The Art of Detection (43 page)

“I need to know by next week if I’m setting up something for May. You can’t put together a catalogue like that overnight. You wouldn’t know what this was, would you?” she probed.

“I couldn’t say,” Kate equivocated.

“Because if his estate is going to sell it, I’d be extremely interested in handling it.”

“I’ll pass the word on to his executors.”

“Thank you. Was there anything else?”

“Did he say anything during dinner about his plans for the…item?”

“Just that he would be selling it. I got the impression that he badly wanted to keep the thing for himself, but that it simply was too valuable to stay in his personal collection. Not every collector has the facilities to care for an item of world importance, or to deal with the publicity it would generate.”

“Did anything else come out of the dinner conversation?”

“Yes. I told him that I had heard that Christie’s was planning an auction of a large number of Conan Doyle papers. It hasn’t been announced yet, but I have my contacts.”

“Why did you tell him? I’d have thought this would tempt him to take his…item to them.”

“I considered that, but I knew that Philip would hear about it sooner or later, and I thought that it was better to control the information myself. I told him that his item would be a welcome addition to their sale, but if he expected it to get much attention, he would be sadly disappointed. If, however, we could make it the crown jewel of our own sale of literary-related items, which would not be limited to Conan Doyle papers, he might attract a very different and considerably more diverse group of bidders. He could see the advantage in having his item in with such things as a first-edition Hemingway inscribed to Gertrude Stein and one of Faulkner’s pens. Along with a number of lesser items, of course.”

“Of course. But he didn’t commit himself?”

“No, as I told you, he said he would need a couple weeks to decide. And that was pretty much that.”

“What did Mr. Gilbert do when you finished dinner?”

“What did he do? He thanked me and we waited for the valet to retrieve my car.”

“So you last saw him standing outside the restaurant?”

“Well, he was giving one of the other valets a tip and walking toward his own car. His had arrived first, but he waited with me until mine came. He was a man with old-fashioned manners.”

“Would his car have been a black Lexus?”

“I think so. A black car, anyway.”

“What time would that have been?”

“Gee, let’s see. Perhaps a little before eleven. Of course, I was on East Coast time, so it felt like two.”

“And you met at what time?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Thank you, Ms. Brancusi. If you think of anything else, could you give me a call?”

“Sure. And I’m sorry. About Philip. I liked him.” She sounded surprised, either at the fact or that she was giving it voice: Gilbert had gotten under the skin of the honey-tongued tigress.

“A number of people have said the same,” Kate told her.

Kate gave Al the gist of the conversation, and they both looked at the reconstruction. Where had Gilbert been between his 11:44 purchase of gasoline and his 8:00 dinner meeting with Louisa Brancusi? And even more urgent, where had he gone afterwards?

And one niggling question: Why had this technophobe, who rarely even carried his cell phone and whose records indicated that he had used it an average of twice a week, used his cell phone on the Saturday morning? Company records showed that the call was relayed through the tower nearest Gilbert’s home. So why hadn’t he used his home phone to place the call to Ian Nicholson, his last act before disappearing?

At one o’clock they broke for lunch, walking down to the nearby center of shops, bank, and cafes. On their way back, Kate proposed that they begin their second run at the neighbors.

“I was thinking the lawyer,” Al said, “but let’s start here, sure. Together, or you want to divide and conquer?”

“I’m meeting Jeannine Cartfield at four, but let’s start here and see how it goes.”

She found her notes on the Sunday interviews, and tried not to think about how slow progress was in an investigation: all week, and they were still sifting for threads that led somewhere.

“The woman on the left—as you look at this house, I mean—is a dancer. She gave me the name of Gilbert’s cleaning woman, she works at a desk overlooking the street and saw Gilbert’s comings and goings, noticed his car here and gone on the Friday. I think she’d have phoned if she remembered anything new.”

“What about houses you didn’t reach anyone at?” Hawkin asked.

