Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “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.

  We knocked for a few minutes, and Penny called out cautiously, “June, you there?” but no one came to the door. She was either deep asleep or she hadn’t wanted to come back to the place she and Jeremy had shared—if she’d even been released. We decided to drive over to her mother’s and see what she knew.

  Mrs. Rich lived with June’s married cousin and her husband in the Central District, in a rambling two story green house with rose bushes all around. They were luxuriantly in bloom this summer morning, still fresh with dew.

  “She’s sleeping,” said her mother when she answered the door. Mrs. Rich was a big-boned woman, lighter than June, and with the same snappy energy. Her eyes were brown and slightly almond-shaped under the red and yellow turban she wore. She didn’t look very friendly now, even though the last time we’d been there—to the cousin’s wedding—she’d hugged us like family.

  “We just wanted to find out if she was okay,” said Penny.

  “Who is it, Mama?” called June from one of the back rooms.

  “Penny and Pam,” Mrs. Rich boomed back. “You sleep or ain’t you?”

  “No, I can’t sleep no more,” said June. “Let them in, Mama, I’m coming.”

  We were seated on the couch when June walked into the living room. She looked exhausted and wired at the same time and her usual jaunty look was shot through with anger and pain. “How ’bout some coffee, Mama?” she said, and to us, with a shrug of a smile, “No way I’m going to get my beauty sleep today, I guess.”

  She sank onto the couch beside us and Penny put an arm around her. “They didn’t keep you there too long, did they?”

  “Nah. Not really. What could they pin me with, I mean? So the guy was my boyfriend and so we had a fight and so about an hour or two later he got offed.” June’s voice was dully ironic. “So why should they accuse me of anything?”

  “But they didn’t keep holding you or put you in jail, right?” asked Penny. I could hear the guilt in her voice. After all the cops had heard about Jeremy and June’s fight through her.

  “Oh yeah. Just asked a few questions. Like ‘How long you been fuckin’ that white boy, girl?’ and ‘Where’d you get that gun?’ And ’shore nuff look like you got a thang against these mens, to be shooting ’em like this.’ They gave me a Black cop, see. Get the truth out of me. Someone from my own ‘culture,’ knows about us Black girls’ murderous instincts.”

  Mrs. Rich came in with coffee. “Makes me so mad I could spit, the way they treat her. Like she was some old piece of trash. There’s nobody thinks what happened before was nothin’ but an accident. My baby’s no killer, no way, and you know I never liked that boy one bit.”

  “Ever since last night I’ve been getting the idea that none of us ever really knew Jeremy,” I said.

  “Huh,” said June, sipping her coffee. “You’re telling me. I never thought I’d see the day some white guy would try and walk on my face, but I saw it last night. I never want to see it again. Or I will kill somebody.”

  “Fran said that Jeremy was the one who destroyed B. Violet. She said she found him there smashing and ripping things up.”

  June took this in. “Someone maybe killed him for that then? Like that big bulldagger Fran? She could, I bet.”

  “Don’t know. She’s sure been drunk enough lately not to know what she’s doing. Who knows if she even saw Jeremy wrecking B. Violet or if she did it herself.”

  “I couldn’t give him an alibi that night even if I wanted to,” said June. “We started out together after the collective meeting, but then he had to do a dope deal, he said.” June shook her sculpted black head. “My opinion was he was screwing around on me. That’s what we were fighting about last night. He wants to get out of town fast, he says, move on out. When I said, no way, I’m not going anywhere with these two kids and you and your roving eye, that’s when it started. All his talk about attitude. That’s the first thing they start on when they’re fucking someone else.”

  “June, shush now,” said her mother.

  June’s round, nut brown eyes filled with tears. “He had someone else, he was just using me. He pretended to be so nice and sweet and liking the kids and all but he was a goddamned motherfucker and I’m not sorry he’s dead!”

  She stalked abruptly from the room and her mother went after her. Penny and I continued sitting, at a loss. I kept thinking about Zee and her appointment with Jeremy and what all that meant. I found it impossible to believe that Zee could have been involved with him, but what else had all that stuff Jeremy threw in June’s face been about? I sure didn’t feel like telling June about Zee’s visit last night.

  Mrs. Rich came back out. “Time for you girls to go,” she said. “June’s tired, real tired.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” Penny asked.

  Mrs. Rich smiled bitterly. “Just find out who killed that boy and thank them for me.”

  12

  AFTER LEAVING MRS. RICH’S house Penny and I stopped for another bolstering cup of coffee and a donut, then went on down to the shop. Neither of us had much to say; we both felt too bad about June.

  The sun had begun to smolder in the sky like a cigarette burning an orange-red hole in a bright blue tablecloth. Another scorcher, said the radio announcer, mildly hysterical. May reach ninety. I was glad I’d worn a halter top, sorry I didn’t have on shorts. Maybe we should just take the day off and go swimming?

  “So what’s the big idea?” said Ray when we got to Best. He was stomping around in a rage and lit into us like a flying piece of machinery. “No note, no nothing. I get down here early to start the big job and where is everybody? Zee’s not here, Jeremy and June aren’t here, Elena’s not here, you’re not here. Is this a holiday I don’t know about maybe? The sunshine festival? Is it a wildcat strike? No one answering the telephone and no one coming in. It’s almost eleven, and no one’s here but me.”

