Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

  “Why?”

  “Knowing its history might shed some light on why Grant was murdered. Or even why Hilderly was killed.”

  Greg looked doubtful, but he merely nodded. “Okay. I’ll send it down. I can’t tell them to place priority on it, though.”

  “I don’t expect you to. Another thing: may I take a second look at those files on the snipings?”

  “Again, why?”

  “I have a feeling there’s something I missed the other day.”

  His gaze suddenly turned inward, reminiscent. “You remember when we first me, and I accused you in my sexist way of relying on woman’s intuition?”

  I nodded.

  “You were fiddling with a hair ribbon you’d had on, and without noticing what you were doing, you twisted it into a little noose.”

  “That’s right. I’d completely forgotten.”

  “Well, over the years I’ve come to realize it’s just plain good investigator’s instincts you rely on. And I’ve come to trust them, too. You’re welcome to the files.”

  He picked up the phone receiver and asked that the files be brought in, then made arrangements to have the gun sent to the lab. “You can use my desk again,” he added when he hung up. “I’m due in a meeting in fifteen minutes and probably won’t be back until afternoon. If there’s anything you need to tell me, call me then.”

  I watched him leave the cubicle, thinking that he looked not all that different from the man who had made me want to hang him in the old days. But underneath he had changed—become more mellow, plus a good bit sadder and more cynical.

  Well, hadn’t we all? I thought as I moved around the desk and took his chair.

  When a clerk brought the files in, I began going over them in a great deal more detail than I had earlier in the week. This time I paid particular attention to the other three sniping victims.

  The first victim—the restaurant employee—was Bob Smith. A common name—perhaps false. I noted it on my legal pad, put a question mark beside it. Smith’s employment record was spotty; for the nine months prior to his death he’d worked in food preparation at a small pizza restaurant on Market Street; in the fifteen years before that he’d sporadically held various food-service jobs in Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix. His only long-term employment—from 1967 to 1973—was with American Consolidated Services of Fort Worth, Texas. I made a note to find out more about the company. Smith had lived alone in a rooming house in the Outer Mission; from police talks with the landlord and other tenants, the picture that emerged of him was of a loner, a drifter, a man without family and friends. Whatever I’d sensed I’d missed in the files did not have to do with him.

  The second victim was a nurse, Mary Davis, birth name Johnson. Another common name. Davis had worked at Children’s Hospital in Laurel Heights less than two months before she was shot while walking to her car on a quiet side street near the crisis clinic where she’d been on night duty. Before that she’d done psychiatric nursing at Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio, and S.F. General. There was an eight-year period of unemployment after her 1975 marriage, and in 1983 she’d attended City College for additional training in the psychiatric nursing field. Before her marriage she’d been with the American Red Cross from 1968 to 1974. Davis’s family and friends described her as a devoted wife and mother, good neighbor, and active volunteer for an organization providing counseling for AIDS patients.

  I noted down several details about Davis, feeling an idea begin to take shape.

  The third sniping victim, John Owens, was a veteran living on disability pay in a small home near the beach in the Outer Sunset. His wife and friends described him as the designated neighborhood repairman: he had a shop in his garage and was a genius with balky machinery. The fact that he was confined to a wheelchair due to injuries suffered in the shelling near Saigon in 1972 didn’t affect his ability to fix practically anything—

  Vietnam again.

  Hilderly had been there. So had Hank and Willie. And John Owens. All roughly within the same time frame. I checked my notes on Mary David: American Red Cross, 1968 to 1973. Had she also been over there? Bob Smith, too, maybe?

  Embittered war protester knocking off veterans eighteen or so years after they’d fought their war? No. It sounded too much like the plot of a bad made-for-TV movie. Besides, Hilderly and Davis hadn’t been in the military. And Hank wasn’t what you’d call your typical vet. For that matter, neither was Willie.

  I wished Greg were there so we could talk it over; he was good at sorting out the possibilities form the improbables. But he wouldn’t be back until afternoon, and I had to be in Berkeley in less than an hour.

  What I needed was more information. I picked up Greg’s phone receiver and called Hank’s flat; only the machine answered. The same was true at Willie’s house. I got the number of his main store on Market Street from directory assistance. Willie wasn’t there, either, but I finally tracked him down at the Daly City store, in conference with its manager.

  I asked, “When will you be free?”

  “Christ, McCone, I don’t know. I’ve got a full schedule today, going round to the stores.”

  “Give me a time when you’ll be back at Market Street.”

  “Five? Five-thirty?”

  “Good. I’ll see you then.” I hung up before he could reply and called Ted at All Souls. “What’s Hank’s schedule today?”

  “Let me—dammit, get down!”

  “Ted?”

