The Art of Detection (15 page)

Because traffic had been light and the conversations even lighter, Al had managed to fit one of the San Francisco residents into his schedule. Soong Li had been in touch with Gilbert later than the circular e-mail of the sixteenth, conducting a brisk correspondence over the nineteenth and twentieth, concerning a Sherlock Holmes teapot for sale in Hong Kong that he wanted Gilbert’s opinion about.

“He was peeved when Gilbert told him he wouldn’t judge it without looking at it, and that he wasn’t about to fly to Hong Kong unless Li paid for the trip. Li seemed to think Gilbert should do the thing out of sheer goodwill.”

“A Sherlock Holmes teapot?” Kate asked.

“With the pipe as its handle and the lid a deerstalker cap.”

“Please don’t spoil my appetite,” she protested.

“You want to go together and see Jeannine Cartfield when we’re done?”

“Sure. She and the other woman, Geraldine O’Malley, are friends outside the dinner club. She thinks that Cartfield—she calls her Jeannie—and Gilbert might have known each other in college.”

“Anything beyond friendship?”

“Not so far as O’Malley knew. Actually, I found it reassuring to hear that the man had that much of a tie. He seems to have cut himself off from anything smacking of emotion.”

“A man with one passion.”

“Yeah, and that directed at a dead, made-up character.”

“Wrong there.”

“What do you mean? You’re not trying to tell me that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t made up?”

“The people I saw today might take those as fighting words, but I meant the dead part. I was informed by Soong Li, quite seriously, that since no Holmes obituary has yet to appear in the
Times
of London, clearly he has not yet died.”

Kate stared at Al, who looked back at her over the top of his glass, one eyebrow lifted. She began to laugh, and he joined her, which was about the high point of this, their case’s third day. Particularly as Jeannine Cartfield, onetime mystery writer who worked for the Ferry Building, was in Sacramento until at least the following afternoon.

So they both went home, to write up their notes in the comforting midst of their respective families and meet again for a trip to the Marin headlands in the morning. At her car, Kate glanced at her watch, saw that Lee would just have finished with Monday’s final, late-afternoon client, and phoned to see if she needed anything on the way.

“I was going to start dinner,” Lee said, “but if you want to grab something, I’ll go get Nora and then put my feet up.”

“Let me get Nora. She can help me pick up groceries.” Anything that let Lee put her feet up was good, and besides, for some reason Nora counted a trip to the grocery store as a great treat.

“Okay, if you want. Let her choose the salad makings. Maybe that will encourage her to eat some greens.”

Not if she chooses Jell-O and canned fruit,
Kate thought but did not say aloud. Lee’s approach to parenting was inevitably colored by her life as a therapist; still, Nora appeared to have been born with skills of resistance that could meet the challenge of a too-clever mother.

However, the moment Kate saw Nora, standing in the hallway of the nursery school getting her coat put on, she was seized by the cowardly wish that she had let that other, more clever mother come pick the child up today: Nora was moping.

A moping Nora was Eeyore with a thundercloud overhead: glum, listless, unable to summon enough energy to meet another’s eye. She allowed her young teacher, Rowena, to thread her limp arms into the jacket, deaf to the young woman’s cheery chatter. When the buttons were done up and the day’s art masterpieces pressed into the small hand, she still just stood, until the teacher’s hand gently urged her in Kate’s direction. Kate had to stretch down for Nora’s hand, and as she straightened, she looked a question at Rowena.

The teacher shrugged, and told Kate, “Nora was great all day, but something seems to have happened during recess. She won’t tell me what it was, but she seems very sad.”

Nora’s response was to allow her head and shoulders to droop even farther, the very image of despondency. It was all Kate could do not to laugh, seeing her curly-headed three-year-old acting out depression. She winked at Rowena, who appeared relieved that Kate wasn’t taking it too seriously, and took Nora’s hand more firmly, leading her to the car and buckling her into her car seat.

All the way to the grocery store, Kate carried on a running conversation about nothing. Nora said not a word, but Kate didn’t press her. And she didn’t make the mistake of offering her an ice cream to cheer her up, merely lifted her into the cart and debated aloud the merits of red tomatoes versus yellow, frizzy lettuce versus crunchy.

“Don’t like frizzy,” said a small gloomy voice.

