The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  Nicholson could be talked down, she decided. He’d used her name; he wasn’t standing with the gun in her back gibbering about making a break for it; he wanted to talk. If she could remind him that he was a reasonable man, he would eventually put the gun down. If, on the other hand, she refused to disarm, or tried to leave without talking to him, his finger might well tighten on the trigger. She put her own note of apology into her voice, and held up her hands in a sort of shrug.

  “Ian, I really can’t just take off my gun. There are regulations, you know? The worst thing in the world is for a cop to lose her weapon and have it turned against her.”

  “I don’t need your gun, I already have one,” he pointed out.

  “Still.”

  After a moment’s thought he asked, “What if you tossed it out of the window?”

  Kate was encouraged at his attempt at being reasonable. “And let some neighborhood kid find it?”

  “Call your partner. You can drop it to him.” When she hesitated still, he added, “I would like to talk, and I want to do it here. Honestly, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Not wanting to indicated that he would hurt her, if he believed it necessary. She would have to trust Hawkin, and her own instincts, to get her out of this. “Okay, Ian, I’m going to reach for my gun. I’ll keep my fingers open so you don’t have to worry that I’m about to use it. And I’ll empty out the bullets and then drop the gun out the window. But I’m going to need to use your phone to call my partner—my little girl was playing with my cell phone the other day, and I think she decided it needed a bath.” Use his name often; provide him with humanizing details about his hostage; remind him that she was a friend, and on his side; above all, stay calm.

  He nodded at the portable phone on the desk. She dialed Al’s number, and was kicked into his voice mail, since his line was still open to hers. She spoke as if he was on the line, careful to add the appropriate pauses, but loudly enough for him to hear through the phone in her pocket. “Al? Yeah, this is Kate. Look, I need you to walk around the apartment building and stand under Ian’s window so I can drop something down to you. Well, it seems he’s not happy about having my gun in the place, so I’m going to give it to you for safekeeping. Al, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, just come around to the window.” She paused for a moment as if listening, pursed her mouth in impatience, and snapped, “Al, just do it.” She punched the phone’s off button, and then, facing Nicholson, pulled open her jacket to show him the gun in its shoulder holster.

  “I’m going to pull it out with two fingers. Now, I have to use both hands to take out the clip, but I’m leaving the safety on, can you see? Okay, there’s the clip, we’ll set it right here, and I’ll just ease out the loose round, and we’ll set that right next to the clip. There: empty.”

  On either side of the big plate-glass windows were smaller louver windows, unscreened and cranked open full, the cold winter air pouring in. With the gun dangling from her left hand, she stood staring down at a remarkably empty street (the police barricades having been set up out of sight from the Nicholson apartment) until Al came around the corner. He stopped on the sidewalk ten feet below her feet, his face unreadable—as if she’d need to see his face to know what he was thinking. She threaded the gun between the tilted glass panes, let Al position himself underneath it, and let it go. They held each other’s eyes, an entire conversation in a moment, then Al turned and walked away. Kate looked at Nicholson.

  “You can sit down now,” he said. When she was in the chair, he came around the divider from the kitchen, his eyes and the weapon off Kate for perhaps half a second. She did not move, just waited until he was sitting in the sofa twelve feet away.

  “I’m afraid with this gun business you’re going to be in trouble now, Ian,” she told him.

  “And I wasn’t in trouble before?” he countered, summoning a wry grin.

  “Not as much, no.”

  “You’re telling me you didn’t come here with all those others to arrest me for Philip’s murder?”

  “Ian, your friend Philip died of a heart attack. It’s not going to come to a murder charge.”

  “Do you honestly expect me to believe that you regard his death as from natural causes?”

  “It’s not quite that simple, of course it isn’t. But it’s a far cry from first-degree murder.”

  “What would be the charge?”

  “Manslaughter, maybe. The Parks Service may charge you with illegal disposal of a body. Admittedly, that’s a step up from littering.”

