Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

  I watched him wordlessly for a moment, studied his rugged, hawk-nosed profile, wondered what had made him this way. As if he could hear my unvoiced question, he said, “I’ve never been a strong man. But I’m not insane, at least in any classical sense. I just slip in and out of touch with reality. Out is better.”

  “Why, D.A.?”

  “Why not?”

  I could find no reply to that.

  After a moment he said, “I suppose you saw Harley and Jake on your way in.”

  “The men in the first cottage?”

  “My cousins. My self-appointed caretakers. When Mia’s gone, it’s their duty to watch over old D.A., make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy. There has been trouble with the sheriff, you see. Trouble with the customers at the restaurant. Did they try to stop you from coming out here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do to convince then otherwise?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Taylor actually smiled—a brief upturning of the corners of his mouth. “They probably decided you looked as if you could take care of yourself. And they know I’m not really violent, just bizarre and unpredictable. I insist to Harley and Jake that I actually own Hog Island. They’re convinced I believe that. I’ve always had a perverse streak with it comes to my cousins. Stupidity brings it out.”

  “Are they stupid?”

  “Moderately. My father’s side of the family never had too much going for it. Their capacity to choose smart, strong women is all that’s allowed them to survive.” Again the small smile flickered. “Listen to me. I claim to be so smart, but what have I ever done right but marry Mia? And now I’m destroying her little bit by little bit.”

  I decided to let that issue go for now. “You’re well educated. Where did you go to school?”

  “U.C. Berkeley—in its Golden Age.” His wry expression made me think of Hank’s when we’d spoken of those days.

  “I went there myself, but several years later. Was that where you met Perry Hilderly and Jenny Ruhl?”

  He nodded.

  “Libby, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you still don’t remember Tom Grant.”

  He considered. “No, not even now, and I’m much more clear-headed than when you came out here.”

  “Let me describe him: he’s a tall man, well built. Thick gray hair, but it would probably have been brown back then. Handsome, but he has a scar on his left cheek. I told Libby it looks like something he got in a duel—”

  Taylor’s face went very pale, then flushed. His eyes came alive, fires rekindling in those previously dead pits. He put his hand on my forearm, grasping it hard enough to create five small epicenters of pain.

  He said, “Right man!”

  I grabbed his fingers, trying to ease their pressure. “What?”

  “Right man!”

  “Who was the right man?”

  “The right man,” he said for the third time. He laughed bitterly, the sound harsh, as if his vocal cords had not been used for any kind of laughter in years. “The right man was the wrong man.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Abruptly he let go of my arm and slumped forward staring down at the brackish water of the oyster beds. “Neither do I,” he said.

  “Who was the right man?” I asked again.

  He didn’t reply: his breath came fast and ragged.

  I touched his arm. “D.A.?”

  He remained silent for several minutes, his breathing gradually returning to normal. When he raised his head and looked at me, his eyes were as dead as before.

  Formally he said, “Thank you for coming. Please give my regards to Libby.” Then he returned his gaze to the distant island.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Taylor had withdrawn behind an impenetrable psychic wall, so I left him and made my way back toward the restaurant. Neither his children nor his cousins were in evidence; the dogs still lay on the path, and they still ignored me. The red pickup and the camper with Oregon plates were gone; my car looked to be the only one in the lot that was actually capable of running.

  I went up to the restaurant and stepped inside. It was one big room with smeary, salt-caked windows overlooking another sagging dock. Four tables stood by the windows, and more were aligned between them and the door; their oilcloth coverings didn’t look any too clean, and a large black cat slept on one. A bar ran along the right-hand wall, and the mustached cousin sat behind it, reading a racing form. A skinny red-haired waitress slumped on one of the barstools, drinking beer from the bottle. Neither appeared to notice me.

  I slipped onto the stool in front of the man. He didn’t look up, but asked, “You find D.A.?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see why we worry about him?”

  “He didn’t seem that bad.”

  He raised his head, frowning. “You don’t know. You didn’t know him before.” He laughed cynically. “Big intellectual, head of his class, college scholarship, when the rest of us didn’t even get to finish high school. Now look at him—all fucked up.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I think we’ll keep that a family secret.”

  “Suit yourself.” I took one of my cards from my bag. “Are you Jake or Harley?”

  He seemed taken aback that I knew names. “Harley,” he said after a moment.

  “When’s Mia due back?”

  “Whenever my wife gets done having her baby.”

  “Your wife’s having a baby, and you’re not there with her?”

  He shrugged. “Chrissy’s had three others, she can manage without me.”

