The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  6 December, typed manuscript, 117 pages, unbound, clean condition, foxed corners; from Paul Kobata; a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, poss. early 20th century.$30.

  The appraised value was left blank, and although he’d made a note on his vault copy, here he had not recorded giving the photocopy to Ian Nicholson.

  She found Kobata late that morning at his current place of business, the basement depths of a shop selling what they claimed were antiques, but looked to her like used furniture. The woman working the desk, whose heavy makeup put a good five years on top of her honest sixty, answered Kate’s inquiry with a jab of the thumb toward the back of the store. Kate picked her way cautiously between the beaten-up iron bedsteads and the chipped paint of various objects with ill-fitting drawers, finally coming across a hole in the floor from which, on closer examination, a set of ill-lit stairs descended. She glanced at the woman for confirmation, and took the lack of response for a yes. Gingerly grasping the rough wood handrail, Kate descended.

  Thumps and a ragged cough led her to a back corner of the dim cellar. When she was near enough to feel that she could catch him if he turned and ran, she called out, “Mr. Kobata?”

  A larger thump followed, a gargling noise that might have been the clearing of a throat, and a hat rose from a heap of unidentifiable objects, with a head attached to it. “Yeah?”

  When she got close enough for her badge to be visible, she held it out, introduced herself, and said, “I’m interested in a typed document you sold to Mr. Philip Gilbert a few weeks ago.”

  “Yeah?” he said again, not appearing too impressed with her badge.

  “Do you know the manuscript I mean?”

  “Sure. Some detective story from the Twenties, a body in the Presidio or something. Never much of one for that kinda shit, myself. Mysteries, you know.”

  Not to get waylaid in literary criticism, Kate pressed on. “I’m interested in where it came from.”

  “Dunno. I picked it up at a book fair in the East Bay, back in, oh, maybe October?”

  “Can you give me a few more details?”

  “San Leandro, I think. A fund-raiser for the library, put on in the high school gym. No, it musta been November, it was tit-freezing cold.”

  “Who did you buy it from?”

  “Who did I buy it from?” Kobata mused. He emerged more fully from the cartons, and walked around to a sturdy wooden box, sitting down on it and taking an old-fashioned tobacco pouch from the pocket of his plaid shirt. He tugged a paper from the packet and began to dribble tobacco down the middle, frowning all the while. “The kid I’m s’posed to be training spotted it, in a loose box with a whole lot of other dreck, magazines mostly, a few prints, the odd newspaper from some event or other—Pearl Harbor headlines, that was one of them.” The leaves on the paper and the memories in his mind arranged themselves slowly, and Kate waited. “The box was marked ‘Curiosities, $5,’ I remember that. A woman selling them. Didn’t know her.” He ran his tongue thoughtfully along the edge of the cigarette paper, then nodded decisively. “Last booth but one along the back. Number fifty-two.”

  Kate had worked with too many witnesses to feel any surprise at the twists of memory that produced a number when the person attached to it was forgotten. “I take it these are reserved spaces, and someone is in charge of assigning them?” she asked.

  “How the hell would I know? I just go and sort through the crap.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Kobata, how did you come to sell it to Mr. Gilbert?”

  “I’d brought him one or two things over the years, I knew he was interested in that Sherlock Holmes crap, thought maybe he’d like this, too.”

  “Was it a Sherlock Holmes story?”

  “Wasn’t a story at all, in the sense of it being published, just a bunch of typing. But it was old, and it never ceases to amaze me what absolute tripe your average collector will hand over cash for because they’re afraid they might miss something. Anyway, it only cost me a phone call to ask, and as it turned out, when he stopped by a couple days later, he bought it.”

  “But you didn’t actually read it?”

  “Like I said, I’m not much for detective stories. I just thought maybe it was something that’d been published in one of the pulps, maybe even by a writer that made something of himself—like Dashiell Hammett or someone, although it wasn’t anything like his stuff, that much I could tell. Hammett lived in San Francisco for a while, you know? But because the story didn’t have a name on it, you’d have to know absolutely everything that was published back then to know when it appeared, and I don’t. Anyway, Gilbert came out, glanced through it, peeled off a twenty and two fives, and had me sign and date his receipt. Four minutes, start to finish.”

