Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “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.

  I couldn’t figure out Hadley’s tactic. Far from challenging the meaning of his sarcasm, she was fiddling with her hair and looking into the mirror above the mantle in a very uncharacteristic display of vanity. Then I saw that she’d inserted the gold S-shaped earring with the turquoise stone, the same color as her eyes.

  “But that’s Zee’s earring,” Carlos burst out. “Where did you find it?”

  Benny stood up and went over to Hadley. He was about five inches shorter but he seemed to look her right in the eye. Or the ear, to be more precise.

  “Oh, yes, that used to be Zenaida’s earring, but she lost the other one and gave this one to Jeremy. I remember. I suppose you found it in his apartment.”

  “As a matter of fact, we did,” said Hadley. “Do you think she’d like it back?”

  “Not without the other one. It’s lost, you know, it’s been lost a long time.”

  “Well, we’ll have to keep looking for it then, I guess.”

  Carlos rose as if he couldn’t stand it anymore and started for the door.

  “Do you mind if I take these clippings?” Benny asked me.

  I didn’t feel like looking at him. “Sure, go ahead.”

  When they’d gone I turned to Hadley. “And you talk about my detective techniques. Christ! You should be on TV…you should have your own show…Do you think they did it, Hadley?”

  “I think we know now that Jeremy was recruited in the Philippines to do some spying or passing on of information here in the States. I don’t know by whom. The CIA, someone in the military working with the Marcos government? We’d have to find the officer who gave him a reprimand for his dope possession instead of a discharge, and we’d have to find out what the conditions were. But I think it’s clear that Jeremy was up to a lot of things. Maybe he started small, just attending the meetings and the demonstrations, and then got lucky. Marrying a Filipina activist must have been a great cover. By the time Zee realized what was going on it was too late. He was working at Best, involved in the forgeries, which he himself had suggested, he knew the names of everyone. Of course he was blackmailing Benny and anyone else he could. Money, sex, drugs, he could have asked any of them as payment. He was running a little empire out of your darkroom until they got him…”

  “Until Benny got him?”

  “Well, we don’t know that for sure, do we?” Hadley remained at the mirror, swinging the S-shaped earring back and forth with a finger. “Yet, anyway.”

  29

  THE NEXT MORNING, EXACTLY one week after the murder, Elena met me outside the shop door as I was arriving to open up.

  “Elena! You’ve come back to us.”

  “Well…not…look,” she said. “I’d hoped you would be the first person here. I need to…Look, how about a cup of coffee?”

  “Well,” I hesitated. I’d gotten down here at seven-thirty this morning precisely becau
se I wanted an hour to get things ready for a big job we were starting today. But Elena didn’t look well. Her skin was, in the glowing light of a summer morning, the color of a beige pair of pumps, and her curly blond hair looked like she’d removed it from a paper bag and clamped it on askew. Her jeans no longer clung to her, but were all folds and wrinkles. What had happened in the four or five days since I’d last seen her?

  “Sure, Elena,” I said, putting the keys to Best back in my pocket. “But just for a half-hour or so…”

  She didn’t seem to hear me at all.

  We started off to the local trattoria. I kept waiting for her to speak, but she didn’t say a word until our caffé lattés had been ordered. Then she mumbled so that I almost didn’t catch it:

  “I’m moving back home to Indiana.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said in that same low, tense monotone. “Everything is just too hard. Always too hard. I can’t stand up to it any more. I can’t give the kids anything they need, emotionally or financially. They put up with a lot from the two court cases already and now this…”

  “Is Fran drinking again?” I took her hand.

  “She may be,” said Elena. “I told her last Friday night after you and Hadley left that I didn’t want to continue our relationship any longer.”

  “But Elena, you were so worried about her last week. And now she’s going to AA and everything.” I stopped. What did I know? Perhaps Fran had only said that, perhaps that was something she said all the time.

  “She’s got to help herself,” said Elena. “I can’t help her anymore. I can’t help anybody anymore. No one ever helps me.” She was crying now, just as the caffé lattés arrived. The waitress, who was barely awake, looked as if she couldn’t imagine anyone being that emotional this time of day.

  I had a feeling that it might not be morning for Elena though, but the end of a long hard night. She smelled of alcohol and her eyes were wet and feverish. I reached out and took her hand. It was surprisingly cold and shaky. I rubbed it between my own hands.

  “You’ve had a difficult time the last couple of years, Elena. But are you sure going back to your parents is the best thing to do?”

  “I guess I can’t think what else to do now,” she said, withdrawing her hand and wiping her eyes. “You know, Pam, I’m so goddamned tired of sisterhood,” she said almost violently, and then laughed. “It’s really a joke, feminism. When I think back on it, I was a hell of a lot happier as an oppressed wife and mother.”

  “Oh, Christ, Elena.”

  “No, really. Was it so bad? As long as I didn’t know anything different…I think back on those years with a kind of longing sometimes. Like right after we were married, when he was in graduate school and I was teaching in the local high school. We’d meet in the same little restaurant after work and he’d sometimes have flowers, or I’d have a book to show him, we’d both be full of stories about our classes…And even later, when I was home with the kids, I remember feeling a kind of peacefulness in the midst of the boredom. It was nice some days to realize I didn’t have to get up and go to work, that I didn’t have to be ambitious. I know I couldn’t go back to that, but…was it really such a bad time? I don’t know if I think so anymore.”

  “What about your parents, I mean, going back to your parents?”

  “I had such a secure life as a kid, you couldn’t believe it. A little pink and white room, swimming and dance lessons. Good in school, played the flute, lots of friends…it seems like a dream.”