  “I was talking to Alice. She just walked across my keyboard and screwed up the computer. Back, you beast! There was a thump and a tiny indignant yowl. “Now—what?” he asked. “Hank’s schedule?”

  “If it won’t interrupt your parenting too drastically.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. You could have taken them off my hands, you know.”

  “The schedule . . .?”

  “In court this morning. Back around two. Says he’s going to clear up a few things and then go home early for a change.”

  “Okay, will you give him this message, please, and tell him it’s urgent? I want him to meet me at Willie’s Market Street store between five and five-thirty. Emphasize the urgent.”

  “Willie’s, Market Street, four-thirty. That’s so he’ll get there on time; Hank, as you know, runs late. Will do, and I’ll see that he follows through on it.”

  There are times when I thank whatever powers-that-be for Ted’s calm efficiency. “Great,” I said, “One more thing—is Rae in her office yet?”

  “I think I heard her stumble in there about five minutes ago. Hold on.”

  When Rae picked up her extension, she sounded none too cheerful. “I just read about Tom Grant in the paper,” she said. “Did you get involved in that?”

  “I arrived right after the secretary found his body.”

  “They didn’t mention you.”

  “Good. I’m notorious enough as is. Listen, I’ll fill you in on it later. Do you have time to check into something for me this morning?”

  “If it’s not too complicated. My brain seems to be on hold. Okay, go ahead.”

  “I need to know about a Forth Worth, Texas, firm—American Consolidated Services. Specifically, what services they provide, and where. If you can get personnel to cooperate, ask about a Bob Smith who worked for them from nineteen sixty-seven to seventy-three.”

  “What’s my reason for wanting to know about him?”

  “Tell them employee background check. No, that won’t work—they’ve been contacted by the police and whoever you talk with might remember he’s dead. Well, think of something.”

  “Sure,” she said, a shade glumly.

  I scribbled a note to Greg, telling him I had a possible lead on the sniper and would be in touch later. Then I set off for the town that plays host to my alma mater.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I seldom visited Berkeley anymore—not because I didn’t like the town, but because long ago all my old friends had moved away and I had no r
eal reason to go there. As I drove up University Avenue toward campus that morning I found myself experiencing a keen attack of nostalgia. That dark-haired young woman in jeans who moved past me in the crosswalk could easily have been me, walking reluctantly to my nine o-clock SOC class and wondering how I could get through it without a third cup of coffee. That sandwich shop on the corner was where I’d often grabbed a hasty lunch, and I was willing to bet their bread was just as stale and dry as ever. When I crossed the Milvia intersection, I felt a swift wrenching; some two blocks away down a little side street was the apartment building where I had enacted the happy, then disillusioned, and finally painful scenes of my one and only long-term live-in relationship. All about me—and inside me, too—things had changed, and yet they hadn’t.

  It was odd, I reflected, that part of me didn’t feel any older than on the day I’d left here with my diploma. Since then I’d entered a profession I’d never given a prior thought to; I’d dealt with people and situations that would have made that graduate’s flesh creep; I’d often been in extreme danger, had coped as best I could with violence and death, had even been forced to kill a man. I was more cynical, more judgmental, more prone to anger. But deep inside there was a wistful, yearning part that still felt twenty-three years old.

  The changes in Berkeley were contradictory, too. The old landmarks remained, but interspersed among them were new buildings and a fair number of trendy shops and restaurants. The quiet, somewhat funky town of my memory has become chic these days; home of the Gourmet Ghetto, pioneering frontier of the New California Cuisine. The university, while still a major player, is no longer the only game in town. On the streets where you once mainly saw students on bicycles or in beat-up basic-transportation vehicles, you’re now just as likely to spot well-heeled executive types in BMWs. Of course, the direction of progress has not been totally upscale: as I reached the edge of campus and went to turn left on Shattuck, I was momentarily taken aback by an enormous McDonald’s. Not everyone in Berkeley, apparently, is a gourmet.

  He was a slender man with curly brown hair and a fluffy beard, dressed in khakis and a blue T-shirt. There was an openness in his manner that I liked, and he seemed so glad to see me that I guessed my arrival had saved him from some distasteful task. He ushered me into a room with a paper-strewn desk and a pair of comfortable old armchairs, offered coffee, and went to fetch it.

  “The nice thing about working out here,” he called from the next room. “is that there’s a small kitchen. I don’t need to go to the main house if I don’t want to. Which is a blessing, because I rent a couple of room to students who like loud music. Do you take anything in your coffee?”

  “Just black.”

  “Me, too.”

  Widdows returned and handed me a large mug, then sank into the opposite armchair, eyeing me with frank interest. “Private dectective, huh?” he said. “ How’d you get into that line of work?”

