Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (20 page)

After a while a motorized skiff
piloted by Harley pulled up to the ramshackle dock behind the
restaurant. The mangy dogs that had been sleeping in the sun—there
seemed to be virtually dozens of them—jumped up and ran to meet him as
he disembarked. In the kitchen that opened off the bar something made a
pinging noise. A motor—the refrigerator's?—whirred, ground, and
stopped. I turned away from the window and surveyed the empty,
cheerless restaurant.

No amount of money, not even what
Hilderly had willed to D.A., could reclaim this moldering place. No
amount of renovation and financial acumen—which I doubted any of the
family possessed—could make a go of the moribund business. Recalling
what Mia had said about Harley and Jake having plans for D.A.'s
inheritance, I made a mental note to speak with Hank and encourage him
to convince Mia that the money should be placed in trust for D.A., her,
and their children.

The sound of the door opening
broke into my musings. Mia entered, her face drawn and mouth pursed
tight, as if to restrain tears. "Is something wrong?" I asked.

"Something's always wrong. D.A.'s
woke up and wandered off again. I don't know where—none of the trucks
or cars is gone. And you know what? Maybe I don't care. Maybe if he
stumbles out onto the
highway and a car picks him off, or if he falls in the bay and passes
out and drowns, maybe that would be the best thing for me and my
babies." Her eyes flashed with anger now. She tossed her head defiantly.

I sensed that anger was how she
got through—that, and a devotion to her family that made me forgive her
not understanding D.A.'s similar, although long-dead, devotion to the
wrongness of the Vietnam war. I said, "You know you don't mean that."

She shrugged and sat at the table
again. I reclaimed my chair.

"You're right," she said after a
moment. "I don't mean it. But I get so damn tired. Look at me: how old
do you think I am?"

"I can't tell. I'm not a very
good judge of age."

"You're just trying to be nice.
I'm twenty years old." She smiled bitterly. "Twenty. Not even old
enough to serve drinks here, though I do, when we get a customer who
wants one. I was fourteen when D.A. knocked me up. My mother had to
sign so we could get married. The way it was, I was working in a market
down in Point Reyes after school, and he'd keep coming in and talking
to me. I was so young and dumb I didn't
realize
how fucked up
he was. And then there was Davey, and I couldn't let my baby go without
a daddy, could I?"

"I suppose not."

"Jake and Harley came around
after I told D.A. about the baby. They tried to talk me into getting an
abortion. Said they'd pay. Maybe I was stupid not to take them up on
it. You think I was stupid?"

"Do
you
think you were?"

"I don't know. I love my kids.
They're mine; at least I have
something.
No way of knowing if
my life'd been any better if they'd never come along. But sometimes I
wonder—could I
have made something of myself if I'd of at least
had a chance?"

Age-old question, never to be answered. "Did Jake and Harley tell you
why they were making such an offer?"

"Oh, sure. They went on and on about D.A. being weirded out. But like
I said, I was young and dumb and didn't want to believe them. Fourteen.
Jesus. I thought I could help him." She laughed mirthlessly. "You hear
that? Help him! I can't even help myself."

"Mia, the money will make a difference."

"Not if Jake and Harley have their way."

"Hank Zahn can get around them—I promise."

Her eyes stared intently into mine for a few seconds. I thought I
caught a glimmer of hope, but then she shrugged— as if to say she knew
all about promises and that everything she knew was bad.

"Anyway," she said after a moment, "here's that necklace thing you
wanted." She pushed a handful of gray metal across the table at me.

I picked up the chain, which was the same type as the one I'd found at
Hilderly's, and let the letters dangle from it. They were an A and an
M; the A was bracketed with the same kind of curved edging as the one
on the other chain; there was also a clip-like protrusion on the back
of the M. I took the other chain from my bag and lay the two beside one
another on the table, beginning to visualize the whole. It would have
been an oval, perhaps two inches across and three high. I wondered how
many pieces it had been broken into.

"May I borrow this?" I asked, pointing at the one that belonged to her
husband.

She hesitated, then shrugged. "If you bring it back soon. D.A.'s gonna
be too out of it for a while to notice it's gone."

"Thanks." I put both chains in my pocket.

Mia asked, "Do you know what those are?"

"I think so."

"Some devil-thing, maybe?"

"No, nothing like that."

"But then why does that one have this . . . power over D.A.? What does
it mean?"

"Nothing much now. But it's not bad. You shouldn't worry. It's ..." I
paused, searching for the right words. "It's nothing but a symbol of
things that are over and done with."

When I stopped the MG next to
the paddock fence at Moon Ridge Stables, Libby Ross was emerging from
the tack room. She again wore faded jeans and a down jacket, and in her
hand she carried a plastic bucket full of brushes and currycombs. She
saw the car and shaded her eyes with one arm as she peered toward it.

I got out and called hello. She
acknowledged me with a wave and went to a rail where one of the pintos
stood, the lead rope of its halter looped around it. As I approached
she selected a rubber currycomb from the bucket, fitted it to her hand,
and began brushing the horse's coat in a circular motion.

"Didn't expect to see you here
again," she said over her shoulder. "I talked with your boss; he said
everything's in order about my inheritance."

"Yes, it is. Actually, I stopped
by to check up on you, make sure you're all right."

She glanced at me, the lines
around her eyes crinkling. "Why wouldn't I be?"

I recalled that Ross neither
owned a TV nor took a paper. "You haven't heard, then."

 "Heard what?"

"One of the other beneficiaries
of Hilderly's will, Tom Grant, was murdered last night."