  He was not distracted by her attempt at humor. “Those still sound like felonies and jail time.”

  Obviously it’s jail time, you idiot, she thought—for Christ’s sake, you’ve pulled a gun on a cop. But she didn’t say that, just continued to treat the whole thing like an unfortunate misunderstanding that might go away if they demurely cast their eyes in the other direction. For some reason he was thinking of her as a friend: Play on that.

  “I really don’t know, Ian, the charges would be up to the DA. Look, why don’t you just tell me what happened, we’ll see how we can spin it for you.”

  Nicholson stared at the gun in his hand as if wondering how it had gotten there, and Kate braced herself. But in the end, he drew a slow breath, then suddenly seemed to relax, as if letting go—unfortunately, not of the weapon itself. He allowed it to rest on his knee, where at least it was pointing to one side, and for the first time Kate noticed that it was an old, rather beautiful wood-handled revolver. He studied the gun as if it held his past and his future in the grain of its handle, and gave a small noise that sounded remarkably like a chuckle. “‘Spin it,’” he repeated. “As my daughter says, ‘Sure, that’s going to happen.’ But look, Kate, before we open the doors and let in the tides of bureaucracy, I want you to know what happened. You, personally. It may be the last choice I have in this life. And I feel as though I owe it to Philip, poor bastard, to tell the story to a pair of sympathetic ears, before the notebooks and tape recorders take over.”

  “That’s fine,” Kate said, hating to interrupt but knowing that she had no choice, “but before we get started, do you mind if we just take care of reading you your rights?”

  However, Nicholson had no objection, seemed rather to find the process of recitation and agreement amusing. Normally she would have had him sign a rights statement, but she decided not to push her luck. She hoped at least Al was listening in, if it came to witnessing this highly irregular interview in court. At the end, she sat back in the chair, settling with her hands crossed easily, erasing any trace of officialdom from her expression or her position.

  “First off, you want to know if I killed Philip,” Nicholson began. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Where was he when he died?”

  “Right here. I mean, almost exactly right here. He was sitting in that chair across from you, and I threw a bottle of champagne at him. It hit his head and knocked him out of the chair, and I went downstairs to get myself under control. When I came back into the room, he was still on the floor. He wasn’t breathing.”

  “This was on the Friday night? January the twenty-third?”

  “Yes, although by that time it would have been Saturday. I suppose you’ve figured out that we were lovers?”

  “We put that together, yes.”

  “Philip was so…It was just bizarre, in this day and age, to be so absolutely paranoid about anyone ‘finding out,’ but that was Philip for you. It was…Well, to tell you the honest truth, I think he felt a responsibility not to be gay. Because his business, his life it seemed, lay in evoking Holmes. It was as if by publicly admitting that he was gay, it would be tantamount to saying that Holmes was gay as well. I know, it’s nuts, but he used to get so irate at the suggestion that Holmes and Watson might be more than friends—” He broke off, and shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, Kate, you’re not interested in any of that. Suffice it to say, Philip was adamant. So I never told anyone about us. We’d been together on and of
f for six years.”

  “Since you moved out here from New York.”

  “It started in New York, and he was one of the reasons I moved out here. Although I don’t know if I should use the word ‘together,’ since we barely were. Maybe five or six times a month he’d come over here, spend the night, leave early the next morning. A few times we went away, that was lovely, but generally it was here, and short.”

  “You didn’t go to his house?”

  “Not for sex. And even when I went there for business reasons, he was uncomfortable with it, would push me out as soon as we were through.”

  “So what happened on Friday the twenty-third?”

  “It was that…that fucking manuscript,” he burst out in despair. “God, I wish he’d never found the thing.”

  “The Sherlock Holmes story.” “The Tale of Billy Birdsong,” a voice in the back of her mind suggested, but she did not let the stray thought register on her face.

