Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (54 page)

"I suppose not."

"Jake and Harley came around
after I told D.A. about the baby. They tried to talk me into getting an
abortion. Said they'd pay. Maybe I was stupid not to take them up on
it. You think I was stupid?"

"Do
you
think you were?"

"I don't know. I love my kids.
They're mine; at least I have
something.
No way of knowing if
my life'd been any better if they'd never come along. But sometimes I
wonder—could I
have made something of myself if I'd of at least
had a chance?"

Age-old question, never to be answered. "Did Jake and Harley tell you
why they were making such an offer?"

"Oh, sure. They went on and on about D.A. being weirded out. But like
I said, I was young and dumb and didn't want to believe them. Fourteen.
Jesus. I thought I could help him." She laughed mirthlessly. "You hear
that? Help him! I can't even help myself."

"Mia, the money will make a difference."

"Not if Jake and Harley have their way."

"Hank Zahn can get around them—I promise."

Her eyes stared intently into mine for a few seconds. I thought I
caught a glimmer of hope, but then she shrugged— as if to say she knew
all about promises and that everything she knew was bad.

"Anyway," she said after a moment, "here's that necklace thing you
wanted." She pushed a handful of gray metal across the table at me.

I picked up the chain, which was the same type as the one I'd found at
Hilderly's, and let the letters dangle from it. They were an A and an
M; the A was bracketed with the same kind of curved edging as the one
on the other chain; there was also a clip-like protrusion on the back
of the M. I took the other chain from my bag and lay the two beside one
another on the table, beginning to visualize the whole. It would have
been an oval, perhaps two inches across and three high. I wondered how
many pieces it had been broken into.

"May I borrow this?" I asked, pointing at the one that belonged to her
husband.

She hesitated, then shrugged. "If you bring it back soon. D.A.'s gonna
be too out of it for a while to notice it's gone."

"Thanks." I put both chains in my pocket.

Mia asked, "Do you know what those are?"

"I think so."

"Some devil-thing, maybe?"

"No, nothing like that."

"But then why does that one have this . . . power over D.A.? What does
it mean?"

"Nothing much now. But it's not bad. You shouldn't worry. It's ..." I
paused, searching for the right words. "It's nothing but a symbol of
things that are over and done with."

When I stopped the MG next to
the paddock fence at Moon Ridge Stables, Libby Ross was emerging from
the tack room. She again wore faded jeans and a down jacket, and in her
hand she carried a plastic bucket full of brushes and currycombs. She
saw the car and shaded her eyes with one arm as she peered toward it.

I got out and called hello. She
acknowledged me with a wave and went to a rail where one of the pintos
stood, the lead rope of its halter looped around it. As I approached
she selected a rubber currycomb from the bucket, fitted it to her hand,
and began brushing the horse's coat in a circular motion.

"Didn't expect to see you here
again," she said over her shoulder. "I talked with your boss; he said
everything's in order about my inheritance."

"Yes, it is. Actually, I stopped
by to check up on you, make sure you're all right."

She glanced at me, the lines
around her eyes crinkling. "Why wouldn't I be?"

I recalled that Ross neither
owned a TV nor took a paper. "You haven't heard, then."

 "Heard what?"

"One of the other beneficiaries
of Hilderly's will, Tom Grant, was murdered last night."

She turned slowly, her wide mouth
pulling down. "Murdered? By who?"

"I don't know. The killer got
away unseen."

 "Last night, you say?"

"Yes."

 "How?"

"He was beaten to death, in a
studio behind his house."

She shook her head. "What is
it—you think
this has something to do with him being named in Perry's will?"

 "It
might. And then again, it might not."

An odd expression came across
her
face—part fear and part comprehension. For a moment she seemed to be
lost in thought. "So what you're thinking is that if it did, the rest
of us might also be in danger."

 "It's a definite
possibility."

Ross looked around—at the
cypress-covered knoll, the paddock, the barren stretch of land between
the ranch buildings and Abbotts Lagoon. I knew what she was thinking:
this was an isolated place, where a solitary person would be easy prey
for a killer. I asked, "Are you alone here?"

"The kid who cleans the stalls is
here right now." She motioned at the barn. "But most of the time, yes.
My stepson Dick comes and goes, but even when he's around, he's pretty
useless."

"Is there someone you could get
to stay with you for a while? A friend or a relative?"

"No, no one." She continued to
contemplate the lagoon for a bit, then shrugged and went back to
grooming the pinto. "Don't worry about me," she said. "I've got a rifle
and a couple of twenty-twos in the
house, and I'm a damned good shot when I have to be."

I went over and leaned against
the rail, watching her brush the horse. The wind blew her dark blond
curls across her face, so I couldn't see her expression. I said, "I was
just talking with Mia Taylor. She told me about D.A. having been in
prison."

Her hand slowed in its circular
motion, then picked up the rhythm again. "So? It's not exactly a
secret."

"What did he do?"

For a moment I thought she wasn't
going to answer. Then she said, "Tried to bomb the Port Chicago Naval
Weapons Station out at Antioch."

 "When?"

"August of sixty-nine."

"Who else
was at Port Chicago?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Bombing a federal military
installation isn't something one undertakes alone."

 "The collective—"

"What collective?" Silence.

"What collective, Libby?"

Abruptly she tossed the currycomb
back into the bucket and turned as if to go to the barn.

I stepped in front of her,
reaching into my pocket for the two medallions and holding them up at
eye level. "Do you remember these?"

