The Art of Detection (38 page)

She put the screen to sleep, and went down toward the odors and noises of family.

After dinner and dishes but before bedtime stories, Kate fit in another hour at the computer. While the thing was speeding through time, registering no motion but the slow wax and wane of the sun outside, she phoned Lo-Tec Freeman at home.

She identified herself, and heard his voice go instantly defensive. “I’m not on call tonight,” he said.

“This isn’t about tonight. It’s about that webcam hookup on Gilbert’s computer. Did you guys find any kind of switch for it?”

“We haven’t been to the house since Sunday,” Lo-Tec pointed out. “We would have told you.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d have said something. But there’s a switch downstairs somewhere, and it might have a print on it.”

She stopped talking then, knowing that he would be pulled between professional pride, that he might have missed something, and affront, that she might be accusing him of missing something. In the end, pride won.

“You want me to go look?”

“Not tonight. But Hawkin and I will be there in the morning, if you can give us five minutes.”

“What time?”

“Nine-thirty? Ten?”

“I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up.

She put down the phone and it rang, with Al’s voice. “I’m not going to show up tonight, unless you need me,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

“Interesting story.”

“I kind of liked it, although I haven’t a clue what it has to do with Gilbert’s death. I managed to reach most of those names, left messages for the others, so I wouldn’t bother with them if I were you.”

“Anything?”

“Not really. They all liked him a little, were somewhat intimidated by him, sorry he was dead, but he hadn’t said anything about a typescript or a new Sherlock Holmes story.”

“Okay. Well, enjoy your nuts and Port.”

Just after seven-thirty, the HolmesCam recording reached its end. On the Saturday, Kate had appeared, sitting in Gilbert’s chair while talking on her painfully anachronistic cell phone. Chris Williams came through, then all was still for a while, until on Sunday Lo-Tec had pulled the plug, and the screen blinked into emptiness. She turned off the computer, read Nora a quick story, and went off to meet the Sherlockians.

Kate left the house just before eight. She lucked out with parking, when an SUV the size of a small motor home pulled out just ahead of her, down the street from Tony’s. The greeter (the place was not grand enough for the man to be called a maitre d’) led her through the tables to a back room. The door stood wide open and voices came from within; when she stepped inside and the greeter closed the door after her, nine faces looked up, wearing varying degrees of surprise. Tom Rutland and, a beat later, Ian Nicholson stood to welcome her, but Ian, seeing Tom rise, sat back and let the lawyer do the honors.

Rutland was the only one wearing evening dress; he resembled a maître d’ himself, among the ordinary suits and dresses. Of course, the tux Rutland wore would have eaten up a solid month’s salary for a maitre d’, and a restaurant employee would not have have worn the small “221B” pin on his lapel.

Kate now knew 221B was the London house number of Sherlock Holmes.

“Hope I’m not too late,” she told the room, and added, “Bedtime stories to read.”

As she’d expected, evoking a child instantly disarmed any mistrust of the cop in their midst—although the number of wine bottles on the table might have had something to do with the ease of their welcome. Nicholson introduced her by name rather than rank, and she shook hands all around, receiving introductions to those she had not met before. Alex Climpson, winery supervisor, was the pudgy young man who had failed at a number of the quizzes the night of the party, with Wendell Bauer the even younger, rather shy-looking man, at Climpson’s side tonight as he had been in the photo of the party she had printed out. Soong Li, as Chinese in looks as his name was, sat across from Bauer between Pandi and Venkatarama. Finally, at the far end of the table next to Thomas Rutland, the tall, dignified woman who had helped Gilbert the night of the party. Tonight she was wearing a soft wool dress instead of the severe white blouse and black skirt, and the hair on her head was still gathered up, although in a style less reminiscent of a stiff wig.

“Jeannine Cartfield,” she said to Kate; her hand was hard: Did she lift weights?

“So you’re all here,” Kate said, sinking into the chair Rutland pulled up for her at the end of the table, her back to the door. He started to sit in his chair at the end facing her—had that been Gilbert’s customary position?—but interrupted the motion to walk around the table behind Kate and open the door again. As he came back around, he said to Kate in explanation, “Gets stuffy in here.” When he sat down again, Nicholson shot him a grateful glance, making Kate wonder if stuffiness was the problem, or an enclosed surrounding for one of the members. Yes, Rutland seemed to be stepping into the position of leader here, to the extent of providing for the members’ comfort.

