Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (50 page)

Again Jess Goodhue hadn't called
with the investigator's name. I dialed KSTS-TV, was told the
anchorwoman was unavailable. The results of my final call were a bit
more positive: Luke Widdows would be glad to talk with me about
Hilderly, but was on his way out. Could I come to his place at nine the
next morning? I agreed and took down directions.

Now what to do? I thought
irritably. I had four empty hours before my appointment with Tom Grant.
I didn't particularly want to go home, nor
was I enthusiastic about catching up on my paperwork. Finally I went
downstairs and lured Rae away from filling out her expense report, and
we headed down the hill to the Remedy Lounge on Mission Street.

The Remedy has long been an All
Souls hangout. Hank discovered it, I think, only hours after signing
the lease on the Victorian, and over the years we've celebrated our
triumphs and commiserated over our failures there. Unalterably dark and
sleazy, with a frequently broken jukebox and shabby appurtenances, it
would seem a good place to stay out of, but its ambiance belies mere
surface appearances. At times within its four grimy walls I have the
sensation that its tolerant—but not intrusively friendly— clientele and
I are sailing a stormy sea on a ship, snug and protected from the
raging elements. Of course, the ship is a tired old scow and the rocky
shoals lie straight ahead, but the temporary sense of security is
soothing nonetheless.

Rae and I took one of the rear
booths, and within a minute Brian, the bartender, brought her a beer
and me a glass of white wine. That was one of the advantages of taking
my assistant along: so far as I know, hers is the only table Brian has
ever brought a drink to in some thirty years of tending bar. Perhaps
she reminds him of some long-lost sweetheart back in Ireland; perhaps
he admires her because she naively assumed from the start that such
treatment was merely her due as a paying customer. Whatever the reason,
Rae rates with Brian—far higher than those of us who have been
patronizing the Remedy for years.

She wanted to rerun the
liquor-store saga—the realization that she'd have to testify in court
having lent it further drama—but I cut her short and updated her on the
Hilderly case. We kicked the facts around for two hours and three
drinks plus beer nuts, but came to very few conclusions.

Rae asked, "Are you going to
confront Grant about his friendship with Hilderly tonight?"
 

"It's the only way I'll pry the
whole story out of him."

"According to you, the guy is
weird. What if he gets violent?"

"I can handle him. But I doubt he
will. He's not the type and, besides, he's got a position to protect.
He's not about to harm me when there are people who know I'm with him.
I plan to call All Souls when I get to his house and make sure he hears
me tell whoever answers exactly where I am."

Rae considered that, then nodded
thoughtfully. I could see she was placing the technique in her mental
file for future use.

I said, "I meant to ask you—have
you heard whether the bullet the police found at Hank and Anne-Marie's
matched the ones that killed the sniping victims?"

"Yeah. Willie called Greg Marcus
this afternoon. It matched."

I'd expected as much, but I
supposed on some level I'd been hoping to hear the bullet didn't match.
It would have simplified my investigation if the sniping had turned out
to be a copycat shooting perpetrated by, say, someone who had had a
diamond ring repossessed by Willie. Rae was watching me as if she
expected some insightful comment, but I had none to offer.

When I didn't speak, she said,
"What about Hank? Does he still think he's not in any danger?"

"That's what he says. But I'm not
convinced of that—and I don't think he really is, either. How's Willie
doing?"

"He's housebound and
claustrophobic. They've stationed a cop outside, but he's afraid to
leave after dark." She looked at her watch. "Come to think of it, I
promised to be there right about now."

After she left I finished my wine
in solitude and went home. The only message on my answering machine was
from Jim, asking plaintively if we couldn't get together and talk
things over. No, I decided, we couldn't. I then tried Jess Goodhue
again, but the switchboard couldn't locate her. The microwave burned
the middle of my
frozen lasagna and left icy little lumps on the top. I ate it anyway.
Afterward I went to the strongbox where I keep my .38 and took out the
pouch I'd found among Hilderly's boxed possessions. The gun weighed
heavy in my hand. I fingered the rough place where its serial number
had been removed, then replaced it in the pouch, and the pouch in the
strongbox, keeping out only the chain with the metal letters
K
and
A
depended from it. After studying it for a moment, I put it
into the zipper compartment of my purse.

