Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

  The fog had continued through the weekend and into the morning. Even the quiet streets of Pacific Heights—where the residents are normally blessed not only with affluence but also with good weather—were finely misted. I parked my MG in front of the address Grant’s secretary had given me and got out, shivering slightly in the cold.

  The house—one of only a few that backed up on the thickly forested grounds of the Presidio—was a large one. Its brown shingles, leaded-glass windows, and shiny black trim were of an early twentieth-century style that abounds in that part of the city. An arched wooden gate led into a bricked front yard shaded by an acacia tree. The bricks had been swept clean of every leaf. Raised flower beds bordered the small yard at the base of its high-wooden fence. The geraniums that grew in them were planted at precise intervals; they looked prim and stiff, as if standing at attention.

  Grant’s secretary, who greeted me at the door and introduced herself as Ms. Angela Curtis, looked prim and stiff, too. Her blond hair was cropped in a style that immediately suggested the word “efficient”; she wore a plain gray suit, simple gold jewelry, and sensible low-heeled pumps. Although she was around my age, she seemed a much older woman. As I watched her cross the large oak-paneled entry to tell Grant I was there, I tried—and failed—to imagine her running on the beach, or laughing and eating and drinking with friends, or making love, or any of the other things that normal, vital women enjoy doing.

  When Ms. Curtis vanished through a closed door to the right of the wide central staircase, I turned and studied my surroundings. The other doors that opened off the room were shut, too, as if Grant sought to separate his professional and personal lives. There was a red Chinese rug on the parquet floor and a large oval table in the center under the brass chandelier, but otherwise there were no furnishings, no decorations, no pictures on the golden-oak walls. An austere man, this Thomas Y. Grant.

  Ms. Curtis returned and motioned to me. “Mr. Grant is on the telephone,” she said. “If you’ll go in and take a seat, he’ll be with you shortly.”

  I thanked her and entered the office. At first glance the room appeared to be a typical lawyer’s study, with the obligatory wall of thick tomes, the obligatory mahogany desk and leather-upholstered furniture. I couldn’t see Grant because he was swiveled around the high back of his chair to the desk, talking into the phone in a low voice. Ms. Curtis shut the door behind me.

  Then I realized that unlike the typical lawyer’s study, the room contained no framed diplomas, certificates, or pictures of the attorney with prominent clients or politicians. I smiled faintly, thinking that this was also different from Hank’s, which contains—among other things—a cigarette store Indian and a poster of Uncle Sam saying, “I want YOU for the U.S. Army.” But then I realized Grant had some peculiar objects of his own, and went over to the shelves that flanked the fireplace to have a closer look at them.

  They appeared to be a bizarre form of sculpture; strange, twisted, unrecognizable shapes of wood and metal intermingled with feathers and tufts of fur and fragments of bone. I looked more closely at one and saw a pair of yellowed fangs protruding from a strip of reptile skin; another had claws—ragged, broken ones. Some sort of primitive folk art, I supposed, unsettling and quite unpleasant.

  Behind me, Grant was still talking. I moved to the other side of the fireplace and examined a piece that sat apart from the rest on a shelf of its own. The framework was a crossed pair of rusted metal spikes, each festooned with mockingbirds’ feathers. Stretched between the spikes was a swatch of what resembled—but certainly couldn’t be—dried human skin.

  I recoiled, and a phrase came to me: trophies and dead things. An odd phrase. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard or read it.

  There was a footfall behind me; I turned. Thomas Grant was approaching, one hand extended. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I wanted the possessor of such nasty artworks to touch me.

  Grant was handsome in a conventional way. The body clad in the expensive blue suit was trim and well muscled, and I suspected he didn’t have to work at keeping in shape. His hair was iron gray, thick, and so well cut that not a lock strayed from its proper place. His strong-featured face, while not totally unlined, was supple and youthful; its only imperfection was a jagged scar on his left cheek that made him look like the romantic lead in a melodrama about male honor. Otherwise it was as if nothing in his life had touched him deeply enough to leave vestiges of pain, sorrow, or even happiness. As he shook my hand I felt a wave of visceral dislike.

  “I see you were looking at my fetishes,” he said.

  “Is that what they are?”

  “In a strict sense, no. But a fetish is a charm something with magical powers. These certainly do have the power to disturb.” His eyes—gray like his hair—remained on mine as he released my hand. Their expression was sly, knowing; he liked the fact that the fetishes had unsettled me.

  I moved toward the clients’ chairs in front of the desk, set my briefcase on one of them. “Are they some kind of tribal art?” I asked.

  “Actually, I made them myself.”

  I paused in the act of opening the briefcase. “You . . . ?”

  “Yes, I have a studio at the rear of the property. Perhaps you’d care to see it sometime, since you seem to be interested in the pieces.”

  “. . . Perhaps. Where do you get your materials?”