“Just two of those—one is empty and has a For Sale sign up, the other the people spend the winters in Mexico. However, I had questions about a couple of places. One was the guy across the street who gave us the information about Gilbert’s security company. He didn’t know much when I interviewed him, but he kept hanging around outside while we were here, walking his dog, checking to see if we needed anything—did everything short of offering us donuts, and probably would have done that if we’d been here the next morning. Could just be a cop wannabe, but still…The other is the house next door—not the dancer, the night nurse. The more I think about it, the more it seems the woman was hiding something. And before you say it, yes, I know everyone’s hiding something, but she was clearly not happy about having a cop at her door.”

“Let’s start with those two, then, and work our way around. You did interview the people on the next street, backing on Gilbert’s yard?”

“Yes, O boss, I did. They heard nothing, saw less.”

The Murray household was even less helpful that day than it had been on Sunday. A different elderly woman answered this time, after they’d rung the bell twice and nearly walked away. She identified herself as Miss Flanders, and informed them in a very shaky voice, hiding behind the crack in the door, that her sister Mrs. Murray was not at home.

Al stepped in for this interview—he was an expert with little old ladies. “That’s right, she works, doesn’t she?” he said, making a show of fumbling through the papers in his hand. “What was it, noon to midnight? Long hours.”

“Tuesday through Friday,” she agreed, not falling for the sympathy routine.

“Well, ma’am, we’re going around the neighborhood asking about the evening of January twenty-third, to see if anyone noticed anything unusual with the house next door to you. Mr. Gilbert?”

“Next door?”

“That’s right, 927.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“You recalled that after very little thinking,” he said amiably.

“I wasn’t here the twenty-third. I was in Texas.”

“Houston, is that right?”

“Yes. My brother just got—got in. From South America. I needed to meet him and help him get settled.”

“Where is your brother now, Miss Flanders?”

“I told you, he’s in Houston.”

“And you didn’t see or hear anything around the twenty-third of January that concerned your neighbor?”

“I did not.”

“Okay. Well, thanks for your help. We’ll drop by maybe tomorrow and have a chat with your sister.”

“Don’t come early. She needs her sleep,” she said, and closed the door.

“Tomorrow, then,” Hawkin said to the wooden surface.

As they went down the steps, Kate told him, “Interesting to note that ‘getting my brother settled’ is pretty much the same words her sister used.”

“Personally, I was taken by that hesitation before saying that her brother just got ‘in, from South America.’ Have to wonder if maybe it was ‘out’ that he got.”

“We can check to see if they’ve just paroled any prisoners in Houston by the name of Flanders. Otherwise, I’m afraid your charming aw-shucks manner just struck out.”

“I’m not the boy I was.”

“Let’s try the guy across the street.”

The man across the street greeted them as long-lost colleagues, told his yappy white puffball of a dog to be quiet, offered them coffee, nodded at their refusal as if it referred to a trade secret, pressed them for details, put up both palms in a gesture of secret knowledge when Al reminded him that they could not tell him any, pulled his dog off Al’s legs, nodded with great sympathy at Kate’s admission that they hadn’t progressed very far, offered them lemonade, accepted their refusal with another knowing nod, and finally permitted them to get to the point.

“Mr. Wallace, have you remembered anything else about Friday the twenty-third of January? I know you were sick, but maybe when you had to get up to go to the bathroom or something, you might recall seeing Mr. Gilbert come and go? At any time during the day?”

“Please, it’s Simon. And here, why don’t we go upstairs?”

They protested that it was not necessary, but he was already moving toward the stairway, and insisted that they needed to see it.

So they followed him, trying not to step on the pile of fluff that scurried around their feet, and turned to the second-floor room at the front of the house. Simon Wallace walked to a wooden desk with a highly polished surface the approximate square footage of a marriage bed; Kate couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten it up the stairs. He stood at the desk and pulled open a ring binder, turning it sideways and thumbing the pages until he came to a calendar page labeled JANUARY. But by the time he had it, both Kate and Al were looking beyond the desk to the setup at the window.

In the window stood a camera on a tripod, its lens something a paparazzo would drool over. On the room side of the three legs stood a chair; to the right was a small table with an open spiral notebook and pencil.