  “Did he say anything in particular about it?”

  “Not much. Just asked me where I’d got it, and said that it would be an amusing addition to his collection, something like that. I’d been hoping to make maybe ten bucks, but in the end, I asked thirty and kicked myself when he paid it so fast.” He shook his head, and stood up. “Shoulda asked fifty.”

  IT took half a dozen phone calls, beginning with the San Leandro library and working through several of its book fair volunteers, before Kate could identify the date of the book fair as November 15, and the seller of “curiosities” in space 52 as Magnolia Brook. She drove across the Bay Bridge to speak with her.

  Magnolia’s Antiquities was a traveling business run out of its owner’s home, a dark-shingled 1930s building on the north side of College Avenue in Berkeley. A teenage girl wearing zebra-striped pajamas and holding a wad of tissues to her red nose answered the bell, and in a gravelly voice directed Kate to the garage around the side of the house.

  She found the garage set back from the street along a narrow drive, a tidy structure with shingles that matched the house. It had to be a rarity, Kate thought, to find a freestanding garage that hadn’t been converted into living quarters and rented to students. Still, it looked as if the woman was making good use of the space.

  “Ms. Brook?”

  Magnolia Brook was oddly suited to her name, being large, blowsy, colorful, and given to the habit of wide, loose gestures. The only thing that wasn’t magnolia-like was her complexion, which had seen far too much sunshine ever again to be luminously pallid.

  “Yes, you’re the Inspector?”

  “Kate Martinelli,” Kate agreed, showing her badge.

  “What can I do for you, Inspector Martinelli? I hope you don’t mind talking while I work, I’ve got a ton of stuff to do this afternoon.”

  If the other option was going inside to breathe the teenager’s germs, Kate was happy to be in the open air. “This is fine,” she replied. “I’m interested in an item you sold during the San Leandro book fair last November.”

  Ms. Brook looked up sharply from a box of tattered books. “That again? Why is everyone so interested in that manuscript? Is there something illegal about it? Is it stolen merchandise or something?”

  It was Kate’s turn to look startled. “Was someone else here asking about it?”

  “Yes, two or three weeks after the book fair, a fellow came asking about it. Tall, thin man with longish hair and a big nose.” Philip Gilbert. “He asked me to write out how I got it, its condition when I first saw it, what I did with it, all that. Then I had to sign and date it. He gave me twenty-five dollars for the statement, which was more than I’d sold the thing for in the first place, so I was happy to do it. Honest, I don’t deal in stolen merchandise.”

  “No, of course not, no one thinks you do. Look, just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, this is a sort of short story, typed, about a hundred pages?”

  “That’s right, a detective story. It wasn’t signed or even dated, so I figured it wasn’t worth much.”

  “You had it in a box marked ‘Curiosities’ and sold it to a San Francisco dealer named Kobata for five dollars?”

  “That’s right,” she said, and asked again, “Why are you all so inte
rested?”

  “I can’t speak for your other visitor, but as for me, the thing has come up in an investigation, and we need to clear up where it came from.”

  “It was just a story. Mildly amusing, but nothing special—still, I thought maybe someone would buy it, so I stuck it in the box. And they did. When you say it came up, in what way? Don’t tell me it was actually worth something?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Kate replied honestly.

  “It’s every dealer’s nightmare, that some absolute gem passes through their hands unnoticed. What was it you wanted to know about it?”

  “Did you read it?”

  “I did, mostly to make sure all the pages were there and that it wasn’t pornographic. In the end, I enjoyed the thing.”

  “I was told it was a Sherlock Holmes story.”

