Murder in the Collective (27 page)

“Like in a dream I put the gun inside my jeans and then I walked to the ferry. I waited a little bit and then I went out to Winslow. On the way I put the gun over the side. It fell, I saw it fall in the water, they won’t ever find it.”

“So now’s your chance,” said June. “Which side are you on? Are you going to say anything?”

“How long have you known?” I asked her.

“I came over here yesterday, mad as hell, when I should have been in Oakland, to find out the truth. How Zee could have been married to the fucker the same time he was with me.”

“We were talking,” said Zee. “We had some common things we were feeling about Jeremy. I told her what he had done to me and to everyone.”

“He never tried any of that blackmailing shit with me,” said June. “But it was probably only a matter of time. He was sick.”

“I knew he was sick,” said Zee. “He was sick about the Filipino people. He hated us. I don’t know why.”

“I think Jeremy hated a lot of people,” said Hadley. “He was a weak man who needed a sense of power. The more he got the more he used it. I wonder if we’ll ever know who was paying him for his information?”

We sat in silence. June had an arm around Zee and Zee was looking at her lap. They were united in a way they’d never been before, a way that was good to see, even if it made me feel excluded. June’s sense of direction had been as keen or keener than ours, but she hadn’t pursued Zee like a detective, she’d confronted her like a woman and stayed to comfort her like a friend.

“It seems so strange,” I said. “It was Elena who wrecked B. Violet and Elena who was really the cause of Jeremy’s death. You protected her from Jeremy, Zee, and she doesn’t even know.” I suddenly realized who Zee had been looking for the other day in the crowded courtroom.

“Yeah, Elena, the big feminist heroine,” muttered June.

“I think it’s funny, somehow, you know, Pam, you and me were talking in the attic. And I said I wanted you to understand about women in the other parts of the world and how you had to learn to care about them to be a feminist. And now maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison because of a white woman in America.”

Zee said it quietly, as if it didn’t concern her, but her black eyes burned into me, asking for something that I was finally ready to give.

“No,” I said, “You
can’t
.”

“No,” Hadley repeated firmly. “The weapon’s gone, they’ve got nothing on you other than that you married him. You’re going to be trusting a few too many people with your secret, but I swear you’re not going to jail. Not for Jeremy Plaice. You’ve got too many things to do to be spending your life in prison.”

And June, without letting go of Zee one instant, said, “Amen to that.”

Hadley and I walked out to our separate cars, stood under the streetlights talking like strangers. The weather was changing; purple clouds moved against the smoked glass sky, there was a taste of rain in the air.

“Somehow I always thought the solution of the case would hinge on you and Penny being twins,” Hadley said. “It never even came up.”

“You made a great entrance anyway….” I paused. “I guess this means our detective story is kind of at an end, doesn’t it?” I was giving her another chance, a way not to break my heart.

Her long legs kicked at the tire of her truck. Under the streetlamp her hair was silver and her eyes like cool blue stones.

“I can see you know what I’m going to say,” she said. “But believe me, it’s not usually a practice I make, to bring women out and then….”

“Just don’t tell me you want to be friends.”

“What about starting our own detective business. Amazons, Inc. Have labyris, will travel.”

“What did we ever really solve? Nothing that we can ever talk about to anyone.”

“Hell, Pam, please don’t be mad. I like you, I’ve always liked you. You’re uncomplicated, nice, it’s been…”

“
Nice
…give me a break. I’m sorry I’m not a violent drug addict or something. Would you like me better then?”

“Listen, I told you I’m the rescuing type. And you’ve never needed rescuing. Fran needs me right now, to keep going to AA, to change her life.”

“You don’t have to keep rescuing her! You stopped rescuing your father.”

“And maybe I’ll leave Fran again too.”

“What about Elena? Or is that just twice as good? Two people to save now?”

“They’re through with each other. I can tell. If Elena knows what’s good for her she’ll go back to Indiana.”

I was silent.

“If I thought you could handle a triangle…”

“Forget it.”

“I bet, in a few months, I could get her out of my system.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“And you don’t want to be friends?”

“No!”

“Look. I want to show you something. Maybe it will make it easier.”

She turned away, bent over, put her hands to her face, as if pulling out eyelashes. When she turned back her face was strangely different, colorless under colorless hair.

“They’re blue contacts, the strangest blue I could find,” she said, handing them to me.

Her real eyes were pale green and unfocused under the glow of the streetlamp. The two round turquoise blue drops glittered in the palm of my hand. Like tears. I handed them back.

“It didn’t make it any easier,” I told her.

“I thought it might not,” she said, kissed me and started walking away.

I waited until her truck had started up and she was pulling slowly away down the block.

“I didn’t just like you for your goddamned turquoise eyes, you know!” I screamed, beginning to run after her. “Hadley, come back here. I’m warning you, if your car turns the corner, I’m never talking to you again. You’ll never see me again.”

Her truck turned the corner.

I’ve always wondered if she heard me.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Pam Nilsen Mysteries

“G
OOD-BYE,” I WHISPERED.
Outside the airport’s plate glass windows the lights of the jet floated eerily upwards and disappeared into the night and thick cloudcover; snowflakes fell like confetti at a ghostly leave-taking. Seattle to Mexico City, Mexico City to Managua. My twin sister Penny and her boyfriend Ray were off to help with Nicaragua’s coffee bean harvest for six weeks.

Bon voyage, buen viaje. Love and resentment, the two emotions I most often associated with my sister, flared up suddenly, destroying the jovial, all-for-the-revolution mood I’d so carefully cultivated and acted out at Gate Six, Mexicana Airlines. Except for a misguided effort on our parents’ part one summer to send us to different relatives, Penny and I had never been parted by such a great distance before.

