The Art of Detection (12 page)

The fish and vegetable kebabs came off the grill just before six o’clock; two minutes later, the phone in Kate’s pocket began to chirp. She checked the display, and abandoned her place in line. “Sorry,” she murmured, and took the phone into the house to talk to Chris Williams.

They’d caught the shooter, who in the end turned his gun on himself, but now all available personnel had been brought in to work the two crime scenes. Marin had the church scene, but the scene where the suicide occurred was on park land, and Williams was needed.

“Look, Chris, don’t worry about Gilbert, I’ve got it.”

“Gilbert, right, I couldn’t remember his name—I was thinking of him as Pajama Man.” Williams’s voice was hoarse with prolonged tension and fatigue, a state Kate knew all too well. “What do you think?”

“There’s a good chance he died in his own house, certainly better than the chance he was killed on your turf.” She told him about the missing statue that had prompted the summons for Crime Scene, and went over their preliminary findings with him—hard results would be days, even weeks in coming, but one thing was certain: There had been blood on the back of the chair.

“Okay,” he said. “My illegal disposal case can wait. Keep me informed, and let me know when you’re going to be in the park; if I’m free I’ll join you.”

In the meantime, Pajama Man was all theirs.

FOUR

F
irst thing Monday morning, Kate and Al were facing their lieutenant across his desk in the fourth-floor Homicide Detail, presenting their review of the case thus far. It was not one of their more satisfactory briefings, since they had no answer to his insistent question of why the Park had given it to San Francisco in the first place. However, the Park CIB had done so, and considering the events of Sunday morning, the option of the SFPD passing it back to Marin did not seem a great idea. He subsided, with grumbles about his own briefing to the captain later that morning, and let them get on with their jobs.

Back at her cubicle in the cluttered Detail, Kate phoned the numbers Rutland had given her for Gilbert’s known family members. The immediate reaction of the Boston ex-wife, whose name was Corina Ferguson, was “Who?” Her second question, despite Rutland’s assurances that the woman would expect nothing, concerned the inheritance. Kate suggested she contact Gilbert’s lawyer, asked who would be claiming the body, and was not in the least surprised when the woman reacted with distaste.

“Why would I want to claim Philip’s body?” she asked. “I haven’t even heard from him in years. Let his friends bury him out there.”

Hawkin, who had been doing his own hunt into the lawyer’s past, spoke up from the adjacent desk. “Only thing I see on Rutland is three divorces and a couple of complaints from families of old people who died and left him generous thank-yous in their wills.”

“Any indication of the grounds for divorce?”

“Looks to me like he was marrying up. Not necessarily money, but each woman had a bigger circle of important friends.”

“Neither of those things is illegal,” Kate commented, although both indicated that Rutland was none too rigid in his personal, or professional, code of ethics. She went back to her calls.

The Midwestern cousin sounded more sympathetic at first, but it did not take long for Kate to realize that it was feeblemindedness, not sympathy, and that the elderly woman had little or no concept of who Philip Gilbert was. Kate thanked her and gave the woman her number—a process that took nearly ten minutes, between the search for a pencil, a second search for a piece of paper, and the sounds of the woman wandering vaguely through the kitchen opening the refrigerator and filling a glass before she either remembered her caller or noticed the phone off the hook.

The two Texas nieces were more vigorous than the cousin and more concerned than the ex-wife, but neither volunteered to fly out to San Francisco to claim the body, and both found it difficult to remember when they had last heard from Gilbert apart from his annual Christmas card—no message, just signed. She gave them both her number, then Rutland’s, and finally called the lawyer himself, to tell him that it looked like he’d be in charge of choosing cremation or burial, funeral or memorial service. He didn’t sound very surprised.

Her next call was to the Medical Examiner’s office, to inform them that there wouldn’t be a family member coming to identify the body, and they should either use Gilbert’s lawyer or send for Gilbert’s dental records. The ME’s assistant she talked to was a little vague about the body, although in the end she was definite that the autopsy wouldn’t be that morning.