Her violet eyes widened. Then she
looked away, trying to sidestep me. "You're not making a whole lot of
sense today. First you tell me I might be murdered. Then you dangle
some cheap jewelry in front of me—"

"Drop the pretense, Libby. A
man's
been killed." She was silent, biting down on her lower lip. It was dry
and chapped; when her teeth came away from it, blood welled from a fine
crack.
 

I continued to hold the
medallions up. Their gray pot metal gleamed dully in the sun. Ross
stubbornly refused to look at them.

I asked, "What did the whole
thing look like, Libby?"

No response.

I glanced around, saw a stick on
the ground, and picked it up. Then I squatted in the dirt in front of
her, drawing with the stick's sharp point. "It was an oval. Like so. On
this side, the letters
A
and
M.
And on this side,
K
and
A."

I looked up at her. Her gaze had
been drawn to the stick, and she was watching its motion intently.

"I'd guess there were more
letters in between those," I went on. "Like these—
E,R,
and
I
.
Am I right, Libby?"

She made a gesture with her hand,
as if to erase the letters I'd just drawn.

When she didn't speak, I said,
"Amerika. The way people in the Movement spelled it—taken from the
Kafka novel, and used to say that the United States was an imperialist,
fascist, racist, militaristic country."

Ross sank to the ground, staring
at my drawing. Then she took the stick and added a peace symbol, the
branches of the inverted
Y
converging at the
R
of
"Amerika."

She said, "I haven't thought of
those medallions in years. I don't even know what happened to mine. Our
talisman." She laughed ruefully. "From this vantage point, it seems
like just one of those silly things that kids do—like sitting around in
a clubhouse in a vacant lot and cutting your fingers so you can
exchange blood oaths. But at the time it was a big deal: we'd each have
a piece of this thing that stood for what we believed in and be
connected forever."

"In a way, I guess you are."

"Yes. Yes, I guess so." She
sighed, then took them from me, examining them as they lay on the palm
of her hand. "Where did you get these?"

"One from Perry Hilderly's flat.
The other was given me by Mia Taylor."
 

"D.A. actually kept his?"

"Mia says he takes it out
occasionally and looks at it. She thinks it has power over him, like an
evil charm."

I thought Ross might scoff at
that, but she merely said, "Maybe it does."

I said, "I take it this . . .
talisman, as you call it, was something you shared with the other
people who were involved in the Port Chicago bombing attempt."

"You think you know a lot about
us. But not everyone in the collective was in on the Port Chicago
thing."

"The collective again. What was
it?"

She sank into a full sitting
position, arms wrapped around her knees. "We were a political
collective, loosely affiliated with the Weathermen. The Weather
Bureau—the top leadership—was supposed to control policy, but there was
a lot of ideological struggle, and the Weather Machine was informally
structured to begin with."

"When was this?"

"Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. Things
were bad: the Movement as originally conceived was losing momentum, and
the cops were really cracking down on us. Everybody was dropping out,
preparing for direct, violent action. On campus, the scene had shifted
from Berkeley to S.F. State. So a bunch of us split for the city."

"And?"

"Like I said, the Weathermen were
pretty loosely structured. We just did our own thing."

"Which was?"

She shrugged. "Debated ideology.
Engaged in political education. Refined skills that we'd need in the
struggle."

"Skills?"

". . . Well, self-defense,
propaganda, marksmanship, weaponry."

"Bomb making?"

She nodded. "But mostly what we
did was talk—endless, intense talk. We were so self-consciously
political. And romantic. We thought it was so
damned romantic to live in a crummy flat in the Fillmore and share
everything—clothes, food, money, drugs, sexual partners. God, when I
think of how naive we were! We were going to change the world, but we
knew no more of it than . . . than old Chaucer over there." She
gestured at the pinto.

"The individual Weather
collectives were quite small, weren't they?"

"Well, yes, they had to be, in
order to create trust among the members and prevent infiltration."

"How many in yours?"

". . . People came and went, but
there were never more than six or seven of us at a time."

"You and D.A. and Jenny Ruhl?"

She nodded.

"What about Perry?"

"He was . . . part of it. He had
this job on a magazine and was supposed to get our propaganda across to
the people through his stories. But he was
not
in on the
bombing. He went to Vietnam as a reporter when that was still in the
planning stages."

Hilderly apparently hadn't told
his comrades that he was so fed up with the Movement that he was
willing to pay his own way to Southeast Asia. Nor that he'd thought
about writing a story on the collective. "Who else?"

"No one."

"You said up to seven."

"People came and went."

"Who else was at Port Chicago
with D.A.?"

She got to her feet, brushing
dirt from the seat of her jeans.

"You, Libby? Jenny Ruhl?"

She turned and started for the
tack room. I followed. "What about Tom Grant?"

At the door she faced me. "How
many times do I have to tell you that I don't know Tom Grant?"
 

There was something in her
voice—a tone oddly close to relief—that gave me pause. I watched as she
entered the room, dumped the medallions that she still held on the
desk, and collected a bridle and saddle. As she brushed past me and
went back outside I said, "What about the right man?"

She stopped halfway to where the
horse stood. "Are you talking about Andy?"

I covered my own surprise, asked,
"Was he there at Port Chicago?"

"Are you kidding?" She continued
over to the rail, set the saddle on it, and began to bridle the pinto.

"Why wasn't he?"