Trophies and Dead Things

by Marcia Muller

  Goodhue reached the pier and clung to it, arms outstretched above her head. Waves lapped at her waist and sprayed the back of her tan suit jacket. I moved toward her, fighting a strong current. She was crying, clawing at the concrete with her fingernails. When I came up behind her and grasped her by the shoulders, she flinched.

  “Come on, Jess,” I said. “Out of the water. We’ll both catch pneumonia.”

  She sobbed and rolled her head from side to side, face pressed against the rough surface of the pier.

  “Jess!” I shook her.

  She muttered something I couldn’t understand.

  “What?”

  “Don’t care.”

  “Stop it!” I yanked on her shoulders, dragged her upright. She sagged against me. I slipped my right arm around her, extending the other for balance, and began guiding her back toward the steps. My feet were numb now. Halfway to the steps, she stumbled, and we both nearly went down.

  “Walk, dammit!” I said.

  She walked. But when we got to the steps, she sagged again and sat down.

  “Jess,” I said. “get up!”

  She shook her head and doubled over, arms wrapped around her bare knees. Her pale skirt was molded to her thighs, water streaming off it. In spite of her soaking she didn’t seem to feel the wet or the chill. Finally I took off my jacket and draped it around her shoulders, then sat a little way down, avoiding the puddles forming around her. I couldn’t single-handedly wrestle her to warmth and shelter. It was obvious she wouldn’t help me, and nobody else had been drawn to the vicinity by the sight of two wet, struggling women. At least not yet.

  I fumbled in my damp shoulder bag and came up with a couple of reasonably clean tissues. Pressed them into her hand. She took them, scrubbed at her face, and blew her nose.

  “What was all that about?” I asked her.

  She didn’t reply, merely hunched over, clasping her knees again.

  “Well, I think I know,” I added. “But maybe it’s not that bad. Let’s talk about it, see what can be done.”

  “There’s nothing that can be done. I want to die.”

  I doubted her wading into the bay had been a suicide attempt; more likely she’d been running in blind panic—both from having to face me and having to deal with what had happened. I said, “You don’t’ want to die, and you don’t know there’s no solution. Come on, we’ll go back to the studio and talk this through.”

  This time she let me help her to her feet. When we reached the promenade, we encountered Les Gates and the bald man from the assignment desk, who had come out looking for us. Together the two men and I got Goodhue back to her dressing room. Gates and the other man didn’t want to leave us, but Goodhue dismissed them—a bit imperiously, I thought, for someone who had recently been wallowing and crying in the bay. While she changed into dry things, I went to my car and carried in the overnight bag I keep in the trunk in case an investigation unexpectedly takes me out of town. Finally we sat down to talk, me clad in a fresh sweater and jeans, Goodhue wrapped in a warm robe.

  I said, “Jess, there are extenuating circumstances in Grant’s death. I noticed you’d written down Harry Sullivan’s number. A good lawyer like him—”

  “Can get me off,” she finished. “But my life’s wrecked, anyway. My career. And how can I live with what I did? I keep seeing him . . .”

  “Tom Grant—your father.”

  After a moment she nodded, bending her head so I couldn’t see her face.

  “You picked up the report on the background investigation on your mother Tuesday afternoon—”

  Now she looked up. “How did you—”

  “Doesn’t matter now. You read in the report that a man named Andy Wrightman was your father. Later that afternoon I called and mentioned that one of the other heirs had said something about the ‘right man’ when I’d described Tom Grant to him. So you decided to go see Grant, but you didn’t tell him the real reason why you were making the appointment. Did you claim you wanted to interview him for another story?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  “And what happened when you went to his house?”

  She sighed deeply. “Why go into it? The end result is the same.”

  “You’re going to have to talk about it sooner or later. There’s no way I can withhold this kind of information from the police.”

  Goodhue stared off into the shadows, her face reflected murkily in the unlit mirror above her dressing table. For some reason I was reminded of D.A. Taylor staring at Hog Island, and I knew Goodhue’s thoughts were as bleak as those Taylor entertained. In spite of what I’d said earlier about her not really wanting to die, I was afraid for Jess. I wanted to yank her back to the present, reintegrate this new, fragile personality with the strong, confident woman she had been until two days before. But I doubted my ability to do so.

  Finally she turned her gaze to me. “Why do you need to know these things?”

  “I want to help you, if I can. And as I told you on Monday, the truth is important to me.”

  After a moment she said, “All right, then—the truth. I went to his house right after the early-evening broadcast. No one saw me leave the studio; they just assumed I was resting in my dressing room. I’d got myself all prettied up.” Her lips twisted in bitter self-mockery. “Daddy’s little girl, wanting to make a good impression. But there was something about his manner . . .I couldn’t ask him right off. We had a drink in his office. I was trying to think of a way to get into it. I asked him about those horrible . . . what did he call them?”

