Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

  Hank was grinning. “I thought, as you’re fond of proclaiming, that you have no food prejudices.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why not try the duck feet?”

  “Well, it’s just that . . . they probably don’t have much meat on them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it’s true—you saw them. And I don’t have any prejudices; I’ll eat what’s set before me. People who are picky or won’t try new things drive me crazy.”

  “That’s why you wouldn’t eat Larry’s tofu in chili sauce last week.” Larry Koslowski, an All Souls partner, is a health-food nut.

  “I couldn’t help that. It looked like . . . I don’t think we should discuss it while we’re eating. Anyway, back to Hilderly. He never talked to you about wanting to change his will?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder why he made a holograph? Why not ask you to draw up a new will?”

  “I suspect because he was afraid I’d try to talk him out of it. Or insist on knowing what those people were to him and why he wanted to make them his heirs.”

  “Makes sense.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. A dessert cart went past, and I spied the little yellow custard pies I’m fond of. I’d eaten too much to even entertain the thought of having one now, but I’d noticed a take-out counter off the restaurant’s lobby; I’d stop there and buy a few pies for later.

  Hank was looking preoccupied again, fiddling with his chopsticks.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked

  “Just brooding. I keep thinking how unlike Perry this is. He wasn’t close to those kids, but he loved them and always carried out his responsibilities.”

  “Then he must have had a strong reason for disinheriting them. Maybe when we located the beneficiaries they can explain it.”

  ‘It isn’t really any of our business,” Hank said. “As Perry’s executor, I’m bound to carry out his wishes, not to snoop into something he clearly didn’t care to explain to me.”

  “No, it’s not our business, but I wonder . . .”

  “Wonder what?”

  I pushed my plate away toward the others that littered the table, then took my teacup in both hands and stared down into it, trying to put the feeling of wrongness that I was experiencing into words. “When someone makes a major change in his will and conceals it from his attorney, isn’t there a possibility of undue influence or duress?”

  “A possibility, yes.”

  “And when the person dies violently, as Perry did—”

  “Shar,” Hank said patiently, “you’ve read the papers. His killing was a random shooting. The bullet matched those found in the bodies of the sniper’s other victims, all of whom were unrelated.”

  That was true. Still . . . “Hank, does any of this feel right to you?”

  “. . . No.”

  ‘Then let’s see if we can’t find an explanation for Perry’s actions.”

  There was no way I could start a skip trace on either Heikkinen or Taylor on a Saturday. When we returned to Hilderly’s flat and I checked the phone directory, I found that neither Grant’s nor Goodhue’s home number was listed. I called Grant’s law office and reached an answering service; the operator at KSTS-TV told me Goodhue was off until Monday. In the end I decided to go through the boxes in Hilderly’s dining room, which Hank said had been sitting untouched since he’d move to the flat nearly ten years before; they might contain something that would explain his connection to his four heirs.

  The boxes held fairly commonplace items; household goods such as a fondue pot and yogurt maker that Hilderly had apparently no use for; high-school yearbooks from a town I’d never heard of; photograph albums with pictures of his boys and a plump brown-haired woman, as well as of a younger Hilderly and a couple I took to be his parents; 45-rpm records that had been hits in the fifties; a collection of baseball cards that by now would be quite valuable; a catcher’s mitt; a set of Hardy Boys mysteries; a high-school diploma. Like the flat itself, the boxes contained no memento of his rebellious college days; it was as if he had never attended Cal or participated in the Free Speech Movement. There were no journals, personal letters, or address books that might contain telling information.

  I was about to give up when, at the bottom of the last carton, under a folded athletic jacket that showed Hilderly had lettered in high-school baseball, I found a heavy leather drawstring pouch. The object inside had the distinctive shape of a gun.

  I lifted the pouch from the carton and loosened its drawstrings. Inside, my fingers touched metal. When I tool the gun out, I saw it was a .38 Special of German manufacture, with a two-inch barrel—a reasonably powerful weapon that is easy to conceal on one’s person. I examined it more closely and found that someone had attempted to remove the serial number, probably with acid. The number was indecipherable, but a forensics laboratory would be able to bring it out with chemicals.

  There was something else in the pouch, something lighter. I reached for it, expecting ammunition. It was a pendant of sorts—a gray pot-metal chain with two small letters attached to it, a K and an A, but the K was jagged, as if the fragment had been broken off a larger object. A clip-like piece of metal protruded from the back of it.

  A piece of junk that ended up in the pouch by mistake? I wondered. Or something that mattered enough to Hilderly that he took the trouble to separate it from his other mementoes?

  I got up from the floor and carried the gun and pendant into the kitchen, where Hank was emptying a cupboard. “I found a couple of “odd things,” I said, “but I can’t even tell what one of them is.”

  He turned, saw the gun, and frowned. “Is that Perry’s?”