  My earlier sympathy for the newborn, I decided, was fully justified. I pushed the card across the sticky surface of the bar and said, “When Mia gets back, ask her to call me—collect—please.”

  Harley glanced at it, his eyes narrowing slightly. “What’s your business with D.A. and Mia?”

  “I told you before, it’s private.”

  “And I told you before, they’re family.”

  “If either of them wants you to know, they’ll tell you.”

  He picked up the card and tore it in half. “You don’t tell me, Mia don’t call you.”

  I reigned in my rising anger, took another card from my bag, and placed it on the bar. “If Mia doesn’t call me, you’ll never know what I want with them, now will you?”

  Harley pushed his jaw out belligerently and glanced indecisively at the card. Then he went back to his racing form, leaving the card untouched where I’d put it.

  As I went out, the waitress winked at me and made a circle with her thumb and forefinger.

  The drive back to the city seemed endless—possibly because the list of questions running through my mind was also endless. Something had happened a long time ago, probably in the sixties at Berkeley, that had welded Hilderly, Ross, Taylor and Ruhl together—the chains that linked them transcending years, distance, and even death. Something to do with the Free Speech Movement, I supposed. Jess Goodhue had told me her mother had gotten into trouble over something associated with the protest shortly before she killed herself. What? Had it also involved Hilderly, Taylor, or Ross? That didn’t seem right; Ruhl had died in 1969, and Hilderly was probably in Vietnam by then. And what had Grant to do with it all—a man whom both Ross and Taylor seemed to recognize but would not own up to knowing? And what was this about the right man? Right man for what?

  As I approached the Golden Gate Bridge, the traffic coming from the city slowed to a near standstill. Then the traffic on my side of the freeway slowed, too—due partly to the rush-hour closure of two lanes and partly to a stall just south of the Waldo Tunnel. I left off my reflections and concentrated on not rear-ending anyone. By the time I’d passed through the toll plaza and sped up on Doyle Drive, I was regretting not having a car phone so I could check in for messages. A friend who had one recently, convinced me of their merits, but when I’d broached the subject of getting one to Hank, he’d told me I was fortunat
e just to have an All Souls telephone credit card.

  Traffic was heavy within the city as well, and I fumed all the way crosstown to Bernal Heights. When I arrived at the co-op, it was after five, and Ted was no longer at his desk. I checked the chalkboard for urgent messages, then went up to my office and looked in my In box for the routine ones. Nothing.

  I’d hoped for one from Jess Goodhue giving me the name of the investigator who had looked into her mother’s background, so I called KSTS-TV. Goodhue came on the line, sounding rushed. No, she said, she hadn’t yet had the time to look for the detective’s name and wasn’t sure when she could get to it.

  “I really wish you’d try to find time,” I said. “After talking with the two remaining heirs, I think Tom Grant figures in all of this far more prominently than he’s letting on.”

  Goodhue said something that I couldn’t catch.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I was talking with one of our writers. Why do you think that about Grant?”

  “Both of the remaining heirs seemed to recognize his description, even though his name did not ring a bell. One of them was very startled, said something about Grant being the right man.”

  “Right man?”

  “Yes. What do you suppose—”

  “Hang on.” There was a clunk, and then I heard papers shuffling. When she came back on the line, she said, ‘Sharon, I’ve got to go—urgent conference with my producer. I’ll try to call you in the morning, okay?”

  I glared at the receiver for a few seconds, slightly miffed by Goodhue’s abrupt dismissal of me. Then I replaced it and stood by my desk, feeling deflated and at loose ends. My gaze rested on the new chaise lounge, the one I’d brought to relax on, and irritation with myself rose. It was really stupid to buy a new piece of furniture and then not use it as intended.

  I flung off my jacket, stalked over there, and removed the file box, camera, and tape recorder, depositing them unceremoniously on the floor. Then I lay down and contemplated the ceiling. It was cracked and water-stained, and cobwebs trailed down from the rosette above the fluted light fixture. I refocused on the wall beside the fireplace. That was even worse.

  I’d only been working out of the office for a little over a year, and it had taken me six months to really notice the wallpaper. For years previous to that, Hank had lived in the room (because All Souls pays salaries that are lower than the going market rate, it makes a policy of providing cheap living quarters on an as-available basis to employees and partners who request it) and I’d had little occasion to visit it, much less examine the décor. The wallpaper would definitely not have been either of our choosing: faded rose and gray and cream, with flowers and garlands and cherubs arranged in a repetitious ovate pattern. After moving in, I’d paid it as little attention as I assumed Hank had.