  “Was it? No, I don’t think so. I’d have remembered that. About an English detective, yes, probably patterned on Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “One of my customers, as much a friend as a customer I suppose, was hired to do some work on a house in San Francisco, a really lovely old, pre-Earthquake place in Pacific Heights. He came across a whole pile of stuff that at some point had been closed up inside the attic—you know how it is, someone slaps wallpaper over a door and forgets it’s there. But to the owner’s disappointment, there weren’t any particular treasures, and after she’d gone through and taken out the things she liked, she had him haul the rest of it away. He offered the stuff to me, and I gave him a hundred dollars for the lot. Some of it really was junk, I even ended up throwing a couple bags of stuff out, but a few things were worth troubling over. I made twice what I’d paid him off two old dolls that I cleaned up and sold to a collector I know, sent an old typewriter and an embroidered footstool to an antiques dealer friend in Carmel—it’s all in who you know, this business. The rest I put in my own stock. Most of the books went at the San Leandro sale.”

  “This was the only manuscript?”

  “The only one. There were some old garden journals, handwritten, that followed the development of the house’s landscaping. And a few magazines from the 1920s, one of those had an F. Scott Fitzgerald story in it, as I remember. That brought a few dollars. But as I say, the rest of it was junk. Typical attic debris—it’s one of life’s mysteries, why people save the stuff they do.”

  “I’d like the name of the person you got the things from,” Kate asked.

  “Sure, I’ve got his number in the house. Come on in.”

  Kate followed Brook to the back door, and hovered in the clear air while she pawed through a drawer near the telephone, found an address book, and copied down a name and number on a card that she handed to Kate. “He’s a nice guy, not the brightest bulb in the box, but honest down to his toes. Was there anything else?”

  “Not right now, thank you. Give me a call if you think of anything else,” Kate said, handing over her own card.

  “You don’t want the name of my friend in Carmel, too?”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “I don’t know, but everything else you’ve asked I already told the man. I thought you might want Tessie’s number, as well.”

  “Okay, maybe you should give it to me,” Kate said, and watched her write down the phone number, this time from memory.

  She thanked the woman, and walked thoughtfully back up the driveway to the street. What had Gilbert been after, and why had he wanted to speak with the Carmel dealer? Just complete thoroughness?

  She opened her cell phone and called both numbers; the Carmel shop was closed but invited her to leave a message, the other number answered, barely audible over a cacophony of hammers.

  The nice, dim, honest-to-his-toes handyman that Kate tracked down to the building site told essentially the same story that Magnolia had given. And back across the Bay Bridge just in front of the rush-hour traffic, the owner of the Pacific Heights house came to the door with a laden paint roller in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Once she had gotten rid of the caller and the paint roller, she invited Kate inside the plastic-draped rooms and affirmed the details of what Kate had already learned: She and her handyman had been stripping wallpaper early last fall when they’d come across an unexpected access door to the attic. He had retrieved his longer ladder and they had gone up, with flashlights, hoping to find, if not treasure, then at least some usable space under the eaves. The head space had proved too low and the floor joists too small to make it economic, but as storage space it was useful, once the odds and ends left by former owners had been cleared away.

  Kate asked about those odds and ends. The woman’s eyes went up in thought. “Two nice old metal bed frames, simple but attractive, that we sent down to be stripped and repainted. Half a dozen watercolors, none of them worth anything but they were nice period pieces, once they were cleaned and rematted. There were some old photographs that were too badly faded by the heat and damp to bother restoring, but they were mounted in really lovely silver frames, which polished up beautifully. The rest of it was just junk—old books and magazines, a massive old typewriter, three empty hatboxes.”

  She didn’t remember the manuscript, except in general terms, and mostly because she, as Magnolia Brook before her, had received a visit from a gentleman with thin hair and a long nose, in the first part of December.

  He had left here, too, with a signed statement concerning the discovery of the typescript.

  Finally, just as Kate was sliding the key into the car’s ignition, her cell phone rang. The Carmel antiques dealer knew exactly the man Kate was talking about, he’d been to her shop about two months earlier. What did he want? Why, the typewriter, of course. And no she didn’t still have it, not exactly.

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Kate asked.

  “You see, your man called just after he’d talked to Maggie Brook, to see if I still had the machine and if I’d cleaned it up yet, which I had, and I hadn’t—I mean, I had it, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it, I’d only had it two or three weeks. Maybe a little longer, but still, fall’s a busy time, and I figured I’d get around to it after Christmas when the tourists were gone.”

