As I waited for a phone booth to free up, I shifted from foot to foot, listening to snatches of conversation.
"… Hon, I tole you we gonna get the bail money…"
"… case has been continued until next Thursday, so you'll have to shift my calendar around…"
"… Babe, it's me. If you get home before I do, stick that roast in the microwave so it'll defrost…"
"… Can we still make the early edition…?"
When the man with the frozen roast relinquished his phone, I stepped into the booth and dialed Patient Information at S.F. General. No change in Hank's condition. Then I called All Souls for my messages; there were three from media people-none of whom was Goodhue. In light of the fact that she knew me personally, I found it odd that the anchorwoman hadn't tried to contact me for an exclusive story for one of KSTS's reporters on collaring the sniper. Perhaps her resistance to turning the investigator's name over to me had its roots in more than being too busy to look for it? But I couldn't imagine what.
A fourth message, however, was one I'd been hoping for-from Wolf. I dropped two more dimes into the slot and punched out his office number. He answered on the first ring.
"Well, Sharon," he said when I identified myself. "What's up?"
"Do you recall a client named Jess Goodhue? The TV news anchorwoman? The job would have been a background check on her mother, Jenny Ruhl, a few years ago-"
"Sure I remember. What about her?"
"She's peripherally involved in a case I'm working, and I need to take a look at your report on the investigation. It's okay with Goodhue," I added, since I didn't really know that it wasn't, "but she's been too busy to contact you, so I thought I'd go ahead and request it myself."
"Funny."
"How so?"
"She called Tuesday morning and asked for a copy of the report. Picked it up that afternoon."
So Goodhue, like Ross, had been lying to me. But why didn't she want me to know she already had the report? I said, "And now I'm unable to reach her. I know that technically you shouldn't give me a copy without her permission, but what are my chances of getting a look at it?"
"Depends. Why do you need it?"
I explained about the Hilderly case, stressing our need to know that Perry had not been under duress or undue influence at the time he made his holograph will.
Wolf said, "Well, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't have a copy, since you say Jess Goodhue has already agreed to that. I can't get to it until this afternoon, though. If you want I'll drop it off at All Souls around four."
His mention of All Souls made me realize that Wolf-who makes a point of avoiding the often depressing contents of the morning paper-probably knew nothing about what had gone on there the night before. By the time I'd finished telling him that story, my rage at the sniper had been rekindled, and when Wolf expressed his regrets about Hank being shot, I could hear some of the same anger in his voice. Before I hung up, I thought to ask one last question. "I don't suppose you recall what you found out about Goodhue's mother?"
"Sorry, I don't. My memory isn't what it used to be." I thanked him and hung up the receiver. The phone booth was quickly claimed by a young woman with reddened eyes and runny mascara. Someone had once commented to me that more tears must be shed in the Hall of Justice than any other building in San Francisco-public or private, and not excepting the funeral homes. I had never doubted the truth of that statement.
By eleven-thirty I was seated at a machine in a quiet corner of the microfilm room at the main branch of the public library. Ghostly images flickered before me as I fast-forwarded through the reels I'd requested, stopping at articles on the Port Chicago bombing attempt and trial. When I'd checked the various periodical indexes, I'd found that coverage had been extensive; one of the national newsmagazines had even run a long piece on the case: "Revolutionaries' Plot Runs Afoul of Government's Tough New Stance on Violence."
What I gleaned from the article jolted me. Taylor and Heikkinen had been sole defendants in the trial; the government had asked for stiff sentences in order to make examples of them for other would-be saboteurs, and each had received five years in federal prison-Taylor at McNeil Island in Washington State, and Heikkinen at a facility in Alderson, West Virginia. The crime of conspiracy to bomb a military installation had held more serious undertones than I'd originally assumed: had they been successful in planting and detonating the bombs, their blast would have taken several lives.
But what surprised me the most was the identity of the prosecution's chief witness. Jenny Ruhl had been the one to offer the particularly damning testimony that the collective had "deemed the sacrifice of life acceptable and even desirable, given the cause for which they were fighting."
Libby Ross had told me that what the collective mainly did was engage in endless intense talk; now it seemed that the rhetoric had gotten seriously out of hand. Even though-as the accounts of the trial pointed out-there were significant reasons to doubt parts of Ruhl's testimony, it made me look at the affair in a new light. If the members of the collective had been comfortable with the concept of killing innocent strangers, what other crimes might they have contemplated-or committed? If I kept digging, what else might I turn up? And was that really necessary at this late date? There were people who could be badly hurt: Jess Goodhue, D.A. Taylor's wife and young children. Perhaps it would be kinder to let the past die, as most of those involved in the case had.
But even as I thought about it, I knew I wouldn't stop. Tom Grant had been murdered, and my gut-level feelings told me that the forces leading up to his killing had been set in motion by something in that past. True, Grant had been a poor excuse for a human being, but when it comes to murder, an investigator doesn't establish an A List and a B List. I would keep going simply because it was a valid line of inquiry that McFate seemed unwilling to pursue.
My pages of notes quickly piled up: a chronology of events, key phrases from the trial testimony, addresses, names. Hilderly was only mentioned once, in a list of people suspected of being former members of the collective; the names Andy Wrightman and Thomas Y. Grant appeared nowhere at all.
After I finished with the first batch of films, I went out to the reference room and rechecked the indexes for articles in radical and alternative publications. Then I returned to the microfilm room and checked out a few reels containing the coverage in the Berkeley Barb-an acerbic, muckraking paper that had achieved national prominence in the sixties. While the establishment press had not attached any particular significance to the fact that four guns had been seized from three people at Port Chicago-Taylor had been carrying two at the time of his arrest-the Barb viewed this with suspicion. One reporter wrote of rumors (possibly created by himself) that there had been a "mysterious fourth person" at the weapons station, who had handed Taylor his or her gun and walked away from the scene when the federal agents appeared. "A Setup!" the Barb's headlines proclaimed. "An informant in the midst of our courageous brothers and sisters," an editorial insisted.
"Jenny Ruhl, Traitor" was the title of the profile that appeared immediately after she'd testified at the trial. Ruhl was described as "the pampered daughter of rich Orange County pigs, who was too soft to stand with her brother and sister during their persecution." Another reporter, less kind, said she was "seriously fucked up, had probably fed information to the enemy all along." By contrast, Ruhl's obituary some weeks after the trial categorized her as "a martyr to the Movement" and a "victim of bourgeois values." It was also posited that she had been "murdered by the pigs." At that point I decided that the Barb hadn't been able to make up its mind about Ruhl any more than I could.