Trophies And Dead Things

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 andA 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?'