  “But Elena,” I tried to reason. “It wouldn’t be like that if you went back. I mean, your parents know about you being a lesbian and how political you’ve been and how you’ve lived…”

  “You’d be surprised,” she murmured, sipping at her coffee. “They wouldn’t care, I bet, as long as we didn’t talk about it. As long as the word never came up in conversation or my life in Seattle was never referred to—and you don’t have any idea, Pam, what a relief it would be not to talk about it. I feel like I’ve done nothing but talk for the last three years. Talk about my life, my relationships, my oppression—as a daughter, a wife—about compulsory heterosexuality, about biological determinism, about homophobia, racism, classism, anti-Semitism, sado-masochism, battering, incest, rape, spirituality. I’m tired of talking. I don’t have another word to say!” she burst out vehemently and even banged the glass-top table.

  But she did. She said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that lesbians aren’t one bit better than anyone else. There’s been this huge amount of propaganda about lesbians being so much more together than other women. They don’t put up with any male bullshit, no, they’ve made the right decision. You don’t like the way men are—and who in their right mind does?—become a lesbian, that’s all you have to do. And if you don’t, if you continue trying to work things out with your husband or your boyfriend or your son or your father, well, then you’re a jerk, plain and simple.”

  Elena’s raised voice was attracting attention from two young women executives in another corner, one of whom seemed to be nodding her slickly coiffed head in agreement.

  “But I’ll tell you, Pam, I’ve seen more fucked-up women who are lesbians and even more who are lesbian-feminists. They’re jealous, they gossip and lie, they’re promiscuous, they drink, they fight, they hurt people, they don’t live out any feminist ideals in their own lives, they think they can judge everyone but themselves. They’re nothing but goddamn hypocritical bitches!”

  The women executives were getting worked up too, I could see out of the corner of my eye. “Now, Elena, come on…”

  She stared at me, laughed darkly. “I forgot, you’ve become one of us now. But wait until you’re out of the honeymoon stage. You’ll see.”

  “Elena,” I said. “What really happened between you and Fran?”

  Elena looked down at her empty but still foamy cup. “When Fran sobers up, she doesn’t need you,” she said at length.

  “But she needs your help to stay sober.”

  “That’s a little harder. Especially if you’re used to the dramatics. Especially if you drink yourself—are you just supposed to stop overnight, too? What if you can’t? Besides,” she added, more and more bitter, “no one ever helps me. They expect me to be the strong one.”

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t make a final decision. I mean about moving to Indiana. Why don’t you just visit? Take the kids and see what it’s like there, but don’t decide now, here.”

  “My parents want me to come. They’d pay everything, the moving expenses…”

  “But Elena—what would you do there? Could you teach? Wouldn’t the court case and everything follow you there?”

  Elena started crying again, tears glittering then dripping. “It’s not fair. Why is it my life that’s been wrecked? Other people live as lesbians and don’t get punished. Why did I have to lose my job, everything?”

  “But you’re fighting back, Elena. I know it’s hard, but if you win, it will make a difference to all of us.”

  Through her tears Elena’s face turned sad, distant. “It’s not that easy, Pam. And anyway, I don’t have the strength anymore. Not again. Three years ago I had a lot of strength.” She twisted and tore at her napkin. “I was full of great discoveries: Women are oppressed. Lesbians are oppressed. I wanted to stand up and tell the world to go to hell. I told my husband to go to hell anyway. That was the big mistake. It was too fast—all of it—for him. He got freaked out and went vindictive. I shouldn’t have moved so fast, I shouldn’t have…I just shouldn’t have…” she repeated over and over and burst into tears again.

  Impatience was gaining on sympathy. My watch said it was near eight-thirty. Everyone would be arriving at the shop wondering where I was; the paper company would be delivering, we had a big day ahead of us and here was Elena regretting that she’d told her ex-husband to leave.

  “Like I said, don’t make any big decisions now, Elena. You’re upset, but it will pass. Visit yo
ur parents, remember what it’s like and come back. The shop can wait.”

  “Sure,” she said bitterly. “The shop could wait twenty years before I’d ever be any use there. I know I’ll never be any good as a printer, it’s no use pretending otherwise. Oh yeah, I thought it would be so great, a printshop. Working class feminism, hahaha…”

  “Elena, I’m sorry. I just can’t stay to talk any longer. I can call you up later, but we’re really busy today and…”

  “I heard Hadley’s working with you now.”

  I nodded.

  “Fran is really pissed, you know. She thinks it’s betrayal. She thinks Margaret and Anna are going to start a typesetting business on their own and then she’ll be left out in the cold.”

  “Oh, for godssakes, Elena,” I got up to go. “I really have to leave. I’ll pay the cashier.”

  “No, wait, Pam,” she said, pulling at my sweatshirt. “I mean, I didn’t even ask you about Zee and everything…”

  I paused unwillingly. “She’s out on bail, the trial is set for the end of next month and we still don’t know how they can prove it.”

  “But they were married.”

  “I can’t believe that had anything to do with it. She’s having to take the rap for someone else, probably someone who found out he was informing, or maybe one of his own circle, some other agent. I don’t have any idea how we can find out, but Hadley and I are trying.”

  Elena’s face had changed. “Then you don’t think that Fran had anything to do with it,” she murmured under her breath.

  I stared at her. Could that be the real reason she’d called it quits with Fran? From a fear that Fran had really knocked him off?

  I bent down, hugged Elena. Her body was light and stiff as a styrofoam board. “I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about, Elena.”

  She didn’t look up at me. “Thanks anyway, Pam.”

  The morning was ruined. Everyone was there when I arrived back at the shop.

  “I thought you were coming in early to get ready,” said Hadley.