  “Must be. It was in one of those boxes in the dining room. Someone’s removed the serial number from it.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “It could have been done by someone who had possession of it previously, and Perry bought the gun illegally—on the street, for instance. Or he could have done it himself because he—or someone close to him—was the registered owner, and he didn’t want that fact to come out.”

  Hank looked down at a blue pottery bowl he held, then set it carefully on the counter, as if he were afraid he’d drop it. “And if the latter is the case, what it implies is that he used it or intended to use it for some illegal purpose.”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus. I came here this morning with one conception of Perry, and I’ll be walking away with a completely different one.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” I warned. “There are other possibilities. He could have taken this off someone and put it away for safekeeping. He could have found it. You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know what I know anymore.” He glanced at the pendant. “What’s that on the chain?”

  “A pair of letters.” I handed it to him.

  He examined it, fingering the rough edges as I had. “Every weekend hippie had a chain like this, but it usually had a peace symbol attached.”

  I smiled and took it from his outstretched hand. “I even had one. We weren’t allowed to wear them to school, but on weekends we’d dress up in our bell-bottoms and tie-dye and love beads. There was this store in Laguna Beach that sold beads—fantastic hand-painted ones, all colors and sizes and shapes. We’d drive all the way up there from San Diego to buy them.” I still had some of the prettier ones, unstrung now, in my jewelry box.

  “You were a regular little hippie child, weren’t you?” Hank said. “I never would have guessed. When I met you at Berkeley, you struck me as such a . . . well, cheerleader.”

  “I was. Captain of the high-school squad my senior year. The hippie stuff was strictly masquerade; it made us feel with-it and wicked. I hardly ever smoked dope until I got to Cal, and I only attended one feeble peace march. Then, when I was in college, the energy had kind of gone out of the Movement, and besides, I was too busy studying and working to have the time.” I’d put myself through the university, working nights and week
ends as a security guard, pouring over my textbooks during the long fallow hours.

  Hank nodded, his gaze far away, seeing—what? The young man and women we’d been? The idealists with all of life ahead of us? And was he comparing those people to the ones we’d become: in his case, the disillusioned but ever-hopeful dreamer; in mine, the realist, whose cynicism was thus far untainted by bitterness?

  I said, “Can I keep the gun and this . . . whatever it is?” Salvation Army would want the whatsis, and we’d better hang on to the gun for a while, until . . .” He let his words trail off, unsure what that eventuality might be.

  “I’ll put it in the strongbox where I keep my own gun. It’ll be safe there. By the way, before they pick up the furniture and boxes, you ought to look through the ones I’ve set aside in the dining room. There’s a lot of personal stuff, plus a fairly valuable baseball-card collection. It would be nice if Hilderly’s kids had the cards, plus other things to remember their father by.”

  “You’re right. I’ll see that they get them.”

  I helped Hank clear the remaining cupboards, then offered to drop the keys at the landlady’s, since he’d mentioned she lived in my neighborhood. He said he’d take care of it, then added, “I meant to tell you, I’m cooking chili at my flat Monday night, in honor of Anne-Marie’s birthday. Jack and Ted’ll be there, and Rae and Willie. I’d like you to come.”

  “Rae and Willie—that’s getting to be a pretty steady thing, isn’t it?”

  “Appears that way. Do you disapprove?”

  Since she’d started seeing Willie Whelan some months before, I’d harbored certain reservations about my assistant’s new relationship, mainly because I know Willie’s myriad faults altogether too well. He is a friend of Hank’s from his Vietnam days, and a former fence who—as he puts it—has “gone legit.” What started out as a small discount jewelry store on Market Street had turned into a gold mine for him, with branches all over the Bay Area, and he takes great pride in the fact that he—like his arch competitor at the well-known Diamond Center—performs his own television commercials. On late-night TV you can usually see him luring the young and gullible to acquire gems that they don’t need, to establish credit histories that will set the stage for future judgments against them, and—if by some miracle they don’t default—to surrender a good portion of their lifetime earning to Willie Whelan.

  Willie is, in many respects, a great guy—provided you don’t buy anything from him or take him too seriously. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my bright, young, recently divorced assistant was seeing him.

  I said to Hank, “It’s not my place to approve or disapprove. I just hope she doesn’t get hurt.”

  “Would be a shame, so soon after she got rid of Doug-the-asshole, as she’s so fond of calling her ex. But what about it—will you come for dinner?”

  I checked my mental calendar. I’d planned to suggest to Anne-Marie Altman, Hank‘s wife, that I take her to lunch to celebrate her birthday, but with this new investigation there might not be time for that. “Okay,” I said, “you can count me in.”

  “If you want to bring Jim—”

  Jim, I thought, feeling a sinking sensation. I’d almost forgotten his unwelcome early-morning visit.

  “No, I’ll come by myself.” I hadn’t yet told Hank that I’d broken it off, and I was in no mood to discuss it now. Quickly I started down the hall, trying to remember where I’d tossed my bag and jacket on the way in.