“You don’t feel like spring mix today, huh? Well, shall we get some for Mamalee, and you and I can have iceberg?”

“With glop.”

Kate laughed at the word. “That’s right, with blue cheese glop on top.” She repeated the inadvertent rhyme a few times, making a song out of the last three words, but Nora wasn’t quite ready to respond, so they continued with their shopping.

Finally, standing in front of the deli section waiting for their sliced turkey, Nora broke. She leaned forward in the cart until she was resting against Kate’s chest, and Kate wrapped her arms around the child, bending her head over, a still island in the middle of the busy store. When Nora spoke, it was in a voice too low to hear.

“I’m sorry, love, I can’t hear you. Could you say that again?”

“Am I illemut?”

“Are you what?”

“Illemut!”

“I’m really sorry, sweetheart,” Kate said, hating herself as a failure, “but I don’t know what that word means. Can you tell me where you heard it?”

“Dierdre Carter, I really hate her, she said I was illemut, and that you were going to go away and Mamalee won’t love me.”

Shocked, Kate stood back and tipped Nora’s head up so she could see. The child’s eyes trembled with unshed tears. “Who the hell is this Dierdre Carter and why would she say such stupid things?”

“She’s Alda’s big sister and she had to come today ’cause her school’s out and she bossed us all and took all the toys and then she was teasing Steven because his parents are getting a ’vorce and she said they were never really married and that he’s illemut and, and, she said I was, too.”

Illegitimate.
Fuck.
Kate wanted to hunt down Dierdre Carter and throttle the child. But more immediately, she leaned down until her face was inches from Nora’s. “This Dierdre sounds like a very stupid little girl, and a bully.” Bully was a concept much in play in modern schools, a thing nobody wanted to be. “Illegitimate is a really old-fashioned idea that means two people had a baby by accident, before they were really ready for it. But I guarantee you, there was nothing even a little bit accidental about you. We had to work really hard to get you, and we wanted you and we loved you before you were even a lump in Mamalee’s belly. Do you understand me?”

Nora nodded, already looking relieved.

“As for the other, just because some people get a divorce, not everybody does. Steven’s parents have a lot of problems we don’t, and sometimes everyone is happier if the parents don’t live together and fight all the time. Do Mamalee and I fight all the time?”

“Not
all
the time,” Nora agreed, unwilling to let go of her worry.

“You rat,” Kate said, her indignation exaggerated in an attempt at comic relief. “We don’t fight at all, we just argue a little.”

“Okay.”

She bent back again, holding Nora’s gaze. “I will not leave you. And Mamalee will never, ever stop loving you. You got that?”

Nora nodded, the black cloud dispersing from above her curls.

“Okay, now I’m finished with Dierdre the bully. Do you want cheddar or jack cheese in your sandwich tomorrow?”

“Gorgonzola,” said Nora with a wicked twinkle in her eye, and succeeded in cracking her mother up.

FIVE

N
ora went to bed early that night, exhausted by her emotional excess, and only when she was safely asleep did Kate tell Lee about the incident. Lee’s first impulse was also to strangle the other girl, although she quickly recovered and speculated about the security of Dierdre’s own family structure. Kate frankly didn’t care, and knew that Lee would have it out with the nursery school director the following day.

She waited for the kettle to come to a boil, making her responses in the right places, her mind moving away from their daughter’s distress. She dropped a tea bag into one mug, reflecting that not long ago, she would have been making coffee. Probably the first sign of middle age, giving up coffee at night. No, the second sign—the first was gray hair Down There. At least she could still manage real tea, not the caffeine-free twigs mixture that Lee seemed actually to like.

She scooped twigs into the hinged teaspoon and put it in the other mug, poured boiling water over both, and moved toward the refrigerator, only to come up hard against Lee, standing and looking at her, the milk in one hand.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the carton, then looked more closely at Lee’s face. “Sorry, did I miss something?”

“I said, do you want to watch a movie?” Lee asked.

“Um,” Kate said.

“You have work.”

“I do, I’m sorry. You go ahead, I’ll come down when I’m finished.”

“By the distracted look on your face, I’ll be waiting until tomorrow. Is this the Case of the Murdered Sherlockian? How’s it coming along?”

“The man’s a puzzle. As far as I can see, he didn’t have a single soul in the world that he just hung out and had a beer with. However, he seems to have had a live camera operating in his sitting room. That’s what I need to look at tonight.”

