I WENT TO THE window of the attic and looked out. I didn’t see a car I recognized in the street, only a plain navy blue sedan. I couldn’t imagine who it was.
“I’ll lock the door after you,” said Zee.
I went downstairs quickly and got to the door as the bell rang again. I opened up on a man in a polyester suit, the same color as his car. Oh Christ, the FBI.
“Ms. Nilsen?” he asked, showing me his card. Fred Parker, Lieutenant Detective, Seattle Police Department.
“One of them.”
“May I come in? I have a few questions to ask about one of your employees, Jeremy Plaice.”
I motioned him inside. He was a tall, fair man with a clean-shaven, friendly face. He moved dragging one leg a bit and compensating with his other, as if it were an old injury.
We sat down in the living room. I felt as if I were entertaining a distant relative or friend of my parents.
“Tea or coffee?” I couldn’t help asking.
Lieutenant Detective Parker shook his head politely. He’d taken out a small pad and pencil.
“Pam or Pamela?”
“Pam. Penny, my sister, is at the shop.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve seen her.”
He got up early. I hoped Penny had acquitted herself well. It made me nervous, though, that she hadn’t called to alert me. What if our stories clashed?
“What can I do to help you?” I said less than eagerly. “I already had my statement taped that night.”
“Let’s start by going over the events the night of the murder. Can you tell me first what you were doing earlier in the evening and then what you saw when you arrived at the shop?”
“Well, I worked at the shop until about six, along with Ray Hernandez. He was there too. Then I left…”
“Was Mr. Hernandez still there?”
“…Yes, he said he’d close up later.” I tried to sound firm rather than hesitant. I’d forgotten Ray was working on a job he wanted to finish. “So, anyway, I went and did a couple of errands—dropped something off at the cleaners, picked up some film I’d had developed—and at seven I met Hadley Harper for dinner at the Doghouse Restaurant. Sally Gassett, the waitress, will remember.”
He was writing all this down in shorthand. He asked me, “Ms. Harper is a friend of yours?”
I nodded. I didn’t feel like going into the merger business any sooner than I had to. I continued, “So we ate and everything, and then about eight-thirty we came by the shop. I wanted to borrow ten dollars from the petty cash. I, we, saw a red light from the darkroom and went in. Jeremy was lying on his back, but sort of crumpled, on the floor. He had a hole in his temple, there was some blood.”
“So this was about eight-thirty?”
“Around then, maybe a little later.”
“The call to the police came at 9:02.”
“Oh well, it must have been later…I didn’t have a watch.”
Lieutenant Detective Parker’s eyes flicked automatically to my wrist. If he’d lifted the watch face he would have seen skin that had never been touched by sunlight. Never lie to the police, I’d heard over and over again. But I didn’t want to tell him about Fran, to have to get into that whole thing—she and Elena and the merger—it was too messy.
Lieutenant Detective Parker said only, “There was no one else in the shop? No one else came in after you?”
“No,” I said. There it was. Perjury or whatever they called it.
He switched the subject. “How many employees at Best Printing?”
Hadn’t Penny set him straight? Or was he just testing me? “We don’t have employees. It’s a collective.”
He didn’t write that down, I noticed.
“The papers are in your and Penny Nilsen’s name,” he said.
“Yes…but we all share the profits and the work.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Didn’t Penny tell you?”
He just looked at me, neither patient or impatient. “It’s only a formality—to ask different people the same questions.”
I bet, I thought. I was beginning to sweat a little. He no longer seemed quite the innocuous friendly fellow he had at first.
“There are, were, seven. Ray Hernandez, Zenaida Oberon, Penny, me, Elena Perrault, Jeremy and June Jasper—you must know June, she was pulled in that night for questioning.” I got angry thinking of it, but Parker just nodded.
“Can you tell me about their movements that evening?”
“No, I don’t know where any of them were.”
“What can you tell me about Jeremy himself? What kind of person was he? Is there anything he was involved in that might have contributed to this…event?”
“I’ve heard,” I paused deliberately. “That he was an FBI informer.”
Lieutenant Detective Parker didn’t raise an eyebrow. “Oh, that’s interesting…You think he might have been killed because he was informing on you?”
“Well, I didn’t say that. I don’t know for sure either. You should be able to find out from the FBI though.”
“It’s not always that easy.” Parker gave me a surprisingly frank smile. “Informers go by aliases, and sometimes report to just one man…we’ll see what we can find out though….So you don’t think it was a lover’s quarrel,” he changed the subject abruptly. “No jealousy, nothing like that? What was his girlfriend so mad about?”
I shook my head. “June would never murder anybody.”
“Except her first husband,” Parker said smoothly.
I bit my lip with anger, but I had to admire his technique. Ever since he’d come he’d kept me constantly on edge. I had no idea what he really thought.
