The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  “So I ask him if he wants to buy the machine and he says yes real fast, but, he says, what I really want is for you to safeguard it for me.

  “‘You want to leave it here?’ I ask him, but he sort of looks around—the back of the store isn’t really very tidy, I admit—and he says that it would be better if we could transfer it to the storage facility I mentioned and lock it up. And he’d pay for it all, he says, and pay me for my trouble.

  “I said I’d take it down and put it into the storage room I rent, but he said he’d really rather have the typewriter in a room to itself. Which is pretty strange, to rent a place and just have a typewriter in it, but it was his money so I said I guess it was okay, I’d take care of it that evening.

  “But he wanted me to do it then and there. I told him I had a shop to run and no help until the afternoon, and with that he pulls out a wallet and starts peeling off fifty-dollar bills. One, two, three, four. We got to six of them, not that I was aiming at three hundred dollars, it just took me that long to realize what was going on, and I told him okay, I’d close the shop and go to the storage place right then.

  “Then he brings out this clean white sheet he’s got folded up in his case and wraps the machine in it. I stuck a note on the door saying I’d be back and he carried the machine out to the car for me. We stopped at the hardware store so I could buy a padlock—he went in with me, paid for the most expensive lock they had—and went to the place. I filled out the papers, rather than him, and he insisted on putting my name on it, even though it was him who paid for the first six months’rent. We drove around to the number we were given, he took the typewriter inside, and left it, still in its sheet, in the back of the room. He pulled down the door, had me put the lock in the door—even made me get the thing out of its package, which is always such a battle, don’t you think? Those awful plastic shrouds they seal everything into these days. I fought with it for a while and tried to hand it to him, but he wouldn’t touch it, just gave me his pocketknife and had me saw the package open.

  “Then he made me keep both the keys, and when we went back to my shop, he peeled off two more fifty-dollar bills and made me write out everything we’d done since he walked into the shop that morning. Oh, yes, and I signed the page he’d typed on the machine earlier. And then he put the pages into an oversized envelope with some papers in it, and had me drop the keys in, then seal it, and I signed that, too. Across the sealed flap, with the date and even the time.

  “Then he paid for the typewriter itself with a credit card, gave me his business card, thanked me, and left. Oh, and he asked me to recommend a good local bank. Then he left, and that’s the last I’ve seen of him. Far as I know, the typewriter’s still sitting there in lonely splendor. I hope he hasn’t been running a meth lab in the storage facility or something?”

  The casual reference to everyday crime on top of the winding narrative of a Sherlockian’s antics came as a bit of a jolt, but Kate told the woman that, as far as she knew, no meth lab was suspected. She asked for the name of the storage facility and the bank, gave her own phone number in return, and hung up.

  What Gilbert was doing sounded remarkably like a police chain of evidence record, down to his refusal to touch the package containing the keys, lest someone, somewhere accuse him of tampering with evidence. And Kate was not surprised when the Carmel bank told her that the safe-deposit box in the name of Philip Gilbert had not been visited since it had been rented on Wednesday, the tenth of December. She’d bet that it contained not only the keys, but all the statements he’d collected along the way.

  So. Gilbert had bought the typescript from Paul Kobata on December sixth, taken it home and read it, seen its potential value, and set off to establish its provenance. He had followed the same trail that Kate had, nearly two months later, from Kobata to Maggie Brook back to the owner of the remodeled house in Pacific Heights, and then he had gone Kate one better, laying claim to a machine that, she was relatively certain, would prove to have been the machine on which the story had been typed. Certainly, Gilbert had thought the type identical, otherwise he would have walked off and left it to Tessie’s Antiques.

  He had locked the machine away, and put its keys and the related evidence in a bank. No doubt he had taken care to establish the time of day he had rented the box, to show that he would not have had time, between leaving Tessie’s Antiques and entering the bank, to make a copy of the key.

  A huge effort, a major expense (peeling off those fifty-dollar bills to buy Tessie’s time). For what?

  The only answer could be, to establish provenance. Or if not that, at least to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that it could not have been manufactured by Philip Gilbert. Each set of hands the story had passed through had signed a statement bearing witness to its passage; the machine on which it was typed had been similarly nailed down.

  Clearly, to Philip Gilbert, the story with the unlikely beginning had been of enormous importance, from the moment he’d laid eyes on it.

  Still behind the wheel of the parked car, Kate took out her cell phone and called Al. He answered on the second ring.

  “Hey,” she said. “You come up with anything?”

  “A hell of a lot of fresh air and a whole lot of nothing. One woman was up with her baby and might have heard a car go by in the middle of the night, but she couldn’t swear whether it was Friday or Saturday night.”

  “Where was she?”

  “She lives in one of those houses along the road between the visitor’s center and the tunnel.”

  “Right on the road.”

  “Yeah, but it was raining and there was a bit of wind, so she couldn’t be sure.”

  “Was it raining both nights?”

  “A little bit Friday night, then it cleared most of Saturday, but it started raining seriously Saturday night, then continued Sunday morning and the whole rest of the week.”

  “Helpful.”

  “What about you?”

  She outlined her day’s activities, considerably more productive than his own.

