THEY ARRESTED JUNE THAT night. No doubt they’d punched one of their computer buttons and found that four years ago a husband of hers had been accidentally shot in the forehead by his wife.
As soon as we got home Penny started to look up lawyers in the phone book. It was almost midnight but Penny didn’t want to wait.
“Why the fuck did I have to say that, put my foot in it? I can’t believe it, I’m so stupid.”
“It’s my fault. I should have told you on the phone that he’d been killed. It just seemed so brutal.”
Penny finally remembered Marta Evans, the lawyer who’d worked with us some years ago on restructuring our business.
“Murder?” Marta said sleepily. “You said someone was murdered at Best Printing?”
“It was Jeremy, no, you don’t know him, but he was shot in the head in the darkroom—and they’ve taken June Jasper in for questioning.”
“Goddamn. What time is it? Okay, okay, I’ll do something. I’ll call them or go down there.” She paused, trying to remember. “Isn’t June the Black woman?”
“Yeah. And Marta…June accidentally shot her husband four years ago. And she was involved with Jeremy…”
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
Penny and I looked at each other in relief. “Now,” I said. “You’ve got to tell me what June said to you.”
“Well, first of all, did you ever know June and Jeremy were involved?”
“Only suspected it a couple days ago.”
“They’ve been hanging out together for a month.”
“Now that’s discreet. In our collective too.”
“They wanted it that way. After what happened between you and Ray…”
“Hey,” I said, nettled. “I didn’t plan it.”
“Well, June just said they both wanted it quiet. That’s why they got on each other’s backs at work all the time.”
“And I just thought they disagreed,” I said, ready as usual to twit Penny, but suddenly choking on the thought that Jeremy, laid-back, good-intentioned Jeremy wouldn’t be around to disagree with any more. “Go on.”
“They’ve been more or less living together, June said. And that’s how this argument started. He wanted to give up his apartment and move in with her. That or else give up everything altogether and get out of town. Travel.”
“Travel?” I sputtered. “June and her kids? And what about us, Best?”
“That’s what June said. She didn’t want to go anywhere. And she didn’t want him to move in. She only liked him living there, being around all the time, as long as he still had his own place.”
“Good thinking.”
“I guess they’d been discussing it for a while and then June just couldn’t take it any more and told him to fuck off last night, to clear out and go travel somewhere, to Antarctica, the farther away the better. You know how hot-tempered she can be. She says she threw a cup at him or something. And all of a sudden Jeremy just erupted. She’d never seen anything like it. Screaming that he didn’t need her fucking attitude any longer—she wasn’t the only scene in town. And anyway, things were changing for him, he was on a good streak but he was running out of patience, he didn’t have to stick around listening to her shit and on and on…”
“Jeremy…” I stopped. I couldn’t believe it. But I couldn’t not believe June either. I didn’t know what to believe. And suddenly I thought of Fran’s story that Jeremy was the one who destroyed B. Violet. I’d thought she was lying, but now…and what the hell had Jeremy been doing with hundreds of dollars in his pocket? He wasn’t that big a dealer.
“Penny, there are a few things I haven’t told you. Like…Fran. Fran was there tonight. She came in just after we found Jeremy, she came rushing in and flung herself down, thinking he was Elena—the hair, I guess. And she told us that Jeremy had sabotaged B. Violet last night. That she found him there.”
“She did what?” exclaimed Penny. “She found him at B. Violet and she didn’t say anything? Why didn’t she stay around for the cops tonight?”
“Maybe because she made that up about Jeremy,” I said. “She may have had some kind of alcoholic black-out and destroyed it herself.”
“Or,” said Penny calmly, “she realized that her motives for offing Jeremy would look too good to the law.”
“Or,” I said, but didn’t finish. The possibility that Fran had actually offed Jeremy became real to me for the first time.
“But if she didn’t,” said Penny, “who did?”
There was a hushed but persistent banging at our front door. My heart mimicked the sound instantly.
“I’ll go look,” I said. I sneaked up to the peephole and announced, “It’s Zee.”
Zee was, for the first time since I’d made her acquaintance, less than perfectly turned out. Her sculpted black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, leaving her wide-angled, rather flat face as free-floating as a light gold balloon. She was dressed simply in jeans, running shoes and a dark sweatshirt, and she was out of breath.
