The Art of Detection (10 page)

“What about last weekend, or the end of the week?”

“You know, there was one day he was in and out a lot, I remember noticing that. What day would that have been?” She struck an unconscious one-legged pose as she thought about it, then abruptly stood on both feet and looked at Kate. “It was Friday—a week ago Friday. I had to go pick up my printer at the shop, and when I got back, there was a place right out in front. He’d been parked there earlier, I’m sure of it.”

“What time of day was that?”

“Late morning. And after I’d taken it upstairs and got it plugged in again, after a while I looked out and noticed his Lexus parked across the street, and I was glad he hadn’t lost out too much by my getting his spot.”

“Late morning, Friday the twenty-third of January,” Kate repeated.

Naomi turned automatically to check the calendar, then said, “That’s right.”

“And the car stayed there the rest of the day?”

“It was there for a while, but I don’t think the whole time. Like I said, as far I remember, he was in and out a lot that day.”

“What about the evening? Did you hear him come in?”

But she was already shaking her head. “No, I’m in bed early, and we sleep at the back of the house.”

“How about Saturday morning?”

Her thin face screwed up, unwilling to commit to that. “I really don’t know when I noticed it next. It could have been Saturday morning, or afternoon. It could even have been Sunday. I just know that it was down the block the next time I saw it, and that was where it stayed.”

Kate couldn’t see that the woman had much more to tell her. She handed her a card and said, “Thank you for all your help, Ms. de la Veaga. If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”

She continued working her way through the neighbors, visiting all the houses for two blocks down, then crossing over and working her way back up the other side. Some of the neighbors knew Gilbert’s name, one of them even had heard of his death on the news, all of them knew him as the man in the funny clothes. Three residents knew the name of the security company Gilbert used, including the balding, boy-faced neighbor across the street who had interrupted his rose pruning to give Kate the information the previous day; he also knew that the lawyer’s BMW was a regular visitor, and that Gilbert held the occasional costume-dress party. This neighbor’s name was Simon Wallace, and he seemed the equivalent of the curtain-tugging village grandmother, so eager to share his knowledge of his cross-the-street neighbor that he ended up wagging his tail like his fluffy little dog.

Unfortunately for both sides, he didn’t have any knowledge of the previous weekend, since he’d been in bed with a cold.

With another person his age, Kate would have raised a disbelieving eyebrow, but he was still coughing and blowing his nose, and Simon Wallace seemed just the type to take to his bed with hot tea and a steamer for days on end, thermometer and doctor’s phone number in easy reach.

As it turned out, most of the houses for a block in either direction were aware of Philip Gilbert, if only through his eccentric dress and his occasional parking-space-disrupting dinner parties. Two of the neighbors were aware that the inside of Gilbert’s house was something unusual: The man three down on the right had provided the name of a contractor for some of Gilbert’s renovations, six years earlier, and the builder, being his brother-in-law, had told him about some of the peculiar work Gilbert had wanted done, the gaslights and the wholesale covering-over of electrical outlets. He in turn had told his running partner across the street and two doors down.

The only other oddity was Gilbert’s neighbor to the immediate left. When Kate rang the bell (electronic chimes, playing a tune) she heard movement inside, but no one came to the door. She rang again, then knocked, half expecting to hear a dog’s bark, but instead the door crept open and a thin, nervous-looking woman in her mid-fifties looked out from the crack.

The hesitation before opening and the nervousness woke Kate’s cop instincts, and she eyed the woman closely as she identified herself, confirmed that she was Mrs. Nadine Murray, and told Mrs. Murray that she would like to ask some questions about her neighbor.

The woman frowned and opened the door a fraction more, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “Which neighbor is that?”

“Philip Gilbert,” Kate said, and instead of giving the number, stepped back slightly and pointed in the direction of the house. “Over there.”

The door came open a little more and now Kate could see both hands and half her body, which was dressed in a faded garment that in the Eisenhower era would have been called a housecoat. The woman’s hair showed half an inch of gray roots under the mousy brown, although her nails had been manicured in the not-too-distant past, and she had put on lipstick that morning. She looked in the direction Kate had indicated, and a degree of her nervousness faded, to be replaced by scorn.