Jeannine Cartfield spoke up first.

“We decided that the dinner should go on. If nothing else, we needed to have a toast to Philip.”

The woman’s voice was even, her eyes did not look as if they had shed tears, and Kate wondered at her relationship with the dead man. “You’ve been in Sacramento, I understand?” she asked Cartfield.

Ian Nicholson murmured in low but ringing tones, “You have been in Sacramento, I perceive,” and a gust of laughter ran around the table, sounding heavily fueled by alcohol.

“Sorry?” Kate asked.

“Sherlockian humor, Inspector,” Cartfield said with a fond glance at Nicholson. “Yes, I just got back from Sacramento. One day turned into three—our state legislators can be remarkably difficult to pin down. I’m trying to arrange funding for some special programs through the Ferry Building.”

“Maybe we could make a time to talk? If nothing else, I need to get a statement from you.”

“Sure, any time.”

Kate sat back slightly in her chair, to take in the whole group, and said, “Thank you for inviting me here. As you all know, my partner and I have been assigned to Philip Gilbert’s murder.” The room stirred at the word, and she said, “Yes, it has officially been classified as homicide. Most of you have already given us your statements, but I wanted to come here to see if I could get a sense of Mr. Gilbert himself. You nine seem to have been among his closest friends, although I’m told that Philip didn’t really have close friendships, so I’d like to ask you to tell me about him.”

No need to point out that telling Kate about Gilbert would invariably mean telling her about themselves as well: She wanted to be their bright-eyed friend, not an interrogating cop. Coming here alone, mentioning her family life, and shifting immediately to the victim’s first name all helped nudge them into thinking of her as just another member of Philip Gilbert’s circle.

“What do you wish to know?” Rutland asked.

“Big things, small things. Let’s see—ah. Why would Philip have kept his keys on the top floor?”

Kate had chosen the seemingly trivial question with care: Whoever had entered the house for twelve minutes at two o’clock Saturday morning had almost certainly used Gilbert’s keys, since even the cleaning woman didn’t have a set. He—or she—had not used them to leave the house, since the deadbolt had not been turned, and might well have simply forgotten to return them to the ground floor in the haste of a surreptitious exit. Kate watched them, alert for any twitch or flush of guilt, but nine faces sat as before, until Pandi spoke up.

“That is a very interesting question, sounding positively Holmesian. His mysteries often turn on a small and obscure fact. I fear, however, in this case the obscure fact will remain obscure. I have seen Philip put the keys on the stand inside the door, it is true, but I have also noticed him carry the keys upstairs with him and leave them on the desk. I believe Philip found it unpleasant to have reminders of the present century lying out in the open in the ground-floor apartments.”

“That’s why he hid the alarm pad behind the picture?”

“Behind the Paget drawing, yes. Certain things were necessary, but jarring.”

“Philip hated to break character,” Nicholson volunteered.

“Exactly,” Pandi agreed with a decisive nod.

“That’s why he left the lights over the stairs burning, and the fake coal fire going?” Kate asked. “So he wouldn’t have to turn them on and off?”

“I suppose,” Pandi said.

“What about the dead bolt?” she asked. “When we entered the house, we found just the lock in the knob was set.”

But again, if she had been hoping for a start of guilty memory, she was disappointed.

“He may not have intended to be gone long,” Venkatarama answered. “He did not always secure his door as he should have. That, too, may have reminded him that he was not in the nineteenth century.”

“If he didn’t like going through the motions of modern life, how did he handle the webcam business? He switched that off from time to time.”

Climpson spoke, for the first time since the introductions. “I helped Philip set that up, last fall. He needed an override, for privacy and whenever someone inappropriately dressed for the era was in sight of it, but he didn’t want a visible switch. We disguised the device behind a framed photograph on the wall next to the stairs. It’s hinged, like the Paget drawing, an early daguerreotype of Windsor Castle.”