  “Yes. It was going to change his life. That’s what he said: ‘change my life.’ A thing like that, you can’t imagine what it would do to a scholar: You present it, you offer analysis, you make a good pile of money off it, and then you spend every second of the rest of your life defending it. Defending yourself, against charges of fraud and hoax, rolled eyes and patronizing words and claims of fanaticism and mental imbalance. Madness, to even contemplate it. You know that Conan Doyle ended up hating Holmes for taking over his life? Well, Holmes would have taken over Philip’s life every bit as completely. And of course it was the end of us, that was already clear to him.”

  “Because of the dinner he had that night.”

  “Louisa Brancusi.” He spat out the name.

  “You sound like you know her.”

  “I worked with her, briefly, in New York. God, she’d have ripped him apart, taken credit for the discovery or at least shifted it closer to home, set up one of her pet scholars as the expert. I can just see the catalogue copy now: ‘Unprecedented Literary Discovery!’ ‘Conan Doyle’s Lost Masterpiece!’ The press would have been out for blood. Philip imagined he could handle Louisa. He didn’t even understand that to her, an accusation that the thing was a hoax would be just another way of driving up the price.”

  “He was going to offer her auction house the manuscript to sell?”

  “He might as well have delivered his balls on a platter.”

  “But surely he understood what the publicity would do?”

  “To some degree. That’s why he told me we’d have to stop. For a while, he said, while the spotlight was on.”

  “And you were angry when he told you that.”

  “I was furious. Partly that he’d even think of handing it to Louisa instead of me. You see, when he gave me the story to read, I thought he was telling me that this was a project we could work on together. A partnership, with me taking care of the commercial and analytical side. But his attitude was, Louisa has all the machinery for publicity already at her disposal—that was his phrase, ‘the machinery for publicity.’ Probably her phrase, come to think of it. He said that we’d have to break off ‘for a little while,’ because he’d be under public scrutiny and needed to keep everything simple and aboveboard. Jesus. As if anything of Philip’s life would remain his own once the story came out.

  “But I think what really tipped me over the edge was the way he did it. He had the dinner with Louisa, he came here with a bottle of champagne—Taittinger, no less. We drank a couple of glasses and went to bed, and afterward he said he wanted to talk. So while he was showering, I made up a fire, he came up in the dressing gown I gave him for Christmas and a towel around his neck. He poured out the last of the champagne, and then he announced that would be our last night. For a little while. It was just such an absolutely, barefaced…shitty way to do it. Bring the bubbly, bang the boy, and then oh by the way, it’s been real, ta. Fuck him. I was so pissed I picked up the bottle and just threw it at him, marched downstairs and stuffed his slippers and pipe and hairbrushes and crap into a pillowcase. When I came back to give it to him, there he was on the floor, going cold.” The shock of the discovery was still vivid in his voice.

  “How long were you downstairs?”

  “Maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes. I get weepy with champagne,” he admitted. “Always have. And I didn’t want to come back upstairs with my eyes all red.”

  “So what did you do then, when you found him?”

  “I was going to call 911, of course. Had my hand on the phone and the first two numbers dialed when it occurred to me that I’d killed him. I had, myself. Maybe if I’d known it was actually a heart attack I’d have dialed the third number, but I looked at him oozing into the rug and I knew how it would look. Lovers’ quarrel, heavy bottle—the damned thing didn’t even break.”

  “So you put him in your car?”

  “Not right away. I sat looking at him and my brain just seemed to take over. It was like, all those years of reading the Holmes stories, that gear was right there, waiting for me to shift into. I knew I had to get him away, and it came to me that I could make it look like something from that damn story. I don’t know—Looking back I see it was crazy, but somehow that story was responsible for his death, and I wanted to rub its nose in it. And maybe…maybe it was that I wanted to do one last thing for Philip. To make him the centerpiece of his very own mystery.” He shot Kate a glance and then looked away, saying in a low voice, “That probably makes no sense to you.”