“You mean the weirdo?”

“Is that what he was?”

“Sure. Dressed like something from a TV show, snooty as hell, wanted to turn his place into a museum and thought nobody should mind. That’s all we need, more parking problems.”

“Did Mr. Gilbert tell you he was turning his house into a museum?” The interrogation technique of repeating the person’s last statement always made Kate feel like a cliché therapist, but it often gave results.

“Not him. One of his fancy friends, I stopped him when they were having one of those parties they had to ask what they thought they were doing in there, the guy said the house was a showplace and I should be honored to have it next door. Showplace. Ha!”

“Did he actually say Mr. Gilbert was wanting to make it into a museum?”

“Not in so many words, but that’s what a showplace is, isn’t it? I like living here because it’s quiet, and that would be the end of the quiet.”

“Is that why you circulated the petition?”

“It wasn’t my—” She caught herself. Her eyes shifted away from Kate and she said, “Yeah, that’s why.”

Kate studied her curiously. The instantaneous denial would have made sense, except that the admission that followed sounded like the lie.
It wasn’t my
—what? My idea? Then whose was it? And was the minor puzzle worth digging for here and now?

No, Gilbert hadn’t been murdered over some parking petition, and there was no point in alienating this witness just yet. Still, she would keep Mrs. Murray in mind, and return to the question later if need be.

It also demonstrated the limits to the neighborhood’s knowledge of itself: Had this neighbor known that the renovations on Gilbert’s house included those gaslights, she would surely have turned him in for a code violation rather than bothering with a petition.

“Mrs. Murray, we’re interested in Mr. Gilbert’s activities the end of the week before last—the twenty-first to twenty-fifth, say. Did you notice any particular activity around those days?”

“I work twelve-hour shifts at the nursing home, noon to midnight, Tuesday through Friday. I don’t see much of anything those days, and the others, I’m catching up on my sleep. No, I didn’t see anything.”

“Are you the only person who lives here, Mrs. Murray?”

The remnants of pink lipstick puckered up in reaction. “You think a woman can’t live alone in a house?”

“I think many woman do, Mrs. Murray,” Kate replied, hanging on to politeness with an effort. “Are you one of them?”

“My sister lives here,” the woman admitted grudgingly. “She moved in after my husband died two years ago. He bought this house in the days when the hippies were dying off, before it got popular with the yuppies and then the dot-commers, and we never saw reason to sell it just because the neighborhood changed.”

“Could I speak with her?”

“She’s out of town. Helping our brother get settled in Houston.”

“Will she be back soon?”

“Should be home on the weekend.”

“That’s fine, then, I won’t ask you for her phone number there. I just wanted to see if anyone else might have noticed anything at the Gilbert house.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Visitors, perhaps?”

“I can tell you he hasn’t had one of his fancy-dress parties in a while.”

“How can you tell, if you work evenings?”

“Because when he has one, his friends all drive here and they take up all the parking places until late, so everyone who lives here has to look elsewhere.”

“And some of you resent this?”

“Some of them do. Tell you the truth, I was never here for his parties, and when I did come home, all those people leaving late meant I always found a place right close. The only good thing about Mr. Gilbert, you ask me.”

Tell you the truth
generally flagged an oncoming lie, but in this case, Kate suspected that the woman did in fact appreciate the convenience. Which meant that her previous cut-off statement,
It wasn’t my idea,
was also true.

“Who gave you the petition to circulate, Mrs. Murray?”

But that was one step too far for the night nurse. She drew herself up, fixed Kate with a glare, and replied, “It was my petition, I already told you that, and I won’t have you harassing me. If you want to talk to me further, you’ll have to arrange it with my lawyer.”

And with that, she shut the door.

That wasn’t how it worked, and the woman probably didn’t have a lawyer, but Kate was well used to indignant witnesses, and she retreated without a second thought.

