The Art of Detection (14 page)

“Mr. Pandi?” she asked. The slightly more solid young man on the far side lifted his finger, and she walked across to shake his hand and introduce herself. “And you must be Mr. Venkatarama?” she said, going to the other. Both men seemed rather taken aback, at her presence or at her handshake she did not know. She looked around: no spare chairs. Pandi saw her gaze, and stood up, walking over to the nonsteel door on the back wall and coming out with a plastic chair. He stood indecisively, then put it down halfway between the two desks, and went back to his own chair.

Neither man had said a word.

“I am investigating the death of Mr. Philip Gilbert, whose body was found on Saturday up in Marin. I believe you were friends of his?”

Finally, Venkatarama stirred. “We had shared interests, we enjoyed his company, so yes, I suppose we were friends.” Other than the precision of his words, his accent was straight California.

“How did you meet him?”

Pandi answered. “There was reference to the Strand Diners in one of the chat rooms fifteen months ago. Sherlock Holmes chat rooms,” he clarified for her; unlike his cousin’s, Pandi’s voice was accented, melodious and Indian. “We researched its members, arranged to be invited as guests, and found the company pleasing. We are regular attendees, even though the actual menus are rarely to our taste. We do not eat meat,” he explained.

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Gilbert?” she asked him, but it seemed to be Venkatarama’s turn, so her head swiveled back in his direction.

“We saw him at the January dinner, on the seventh. It was at his home.”

“Dead cow, yet again,” his cousin noted sadly.

“And you haven’t been in communication since then?”

“No,” said Venkatarama.

“Yes,” said Pandi.

The cousins looked at each other, and Pandi explained, “We had an e-mail, a group mailing to the dinner group, perhaps two weeks ago, concerning an article in the newspaper. Philip forwarded it on to us all.”

“Ah,” said his cousin. “That must have been your day for the e-mail, so I did not see it.”

Satisfied, the two sets of dark eyes turned back to Kate expectantly.

“An article in the paper?” she queried.

“Not even an article, a mere mention of three or four lines, a rumor some woman picked up at a party concerning yet another ‘lost Sherlock Holmes manuscript.’ Sometimes such things are mildly amusing; this was not even that.”

“But he thought it worth telling you about.”

“Philip often did so. We all do. But in this case, there was nothing personal from him, merely the mention.”

“When you saw him, on the seventh, did he seem at all different? Upset, preoccupied, excited?”

“The meeting was at his house, which always exaggerates a person’s normal behavior. Philip was as he generally is.”

“Perhaps a smidgen more pedantic, a touch more authoritative,” Venkatarama suggested.

Pandi considered this, then nodded. “Perhaps a little. I might even say condescending.”

Kate broke in before the cousins could get involved in a thesaurus duel. “Have you any idea why?”

The cousins locked eyes, as if in telepathic discussion. After a minute, Pandi suggested, “He was that way in October, when he finally got his hands on the
Beeton’s Annual
.”

“You are right,” said the other. “Lofty and set apart from mere mortals.”

“Sounds annoying,” Kate said: conflict among the Sherlockians?

“Perhaps,” Pandi admitted. “He would invariably prove generous with his good fortune, and permit everyone to take pleasure in his trophy, but Philip was in the end goal-oriented. He was, to his mind, the keeper of a shrine, and had little outside his possessions. For those of us who have family, interests, lives, his attitude could be a touch…claustrophobic.”

Kate was taken aback, and realized that she’d fallen into the trap of seeing this sterile place and the fantasy world of the dinner club as the entirety of the two men’s existence.

Looking at the even brown gaze across the desk, she wondered if Pandi had seen this, and chosen his words deliberately. Seeing the tiny smile on his face, she knew he had.

“Do either of you know of any friends Mr. Gilbert might have had outside the dinner club?”

The dark eyes consulted, to a count of five, then Pandi said to his cousin, “There was that woman.”

“I still think it was Jeannine.”

Pandi did not answer, but instead said to Kate, “Perhaps three months ago, we saw Philip driving with a woman in the car. However, it was only a glimpse, and the passenger side was away from us. She appeared to be wearing a hat of some kind as well, so it could have been anyone.”

