Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (40 page)

The receptionist finished with
the last of the waiting callers. "May I help you?" he asked.

I told him I wanted to speak with
Goodhue and handed him one of my cards. He dialed an extension and
spoke into the phone, then said to me, "She wants to know what this is
in reference to."

I said it was in reference to an
inheritance left her by an All Souls client.

He spoke into the phone again,
then replaced the receiver. "She says she's got to review a couple more
scripts but if you want to talk
afterward, while she's doing her makeup, that's fine with her."

"Fine
with me, too."

"Okay, why don't you—" He broke
off and waved to a young woman who was entering from the street,
bearing a grease-stained bag of what looked and smelled to be Chinese
carry-out. "Hey, Marge, would you take this lady back to the newsroom
and point her toward Jess?"

Marge nodded and motioned for me
to follow her; the receptionist buzzed us through an interior door near
his desk. The newsroom was the first on the left off the long hall
beyond it.

My initial impression was of
noise: voices, telephone bells, the clatter of typewriters, the squawk
of police-band radios. A half dozen TV monitors were mounted on one
wall, pictures turned on, but sound muted. Silent spectral images moved
across their screens: Woody Woodpecker, a hand-wringing soap-opera
heroine, Oprah Winfrey, earnest individuals extolling the virtues of
baby diapers and spray wax and deodorant.

Marge said, "First cubicle to the
right of the assignment desk," and went back into the hall.

Directly ahead of me was a long
desk on a raised platform. Three men and a woman sat at it—talking on
phones, scribbling notes, scrutinizing the monitors. I looked to the
right and saw a row of modular cubicles. As I started over there I had
to dodge a woman who rushed through the door behind me dragging a bulky
tote bag by its strap and flashing a victory sign toward the assignment
desk.

There were two people in the
first cubicle: a dark-haired woman seated in a swivel chair at the desk
and a tall, angular man who loomed over her, stabbing his finger at a
typewritten page. The woman's face was not visible, but I assumed she
was Jess Goodhue. I moved away from the opening of the cubicle and
leaned against its wall, idly observing the activity in the newsroom.
The woman I'd
nearly collided with was at the assignment desk
talking with a bald-headed man. After a moment she hurried to one of a
row of smaller desks on the far side of the room, plunked her tote bag
down, and began rolling paper into a typewriter while still standing.
The bald-headed man got up and went to a board that resembled an
airline arrivals-and-departures schedule mounted on the wall behind
him. He rubbed out a
couple of notations with the side of his hand, then used a blue crayon
to enter new ones.

A voice came from inside the cubicle—Goodhue's, not so carefully
modulated as it was on her newscasts. "No, Marv, that's got to be
rewritten. I don't see how we can compare Barbara Bush to Mother
Teresa." Marv said something that I couldn't quite make out. "No, I am
not expressing a political bias. This is one I think even Babs would
agree with me on."

The man left the cubicle without another word and stalked toward the
row of desks on the other side of the room.

"That's a Republican for you," Goodhue said. I glanced into the
cubicle, saw she was paging through a script, and stepped back.

After a few more minutes a thin blond-haired woman approached, her step
tentative, expression anxious. She stopped a foot from the cubicle's
entrance, as if afraid to go further. "Jess? The order of these
stories—do you really want the mercy killing moved ahead of the drug
busts and the new environmental plan?"

"Yes, I do. It's lost where you
had it."

 "But—"

"It's an important story, Linda. It's about . . . just reorder it."

Linda remained where she was, silent and indecisive. Goodhue added,
"And when you see Roberta, tell her the lead-in to the drug busts needs
more punch—a lot more. I want to see new copy by four-thirty."

Linda turned quickly and walked away.

Goodhue said to herself in a low
voice, "You get too abrupt with them on days like this. It's something
you've got to work on."

I stepped up to the entrance of
the cubicle and saw she had pushed back from her desk, extending her
arms in a little stretch. "Ms.Goodhue?"

