The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  “The Farmer’s Market?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Cartfield laughed with pleasure, and while they waited for their drinks, they talked about the process of the renovations, the enormous liberation of the waterfront following the 1989 quake and its attendant removal of the elevated freeway, and the plans for the entire perimeter of the city.

  With drinks in front of them, talk turned from Cartfield’s business to Kate’s. She took her notebook from her pocket, setting it out of view on her lap.

  “As you know, I’m interviewing Philip Gilbert’s friends and associates about what was going on in his life before he died. Primarily, this manuscript that Ian Nicholson was talking about the other night seems to have played a large part in Philip’s life, toward the end.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Did he give you a copy?”

  “Who, Ian? Or Philip? Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said with a shake of the head. “Nobody’s given me the story.”

  Kate glanced down, as if consulting the blank page of her notebook. “You acted as co-host at Philip’s party in January.”

  “I helped him cook,” she corrected, adding by way of explanation, “I am a very good cook.”

  “He didn’t talk to you about the story?”

  “No.”

  “And we noticed that he phoned you on the morning of January the twenty-third. What was that call concerning?”

  Cartfield’s eyes went out of focus for a moment while she conducted an internal search, then they came back to Kate’s. “You’re right, he called about the next meeting. I’m the secretary this year, he wanted to schedule ten minutes during the February meeting for an announcement. I guess we know what that was about, don’t we?” she said, her mouth quirked in a painful smile.

  “You went to college with Philip, is that right?”

  “University, yes. We were both at the University of London in the early seventies, Philip reading lit and I was in economics. I hadn’t seen him in nearly ten years when one day out of the blue he phoned to say that he’d just moved to town and did I want to help put together a Sherlockian dinner group? There was a Sherlockian group, of course, but he wanted to concentrate on the food more than they did. And I think he liked being in charge. No, correct that: I know he liked being in charge.”

  “A benevolent autocrat,” Kate suggested.

  “Always,” Cartfield said, which Kate gathered meant she agreed with both elements of the description.

  “Can you tell me what you were doing on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of January?”

  Cartfield reached into her pocket and drew out her PDA. She glanced up and said, “Electronic life preserver,” then tapped at the keys and screen for a minute. “Oh, right. I was here on the Friday. Saturday I was up in Calistoga with a couple of friends, we had a weekend baking out the poisons in the mud baths during the day and restoring the poisons at night.”

  Kate took the details of the friends’ names and numbers, although she did not imagine she would find any conflicts in the information. This was not a woman who would casually mislead the police. She set her closed notebook on the table, as if indicating that she was now off duty, and spooned some foam from her cup.

  “I’ve been told that you and Philip Gilbert were close.”

  “We were friends, although I don’t know about close. Philip lived in his own world, and allowed the rest of us to visit sometimes.”

  “You were lovers?”

  Cartfield’s head came up sharply, not in defense but in surprise. “Lovers? Where on earth did you hear that? No, we weren’t lovers.”

  “Did he have any lovers?”

  “I told you, Inspector, we weren’t exactly close. His love life wasn’t something Philip would talk about.”

  “Oh come on now, you’ve known the man for thirty years and you don’t know who he shared his bed with?”

  “I always thought Philip regarded sex as a mildly distasteful and rather messy pastime, best avoided by civilized people. Somewhat like Holmes in that regard, I’d say.”

  “So he was a virgin?”

  “No, oh no. In London days he was a party boy, but that was a very long time ago.”

  “Did he party with girls or boys?” Kate pressed.

  “Oh, both, for sure.”

  “He was bisexual?”

  “A little ahead of his time, you know—the Seventies were conservative when it came to anything but number of partners. But yes, he, as the saying goes, swung both ways.”

  “Would you say he was the same now?”

  “I wouldn’t say anything about how he was since he moved here, he was a very different person. However,” she said thoughtfully, “I have noticed since then that Philip’s kind of experimental bisexuality is often the sign of a young person on the road away from being hetero.” She looked surprised at what she had said, and eyed her empty glass accusingly.