“A webcam?”

“Looks like. Pointing right at the chair in his Sherlock Holmes sitting room, where people could tune in and see him sitting and waiting for Dr. Watson.”

“The man’s entire life was a construct,” Lee commented sadly.

Not, Kate reflected as she walked upstairs to the computer, a very desirable epitaph.

THE screen came up, showing the same image she had seen in the offices of Diagram Research, the clock frozen at 14:43 Sunday. She moved the cursor to the archives and clicked on January 23, the Friday around which he had died. The room appeared, looking much as she had seen it on Rajindra Pandi’s monitor that afternoon. The clock in the lower corner said 7:24; the “fire” was glowing and the gas lamps were burning bright to supplement the winter sun. She explored the site for a while, found a means of speeding things up, and watched nothing move at a faster rate, the clock spinning quickly forward.

Suddenly a figure flashed past, and she slowed, reversed, and saw a tall man in an old-fashioned suit walk across to the bookshelf, stand there for a couple of minutes, then come over to the chair with a slim book in his hand. Philip Gilbert laid the book on the littered table, trading it for a pipe, which he dug around in for a while before reaching forward to remove the tobacco pouch from the decorative slipper tacked onto the fireplace. He loaded the pipe and tamped it down, returned the tobacco pouch to its resting place, and lit a match, holding it to the bowl of the pipe. A cloud of smoke obscured his face briefly, then dispersed. He propped his feet up on the leather hassock that sat in front of his chair, took the book from the table and opened it, and sat, reading and smoking.

“You sure got an exciting life for yourself there, Phil,” she told the man on the monitor.

He turned a page.

The nose that had looked so sharp in death fit his living face more comfortably. It was actually not a bad-looking face. A little extreme in its features, between the big nose, the deep-set eyes, and the high cheekbones, but an interesting face, which looked younger than his fifty-three years. His hair was not as thick as she’d thought it; either that or the pomade he used was freshly applied. His body was long, his hands thin and sensitive—surgeon’s hands, they were called, or perhaps a pianist’s. No rings. No watch, although a shiny chain was visible across his vest, under the suit’s jacket.

She made a note on her pad: No such timepiece had come to light in the house.

“Where’s your damn watch, Sherlock?” she asked him. He did not look up from his page. She advanced the record in fits and starts, until at 8:40 he closed his book and took a final puff on his pipe, leaving it propped against some unidentifiable rubbish on the table.

He then reached into his inner pocket and took out a small notebook with a dark cover. He opened it, pulled a miniature silver writing instrument from within—pencil? pen?—and bent over the notebook. Of course, what he was writing could not be seen from the camera’s angle.

Kate sat back in disgust and told the man, “Phil, you’re going to be dead soon, and if you don’t help me out here, I’m not going to figure out what happened to you.”

She reached for her cup, but her hand froze as the man on the screen seemed to respond to her complaint. He slipped away the pen, snapped the book shut, and dropped it into his pocket. He placed his hands on the arms of the chair, and as he prepared to rise, he looked directly into Kate’s eyes and winked at her.

The frisson of reaction passed before the man was even on his feet: He’d been winking at the camera, not at her, and the coincidence in timing was just that. Still, she thought as her fingers finished closing on the mug, it had been an eerie sensation, that instant of communication with the dead. When he had left the room, she played the moment back, and decided that yes, it was a faint but deliberate movement of his right eyelid. A wink.

She drank her tea and watched the empty room for a while. Friday morning, the last Friday morning of Philip Gilbert’s life.

After a while, she stopped the clock, made note of the time, and went back into the archives for the day of the dinner party, January 7.

Geraldine O’Malley had said that Jeannine Cartfield, one of the dinner club members they hadn’t spoken to that day, had helped Gilbert make dinner that night. Probably that meant she had come by after work, so Kate scrolled to five o’clock and set the speed high. At 17:21 a brief blip registered on the left side of the screen. She rewound, and saw through the doorway a man’s feet passing left to right, then after a moment, the same feet, accompanied by a woman’s legs and heeled pumps, going from right to left: Gilbert letting someone in the front door. The woman was carrying something, but Kate could only catch the corner of a dark shape at about knee level. Neither came into the sitting room, which meant that they had either gone upstairs, or walked directly back into the kitchen.