  Kate interrupted the flow with a question. “Can you remember just when this was?”

  “It was a Tuesday, and I’m sure it was December. I know it was a Tuesday because I’m closed Monday and Tuesday, and he’d left a message on my day off. But which Tuesday? Oh yes, I know. I was putting up my Christmas decorations, which I always do the first week after Thanksgiving, but I’d had that terrible flu that was going around over Thanksgiving, just knocked me out for two weeks, so it wasn’t until the first part of December that I could manage it. Many of the shops put up their Christmas things before Thanksgiving, so as to encourage the shoppers on the day after, but it just seems to me that Thanksgiving decorations get short shrift, and they’re beautiful on their own, the cornucopias and the gourds and all, that I hate to hurry them out the door just to jolly customers along into thinking about gift giving. Don’t you agree?”

  “Er, yes. So the first Tuesday in December. That would have been, let’s see, the second of December?”

  “No, that’s too early, I was sick for a good two weeks. It must have been the following week. The ninth, would that be? Anyway, I went in that Tuesday to get a start on the Christmas tree and found the message from him, and when I called him back he asked me if I had the machine that Maggie had sold me, and I said yes, and he said he wanted it in its current condition—didn’t ask first how much I wanted for it, which is always a good sign, you know? Just that he wanted it as it was, and then he sort of remembered and asked how much I wanted. So I told him a hundred dollars, although I probably would have taken forty, and he said he’d give me a hundred fifty dollars for it if it was in its original condition, and he’d come down then and there. But I knew he was in Berkeley because he told me he’d just left Maggie’s house and it was four-thirty and he’d hit all that traf
fic and I was still tired because of the flu and I wasn’t about to wait around for him at the shop when my cats were used to eating at six, so I told him to come in the morning. And at first he didn’t want to, but then he sort of seemed to think of something and he changed his mind and he asked me what time I opened and I told him and then he asked if there was a secure storage place nearby. Which there is, I use it sometimes when I have something big or the shop is getting crowded.

  “But anyway, long story short, there he was waiting on the sidewalk when I came to open the next morning, nice fellow, good clothes, tall and kind of old-fashioned for his age, you know, actually tipped his hat at me—actually wore a hat, come to that, men don’t tend to these days. I took him to the back room and showed him the typewriter, all grubby and a little rusty but not too bad, just a couple of the keys were sticking, and anyway, who uses the things these days, they’re just for decoration and it would clean up nice enough for show. But he takes off his hat and coat and sets his briefcase on this nice étagère I picked up in Lodi last fall and pops it open, and whips out a pair of white cotton gloves and a package of typing paper. He puts on the gloves and feeds a sheet of paper into the machine and starts to type, although of course the thing is practically frozen solid and the ribbon falls to shreds as soon as the first key hits it.

  “But that doesn’t seem to bother him a bit. He’s actually humming under his breath as he goes back into the briefcase and pulls out a typing ribbon—the real thing, an actual ribbon. The spools don’t fit, of course, so he very carefully snips the old ribbon with a pair of scissors he’s brought and winds a length of the new stuff directly over it on the spools, and pulls the keys back and forth for a while with his fingers to loosen them up and then rattles off half a page of ‘quick brown dog jumps over the lazy fox,’ or anyway he would’ve rattled it off if the keys didn’t stick so much, but he gets a few lines and pulls it out of the machine and goes back into his briefcase again and pulls out a folder. In it he’s got a page of typing, looks like a photocopy, and some blowups of the same page. And he takes this magnifying glass out of the briefcase and bends over the two pages, the one he brought and the one he’s just done—looks like some sort of Sherlock Holmes there, you know, without the deerstalker cap—and compares the two. And then he sits back with this giant grin on his face—which you know, seeing his face originally you wouldn’t have thought he could look like that, like a kid you’d handed the keys to a candy store—and says that if it wasn’t impolite he’d kiss me, for my impeccable preservation of this gorgeous machine. That’s exactly what he said, my ‘impeccable preservation of this gorgeous machine,’ even though his white gloves were nearly black with the dirt and ink and the bits of disintegrating ribbon.