  “So you’d say Philip was gay?”

  “I’d say there was a good chance. Although whether he practiced or whether it was as theoretical as a priest’s, that I couldn’t tell you.”

  And that was all Jeannine Cartfield had to say on the matter.

  KATE caught a streetcar down Market for a few blocks, enjoying the feel of being a tourist in her own town, then walked over to the Hall of Justice. Al was still there, his ear glued to a phone, and she waved and picked up a phone of her own. She located the number in the Gilbert case file; luckily, the woman was home.

  Corina Ferguson had been married to Philip Gilbert for just under two years in the mid-1970s, when the young man came back from London and enrolled in a master’s program at Harvard. Ferguson’s own degree was from the University of Massachusetts, so they had probably not met in one of his lit classes, but her family lived in Boston, and she did still.

  She came on the line with irritation clear in her New England accents. The irritation did not fade when Kate had identified herself.

  “Couldn’t you call at a more reasonable hour?” she demanded. “I have guests here.”

  “Just a brief question, Ms. Ferguson.”

  “Oh, well, go ahead.”

  “Can you tell me why you and Philip divorced?”

  “What—my good woman, that takes some nerve—”

  Kate broke into the protests with the practiced intonation of a cop who has heard it all and been impressed by none of it. “Ma’am, please, if you could just answer the question. It has to do with a lead I’m following up regarding his murder.”

  The harsh final word silenced the Boston voice for a moment; then, “‘A lead.’ Was Philip…You hear about these things, and in San Francisco…Was it…I hope it wasn’t one of those horrible gay bashings?”

  Bingo. “Why do you ask that, Ms. Ferguson? Was Philip gay when you knew him?”

  “No! I mean, why would I have married him if…But when you ask that question and he’s dead, you said he was murdered, I thought…And it’s San Francisco…” Kate continued to say nothing to rescue the woman, just kept quiet. “No, he wasn’t gay.” Kate still said nothing; reluctantly, the woman went on. “Although, I have to say, since then, I have occasionally wondered. I mean, he was sweet, but the marriage, it wasn’t really much in the bed department.” She tried out a laugh, which fell flat, and then she sighed. “So I wondered, you know? You do, after all, even after all those years. And then six or seven years ago a friend mentioned they’d seen him in a restaurant somewhere, with an actor. Which made me think that maybe…Anyway, I never knew, but I hope he was happy. Happier than he was with me, anyway.”

  Mentally, Kate reviewed the epitaphs she had been collecting for Philip Gilbert, and found that of the long-estranged ex-wife surprisingly touching.

  When Hawkin got off the phone, she told him about the conversations she’d had with two of the women in Gilbert’s life. He sat back with his hands locked over his stomach, and shook his head in wonder. “A closeted gay in San Francisco? Who’d have thunk it?” />
  “Well, Louisa Brancusi did say he was old-fashioned. What about your shadowy brother?”

  “We were right, he’s an ex-con name of Wayne Flanders. Not on parole, he served his whole time. Seventeen and a half years. Grand theft auto, felony drunk driving, felony manslaughter.”

  “Got drunk, stole a car, killed someone,” Kate translated.

  “More borrowed than stole, it belonged to a friend of his. And the driver of the other car was drunk, too, so it wasn’t like old Wayne killed some family of six on their way to a church picnic.”

  “But still.”

  “And no parole because he refused to apply. Found Jesus in prison and thought he ought to serve his full time.”

  “Think we need to roust him?”

  “I don’t know. I’m tempted to let it go for now.”

  “I agree. Okay, so what have we got over the weekend?”

  “You’ve got a trip to Point Reyes with your family. All weekend. You’re going to relax and have fun and freeze to death on the beach.”

  “Look, I can run back for a few hours on Saturday afternoon if you think—”

  “If I drag you away, Lee will flay me alive.”

  “Yeah, probably,” she admitted. “But only when she’s finished with me.”

