Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “Then June had a right to be jealous,” I said.

  “No, it wasn’t that way, it wasn’t that kind of involvement,” Zee said quickly.

  “But you were planning to meet Jeremy last night at the shop for some reason.”

  “That’s true,” said Zee. “I was.” She paused and looked at her feet, as if wondering where they had taken her. “I had gotten there early. I thought, if Jeremy hadn’t arrived perhaps I could do…something…on my own. We should have been meeting at eleven. I got there at ten and saw the police cars everywhere. I went into a doorway across the street and just watched. Finally I saw you leave and then they brought a stretcher out. That’s why I came to you last night, to find out what happened.”

  “But you didn’t go to Ray’s afterwards.”

  “No. I didn’t. I…had to go back to the shop.”

  “To destroy something,” I suggested.

  “No,” said Zee firmly. “To save some things.”

  I looked at Ray. “Do you know what this is all about?”

  “I trust Zee,” he said. “I think we’ve all got to trust Zee.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Penny yawning again and suddenly turned on her. “Are we boring you? I suppose you’ve already figured out the whole thing.”

  She yawned again. “It’s physiological, dear, not a measure of my interest. And yes, I think I do have an inkling.”

  “What then?”

  “You were the one who suggested the idea to me. Noticing the negatives hanging to dry and also noticing that they’d been taken down the next morning. Zee asked about them specifically last night. Therefore, I deduce that both Zee and Jeremy had an interest in those negatives and probably a joint interest.” She paused and ran her fingers through her cockscomb hair. “I don’t necessarily deduce from that that Zee had anything to do with his murder.”

  “But what were they—what were you,” I looked at Zee, “doing with the negatives?”

  “Forging,” said Penny and Zee in unison and Zee continued, “We were forging documents for illegal aliens.”

  She had met Jeremy, Zee said, through Best Printing, but she’d also seen him once or twice at a demonstration and once at a benefit for the anti-Marcos group she was involved with. She’d judged from that that he was a sympathizer. One day, over lunch, they’d gotten talking about the current situation in the Philippines. He was really shocked; he said he’d had no idea it was so bad there. He asked if there was anything he could do about it, anything to help out. Well, maybe Zee had confided more than she ought. She had said there was a big problem now with people like herself, students who had gotten involved politically or who came from politically inclined liberal families, and who were now afraid to go back home, who wanted to stay in the States. They couldn’t get papers to stay, most of them. Not for working, not for further studies. She already knew some who had gone back home and immediately been put in jail.

  It was Jeremy’s idea, yes, he had suggested it. What kind of papers did they need, he wanted to know? Work papers, green cards, certificates. Wouldn’t it be possible just to make them? Duplicate them, fill them out, and sign them? After all, they worked at a print shop.

  When did all this start? Six months ago, maybe seven. It had taken them a while to come up with the information and the best way of producing the documents. Now they met, had met, once every two weeks. The negatives on the line last night had been for some new forms the government had started using.

  Over the course of half a year they had gotten new papers for twenty or thirty people.

  “I suppose they paid pretty well for the documents,” I said, thinking of the roll of bills in Jeremy’s pocket.

  Zee looked surprised. “Not much,” she said. “Jeremy and I didn’t take anything, just the cost of the materials and a little bit more. It was for political reasons.”

  I said slowly, “Elena today suggested that Jeremy was an informer, that Fran told her she saw him accepting money or something….Maybe he was spying on B. Violet, she said.”

  Penny snorted, “Elena is one of those half-baked lefties who always think they’re being infiltrated. Jeremy’s been with Best for almost a year and this merger idea only came up last week. How could he have been investigating B. Violet? How come he wasn’t investigating us?”

  “Maybe he was investigating us,” Ray said.

  15

  IT WAS THREE IN the morning before I got to sleep again. I’d spent an hour hearing the whole story from Zee and another two thinking it out for myself. Penny had fixed up a bed for Zee in the attic and Ray had finally gone home.

  I lay in bed watching the street lamp through the window and realized that my attitude toward Jeremy had changed drastically in the past forty-eight hours. Before his murder I’d had only pleasant, if sometimes impatient, feelings about him. He had called out the familial in me, rather than the romantic, even though I acknowledged his good looks. He was too skinny, too pretty, too young; he wore too many earrings, smoked too much dope. Yet it had been fun to horseplay with him sometimes, to shake my (elderly) head over his naive remarks. I’d always been more lenient with him than with any of the others; I’d made jokes about his spaciness but had still accepted it with an “oh well,” a shrug. Jeremy’s forgetfulness, his slow tentative smile as he asked you to repeat something or as he apologized, they were just his way.

  But what if they hadn’t been “his way”? What if Jeremy’s sweet boyishness, his puzzled vagueness had been all put on? What if the real Jeremy was the one who told June she wasn’t the only scene in town, the one who had hundreds of dollars in his pocket, the one who forged identity papers—the one who was an informer—for someone—about someone?

  It was hard to believe. I thought back to the day Jeremy had come by the shop last year. Kay had been doing our camera work then. She’d been a hard person to get along with, testy, with a flaring temper, and in recent months there’d been a lot of fighting. She’d finally announced she was leaving. Fine, we said, while wondering what to do now. That same afternoon a young blond man with earrings and ringlets had stopped in the doorway.

