Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  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 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 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 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 my 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 Stations 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 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 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 take 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 structure. We just did our 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.”

  “Bombmaking?”

  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 f
lat in the Fillmore and share everything—clothes, food, money, drugs, sexual partners. God, when I think of how naïve 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 Weathermen 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?”

  “Because by then Andy Wrightman was long gone. It was . . . as if he never existed.” Her fingers moved clumsily with the bridle, her hands shaking slightly; she had difficulty getting the tongue of the buckle through the hole.

  “He was Jenny Ruhl’s lover back in Berkeley, wasn’t he?”

  “One of them.”

  “Was he Jessica’s father?”

  “God knows. For a while there Jenny was fucking a lot of guys. But yes, he probably was. The timing was right.”

  “Did Andy Wrightman run off when Jenny became pregnant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  Ross hoisted the saddle onto the pinto, positioned it, and squatted to buckle the girth. Her voice was muffled when she said, “Virtually nothing. He was a . . . nobody.”

  “Any idea where he was from?”

  “No.”

  “It’s my guess that he was from somewhere in the Southwest, and that he came back to Jenny—at least for a while, and as late as sixty-nine.”

  Ross straightened, her face red—whether from exertion or anger, I couldn’t tell. “For God’s sake, where do you get these ideas?”

  “Jenny’s daughter tells me that her father came to see her with her mother once, when she was four years old. That would have been in sixty-nine. The man wore a string tie, as many people from the South do.”

  Ross seemed to find that amusing. She chuckled and said, “All sorts of people wear string ties—including tourists who buy them on vacation. And as for Jenny’s daughter, I don’t know anything about her other than that she existed.”

  “And you know nothing about Andy Wrightman?”

  “I told you, he was a nobody, a nothing.”

  “It’s funny: when I went to see D.A. the other day, I described Tom Grant to him, same as I did to you. You know what he said?”

  “Where D.A. is concerned, I have no idea.”

  “He got very excited, said, “Wrightman!”

  Again Ross bit her lip, then gave me a long, measured look. “I have to ride over to see a neighbor who runs cattle on my land. I want you gone by time I get back. And don’t come again.”

  “I need to ask—”

  “No more questions. I told you before; it’s an old, sad story, and I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve said far too much already.”

  “D.A. came to see you yesterday afternoon. What was that about?”

  Her eye narrowed as she mounted the pinto. “I suppose Mia told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “She would. Mia’s young and insecure. She can’t understand what D.A. and I have . . . had. So she puts the easiest interpretation on it and is jealous. Every time he takes off, she thinks he’s coming here. But he doesn’t. I haven’t seen him in a good long time, and I don’t expect him in the foreseeable future.”

  Abruptly she turned her horse and urged him into a trot. I watched as she took the trail under the trees—not toward the ranch of the neighbor who contracted to run cattle, but toward Abbotts Lagoon and the seacoast.

  When she was a fair distance away, I went over to the barn. Inside I could hear sounds of activity—the kid she’d mentioned who cleaned the stalls. Ross had neglected to lock the tack room; I went in there and retrieved the medallions from where she’d tossed them on the desk. Then I began looking around.

  There was a calendar blotter on the desk, with notations in its squares of upcoming pack trips and rentals. Next to it was a phone and a neat stack of periodicals such as Horse & Rider. The center desk drawer held the usual assortment of pens, pencils, and paper clips; the deep bottom drawer contained files. In the one above it were blank checks, envelopes, a ledger, and a box of business cards. But toward its back, in a separate compartment, a framed photograph lay facedown.

  I took the photo out and found it was a color shot of Ross, Hilderly, Taylor, and a woman whom I first mistook for Jess Goodhue. They were grouped on the wide stone steps of some building—I thought it might be Sproul Hall at Berkeley. While Ross, Hilderly, and the other woman were seated, D.A. stood behind them, one arm raised in a clenched-fist salute. Ross didn’t look much different than she did today; Hilderly I recognized easily from the old photos I’d seen in his albums. But Taylor was another man entirely; his stance was aggressive and proud, his eyes burned fiercely. Seeing all that intensity, however poorly preserved on film, made me understand how D.A.’s internal fires could have flared out of control and burned themselves out in the bitter aftermath of failure and imprisonment.

  The other woman was such a mirror image of Jess Goodhue that I knew she had to be Jenny Ruhl. She’d passed on her elfin facial features to her daughter, and her hair—while long and straight—had the same dark sheen. Next to Hilderly’s and Ross’s lankiness, she was tiny and compact, also like Goodhue. But while she smiled brashly at the camera, her eyes held none of the uncompromising quality of Jess’s. While her daughter’s photos impressed the viewer as direct, Ruhl merely looked tough and defiant. I suspected the difference was in their upbringings: Ruhl was from a wealthy family and probably had had everything handed to her; Goodhue had had to rely on her natural strength to survive.

  I stared at the photograph a while longer, wondering whose eye had been behind the camera lens. Wondering why Ross had framed it and kept it all these years. And wondering about the disparate reactions of these four people to the cataclysmic events of the late sixties.

  According to Luke Widdows, Hilderly had become so deeply disillusioned with the cause the others were fighting for that he set off on a trip halfway around the world in search of the truth—and then retreated into an emotional void for the rest of his life. Ross’s silence about Port Chicago led me to suspect she’d been in on the bombing attempt and served
time in prison herself. But after that she’d made a life for herself—albeit one that she’d hinted was at best only a life “of sorts.” Taylor had been broken by prison—turned into something far less than a functional human being. And Ruhl? She’d shot herself.

  What fundamental flaw had caused the crack-ups of Ruhl and Taylor? What made Ross and Hilderly survivors—however wounded? Taylor claimed he’d never been a strong man, but I suspected the crucial difference had less to do with strength than flexibility. The eucalyptus trees that formed the windbreakers on this headland looked strong, but in a bad storm they were easily torn apart or uprooted. Conversely, the relatively delicate-looking cypress could bend to the ground and live on, bowed and warped as they might become.