Trophies And Dead Things

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 memoney?'

'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.'

Five

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