She looked up, then snapped her
fingers. "You're the woman from the law firm . . . what was it?"

"All Souls Legal Cooperative."

"Right. I know of you people. Did
a series on alternative legal services back when I was a field
reporter. McCone, is it?"

"Sharon McCone."

She stood and came forward,
clasping my hand in a strong grip. "Call me Jess, everybody does. Let's
go upstairs, huh? I have to make up for the three-fifty-five teaser."

"The . . . ?"

She started through the busy
newsroom toward the hall. "A one-minute spot. You've probably seen
hundreds of them: 'Coming up on the six o'clock news.'"

"Of course." I trailed her down
the hall. Goodhue was not as tall as I—five two or three to my own five
six—but her brisk pace made up for her shorter stride. As she clattered
down the hall in high-heeled shoes that matched her smart turquoise
dress, she kept up a running chatter.

"Sorry I kept you waiting, but
things are pretty frantic, and they'll get positively hairy from here
on out. I've got to make up, do the spot, go over the scripts again
with my co-anchor. You came at the right time, though; nobody,
absolutely nobody, bothers me in my dressing room."

At the end of the hallway was a
winding iron staircase. Goodhue led me up it, and down another long
hall, past other rooms that hummed with activity. "Sports and weather,"
she said, waving her hand. "They're pretty much autonomous of the
newsroom." Close to the end of the hall she opened a door and motioned
me
inside. "And this," she said, "is where I go when I want privacy."

It wasn't much of a dressing
room: a long counter below a bulb-edged mirror; two wicker chairs, both
somewhat raveled; a rack with changes of clothes hanging from it; a
small adjoining bathroom. The counter was littered with cosmetics.
Among them stood a vase of yellow roses that had seen better days.

Goodhue shut the door and grinned
wryly at me. "Well, it ain't Broadway, but it's mine."

"I don't think they have it so
good on Broadway, either."

"Probably not. You've got to go
to Hollywood for the glitzy stuff." She frowned at the browning roses,
swept them from the vase, and jammed them into a wastebasket under the
counter. "Sit, while I make up," she said, and plunked down onto a
stool in front of the mirror. "What's this about an inheritance?"

I sat in one of the wicker
chairs—gingerly at first. "One of our clients has named you as a
beneficiary in his will. Perry Hilderly. Do you know him?"

She considered, picking up a
bottle of makeup base and beginning to apply it with practiced strokes.
"The name's familiar. Who is ... was he?"

"A tax accountant. Worked for a
small firm out in the Avenues."

"Wait a minute!" She snapped her
fingers. "Wasn't he the last victim of that sniper?"

"Right."

"Weird. Why would he leave
me
money?"
 

"I don't know. He made a
holograph will—self-written, I without the aid of an attorney—and left
no explanation."

"I don't get it. Would it be
crass to ask how much he left me?"

"Somewhere in the neighborhood of
a quarter of a million dollars." More, I reminded myself, if Grant went
through with signing the document
renouncing his inheritance, since it had been left on a share-alike
basis.

Goodhue's hand paused in
mid-stroke near her hairline. "Jesus! Why on earth . . . ?"

"I'd hoped you could tell me."

She shook her head, set the
makeup bottle down, and opened a compact of blush. After rummaging
around on the counter for a brush, she began applying color to her
cheekbones. "As far as I know, I never met the man. Tell me more about
him."

"Before I do that, I have a few
questions. Does the name Thomas Y. Grant mean anything to you?"

"Grant . . . Tom Grant, the
attorney?"

"Right."

"I interviewed him for that
series on alternative legal services I mentioned. Not that I approve of
his particular alternative, but it fit with the theme. Actually, I was
surprised to find him quite charming."

It was a temptation to ask what
she'd thought of Grant's fetishes, but I merely asked, "What about
someone named Libby Heikkinen?"

"No."

"David Arlen Taylor?"

