Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (33 page)

He sat slowly, watching his
father. Slipped away from his encircling arm. Stood and moved quietly
across the clearing. I pulled him down beside me on the other side of
the tree trunk.

Putting my lips close to his ear,
I whispered, "Everything's going to be okay now. Mia's down on the
beach with Libby. Can you get back there on your own?"

". . . If I have a light."

"Come on, then."

We wriggled back to the first
giant step, and I boosted him over it. Handed him my torch. He glanced
around at the encroaching blackness, but when he looked at me again,
his gaze was steady, resolute. In it I recognized the strength and
pride his father had possessed so long ago.

"Be careful," I whispered. "Tell
Libby I said to take you and Mia home. Then she can come back for your
daddy and me."

For a moment he looked longingly
upward, to the misty light coming from the clearing where his father
slept. Then he turned and let himself down the next step.

I remained where I was, giving
him a five-minute head start before I went to rouse D.A.

Taylor took a great deal of
rousing. He thrashed and mumbled and jerked violently away from my
outstretched hand. I got a firm grip on his shoulders and hauled him to
a sitting position. He hunched over, black hair down in his eyes. For a
moment his emaciated frame shuddered. Then he looked up at me.

Beneath the shaggy fringe of hair
his eyes were as burnt-out as the first time I'd looked into them. He
stared at me without recognition.

I said, "D.A., it's time to go
home now."

He didn't reply, merely moved the
focus of his gaze to the lantern and then around the clearing. He put a
hand on the smooth rock and stroked it.

"Do you know where we are?" I
asked.

"I know."

"Do you remember coming here?"

He considered, shook his head. "I
often do."

"You brought your children with
you this time."

"My children."

"Mia and Davey—"

"I
know
who my children
are." Now a puzzled expression crossed his face. He continued to look
around the clearing. "I was singing to them . . . Where are they?"

"On their way home."
 

He nodded, as if he'd suspected
as much.

I sat cross-legged on the end of
the rock, looking about for the gun Mia thought he'd taken. There was
no sign of it. "D.A., why did you come here tonight?"

"It seemed time, I suppose." He
was entering one of his periods of lucidity now; I could tell by his
expression and the tone of his voice. "But I'm not all that clear on
it, to tell you the truth. There were some pills, and some wine."

"I see. What's the last thing you
are
clear on?"

"You'll have to refresh me as to
what day this is."

"It's Friday, near midnight."

He looked down at his hands,
making an effort to recall. "As near as I know, this began a couple of
days ago."

"On Wednesday, when you went to
San Francisco to see Tom Grant."

His fingers clenched
spasmodically.

"How did you know where to find
Grant, D.A.?"

". . . There was a map, drawn for
me. It showed where his house was."

Although it didn't surprise me,
anger at Libby Ross rose, forcing me to choke back a curse. After I got
it under control, I asked, "Why did you go there?"

"Just to see. I wanted to know
what had become of the man who betrayed us."

"And you saw . . .?"

"He was afraid. Oh, there was
something about someone just having attacked him, and a bump on the
head, but I knew I was the one he really feared. He hid behind scorn
and ugly words and threats—just as once he hid behind Andy Wrightman.
But in the end, he was very afraid."

I bit my lip, remembering the
blood-spattered workshop and the ruin of what had once been human.

"Tell me about the ugly words," I
finally said.

Taylor made a motion with his
hand, brushing the request away. "They were very unpleasant."

"Did he tell you about
Jenny—about how he drove her to suicide by working on her guilt
over turning you and Libby in, and gave her the gun?" It was the only
explanation I'd been able to come up with for Grant going to such
lengths to keep his past from coming under scrutiny. He'd rid himself
of a woman who was a great liability, but he'd done it by providing her
with a weapon that he should have turned over to his fellow agents when
they'd searched the flat on Page Street.

But Taylor shook his head. "He
didn't need to. Libby and I knew; we've always known. Jenny could only
have gotten that gun from the man who knew where the weapons were kept
in the flat. No, what he said was worse than that. He said it was Perry
who betrayed us."

Again I wasn't surprised.

Taylor added, "I couldn't listen
to him say those things. Perry was the man I looked up to the most. If
he betrayed us, then . . . there were no heroes."

D.A. bowed his head again. A
sudden gust of wind swirled through the clearing. From below I heard
the faint noise of a motor—the overworked one on the boat I'd piloted
earlier. Davey had reached safety; Ross was taking them home.

The lantern flickered, getting
low on fuel. I stood. "D.A., come back to shore with me. We'll work
this out."

He shook his head.

I went over to the lantern,
turned it down lower. "Come on," I said. "You'll be okay." I stretched
out my hand.

He didn't seem to see or hear me.
His gaze moved around the clearing, stopping here and there, as if the
trees and rocks and plants were cherished objects. Then his eyes met
mine—their always fleeting light extinguished so totally that not even
the rays from the lantern enlivened them.

"What happened to all the
heroes?" he asked.

I had no answer for him, because
I suspected there had never been any heroes—not in the world he was
longing for. That was a world all too often re-created not from fact
but from wishful fantasy, and none of
us could ever know where the truth left off and the lies began.

I turned, bent to pick up the
lantern. Behind me I heard Taylor make a sudden movement.

Then I heard the click.

I froze, skin acrawl; the click
was the unmistakable one of a safety being flipped off an automatic. I
glanced back, ready to run. And saw that the .22 he'd had concealed
somewhere on his person was not pointed at me.