  “Didn’t Zee tell you last night?” Penny said, holding up a hand to stop him.

  “I didn’t see Zee last night,” shouted Ray. “Tell me what?”

  “But she said she was going over there,” I stuttered.

  “Never mind, Pam,” said Penny. “Ray, listen.” Her voice got quiet and funny. “Something happened here last night. An awful thing. Someone shot Jeremy.”

  “Shot Jeremy,” he repeated, uncomprehending. “Where is he then? In the hospital?”

  I shook my head.

  Penny shook her head.

  “Not dead, no!” Ray sat heavily on the sofa. “Those goddamned women,” he shouted.

  Penny opened her mouth and then closed it. She sat next to him on the sofa and put her arm around his shoulders. He started sobbing, inconsolably, like a small child, like the way he had when we’d had our first fight. It was the first time I’d seen anyone really cry for Jeremy, because th
ey cared. It embarrassed and shamed me that I couldn’t cry in the same way, that my tears this morning, like Penny’s, had been more from the horror of the thing, the idea of murder, than for Jeremy the person.

  I couldn’t comfort Ray either; the time had long passed when we could help each other get through anything. I left him to Penny and went back towards the darkroom.

  The more I thought about it the stranger I found Zee’s visit last night. She’d been distraught when she heard about Jeremy’s death, but she hadn’t asked for the details. She’d been overly concerned about the negatives he’d been producing and had as much as admitted they were supposed to have met here sometime that evening. And she’d been so frantic to go to Ray’s, claiming that he would understand. But if she hadn’t gone to his house, where had she gone?

  I stopped at the door of the darkroom. There were no lights on inside, either red or white. It gave me a chill to be here again. All too clearly I remembered the sprawl of Jeremy’s thin body last night. I turned on the white light and poked my head in. Everything was normal, quiet; there wasn’t even a stain of blood on the floor. I glanced toward the line where the negatives had been hung to dry.

  Not a single one was left.

  I called the company whose job we were supposed to be starting that day and cancelled the whole thing. Better have them mad at us now than frustrated for days while we struggled to catch up. I told the production manager the truth, that our cameraman had died suddenly, but he wasn’t much appeased. “Couldn’t you send the camera work out?” he wanted to know.

  The wheels of capitalism never stop.

  Penny had taken Ray in hand and was going to drive him home. She told me that she wouldn’t be coming back either. “Last night’s caught up with me. I’m about ready to drop.”

  After they left I sat alone for a while, listening to the telephone but not feeling like answering it and trying to think. Eventually I unplugged the phone jack. The sunlight poured hot and strong through the windows. How had everything gone so wrong, so suddenly? Last week all I’d had to worry about was my lack of interest in men—this week it was destruction and murder served back to back. Things weren’t supposed to happen like this—not to people like us….

  I must have slumped over asleep at the desk because I burst out shrieking when someone tapped me on the back.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said weakly when I made out Hadley’s face. I settled my glasses back firmly on my nose. “Was I sleeping or something?”

  “I got worried when I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “And then I tried to call….” She held up the disconnected telephone cord, laughing, “Just nervous, I guess.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” I said. We smiled at each other and I shook the sleep from my eyes.

  “Listen,” Hadley said, after a pause. “You want to go have a picnic?”

  “What, now?”

  “Well, it’s lunchtime after all, and a gorgeous day to be outside. We could go over to Gas Works Park, lie on the grass, talk it all over. Pam, it’d be great.”

  “It’s not as if I’m exactly getting any work done here,” I said, sighing and looking around.

  “Fantastic. Come on, lock up.”

  She had a picnic basket waiting in the passenger seat of her truck, along with a huge Chinese kite shaped like an octopus: oblong, with tentacle streamers. It was purple and green and red, a beauty.

  “A present,” Hadley said, opening up the door and handing it out.

  “Thanks!” I was dumbfounded for a moment at her generosity. “Is it symbolic? I mean—an octopus?”

  “If there’s not enough wind we can use it as a sunscreen,” Hadley smiled. “Hop in.”

  Gas Works Park was Seattle’s first post-industrial recreation spot. They hadn’t moved the machinery; they’d simply painted it in bright colors and landscaped hills and paths and playgrounds around it. It looked across Lake Union to downtown Seattle, where the new skyscrapers were changing the line of the city.

  Hadley’s picnic basket contained fresh rolls and chèvre and tomatoes and strawberries, and a bottle of Calistoga water to wash it down. After eating we launched the kite from the ridge. The same breeze that was sending the white-sailed boats scudding around Lake Union kept the kite up at a low, but respectable distance. We sat back and sighed in unison. For me, it was as if all my anxieties had been attached to that octopus kite—they weren’t gone but they were now safely at a distance, sailing and bouncing about in the blue sky.

  “You want to bring me up to date?” asked Hadley. She was sitting with her long legs drawn up to her chin like a kind of enormous cricket. Her hair shone silver and her eyes were brighter than the sky, so bright I couldn’t quite look into them.

