Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (37 page)

I trailed him to the front door,
shrugging off Hilderly's big sweater and grabbing my jacket and bag. On
the sidewalk I lengthened my stride to match Hank's. He walked with his
head bent, hands shoved in his pockets, obviously preoccupied. I
steered him toward Clement. Earlier I'd noticed a
dim sum
place—the
Fook Restaurant, of all things—and now
the idea of steamed
dumplings and pork buns appealed to me.

As we turned onto Clement, I realized that the fog had lifted, and
observed a phenomenon that has always interested me: the line of
demarcation between blue and gray sky stopped in the middle of Arguello
Boulevard, bisecting the city in a north-south line. To the west, in
the largely bland residential avenues that stretch toward the sea, the
day would remain overcast; to the east, in such diverse areas as North
Beach, downtown, Noe Valley, Hunters Point, and my own little
neighborhood near the Glen Park district, the weather would turn sunny.
It is a peculiarly San Francisco phenomenon, and one that outsiders
have difficulty grasping. As a New York friend once told me, "There's
something very odd about a city where people move across town just to
get better weather."

Hank seemed oblivious to where we were going, so I steered him into the
restaurant. It was noisy and crowded, but we were quickly shown to a
table against one of the walls. He blinked and looked around like a
rudely awakened sleepwalker as I ordered jasmine tea. The nearby
tables— round ones with lazy Susans in their centers—were mainly
occupied by Asian families; restaurant employees moved slowly among
them, pushing stainless-steel carts loaded with delicacies and hawking
their wares in Chinese. When the first cart arrived at our table, I
pointed to plates of pork buns and barbecued spareribs. Hank recovered
from his preoccupation and gave the nod to shrimp in fluted rice
wrappers.

As I picked up my chopsticks I said, "Is Hilderly's ex-wife going to be
upset that the kids w
on't
inherit?"

"Hard to say."

"How much is the estate worth?"

"Quite a bit. Perry inherited roughly a quarter of a million dollars
some seven, eight years ago. From time to time he'd mention investments
to me—mostly conservative stuff like
municipal bonds, T-bills, blue chips. But every now and then he'd take
a flier on one of the glamour stocks like Genentech. I'd estimate that
he was worth at least a million."

"He didn't live like a millionaire."

"Perry wasn't into money. The investing was a game to him, matching his
wits against the market. If he made a profit, that was fine, because it
would mean there was more to leave to his boys. But he didn't care
about it for himself, and he spent very little."

"Well, what about those four people named in the new will? What were
they to him, that he'd cut out his own kids and leave them that much
money?"

"Damned if I know. He never so much as mentioned a one of them to me.
Two of them, he himself didn't know how to contact."

"You say Thomas Grant is an attorney?"

Hank nodded, biting into one of the shrimp dumplings. After he
swallowed he said, "A real sleazebag. Around fifty, I'd say. He turned
up here in the mid-seventies, went into divorce work—for men only,
taking a very aggressive 'to hell with the wife and kids' stance.
Advises his clients on how to get around the community-property laws,
and not always in legitimate ways."

"Sounds like a sweetheart."

"
He doesn't have too many
scruples, or much humanity. Grant latched on to an idea whose
time—unfortunately— had come, due to the backlash against the women's
movement. Now he's got branch offices—franchises is actually a better
description—throughout the Bay Area, and is looking to expand further."

"The fast-food chain of divorce lawyers."

"Right."

I looked over at a cart that had paused by our table. There was a plate
of oddly shaped objects coated in a golden crust. I pointed at it with
my chopsticks. "What're those?"

The waitress said, "Duck feet."

"Duck . . . feet?"

She nodded, smiling at my reaction.

"How about some of that chicken? And a plate of pearl balls?"

She set the plates down, marked our check, and departed.

Hank was grinning. "I thought, as
you're fond of proclaiming, that you have no food prejudices."

"I don't."

"Then why not try the duck feet?"

