Murder in the Collective (17 page)

“Hey, we’re on,” I whispered, a little dazed, starting to climb inside. “Go around to the door, I’ll let you in.”

I didn’t dare turn on any lights, but fortunately it was just one room, with a kitchen and a bath, not difficult to negotiate in the dark. I stumbled and slid on some magazines or newspapers but managed to reach the door and unlock it. Hadley came in and turned on her flashlight.

“I always did have a hard head, luckily,” I said.

“I guess you do! What a stunt. You should think about the movies.”

“Yeah, too bad the Marx Brothers are no longer in business.”

“I was thinking more of James Bond. I could be the love interest…Do you think the cops left us anything to look at?” she asked, sending her flashlight’s beam on a trip around the room.

“
Someone’s
been here, said the little wee bear.”

“And it sure wasn’t Goldilocks.”

Jeremy’s studio wasn’t so full of junk as it was littered with stuff that belonged in drawers and closets. A certain amount of it was clothes and linen, but there were also ashtrays and beer bottles and coffee cups, and a smell of all three, mixed with the airless dirty scent of a closed-off room.

“I wonder what his family will say when they get here?” I said, lifting up a handful of socks strewn over the floor and staring at the magazines underneath:
Reader’s Digest, Hustler, Rolling Stone, High Times, Newsweek
.

“Aren’t you surprised that they aren’t here yet?” Hadley asked, rummaging through the contents of drawers that had been dumped on the pulled-down Murphy bed. “I mean, it’s been two days.”

“Maybe that’s partly why the cops were here, looking for their addresses. I’m sure Jeremy has family, he’s talked about them often enough.”

“It could have been the dope mafia here, looking for something, or the FBI, right?”

I had come to a pile of newsclippings stapled together. They were in a manila folder that had slipped down between the table and the sofa. Flipping through them quickly it occurred to me that Hadley still didn’t know that Zee was staying with us, that there had been more than a casual connection between Zee and Jeremy. I had meant to tell her something about it, not all, yet still couldn’t think how to begin without betraying Zee’s trust.

But Hadley had discovered a stack of
Hustlers
and soft-core porn magazines under the bed. “That guy was sick,” she said. “Poor June.” She suddenly ripped one of them in half. “Christ, I’m starting to get the creeps in here.”

I couldn’t help shuddering too. June had deserved better than that. We all did. Reading porn had never been grounds for expulsion from a leftist collective, much less for murder, but if I’d known that Jeremy was a fan of
Hustler
I’d never have let him through Best’s doors. And for a moment I was only sorry Jeremy was dead because I couldn’t tell him so.

I was still holding the newsclippings and wondering if they had any importance. They were from different American dailies,
The Seattle Times,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
as well as some leftist papers. There were also several from Filipino papers, some in English and some in what I took to be Tagalog. They dated from about three years back, and virtually all of them concerned bombings and protests in Manila. When I turned the flashlight on them more closely I could see pencil marks. There were names underlined, some faintly and some with a check mark. Nothing else, no comments in the margin, nothing to indicate the agitators’ interest to Jeremy.

Hadley had gone into the bathroom. “Yuck,” I heard her mutter. She was opening the medicine cabinet. On an impulse I took the clippings out of the folder and stuck them in my jacket pocket.

Then I joined her. I’d expected her to be staring at a syringe or something, but apparently her comment had referred to the state of the toilet and the sink, which were obscenely filthy. She was now, for some mysterious reason, fastening a beautiful earring in her earlobe, humming. It was gold and turquoise and shaped like an S.

“It’s too bad there’s only one,” she said. “I just found it in the medicine cabinet. I’ve always wondered what all those people with one hole in their ear do with the other earring.”

“Jeremy didn’t have one hole, he had at least five.”

“Same difference…I think I’ll keep it.” She laughed and turned me around, propelling me out of the bathroom. “There’s nothing in here, let’s try the kitchen.”

Ten minutes later we’d finished our search. We found no dope, no incriminating letters, no mysterious tape recorder or tapes, no stashes of money, nothing that could link Jeremy to either organized crime or organized spying. Just a lot of dirt, a dozen porn magazines and the small pile of news clippings stapled together, with names checked or underlined in light pencil.