It was eight-thirty by now, time
to leave for my appointment with Tom Grant. I made another quick call
to KSTS-TV; this time Goodhue was resting until her eleven o'clock
broadcast and couldn't be disturbed. I remembered what she'd said the
other day: "Nobody, absolutely nobody, disturbs me in my dressing
room." Although I could understand her need for that quiet time, it
still irked me that she hadn't phoned as promised, and I fretted about
that all the way to Pacific Heights.

The night was clear and unusually
warm; the streets of Pacific Heights were hushed, set apart from the
rest of the city by that silence that often envelops privileged
neighborhoods. Outside the Gate, the foghorns bellowed—a dolorous and
faintly menacing reminder that the fog had not left for good, was
merely waiting in abeyance at sea. As I crossed the sidewalk from my
car to Grant's house I heard other sounds: a cat fight somewhere up the
hill; the breeze rustling the leaves of the eucalypti in the vast
military reservation behind the homes; the wail of a siren down near
Lombard Street.

Then I heard yet another noise:
footsteps running and stumbling. As they came closer, they were
punctuated by a harsh gasping and sobbing, and I realized the sounds
were coming from Grant's property. I hurried up to the gate just as his
secretary, Ms.Curtis, burst through it and let forth a wild
high-pitched scream that
escalated in shrillness until it set a chill skittering across my
shoulder blades.

She was dressed much as she had
been two days before, but the primness and stiffness were gone. Her
face was gray and twisted; her eyes were glassy and jumpy. I grabbed
her arm, and they focused briefly on my face, but she didn't seem to
recognize me. Then she turned her ankle and the scream cut off as she
pitched forward. As I caught and steadied her she said between gasps,
"The police! Call the police!"

I glanced around. People were
looking through their windows on the other side of the street, but—as
in Hank and Anne-Marie's neighborhood—they weren't about to come
outside when someone was screaming. I eased Ms.Curtis through the
gate. She stiffened and shook her head. "I can't go back there!"

"Here—sit down." I guided her
onto the wall of one of the raised flower beds, then went to shove the
gate closed. When I turned, she was hunched over, arms wrapped around
her midsection. "Tell me what happened," I said tensely.

She moaned. "Tom. He's in the
studio. He ... I think they've killed him."

I noted her use of the plural,
but now wasn't the time to question her. "How do I get to the studio?"

"Path around the house." She
motioned to the left and behind her.

"You go inside. Call nine eleven."

She remained hunched where she
was.

"Can you do that?"

She nodded.

I hurried across the courtyard
and followed a bricked path to the rear of the property, where a second
courtyard overshadowed by another acacia tree lay between the house
itself and the wall that bordered the Presidio. It was very dark back
there, even though the moon silvered the bricks but in the far
right-hand corner
of the lot I saw a small structure faced in the same brown shingle as
the house and overgrown with broad-leaved ivy. A faint light shone
through its one narrow window.

I moved slowly toward it, aware
of the clicking of my heels on the bricks. Around me everything seemed
to have stopped moving; even the breeze had died, and the eucalyptus
leaves no longer rustled. No sounds came from the small building.

The door was ajar, spilling a
fine line of light onto the bricks. Warily I pushed it all the way
open. The faint squeak of its hinges made me start.

Before me lay a room with a large
central worktable; the wall behind it had drawers at the bottom and
tools suspended from a pegboard above them. The other walls were bare,
painted white. An odor filled the room: metallic, sickly sweet. The
odor I've come to think of as the smell of death.

I stepped inside, moved past the
cluttered worktable. Grant lay on the floor behind it. He was on his
back, his left arm flung out beside him, his right raised above his
head as if to ward off his attacker. Blood covered his face, hands,
casual tan clothing. It had spattered over the drawers and pegboard. As
I moved closer I saw his forehead was caved in, white bone showing.