"Uh-uh. Who
are
these
people?"

"Your co-beneficiaries. Hilderly
divided his estate four ways."

"This Hilderly must have been a
wealthy man."

"Not in the usual sense. He
inherited some money, invested well, and didn't have expensive habits."

"And he lived here in the city?
Of course he did; I remember that he was shot on Geary, near his
apartment. Was he from here originally?"

"I don't know much about his
background, just that he was a radical during the Vietnam era, one of
the founders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
 

"Berkeley!" She spun on the
stool, the cosmetic brush falling from her fingers.

"Is that significant?"

She ignored the question. "What
else can you tell me about him?"

"He was kicked out of college,
worked for a magazine for a while, until they sent him to Vietnam as a
correspondent. He stayed there for some time, had a son by a Vietnamese
woman. She and the child were killed by mortar fire, and then Hilderly
came back to the States. Married, had two more boys, divorced, and
lived very quietly in the Inner Richmond until he was shot."

Goodhue was sitting very still
now, hands locked together on her lap, makeup brush forgotten on the
floor at her feet. "Just think of that," she said after a moment. "I
reported the story of his death." There was an odd tremor in her voice,
an emotion I couldn't define.

"Are you sure you never met him?"

"Very sure. The Free Speech
Movement—that was right around the time I was born."

"It started in the fall of
nineteen sixty-four."

Goodhue's focus was inward,
searching. After a bit she said softly, "I was born in January of
nineteen sixty-five."

I waited, but when she didn't
elaborate, said, "I'm sorry, but I don't follow you."

"What I'm trying to say is ...
this Perry Hilderly may have been my father."

The statement came from so far
out in left field that it took me a moment to formulate a response.
"Why would you think that?" I finally asked.

"Because, my mother was at
Berkeley then."

"So were thousands of other
people."

"But not—" She broke off, looking
at her watch. "Dammit! It's a long story, and I don't have much time."

"Why don't you start telling me
now. I can wait around for the rest as long as necessary."

"All right." She swiveled back
toward the mirror and fussed nervously with her hair. "As I said
before, I was born in January of nineteen sixty-five. Out of wedlock."
She paused, looking at me in the mirror, as if she was waiting for some
reaction. When she didn't get one, she went on. "My mother's name was
Jenny Ruhl. She was a campus radical, heavily into the protest
movement. Or so I found out later."

"You never knew her?"

Goodhue turned toward me again,
backlit by the glow from the bare frosted bulbs around the mirror. It
softened the planes and curves of her face and she appeared even
younger. When she spoke, her
voice was not as crisp and self-assured as before.

"Oh, I knew her. I can even
remember her—some. But I'm getting ahead of my story. Anyway, my mother
had me on January seventeenth. My father was listed as 'unknown' on my
birth certificate. My mother came from a well-to-do Orange County
family; I guess a lot of the so-called revolutionaries had affluent,
conservative backgrounds. For whatever reason, she never let her people
know about me. Instead, she used the allowance they sent her to farm me
out to an older couple here in San Francisco who ran a little day-care
center and took in kids whose parents couldn't care for them—foster
kids from the welfare department, as well as others like me. Ben and
Nilla Goodhue. They—"

There was a knock at the door. A
woman's voice called, "Jess, you're due on the set. Hurry up!"

Goodhue started. "Jesus, I almost
missed the spot! I've got to get my ass upstairs on the double. Do you
mind staying here—they don't like strangers on the set."

"Sure. I'll wait."

After she left the minutes passed
slowly. I shifted on the wicker chair—which had grown uncomfortable—and
tried to fit Goodhue's claim that Hilderly might have been her father
into what I already knew. I supposed it was possible that Hilderly had
fathered her and written her into his will in a too-late attack of
conscience. But that didn't explain the bequest to Tom Grant. And what
about Heikkinen and Taylor? Other children he'd failed to acknowledge?
Could any young man have been that prolific—even in the sexually free
sixties?