Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (29 page)

The hands of my watch moved
slowly toward seven o'clock. The lobby was deserted and the building
seemed hushed, as if everyone were holding his breath until the
newscast was successfully completed. The impression, I knew, was
deceptive: frantic activity would be going on behind the locked door by
the reception desk; stories would continue to break up until the eleven
o'clock report; other stories would constantly be updated. And Goodhue
could very well use that activity as an excuse for avoiding me.

So far no one had entered the
studio from the street. It occurred to me that there was a door from
the parking lot. If Goodhue wanted to duck me, she could slip out that
way when the receptionist told her I was here. I glanced at him; he was
reading a current best-seller, totally absorbed. When I got up and
meandered around the lobby, pretending to study the blowups of KSTS
personalities, he paid me no attention. I moved closer to the locked
door, staring at the face of Les Gates, Goodhue's co-anchor.

At five minutes to seven, a tall,
curly-haired man strode into the lobby, announcing that he had to see
someone named Rick—was he in the building, and if so, where?

"Studio D," the receptionist
said, his hand moving automatically to the buzzer.

The man hurried over to the door,
opened it as soon as the buzzer sounded, and went inside. I caught it
before it closed and slipped through. The man was already at the other
end of the corridor and didn't notice me.

The pace in the newsroom was even
more hectic than it had been on Monday afternoon: phones rang; people
rushed about; the sound was turned up on the monitors, and the
competition's newscasts blended into an unintelligible babble. I
entered as if I had business there and went straight to Goodhue's empty
cubicle.

The anchorwoman's desk was
covered with papers: scripts, memos, correspondence, a copy of the
Examiner,
sheets from yellow pads. As I was about to sit down, one of the
latter caught my eye; it was covered with doodles that looked like
crude representations of Tom Grant's fetishes. At the top of the sheet
was a name and a phone number— Harry Sullivan. Sullivan was one of the
city's top criminal attorneys; it looked as though Goodhue planned to
consult him.

Quickly I flipped through the
appointments calendar on the desk. Notations were scrawled all over it,
but there was no indication of any meeting with Sullivan—not in the
past couple of days nor in the near
future. Goodhue must have been debating calling him. Ironic what she'd
doodled while thinking it over.

Voices rose louder in the
newsroom. I recognized Goodhue's. Footsteps approached the cubicle. I
turned as she and Les Gates entered.

Gates looked mildly surprised to
see a stranger there. Goodhue blanched and exclaimed, "You!" Her eyes
moved from me to the yellow sheet on the desk; when they met mine
again, they were flooded with fear. Her mouth twisted as if she
suddenly felt sick.

I said, "Jess, we have to talk."

She took a step backward. "No."

Gates was frowning. "Jess, what's
wrong? You want me to call security?"

"No!" She turned quickly, bumping
into a woman who was passing.

"Wait," I said.

Goodhue ran for the door of the
newsroom.

Gates put a restraining hand on
my arm. "What's going on? Wait a minute—aren't you the investigator who
collared that sniper? How come you're here—"

Typical newsman, all questions. I
wrenched free, went after Goodhue. The door to the lobby was just
closing. I ran down there, yanked it open, saw her pushing through the
street door. As I ran across the lobby, the receptionist shouted, "Hey,
what were
you
doing back there?"

Outside, the Embarcadero was gray
with mist. Heavy traffic moved swiftly in both directions; from above
came the hum of cars on the Bay Bridge. Goodhue was running awkwardly
across the railroad tracks that fronted the building. She caught the
toe of her high-heeled shoe on one of the rails, stumbled, righted
herself, and kept going.

I yelled for her to stop, but she
didn't even pause at the curb, dodging cars and trucks on her way
across the Embarcadero. A sports car screeched to a stop, barely
missing her. Horns blared. Goodhue ran
for the piers on the other side, seemingly oblivious to the commotion.

I started after her, was almost
mowed down by a van whose driver screamed obscenities at me. Goodhue
had reached the sidewalk and was angling to the left, past the SFFD's
fireboat station. I stepped into the crosswalk, holding up my hand to
stop an oncoming car like a traffic cop. It braked, and the cars
traveling in the opposite direction halted, too. I spotted a look of
astonishment on one driver's face as I sprinted in front of him and
down the sidewalk.

It was cold, and the wind blew
strongly off the bay, redolent of creosote and salt water. Ahead, a
gust threw Goodhue off stride as she reached the wide strip of
promenade. I passed the fireboat station, gaining on her.

Goodhue stumbled, looked over her
shoulder, and saw me. She glanced at the traffic whizzing by, then at
the chest-high seawall to her right. For a moment I thought she might
climb it and fling herself into the bay. Then she kicked off her shoes
and ran faster.

Ahead was a concrete shelter
topped by a flagpole—part of some waterfront design plan that didn't
appear to have come off properly. The promenade widened at that point,
jutting out into the bay. Goodhue made a sharp right turn and suddenly
disappeared from sight. I sped up, reached the corner of the seawall,
and rounded it.

On the other side was an area
between the wall and an arm of the promenade that looked like a large
boat slip. Steps led down to it and vanished under the lapping waves.
Goodhue was descending them. I shouted for her to stop. When she
reached the bottom step, she didn't hesitate a beat, just waded into
the water.

Two concrete landing piers rose a
couple of feet above the water in the middle of the slip—another part
of the design plan that hadn't been thought through, since there was no
way of reaching them without getting soaked. Goodhue was slogging
toward the closer of
them, in up to her knees now. I ran down the steps and waded in after
her; the water felt icy through my athletic shoes.

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 of 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 it to
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."