I wanted to grip the worktable
for support, but I knew better than to disturb the scene; Ms.Curtis
had probably done a good bit of damage already. I turned away briefly,
breathing shallowly through my mouth. When I felt steady enough, I went
over to the body and checked to see if there was any pulse. Of course
there wasn't.

Something on the floor a few feet
away caught my eye as I straightened. I leaned out, staring at it. It
looked to be a partially finished fetish—a heavy gridwork of metal with
feathers sticking through the spaces between the rods—and it was
covered with drying blood. Grant had been bludgeoned to death with one
of his own hideous creations.
 

The phrase seemed eerily apt here
in this workshop-turned-abattoir, where Grant had fashioned his sick
fetishes from animal and bird corpses and where, in turn, someone had
fashioned his death.

And then I remembered another
phrase from the quatrain:
nets to catch the wind.
Grant had
also fashioned such nets, fed his ambition by fanning the greed of his
clients and using it against the wives and children they had once
loved. And now?

Nothing, I thought as I hurried
back to the house. Nothing but empty nets—a life that had produced
nothing of value, that would not be long remembered beyond the last
obituary.

I found Ms.Curtis sitting in one
of the clients' chairs in Grant's office, staring at the telephone on
the desk. "Did you call nine eleven?" I asked her.

She looked up as if surprised to
see me there. "I ... couldn't."

"I will." I punched out the three
digits, gave the operator the necessary information. Then I sat down on
the other chair.

Angela Curtis had been crying.
The tears had left a tracery of pale brown mascara on her cheeks. I
fished in my bag and handed her a clean tissue. "When did you find him?"

She scrubbed at her face, made a
weary gesture. "Just before you arrived. I'd been to a movie on Union
Street. Tom told me to go; he had someone coming, and he didn't seem to
want me around the house."

When I'd spoken with him on the
phone, Grant had mentioned an interview he had scheduled after his
dinner appointment. Perhaps he planned to replace Angela Curtis and was
talking with a job applicant; that would explain him not wanting her
around. But why send her to a movie? Why not just send her home?
 

"Why did you come back here?" I
asked.

"I live here."

How convenient for him, I
thought. A secretary who lived in; no wife to potentially demand her
share of the community property. And you could be sure he'd made no
promises or statements that would give rise to a palimony suit.

She sensed my thoughts, because
she said, "It wasn't like that. It was just . . . easier if I lived on
the premises." Then she scrubbed at her face some more, balled up the
tissue, and tossed it in the wastebasket. "Oh, God, who do I think I
can fool? Of course it was like that. What idiot would believe
otherwise?"

I said, "Ms.Curtis, what
happened when you came home?"

"I went out to the studio, and
Tom was . . ." She shook her head, swallowed.

"Earlier you said 'they' killed
Tom. Who did you mean?"

She shook her head, distracted.
"I said that?"

"Yes. Do you have reason to
believe it was more than one person? Suspect someone?"

"I guess I meant his clients.
They took and took, and then they weren't satisfied."

"Did Tom ever mention an old
friend named Perry Hilderly to you?"

She shook her head.

"There was a seminar Tom
participated in at the Cathedral Hill Hotel the last weekend in May.
Are you sure Hilderly's name didn't come up in connection with that?"

"I'm positive."

"And you don't suspect any one of
his clients in particular?"

"I suspect all of them. Any of
them. I'm not blind to what Tom was, Ms. McCone. The reason his clients
weren't satisfied was that he'd conditioned them to selfishness and
cruelty. Simple stimulus-response. Someone tries to take something from
you—even something that's rightfully
theirs—and you lash out, take it
back, hurt them in the process. Afterward they would turn on Tom; often
they didn't even want to pay his fee." She paused, then said as fresh
tears welled in her eyes, "I knew exactly what he was, but that didn't
stop me from loving him."