  “Well. To begin with. Last night after Penny and I went home, around midnight, Zee comes knocking on our door. She was all worked up, said she’d seen a body being removed from the shop. She wanted to know whose, but when we told her Jeremy’s, she seemed somehow like she knew or suspected already. Then she asked about some negatives in the darkroom, wanted to know if he’d been working on anything. I said I’d seen some negs hanging up. And then I wanted to know if she was supposed to be meeting Jeremy there for some reason. At that she got all hysterical, said she was going over to Ray’s and left. This morning we find out that she didn’t go to Ray’ s—he was at the office when Penny and I got there and he didn’t know what the hell was going on—he got all emotional—the first person to really cry for Jeremy.”

  “Poor guy,” said Hadley. I nodded, omitting to tell her Ray’s remark about the goddamned women. For all I knew he was right.

  “So I went to the darkroom—and the negatives were gone.”

  “You think the cops took ’em? As evidence?”

  “Wouldn’t they have to tell us? I mean, we were there until the very end. If they’d gone back to investigate they would have had to have a search warrant.”

  “So Zee might have gone back there last night…” Hadley echoed my own suspicion. “Those negatives were proof maybe….”

  “Of something she and Jeremy were working on together.”

  We watched the kite dip and sway, dip, dip. I got up hastily and ran back and forth a few times along the ridge, trying to find the breeze to lift it again. Sweating, but temporarily successful, I sat down again next to Hadley.

  “What about June?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask. They gave her a really rough time, the bastards. The lawyer got her released. I hope to god they don’t arrest her again. I suppose they’d need some evidence—a witness or the weapon or something.”

  “You don’t think,” Hadley said carefully, “that there’s any possibility…”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe it, I just can’t. I know they had a fight, but June’s not crazy.”

  “Well, I’ve been spending the morning with Elena. She was totally hysterical when I told her this morning.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “No, she came over looking for Fran at some ungodly hour. If I’d thought about it more I might not have told her that Fran was around last night and that I’d handed over the car keys. But my first thought was to reassure her that Fran was at least among the living.”

  “Unlike Jeremy. What reaction did she have to his murder?”

  “She shuddered. She shrieked.”

  “Do you think she thought…that Fran had done it?”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “You know what I wondered—it’s far-fetched, but still…It occurred to me that Jeremy might not have been the intended victim at all. That Jeremy and Elena look a lot alike in some ways…”

  “And someone thought he was Elena? But that’s even more impossible. Who would want to kill Elena?”

  She looked at me closely. “You’re not thinking that Margaret or Anna wanted to bump her off, after they’d destroyed B. Violet?”

  It sounded ridiculous aloud on this sunny afternoon. I mumbled, “Well, what about h
er ex-husband? She had to fight him on the custody case; maybe he wanted revenge. And what about all the hate mail she got after the school firing? Or some of the feminists who’d probably like to stuff a sock in her mouth sometimes. Elena’s aroused a lot of opposition in the last couple of years.”

  “But murder, Pam.”

  “There may have been as many reasons for Elena to be murdered as for Jeremy.”

  Hadley suddenly shivered and jerked at the kite. “If that were true then Elena still wouldn’t be safe.”

  “Where’s Elena now?”

  “She went back to her vigil at home, waiting for Fran.”

  We looked at each other. “I guess I’m just more sympathetic to lovers than you, Pam,” Hadley said.

  “Huhmmph.”

  After that we didn’t say much, just lay flat watching the kites. I started yawning and forgetting the direction of my thoughts. They swirled and fluttered like the bright nylon and paper shapes in the sky. Fran, Elena, Ray, June, Zee, Margaret, Anna. Bobbing and bouncing, evading each other, soaring, dipping down. One of them must have done it, but which one?

  Sometime later I woke with my face pressed against the sweet-smelling grass and my body burning. Hadley was asleep too, breathing with her mouth slightly open. Her half-clenched hand still held the ball of string, but our kite had settled somewhere far down the slope. It was a peaceful moment and I didn’t wake her.

  I wished we could go on lying there as if nothing at all had happened.

  13

  AFTER GAS WORKS PARK Hadley and I went to her house for a cup of coffee. My face and shoulders were sunburned and my brain felt like a small hot roll in an oven. The surface of my skin was tenderly feverish to the touch, erotically feverish. I kept wanting to say something about it to Hadley; instead I leaned my head out the window to cool it.

  Hadley lived in a huge collective household in a rambling old mansion overlooking Lake Washington. The living and dining rooms were paneled in dark walnut and papered in yellow roses. There was a jungle of plants along the bay windows that any tropical country would be proud of. Here and there were the regulation political posters: some left over from long ago Vietnam days—doves and raised fists—some advertising women’s dance groups or free clinic benefits. In some ways the house, like most of those that had survived the seventies, was a minor museum of the changing counterculture: old Ramparts in the bookshelf next to Co-Evolution Quarterly and Runner’s Magazine; a hash pipe lying serenely on a shelf beside a bottle of B-Complex, high stress tablets; a copy of Lesbian Nation side by side with Managerial Woman.