The chronic parking problem of areas like this, with single-family homes built at a time when a car was a luxury and now divided into three or four apartments, each with its car, meant that people came to blows over a patch of curb. Maybe Gilbert had been shifting his car in his pajamas when an irate neighbor came out to object and things got out of hand…. But Kate rejected the scenario as soon as it appeared in her mind: Somebody would have noticed a violent shouting match on the street.

She silently thanked Mrs. Murray and, having completed the circuit of their victim’s neighbors, went to sit on the steps of the Gilbert house. Sure enough, the lace curtains on the house across the way twitched slightly, and she smiled to herself as she took out her phone and the Post-it the dancer had given her for Gilbert’s possibly Russian housecleaner.

Nika’s last name proved to be Kilanovitch, emphasis on the
o,
and her English was somewhat better than Kate had feared. Kilanovitch was saddened to hear of her employer’s death, and it sounded to Kate as if the concern over lost income might actually be the secondary concern.

“I afraid something happen, when he not there and I come to clean. I not have key—I only have key when he there, he give me one if he going out, so if door shut on me I not lock out. Is clear, what I say?”

“When you were there and Mr. Gilbert had to go out, he lent you a key in case the door swung shut and locked you out. What day was it that you came to clean and he wasn’t there?”

“Thursday. Three day ago. I wait in car, half hour, forty minute, but he not come, I go. I say to husband, maybe should I call police? But he say no, say I should go again maybe Monday and then call. Should have called. He not lying there, when I knock?”

Her voice was so apprehensive that Kate hastened to reassure her.

“Oh, no, don’t worry, he died somewhere else.”

Kilanovitch had worked for Gilbert for seven years, coming once a week all year except for the period between Christmas and New Year’s. Certain tasks were weekly, others—wiping down woodwork, cleaning the windows—were done on rotation throughout the month.

“He was nice man, spend too much time on silly games, but he laugh when I say he need wife, ask me if I want to divorce and marry him. Only joke, you know? Never rude to me, never…” Her English deserted her, and she put in a Russian word. Kate figured she was trying to say that Gilbert had never hit on her, and made understanding noises. “I clean, part of silly games. Want me not use vacuum, not if he home, I say okay, you boss. And also want me use, how say?” Again she used a Russian phrase, then tried in English, “Put on furniture, yes?”

“Polish?” Kate offered. “Wax?”

The front door of the house across the way opened, and Simon Wallace came out with his dog on a bright yellow leash. She watched him as Kilanovitch was talking, and was not in the least surprised when, coming out of his gate onto the sidewalk, he made a show of perusing the street, saw Kate, and did a double take worthy of vaudeville. She waved her free hand, he waved back happily with his free arm, and walked on, slowly, down the street.

“Furniture polish, yes. Old kind, come from Europe, cost—phew! Part of game, you know? For the smell?”

“He wanted you to use special cleaning materials in order to make the house smell authentic? Like an old house?”

“Yes! He say, sorry if this a problem, I say no problem for me,
I
not have to pay all that for little bit of wax, but sorry back, because it hard to clean good using just old kind things, mop and broom and rags, you know? So, some days when I finish he say, ‘Next week I going to be on walk.’ And next week he let me in, he go for walk, I use vacuum not just on top floor but through whole house, rugs and furniture and curtains, then put away vacuum, he come home from walk, everybody happy.”

Kate laughed, inexplicably relieved at this indication of Gilbert’s mental flexibility and perhaps even humor. A stickler for detail, but willing to turn a blind eye for the sake of practicality, and for the sake of his cleaner’s pride.

However, the cleaning woman could tell Kate little about Gilbert’s visitors. “He have party there three, four times year. One last month, a Wednesday. He clean before, I clean day after.”

“Did he ever have houseguests?”

“One, maybe two times a year.”

“What room did the guests stay in?”

“Guest bedroom second floor,” she said without hesitation. “Room used twice in year, silly. Waste, you know?”

“I know,” Kate agreed. She explained that Kilanovitch would need to sign a statement and provide some fingerprints so they could eliminate her from the household, added her standard request to be called if the woman thought of anything else, and closed the phone, raising her face to the winter sun.