  He moved around the desk and sat, motioned at one of the client’s chairs. “Here and there. I guess you could call me a scavenger. I pick up things on the beach or in the parks.”

  Things. Meaning dead birds and animals, or parts of them. God knew what he had to do to them to make them usable. I’d recently started—and quickly stopped—reading an article in a magazine in the dentist’s office about a Texas woman who created what she termed “road kill art”; the point at which I’d set it aside was where she described the color in the cave where she left her “art supplies” so flesh-eating beetles could clean them. Rather than commenting on Grant’s hobby, I sat and busied myself with the file I’d taken from my briefcase. “Mr. Grant—” I began.

  “Please—Tom.”

  “Tom. Does the name Perry Hilderly mean anything to you?”

  I thought I glimpsed a flash of recognition in his eyes, but it was gone so quickly that I might have imagined it. He considered briefly, then shook his head. “I can’t say as it does. Angela-Ms. Curtis—mentioned something about a bequest. Is this Hilderman—”

  “Hilderly.”

  “Is he the testator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he make a bequest to me?”

  “I don’t know precisely that he did. Hilderly named a Thomas Y. Grant in his will, without indicating what the relationship was. In a note to his attorney, he said that he—the attorney, Hank Zahn—would know how to reach Grant. You are the only Thomas Y. Grant that Mr. Zahn knows of.”

  Grant’s expression became puzzled. “I know Hank Zahn by reputation. I’m surprised he would draw up a will without first ascertaining the client’s relationship to his beneficiary.”

  “He didn’t draw up this particular one. It was a holograph superseding an earlier will, written three weeks before Hilderly died.”

  “When and how was that? His death, I mean.”

  “Last week, in a random shooting on Geary Boulevard.”

  “One of those snipings? I remember seeing on TV that there had been another, but none of the details.” Grant closed his eyes, as if trying to call forth the news story. When he opened them again, their expression was one of bewilderment. “Ms. . . may I call you Sharon?”

  I nodded.

  “Sharon, I’ll be damned if I know what this is all about?”

  “Is it possible that Hilderly was once a client of yours?”

  “I have a good memory for my clients. He wasn’t.”

  “Could you have employed him as an accountant at some time?”

  “Is that what he was? No, I’ve always used the same man at the sam
e Big Eight firm.”

  “Where are you originally from, Tom?”

  “Durango, Colorado.”

  “And you attended college and law school at . . . ?”

  “Undergraduate at Boulder, law at Illinois.”

  “Have you spent much time in Berkeley?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve been there more than a dozen times in my life. Is that where Hilderly came from?”

  “He attended the university until he was expelled for activities relating to the Free Speech Movement.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t’ know much about that, other than what I read in the papers a long time ago.”

  I watched him for a moment. While his eyes seemed candid and his manner was relaxed, I sensed an undercurrent of falsehood in the man. After a bit I asked, “What about the name Libby Heikkinen? Is that familiar to you?”

  He shook his head—too quickly, I thought.

  “Jess Goodhue? David Arlen Taylor?”

  “Neither. Who are these people?”

  “The other beneficiaries. Are you sure none of their names rings a bell?”

  “Goodhue sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “She’s an anchorwoman with KSTS-TV.”

  “Right. I think she interviewed me once.”

  The sense of falsehood still nudged me. I said, “Aren’t you interested in the value of your share of Hilderly’s estate?”

  “I’m more interested in why he named me in his will. But, yes, how large is it?”

  “Your share would come to around a quarter of a million dollars—should you be able to prove you are the Thomas Y. Grant that Hilderly intended the money to go to.”

  Grant’s gaze strayed to the window that overlooked another bricked courtyard, and to the eucalyptus groves of the Presidio beyond its wall. He was silent for a long moment, then looked back at me and said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that. And frankly, while it’s a good deal of money, I don’t really need it. I understand the difficult position this places Hank Zahn in; naturally he’s bound to do everything he can to carry out his client’s wishes. So what I’m going to propose is this: I will sign a document renouncing all claim to this inheritance, in perpetuity.”

  It was a gesture I hadn’t expected—and one that was totally unnecessary. Now I began to suspect that—despite his outwardly cool manner—Tom Grant had known Perry Hilderly and was afraid I’d find out the nature of the relationship.

  I said, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Yes. Will you ask Mr. Zahn to draw up the paperwork?”

  “Certainly. I’ll call for an appointment when it’s ready.” I closed the file and replaced it in my briefcase.

  Grant stood. “When you do, ask Angela to schedule it for late in the day; I’d like to show you my studio.”

  Involuntarily I glanced over at the shelf beside the fireplace where the mockingbird feathers spread about the dry taut piece of skin. My feeling of distaste was even stronger now.

  “Since you seem so interested in my hobby,” Grant added.