  “I got a degree in sociology from Cal.”

  He laughed knowingly. “Mine was in journalism.”

  “I’d say that’s a bit more practical.”

  “Not much. In journalism, there’s no teacher like hands-on experience.”

  “Well, obviously you’ve acquired that.”

  “All of it the hard way.” He spoke without bitterness or self-pity; whatever his trials had been, they seemed to amuse him. As he slouched in the chair, one leg thrown over its arm, bare foot dangling, I glanced at the chaotic desk and computer setup—reminders of the work I was probably interrupting.

  I said, “I don’t want to keep you from anything pressing.”

  “You are—and I’m delighted. This morning I couldn’t get any of the Jumble—that word scramble in the paper—so I know this is going to be one of those days when I won’t be able to string the parts of a sentence together. You wanted to know about Perry Hilderly?”

  “Yes. I understand he worked for you at New Liberty.”

  “If you could say that any of us really worked. Perry was a reporter. Investigative, I guess you could loosely term it. He couldn’t write worth a lick—I had to rewrite most of what he turned in—but he was a Movement figure, had contacts with people who might not otherwise have talked with reporters.”

  “How long was he at the magazine?”?

  “He started in sixty-eight, after he left Berkeley.”

  “And he lived in San Francisco then?”

  “Somewhere in the lower Fillmore district, I think. A lot of Movement people did back than—it was cheap, and they could get in touch with the ‘real people,’ as we were fond of calling minorities.”

  “And he went to Vietnam in sixty-nine?”

  “Spring, it was. He came to me, said he was burned out and disillusioned with the Movement. He wanted to see firsthand what the war was all about. We didn’t have the funds to pay him, but we struck a deal that if he paid his way, we’d supply press credentials. So off he went.”

  “And what did he report on?”

  “He hadn’t so much as delivered a line of copy by the time the magazine folded.” Momentarily Widdows looked regretful. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. My draft board was after me—this happened about a month after Perry left for ‘Nam—so I took what I thought was the easy way out and split for Vancouver. The magazine never had strong management after I left.”

  Now I eyed him with interest. Strangely enough, I’d never met anyone who had moved to Canada to avoid the draft. “From the way you phrase it, I take it the ‘easy way out’ wasn’t?”

  “Not really. Draft resisters weren’t all that welcome up there. There were simply too many of us and not enough jobs. Not enough commitment to the country for the Canadians to accept us. And a lot of us got homesick—I know I did. I came back here under the amnesty program. Wrote a book about my experiences that did well enough that I could buy this house. I’m pretty apolitical these days; mainly what I write is gardening books and articles. You saw my vegetables?”

  I nodded, thinking that Luke Widdows was a much of a victim of the turmoil of the war as those who had gone to Asia and fought.

  “Where did you first meet Perry?” I asked.

  “Here in Berkeley. I interviewed him for a couple of articles in the Daily Cal.”

  “Can you tell me something about the people he was close to?”

  “You mean like the other leaders of the FSM?”

  “Let me give you some names, see if they were friends of his. Thomas Y. Grant?”

  “Where have I—isn’t he the attorney who was murdered in the city last night?”

  “Yes.”

  Widdows’s eyes widened. “You’re working on that?”

  “A related matter.”

  “I see.” He seemed intrigues by my reticence. “Well, as near as I recall, the first time I ever heard of Grant was when I unfolded the paper this morning.”

  “What about David Arlen Taylor—D.A. Taylor?”

  “Oh, sure. He was a close friend of Perry’s, probably his closest.”

  “And Libby Heikkinen?”

  “Taylor’s girlfriend.”

  “What about Jenny Ruhl?”

  “Ruhl. Ruhl. Yes. I remember her. Tiny girl, long black hair.”

  “Any chance she was romantically linked with Perry?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Perry liked women, but he was basically shy around them. He wouldn’t have taken up with someone like Jenny.”

  “Why not?”

  “How can I put this without—Jenny liked men, in quantity. For a while, around sixty-four or five, she was living with a guy, a real sleazebag hanger-on. One of those guys who was just in Berkeley for the sex and drugs and rock and roll, as they used to put it. Then he disappeared from the scene about the time she turned up pregnant. She had the baby, and I guess she put it up for adoption. After that she just drifted from guy to guy, never staying with anyone very long.”

  “What was her connection to Hilderly, then?”

  “Just as one of the grou
p that hung out together. Very involved with the protests.”

  “This . . . sleazebag Ruhl was living with—what was his name?”

  “I don’t think I ever knew.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Other than a typical drifter, no. You remember the type—long unkempt beard, the same with the hair, generally grimy-looking, a little older than most students.”

  “Nothing at all memorable about him?”