“Mr. Wallace,” Al asked in a mild voice, “are you spying on your neighbors?”

“Conducting surveillance,” Wallace retorted, stung.

“Why?”

“Well…Because…In case something comes up you need to see.”

“So you don’t always have this equipment set up?”

“It’s my bird-watching kit. No, it’s just been here since you came on the first.”

Which meant that he would have nothing for the days they were actually interested in. However, rather than showing disappointment, Al maintained the disapproving attitude as he said, “Then you have no information for the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of January.”

“Here,” Wallace nearly shouted in his eagerness to prove his worth, “I’ve got photos of people coming and going. They say criminals often revisit the scene of the crime.”

He thrust a stack of photos at each of them; Kate felt a bit sorry for the fellow, and looked at a few on the top, but as far as she could see, all the people were either criminologists or people who lived in the house. She flipped through a dozen more—there was one of her, sitting on the front steps of the Gilbert house talking on her phone and looking positively frumpy—then piled them together and handed them back to him.

“Mr. Wallace—”

“Simon, please.”

“—I think it might be best if you were to stop taking pictures now and went back to bird-watching. Your neighbors might not be happy about it if they found out, and nothing’s likely to happen now.”

He looked sadly at the stack of snapshots showing the street outside. “I was just trying to help….”

Al, however, had removed one picture from his pile. “Does Mrs. Murray in 929 have someone living with her?”

Wallace glanced at the picture, which showed a slim young woman in athletic shoes walking a pair of slim young dogs past the Murray house. A window in the second story held a dark shape that looked like a man, although it could have been merely a shadow. But Wallace was nodding quickly. “Yeah, he’s only been there for a few days. Big guy. Doesn’t come out much.”

“May we have this?” Al asked.

“Of course,” Wallace said, all but wriggling in excitement. “Just tell me the number on the back.”

Al turned it over curiously and read, “F19.”

Wallace moved to his binder, flipped pages, and bent to make a note. Kate moved close enough to see what he had printed:
Surveillance photo F19; turned over to Inspector A. Hawkin, 2/6/04; 15:22 hours.

She felt as if he expected them to salute him as they left.

EIGHTEEN

I
’ve got to run if I’m going to catch Jeannine Cartfield,” she said to Hawkin.

“I think I’ll head back to the Detail,” he said, “see if I can track down this guy next door. I’ll drop you by the Ferry Building on the way. Or would you rather get your car?”

“No, I’m fine getting back. But how can you fit a neighbor into this?”

“Can’t, yet. But it’s a hole that needs filling, and you never know. He might be a paroled forger who did work for Gilbert—”

“Yeah, right,” she said dryly.

“Or a home invasion.”

She didn’t take his suggestion at all seriously. As they drove, she chewed on the problem. After a while, she said, “It’s all about the dump site.”

“Yep.”

“There’s no gaping alibis, just the usual problems, and so far we’ve caught no one out in a lie. Nobody admits to knowing about the story, but somebody used it for the disposal.”

“Nicholson knew.”

“Nicholson was two hundred fifty miles away the night the body had to have been left, reading the damned story in his motel room. I checked. Even if he had a Ferrari and collected speeding tickets all the way, the return trip back to San Francisco would have taken him eight or nine hours. I think Gilbert gave someone else a copy.”

“Rutland?”

“Either him, or Jeannine Cartfield. And I know I said it wasn’t likely to be a woman, but she’s a strong woman, and she has an air of…determination about her.”

“Determination.”

“You know what I mean. But look: Gilbert made three phone calls on Friday morning, to Rutland, Nicholson, and Cartfield. And the next day, Gilbert was in a rush to get the story to Nicholson before Nicholson took off for Seattle.”

“That’s right.”

“What if someone else got ahold of the manuscript? What if Gilbert discovered that a copy was missing, or that someone had broken in and read the thing? If he wanted to control the publicity, he’d be in a panic because the news was about to break without him.”

“But it hasn’t broken,” Al pointed out.