Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “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.

  26

  THE 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 w
ere 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…”

  I thought, if this is what she told the reporter, then the account in the paper was mild.

  “Mrs. Plaice,” I interrupted. “When was this, when did you meet her?”

  “It was Christmas,” she said. “Christmas before last and Jeremy called down and said he wanted to come home and could he bring his girlfriend and of course I was just tickled pink, he’d never brought a girl home for the holidays before, and of course I was worried about him, I was working again, his brother and sister were married and there was just Jeremy. I used to worry about him and then he just up and joined the Navy, gone three years…so it wasn’t like we were used to him bringing girls home…”

  She paused for breath and her voice took on a tone of betrayal.

  “…And then we went to pick them up at the Ontario Airport and you know he hadn’t said one word about her being a Philippines girl, he could have at least said something. Well, we’re not rich people but I’d decorated the house up something special and cooked a ham and a turkey and there were all kinds of relatives and some of the neighbors…oh, it was downright embarrassing.”

  “How long did they stay?”

  “Well I just asked her what they did in the Philippines instead of Christmas and she said they celebrated the birth of Christ, they were Catholic there, but how was I supposed to know that, they look like Japanese practically, over there in Asia somewhere with those slanty eyes I thought they had Buddha or something. I was just trying to be friendly and so I started telling her about Uncle Joe being stationed there during the war and somebody else said something about the Philippines always wanting to be the fifty-first state and someone else said they thought it was better with just Hawaii, though the Philippines people made really nice baskets, she’d bought some on sale…”

  “And Zenaida left.”

  “They both left, first her, in a huff, then Jeremy. Then Jeremy came back and we told him it was all for the best, a girl like that could have never fit into American life, he’d be feeding all her relatives before he knew it…”

  “Well, thanks, Mrs. Plaice,” I said in as neutral a voice as I could manage. “I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “My husband and me we’ll be coming up there when the trial starts,” she said. “I want to make sure justice is done, that everybody knows what a good boy Jeremy was to be murdered by that little…”

  I hung up and turned, shaking, to Hadley. “I’m sure glad we didn’t fly down to Fullerton,” I said. “Or I think there could have easily been another murder. By strangulation.”

  27

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON ZEE was released on bail. Hadley and I were waiting for her when she and her aunt arrived home.

  “I see you want some explanations,” said Zee tiredly when she saw us sitting on the front steps.

  “This isn’t the right time,” Mrs. Reyes said, unlocking the door and making a kind of sweeping movement as if to drive away flies. “Go away now, girls, can’t you see Zenaida is exhausted? She has just spent a night in jail.”

  “Come on in,” said Zee. “We’ll have some tea. And a talk. I enjoyed talking to you, you know, Pam, up in the attic.”

  “We didn’t come just to interrogate you, Zee,” I admitted. I was recognizing for the first time how very bad the situation was for her and how well she was taking it. She couldn’t be guilty, I knew that. I knew it. “We also wanted to ask what we could do to help.”

  “Thanks,” she said, catching my hand and pressing it. “But I guess I need to tell you some things, things I didn’t tell you before.” She sat down in the living room and brushed her thick black hair with both hands. Mrs. Reyes went into the kitchen without another word.

  “When did I marry Jeremy and why? Is that what you have been asking yourselves? Well, I have too, you know. For months. I knew Jeremy first from his interest with one of the Filipino groups. He was liked, at least he was accepted. No one could very well understand what he was doing with us, but he explained that he had been in the Navy in the Philippines and that was making him completely anti-Marcos. We all said okay to that. If you believe in something so much yourself you don’t ne
ed so much convincing that other people believe it too. And well, you know, this was all around the time I was quitting the nursing school and trying to switch into graphics. My English still had some problems—Jeremy offered to help me—just as a friend. I thought he was a very good kind of person in some ways. And then I was having trouble with the immigration, you know, and suddenly he says to me, I will marry you if you want to—to help you—it won’t be serious.

  “I don’t know why it seemed like such a good idea. I guess I had known some other people who had done it, mostly political men who did not want to be deported, with white women. And it seemed like a permanent solution. No more forms and waiting in lines, and always being afraid of having to go back to the Philippines. This time if I went back I would be the wife of an American. I would have some rights!”

  Zee laughed scornfully. “That is the state of things there, you know, no rights as a Filipino, every right as an American. I had to ask myself how I felt about Jeremy and the answer was he seemed very kind and anyway I never planned to marry anyone else—not me! So we did it, without anybody but a few people knowing. And then it was funny, I don’t know, maybe just the fact of being married made us fall in love a little bit. There is so much solemn attached to it, this marriage thing, you can’t help but feel. Ah, we were sleeping together then and Jeremy wanted me to meet his family. That was when—his family weren’t so very nice to me. And I came back feeling like I could have nothing to do with a white man again, you know? There is always some way they try to make you feel dirty…”

  I almost asked her about the porn magazines and if he’d ever…but Zee looked so uncomfortable already that I didn’t push it.