The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  “Any longer and you get to do the dishes.”

  Since Kate generally did the dishes anyway, this was not much of a threat. She trotted upstairs and locked her gun away, changed into jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and plopped down in front of the desktop.

  Tom Rutland had e-mailed her the promised list of Gilbert’s relatives and the members of the Sherlockian dinner club. She had not checked her e-mail that morning, but found that this had been sent off less than two hours after he had left the Gilbert house the night before.

  Kate printed the document, and mused over the names of the dining club:

  Philip Gilbert

  Wendell Bauer

  Jeannine Cartfield

  Alex Climpson

  Soong Li

  Ian Nicholson

  Geraldine O’Malley

  Rajindra Pandi

  Thomas Rutland

  Johnny Venkatarama

  Alphabetical, but for Philip Gilbert, and unlike Gilbert’s, which stood unadorned at the top, all the other names were followed by two or three phone numbers, home addresses, places of business, a few fax numbers, and, for six of them, e-mail addresses.

  An extraordinarily cooperative lawyer, indeed.

  The other e-mails did not seem to be of any importance, so she closed the computer down and punched Al’s number on the phone.

  “Hey,” she said when he answered. “Lee’s organizing a barbecue, if you guys aren’t doing anything for dinner.”

  “Yeah, she called and invited us, but we’re entertaining some of Jules’s friends. Mostly a boy. How’d it go?”

  “Crime Scene found blood on the back of Gilbert’s armchair—just a little, but they said they’d hurry that one through the lab for us. And I managed to reach most of the neighbors, nothing that jumps out at me from what they had to say—I’ll write it up and give it to you tomorrow. And I have the names of the next of kin. Should I call them tonight? The ex-wife’s on the East Coast.”

  “Kind of late. Tomorrow’s fine, since the lawyer seemed to think none of them were very close to the man.”

  “I’ve got to say, that lawyer of Gilbert’s bothers me. He’s too helpful by far.”

  “A helpful lawyer? Definitely suspicious,” Al growled. “Let’s go arrest him now.”

  “I don’t mean—”

  “Yeah, I know. We’ll do a search on him tomorrow. Still set for the bank in the morning?”

  “I thought I’d go in early and make these calls. Meet me at the office?”

  “Will do.”

  “See you then,” Kate said. “Hi to Jules and the others.”

  “And to Lee.”

  But before going back downstairs, Kate did a quick search on Thomas Rutland.

  He moved along the edges of the Bay Area social elite. He had established himself among the corporate executives of the dot-com boom, which had gone bust but was beginning to show signs of recovery. A cursory glance at the appearances of his name showed that he was a regular at San Francisco social events—one Chronicle photograph showed him at a table before the annual Black and White Ball, laughing with five other formally clad power brokers. The only indication that he was not truly one of the blessed was the eagerness of his laugh, and a slight yearning in the arm that stretched along his companion’s seat back.

  Or perhaps that was Kate’s imagination.

  As she’d thought, Rutland’s legal life dealt with dollars, not with the everyday crimes of drugs, prostitution, and violence. The only sign of conflict she came across in her brief read was the statement that he had divorced three wives, which seemed a bit excessive for a man not yet forty-five.

  The doorbell rang, and she made haste to shut the machine down and join the others.

  Jon Sampson was just coming in the front door when Kate got downstairs, followed by his partner Sione, who cradled their sleepy two-year-old daughter, Lalu, to his chest. Once upon a time, Jon had been Lee’s client, then later her caregiver, in the months after the shooting when she had needed help just to get around. Now he was simply her friend—and Kate’s, which still rather surprised her, considering how grating she had once found his personality. The child in Sione’s arms stirred, spotted Nora, and flung herself in the direction of the older girl, to spend the next two hours glued to Nora’s hip, blond Nora’s little Polynesian shadow. Kate handed Jon a beer and his partner a Pellegrino—Sione was a dancer, in constant battle against his own hearty Polynesian genes.

