Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (30 page)

"Did you ask him if he was the
man who came to see you at Ben and Nilla's?"
 

She bent forward, resting her
face against her open palms. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. "He
admitted he was. Said my mother needed someone to drive her there, so
he went along. He told me I'd been a cute little thing, the way I'd sat
on his lap and played with the ends of the string tie his peace
medallion was clipped to."

So that was the medallion the
collective had broken up to make "talismans." I thought of the small
metal protrusions on the backs of the two pieces I had in my purse,
which would have held the string.
 

Goodhue added, "And then it all
came back to me so clearly: the big gray metal clip, and above it his
face—the way he looked back then. And I also very clearly saw my mother
kneeling beside us, looking prettier than I'd ever seen her, saying,
'Honey, this is your father.'" She was silent a moment, crying quietly.
Then she raised her tear-wet face.

"The way he spoke, I thought he
might be softening toward me. But when I told him what I remembered my
mother saying, he started to attack her character again. Said that in
addition to being a roundheels, she was mentally unstable, that she'd
been breaking down long before the thing at Port Chicago, which was why
she testified against the others. Afterward, when just the two of them
were living at the flat in the Fillmore, she kept talking about
suicide, and finally she took the gun they had left and . . . you know."

But something was wrong with
that. Cal Hurley had told me the federal agents had raided the flat,
taken evidence away. If the gun had been there, they would have found
it. "Did Grant tell you why he wasn't in on the Port Chicago bombing
attempt?"

"He said he was, that he'd done a
cowardly thing. When he saw the FBI men, he gave another man his gun
and then faded into the background. A Weather collective in Oakland hid
him until after the trial, when he and my mother got back together."
 

A second contradiction to what
Cal Hurley had told me. According to the old man, Grant had been at the
flat on Page Street when the agents conducted their search. Of the two,
I tended to believe Hurley, who had no reason to lie.

Goodhue added, "Grant said he
hung out in the Weather Underground for a long time, then bought false
documentation, set up a new identity, and went to law school. But he
claimed that what had happened had ruined his life, anyway—because of
his shame at his cowardice and his fear that one day someone would
recognize him and destroy everything he'd built up. He became quite
maudlin about it, practically cried, but I sensed he was working on my
sympathy. Unfortunately for him, after what he'd said about my mother,
I couldn't feel much."

Ruined his life.
It was
the same as what Hilderly had said of Grant to his employer the day
he'd encountered Grant at the taxation seminar. Had Grant also become
maudlin when he'd told Perry a similar story over lunch at Tommy's
Joint? Perhaps added the heart-wrenching detail that he lived in such
fear that he was unable to acknowledge his own daughter?

It struck me that Grant, who had
been interviewed by Goodhue, could not have helped but notice the
newswoman's striking resemblance to Jenny Ruhl. And the name Goodhue
must have rung a bell with him, since he had visited at Ben and Nilla's
home in the Portola district. I would not have been at all surprised if
Grant had a background check run on Jess to ascertain that she was
indeed his offspring.

On the other hand, Hilderly had
lived in the past and probably seldom watched TV newscasts. In all
likelihood he had not known the whereabouts of Ruhl's daughter until
Grant told him, and this finishing touch to Grant's tale of woe would
have been sure to deeply affect a man who was more or less estranged
from his own sons. The bond that he imagined between himself and his
former friend—evidenced by his telling Gene Carver that
he saw a lot of himself in Grant—could only have been reinforced by it.

But there was a great deal wrong
with Grant's story . . .

I asked, "Then what happened?"

"He threatened me, in a subtle
way. Said it would be dangerous for me to go up against someone in his
position, that sort of thing. It didn't frighten me. It only made me
sad. I started to cry. He put his arms around me and told me to cheer
up. He said that just because he wasn't my father, it didn't mean we
couldn't be
very good
friends. And then I realized he was
coming on to me again—this man who really was my father, who knew that,
no matter what he said." She covered her face with her hands; tears
welled through her spread fingers.

"I'd finally found my father,"
she added, "and he was a pervert."

I doubted that. My guess was that
Grant had been trying to put her off so that she would leave him alone
in the future. There was something in his past that he didn't want to
come out—but it wasn't the story he had handed her.

After a bit Goodhue went to get
some tissues and wiped her face. She sat on the stool by the counter,
her gaze turned inward, on the hopelessly bleak memory of Wednesday
night.

I said gently, "Tell me the rest
of it."

"The rest is just . . . ugliness."

"Don't bottle it up."

A long silence. Then the words
came out in a rush; she was eager to get the telling over with. "I was
outraged. Shoved him away, hard. He stumbled and reached out for me. I
shoved him again. He fell, and his head slammed into the iron leg of
the worktable. And he just lay there, bleeding."

"And then?"

"I got out of there. Ran. I was
halfway down the path by the house when I remembered I'd left my coat
in his office. I went in, got it. There were the
glasses we'd drunk from. I put them back in the cabinet under the wet
bar. Then the phone rang. I panicked, rushed out of the house, right
through the front door."

I frowned. There was a gaping
hole in her story. Had she blacked out, repressed the memory of how
savage her attack on Grant had been?

"Jess," I said, "think back to
the studio, after Grant fell. Did you touch anything?"

"Like what?"

"Well, the fetish he had in
progress?"

"No."