  Then one day, in a fit of contemplation, I noticed that it looked uncannily like one of those charts of female reproductive system usually displayed on the walls of examination rooms in the gynecologists’ offices. When I mentioned this to Hank, he confessed that he’d noticed it long ago, but had merely been amused. I was not amused, however; every time I looked closely at the walls from then on, I was reminded of stirrups and a cold spectrum.

  I closed my eyes, but the image of the wallpaper remained with me, intruding on my concentration. A car raced its engine in the street below, and downstairs in the parlor that doubles as a waiting room, someone turned up the TV. Shortly afterward there came a thump and a series of scrambling noises from Ted’s room next door. Then a second thump and a loud curse.

  I sighed, got up, and went out into the hall. When I knocked on his door, Ted’s voice called out in harried tones, “Come in, but be quick about it.”

  I opened the door and a furry yellow missile hit my shins. Reflexively, I reached down and grabbed it, found myself holding a wiggly little cat.

  “Shut the door!” Ted shouted.

  I did as he told me. He was sitting on his red velvet Victorian sofa, as dejected-looking as I’d ever seen him, and against his chest he cradled an equally wiggly bundle of black and yellow and white fur.

  “Good Lord,” I said, getting a firmer grip on the creature in my hands. “What is this?”

  “Harry’s cats.” The calico wriggled free from him and bounded to the floor, skidding slightly. Ted rolled his eyes in resignation as it made a beeline for the ladder to his sleeping loft.

  “Harry’s? These are kittens; they can’t be over twelve weeks old.”

  “Exactly twelve weeks. They were an ill-advised gift from a well-meaning friend who thought they might cheer him up. His landlady’s been keeping them since he went into the hospital, but now she’s turned them over to me. I promised Harry I’d find a good home for them.”

  “Oh.” The kitten I held had stopped wiggling and started to purr. It reached out a paw and patted my cheek. Quickly I set it down. “Are you going to keep them?”

  “In here? Be serious.”

  He had a point. Ted’s room is really a cubbyhole—the former bathroom for the room that is my office. It’s a baroque retreat with red-flocked wallpaper and one of the ugliest lamps this side of Denver, but Ted takes great pride in it. And I have to admit that he’s made the most of the least possible space: the sleeping loft, curtained off by red sheers, is suspended above the ornate brass-and-marble sink and toilet; the tub had been removed and replaced by the sofa and an antique armoire; a Japanese screen discreetly separates the two areas. To me, it looks like a tiny room in an 1890s whorehouse, but to Ted it is perfect—minimalist and opulent at the same time.

  I sat down beside him on the sofa. Both cats were in the loft now; there was a tearing sound, and Ted winced. “My sheers—again.”

  “What about Hank?” I asked. “Maybe he’d take them.”

  “He’d forget to feed them.”

  “Anne-Marie?”

  “She’s allergic.”

  Briefly I considered the other partners and employees of the co-op, but dismissed them all for various reasons. “Do they have to stay together?”

  “They’re brother and sister, and they get on. It would be a shame to separate them.” Now Ted was watching me hopefully. “Shar, maybe you could—”

  “No.” I said quickly. “I don’t want another cat.”

  He was silent for a moment, then said. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you kind of . . . closing off since George moved back to Palo Alto?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s none of my business, really. Forget I asked.”

  “Ted, the only reason I don’t want another cat is that I’m not home very much. I can’t care for a cat properly. Wat was different—he was old and very independent. These are kittens; they require a lot of attention.

  Another tearing sound. “I know.” Ted said morosely.

  “Look, I’ll ask around for you, see if I can’t find somebody who wants them.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  I got up and went to the door, but before I opened it I asked, “What’re their names?”

  “Ralph and Alice.”

  “ ‘The Honeymooners.’ ”

  He brightened some. “I’m glad you knew that. Half the people I tell don’t get it. It makes me feel ancient. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who remembers things like old TV shows.

  “I remember,” I said, and left the room, shutting the door quickly against further feline onslaught.

  Contemplation no longer seemed possible, so I went downstairs and looked into Rae’s office—my former one, a converted closet under the stairs. The light was out and, although there were papers scattered all over her desk, her coat wasn’t on the hook where it usually hung. Then I remembered the liquor-store surveillance job; most likely she was still on it.

  As I turned to go back upstairs, Hank came through the front door, a sack from a tacqueria down on Mission Street in hand. Seeing it
made me realize how inadequate a lunch was the chocolate bar that I’d eaten on the drive to Point Reyes. “Working late?” I asked him.

  “Yes. You?”

  I shook my head. “I’m going home pretty soon. Did you get a chance to draw up that document for Tom Grant to sign?”