  “What’s all this? Oh wow, a collective printshop. What a great idea, far out. Hey, I studied printing and camera in California. You don’t need anybody, do you?”

  An FBI informer would never have had such good luck. An FBI informer would have been seen through months before. An FBI informer wouldn’t waste his time on Best Printing. It wasn’t like we were some ultra-left group fomenting revolution. We just did printing.

  Automatically, memories of different jobs passed through my mind. Benefit posters and flyers for bookstore collectives, for food and bike co-ops, pamphlets for anti-war groups, brochures for feminist businesses, a few books every year on subjects like rape, racism and cultural genocide…it was true that almost every leftist feminist or progressive group had dealt with us at one time or another….

  A sudden chill passed over me and I huddled deeper under my covers. It had just occurred to me that a print shop might be the ideal place to keep tabs on the various groups in town. No need to go and hunt them down, they would come to you, flyer copy in hand, earnestly explaining their politics. You’d know of every benefit before it was announced, read every bit of literature before it appeared in the mail. Aside from that you could hear a fair amount of gossip as well—which group wasn’t speaking to which group, for instance; the ins and outs of various party lines; who was coming to town, who was leaving, who was here.

  And what a bonus being in the darkroom, able to develop all those negatives—one for you, one for them—not to mention the photographs you could take—with your secret camera—of everyone who came to the shop.

  It was a nightmarish thought and one which, I stubbornly continued to feel, was impossible. Not Jeremy, not Jeremy. We would have known.

  And yet, what had we really known about Jeremy? He talked freely—but about nothing in particular. He lived in a small apartment by himself in the Universit
y District, he had a few friends who called him up from time to time, he’d had a girlfriend once, I remembered…had those people suspected? Had they been FBI agents or informers too? And what would the FBI do now that he was dead? Would they be investigating? The very thought was enough to make me scrunch up into the tiniest ball I could. I hadn’t frightened myself so thoroughly since the day after my parents died.

  The next morning I felt, at least temporarily, much better. The sun was shining through the kitchen windows and buttering the counters and floor with its light when I came down to make some coffee. It was about ten o’clock and no one else was around. There was a note on the table from Penny:

  “Pam—didn’t sleep too well and got up to go down to the shop. Don’t want to let things get too much out of hand there. Hadley picked up her truck, said not to wake you. Will call you later about alphabetizing.”

  Alphabetizing? I stared at the word a few minutes before realizing that Penny was referring to Zee up in the attic. XYZ we’d sometimes called her for a joke. God, I’d forgotten about her. She was going to roast up there if she stayed the day. Was it really so necessary to hide her? In the light of the morning it seemed very cloak and daggerish.

  I made two cups of coffee and took them both to the small door upstairs, across from the bathroom. It was locked.

  “Zee. It’s Pam. I’ve got some coffee.”

  I heard her coming down the stairs inside, then the door being unlocked.

  “Do you really think that’s necessary?” I asked, handing her a cup.

  “I don’t know. But I do it anyway.”

  She turned and I followed her up. The attic had at one time been Penny’s and my favorite playing place, and it still held happy associations for me, even though it was now little more than a storage area for trunks and boxes and old mattresses, skis and sleds, hoola-hoops and roller skates. It wasn’t so warm up here as I’d thought, not so early in the day.

  Zee sat down on her mattress, and sipped the coffee thoughtfully. Barefoot, without make-up and with her hair pulled back, she looked far more serious than usual. Younger, too.

  “Are you going down to the shop, too?” she asked.

  “I haven’t decided. I know there’s work to do but it kind of gives me the creeps to be there. Everything has been so up in the air the past few days, too. I don’t know what to think. I feel like I could put it all together if I had some time.”

  “Don’t get too involved, Pam, not if it’s going to mean trouble.”

  “You tell me not to get involved, when we’re hiding you up here and you’re involved….What are you scared of, Zee? You think the cops will figure out you and Jeremy were helping illegals to stay?”

  She nodded without meeting my eyes.

  “But you took the negatives. And there’s nothing to connect you to Jeremy, is there?”

  Zee paused. “No,” she said. “But all the same, some funny things were happening the last few weeks. They make me nervous. One guy, a guy we helped with a labor certification, got turned down from a job he wanted, he didn’t know why. They kept his papers. Lucky they were under a false name and we got him new ones, but this keeping the certification, it’s unusual, it’s frightening.”

  “Have all the people you’ve helped been political? I mean, anti-Marcos?”

  “Anti-Marcos, yes, but we mean a lot of different things by that, you know. Lots of people in the Philippines are anti-Marcos now, but not everybody does anything about it. Well, and they can’t always,” Zee added, looking over at me as if wishing I could understand. “It’s very dangerous. Thousands are in jail, and some of them because they did just one little thing, maybe only talking back to some local mayor or something. One old guy I heard of, he just went and asked for his pension, the pension that was owing him, and they put him in jail, they beat him, you know, and put him in jail. That’s the way there now.”

