Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (31 page)

"We all do some whimpering and
sniveling," I said. "Just be glad you got yours over with early in
life."

"You know, I think I'm going to
put my past behind me now and get on with that life. My mother killed
herself, and my father wouldn't acknowledge me. Their problems had
nothing to do with me as a person. My mother's family didn't want me,
either. Fuck 'em—it's their loss."

I gave her a thumbs-up sign and
left the studio.

On the drive to West Marin I
thought about various scraps of seemingly unrelated information that
I'd collected over the past five days. Some pertained to Tom Grant: the
things Cal Hurley had told me; Grant's fabrications about his past;
Luke Widdows's insights into certain aspects of the sixties. Others had
to do with Perry Hilderly: the things he'd told Kurt; what I thought
his "most important" ideal was; a police inspector who normally went by
the book but now seemed to be covering up something.

And I thought about dreams, and
how they sometimes can take the form of clever visual puns, prompting
the dreamer to become aware of things she already knows. . . .

By the time I reached Inverness
it was after ten. The hamlet was shut down, except for the Czech
restaurant. I continued along the shoreline, past dark cottages, then
wound up through the conifer forest. Fog drifted from pockets between
the hills; the night was moonless. On the barren headland the mist
thickened, coated my windshield. When I put on the wipers, the glass
smeared. Beyond it the headlight beams looked to be
reflected off a solid white wall. All I could make out were the fence
posts along the road.

The wind blew strong, pushing at
the little car until its tires strained to hold the pavement. I slowed
to twenty, opened my window to help the feeble defroster. As I rounded
the sharp curve above Moon Ridge Stables, I saw that the fog was
lighter on that side of the headland— blowing back out to sea. Abbotts
Lagoon was a black stain on the landscape; beyond the beach, a white
line of surf moved restlessly.

I couldn't make out any of the
ranch buildings down in the cypress-ringed hollow, but there was a pair
of lights moving across the cattle graze. I turned into the rutted
access road, rumbled down the hillside. The lights came my way, moving
fast. I crossed a cattle guard beyond which the land dropped off on
either side, and suddenly the other vehicle rounded the curve some
twenty yards ahead.

I slammed on my brakes, stalling
the MG; yanked on the wheel, fighting a skid. The other vehicle—a
Jeep—slewed sideways. For an instant it hung on the edge of the road,
then lurched nose-downward into the ditch. Its motor stalled, and the
night became very quiet.

I jumped out of my car and ran
toward the Jeep. Its driver's door opened and a tall, rangy figure got
out. Libby Ross.

"Goddamn it!" her husky voice
shouted. "What the hell're you doing running me off the road like that?"

"Are you all right?" I called.

Ross stopped halfway up the
incline, recognizing me. "I thought I told you to stay the hell away
from here. Now you've gone and made me wreck my Jeep."

"Doesn't look wrecked," I said.
"You've got four-wheel drive, should be able to get it out of there
easily."

"No way. I hit a rock—one of the
tires is going flat." Ross kicked the Jeep's bumper. "Shit! Not my day.
Or week. Or year." She kicked the Jeep again,
then looked back at me. "What're you doing here?"

 "I need to talk with
you."

"Can't. I've got to get over to
Taylor's. Some trouble with D.A."

She glanced speculatively at
my car.
I said, "Climb in, I'll take you."

Ross came the rest of the way up
the incline and strode to the car, folding her rangy body into the
cramped passenger seat.

I backed up and turned around on
the other side of the cattle guard. "What kind of trouble?" I asked.

"Don't know. Mia was practically
incoherent when she called. Panicky. She'd walked down the highway to
the phone booth outside of Nick's Cove."

"How long ago?"

"Maybe fifteen minutes. Something
about D.A. and that island. Nobody's there at the restaurant but her,
so she called me."

I didn't like the sound of that
at all. When I turned onto the main road, I put on speed in spite of
the limited visibility.

Ross glanced at me. "What're you
thinking?"

"The same thing you are."

She bit her lip, turned her face
toward the side window.

"It's time you leveled with me,"
I said. "You pretended you had no ongoing relationship with D.A., that
Mia's jealousy was unfounded. But not long after that I saw the two of
you kissing down on the beach."

"Where were you when this
supposedly happened?"

"At the stables."

"I thought I told you to leave
when I rode off."

"I stayed to look around your
tack room."

"You had no right—"

"I found the photograph of you,
D.A., Perry, and Jenny. Who took it—Andy Wrightman?"

". . . Yeah."

"Why'd you keep it?"
 

She sighed. "You wouldn't
understand. You probably think I wouldn't want a reminder of those
days, not after the way things turned out. That was what Glen—my
husband— thought. It was him that didn't want to be reminded of my
past, so I always kept the picture out in the tack room. I didn't mind
remembering. Those were the best days of my life, back when we were
young and going to change the world. Since then, nothing's been . . .
anything."

"When did you first figure out
Wrightman and Grant were one and the same?"

"I'd never even heard of Grant
until you came here the first time."

"But when I described him, you
suspected who he was."

No reply.

"D.A. did, too."

More silence.

I said, "Why did you lie about
your relationship with D.A.?"

"Because it's too damn hard to
explain a relationship like that. What little we have isn't taking
anything away from Mia. It's just our way of keeping the past alive."

"D.A. did come to see you
Wednesday afternoon, then. He'd been brooding about Andy Wrightman,
hadn't he?"

She shifted in the cramped seat,
shoved her hands between her bent knees.

"Did you tell him where to find
Tom Grant?"

