THE MOST IMMEDIATE PROBLEM the next morning was to make sure June was out of the clutches of the police. Penny and I woke up early, called the station and got the run-around. They’d either never heard of her or she’d been released sometime during the night.
There was no answer either at June’s or at Marta Evans’s. This wasn’t altogether surprising. It was only seven; anyone who’d been up all night might not be inclined to answer the phone.
Sam was up too and, while we ate granola and he drank what he called a pep drink—milk, yeast, lecithin, eggs, strawberries, yogurt and honey, along with his usual four cups of coffee (he liked to cover all bases)—we filled him in on the recent events.
“What does the group think of all this?” he finally asked. He always called the Best collective “the group,” an old-fashioned hipsterism that made me feel like we were a jazz ensemble. I was fond of Sam, but he got on my nerves the way Jude never did. Without her around he always seemed a little dull and technical, with a helpless air of never knowing how to respond. The recent studies of male/female languages were direct illustrations of Sam’s conversational skills. He was perfectly enthusiastic when discussing a topic he’d brought up—floppy disks for instance—and to the extent that Jude’s feminism had influenced him, he was civilized enough to listen, without interrupting, to you spouting off about your own passions—the overthrow of the white capitalist patriarchy, for example—but as far as giving off any little reassuring “umms” or “oh reallys” or showing any sort of facial reaction while you talked—you could forget it. He’d listen to you with the politeness of a doorknob and then, after a silence just long enough to disconcert, he’d come out with a question that missed the point entirely with its innocuous brevity. Thus, “What does the group think of all this?”
“You mean the plot to knock of all the men in the collective?” I said, “Well, I’ve heard Ray is hiring a bodyguard.”
Penny gave me a look. She didn’t have the same reaction to Sam. She thought of him as a “very sincere guy.”
“We’re the only ones who know, Sam,” she said in a hushed voice.
“June knows,” I pointed out. “And Zee. And Zee must have told Ray when she went over there. Jeremy, of course, doesn’t need to know. So that just leaves Elena. I guess we’d better call her before she gets down there.”
Penny nodded. “What about the Bee Vee’s? Let ’em read it in the paper—or on a warrant?”
“Hadley was with us,” I reminded her. “I’m sure the topic will come up.”
“Oh god,” Penny suddenly started crying. “We’re talking about it in this flippant way—as if it didn’t really happen, as if it weren’t Jeremy who’d died.”
I felt tears springing to my eyes too, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t liked him more, that I had so many new suspicions of him, that I even had the fleeting queasy feeling he may have done something to deserve it.
“Well, see you,” said Sam, getting out while he could. “Uh, hope you find the murderer.”
“We’re not the ones looking,” I said through my weeping. “Thank god.”
But of course we were.
At eight there was still no answer at June’s, so Penny and I decided to make a personal visit. In the meantime, Jude had come downstairs and had compensated for Sam’s lack of response by a positive waterfall of questions and humming, clicking and ohing. I realized more than ever what had made her develop this almost exaggerated mode of urging other people’s words out. In the beginning of her relationship with Sam she must have had to use a pick and hammer. Strange how you never noticed it when they were together—they’d perfected a pattern between them.
Hadley also called.
“How’re you doing?”
“Sleepy, sad in a way, thinking about Jeremy.” I almost told her about Zee’s late night visit, but decided to save it until I’d thought about it further. “Have you seen Elena…or Fran?”
“Elena’s here with me now. No sign of Fran.”
Hadley seemed as constrained as I. Elena was probably listening. I wondered if I should mention that Elena could have been the object of the bullet. Last night it had seemed like a revelation: this morning it just seemed stupid. Besides, if Elena were already completely freaked out about Fran and the destruction of B. Violet, how would she react to a suggestion that she may have just escaped being murdered?
“Tell Elena,” I said, and paused. Tell Elena what? To lie low for a few weeks? To leave the country until it all blew over? “Tell Elena that she shouldn’t come in to work. No regular business hours today. Penny and I are going over to June’s now to see what she knows, if anything.”
“Okay,” said Hadley. “Call me later, okay? Maybe we can get together.”
“All right. See you.”
And suddenly, I really wanted to.
No one seemed to be at home at the apartment where June lived with her kids on Capitol Hill. A sixties-built block on stilts with parking underneath, the whole place had a somewhat deserted air. Curtains were drawn and windows were closed, even though it was the beginning of another hot day.