  Hank followed me. “Shar, is something wrong between—”

  “Everything’s fine,” I lied. “and I’d better get going because I have a date tonight.”

  Hank looked both relieved and pleased. Every time I become irritated with his nosiness, I have to remind myself that it’s not his fault that he loves me and wants me to be happy.

  I’d been looking forward to a quiet evening at home, but when I got there, my little brown-shingled earthquake cottage—one of some four thousand built as emergency housing after the quake of ’06, and lovingly added onto by a succession of owners, including me—seemed less of a haven than it usually did. One reason, I knew, was the unsettling of Jim’s visit. Another was that my fat black-and-white cat, Watney, had died in his sleep two months before, and I hadn’t replaced him, didn’t think it possible to replace him. But the chief reason was that the man who might have become the love of my life was living in Palo Alto to be near his estranged, mentally ill wife, whose fragile emotional balance had been toppled as a result of my own bad judgment during a particularly complex investigation. Never mind that my lover—George Kostakos—who is a psychologist and ought to know—didn’t blame me for her collapse. Never mind that he said it had been long in the making. I blamed myself, and I went about clad in the proverbial hair shirt, insulated by it against disappointment and loneliness.

  But even self-created hair shirts could itch and chafe sometimes. And resentment could occasionally flare against a former lover who was uncondemning, caring, and honorable.

  And after years of Wat’s curmudgeonly companionship, a house without my cat was not a home.

  I stowed the pouch containing Hilderly’s gun in the strongbox, then went to the fridge and put away the little custard pies I’d bought at the restaurant. For a moment I considered a glass of wine, but drinking alone in the kind of mood I was in could lead to dangerous introspection. There was a new comedy I’d been wanting to see at the Northpoint, and if I hurried I could catch the early show. Quickly I took a shower to wash away the dust of Hilderly’s apartment, then donned my soft old faded jeans and a sweater.

  Before I left the house, however, I looked into my jewelry box at the love beads I’d kept there for more than twenty years. They glimmered in the day’s fading light—opalescent blue and pink and green and yellow symbols of an era that perhaps was never as joyful or innocent as some of us remember it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The first thing Monday morning I called Rae Kelleher at All Souls and briefed her on the Hilderly investigation. She said she’d get started immediately on the skip traces on Heikkinen and Taylor.

  “I take it you’re not coming in for a while,” she added.

  “No. I’m going to see what I can find out from Grant and Goodhue, and I’m also going to stop by the SFPD, talk about Hilderly’s death with the detective in charge of these random shootings.”

  “The detective?” Her voice was a shade sly.

  “I sighed. “Okay—Greg Marcus.”

  “You mentioned you’d had dinner with him a couple of weeks ago. Are you seeing him again?”

  “We’ve been going to lunch or dinner together ever since we got over being bitter about our breakup. It’s no big deal.”

  “Amazing how you manage to stay on good terms with your former boyfriends.”

  I started to say, “Except for Jim,” but thought better of it. Rae had introduced me to him last winter, and she’d been disappointed when I broke it off. Instead I said, “Staying on good terms with Greg comes under the heading of good police relationships. I’ll check in with you later.”

  Next I phoned the local branch of Thomas Y. Grant Associates; the switchboard operator told me Mr. Grant worked out of his home office and gave me that number. When I called it and requested an appointment, Grant’s secretary hastened to caution me that his legal practice was restricted to men. I said my business was personal and concerned a substantial bequest left to him by an All Souls client. That prompted her to put me on hold. When she returned, she said Mr. Grant could fit me in at ten-thirty and gave me a Pacific Heights address on the section of Lyon Street that borders the Presidio.

  The final item on my list was to try to contact Jess Goodhue at KSTS. The anchorwoman, I was told, would not come into the studio until three or three-thirty. I left my name and number and said that if I didn’t hear from her, I’d check back then. After I replaced the receiver in its cradle I stared indecisively at it: should I call Greg for an appointment or just drop in? Final
ly I opted for setting a definite time and punched out the number for his extension at the Homicide detail of the SFPD. He was there, and sounded pleased to hear from me. When I explained what I wanted to talk with him about, he invited me to lunch.

  “We could try the South Park Café,” he added.

  “No,” I said quickly. South Park, a curious little street in the newly trendy So Ma district near the Hall of Justice, had figured in the investigation where I’d met and lost George Kostakos; it still held painful memories for me.

  “. . . Oh, right,” Greg said. “Well, there’s always Max’s diner.”

  “Why don’t I meet you at your office, and we’ll decide then.”

  He agreed and we hung up.

  I went to dress for my appointment with Thomas Grant. After some deliberations I chose a gray wool suit with a short skirt and long double-breasted jacket—a Chanel knockoff that nevertheless had been outrageously expensive and worth every penny of it. It’s the outfit that Anne-Marie has dubbed my “schizoid suit,” because it’s businesslike and sexy at the same time.