Trophies and Dead Things Read online

  I said to Hank, “You were still an undergrad at Stanford in the sixties. How come you knew Hilderly? Or did that come later?”

  “Later. I met him in ‘Nam in nineteen seventy. Perry’d been thrown out of Cal and gone to work for a leftist magazine. He went to ‘Nam to report on the war for them, but they folded shortly after he got there. When I met him, he was living with a family near Cam Ranh Bay. He had a baby boy by one of the daughters. He was lonely for American company, so he hung out at a bar with some of us liberals from the base, talking about the war and what was going down back home. Then his woman and son were killed in the mortar shelling. Right after that, Perry went back to California.”

  “And then?”

  Hank shrugged. “He enrolled in S.F. State and got his degree in accounting. Married again, had two more boys. Was divorced about ten years ago, lived alone in this flat, and worked at Geary and Twenty-second, for one of those tax firms that’s a cut above H & R Block.”

  “How’d you come to be his attorney?”

  “I ran into him at Churchill’s Pub one night about five years ago. Recognized him right off—as you pointed out, he hadn’t changed much except for having short hair. After that he came to see me about a minor legal problem, and we started to meet fairly frequently, always at Churchill’s.

  “Were you close friends?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I just wondered about him becoming an accountant. And living like this.” I gestured around the plain, conventional-looking kitchen. “It doesn’t fit with his past.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But the few times I tried to ask him about it, he just changed the subject.”

  “What did you usually talk about?”

  “My work. All Souls. He was interested in the workings of a low-cost legal services plan. Sports; he was a Giants fan. And old movies—he watched a lot of them, mostly from the thirties and forties. But I had the feeling that anything more personal was off limits.”

  “What do you supposed happened to make him that way?”

  “I don’t know, but I sensed it in ‘Nam, too. He wasn’t quite as closed off then, but if anybody got on the subject of the old days at Berkeley, Perry all of a sudden remembered someplace else he had to be.” Hank looked at his watch. “But enough—we’d better get busy. I’ve only got today free to work on clearing this place out, and the landlady wants to start showing it on Monday.”

  I drained my coffee mug and stood. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You could box up the books and videotapes and other stuff in the living room. The Salvation Army’ll pick up everything on Monday.”

  “You mentioned Hilderly’s sons–won’t they want any of it?”

  “Their mother said no. Apparently he wasn’t close to the boys. She remarried a long time ago, and they live over in Blackhawk—that fancy development near Danville. But the kids are provided for in the will. Perry inherited a substantial amount from his mother a few years after the divorce. It’s to be divided equally between the boys.”

  “I see. Well, I’d better get to it.” I started for the door.

  “Shar,” Hank said.

  I turned.

  “Thanks for helping. This is easily the worst part about being executor of an estate.”

  “No problem.”

  He added, “Even though Perry and I weren’t all that close, his death has really upset me. You know?”

  I nodded. “Probably because of the way he died. These snipings. If they hadn’t been spread out over more than three months, the city would be in a panic right now—like when the Zebra killings were going on.”

  “You’re probably right. I find myself getting paranoid. I worked late a couple of nights last week, and when I left I could have sworn there was someone lurking around outside All Souls.”

  “Nerves.”

  “Typical urban ailment.”

  I went down the hall to the front room and dragged a carton over to the brick-and-board bookcase opposite the bay window. Perry Hilderly’s books were mainly texts on accounting, tax law, math, statistics, and investing. The number of them and their presence didn’t surprise me, but what did was the absence of any lighter reading material such as magazines, novels, or non-fiction that didn’t relate to his profession. Finally on the bottom shelf I found a few volumes on film: guides to serials, crime movies, and film noir, plus a few books about old TV series such as “Perry Mason.” I boxed them all, then turned to the videotapes.

  There were hundreds of them, stacked against the wall behind the TV: Bogart, Tracy and Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Cary Grant; a full run of Charlie Chans and Mr. Motos and the Topper series; westerns, comedies, drama. Not one of them had been produced later than the mid-fifties. It made me wonder if Hilderly hadn’t been trying to pretend the sixties and seventies and eighties had never happened.

  After I boxed the tapes, I looked around for what Hank had called “the other stuff.” There wasn’t much of it. A water-stained lobby card for a Bogart movie called All Through the Night, framed but with a badly cracked glass. A carved wooden box, the kind you find at Cost Plus, containing two sets of worn playing cards. A set of Capiz-shell coasters. A silver-plated table lighter, nonfunctional. A brass bowl, also Cost Plus quality, containing nothing but a paper clip and some dust. I put the smaller items into a carton and left it and the lobby card on the cracked vinyl recliner that faced the TV. Then I unplugged the TV, unhooked the VCR, and shoved the stand over by the ugly plaid couch. The act held a depressing finality.