  “Fetishes.”

  She closed her eyes, swallowed. “Disgusting things. And the way he talked about them . . . it was very calculated, for shock effect. He took me out in the backyard to his workshop, showed me the . . . stuff he made them from, the one that he had in progress. And then . . . oh, Jesus!”

  “What, Jess?”

  “The bastard came on to me. His own daughter. And that’s when I just blurted it out.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “At first he was very surprised—more, I think, because I knew. I suspected he’d known all along. He didn’t bother to deny he’d known my mother, or that his real name was Andy Wrightman. Then he became defensive, nervous. Said I was mistaken, he couldn’t be my father, because he’d left Berkeley before I was born. I’d brought the detective’s report along, and I showed him. He read it and laughed—forced laughter. He said of course Jenny would have told her conservative friend that she knew who my father was, but in reality she was a tramp who fucked everybody. There was no way, he said, that she could have figured out whose child I was.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No. When you’ve interviewed as many people as I have, you get so you can sense when someone’s lying. Well, I guess you would know that, too.”

  “Did you ask him if he was the man who came to see you at Ben and Nilla’s?”

  She bent forward, resting her face against her open palms. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “He admitted he was. Said my mother needed someone to drive her there, so he went along. He told me I’d been a cute little thing, the way I’d sat on his lap and played with the ends of the string tie his peace medallion was clipped to.”

  So that was the medallion the collective had broken up to makes “talismans.” I thought of the small leather protrusions on the backs of the two pieces I had in my purse, which would have held the string.

  Goodhue added, “And then it all came back to me so clearly; the big gray metal clip, and above it his face—the way he looked back then. And I also very clearly saw my mother kneeling beside us, looking prettier than I’d ever seen her, saying, ‘Honey, this is your father.’ ” She was silent a moment, crying quietly. Then she raised her tear-wet face.

  “The way he spoke, I thought he might be softening toward me. But when I told him what I remembered my mother saying, he started to attack her character again. Said that in addition to being a roundheels, she was mentally
unstable, that she’d been breaking down long before the thing at Port Chicago, which was why she testified against the others. Afterward, when just the two of them were living in the flat in the Filmore, she kept talking about suicide, and finally she took the gun they had left and . . . you know.”

  But something was wrong with that. Cal Hurley had told me the federal agents had raided the flat, taken evidence away. If the gun had been there, they would have found it. “Did Grant tell you why he wasn’t in on the Port Chicago bombing attempt?”

  “He said he was, that he’d done a cowardly thing. When he saw the FBI men, he gave another man his gun and then faded into the background. A Weather collective in Oakland hid him until after the trial, when he and my mother got back together.”

  A second contradiction to what Cal Hurley had told me. According to the old man, Grant had been at the flat on Page Street when the agents conducted their search. Of the two, I tended to believe Hurley, who had no reason to lie.

  Goodhue added, “Grant said he hung out in the Weather Underground for a long time, then bought false documentation, set up a new identity, and then went to law school. But he claimed that what had happened had ruined his life, anyway—because of his shame at his cowardice and his fear that one day someone would recognize him and destroy everything he’d built up. He became quite maudlin about it, practically cried, but I sense he was working on my sympathy. Unfortunately for him, after what he’s said about my mother, I couldn’t feel much.”

  Ruined his life. It was the same as what Hilderly had said of Grant to his employer the day he encountered Grant at the taxation seminar. Had Grant also become maudlin when he’d told Perry a similar story over lunch at Tommy’s Joynt? Perhaps added the heart-wrenching detail that he lived in such fear that he was unable to acknowledge his own daughter?

  It struck me that Grant, who had been interviewed by Goodhue, could not have helped but notice the newswoman’s striking resemblance to Jenny Ruhl. And the name Goodhue must have rung a bell with him, since he had visited Ben and Nilla’s home in the Portola district. I would not have been at all surprised if Grant had a background check run on Jess to ascertain that she was indeed his offspring.

  On the other hand, Hilderly had lived in the past and probably seldom watched TV newscasts. In all likelihood he had not known the whereabouts of Ruhl’s daughter until Grant told him, and this finishing touch to Grant’s tale of woe would have been sure to deeply affect a man who was more or less estranged from his own sons. The bond that he imagined between himself and his former friend—evidenced by his telling Gene Carver that he saw a lot of himself in Grant—could only have been reinforced by it.

  But there was a great deal wrong with Grant’s story.

