t like it one bit.
And I couldn’t move.

  Not until Zee suddenly laughed and broke the tension. “You can do me a favor if you want…”

  “What? Of course. Anything!”

  “Get out of here before you collapse. You’re red as a beet!”

  “Zee…I mean, I’m glad you came to us.”

  “That’s why I came, because I trust you. You and Penny both.”

  We sat smiling at each other, then I remembered my rice cooking. “Sam and Jude will be home soon. I wish you could come downstairs. It’s so hot up here…Are you sure you need to be worried about the police? I mean, we’re all implicated in one way or another…

  “It’s too dangerous. Too much important is involved.”

  “But won’t it make them more suspicious if you don’t turn up?”

  “Maybe. But it’s better this way, Pam, believe me. For now.”

  “Okay, well…tell me if you need anything, or Penny. I’m going out tonight, but maybe…”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling, patting the newspapers. “I’m only up to 1980.”

  “We really have to recycle those papers some time,” I sighed.

  Penny came home and into the kitchen. She was tired but more cheerful than I’d seen her in a few days. “The paper delivery arrived, the typesetting’s all done, we’ll be ready to start tomorrow. Ray said he’ll send out the camera work…” She took a carrot and started chewing.

  “Did a Lieutenant Detective Parker come by?”

  “Yes. I just gave him the story. How you called and I came down to the shop.” She seemed reluctant to talk about it. “You know, Ray says he’s going to take the shop portfolio around tomorrow and see if…”

  “I know, but didn’t you have a funny feeling about that detective, that he didn’t believe you, that something else was going on. He wondered about Zee and he didn’t seem that surprised when I said I’d heard Jeremy was an informer….”

  “Pam,” Penny turned and faced me squarely. “I decided today that I don’t want any part of this, this, detective business. I mean, trying to find the murderer ourselves, keeping things back from the police, any relevant information. I didn’t know what to tell him when he asked where Zee was, I said she had an emergency and left with her aunt….”