“Penny, Pam, let me in,” she was whispering urgently to the doorknob when I opened the door. She bounced in and grabbed each of us by an arm. “Something awful has happened. At the shop. There were policemen carrying out a body.”
I couldn’t help shuddering. We’d turned away from that last horrible sight.
“I know,” I said, as gently as I could. “It’s, it was Jeremy.”
She burst into frantic tears, grinding her eyes with the balls of her hands. Her body was trembling like a fish out of water. Penny put her arms around her and I stroked her hair. It was heavier than it looked, stiff and shiny as a lacquered basket.
We led her to the sofa and Penny asked, “How did you happen to see it, Zee?”
At that she only cried more hysterically. Penny rocked her back and forth, murmuring “Now, now,” but I couldn’t help thinking, What was Zee doing in Pioneer Square so late at night? She didn’t have a car and she lived way up on Beacon Hill. For that matter, what was she doing in our Ravenna neighborhood at midnight? Why hadn’t she asked the cops what was going on? Why had she come here instead of calling us to find out, and why had she been sure we’d know what had happened?
I pushed these thoughts away temporarily and got up to make us all a pot of tea. When I got back from putting the kettle on, Zee was a little more coherent.
“Thank you Penny and Pam, now I am better. I’m sorry I was so crazy. Now I think I’ll go, now.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Penny with surprising firmness, turning her cradling movements into restraining ones.
“Please, I’m just going to Ray’s house in the next few blocks.”
“Let him sleep, for god’s sake,” I said harshly, and Penny gave me an irritated look. “I mean, don’t you want to know what happened to Jeremy?”
“Yes,” said Zee slowly, almost reluctantly. “I want to know.” She half-sat up; her pale ochre face was splotched with red, her thick hair fell into her eyes. “What happened…to him?”
I told her how Hadley and I came to find him in the darkroom, and how Fran had burst in thinking he was Elena. That fact didn’t seem to register with her.
“He was working in the darkroom,” she repeated. “He was developing something?”
“Yes.” I remembered the small negatives hanging up to dry. I hadn’t bothered to look at what they were. Now it struck me that they couldn’t have had anything to do with Best Printing. I took a stab in the dark. “Were you supposed to be meeting Jeremy there, Zee? Say around ten or ten-thirty?”
Her jaw dropped, then snapped closed again as tight as if it were stapled. Penny looked at her, surprised and worried. “Zee, was something going on between you and Jeremy? You can tell us, we won’t tell Ray.”
The staples flew apart like magic. “With Jeremy, with that little weasel? I wouldn’t be caught dead, I mean…how could you ever think of me and him…No, only for one reason was I going there, the same reason as always…”
She stopped, stared wildly at us and jumped up. “I’m going to Ray’s, I don’t care. Ray will understand, Ray isn’t like you! He trusts me!”
And with that she was out the door. Penny and I let her go. The teakettle was whistling. From upstairs came a weakly irritated cry, “Turn that fucking thing off!”
Penny and I went into the kitchen and complied.
“Well,” she said, “I’m not sure I’m cut out for the amateur detective business. At what point do we call the number they gave us at the station?”
“Who are we going to point the finger at?” I asked glumly. “They’ve already got June there. I suppose it’s possible she followed him down there and shot him, but I find it really hard to believe.”
“What if Ray did it?” tried Penny. “Found out about Zee and Jeremy and with typical Latin passion…”
“No macho herrings, please. You can’t honestly be thinking of Zee and Jeremy getting it on in the darkroom, can you? The thing she was interested in was the negatives…why?”
Penny pumped the tea ball up and down in the pot before removing it. “But Fran. Why was Fran there? She was the one with the motive, of course.”
I sipped my tea carefully. “I’m not ready to tell the cops anything yet. Let’s wait and see what happens.”
Penny nodded wearily. “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one night.”
“More than enough,” I agreed.
The clock was striking one when something clicked in me. “What if,” I said excitedly, “just what if it wasn’t Jeremy they meant to kill at all?”
“What are you talking about, Pam?”
“What if, because of the red light…and because Jeremy had his head bent, rinsing the negatives, they couldn’t see his face?”
“Who else could they think he was?”
“Elena, of course. Elena.”