She turned slowly, her wide mouth
pulling down. "Murdered? By who?"

"I don't know. The killer got
away unseen."

 "Last night, you say?"

"Yes."

 "How?"

"He was beaten to death, in a
studio behind his house."

She shook her head. "What is
it—you think
this has something to do with him being named in Perry's will?"

 "It
might. And then again, it might not."

An odd expression came across
her
face—part fear and part comprehension. For a moment she seemed to be
lost in thought. "So what you're thinking is that if it did, the rest
of us might also be in danger."

 "It's a definite
possibility."

Ross looked around—at the
cypress-covered knoll, the paddock, the barren stretch of land between
the ranch buildings and Abbotts Lagoon. I knew what she was thinking:
this was an isolated place, where a solitary person would be easy prey
for a killer. I asked, "Are you alone here?"

"The kid who cleans the stalls is
here right now." She motioned at the barn. "But most of the time, yes.
My stepson Dick comes and goes, but even when he's around, he's pretty
useless."

"Is there someone you could get
to stay with you for a while? A friend or a relative?"

"No, no one." She continued to
contemplate the lagoon for a bit, then shrugged and went back to
grooming the pinto. "Don't worry about me," she said. "I've got a rifle
and a couple of twenty-twos in the
house, and I'm a damned good shot when I have to be."

I went over and leaned against
the rail, watching her brush the horse. The wind blew her dark blond
curls across her face, so I couldn't see her expression. I said, "I was
just talking with Mia Taylor. She told me about D.A. having been in
prison."

Her hand slowed in its circular
motion, then picked up the rhythm again. "So? It's not exactly a
secret."

"What did he do?"

For a moment I thought she wasn't
going to answer. Then she said, "Tried to bomb the Port Chicago Naval
Weapons Station out at Antioch."

 "When?"

"August of sixty-nine."

"Who else
was at Port Chicago?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Bombing a federal military
installation isn't something one undertakes alone."

 "The collective—"

"What collective?" Silence.

"What collective, Libby?"

Abruptly she tossed the currycomb
back into the bucket and turned as if to go to the barn.

I stepped in front of her,
reaching into my pocket for the two medallions and holding them up at
eye level. "Do you remember these?"

Her violet eyes widened. Then she
looked away, trying to sidestep me. "You're not making a whole lot of
sense today. First you tell me I might be murdered. Then you dangle
some cheap jewelry in front of me—"

"Drop the pretense, Libby. A
man's
been killed." She was silent, biting down on her lower lip. It was dry
and chapped; when her teeth came away from it, blood welled from a fine
crack.
 

I continued to hold the
medallions up. Their gray pot metal gleamed dully in the sun. Ross
stubbornly refused to look at them.

I asked, "What did the whole
thing look like, Libby?"

No response.

I glanced around, saw a stick on
the ground, and picked it up. Then I squatted in the dirt in front of
her, drawing with the stick's sharp point. "It was an oval. Like so. On
this side, the letters
A
and
M.
And on this side,
K
and
A."

I looked up at her. Her gaze had
been drawn to the stick, and she was watching its motion intently.

"I'd guess there were more
letters in between those," I went on. "Like these—
E,R,
and
I
.
Am I right, Libby?"

She made a gesture with her hand,
as if to erase the letters I'd just drawn.

When she didn't speak, I said,
"Amerika. The way people in the Movement spelled it—taken from the
Kafka novel, and used to say that the United States was an imperialist,
fascist, racist, militaristic country."

Ross sank to the ground, staring
at my drawing. Then she took the stick and added a peace symbol, the
branches of the inverted
Y
converging at the
R
of
"Amerika."

She said, "I haven't thought of
those medallions in years. I don't even know what happened to mine. Our
talisman." She laughed ruefully. "From this vantage point, it seems
like just one of those silly things that kids do—like sitting around in
a clubhouse in a vacant lot and cutting your fingers so you can
exchange blood oaths. But at the time it was a big deal: we'd each have
a piece of this thing that stood for what we believed in and be
connected forever."

"In a way, I guess you are."

"Yes. Yes, I guess so." She
sighed, then took them from me, examining them as they lay on the palm
of her hand. "Where did you get these?"

"One from Perry Hilderly's flat.
The other was given me by Mia Taylor."
 

"D.A. actually kept his?"

"Mia says he takes it out
occasionally and looks at it. She thinks it has power over him, like an
evil charm."

I thought Ross might scoff at
that, but she merely said, "Maybe it does."

I said, "I take it this . . .
talisman, as you call it, was something you shared with the other
people who were involved in the Port Chicago bombing attempt."

"You think you know a lot about
us. But not everyone in the collective was in on the Port Chicago
thing."

"The collective again. What was
it?"

She sank into a full sitting
position, arms wrapped around her knees. "We were a political
collective, loosely affiliated with the Weathermen. The Weather
Bureau—the top leadership—was supposed to control policy, but there was
a lot of ideological struggle, and the Weather Machine was informally
structured to begin with."

"When was this?"

"Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. Things
were bad: the Movement as originally conceived was losing momentum, and
the cops were really cracking down on us. Everybody was dropping out,
preparing for direct, violent action. On campus, the scene had shifted
from Berkeley to S.F. State. So a bunch of us split for the city."

"And?"

"Like I said, the Weathermen were
pretty loosely structured. We just did our own thing."

"Which was?"

She shrugged. "Debated ideology.
Engaged in political education. Refined skills that we'd need in the
struggle."

"Skills?"

". . . Well, self-defense,
propaganda, marksmanship, weaponry."