Taylor held the gun in both
hands, muzzle in his mouth.

As I lunged at him, screaming for
him not to do it, he pulled the trigger.

I left D.A. Taylor finally at
peace on the slab on top of his island. Climbed back down, feeling
sick, the lantern guttering and going out when I reached the easy
section of the trail on the beach. There I rested until I heard the
irregular stutter of the returning motorboat.

Ross was piloting it. I slogged
through the shallow water and climbed aboard.

"D.A.?" she asked.

"Dead. He shot himself."

She compressed her lips, turned
the boat around. I made no effort to speak to her on the return trip.
When we reached the dock behind Taylor's, I jumped from the boat as
soon as it bumped against the pilings.

"Wait!" Ross said.

I turned, looked coldly at her.
"Before he killed himself, D.A. told me about the map you drew him.
What did you do—go down to the city and case Grant's property before
you sent D.A. out to exact revenge for you?"

The faint light from the
restaurant's windows showed her face, surprise altering its set lines
of strain.

"You knew what would happen,"
I added. "You're an accessory—more guilty than D.A., to my way of
thinking."

"... What do you intend to do
about it?"

"Nothing. You'd only cover up
with more lies. Besides, enough people are going to be hurt by this
without me compounding it."

She raised her hands, then let
them fall limply to her sides. "Everybody I ever cared about is dead.
Everything that ever mattered to me is over."

"And now you'll just have to live
with what you did, won't you?" I strode up the rickety dock, away from
her self-serving deceptions, out of her wasted life.

From the phone booth outside
Nick's Cove I called the sheriffs department. Later, when I was
finished dealing with them, I made two other calls.

The first was to Goodhue,
relaying what had happened and saying that I would be able to leave her
out of my version for the authorities. "There's something I want you to
do in exchange, however," I told her.

"Certainly. What?"

"Since Taylor's dead, his share
in the Hilderly estate will be divided between you and Libby Ross. The
same with Tom Grant's. I want you to give the amount you receive beyond
your original inheritance to Taylor's wife and children. They're going
to need money to start a new life."

Goodhue agreed without hesitation.

Next I called Greg at home. I
asked him to meet me at the Hall in an hour, said I wanted McFate
there, too. Greg didn't ask many questions; he was used to peculiar
requests from me and, besides, he probably relished dragging McFate out
of whatever bed he might occupy at that hour on a weekend morning.

By the time I parked at the
nearly deserted curb in front of the Hall of Justice my anger had built
to full pressure and I was primed for a confrontation. As I passed
through the echoing marble-walled lobby, I
glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes to four on Saturday morning—a week
after I'd become involved in the case that for me had stripped away
what little remained of the mythic charm of the 1960s.

I still valued the legacy of
those years. A war had been stopped, the will of the people had
prevailed, society had been altered in profound ways. But there was a
darker side to the legacy, and the personal cost had been high on both
sides.

I'd been right on Monday night
when I'd told Rae that what the sixties had been about was rage—but
that was only part of it. What they'd also been about was the same as
any other decade: winning and losing. Winning the war against communism
in Southeast Asia; winning the war against the Establishment in the
streets at home. Losing the country because it had become bitterly
divided over the Asian conflict; losing yourself because the conflict
in the streets had left you bitter, broken, alone.

That was another legacy of the
sixties: trophies and dead things. Nets to catch the wind . . .

McFate was the first person I saw
when I entered the squad room: standing near Greg's office, looking
pressed and combed and clean-shaven, even on such short notice. He
glanced at me—took in my mud-stained clothes and dirty face and
disheveled hair—and sneered. The pressure of my anger soared, and then
I totally lost it.

I strode over to him, put my
grimy hands against his pin-striped chest, and gave him a shove. "You
son of a bitch!"

Greg came to the door of his
cubicle, eyebrows raised.

"You fucking pompous jerk!" I
shoved McFate again, making sure I left a dirty handprint on the front
of his pale blue shirt.

McFate shoved me back, said to
Greg, "You saw that! She assaulted a police officer! What are you going
to do about it?"
 

"Shut up, Leo," Greg said
wearily. "Get in this office. You, too," he added to me.

McFate did an about-face and went
in there, brushing fussily at his shirt. "I don't know why you let her
get away with things like this," he told Greg. "If you ask me—"

"Nobody did. Sit down, Leo.
Sharon, close the door."

I closed it, then moved the
second visitor's chair as far from McFate's as possible, and sat.

"You could at least make her
apologize," McFate said.

"Unfortunately, she's not very
good at that." Greg turned to me; I could tell I was putting a heavy
load on his patience. "Will you explain why this is necessary, please?"

I took a deep breath, gathering
the vestiges of my shattered self-control. "The man who killed Tom
Grant shot himself tonight—on Hog Island in Tomales Bay."

Slowly McFate turned his head
toward me; his pupils narrowed to pinpoints. Greg merely waited.

I filled them in on what had
happened, making it sound as if I'd gone up there on business about
Hilderly's will and walked in on a family crisis. When I finished, I
said to Greg, "That's one of the reasons I'm so pissed at him." I
jerked my chin at McFate. "If he'd told me about Grant's early career
as a federal undercover agent, I would have realized who had motive to
kill him, and Taylor might not have died."

McFate said, "Doesn't sound as if
he was worth keeping alive."

I turned on him. "Shut up, you!
You don't know anything about . . . anything."