  Roz Hall arrived, ordained minister and powerbroker, followed by gorgeous sixteen-year-old Mina, who carried a promising-looking bowl; nine-year-old Satch, whose arms were full of baguettes; and an elderly Mutton, whose graying muzzle was stretched around a soggy tennis ball, and who immediately attached himself to the Nora-Lalu duo. Roz swept through the house and out the kitchen door into the yard, calling out instructions to her children and dog, catching up a glass of wine as she passed, greeting every person with a hug or a kiss or both, then taking over a chair that immediately became the center of the party. She greeted those she knew, shook the hands of the two adults she did not, then launched with her usual panache into her own inimitable brand of News of the Day. However, instead of some juicy tidbit concerning the mayor or City Hall, her first announcement was that Mina had driven them over.

  “Well done, Mina,” Jon said. “How many bicyclists did you kill on the way?”

  “Not one,” the girl shot back, “and I missed most of the joggers I was aiming at.”

  “Better luck on the way home,” he commiserated.

  “No Maj?” Lee asked Roz, when Roz’s partner failed to bring up her customary quiet place behind the rest. Maj—pronounced “My,” although her looks were far from Scandanavian—was Mina and Satch’s birth mother, an expert on the human brain, and a woman with a history of devotion to shadowy radical causes.

  “She’s helping out a friend who was in that church in Marin this morning. She’s all right, but shaken, as you can imagine. Maj’s spending the night with her.”

  Talk veered in the direction of the catastrophe, but Lee eyed the kids running around at their feet and interposed firmly, “I’m sure there’ll be more about it in the papers tomorrow.” Obediently, they turned to other things.

  “How’s the new hizzoner, Roz?” Jon asked.

  “Surprising us all,” she admitted. San Francisco’s new mayor had looked so clean-cut and talked so correctly, everyone had assumed that, Democrat or not, he would tug the city back toward the right. Instead, even the most fearful of pundits were admitting to a cautious optimism, Roz among them. Maj had told Lee, who had told Kate, that Roz was spending a considerable amount of time with the man, a task she appeared to find more energizing than frustrating, rare with politicians. The mayor seemed honestly interested in what his city had to tell him, and in Roz, he found a voice both articulate and experienced.

  Before the last election, rumors had made their way around the city that Reverend Roz Hall would cast her hat into the ring. Everyone who was anyone in the city considered themselves a friend of Roz’s; a few of them even were. Kate, too, had considered herself a friend until Roz, and especially Maj, had skirted far too close to felonious acts for a cop’s taste. But that was nine years ago, when Maj was pregnant with Satch. With Roz’s burn scars as a visible reminder of consequences, and the sobering effects of motherhood, Maj had stepped back from the borderlands of activism. Over the last year or two, Kate had begun to relax and see them socially again, brought together by Lee, the children (Mina sometimes babysat Nora), Maj’s apparent reformation, and most of all by Maj’s cancer scare the year before.

  Kate wondered how Roz had kept the scandal out of the newspapers. To this day, few people even suspected that public office would blow up in Roz’s face and peel her family wide open: Kate had never heard so much as a whisper linking Maj with the group of feminist vigilantes that had set the entire city on its ears. But the tie was there, if more philosophical than purely criminal, and since that episode, Roz
had seemed content to play the role of backroom powerhouse in the city’s politics. However, it was beginning to sound as if the new mayor might be Roz’s conduit back into the center of things.

  The fish and vegetable kebabs came off the grill just before six o’clock; two minutes later, the phone in Kate’s pocket began to chirp. She checked the display, and abandoned her place in line. “Sorry,” she murmured, and took the phone into the house to talk to Chris Williams.

  They’d caught the shooter, who in the end turned his gun on himself, but now all available personnel had been brought in to work the two crime scenes. Marin had the church scene, but the scene where the suicide occurred was on park land, and Williams was needed.

  “Look, Chris, don’t worry about Gilbert, I’ve got it.”