  “But the Filipinos you know in America, are they anti-Marcos too? Do they care if they’re not living there?”

  Zee looked at me curiously, as if trying to gauge the extent of my interest.

  “Well, you’ve got to remember,” she began slowly, “there are different kinds of Filipinos here, different groups: first wave, second, third. They say the first wave is the ones who were brought over and who came over to work in the fields in California. You know Carlos Bulosan, the writer? No…well, he wrote about that life, a very beautiful novel, you know—America is in the Heart. These men, they were mostly men, sometimes went back, sometimes stayed, and brought over a girl, married, had families. They’ve been here as long as lots of immigrants from Europe….

  “The second wave, they were those guys, from the war, you know.” When I looked puzzled she explained patiently, “The Filipinos fought for the United States in the war; they thought that because they were governed by the U.S., had treaties and like that, the U.S. would protect them from the Japanese. Oh no, the Japanese invaded, killed thousands; Manila was the worst-bombed city in the whole war, you know, worse than Warsaw. You didn’t know that, did you? No, Americans don’t know that…But after the war Congress passed a bill saying that all the Filipinos who fought in the war could become citizens. So they did, and they came over here, to have the good life. Everything they wanted—car-house-television, that’s what they heard. We all hear that, all our lives, how great life is in America.”

  “And the third wave?”

  “It’s mostly professionals—doctors and nurses, engineers, computer programmers and things like that. It’s not hard to come if you have some money and some relatives—almost everybody has some relatives here—and a skill. Or you’re a student. Marcos doesn’t care so much if professionals leave. Because the Philippines can’t support them, and they just get liberal and dissatisfied. And besides, everybody sends money back home. He doesn’t lose much.”

  “What about the students, the radicals?” I asked. “Aren’t they some kind of fourth wave?”

  “If we were truly so radical,” Zee smiled a little bitterly, “we would stay in the Philippines and join the guerillas. You,” she made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the downstairs, “have your own special ideas about what is radical. But listen, okay,” Zee’s voice got hard. “We have been years and years under American imperialism and we hate it. Hate the Coca-Cola and the soldiers and sailors and air force at Subic and Clark, hate the way our women are prostitutes and our men are black marketeers or the way we have to work for your companies in factories making little pieces of things, not even the whole thing! But we come to the U.S. anyway when we’re in trouble or to study, because where else can we go? We come here, we can stay with relatives or go to school—your nice, your such nice universities with their student centers and swimming pools—and we can sit in the library and read all the Marx and Fanon and everybody we want to, and nobody is going to bother us, you know, cut our toes off one by one or put electrodes on our genitals or anything…”

  “Zee,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “Zee…”

  She shook me off. “We come to America because we are middle-class or upper-class and we don’t know how to fight wars or if we want to, and because we can come here.” And she was crying now, holding her arms close to her sides. “But if you do anything here, the more visible you become, the more you can’t go back. You just have to keep staying. You don’t influence the Americans, because they don’t hear you, they don’t believe you when you talk about what’s happening in the Philippines. You just stay, you just stay. And gradually you lose touch, and it’s a little unreal to you, too. You live in a country like this, and you forget; it starts to seem impossible. You don’t believe it either.”

  The morning sunlight was falling now in a straight path over her shoulders and my legs, as we faced each other, both crying now.

  “You’ve never really liked me, Pam, have you?” she said, after a minute.

  “I…I’m sorry Zee, how I’ve been. Can we start again?”

  “Yes,” she nodded a
nd put her hand out.

  We shook on it, a little solemnly, then couldn’t help laughing.

  Zee said, “…You know, Ray and I, it’s not…”

  “I don’t want to hear about you and Ray. I don’t mind, really, I don’t mind at all. I’m happy for you, and embarrassed about my bad manners. But that’s really the least of our worries now.”

  “But Pam, really…”

  Then the doorbell rang.

  16

  I WENT TO THE window of the attic and looked out. I didn’t see a car I recognized in the street, only a plain navy blue sedan. I couldn’t imagine who it was.

  “I’ll lock the door after you,” said Zee.

  I went downstairs quickly and got to the door as the bell rang again. I opened up on a man in a polyester suit, the same color as his car. Oh Christ, the FBI.

  “Ms. Nilsen?” he asked, showing me his card. Fred Parker, Lieutenant Detective, Seattle Police Department.

  “One of them.”

  “May I come in? I have a few questions to ask about one of your employees, Jeremy Plaice.”

  I motioned him inside. He was a tall, fair man with a clean-shaven, friendly face. He moved dragging one leg a bit and compensating with his other, as if it were an old injury.

  We sat down in the living room. I felt as if I were entertaining a distant relative or friend of my parents.

  “Tea or coffee?” I couldn’t help asking.

  Lieutenant Detective Parker shook his head politely. He’d taken out a small pad and pencil.

  “Pam or Pamela?”

  “Pam. Penny, my sister, is at the shop.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve seen her.”

  He got up early. I hoped Penny had acquitted herself well. It made me nervous, though, that she hadn’t called to alert me. What if our stories clashed?

  “What can I do to help you?” I said less than eagerly. “I already had my statement taped that night.”