“But you thought it was a woman?”

“We did. Looking back, I do not know why.”

“The hat,” Venkatarama said. “And the gesture.” To Kate he explained, “The colors the passenger wore would have been unlikely on a man, and in addition, she was making a hand gesture as they passed, a rather feminine motion.”

“When was this, do you remember?”

“The weekend before Christmas,” Pandi spoke up. “Either Saturday the twentieth or Sunday the twenty-first. We took our families to the city to see the
Nutcracker,
staying the night.”

“I think it was the Sunday, when we were in Union Square,” Venkatarama said.

“Sunday, December twenty-first,” Kate repeated, dutifully writing it down, although she doubted it had anything to do with the case.

“And she was in his house,” Pandi added.

Venkatarama shook his head, disagreeing. “We cannot know that for certain,” but Kate was staring at Pandi.

“Why do you say that?” she asked him.

“She—or someone in a woman’s shoes—passed by the HolmesCam that afternoon.” His accent gave the name three syllables, so it took Kate a minute.

“The Holmes…?”

“HolmesCam. That’s what Philip called it, although others had rude names for it. Johnny and I call it the Spying Eye of Sherlock. Do you not know of it?”

“Perhaps you’d better explain.”

“A webcam link, to Philip’s sitting room.”

Lo-Tec had thought it would be a nanny-cam, or security monitor—
if you see a camera lens poking out of somewhere, let us know
. “We found the hookup, but we hadn’t got around to the site itself yet. It’s a camera operating in the living room?”

By way of answer, Pandi hit some buttons on his desktop and swiveled the screen around to Kate.

The comfortable chair, the fireplace, the littered tables, the drinks tray, in living color, a clock at the bottom frozen at 14:43.

“This is not live?”

“Not now, the feed went down on Sunday afternoon. Philip generally set it up to replay one event or another, such as one of the dinner parties. Many people use the website for their desktop.”

“The camera sees everything?”

“Only in this room, and not if Philip tripped the off switch near the door, at which time it would loop back, as I said, into a recording. Generally one where something interesting was happening.”

“The January dinner was on, last I saw,” said Venkatarama.

“The camera saw you, last weekend,” Pandi told Kate.

“Me?”

“Oh yes.” He turned the screen back to his side, typing as he continued, “You and a man. Your presence created quite a buzz on the comments. Nobody could figure out who these anachronisms were.” Kate went around behind him. Up came a website home page with an etching of what could only be Sherlock Holmes, superimposed by the name of her victim. Pandi chose one of the site’s pages, and the sitting room came on, stills of the room with dates going back over the past year down the left side. He chose the previous Saturday’s date, and asked, “Do you remember what time you were there?”

“From four-thirty to about eight,” she said weakly.

He chose 18:30, then went rapidly forward through the unchanging display of furniture and cold fireplace until a sudden flash of motion broke onto the screen. He slowed, and sat to one side so she could see.

A rather puzzled-looking woman with hair in need of a cut stood in the doorway, surveying the room. After a minute, she walked over to the chair, her movement jerky in the camera, and sat, taking out her cell phone. She slumped into the chair, legs crossed and one foot bouncing as she talked, her eyes moving up and down all the while. At one point, the eyes seemed to lock onto the camera, then passed on. The lens was concealed up near the ceiling in the corner near the dining room.

“No sound?” Kate asked.

“No, just the camera.”

Thank God for small favors, she thought. “Okay,” she told him, not wanting to watch the rest of her conversation with Lee, or Chris Williams’s entrance.

“Do you want to see some of the dinner party?”

“Sure,” she told him. She was only half aware of Venkatarama bringing her chair around for her.

The camera was arranged so the fireplace was center screen, a person sitting in the frayed chair dead in the middle of the picture, the bullet holes of “V. R.” clear on the wall overhead. The very right edge of the screen was defined by the velvet curtains which, even pulled back, allowed no glimpse of the outside world onscreen. On the left was the doorway to the hall, with the front door invisible beyond it. If someone came in the door and went directly upstairs, the camera would only catch passing feet. Kate opened her mouth to request to see the person they had seen that weekend in December, but then the screen filled and she forgot what she was going to ask.