  “Gilbert, right, I couldn’t remember his name—I was thinking of him as Pajama Man.” Williams’s voice was hoarse with prolonged tension and fatigue, a state Kate knew all too well. “What do you think?”

  “There’s a good chance he died in his own house, certainly better than the chance he was killed on your turf.” She told him about the missing statue that had prompted the summons for Crime Scene, and went over their preliminary findings with him—hard results would be days, even weeks in coming, but one thing was certain: There had been blood on the back of the chair.

  “Okay,” he said. “My illegal disposal case can wait. Keep me informed, and let me know when you’re going to be in the park; if I’m free I’ll join you.”

  In the meantime, Pajama Man was all theirs.

  FOUR

  First thing Monday morning, Kate and Al were facing their lieutenant across his desk in the fourth-floor Homicide Detail, presenting their review of the case thus far. It was not one of their more satisfactory briefings, since they had no answer to his insistent question of why the Park had given it to San Francisco in the first place. However, the Park CIB had done so, and considering the events of Sunday morning, the option of the SFPD passing it back to Marin did not seem a great idea. He subsided, with grumbles about his own briefing to the captain later that morning, and let them get on with their jobs.

  Back at her cubicle in the cluttered Detail, Kate phoned the numbers Rutland had given her for Gilbert’s known family members. The immediate reaction of the Boston ex-wife, whose name was Corina Ferguson, was “Who?” Her second question, despite Rutland’s assurances that the woman would expect nothing, concerned the inheritance. Kate suggested she contact Gilbert’s lawyer, asked who would be claiming the body, and was not in the least surprised when the woman reacted with distaste.

  “Why would I want to claim Philip’s body?” she asked. “I haven’t even heard from him in years. Let his friends bury him out there.”

  Hawkin, who had been doing his own hunt into the lawyer’s past, spoke up from the adjacent desk. “Only thing I see on Rutland is three divorces and a couple of complaints from families of old people who died and left him generous thank-yous in their wills.”

  “Any indication of the grounds for divorce?”

  “Looks to me like he was marrying up. Not necessarily money, but each woman had a bigger circle of important friends.”

  “Neither of those things is illegal,” Kate commented, although both indicated that Rutland was none too rigid in his personal, or professional, code of ethics. She went back to her calls.

  The Midwestern cousin sounded more sympathetic at first, but it did not take long for Kate to realize that it was feeblemindedness, not sympathy, and that the elderly woman had little or no concept of who Philip Gilbert was. Kate thanked her and gave the woman her number—a process that took nearly ten minutes, between the search for a pencil, a second search for a piece of paper, and the sounds of the woman wandering vaguely through the kitchen opening the refrigerator and filling a glass before she either remembered her caller or noticed the phone off the hook.

  The two Texas nieces were more vigorous than the cousin and more concerned than the ex-wife, but neither volunteered to fly out to San Francisco to claim the body, and both found it difficult to remember when they had last heard from Gilbert apart from his annual Christmas card—no message, just signed. She gave them both her number, then Rutland’s, and finally called the lawyer himself, to tell him that it looked like he’d be in charge of choosing cremation or burial, funeral or memorial service. He didn’t sound very surprised.

  Her next call was to the Medical Examiner’s office, to inform them that there wouldn’t be a family member coming to identify the body, and they should either use Gilbert’s lawyer or send for Gilbert’s dental records. The ME’s assistant she talked to was a little vague about the body, although in the end she was definite that the autopsy wouldn’t be that morning.

  With that out of the way, they could begin to organize their case. Two things were basic here: a time frame and a list of Gilbert’s known associates. While Hawkin was putting together everything they knew about the former, Kate compiled a list from Rutland’s e-mail and started on the names in the ledger they’d found in the safe. Many of those appeared regularly, sometimes in the “bought from” column, other times in the “sold to.” An incestuous little world, that of collectors. Which helped when one of them was killed.