With that out of the way, they could begin to organize their case. Two things were basic here: a time frame and a list of Gilbert’s known associates. While Hawkin was putting together everything they knew about the former, Kate compiled a list from Rutland’s e-mail and started on the names in the ledger they’d found in the safe. Many of those appeared regularly, sometimes in the “bought from” column, other times in the “sold to.” An incestuous little world, that of collectors. Which helped when one of them was killed.

If
one of them was killed: Kate shot a brief glare at the telephone, knowing full well that she and Al might be devoting days of work to lay the ground for a mere illegal body disposal case. If they’d been more pressed, they might be justified in moving a little slowly on the Gilbert case, at least until the Medical Examiner got around to giving them a pronouncement on cause. However, though at times she and Al juggled as many as thirty or forty open homicides, things had been slack recently in the homicide business, and Gilbert’s was the only call they’d caught during the week’s cycle. Pajama Man was in the center of their plate.

“The neighbor de la Veaga didn’t have any definite times for the afternoon when it came to Gilbert’s car?” Hawkin asked.

“Just the one in the late morning.”

“Why don’t people look at their watches?” complained the man who didn’t even wear one.

According to the ledger, Gilbert had bought the pricey magazine in the first week of October for $139,500. Two columns over, the appraised value notation was:

$300,000 (est.)

“Can you imagine paying a hundred forty thousand dollars for an old magazine?” she asked Hawkin.

He raised an eyebrow at that, but only for a moment. “Bad as stamp collecting,” he noted, and went back to his papers.

Kate’s list of Gilbert’s close associates ended up with a little over fifty names on it. She turned to the computer and printed off whatever she could find about the people. A few of them had criminal records, mostly small stuff. Twenty-three of them had websites, which made sense as most of those bought and sold online, and most of those home pages gave some degree of personal information. One of the dinner club members, Jeannine Cartfield, wrote mystery novels, although she hadn’t published in three and a half years. Two of the antiquarian dealers had criminal records more serious than traffic violations or teenage pot possession, although both of those crimes were white-collar: one had sold a forgery, the other had run a scam to sell a painting several times over. She set aside for the moment those over the age of sixty, who might have had a problem carrying Gilbert’s inert body. With them she put most of those living overseas or on the other side of the country. Finally she added the people her gut told her would be a waste of time: Surely a woman named Amanda Blessing who sold limited-production bone china teasets painted with the images of classical mystery characters was an unlikely suspect, even if she was only thirty-two and lived two hours away in Modesto.

That left her with the nine living members of the dinner club, ten West Coast dealers, six of Gilbert’s closest neighbors, and four others.

Hawkin saw her sit back to survey her work, and dragged his chair over to her desk.

“Looks like Friday the twenty-third to Sunday the twenty-fifth are the days we need to look at,” he told her. “The neighbor sees his car come and go on the Friday, although the last time she’s sure about is late morning. He makes various phone calls that afternoon, but only one on Saturday morning, from his cell phone. That follows his general phoning pattern, which is mostly during business hours, with very few calls on the weekends. But on Monday morning, when he tends to make a lot of calls—see, Monday the nineteenth there are fifteen, Monday the twelfth, eighteen—this Monday there are none at all, and four messages left on his machine. And looking at the dates on the mail, I’d guess he wasn’t there to see Saturday’s delivery, although you can never be sure with the Post Office.”

“Friday and Saturday,” Kate repeated. “That gives us a starting place. Nothing on your list ring any bells?”

“Nope. Even Rutland came up squeaky clean.”

“Highly suspicious,” Kate said darkly.

“You want to get started on these interviews, or take off for the headlands?”

“Neither—let’s go to the bank first. I’ve got to see what a magazine worth one hundred forty thousand looks like.”

Philip Gilbert’s bank was a five-minute walk from his front door. Kate and Al presented themselves to the manager, explained the situation, handed him their warrant, and followed him to the vault.