“So his…” Don’t call it mania, she thought. “…his commitment to authenticity only extended so far?”

Geraldine O’Malley took this one. “Philip called himself a ‘surface purist.’ He would freely admit that his rooms abounded in borderline anachronisms and outright fakes, but it was a work in progress, and when he found something better, he used it.”

Cartfield nodded. “Think of Philip’s rooms as a kind of installation art, an ongoing experiment in living sculpture. He shaped it, he participated in it, he even loved it, but he wasn’t limited by it. In fact, you could say that Philip’s life was that same work of art. He lived and breathed Sherlock Holmes, imitated the man’s values and ways of thinking, took on the dress, speech, and habits as a way of exploring the deeper issues of the man’s righteousness and commitment. I hope you haven’t got the idea that Philip was delusional, that he thought he actually
was
Sherlock Holmes? That couldn’t be further from the truth. Philip was comfortable with modern life, lived most of the time in his apartment on the top floor. The bottom floor was his art, his discipline, his interest both aesthetically and emotionally, but it wasn’t his entire life.”

“It was like a religious discipline with Philip,” said a new voice: Wendell Bauer, grad student. “Eastern monks seek enlightenment in the contemplation of an object or a painting. Philip sought it in a focused concentration on Sherlock Holmes.”

Kate put on an unconvinced face, not difficult to do. “Have to say, though, the place looks more like a shrine than an object of contemplation.”

“I know what you mean.” Climpson spoke up. “When I first saw it, I thought it was, well, more than a little creepy. And when Philip was playing the part, you could be excused for thinking he was delusional—come on, Jeannine,” he said when she tried to interrupt him, “he would be so into it, even his voice changed. It was kind of spooky.”

Tom Rutland stepped in to agree. “It’s true—no, Jeannine, you’ve got to admit a person doesn’t become that immersed in a fantasy world just because it’s an intellectual or aesthetic form for him. Philip loved Holmes and his world. And he loved becoming Holmes.”

Cartfield finally got her voice in. “Philip didn’t become Holmes any more than Anthony Hopkins became Hannibal Lecter when they filmed the movie. He explored the character fully but it’s hardly fair to make him sound like some sicko. The inspector here’s going to think of Philip as a nut.”

Kate kept her face very straight.

“Holmes was an enormous part of Philip’s life,” Rutland admitted. “The rest of us dress up a few times a year and play the game, but Philip played it day in and day out.”

Cartfield turned to the redheaded man. “Ian, wouldn’t you agree that Philip was acting?”

“Certainly, although what Wendell says has some merit. But I’m afraid that Tom may be right, that Philip was dangerously close to forgetting that it was an act. These last two coups of his, the
Beeton’s
and this story, they changed him. Didn’t you think he’d changed recently?”

“He was excited. And distracted,” Jeannine insisted, although she seemed more willing to accept criticism of Philip when it came from Nicholson than when one of the others said it.

Pandi agreed with Nicholson. “I know what you mean, Ian. At the last two meetings, he seemed excited, yes, which we now know was the story. But he was also apart, almost cold.”

“Philip always was above mere friendship,” Venkatarama observed.

“But how long has it been since you saw him laugh?” his cousin asked. “Philip had developed that habit of looking down his nose and giving a sort of condescending smile. It was really quite annoying.”

“It’s true,” Rutland said. “The last few months he could be a real pain in the ass. It was like he’d decided to take on all the most abrasive Holmesian characteristics—superiority, brusqueness—”

“He was smoking a lot, did you notice?” O’Malley contributed.

“And not eating much,” Climpson added.

“Another imitation of Holmes—feeding the brain and not the body,” Venkatarama said in agreement.

“He stood by himself a lot at that party,” said Soong Li.

“Like we were clients instead of friends.” O’Malley again.

“I felt snubbed,” said Pandi in his melodious accent. “As if he had decided that the proper pattern of behavior was that of Holmes to Watson.”

“A casual abuse of friends,” said Nicholson, unable to hide a trace of bitterness.

O’Malley turned to Kate. “This whole Holmes thing. To most of us it’s a game; to others it is a passion. I’d have said Philip was in that second category, until the past few weeks, when it looked like he was getting into the third level: obsession.”