"Well, it's just that . . . they
probably don't have much meat on them."

"Uh-huh."

"Well, it's true—you saw them.
And I
don't
have any prejudices; I'll eat what's set before
me. People who are picky or won't try new things drive me crazy."

"That's why you wouldn't eat
Larry's tofu in chili sauce last week." Larry Koslowski, an All Souls
partner, is a health-food nut.

"I couldn't help that. It looked
like ... I don't think we should discuss it while we're eating. Anyway,
back to Hilderly. He never talked to you about wanting to change his
will?"

"No."

"I wonder why he made a
holograph? Why not ask you to draw up the new will?"

"I suspect because he was afraid
I'd try to talk him out of it. Or insist on knowing what those people
were to him and why he wanted to make them his heirs."

"Makes sense."

We ate in silence for a few
minutes. A dessert cart went past, and I spied the little yellow
custard pies I'm fond of. I'd eaten too much to even entertain the
thought of having one now, but I'd noticed a take-out counter off the
restaurant's lobby; I'd stop there and buy a few of the pies for later.

Hank was looking preoccupied
again, fiddling with his chopsticks.
 

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Just brooding. I keep thinking
how unlike Perry this is. He wasn't close to those kids, but he loved
them and always carried out his responsibilities."

"Then he must have had a strong
reason for disinheriting them. Maybe when we locate the beneficiaries
they can explain it."

"It isn't really any of our
business," Hank said. "As Perry's executor, I'm bound to carry out his
wishes, not to snoop into something he clearly didn't care to explain
to me."

"No, it's not our business, but I
wonder ..."

"Wonder what?"

I pushed my plate away toward the
others that littered the table, then took my teacup in both hands and
stared down into it, trying to put the feeling of wrongness that I was
experiencing into words. "When someone makes a major change in his will
and conceals it from his attorney, isn't there a possibility of undue
influence or duress?"

"A possibility, yes."

"And when the person dies
violently, as Perry did—"

"Shar," Hank said patiently,
"you've read the papers. His killing was a random shooting. The bullet
matched those found in the bodies of the sniper's other victims, all of
whom were unrelated."

That was true. Still . . . "Hank,
does any of this feel right to you?"

". . . No."

"Then let's see if we can't find
an explanation for Perry's actions."

There was no way I could start a
skip trace on either Heikkinen or Taylor on a Saturday. When we
returned to Hilderly's flat and I checked the phone directory, I found
that neither Grant's nor Goodhue's home number was listed. I called
Grant's law office and reached the answering service; the operator at
KSTS-TV told me Goodhue was off until Monday. In the end I decided to
go through the boxes in Hilderly's dining room, which Hank said had
been sitting untouched since he'd moved to the flat nearly ten years
before; they might contain something that would explain his connection
to his four heirs.

The boxes held fairly commonplace
items: household goods such as a fondue pot and yogurt maker that
Hilderly had apparently had no use for; high-school yearbooks from a
town I'd never heard of; photograph albums with pictures of his boys
and a plump brown-haired woman, as well as of a younger Hilderly and a
couple I took to be his parents; 45-rpm records that had been hits in
the fifties; a collection of baseball cards that by now would be quite
valuable; a catcher's mitt; a set of Hardy Boys mysteries; a
high-school diploma. Like the flat itself, the boxes contained no
memento of his rebellious college days; it was as if he had never
attended Cal or participated in the Free Speech Movement. There were no
journals, personal letters, or address books that might contain telling
information.

I was about to give up when, at
the bottom of the last carton, under a folded athletic jacket that
showed Hilderly had lettered in high-school baseball, I found a heavy
leather drawstring pouch. The object inside had the distinctive shape
of a gun.