  “You’ve got the story?” he asked at the end of it.

  “I let Nicholson make me a copy. I didn’t see that we needed the exact one Gilbert made for him, and he was very reluctant to give it up. Looked to me like the same exact thing that’s in Gilbert’s safe-deposit box. I thought I’d swing by the bank on my way home and check.”

  “Other than that, you’re finished for the day?”

  “More or less. I’ll take a look at the story tonight.”

  “Good. The autopsy’s first thing tomorrow. I may be working at home if you need me, or call the cell.”

  Kate switched off the phone and turned the car’s key, this time without interruption. The bank was shut to customers, although by tapping on the window with her badge, she summoned a gatekeeper who let her in. It was the work of two minutes to compare the old typescript with the photocopy Nicholson had given her, but when a dozen randomly chosen pages matched the original exactly, she was satisfied.

  At last, she pointed the car’s nose toward home, and invited her family out to dinner.

  Later that night, after sushi, after bath, toothbrushing, and bedtime stories, Kate retrieved the folder Nicholson had given her and settled into one of the living room chairs to look it over. Before she had done more than remove the clip, Lee stuck her head in and asked, “You want a cup of tea?”

  “Uh, sure. I’ll make it.”

  “You just sat down. I’ll get it.”

  Some faint edge in Lee’s voice advised Kate not to press the matter, so she subsided, with a meek “Thanks, hon.”

  Kate could tell that Lee had had a long day, because she was using the cane. The doctors said that Lee would always have problems with her balance, but she’d never once fallen while carrying Nora, and hadn’t fallen on her own in months.

  However, one of the rules was that Kate did not offer to help for everyday things like carrying a single bag of groceries in from the car or fetching a book from
the next room. Or bringing cups of tea. Even now, ten years after a bitter and frightening separation that lasted several long and dreary months, when Lee had gone away to test her own strengths and boundaries, Kate regularly found herself biting her tongue, reminding herself that Lee needed to do things for herself.

  Allowances were made. The mugs Lee chose from the shelf were generally those with deep handles, suitable for steady carrying even when held two to a hand. And the tea when it came would be nowhere near the top of the cup, since the two-in-one-hand carry combined with the lurch of the cane tended to dribble liquids across the floor. Such things were classed with sensible precautions such as a baby stroller sturdy enough to take some leaning on, a car with automatic transmission, and a walk-in shower level with the floor: things decided upon, then forgotten.

  Lee put the cups onto the low table and lowered herself onto the sofa, stifling a small grunt.

  “Hard day?” Kate asked.

  “I need to start swimming again.”

  And not walking two miles round trip to the park, Kate did not say aloud. “Good idea. Maybe we could find a time that worked for both of us—I’d like to swim, too.”

  “Your schedule being so amenable to regular dates. Would you shove my laptop over here? Thanks.”

  Lee stretched her legs out on the sofa and settled the machine onto her lap. Kate had a brief picture of the tall, big-nosed Philip Gilbert bent over an ancient typewriter, pounding stiff-fingered at its round black keys—Sitting down to that monstrosity of a typewriter downstairs and pounding out a letter, as Rutland had described it. Kate heard the sleek little machine in Lee’s lap whine as it woke up, and shook her head in amusement.

  Lee took a sip of her twig tea and glanced at Kate’s sheaf of papers. “What’s that?”

  “I am,” Kate told her, “‘working the weird.’”

  “Sorry?”

  “Oh, nothing, just something Jules told Al. You know that case of the dead Sherlockian?”

  “It is a great title.”

  “I’ll save it for my memoirs. Anyway, the guy had recently got his hands on what may or may not have been a valuable manuscript, that may or may not be a lost Sherlock Holmes story, which I am told may or may not hold some similarities to how the body was actually found. So I need to look it over.”

  “One thing I love about your job, you deal with so much hard reality.”

  “What may or may not be hard reality,” Kate said.

  While she waited for the machine to find its niche in the household wireless system—another, recent, concession to comfort, freeing her from the upstairs desktop—Lee glanced over at the crisp white paper in Kate’s hands. “That paper’s not from the Twenties,” she stated.

  “This is a photocopy of a photocopy. The original’s in a bank vault, along with a ton of other ridiculously valuable junk. Collectors,” she said with a shrug.

  Lee stared absently into the screen. “A lost Sherlock Holmes story.”

  “That’s what I’m told,” Kate agreed. She kicked off her shoes and put her stockinged feet up on the table.

  “I heard something about that, not too long ago. Where was it?”

  But Kate could only shake her head. In a minute, Lee turned to the keyboard, and Kate settled to her reading, but before she had reached the end of the first page, Lee interrupted. “Got it. It was a little piece in the Chron, Leah Garchik’s column about three weeks ago.”

  “Leah Garchik. The gossip columnist?”

  “She’s a friend of Roz’s, often sticks things in there about her or Maj.”

  “And she had something about this story?”

  “Well, about a story. Look.”