“What about the others?” asked Parker. “Zee, Ray, Elena? How did they get along with Jeremy?”
“Fine,” I said, a little dully. “Jeremy was really very easy to get along with. A little scatterbrained but likeable. As long as he had his stereo earphones on he was happy.” And his daily joint.
“We’ve had a hard time tracking down any friends or family,” Parker said.
“Oh, he’s got a family, parents, brother, sister, he was always talking about them. They’re in southern California someplace. He was planning to go visit them soon. Fullerton, I think.”
Lieutenant Detective Parker wrote that down. “Thank you, Ms. Nilsen. That will be all. We’ll contact you if we need any further information. If anything else springs to mind,” he glanced at my watch, “don’t hesitate to call me.” He gave me his personal card.
I was surprised somehow that he was leaving. I had expected to be challenged, at least to have him ask if I had any ideas about who murdered Jeremy. He hadn’t asked who told me that Jeremy was an informer or what he would have been informing on. Was he stupid, or was I?
“By the way,” he said, as I showed him the door. “We haven’t been able to locate Ms. Oberon. The neighbor said she and her aunt had gone away. Any idea where?”
His eyes were suddenly piercing straight through me. I was totally unprepared.
“An emergency,” I stuttered. “I don’t know anything, just a note.” I stopped. What had Penny told him, not told him?
He waited a moment for me to continue, then smiled pleasantly. “I’m sure we’ll be contacting you again, Ms. Nilsen,” he said as he went out the door. “Good-bye. And have a nice day.”
“Bye,” I nodded miserably.
Bastard. Well, you haven’t found out anything yet.
I waited a good ten minutes to be on the safe side and then went back up to the attic door and tapped. Zee let me in.
“Who was it?”
“A cop. A detective.”
“A detective.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t keep looking guiltily upstairs. But…”
“What?”
“He is looking for you. He just wants to ask you some questions. The same as the rest of us.”
“What did you tell him?” Zee was pacing back and forth across the one cleared patch of floor, hands in her jeans pockets.
“Nothing much. I certainly didn’t make his job easier, that’s for sure. He’ll probably be back. God, why did this have to happen? Who killed Jeremy, Zee? And why? Could it have been someone you know? Someone Jeremy was blackmailing or something?”
“No,” she said. “It was all done through me. They didn’t speak to Jeremy.”
“But he knew who they were, didn’t he?”
She looked unhappy.
“The detective didn’t seem all that surprised when I said I’d heard Jeremy might be an FBI informer. How do you find things like that out, I wonder? Write and request our files?”
“Be careful, Pam. Please be careful. It’s maybe more dangerous than you think.”
She had stopped pacing and was now standing with her back to me, staring out the window. An eerie impression that we were in a kind of prison, a cell, passed over me, disappeared.
I said suddenly, “Zee, what really happens to people who go back to the Philippines, people who’ve been active here?”
She turned slowly, as if pulling herself out of a trance. “I could tell you about Benny’s brother. He went back. You know Benny, Benito—yes?—the boy working with me on the newsletter? Yes. Well, he and his brother, Amado, were both in the student movement in the Philippines. Amado was one of the leaders of a demonstration, an illegal one, some years ago. Then he came here to school. He was going to the University of Washington for a civil engineering degree. He was also active here. He was the one who started the newsletter—and he traveled around talking some. Well, one day this spring he finishes his degree and says he must go home. He says maybe it’s dangerous, but he’s never been bothered by anyone in America, so maybe they don’t know much or anything about his activities here and they don’t remember what he was doing in the Philippines before…”
Zee was sitting on the mattress again with me and had taken one of my hands. Her own were very cold and soft. It was as if by the force of her will she wanted me to understand the exact significance of what she was saying.
“Benny said, we all said, don’t go. But we didn’t really know what goes on there in the Philippines anymore. Sometimes all of a sudden there would be an easier time, you know, like a warming up. Not so many arrests, maybe some promises, a little more hope. It was that way when Amado decided to go back. You see, Marcos had said martial law was over last year.”
Zee’s beautifully shaped lips curled bitterly.
“Can you imagine that any of us would be taken in like that? But we were, we wanted so much to believe…And so Amado went back, in April, I think, April fifth. We had a party for him. A week later Benny got a telegram: Amado is dead.”
Her hands closed like cold iron vises on mine. I couldn’t speak.
“He was tortured, his body was found…no, it’s awful. Benny, he couldn’t believe it. He went around like a crazy man, he wanted to go there and murder Marcos personally. Such a waste, Pam, to think of Amado killed like a dog and thrown out on a pile.”
“But what did they arrest him for? How did they know?”
Zee wasn’t crying, but her pale ochre face had gone paler; her black eyes were filmed with grief. “We don’t know, we never know how they know us, why.” she said.
“But that’s why we don’t want to go back.”