It might have been a scene out of Victorian England. Half a dozen people in old-fashioned dress chatted and laughed, glasses of sparkling wine in their hands. The men wore formal evening wear, and Kate would have bet money that their bow ties had been hand-knotted. There was only one woman, a regal figure in her early fifties, graying blond hair swept into an elaborate hairdo, dressed in a black-and-white gown as severe as the men’s evening wear.

Some noise came from offscreen, causing two or three of the heads to turn. A back passed through the crowd, heading toward the front door. “That is Philip,” Pandi said. The man disappeared, and a minute later came back with Geraldine O’Malley, dressed in an enormous bustled gown made of what looked like upholstery material. She walked into the room, clearly knowing everyone there, and accepted the glass one of the men took from a silver tray and held out to her.

The tall man came back into the room, and Kate asked, “Can you pause it?”

Pandi obediently stopped the motion, and she leaned forward to look at the animate version of the man she had first seen crumpled on a dirty concrete floor.

Philip Gilbert was indeed tall and slim, but whereas she’d always sort of pictured Sherlock Holmes as skinny, pale, and nerdy, the Gilbert version of the man was simply elegant. Gilbert was not handsome, his features too sharp for conventional good looks, but he was so self-assured that a person couldn’t help finding him attractive. He moved into the room the epitome of the host—calm, solicitous, interested, and clearly wanting nothing but for his guests to enjoy themselves. The video had paused just as Gilbert reached the group in front of the fire, and his face wore an expression of intelligence and humor, as if he was about to hear the punch line of a joke he’d heard once before, but liked well enough to listen to again.

“Can you give me the URL for that?” she asked. Pandi touched keys, and an invisible motor started to whine. He pulled open the lower drawer in his desk and lifted out a piece of paper printed with the picture of Philip Gilbert and, at the top, the address of the site.

“Thank you. Tell me, do you know Marin well?”

The two men wordlessly consulted, then Pandi answered, “Not well, I think. Our wives like to go to a spa in St. Helena, one of those with mud baths and massages, and once talked us into going. I think we spent the day playing golf, wasn’t it?”

His cousin nodded.

“I just wondered if you might have any idea why Philip was over at the Marin headlands,” she said, but they could suggest no reason.

“Okay, that’s about it—Oh, just one last thing. Can I ask where you were Friday and Saturday a week ago—the twenty-third and twenty-fourth?”

“A conference in Anaheim,” Pandi answered. “We went down with our families on the Wednesday and came back on Sunday. Do you want the name of the hotel?”

She collected the relevant information that would allow her to check alibis if she wanted, although she had a feeling she needn’t bother, asked for and received their fingerprints, and laid a couple of business cards on the pristine desk. “Thank you, gentlemen, I won’t take up any more of your time. Please let me know if anything else comes to mind.”

Outside the offices, the world seemed a remarkably warm and softedged place. She looked over her notes, to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. None of the three witnesses had set any of her bells off: Their eyes had not suddenly shifted when she mentioned Marin, they had not started to sweat when she asked about Philip Gilbert’s irritating habits, none of them had slipped by revealing they knew more about the circumstances of his discovery than they should. Of course, they were all very bright people, as bright as Tom Rutland was, and in addition they had spent years thinking about criminal behavior, even if it was in the realm of fiction.

She took out her phone, driven as much by the wish to talk to a familiar voice as by mere necessity. However, she just got Hawkin’s voice mail, and had to be satisfied with leaving a message.

“Al, I’m finished here, I’m going to start back now. Give me a ring when you’re free.”

Al’s return call caught her on the freeway, and he suggested they meet for a late lunch. She knew a place not far from the one address still on the list, and found him at a table when she walked in.

They ordered and Kate told him about her two interviews. Al in turn described a completely uninformative conversation with Alex Climpson, a winery supervisor, who had also last seen Gilbert at the dinner party and last heard from him on the sixteenth about the piece in the newspaper, and seemed to have no particular feelings about Gilbert one way or the other. Wendell Bauer, a grad student in history at Cal, was the newest member of the Diners, having joined it in November and missed the December meeting due to the flu. Bauer, too, had little light to shed on the matter of Gilbert’s death.