  If one of them was killed: Kate shot a brief glare at the telephone, knowing full well that she and Al might be devoting days of work to lay the ground for a mere illegal body disposal case. If they’d been more pressed, they might be justified in moving a little slowly on the Gilbert case, at least until the Medical Examiner got around to giving them a pronouncement on cause. However, though at times she and Al juggled as many as thirty or forty open homicides, things had been slack recently in the homicide business, and Gilbert’s was the only call they’d caught during the week’s cycle. Pajama Man was in the center of their plate.

  “The neighbor de la Veaga didn’t have any definite times for the afternoon when it came to Gilbert’s car?” Hawkin asked.

  “Just the one in the late morning.”

  “Why don’t people look at their watches?” complained the man who didn’t even wear one.

  According to the ledger, Gilbert had bought the pricey magazine in the first week of October for $139,500. Two columns over, the appraised value notation was: $300,000 (est.)

  “Can you imagine paying a hundred forty thousand dollars for an old magazine?” she asked Hawkin.

  He raised an eyebrow at that, but only for a moment. “Bad as stamp collecting,” he noted, and went back to his papers.

  Kate’s list of Gilbert’s close associates ended up with a little over fifty names on it. She turned to the computer and printed off whatever she could find about the people. A few of them had criminal records, mostly small stuff. Twenty-three of them had websites, which made sense as most of those bought and sold online, and most of those home pages gave some degree of personal information. One of the dinner club members, Jeannine Cartfield, wrote mystery novels, although she hadn’t published in three and a half years. Two of the antiquarian dealers had criminal records more serious than traffic violations or teenage pot possession, although both of those crimes were white-collar: one had sold a forgery, the other had run a scam to sell a painting several times over. She set aside for the moment those over the age of sixty, who might have had a problem carrying Gilbert’s inert body. With them she put most of those living overseas or on the other side of the country. Finally she added the people her gut told her would be a waste of time: Surely a woman named Amanda Blessing who sold limited-production bone china teasets painted with the images of classical mystery characters was an unlikely suspect, even if she was only thirty-two and lived two hours away in Modesto.

  That left her with the nine living members of the dinner club, ten West Coast dealers, six of Gilbert’s closest neighbors, and four others.

  Hawkin saw her sit back to survey her work, and dragged his chair over to her desk.

  “Looks like Friday the twenty-third to Sunday the twenty-fifth ar
e the days we need to look at,” he told her. “The neighbor sees his car come and go on the Friday, although the last time she’s sure about is late morning. He makes various phone calls that afternoon, but only one on Saturday morning, from his cell phone. That follows his general phoning pattern, which is mostly during business hours, with very few calls on the weekends. But on Monday morning, when he tends to make a lot of calls—see, Monday the nineteenth there are fifteen, Monday the twelfth, eighteen—this Monday there are none at all, and four messages left on his machine. And looking at the dates on the mail, I’d guess he wasn’t there to see Saturday’s delivery, although you can never be sure with the Post Office.”

  “Friday and Saturday,” Kate repeated. “That gives us a starting place. Nothing on your list ring any bells?”

  “Nope. Even Rutland came up squeaky clean.”

  “Highly suspicious,” Kate said darkly.

  “You want to get started on these interviews, or take off for the headlands?”

  “Neither—let’s go to the bank first. I’ve got to see what a magazine worth one hundred forty thousand looks like.”

  Philip Gilbert’s bank was a five-minute walk from his front door. Kate and Al presented themselves to the manager, explained the situation, handed him their warrant, and followed him to the vault.

  Inside a protective box, underneath a careful cellophane wrapping, the prized Beeton’s Annual looked like, well, like an old magazine. It was a little smaller than a National Geographic, with a once-garish cover in red and yellow picturing a man at a desk, stretching toward the light hanging over his head. If Kate had seen the thing lying on a hearth, she would not have hesitated to rip it up as a convenient fire starter. She looked at the ledger, which they had brought along for comparison, and it did indeed say under the appraised value column: $300,000 (est).