Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (5 page)

I thanked her and entered the
office. At first glance the room appeared to be a typical lawyer's
study, with the obligatory wall of thick tomes, the obligatory mahogany
desk and leather-upholstered furniture. I couldn't see Grant because he
was swiveled around with the high back of his chair to the desk,
talking into the phone in a low voice. Ms.Curtis shut the door behind
me.

Then I realized that unlike the
typical lawyer's study, the room contained no framed diplomas,
certificates, or pictures of the attorney with prominent clients or
politicians. I smiled faintly, thinking that this office was also
different from Hank's, which contains—among other things—a cigar-store
Indian and a poster of Uncle Sam saying, "I want YOU for the U.S.
Army." But then I realized Grant had some peculiar objects of his own,
and went over to the shelves that flanked the fireplace to have a
closer look at them.

They appeared to be a bizarre
form of sculpture: strange, twisted, unrecognizable shapes of wood and
metal intermingled with feathers and tufts of fur and fragments of
bone. I looked more closely at one and saw a pair of yellowed fangs
protruding from a strip of reptile skin; another had claws— ragged,
broken ones. Some sort of primitive folk art, I supposed, unsettling
and quite unpleasant.

Behind me, Grant was still
talking. I moved to the other side of the fireplace and examined a
piece that sat apart from the rest on a shelf of its own. The framework
was a crossed pair of rusted metal
spikes, each festooned with mockingbirds' feathers. Stretched between
the spikes was a swatch of what resembled—but certainly
couldn't be—dried I human skin.

I recoiled, and a phrase came to
me:
trophies and dead things.
An odd phrase. I couldn't
remember where I'd heard or read it.

There was a footfall behind me; I
turned. Thomas Grant was approaching, one hand extended. For a moment I
wasn't sure if I wanted the possessor of such nasty artworks to touch
me.
 

Grant was handsome in a
conventional way. The body clad in the expensive blue suit was trim and
well muscled, and I suspected he didn't have to work at keeping in
shape. His hair was iron gray, thick, and so well cut that not a lock
strayed from its proper place. His strong-featured face, while not
totally unlined, was supple and youthful; its only imperfection was a
jagged scar on his left cheek that made him look like the romantic lead
in a melodrama about male honor. Otherwise it was as if nothing in his
life had touched him deeply enough to leave vestiges of pain, sorrow,
or even happiness. As he shook my hand I felt a wave of visceral
dislike.

"I see you were looking at my
fetishes," he said.

"Is that what they are?"

"In a strict sense, no. But a
fetish is a charm, something with magical powers. These certainly do
have the power to disturb." His eyes—gray like his hair—remained on
mine as he released my hand. Their expression was sly, knowing; he
liked the fact that the fetishes had unsettled me.

I moved toward the clients'
chairs in front of the desk, set my briefcase on one of them. "Are they
some kind of tribal art?" I asked.

"Actually, I make them myself."

I paused in the act of opening
the briefcase. "You . . . ?"

"Yes, I have a studio at the rear
of the property. Perhaps you'd care to see it sometime,
since you seem to be interested in the pieces."

". . . Perhaps. Where
do you get your materials?"

He moved around the desk and sat,
motioned at one of the client's chairs. "Here and there. I guess you
could call me a scavenger. I pick up things on the beach or in the
parks."

Things.
Meaning dead
birds and animals, or parts of them. God knew what he had to do to them
to make them usable. I'd recently started—and quickly stopped—reading
an article in a magazine in the dentist's office about a Texas woman
who created what she termed "road kill art"; the point at which I'd set
it aside was where she described the odor in the cave where she left
her "art supplies" so flesh-eating beetles could clean them. Rather
than commenting on Grant's hobby, I sat and busied myself with the file
I'd taken from my briefcase. "Mr. Grant—" I began.

"Please—Tom."

"Tom. Does the name Perry
Hilderly mean anything to you?"

I thought I glimpsed a flash of
recognition in his eyes, but it was gone so quickly that I might have
imagined it. He considered briefly, then shook his head. "I can't say
as it does. Angela—Ms.Curtis—mentioned something about a bequest. Is
this Hilderman—"

"Hilderly."

"Is he the testator?"

"Yes."

"Why did he make a bequest to me?"

"I don't know precisely that he
did. Hilderly named a Thomas Y. Grant in his will, without indicating
what the relationship was. In a note to his attorney, he said that
he—the attorney, Hank Zahn—would know how to reach Grant. You are the
only Thomas Y. Grant that Mr. Zahn knows of."

Grant's expression became
puzzled. "I know Hank Zahn by reputation. I'm surprised he would draw
up a will without first ascertaining the
client's relationship to his beneficiary."

"He didn't draw up this
particular one. It was a holograph superseding an earlier will, written
three weeks before Hilderly died."

"When and how was that? His
death, I mean."

"Last week, in a random shooting
on Geary Boulevard."

"One of those snipings? I
remember seeing on TV that there had been another, but none of the
details." Grant closed his eyes, as if trying to call forth the news
story. When he opened them again, their expression was one of
bewilderment. "Ms. . . . may I call you Sharon?"

I nodded.

"Sharon, I'll be damned if I know
what this is all about."

"Is it possible that Hilderly was
once a client of yours?"

"I have a good memory for my
clients. He wasn't."

"Could you have employed him as
an accountant at some time?"

"Is that what he was? No, I've
always used the same man at the same Big Eight firm."

"Where are you originally from,
Tom?"

"Durango, Colorado."

"And you attended college and law
school at . . . ?"

"Undergraduate at Boulder, law at
Illinois."

"Have you spent much time in
Berkeley?"

"I don't believe I've been there
more than a dozen times in my life. Is that where Hilderly came from?"

"He attended the university until
he was expelled for activities relating to the Free Speech Movement."