We knocked for a few minutes, and Penny called out cautiously, “June, you there?” but no one came to the door. She was either deep asleep or she hadn’t wanted to come back to the place she and Jeremy had shared—if she’d even been released. We decided to drive over to her mother’s and see what she knew.
Mrs. Rich lived with June’s married cousin and her husband in the Central District, in a rambling two story green house with rose bushes all around. They were luxuriantly in bloom this summer morning, still fresh with dew.
“She’s sleeping,” said her mother when she answered the door. Mrs. Rich was a big-boned woman, lighter than June, and with the same snappy energy. Her eyes were brown and slightly almond-shaped under the red and yellow turban she wore. She didn’t look very friendly now, even though the last time we’d been there—to the cousin’s wedding—she’d hugged us like family.
“We just wanted to find out if she was okay,” said Penny.
“Who is it, Mama?” called June from one of the back rooms.
“Penny and Pam,” Mrs. Rich boomed back. “You sleep or ain’t you?”
“No, I can’t sleep no more,” said June. “Let them in, Mama, I’m coming.”
We were seated on the couch when June walked into the living room. She looked exhausted and wired at the same time and her usual jaunty look was shot through with anger and pain. “How ’bout some coffee, Mama?” she said, and to us, with a shrug of a smile, “No way I’m going to get my beauty sleep today, I guess.”
She sank onto the couch beside us and Penny put an arm around her. “They didn’t keep you there too long, did they?”
“Nah. Not really. What could they pin me with, I mean? So the guy was my boyfriend and so we had a fight and so about an hour or two later he got offed.” June’s voice was dully ironic. “So why should they accuse me of anything?”
“But they didn’t keep holding you or put you in jail, right?” asked Penny. I could hear the guilt in her voice. After all the cops had heard about Jeremy and June’s fight through her.
“Oh yeah. Just asked a few questions. Like ‘How long you been fuckin’ that white boy, girl?’ and ‘Where’d you get that gun?’ And ’shore nuff look like you got a thang against these mens, to be shooting ’em like this.’ They gave me a Black cop, see. Get the truth out of me. Someone from my own ‘culture,’ knows about us Black girls’ murderous instincts.”
Mrs. Rich came in with coffee. “Makes me so mad I could spit, the way they treat her. Like she was some old piece of trash. There’s nobody thinks what happened before was nothin’ but an accident. My baby’s no killer, no way, and you know I never liked that boy one bit.”
“Ever since last night I’ve been getting the idea that none of us ever really knew Jeremy,” I said.
“Huh,” said June, sipping her coffee. “You’re telling me. I never thought I’d see the day some white guy would try and walk on my face, but I saw it last night. I never want to see it again. Or I will kill somebody.”
“Fran said that Jeremy was the one who destroyed B. Violet. She said she found him there smashing and ripping things up.”
June took this in. “Someone maybe killed him for that then? Like that big bulldagger Fran? She could, I bet.”
“Don’t know. She’s sure been drunk enough lately not to know what she’s doing. Who knows if she even saw Jeremy wrecking B. Violet or if she did it herself.”
“I couldn’t give him an alibi that night even if I wanted to,” said June. “We started out together after the collective meeting, but then he had to do a dope deal, he said.” June shook her sculpted black head. “My opinion was he was screwing around on me. That’s what we were fighting about last night. He wants to get out of town fast, he says, move on out. When I said, no way, I’m not going anywhere with these two kids and you and your roving eye, that’s when it started. All his talk about attitude. That’s the first thing they start on when they’re fucking someone else.”
“June, shush now,” said her mother.
June’s round, nut brown eyes filled with tears. “He had someone else, he was just using me. He pretended to be so nice and sweet and liking the kids and all but he was a goddamned motherfucker and I’m not sorry he’s dead!”
She stalked abruptly from the room and her mother went after her. Penny and I continued sitting, at a loss. I kept thinking about Zee and her appointment with Jeremy and what all that meant. I found it impossible to believe that Zee could have been involved with him, but what else had all that stuff Jeremy threw in June’s face been about? I sure didn’t feel like telling June about Zee’s visit last night.
Mrs. Rich came back out. “Time for you girls to go,” she said. “June’s tired, real tired.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Penny asked.
Mrs. Rich smiled bitterly. “Just find out who killed that boy and thank them for me.”