  She passed Kate the laptop. The screen showed an archived column of the San Francisco Chronicle from, as Lee had said, the middle of the previous month. The third paragraph read:

  Fans of Sherlock Holmes are abuzz (sorry!) over a rumor that a previously unknown story about the detective has surfaced right here in San Francisco. I’m told that Arthur Conan Doyle spent a few days in the City back in the Twenties, but came away unimpressed. Seems he preferred LA, where his “message” of Spiritualism was more enthusiastically embraced. Isn’t it good to know things haven’t changed much? No one I could find knows anything about the rumor, but while I’m on holiday, I’ll keep my magnifying glass and deerstalker cap out, just in case.

  Kate handed the machine back to Lee. “Thanks, I’ll look into it,” she said, took a swallow of tea, and opened the manuscript.

  SEVEN

  The mind is a machine ill suited to desuetude. The occasional holiday is all very well, but without the oil of challenge and the heat generated by effort, the mind rusts and seizes and is unavailable when needed.

  I found myself in San Francisco one spring evening, my travelling companion temporarily about other business and my mind at a loss for a load to carry. Recent days had seen the successful conclusion of a case not without interest, but after forty-eight hours of solitary leisure, a dangerous restlessness had begun to set in, so I cast about for other forms of stimulation to see me through the days ahead.

  In the brief time I had been in this brash city on the Pacific, I had come to appreciate its idiosyncrasies and, despite its youth, its powerful sense of personality. A remarkably diverse metropolis, with nearly three-quarters of its residents born elsewhere, it seemed less a part of these United States than a country unto itself. It claimed, only half-humorously, its own emperor, a poor madman who had wandered the streets during the previous century; it had faced the worst fire any modern city had ever known and had built anew within a decade; its port linked the disparate parts of the world more than any other I had seen; it even chose which federal mandates it should apply to itself, so that the Volstead Act that was currently shredding the social orders of the rest of the nation went all but unacknowledged in San Francisco, where the prohibition of alcohol was given merely token recognition in restaurants and public houses alike: I had myself seen the chief of police with a glass of wine in his hand. The main effect of Prohibition that I had found was in the reduction of quality, not quantity.

  I decided that, in keeping with my long-held belief that matriculation in the university of life ends only with the great final lesson, my education might benefit by an exploration of this remarkable city of the future. Not, however, the sort of exploration available to me by light of day--I had already spent more time than I cared playing the tourist. Thus, as evening fell I took up my overcoat against the night’s mists and my stick against any possible assailant, and walked out of the doors of my hotel.

  The city had come far from its days of being little more than a polite adjunct to the roaring Barbary Coast. The humorously named Maiden Lane, once the centre of bawdy entertainments, was now a staid enclave of the fashion industry, and these days, few men woke after a night out on the town to find themselves on a ship bound for Shanghai.

  Still, though the Barbary Coast might have been shut down and the Chinese district cleansed of its more noxious corners, this remained, I had been assured, a ‘wide open town’.

  In the interest of research, then, I went to investigate its self-professed openness.

  In San Francisco, those wishing the less salubrious quarters keep away from the hills and make for the low-lying ground. I had been in the city long enough to know the general direction, and made my way out of the commercial centre towards Market Street, and beyond. Within ten minutes I had found what I was looking for, paid a twenty-five-cent ‘membership fee’, ordered an overpriced glass of a beverage that in better times would have been swilled around the floor with a string-mop, and soon had found my evening’s guide.

  My guide introduced himself by a surreptitious insinuation of his fingers into my pocket. When I had his wrist firmly locked between my own fingers, I said without turning around, ‘I see that the New World pickpockets have yet to attain the skill of their London brothers. Or perhaps I have simply come across an incompetent.’


  Give the lad credit, he did not attempt to struggle against my grip, feeling no doubt the threat of broken bones in the particular arrangement of my finger-tips. Actually, I should admit that ‘incompetent’ was something of an exaggeration, a word chosen more for effect than accuracy. The boy was good enough for most purposes, just not good enough to lift the contents of my pocket. Particularly not in a place where I had half expected something of the sort.

  I twisted his arm in a manner that forced him to circle around me, and nodded at the chair behind him. ‘Do sit down,’ I suggested firmly.

  He hesitated, and I bent my restraining hand by way of encouragement. When he was seated, I let go.

  ‘May I buy you a drink?’ I asked him.

  He did not immediately bolt for the door, as nine of ten young men in his position would do. He rubbed at his wrist, then sat back in his chair, eyeing me curiously.

  Returning the favour, I saw a slim young man of perhaps nineteen or twenty, dressed in the compensatory fashion of one who has more sense of style than means of paying for it: quiet and slightly threadbare coat over flamboyant collar, waistcoat, and cravat, freshly polished shoes that had been cut for some other man’s feet, quality trousers slightly bunched at the waist, with knees on the edge of shiny and cuff-edges that had worn through and been neatly turned up. The whole was put together as if to say that if he couldn’t dress well, he would dress with panache. His blond hair (in need of a trim) was sleeked back over his head, and had not known a hat since it was last combed; his cheeks were freshly shaved, albeit by his own hand and with an inadequate looking-glass, or perhaps simply inadequate light; his nails were clean and well trimmed; his teeth had regular acquaintance with a brush and tooth-powder.