  “I think it’s not a bad thing to let everyone settle down for a couple of days. Let ’em begin to relax and we can hit them again Monday. And some of the lab results should start to come in, too. That should give us a new set of questions to work with.”

  “I hate weekends,” she grumbled.

  “No you don’t. Weekends are our friends. Weekends keep us from going up in flames. Weekends keep our marriages from going up in flames. Weekends keep—”

  “Right, okay, say no more, I’m off, and the world can just deal with its own problems. See you Monday.”

  “Have a great time. Bring me a seashell. And do not think about the case. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, boss,” she said. She slapped her things together, looked around as if she’d forgotten something, and strode out the door. In ten seconds, her head was back in the room.

  “Um, Al? Lee will probably insist that I leave my cell phone home. But we’ll have hers with us. You do know that number, don’t you?”

  NINETEEN

  At a quite ridiculously early hour on Saturday morning, Kate came awake, thinking of buff paper.

  After staring up at the darkness for the better part of half an hour, she gave up on sleep, grabbing whatever clothes she could lay hands on without opening drawers and tiptoeing downstairs with them. She put on yesterday’s garments in the living room, lit only by the streetlight down the block, let herself silently out of the house, and drove away. She stopped to buy a takeaway latte and a large bag of pastries from an early-hours bakery, and in the absence of legal parking, pulled across a driveway down the street from the Gilbert house, leaving a note with her cell phone number displayed under the wiper blade.

  The house was still, the air dead and damp after two weeks of emptiness. She went upstairs to the third floor, set her cup on Gilbert’s desk, and pulled the used ream of buff paper from the shelf under the printer. She sat in the chair across from Gilbert’s—she was now convinced that he had not died there, but still—and began to count.

  Her cup was empty and her fingers weary by the time she reached274. She made a note of the number, opened the drawer of the printer and removed the buff pages still in there, and counted them as well. She added those 22 pages to the other, subtracted the resultant 296 from the original 1,000 sheets making up two reams of paper, came up with 704 sheets, printed off between the purchase of the paper Friday morning and Gilbert’s death. She laboriously divided those sheets by 118, the number of pages of the short story. Four pages short of six complete copies of the story, which, considering that a ream was not necessarily an exact count and her fingers might have missed a page or two, sounded pretty close to her.

  So, if Gilbert had made six copies of the story, what had he done with them?

  She consulted the file she had brought with her, found the combination to the safe, and looked inside: The ledger in the bluish folder had been entered into evidence, but the rest of the safe’s contents had been checked and left where they were. And as she thought, one upright folder held 118 pages of buff paper. In addition, three of the mailing envelopes lying flat on the safe’s floor held the story, addressed and ready for sending. One would go to Jeannine Cartfield, which Kate found interesting—why not Rutland? Or was the loose file copy for him? The other two envelopes bore names familiar to her from Nicholson’s list of expert Sherlockians, Peter Blau in Maryland, and Les Klinger in Los Angeles. She’d spoken with both men: Blau had not been in touch with Gilbert since November, when they had spoken about a rather beaten-up copy of a Conan Doyle novel that might or might not have the author’s signature, and Klinger had exchanged a series of e-mails with Gilbert in January regarding corrections to a book he was putting the final touches on, two volumes of annotations on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Both men had asked if she knew anything about a recently discovered short story.

  Four copies here, one already given to Nicholson, although not noted on the ledger: Where was the last? Hawkin had proposed a scenario of theft and violent confrontation: Perhaps Gilbert had, after all, been killed right here. Not with the falcon statue, as it turned out, but with some other blunt object, his head bound up before it could bleed, the story snatched up by his murderer…for what purpose?

  They had thought that the statue was missing, and based a scenario on that, only to have it crumble with a phone call from Goode’s Porcelain Repair. But what was she to make of the other missing objects: a seldom-used cell phone and a copy of the manuscript? Oh yes, and his pocket watch on a chain.