I wanted to get them home, take another look at them, show them to Zee. There was something about one of the names that seemed familiar. I couldn’t remember where or when I’d heard it, but I thought it had been recently. Zee might be able to place it, or jog my memory.

“You want to do anything with the porn magazines?” I asked Hadley as we prepared to leave.

“Spare his family? Prove something to June?”

I shuddered. “No, let’s just get out of here.” I was feeling more and more paranoid. What if the house were under surveillance, what if we were met by plainclothes police outside, what if drug thugs accosted us on the way back to the car? Would Hadley’s new earring and my newsclippings have been worth it?

We left by the back way again, being careful not to go too quickly and give ourselves away. We didn’t go around the house again out to the street, but instead through the alley, just in case.

But nothing happened. There didn’t seem to be a soul around, not even any frat boys on this warm, rose-perfumed June night. And we laughed as we got in the car, thinking we’d gotten away with something.

I
T WAS AN IDYLLIC
sort of dream, an early forties movie about an island paradise where everybody wore sarongs and flowers in their hair, drank from conch shells and lay on green banks of moss under canopies of palm leaves.

I wondered what I was doing here. I was standing in the shallow water of the blue bay with cameras draped around my neck, a notepad in hand. I was wearing a straw hat, big sunglasses and bermuda shorts. The islanders laughed at me, collecting on the beach to point and wave.

Then their spokesperson, their queen, came to greet me, walking quickly and with shy dignity over the sand. She had very black hair and a red and gold sarong around her hips. The film orchestra began to play the overture from “South Pacific.” It was Zee and she welcomed me, saying “The Revolution has begun.” I noticed that she had a carbine over her shoulder and was now dressed in camouflage and khaki.

Fortunately I was dressed the same by this time, though I didn’t have a gun, just my cameras. They were funny cameras, Polaroids, that kept spitting out pictures even when I thought I wasn’t taking any. They were mostly action shots, of combat and death; some had people’s faces—significant portraits of people I knew but didn’t quite recognize.

We were climbing a mountain in the jungle. There were bright parrots in the lianas and the climb was very steep. Zee was leading the way, telling me about the customs and history of her people. I was very moved, I knew they were right to do anything they could to get their country back.

Then I realized that we were climbing a volcano. Zee was gone, everyone was gone, there was only me, with my cameras, again in my bermuda shorts and straw hat and glasses. There was a silence and then I heard it. The volcano was fizzing, it was hissing and spurting. It was mad, it was enraged, it was going to blow and cascade hot lava down on me. The light was suddenly blinding.

I woke to broad daylight and the sound of Hadley’s espresso maker. She was bent over something at the table by the window. When I put on my glasses I saw that she was writing intently in a notebook. Her hair looked silvery in the morning light, pushed behind her ears. She was wearing a sort of discount store kimono that came only to mid-thigh. Her legs were bony and bare; her feet were enormous.

“I hope you’re putting it all down,” I called across the room. “Every single detail.”

Hadley looked over and laughed, pretended to read: “Dear Diary, my orgasm last night measured 7.8 on the Richter Scale. And to think, Miss Pam had never been with a woman before!”

“Well, you’ll never be able to say that again.”

“Uh-uhn!” Hadley closed her journal and got up to fetch two cups. I wondered what she’d really been writing. I never kept a journal myself. I got up a little self-consciously, searched for my clothes, dressed and sat down at the table across from her.

Mornings after great passion can go two ways, at least in my experience. Either you remain connected, can’t keep from touching each other, from continuing to want—or else you’re embarrassed and constrained, wondering, ‘What did I see in this person? Was that really us last night?’

I had a sudden sinking feeling that ours might be a morning like the latter. Hadley was quiet, her bright turquoise eyes preoccupied. She touched me on the arm as she poured my coffee, but didn’t sit down.

“Got to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Back in a minute.”

I waited, anxiously, convinced now that this was going to turn strange. What did I know about her anyway? Nothing. What if she were involved with someone else? What if she’d had second thoughts about me, decided I was too straight, too stupid, too…something.