  I asked, “Then what happened?”

  “He threatened me, in a subtle way. Said it would be dangerous for me to go up against someone in his position, that sort of thing. It didn’t frighten me. It only made me sad. I started to cry. He put his arms around me and told me to cheer up. He said that just because he wasn’t my father, it didn’t mean we couldn’t be very good friends. And then I realized he was coming on to me again—this man who really was my father, who knew that, no matter what he said.” She covered her face with her hands; tears welled through her spread fingers.

  “I’d finally found my father,” she added, “and he was a pervert.”

  I doubted that. My guess was that Grant had been trying to put her off so that she would leave him alone in the future. There was something in his past that he didn’t want to come out—but it wasn’t the story he handed her.

  After a bit Goodhue went to get some tissues and wiped her face. She sat on the stool by the counter, her gaze turned inward, on the hopelessly bleak memory of Wednesday night.

  I said gently, “Tell me the rest of it.”

  “The rest is just . . . ugliness.”

  “Don’t bottle it up.”

  A long silence. Then the words came out in a rush; she was eager to get the telling over with. “I was outraged. Shoved him away, hard. He stumbled and reached out for me. I shoved him again. He fell, and his head slammed into the iron leg of the worktable. And he just lay there, bleeding.”

  “And then?”

  “I got out of there. Ran. I was halfway down the path by the house when I remembered I’d left my coat in his office. I went in, got it. There were the glasses we’d drunk from. I put them back in the cabinet under the wet bar. Then the phone rang. I panicked, rushed out of the house, right through the front door.

  I frowned. There was a gaping hole in her story. Had she blacked out, repressed the memory of how savage her attack on Grant had been?

  “Jess,” I said, “think back to the studio, after Grant fell. Did you touch anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the fetish he had in progress?”

  “No.”

  “What about his body? Did you touch it? Check to see if he was actually dead, or –”

  “I couldn’t touch him. Afterward I hoped maybe he’d just been knocked unconscious. But back at the studio, when the reports started to come over the police-band radio in the newsroom—I knew I couldn’t go before the cameras and report a murder I had committed. So I went home, and one of the co-anchors from the weekend news filled in for me. I didn’t have to fake being sick—I was.”

  “Did you watch the news that night? Read any of the accounts in the papers the next day?”

  “Just the story in the Chronicle. I wanted to see if they suspected . . . and they didn’t.”

  The newspaper article had merely said Grant had died of blows to the head; the police held back the brutality of the attack and the nature of the murder weapon. In her panicked state, Goodhue could easily have ignored the plural, or thought the reporter was mistaken. I wasn’t yet willing to fully credit her story, though; I asked her to go over it again. She did, with enough backtracking and minor inconsistencies to give it the ring of truth.

  I asked one final question. “Did you see anyone on the street when you ran out? Did anyone see you?”

  “. . . There was a truck, one of those ancient pickups. It was weaving down Lyon Street, and I ran in front of it.”

  “What color was it?”

  “I don’t know. Orange, maybe. What does this matter, anyway?” Like you said before, you’ll have to tell the police—”

  “I can be selective about what I tell them, though.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a lot of this that need never come out. You didn’t kill Tom Grant, Jess. A person who arrived after you left did.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Goodhue was so relieved and elated at what I explained to her that she wanted to contact the police and set things straight immediately. I cautioned her against doing so until she consulted an attorney.

  “The inspector in charge of the case is a real . . . well, asshole. He’d see charging someone as well known as you with obstruction as a major coup. Talk with Harry Sullivan. And in the meantime, I’ll keep at it, try to wrap the investigation up quickly.”

  “You think you can do that/”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who killed my . . . Tom Grant?”

  “No,” I lied, in the interests of saving time, “not yet. But I think I will soon.”

  Goodhue turned on the lights around the mirror and began repairing her makeup. I was impatient to make some calls, so I went downstairs to the newsroom and used he same phone I had Monday afternoon. As then, I put in a credit-card call to the Fleming residence in Blackhawk.

  Judy Fleming answered. I identified myself, asked for Kurt. She said she’d call him to the phone. Then she asked, “Does this have to do with why Perry changed his will?”

  “Yes. I’m still working on it.”

  That seemed to satisfy her. She went away, and half a minute later Kurt came on the line.

  I said, “I need to double-check a few things about your discussion with Per
ry the last time you saw him.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “When he talked about making decisions, what did he say about them coming back to haunt you?”

  Pause. “That even if the decision was the right one, it could do that.”

  “And he said you shouldn’t take it out on yourself because you can’t control the consequence of your actions.”

  “Right.”

  “Will you go over what he said about ideals again?”