  When I went down the hall, I found Hank in the bedroom. He was folding the clothing that lay on the bed and stuffing it into a big plastic trash bag, where it immediately became unfolded and jumbled. One look at his woebegone face made me say, “Let me do what while you get started on the kitchen.”

  He nodded, looking grateful, and gently set down the sweater he held.

  I’d never had to dispose of a dead friend’s possessions, but I guessed the clothing must be the most difficult task of all. Even though I hadn’t known Hilderly personally, I also found myself smoothing and folding each item before placing it in the bag; somehow it seemed a negation of the person to toss his garments in there like so many rags.

  As I worked I could hear Hank clinking dishes in the kitchen, but after a while the sounds stopped, and I feared he’d become discouraged again. I finished with the clothing, stripped the bed, checked to make sure there was nothing in the bureau or nightstand drawers. Then I went back there.

  Hank was sitting at the table, a sheaf of papers spread before him. When I came in, he looked up at me, his face a study in shock and bewilderment.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “These were in a plastic bag in the freezer.” He gestured at the papers. “Perry told me to look for his important documents there—said it was a good fireproof place, and cheaper than a safe-deposit box.”

  I looked closer at what lay before him. There were stock certificates, an automobile pink slip, a number of savings-account passbooks, and some other papers. “So?”

  “This,” he said, fingering a document with a pale blue cover sheet, “is a copy of the will I drew up for him four years ago. I had the original in the All Souls safe, and I’ve already entered it into probate. But this”—he held up a page covered in cramped handwriting—“is a second will, superseding the first one.”

  “Is it legal?”

  ‘Yes. It’s a holograph, and he did it properly. It’s dated about three weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  “It’s totally different from the first. Cuts out his kids entirely and makes no explanation of why. He leaves his money to be divided equally among four people—and damned if I know who they are, or what they were to him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hank handed me the sheet of paper, and I scanned it quickly. From the legal terminology, I gathered that Hilderly had copied it from his original will, changing only the names under the section headed �
��Specific Bequests.” The conditions for the executor and disposal of personal effects were as Hank had described them, but instead of Hilderly’s sons, four individuals were to share equally in “all cash, securities, and other financial assets”: Jess Goodhue, Thomas Y. Grant, Libby Heikkinen, and David Arlen Taylor. Hilderly did not specify their relationship to him, but he did state that he was making no provision for his former wife and children. The will didn’t look as official as the typed copy from All Souls, but if Hank said it was legal, it had to be.

  My fingers touched something attached to the other side of the sheet. I turned it over, found one of those yellow stick-on memos. On it Hilderly had written, “Hank: You’ll know how to contact Goodhue and Grant, but you’ll have to trace Heikkinen and Taylor. Sorry for the inconvenience.” I peeled the memo off and handed it to Hank.

  He read it and grimaced in annoyance. “Sure, Perry, I’ve never heard of any of these people!”

  “You must know who Jess Goodhue is.”

  “Why the hell would I know?”

  “She’s a co-anchor on the KSTS evening news.”

  “You forgot—I don’t watch broadcast news.”

  “Oh, right.” For as long as I’ve known him, Hank has been a news snob; he prefers his information in written—in depth, and in quantity. Every day he reads at least five papers: the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Every week he pores over the newsmagazines, regardless of their political orientation, and when he runs out of those he’s likely to be found with his nose stuck in BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, or a legal journal. But one place he is never found is in front of the TV at six or eleven in the evening.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s who Jess Goodhue is.”

  “Tell me more about her.”

  “She’s one of these up-and-coming media stars. Young, in her early to mid twenties. I’m willing to bet that by the time she’s thirty she’ll be anchoring for one of the networks. You know the type: good –looking, poised, superprofessoinal.”

  “I can’t imagine Perry even knowing someone like that.”

  “But he must have. Are you sure you don’t know this Thomas V. Grant? According to Hilderly’s note, he assumed you do.”

  Hank thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Son of a bitch, I bet it is,” he said softly.

  “Who?”

  “Another local attorney.” His lip curled slightly, but he didn’t elaborate.

  I spotted a directory lying on the counter beneath the wall phone. “Heikkinen’s not a very common name.” I set the will down and went to look under the H’s. “No listing,” I said after a few seconds, “but that’s not surprising. Just because the first two are local doesn’t mean the others have to be. Besides, she might have married and changed her name.” I flipped to the T’s. There was more than a page of Taylors, including two with just the initial D and two Davids with no middle initial. “No David Arlen Taylor, either.”

  “That could be a tough one.”

  “No really—the middle name’s distinctive.” I moved back toward the table. “I suppose this one’s going to end up on my desk.”