I lifted the pouch from the
carton and loosened its drawstrings. Inside, my fingers touched metal.
When I took the gun out, I saw it was a .38 Special of German
manufacture, with a two-inch barrel—a reasonably powerful weapon that
is easy to conceal on one's person. I examined it more closely and
found that someone had attempted to remove the serial number, probably
with acid. The number was indecipherable, but a forensics laboratory
would be able to bring it out with chemicals.

There was something else in the
pouch, something lighter. I reached for it, expecting ammunition. It
was a pendant of sorts—a gray pot-metal chain with two small letters
attached
to it, a
K
and an
A
. A curving edge encased the
A,
but the
K
was jagged, as
if the fragment had been broken off a larger object. A clip-like piece
of metal protruded from the back of it.

A piece of junk that ended up in
the pouch by mistake? I wondered. Or something that mattered enough to
Hilderly that he took the trouble to separate it from his other
mementos?

I got up from the floor and
carried the gun and pendant into the kitchen, where Hank was emptying a
cupboard. "I found a couple of odd things," I said, "but I can't even
tell what one of them is."

He turned, saw the gun, and
frowned. "Is that Perry's?"

"Must be. It was in one of the
boxes in the dining room. Someone's removed the serial number from it."

"That's odd."

"It could have been done by
someone who had possession of it previously, and Perry bought the gun
illegally—on the street, for instance. Or he could have done it himself
because he—or someone close to him—was the registered owner, and he
didn't want that fact to come out."

Hank looked down at a blue
pottery bowl he held, then set it carefully on the counter, as if he
were afraid he'd drop it. "And if the latter is the case, what it
implies is that he used it or intended to use it for some illegal
purpose."

I nodded.

"Jesus. I came here this morning
with one conception of Perry, and I'll be going away with a completely
different one."

"Don't jump to conclusions," I
warned. "There are other possibilities. He could have taken this off
someone and put it away for safekeeping. He could have found it. You
don't know."

"I don't know
what
I
know anymore." He glanced at the pendant. "What's that on the chain?"

"A pair of letters." I handed it
to him.
 

He examined it, fingering the
rough edges as I had. "Every weekend hippie had a chain like this, but
it usually had a peace symbol attached."

I smiled and took it from his
outstretched hand. "I even had one. We weren't allowed to wear them to
school, but on weekends we'd dress up in our bell-bottoms and tie-dye
and love beads. There was this store in Laguna Beach that sold
beads—fantastic hand-painted ones, all colors and sizes and shapes.
We'd drive all the way up there from San Diego to buy them." I still
had some of the prettier ones, unstrung how, in my jewelry box.

"You were a regular little hippie
child, weren't you?" Hank said. "I never would have guessed. When I met
you at Berkeley, you struck me as such a ... well, cheerleader."

"I was. Captain of the
high-school squad my senior year. The hippie stuff was strictly
masquerade; it made us feel with-it and wicked. I hardly ever smoked
dope until I got to Cal, and I only attended one feeble peace march.
Then, when I was in college, the energy had kind of gone out of the
Movement, and besides, I was too busy studying and working to have the
time." I'd put myself through the university, working nights and
weekends as a security guard, poring over my textbooks during the long,
fallow hours.

Hank nodded, his gaze far away, seeing—what? The young man and woman
we'd been? The idealists with all of life ahead of us? And was he
comparing those people to the ones we'd become: in his case, the
disillusioned but ever-hopeful dreamer; in mine, the realist whose
cynicism was thus far untainted by bitterness?

I said, "Can I keep the gun and this . . . whatever it is?"

He roused himself from his reverie. "Sure. I doubt the Salvation Army
would want the whatsis, and we'd better hang on to the gun for a while,
until . . ."He let his words trail off, unsure what that eventuality
might be.

"I'll put it in the strongbox where I keep my own gun.
It'll be safe there. By the way,
before they
pick up the furniture and boxes, you ought to look
through the ones I've set aside in the dining room. There's a lot of
personal stuff, plus a fairly valuable baseball-card collection. It
would be nice if Hilderly's kids had the cards, plus other things to
remember their father by."