"In a way I guess I did. I told
him what you'd said about where he lived, that he'd done well for
himself after—"

"After what?"

Ross stared out the window at the
buildings of Inverness. The lights of the Czech restaurant briefly
washed over her dark blond curls.

"What you started to say was
after Andy Wrightman went back to his true identity. Tom Grant was the
man's actual name. Wrightman was just an alias he used."
 

Ross glanced at me. Her eyes
glittered in the headlight beams from a passing car.

"Grant graduated from the
University of Illinois Law School in nineteen sixty-two," I went on.
"It's my guess that he was recruited by the FBI; many law graduates
are. He adopted the Wrightman name when he was sent to Berkeley to
infiltrate radical student organizations. There were a lot of
undercover agents on the campuses during those days. A man I know says
most of them weren't very successful: they either didn't fit in and
weren't trusted with any real information, or they fit in too well,
became unreliable. Grant was effective for a while, but by fathering
Jenny's child, in a sense he also joined forces with the people the
Bureau perceived as the enemy."

I stopped at the intersection
with Highway One. There were no cars coming from either direction. I
eased the clutch out and turned north, over the bridge and into Point
Reyes Station. It was livelier than Iverness: lights shone in most of
the houses, and a group of people congregated on the sidewalk in front
of one of the bars. Ross was silent until after we came out on the
other side of the little town.

"Do you have proof of all this?"

"No, but there's a San Francisco
homicide inspector who probably does, whether he knows it or not. And I
think you and D.A. realized it a long time ago."

"Yeah, we always suspected Andy
informed on us, D.A. and I. Why else would the feds have let him just
walk away from Port Chicago? I saw that at the time. He just jammed his
gun into D.A.'s hand and melted into the scenery. And why was his
girlfriend the one they made the deal with, rather than either of us?
If they wanted to make an example of somebody, the daughter of a rich
family would have been a better choice. Except they didn't want that;
it would have blown Andy's cover. And Andy probably urged it; he must
have been scared to death that the depth of his involvement with her
would come out and screw up his career."
 

"You and D.A. never said anything
about him to the authorities?"

She shook her head. "It seems
incredible now, but at the time we didn't know. Or maybe it was that we
didn't want to believe what he was. Our rationale was, what if we
were wrong? We'd have been informing on one of our own."

"Andy left Berkeley when Jenny
told him she was pregnant, didn't he?"

 "Uh-huh."

"He probably requested assignment
to another campus. If it came out that he'd fathered a child by her,
the Bureau would have terminated him. But he couldn't stay away from
her—maybe he did care for her on some level, maybe he was curious about
his child. He came back a few years later, and when you all started
planning the bombing, he saw an opportunity to make some real career
points."

We were passing through Marshall
now. The boarded-up oyster restaurant was a dark monolith. Tendrils of
fog curled around the small cottages and drifted across the wet road.

I asked, "When he came to see you
Wednesday afternoon, did D.A. say he wanted to confront Grant?"

 ". . .
He wasn't making sense. D.A. rarely does."

"When you told him where
Grant lived, you must have known he'd go there."

 "I never thought he
would."

I wondered about that, but I let
it go for now. "What about the next afternoon on the beach—did he
mention Grant?"

"No. He was in bad shape, had
been doing booze and pills. I tried to slow him down, but when D.A.
goes off on a jag . . ." She shrugged. After a while she asked, "How
come you're so sure D.A. was there at Grant's house?"

"That night, D.A. supposedly took
Jake's truck and went barhopping. Mia told me he'd been in a fight,
lost his jacket. A witness saw a truck like Jake's outside Grant's
house just before he was killed. There would have been a lot of blood
on the jacket if D.A. beat Grant
to death—enough that he'd want to get rid of it."

"God, then it's true."

"You suspected all along. You
should have told me."

"I know, but my protective
instincts kicked in. I've been trying to save D.A. for so long now that
it's automatic."

"You ought to know by now that
it's a lost cause. The man doesn't want to be saved."

"No, but here we both are, trying
to save him one last time."

We neared Nick's Cove in a few
minutes. I asked, "Is Mia still there, or did she walk back home?"

"Said she'd meet me at Taylor's."

I accelerated up the hill.

Ross said, "Thing that bothers me
about Grant—there was nothing in the paper about him having been with
the FBI."

"I thought you said you didn't
take a paper."

"I saw the headline when I was
shopping in Point Reyes yesterday, so I bought it. Picture didn't look
much like Andy, but I recognized the name Grant from your visit."

As I recalled, the story and
picture had appeared on an inside page—a place Ross wouldn't have been
able to see from a casual glance at a newspaper rack. I decided to let
it go for a moment, however.

She added, "Why all the secrecy
about him being with the FBI? Given the political climate in this
country today, you'd think he'd have written a book about his
experiences, gone on talk shows. Man could have been a hero."

"I think the FBI has restrictions
on that sort
of
thing.
Undercover agents' activities are
classified information. But even if they weren't, I don't think Grant
would have gone public with the story. He had reasons for not wanting
his past too closely scrutinized."

"You mean because of Jenny's
baby?"

"That, and other things." But I
couldn't go into them at the moment because ahead I saw the outlines of
Taylor's sign, and the entrance to the
crushed-shell driveway. I turned the MG and coasted down into the
parking lot.

My headlights washed over Mia
Taylor. She stood in front of the restaurant, backlit by its beer
signs, wearing a blue sweater that was many sizes too big for her.
Before I brought the car to a stop she ran toward it.