  “No, it does,” she lied. Keep him talking. “So, you’d read the story that day, Friday, and not Saturday night in your motel as you said before?”

  “That’s right. Philip came by around noon on Friday and gave it to me, said he hoped I could read it before he came back that night.”

  “But you wanted us to think he was alive on Saturday morning.”

  “Right.”

  “I understand. So anyway, there he was, lying on the floor. What did you do then?”

  He frowned. “I think it started because of evidence. You know, hairs and DNA and all that. I remember thinking how convenient it was that he’d just picked up his dressing gown from the cleaner’s and was wearing a pair of pajamas I’d just laundered. So when I got a couple of clean bedsheets and wrapped him in them, it was rational, or anyway as rational as I was just then. I stripped the bed and put the sheets into the washer, and stuck the glass he’d used into the dishwasher and turned it on, but by the time I got out the vacuum cleaner it sort of changed, as if I had found something sticky and disgusting on my hands and couldn’t get it off fast enough. It was like a panic of revulsion, this mad need to erase every trace of Philip from my life and my house. I wanted him gone, all memory, all traces.”

  “But Philip himself was still here?” Kate asked, thinking: Vacuum cleaner; maybe he forgot the bag: have to tell Crime Scene.

  “Bundled into a pair of clean white sheets. But not in here—I’d carried him to the downstairs hallway. Come to think of it, it was the same place I stick a sack of garbage on its way out to the bin.”

  It looked as if he was about to weep, so Kate broke in with a distracting piece of practicality. Which incidentally might explain some evidence. “You must have wrapped his head in something, so it didn’t bleed through to the floor. A towel, maybe?”

  “Only the one he’d had around his neck. It was already sort of bunched up under his head when he fell, so I just tucked it in a little, more to hide the blood in his hair than anything else. He didn’t bleed very much at all. Then I wrapped him in the sheets and carried him downstairs.”

  “Wasn’t he heavy?”

  “Sure. But no heavier than what I dead-lift at the gym.”

  “What time did you finish cleaning?”

  “I don’t know, it was such a frenzy. At least one o’clock, maybe closer to two. I just stopped, utterly exhausted, with the disinfectant spray in my hand.”

  “And then you took him out to the car?”

  “No. I was afraid one of my neighbor
s might have been coming home late and would see me staggering around under a body, or catch sight of me on their security monitor—there’s no recording made of that, in case you’re wondering—so I left him downstairs and took his car back to his house. I wore gloves. And a ski hat, which felt dumb but I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. I parked his car in a spot down the street from his house, and let myself in. I knew his alarm code, since I’d been standing right behind him a couple of times when he opened his door.”

  “You also know where the switch to the webcam is.”

  “The—? Oh right, the HolmesCam. I remembered it just before I stepped out of the foyer. I didn’t know if anyone would be able to see my legs in the dark, or if they could identify me by my shoes or something, but I thought it was better not to take the chance.”

  “You spent twelve minutes inside.”

  “Was that all? It seemed like forever. I needed to remove anything I could find that might be connected to me, although in the end, there was almost nothing of mine there. And then I saw his cell phone in his desk, and I thought maybe I could use that to lay a false trail, so I took it, along with a copy of the story he had in his desk. The gun is his, too,” he added, looking down at where it lay on his knee. “He kept it in his bedside table.”

  “So you left the car there and walked back across town?”

  “Took me forever, and I was scared to death the whole time that I’d get stopped and they’d find the gun. I took off the ski cap so I’d look all white and innocent, but I must have sweated a gallon of water. Anyway, I made it back without any problems, and found the place dark and silent, all my neighbors safe in bed. I rolled up my garage door and let up the boot—the trunk—and propped open the entrance door. Then I just carried Philip straight out through the courtyard and across the street and put him in the trunk. I did use some more towels then, in case the blood leaked through the sheets and stained the carpet in the boot, but there wasn’t much by that time.”