  But the dump site was the key. Someone knew where to leave Gilbert’s body, someone who had seen the story. Nicholson was the obvious suspect for that, but Nicholson had left town on Saturday morning, and the Point Bonita Park ranger had considered it highly unlikely that the shattered padlock and the body behind it would have been simply overlooked on that sunny day. And Nicholson had indeed been on the road—a detailed receipt from his motel confirmed that he had checked in just before six o’clock (which was right, for having left San Francisco near noon and stopping for the meal he’d charged to his card in Red Bluff, along the way). Furthermore, he had logged on to the motel’s high-speed Internet connection for an hour and twelve minutes beginning at eleven-forty that night, then checked out the following morning well before seven, having eaten breakfast at the motel’s buffet. He had stopped briefly at his cousin’s house in Eugene on the way north, midday on Sunday, before arriving at his friends’ house in Seattle at the end of a long day.

  There could have been a conspiracy, of course, among Gilbert’s acquaintances—one to murder, one to dump—but evidence supporting that had yet to appear, and in Kate’s experience, such organizational tendencies among amateurs were unlikely.

  Which left her with a Mr. X. Someone who had been in the house when Gilbert was lounging in his pajamas, someone who had seen the story (either that night or previously) and grabbed at the chance of duplicating the body dump.

  Too complicated. Much more likely to have been Mrs. Murray’s parolee brother, losing his temper at the parking situation.

  But how would he have known where to take the body?

  Circular thinking led nowhere. Kate retrieved her empty cup, closed up the safe and the house, and took the bag of scones and muffins home for her family’s breakfast. At a more reasonable hour, with the sounds of suitcase packing and calling voices all around her, she phoned Hawkin.

  “Al, we really need to meet with Tom Rutland.”

  “Okay. Any particular reason?”

  “Basically, I just don’t trust helpful attorneys.”

  “Reason enough for me.”

  “No, I was thinking. I can’t remember the exact details of Gilbert’s will, and if I went
to the Detail to check on them, Lee would divorce me, but as I recall, Rutland’s authority as executor of the estate is pretty much absolute. He can set up a museum and hire a curator, or he can dispose of what there is and buy other things—in other words, he controls the entire Gilbert estate, manuscript, Beeton’s Annual, Sherlock Holmes teapot, and the lot.”

  “Mm.” The sound was noncommittal, but Kate took it as a sound of meditation, not disagreement.

  “I was also thinking, Rutland is someone you might expect Gilbert to have shown the story to early on—not only his lawyer, but a fellow Sherlockian, a person who would immediately recognize the value of the manuscript, both in monetary terms and in the fame that would come with it. We know Gilbert talked to Rutland on Friday morning, although Rutland says it was to see if he would be free for a meeting the next week. Then Gilbert went out and bought the materials for making copies of the story. What if he gave Rutland a copy the following day, just didn’t mention that he’d given one to Nicholson as well?”

  “Are you suggesting that Rutland intended to steal the manuscript outright?”

  “That’s possible, I suppose.” She hadn’t thought the lawyer’s motivation quite so blatant, but she tried to work her way into that potential scenario. “If he’d thought the original was in Gilbert’s office safe, and if he believed Gilbert had told no one else about it, what was to stop him from claiming it as his own discovery?”

  “But Gilbert had already been around, back in December, establishing the thing’s provenance.”

  “Again, Rutland might not have known that. Or he could have intended to claim that Gilbert was doing it on his behalf. It would be Rutland’s word against that of a dead man, concerning a million-dollar hunk of paper that nobody knew Gilbert had. It might have looked like a stack of cash just lying there waiting for him.”

  “But the original wasn’t in the safe, it was in the bank,” he pointed out, then asked, “When Nicholson revealed that he had the story at the dinner the other night, did Rutland show any reaction?”

  “I wasn’t there when Nicholson told them, although when reference was made to it, he seemed to handle that without discomfort. But then, Nicholson had told him earlier in the day that he needed a few minutes that night to make an announcement. Rutland might well have guessed what it was about, and been prepared.”