  “Unless you want to turn it over to Rae,” Rae Keller was my rapidly-becoming-indispensable assistant.

  “No, I’ve kind of loaded her down lately. Maybe I’ll have her do some preliminary work, but I’ll handle the rest personally.” I didn’t want to tell Hank that Rae had become so good at her job I really hadn’t had much to do recently. It had taken far too many years for the All Souls partners to give me the go-ahead to hire an assistant, and I wasn’t about to sow any seeds of doubt as to the wisdom of that action. I also didn’t want to admit that nowadays I had a lot of empty hours that I’d prefer to fill with work, for fear that such a confession would provoke a solicitous—and unwelcome—inquiry about my private life.

  “Well, handle it however you want. In the meantime I’ll have to stop probate of the other will. And inform Perry’s ex-wife that the kids aren’t going to inherit.” Hank took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “There are times when I hate my work, and this is one of them.” Then he stood abruptly, replacing the glasses. “Come on, let’s get out of here for a while, have some lunch, clear the cobwebs.”

  I trailed him to the front door, shrugging off Hilderly’s big sweater and grabbing my jacket and bag. On the sidewalk I lengthened my stride to match Hank’s. He walked with his head bent, hands shoved in his pockets, obviously preoccupied. I steered him toward Clement. Earlier I’d noticed a dim sum place—the Fook Restaurant, of all things—and now the idea of steamed dumplings and pork buns appealed to me.

  As we turned onto Clement, I realized that the fog had lifted, and observed a phenomenon that has always interested me: the line of demarcation between blue and gray sky stopped in the middle of Arguello Boulevard, bisecting the city in a north-south line. To the west, in the largely bland residential avenues that stretch toward the sea, the day would remain overcast; to the east, in such diverse areas as North Beach, downtown, Noe Valley, Hunters Point, and my own little neighborhood near the Glen Park district, the weather would turn sunny. It is a peculiarly San Francisco phenomenon, and one that outsiders have difficulty grasping. As a New York friend once told me, “There’s something very odd about a city where people move across town just to get better weather.”

  Hank seemed oblivious to where we were going, so I steered him into the restaurant. It was noisy and crowded, but we were quickly shown to a table against one of the walls. He blinked and looked around like a rudely awakened sleepwalker as I ordered jasmine tea. The nearby tables—round ones with lazy Susans in their centers—were mainly occupied by Asian families; restaurant employees moved slowly among them, pushing stainless-steel carts loaded with delicacies and hawking their wares in Chinese. When the first cart arrived at our table, I pointed to plates of pork buns and barbecued spareribs. Hank recovered from his preoccupation and gave the nod to the shrimp in fluted rice wrappers.

  As I picked up my chopsticks I said, “Is Hilderly’s ex-wife going to be upset that the kids won’t inherit?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “How much is the estate worth?”

  “Quite a bit. Perry inherited roughly a quarter of a million dollars some seven, eights years ago. From time to time he’d mention investments to me—mostly conservative stuff like municipal bonds, T-bills, blue chips. But every now and then he’d take a flier on one of the glamour stocks like Genetech. I’d estimate that he was worth at least a million.

  “He didn’t live like a millionaire.”

  “Perry wasn’t into money. The investing was a game to him, matching his wits against the market. If he made a profit, that was fine, because it would mean there was more to leave his boys. But he didn’t care about it for himself, and he spent very little.”

  “Well, what about those four people named in the new will? What were they to him, that he’d cut out his own kids and leave them that much money?”

  “Damned if I know. He never so much as mentioned a one of them to me. Two of them he himself didn’t know how to contact.”

  “You say Thomas Grant is an attorney?”

  Hank nodded, biting into one of his shrimp dumplings. After he swallowed he said, “A real sleazebag. Around fifty, I’d say. He turned up here in the mid-seventies, went into divorce work—for men only, taking a very aggressive ‘to hell with the wife and kids stance. Advises his clients on how to get around the community-property laws, and not always in legitimate ways.”

  “Sounds like a sweetheart.”

  “He doesn’t have too many scruples, or much humanity. Grant latched on to an idea whose time—unfortunately—had come, due to the backlash against the women’s movement. Now he’s got branch offices—franchises is actually a better description—throughout the Bay Area, and is looking to expand further.”

  “The fast-food chain of divorce lawyers.”

  “Right
.”

  I looked over at a cart that had paused by our table. There was a plate of oddly shaped objects coated in a golden crust. I pointed at it with my chopsticks. “What’re those?”

  The waitress said, “Duck feet.”

  “Duck . . . feet?”

  She nodded, smiling at my reaction.

  “How about some of that chicken? And a plate of pearl balls?”

  She set the plates down, marked our check, and departed.