Inside a protective box, underneath a careful cellophane wrapping, the prized
Beeton’s Annual
looked like, well, like an old magazine. It was a little smaller than a
National Geographic,
with a once-garish cover in red and yellow picturing a man at a desk, stretching toward the light hanging over his head. If Kate had seen the thing lying on a hearth, she would not have hesitated to rip it up as a convenient fire starter. She looked at the ledger, which they had brought along for comparison, and it did indeed say under the appraised value column: $300,000 (est).

She laid the magazine back into its box, put a tick next to its description in the ledger, and pulled away the bubble wrap from the next item, a photograph of Queen Victoria in a worn wooden frame. They saw several more magazines, half a dozen old books, some pieces of jewelry, an old-looking typescript short story or novella in a clear plastic envelope, three pipes, and a sheaf of signed photographs, one of which showed a stocky, middle-aged man with a large mustache, dressed in outdoor tweeds.

“I think this is Conan Doyle,” she said, turning it toward Hawkin. He studied the figure—who looked, she realized, like a distant relation of his—then went back to the loose photographs of opera singers and writers, most of them signed, each of them separated from its neighbor by a sheet of tissue.

The arcane contents of the deposit box gave no insight into their owner’s death, however, other than the staggering sum of their appraised value. The bank had no doubt been chosen for its proximity to home, for visits to the vault were a regular part of Gilbert’s business week. He had come here twice during the week he had died, on Monday the nineteenth in the afternoon, and the morning of Friday the twenty-third. On Monday he had left behind slips of paper recording the dispatch of items to Sotheby’s auction house for appraisal and to a gentleman in London for approval; on the Friday he had made a notation on the outside of the manila envelope containing the typescript short story, “to Mr. Ian Nicholson for analysis.”

Kate showed the envelope to Hawkin. “Does this mean that on Friday the twenty-third, Gilbert sent a copy of this to Ian Nicholson? Or does it mean that he meant to give this envelope to him, and didn’t get around to it?”

But Al could only shake his head. “Nicholson is the friend who the lawyer thinks is out of town.”

“And who left two messages on Gilbert’s machine during the week.”

Kate stripped off her gloves and took out her phone, saw by its display that reception was shrouded by the bank, and closed it again.

“Do you want to take any of this in as evidence?” she asked Hawkin.

“I really don’t,” he said with feeling. Stashing evidence with the property clerk was one thing; leaving solid gold there was another. “Let’s just seal the box and make sure the bank knows they’re not to let anyone into it.”

When they had finished and were back on the street, she took out her phone again, got Nicholson’s number from the list she’d compiled, and listened to a polite English accent suggesting that she be so kind as to leave a message. She did, and closed the phone. Al was also talking on his, speaking to the Medical Examiner’s office about the autopsy of Philip Gilbert. She looked around, saw a coffee shop, and tapped on Hawkin’s elbow to gesture that she would meet him there.

She had her latte and his café Americana (plain black coffee given a fancy name and price) on the table in the corner when he entered, looking disgusted.

“Not good?” she asked him.

“Turns out the reason the ME’s assistant was a little uncertain about the autopsy is that Marin hasn’t even brought the body over yet—he’s in their storage locker, and now they’re too busy to bring him over to us. And because he didn’t land here, the ME doesn’t even have paperwork on him.”

“In other words, Marin’s pissed at us. You want to hire a U-Haul and go get him?”

“I talked to one of the drivers, told him he could have my sister in marriage if he managed to get us the body today.”

“You don’t have a sister.”

“So I lied.”

“Okay, you want to tackle the headlands interviews today, or the friends-of-Gilbert?”

“I’d say we start with Gilbert’s life, rather than how his body was dumped.”

“Fine with me.” Kate laid a copy of her list of known associates on the table. “Here’s a beginning on Gilbert’s circle of nonfriends. The family’s a little out of reach, and I don’t know that we can question his business contacts until we know more about what he had going. Which leaves us the Sherlockian dinner club—nine members: Rutland we’ve talked to, Nicholson’s out of town. How do you want to approach these?”

He looked at the addresses: two at the western side of the South Bay, three to the north of the East Bay. It was going to take them all day just to cover the ground.

“You want to split up?” she asked.