I sipped my coffee and stared at her notebook, square on the table. Had she left it there on purpose, so that I could read it for myself: “June 10. Made a terrible mistake last night…”

Well, I wouldn’t. She’d have to tell me herself. Or I’d just leave, yes, maybe I should leave right now, before she got back. No, say good-bye at least…Good-bye Hadley, thanks for everything…

I heard the toilet flush downstairs and suddenly grabbed the notebook, flipped it open and read, “I’m in love, I can’t help it.” slammed it shut and was standing next to a hanging on the wall when Hadley came in.

I turned to her with a beaming face. “Tell me about your mother, Hadley.”

She came over and gave me a long kiss. She had brushed her teeth. “Mmmm. Well. That’s from Iran, where she was living when she met my father. She’d graduated in archeology, from Barnard, and was on a dig. It was before the war, late thirties. My father was from an oil family in Texas; they’d sent him over to check out the fields in Iran. I gather it was love at first sight. So my mother became a housewife in Houston. And my father went on making money and drinking. She was bored, bored, bored, and in the early sixties, when I was in high school, couldn’t stand it anymore. She found out about some group, some organization where upper middle-class, educated, frustrated people like herself could pay lots of money to go on research expeditions to observe the flora and fauna of the Galapagos or chart the social customs of small French villages or dig around in Turkey. So my mother went to Turkey to help excavate something, and loved it, came back and started taking classes at the university for a graduate degree in archeology. She went again to Turkey the next summer, and finished her degree and went again the next summer and somehow never came back. They got divorced, which gave my father an even better excuse to drink, not that he needed one by that time.”

“Do you see her very often?”

“Now and then. I’ve visited her in a couple of places. It’s really been amazing to see the change. She was always a very competent person, running a big house, entertaining, all that kind of thing, but she was always a little cold and detached, bored, uninspired. Suddenly, seeing her supervise a dig in Turkey, wearing this straw hat and khaki shorts, and seeing her passion and how everyone paid attention to her and respected her—it was really amazing.

“But we’re not really close. She doesn’t understand my sexuality—in spite of the fact that she couldn’t deal with my father and probably hasn’t had sex herself for twenty years and sort of gives the impression that she has no time for men—she just doesn’t admit the possibility of putting energy into human relationships, especially with other women. It’s a form of wasting time, I suppose. And then, she’s been disappointed in my career, I mean, that I don’t have one. And I had all the breaks. Went to Sarah Lawrence. Studied economics, of all things…”

Hadley had gradually turned away from the Persian wall hanging and had gone back to the table. She poured herself a cup of coffee and her finger tapped gently at the notebook. “I always had the impression that to have a career you had to have something cold, very cold about you. And it was that coldness I could never muster. I always was too sympathetic, too…I don’t know. I mean, it was fine, it was great for her to break away. She’d taken care of my father for years. But he was left without anyone all of a sudden. I felt
responsible
.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears again. “When she was doing all the beginning stuff, going to graduate school, I was still in high school. Then I went to college. It didn’t take me more than one semester to realize I was a lesbian. It made sense. It was wonderful. I wasn’t at all concerned about what to do in life after I made that discovery. I was beginning to feel for the first time, that’s all I wanted to do. Then my mother left my father and he was all alone and I just went back there. Stayed eight years. In my father’s house. In Houston.”

I went over and put my arms around her neck. We remained like that for a moment, then she said, “Well, let’s not get into all that right now. Tell me about yourself.” She suddenly laughed and turned to me, pushed me into the chair next to her and cuddled close. “Tell me what it’s like to be a twin, for instance. Did you use to play tricks when you were growing up?”

“Oh, of course, especially when we were really young, in grade school, and looked more alike. And later, too, in junior high, we’d sometimes take each other’s tests. Penny was good in math and I was better at English. We either got bored or guilty about it after a while—Penny sitting through two algebra tests, me writing two English papers. And anyway, when you get older your interests separate. I remember in high school especially we had some serious fights. We’d try to find ways to act
extremely
different from each other, then we’d resent each other’s behavior. I remember that whenever Penny went out with any especially repulsive guys that I hated it. I felt it reflected on me.”