"What about his body? Did you
touch it? Check to see if he was actually dead, or—"

"I
couldn't
touch him.
Afterward I hoped maybe he'd just been knocked unconscious. But back at
the studio, when the reports started to come over the police-band radio
in the newsroom—I knew I couldn't go before the cameras and report a
murder I had committed. So I went home, and one of the co-anchors from
the weekend news filled in for me. I didn't have to fake being sick—I
was."

"Did you watch the news that
night? Read any of the accounts in the papers the next day?"

"Just the story in the
Chronicle.
I
wanted to
see if they suspected . . . and they didn't."

The newspaper article had merely
said Grant had died of blows to the head; the police had held back the
brutality of the attack and the nature of the murder weapon. In her
panicked state, Goodhue could easily have ignored the plural, or
thought the reporter was mistaken. I wasn't yet willing to fully credit
her story, though; I asked her to go over it again. She did, with
enough backtracking and minor inconsistencies to give it the ring of
truth.

I asked one final question. "Did
you see anyone on the street when you ran out? Did anyone see you?"
 

". . . There was a truck, one of
those ancient pickups. It was weaving down Lyon Street, and I ran in
front of it."

"What color was it?"

"I don't know. Orange, maybe.
What does this matter, anyway? Like you said before, you'll have to
tell the police—"

"I can be selective about what I
tell them, though."

"I don't understand."

"There's a lot of this that need
never come out. You didn't kill Tom Grant, Jess. A person who arrived
after you left did."

Goodhue was so relieved and
elated at what I explained to her that she wanted to contact the police
and set things straight immediately. I cautioned her against doing so
until she consulted an attorney.

"The inspector in charge of the
case is a real . . . well, asshole. He'd see charging someone as well
known as you with obstruction as a major coup. Talk with Harry
Sullivan. And in the meantime, I'll keep at it, try to wrap the
investigation up quickly."

"You think you can do that?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who killed my . . .
Tom Grant?"

"No," I lied, in the interests of
saving time, "not yet. But I think I will soon."

Goodhue turned on the lights
around the mirror and began repairing her makeup. I was impatient to
make some calls, so I went downstairs to the newsroom and used the same
phone as I had Monday afternoon. As then, I put in a credit-card call
to the Fleming residence in Blackhawk.

Judy Fleming answered. I
identified myself, asked for Kurt. She said she'd call him to the
phone. Then she asked, "Does this have to do with why Perry changed his
will?"

"Yes. I'm still working on it."

That seemed to satisfy her. She
went away, and half a minute later Kurt came on the line,

I said, "I need to double-check a
few things about your discussion with Perry the last time you saw him."

"Sure. Go ahead."

"When he talked about making
decisions, what did he say about them coming back to haunt you?"

Pause. "That even if the decision
was the right one, it could do that."

"And he said you shouldn't take
it out on yourself because you can't control the consequences of your
actions?"

"Right."

"Will you go over what he said
about ideals again?"

"Well, that was after his third
margarita, so ... All that really made sense to me is that sometimes
you have to dump some of your ideals in favor of upholding the most
important one. After that he rambled on about guilt and atonement and
symbolic acts. I wasn't raised religious, so it didn't really mean much
to me."

I
had
been raised
religious, but in view of Perry's atheism, it didn't mean much to me,
either. Unless I could find a context in which to place it ... "Thanks,
Kurt."

"Uh, sure. Anytime." His tone was
somewhat bewildered, as if he'd been expecting some sort of explanation
for my questions.

Next I called Rae at All Souls.
"Any word on Hank?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"If you hear, will you call my
house, leave a message on the machine?"

"Okay. Where are you?"

"Out in the field," I said
vaguely. "I need your help for a couple of minutes. You know that
stack of back issues of the papers in Hank's office? Would you go in
there and get yesterday's
Chron
—the one with the story on Tom
Grant's murder?"

"Hang on."

As I waited for her to come back,
I glanced across the newsroom at Goodhue's cubicle. The anchorwoman was
already there—freshly made up and dressed in dry clothes. She picked up
the phone receiver, consulted the yellow sheet on the desk in front of
her, and began to dial. Rae's voice said, "Shar? I've got it. What do
you need?"

 "First, Grant's date of
graduation from the University of
Colorado. I presume it will be in the obituary."

"The obit . . . here it is—they
ran it as a sidebar to the story. Class of fifty-nine."

 "Okay. Now
University of Illinois Law School."

 "Sixty-two."

"Bastard lied all over the place.
Any mention of what he did immediately after law school?"

"Uh ... no, it just talks about
his 'rather unique law practice.' But it doesn't say when he first hung
out his shingle."

I'd suspected as much. "Shar,
what's this—"

"I'll tell you later. Thanks." I
cut off her protesting "Hey!" by replacing the receiver.

As I crossed the newsroom,
Goodhue motioned to me. I went into the cubicle.

"I reached Harry Sullivan's
service and convinced them it was an emergency," she said. "He's
supposed to call me."

"Good. When you talk with him,
ask him to check with me before speaking with the police. There may be
a way I can keep you out of this entirely. And give me your home number
in case I need to get in touch."

She wrote it on a card. "Why are
you doing this for me?"

 "I like people with
guts. You've overcome a
great deal in your life and shouldn't have to
suffer for one mistake. Besides, I'm doing it for myself, as well—my
need to get at the truth."
 

"Well, I can't tell you how much
I appreciate it. But I sure didn't act as if I had guts tonight.
Hurling myself into the bay, like Anna Karenina under the train.
Whimpering and sniveling and probably causing us both to get bad colds."