SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO make a stunning entrance; we’d had it all figured out. But no one noticed.
Hadley sat down, looking from me to Zee to June, all of us slumped, wordless. “Oh well,” she said. “So how was California?”
“That big earthquake got there just before I did, everything was gone, it was a tragedy. You didn’t hear about it? Hmmm, that’s strange. There must have been too much going on here.”
“Yeah,” said Hadley. “It’s been hectic all right.”
A further silence, and then Zee spoke softly. “You have my earrings on, Hadley.”
If I’d had any doubts at all concerning June, they were gone now. She didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening, while Zee appeared to understand it was all over.
“Benny told me you found one…I hoped you would think it was Jeremy’s,” Zee paused and sighed. “I was in Jeremy’s looking for some marriage certificate. I thought afterward that it would be best to find the paper and get rid of it, I couldn’t find it…I had lost one earring earlier, in the darkroom…I thought if I put one in Jeremy’s bathroom, they would think it was his too….But you found both….”
“You don’t have to tell them anything,” said June. “I told you, we’d figure out a way. They’re not the cops, you don’t have to tell them anything.”
“I know,” said Zee. “I guess that’s why I want to tell them, to see if they understand.” Her black eyes sought mine briefly and then looked away. She had trusted me and I had tried to trap her, Hadley and I both had.
She sighed again. “Okay, where to start. We knew he was an agent, we couldn’t do anything about it. We have known for some weeks now, when Amado was killed. It was like you told Benny, he came and said, if you don’t want this to happen anymore, pay up. And we paid, we paid with dope, we paid with money, we paid and paid. I didn’t want to do the documents anymore, but he…he made me. That night, we went to B. Violet’s. Jeremy said he wants to look at their equipment for himself, in case we really do merge, if we can use it for our work.
“Elena, she was there, standing there like a crazy person. Of course she wrecked and messed everything, you could see it. But she pretended Fran had done it and we pretended to believe her. Afterwards, Jeremy says he is going to blackmail her. He thinks it’s so funny, you should have heard him laugh. He says, the way she acts in meetings, and now he will make her pay. He called her up, he made some time for her to come to the darkroom. I heard him, I decided to go, to try to talk him out of it.
“Now, you have got to know this—Jeremy had got a gun. He always carried it. He had it in his jacket pocket, a small one. I don’t know what kind, I never used a gun before. That night I went there, before eight. I was trying to talk to him. He was saying he had asked Elena to bring him a hundred dollars, but maybe he wouldn’t make her pay. He said he would tell her that if she fucked with him that he would forget it. He had never fucked with a lesbian before, he said. He was telling me the things he would like to do with her….I don’t want to say, but then, I don’t know, I took the gun—he had the jacket hanging on the hook behind the door—I just took it and shot it. I didn’t know about guns, how to shoot, I wasn’t thinking, knowing anything. I don’t know but he fell and that was the end. I ran away outside, I still had the gun, in my hand. There was nobody around, nobody came out and looked.
“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.