  On my way through the pristine front courtyard, I suddenly recalled the source of the odd phrase that had popped into my head earlier; it was from the last stanza of a song by the seventeenth-century English playwright John Webster that I’d been required to memorize in one of my high-school literature classes. I could still remember the entire quatrain, more or less accurately.

  Vain the ambition of kings

  Who seek by trophies and dead things

  To leave a living name behind

  And weave but nets to catch the wind.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As it turned out, Greg was forced to cancel our lunch—a fact about which I had mixed emotions. When I arrived at Homicide, one of the inspectors—a man named Wallace, whom I knew slightly—handed me an armful of files and showed me to Greg’s cubicle. “The lieutenant said to leave them on the desk when you’re finished,” he told me.

  So I spent what should have been my lunch hour reading through the case files on the random shootings. Four of them, dating back to April, the latest being Hilderly’s on July 6. The first was a restaurant employee, returning late to his rooming house in the Outer Mission. Next was a nurse, leaving for her four-to-midnight shift at Children’s Hospital in Laurel Heights. The third victim, a veteran on disability, had been unable to sleep and gone outside his home in the Outer Sunset to get some air minutes before he was killed. And then there was Hilderly. The weapon used was a .347 Magnum, and the bullets recovered from the bodies matched ballistically. All the shootings had occurred after ten p.m. and on relatively quiet streets; even Hilderly’s had been no exception, since normally busy Geary Boulevard is almost deserted at one-fifty a.m., the hour he’d alighted from an empty Muni bus at the corner of Third Avenue.

  There had been no eyewitnesses to any of the killings; the Muni bus, in Hilderly’s case, had already driven away. Family, friends and co-workers of the victims had been interviewed, and the investigators were unable to turn up an enemy or anyone else with a motive for murder. The information in the files showed that the victims had been more or less upright citizens, ordinary people going about their ordinary business. Ordinary people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  As is customary in such cases, the mayor’s office had offered a reward for information leading to the apprehension of the murderer. The usual false leads, extortion attempts, and crackpot calls (including one in which the caller claimed the shootings were the work of her husband, who had then flown off in a UFO) had been phoned in to the police hot line. Unlike killers such as Zodiac, the perpetrator did not contact either the press or the police. If the snipings continued, the public outcry would become louder, and panic would ensue; political pressure on the department, already heavy, would increase.

  I skimmed the files devoted to each individual, then turned to Hilderly’s, curious to see where he’d been on the night of his death. There was a statement from his employer, Gene Carver of Tax Management Corporation, saying that Hilderly had worked late that evening. I frowned; he’d been shot only the week before last, long after the busy income-tax season. Why the late hours? Then I read on; Hilderly and his boss had been preparing for an IRS audit of one of their major clients. Carver stated that he himself had left the office at one a.m. and offered Hilderly a ride home; Hilderly declined, saying he wanted to finish with what he was working on.

  I sighed and leaned back in Greg’s chair. I could understand why the police had been thus far frustrated by the killings. The only links among the victims of the sniper that they’d been able to establish were the circumstances under which they’d been shot and the matching bullets. Apparently none of them had known one another, and there were few commonalities. Of course, little was known about the restaurant worker, who appeared to be even more of a loner than Hilderly, but the fact that he’d been more or less a drifter whose history could not fully established removed him a step further from his fellow victims. The shootings were random, all right. I didn’t envy Greg this one.

  After a moment I looked at my watch, saw it was nearly two. Greg—who had been called away to a meeting with his unit’s deputy chief—obviously wouldn’t be back for some time. I used his phone to check in at All Souls, found there were no messages of any importance, and decided to go grab a burger before running by KSTS-TV. As I hurried through the busy squad room toward the elevators, I waved to Inspector Wallace. He motioned for me to come over, but I shook my head and pointed at my watch. My stomach was making a hollow plaint; if I was to have any lunch at all, I’d better do so quickly.

  At close to three I arrived at the TV studio on the Embarcadero, virtually in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, and only blocks form the proposed site for a new downtown athletic stadium. The building was bulky, red brick with a flat roof sporting an antenna and various other broadcast gear—the former plant of a bakery that had gone belly-up in the seventies. Tracks from a railroad spur ribbed the pavement in front of it;
across the boulevard that rimmed this side of the city along the bay were three piers—no longer used for shipping, but instead devoted to such enterprises as architects’ and real-estate brokers’ offices. To their right was the SFFD’s fireboat station.

  The roar of cars and trucks on the bridge and its approaches drowned out other sounds; the massive concrete facades of the piers all but blocked my view of the water. The day—at least in this part of the city—had turned warmish and sunny. On the wide promenade beyond the fireboat station people sat on benches or leaned against the seawall, looking out toward Treasure Island; joggers pounded along, most of them appearing oblivious to the attractiveness of their surroundings. After I got out of my car I watched one of the harbor pilot’s boats churn by, then turned and went into the TV studio lobby.