Our friends began to move away, hurrying to get home before the weather got worse.

“It’s going to be a long six weeks for you and the print shop without them, isn’t it?” Penny’s friend Miranda said sympathetically.

June and I looked at each other. Our collective had argued for six months over whether we could manage without Penny and Ray, and still there was no way we could predict what it would be like. And no way we could stop them from going. If the U.S. ever did invade Nicaragua we’d be sorry we hadn’t done our bit.

“January’s a slow month,” said June, hugging herself tighter into her heavy wool jacket. Underneath her red beret her small cocoa-brown features showed a sad resignation. She and Penny had gotten very close over the fall, pursuing their favorite sport—skydiving. They’d even formed a women’s skydiving club and pooled their money with friends to hire airplanes to drop them out of the air every other weekend. Someone like me, who couldn’t even manage to get up on the low diving board without feeling my stomach sink to my toes, would not be a good substitute.

I linked my arm in June’s and spoke cheerfully. “We’ve got Carole doing the camera work now. And there’s a guy who’ll help with layout and stripping if we need him. He won’t be part of the collective though, I mean, he won’t have any decision-making power.”

“Mmmm, great,” said Miranda vaguely, anchoring her frizzy red hair more firmly inside the elastic band at the back of her head. She was a staff nurse at Harborview and the complexities of both printing and printing collectives were lost on her. Nothing could be more hierarchical than a hospital. She looked at her watch. “I’d better hurry if I’m going to get to work by eleven. I hate the thought of driving in this stuff though.” She gestured out the window at the falling snow. “It’s really dismal. Not like Central America, huh?”

June and I looked at each other again and laughed gloomily. Not a bit like Central America, we agreed.

I got into my Volvo in the airport garage and let it warm up. For six years it had been a trusted friend—now, like seemingly everything else in my life, it was kicking up. Burning oil and burping wounded little noises whenever I went over forty. The Volvo hadn’t wanted to come to the airport tonight at all, and now it was rebelling against going home. It wanted gas too; I’d better stop at a station outside the airport. I wished June had driven with me, and not only because she was so good in automotive emergencies. I could have used the company.

All the gas stations were off the freeway on Pacific Highway South, also known as the Sea-Tac Strip—a long necklace with a jeweled cluster of Hyatts and Hiltons at the center and tawdry pearls and rhinestones of cheap motels, taverns, go-go dancer bars and Burger Kings strung out a mile in either direction. The street that was so often mentioned as the “last place seen.” The last place a girl or young woman had been seen before she turned up as a heap of bones and teeth to be identified in some wooded, desolate spot nearby.

They called them the Green River murders because the first remains had been discovered by the Green River. In the months and years since then, boy scouts, hikers and picnickers had found almost three dozen corpses or skulls and bones all over the area south of Seattle, and more women were missing. Some estimates ranged in the seventies. The investigation had bogged down over and over, but whenever a new set of remains was found the newspapers regurgitated the whole story and sometimes printed a list of the murdered. Wendy Lee Coffield, Debra Lynn Bonner, Opal Charmaine Mills. They all had three names, with a number from fifteen to twenty-five after them. Their ages. They were runaways and prostitutes, the papers said, and went on with touching articles about their foster parents or their single mothers, who all said they didn’t know where the girl had gone wrong. None of the dead were women that I or any of my friends knew. We didn’t know any prostitutes.

At the station I filled the tank, put in oil and looked into the engine—not that I could have figured out what was wrong. I decided that if the Volvo lasted until spring I’d sell it. Maybe I should even sell it now, while it was still running.

Back inside the car I drove up what looked like a main street and went a couple of blocks before I realized I was going in the wrong direction to get back to the freeway. There was nothing up here but cheap motels advertising adult channels and waterbeds; most of them were too shoddy even to be lurid and they all had vacancies. The snow was falling faster now and it was difficult to see. I pulled into an apartment complex to turn around. It was a badly illuminated, sinister set of buildings with a peeling sign that said Bella Vista: Deluxe Suites Available.

Reversing, the car stalled and died. The wet snow began to pile up on the windshield, on the passenger side where the wiper didn’t work as well.

Don’t panic, I told myself sternly. Just two blocks away, the benevolent yellow neon of a Denny’s restaurant gleamed at me. Where there’s a Denny’s, there’s twenty-four hour safety. I’d give the Volvo a couple of tries and then call June if it wouldn’t start. She’d be home in ten minutes.

But, grumbling, the car came to life again and I began to back up. Out of a gap to my right, behind me, between two of the dimly lit apartment buildings, stepped two figures, one supporting the other and both of them weaving drunkenly. They seemed to be making towards me, and I kept reversing as far to the left as I could. As I went past, the taller one, the one who was supporting the other, gestured to me to stop. I had an impression—but no, they were both wearing hats—it was too dark and thick with snow to see clearly—but even if they were women—to pick up two drunks—in this part of town… I kept staring at them as the car reached the sidewalk. The one had slumped over and the other was trying to drag her. Yes, they were women, they looked quite young, they looked like teenagers.

I put on the brakes and skidded slightly, then began to accelerate cautiously forward again. When I got alongside of them I could see that one was Black and one was white and they were only about sixteen or seventeen, wearing hats and thin leather jackets and tight jeans and, of all incredible things on this night, high-heeled shoes with thin straps.

I leaned over and rolled down the passenger window, shouting, “Hurry up before you freeze to death. There’s a blanket in the back. Get in and tell me where you want to go.”

The Black girl fell into the back seat and immediately passed out. The taller white girl, her face pinched and ghastly under heavy makeup, said breathlessly, “We want to go to downtown Seattle, to a place we’re staying on Second Ave.”