"I'm afraid I don't know much
about that, other than what I read in the papers a long time ago."

I watched him for a moment. While
his eyes seemed candid and his manner was relaxed, I sensed an
undercurrent of falsehood in the man. After a bit I asked, "What about
the name Libby Heikkinen? Is that familiar to you?"

He shook his head—too quickly, I
thought.
 

"Jess Goodhue? David Arlen
Taylor?"

"Neither. Who are these people?"

"The other beneficiaries. Are you
sure none of their names rings a bell?"

"Goodhue sounds vaguely familiar."

"She's an anchorwoman with
KSTS-TV."

"Right. I think she interviewed
me once."

The sense of falsehood still
nudged me. I said, "Aren't you interested in the value of your share of
Hilderly's estate?"

"I'm more interested in why he
named me in his will. But, yes, how large is it?"

"Your share would come to around
a quarter of a million dollars—should you be able to prove you are the
Thomas Y. Grant that Hilderly intended the money to go to."

Grant's gaze strayed to a window
that overlooked another bricked courtyard, and to the eucalyptus groves
of the Presidio beyond its wall. He was silent for a long moment, then
looked back at me and said, "I'm afraid I can't do that. And frankly,
while it's a good deal of money, I don't really need it. I understand
the difficult position this places Hank Zahn in; naturally he's bound
to do everything he can to carry out his client's wishes. So what I'm
going to propose is this.- I will sign
a
document renouncing
all claim to this inheritance, in perpetuity."

It was a gesture I hadn't
expected—and one that was totally unnecessary. Now I began to suspect
that—despite his outwardly cool manner—Tom Grant had known Perry
Hilderly and was afraid I'd find out the nature of the relationship. I
said, "Are you sure you want to do that?"

"Yes. Will you ask Mr. Zahn to
draw up the paperwork?"

 "Certainly. I'll call
for an appointment when
it's ready." I closed the file and replaced it in my briefcase.

Grant stood. "When you do, ask
Angela to schedule it for late in the day; I'd like to show you my
studio." Involuntarily I glanced over at the shelf beside the
fireplace, where the mockingbird
feathers spread about the dry, taut piece of skin. My feeling of
distaste was even stronger now.

"Since you seem so interested in
my hobby," Grant added.

On my way through the pristine
front courtyard, I suddenly recalled the source of the odd phrase that
had popped into my head earlier: it was from the last stanza of a song
by the seventeenth-century English playwright John Webster that I'd
been required to memorize in one of my high-school literature classes.
I could still remember the entire quatrain, more or less accurately.

Vain the ambition of kings

Who seek by trophies and dead
things

To
leave a living name behind,

And weave but nets to catch
the wind.

As it turned out, Greg was
forced to cancel our lunch—a fact about which I had mixed emotions.
When I arrived at Homicide, one of the inspectors—a man named Wallace,
whom I knew slightly— handed me an armful of files and showed me to
Greg's cubicle. "The lieutenant said to leave them on the desk when
you're finished," he told me.

So I spent what should have been
my lunch hour reading through the case files on the random shootings.
Four of them, dating back to April, the latest being Hilderly's on July
6. The first was a restaurant employee, returning late to his rooming
house in the Outer Mission. Next was a nurse, leaving for her
four-to-midnight shift at Children's Hospital in Laurel Heights. The
third victim, a veteran on disability, had been unable to sleep and
gone outside his home in the Outer Sunset to get some air minutes
before he was killed. And then there was Hilderly. The weapon used was
a
.357
Magnum,
and the bullets recovered from the bodies matched
ballistically. All the shootings had occurred after ten P.M. and on
relatively quiet streets; even Hilderly's had been no exception, since
normally busy Geary Boulevard is almost deserted at one-fifty A.M., the
hour he'd alighted from an empty Muni bus at the corner of Third Avenue.

There had been no eyewitnesses to
any of the killings; the Muni bus, in Hilderly's case, had already
driven away. Family, friends, and co-workers of the victims had been
interviewed, and the investigators were unable to turn up an enemy or
anyone else with a motive for murder. The information in the files
showed that the victims had been more or less upright citizens,
ordinary people going about their ordinary business. Ordinary people
who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As is customary in such cases,
the mayor's office had offered a reward for information leading to the
apprehension of the murderer. The usual false leads, extortion
attempts, and crackpot calls (including one in which the caller claimed
the shootings were the work of her husband, who had then flown off in a
UFO) had been phoned in to the police hot line. Unlike killers such as
Zodiac, the perpetrator did not contact either the press or the police.
If the snipings continued, the public outcry would become louder, and
panic would ensue; political pressure on the department, already heavy,
would increase.

I skimmed the files devoted to
each individual, then turned to Hilderly's, curious to see where he'd
been on the night of his death. There was a statement from his
employer, Gene Carver of Tax Management Corporation, saying that
Hilderly had worked late that evening. I frowned; he'd been shot only
the week before last, long after the busy income-tax season. Why the
late hours? Then I read on; Hilderly and his boss had been preparing
for an IRS audit of one of their major clients. Carver stated that he
himself had left the office at one A.M. and offered Hilderly a ride
home; Hilderly declined, saying he wanted to finish with what he was
working on.
 

I sighed and leaned back in
Greg's chair. I could understand why the police had been thus far
frustrated by the killings. The only links among the victims of the
sniper that they'd been able to establish were the circumstances under
which they'd been shot and the matching bullets. Apparently none of
them had known one another, and there were few commonalities. Of
course, little was known about the restaurant worker, who appeared to
be even more of a loner than Hilderly, but the fact he'd been more or
less a drifter whose history could not be fully established removed him
a step further from his fellow victims. The shootings were random, all
right. I didn't envy Greg this one.