The Art of Detection (17 page)

“Yes, I was just about to call you about that. When did
you
find it?”

“Last night,” she told him, fudging a little. “Late. By the time I got the details, it was too late to call you. I hope you hadn’t spent a lot of time on it.”

“Not a lot. Thanks for letting me know.” Freeman hung up, clearly miffed, not that she had wasted his time, but that she had figured out his puzzle first. Lo was a man who loved his work.

She switched on her computer and started working on the reports she hadn’t finished the night before. Twenty minutes into it, Kate Martinelli’s phone rang. As she was short on sleep, needed another cup of coffee, and paperwork wasn’t exactly her favorite part of the job, she probably sounded a bit terse as she answered with a “Yes?”

“Um, I beg your pardon,” said a pleasant English voice. “I’m trying to reach an Inspector Martinelli?”

“This is she.”

“Ian Nicholson here.” When she failed to respond, he prompted, “You left a message on my machine yesterday morning, asking urgently that I call you back?”

Ian Nicholson: missing friend of Pajama Man Philip Gilbert. She shoved away the papers and leaned back in her chair, gazing at the cloudy window. “Yes, thanks for returning my call. Mr. Nicholson, I’m with the San Francisco Police Department, and we’re working on a case in which your name came up as a possible witness. I wonder if we might meet and talk about it?”

“Witness to what?” the Englishman asked warily.

“Perhaps if we could meet?”

“What kind of a case is this?” His voice took on an edge; Kate gave way.

“It’s a homicide, Mr. Nicholson. When would be a good time for you?”

“A hom—Someone was killed? Who?”

“Mr. Nicholson, if we could just—”

“Inspector Martinelli, the machine is telling me that I have twenty-three unplayed messages following yours, and only three came in all of last week. I phoned you immediately I heard your message, as it sounded important. If the victim is someone I know, I should think that information will be the subject of most of those waiting on the machine.”

She sighed; an intelligent witness could be a real pain in the ass. “The body of Mr. Philip Gilbert was discovered over the weekend in—”

“Philip?”
The man’s voice rose in disbelief until it sounded halfway to laughter. “You’ve got to be mistaken.”

“Sir, we need to speak.”

There was a moment of silence as Nicholson confronted the possibility; when he spoke, any trace of amusement had vanished. “Yes, certainly. Do you need me to come downtown?”

“I’ll come to you, if that’s convenient.”

He gave her the address and said he’d be there the rest of the morning. She told him she’d be there shortly, and called Al. He was in his car.

“Do you know what a bad idea it is to talk on the phone while you’re driving?” she asked him.

“Is that what you called to ask me?”

“No, I called because Ian Nicholson’s surfaced. You want me to say we’ll see him this afternoon, when we finish on the headlands?”

“Those headlands interviews are probably going to take most of the day. Why don’t I go start on them, you talk to Nicholson and join me over there when you’re through?”

“You sure?” she asked, although she’d anticipated his proposal. One of the great things about Al was his comfort with working solo.

“Why not? See you later.”

Nicholson lived in a freshly converted warehouse-turned-apartment-building in what had once been San Francisco’s industrial underbelly, an area now being mined for its square footage. This appeared to be an area whose zoning had only recently changed: For-sale signs stood on several of the warehouses she had seen, and the cross streets were quiet. The two-story building across the street from Nicholson’s freshly painted address was windowless and blank on its upper half, although the lower had been set with a symmetrical row of single-car-width garage doors. With the price of garage rental in the city, the owners of that warehouse probably didn’t need to convert to housing.

She left her car on the street and walked down the sidewalk to the expanse of glass that marked the entranceway. Inside was an impressive foyer, a thousand square feet of intricately patterned marble, mailboxes set into one wall, a lively mural depicting an Italian landscape with hill town on the other, and one large potted tree in a corner between them. All of it was brightly lit, readily visible from the street, and protected by the unbreakable glass. Kate stood beneath a security camera and located the name Nicholson set into the still-shiny brass plate, one of only seven labels among the twenty slots; she identified herself to the English voice. The speaker buzzed, and she pushed open the door.

The entrance foyer led into a bare and sunless courtyard clearly intended to host large parties, but as yet lacking so much as a plastic lawn chair. The surrounding walls had been painted various warm earth tones, and a fountain played in its center, the water splashing down its angular sides, but in that stark setting, in the absence of furniture, people, or even birds, the fountain looked like a sculpture that had been temporarily abandoned on its way into an actual living space. With all that concrete emptiness, appealing though the colors were, the walls seemed very high and far away.

A door across the courtyard was standing open, framing the redheaded man who had been standing behind Geraldine O’Malley during the toast, a man in his late forties dressed today in jeans, a much-washed green linen shirt, and dark socks but no shoes. He was not much taller than Kate, perhaps five feet eight inches, but sturdy as a rugby player. His was an interesting face, with a crooked nose, gray-blue eyes, and the texture of freckles beneath the weathered skin. It was an appealing whole, not just from the boyish features, but from the glint of humor that lay in face and shoulders, as if to say there wasn’t much he could do about the youth there except grin at it, and invite others to do the same.

Kate was not grinning, exactly, but she did feel her mood lightening as she approached. “Mr. Nicholson?” she asked; the surrounding walls bounced back echoes.

“Thanks for coming down here,” said the English voice she’d heard on the phone. “I’ve been living in the car for the past week, hated the thought of having to climb back inside.” They shook hands, his hard and cool, and he stood back to let her enter.

“Nice place,” she remarked.

“The flats themselves are great, although that courtyard I find depressing as hell.”

“It does look a bit raw.”

“I think the designer had a sort of Tuscan village flavor in mind, but he overlooked the fact that the effect depends on a full complement of residents, preferably people who are home for more than a few hours a day, and a judicious sprinkling of aged grandmothers in black, small barefoot children, and dogs. To say nothing of bedding draped out of the windows and the occasional chicken. Of course, pets are forbidden here, half the apartments are vacant, what neighbors there are seem to be all between the ages of twenty-five and forty, and building regulations prohibit anything as offensively prosaic as hanging laundry. Perhaps it will be better when it fills up. Coffee? It’s fresh.”

During this monologue, which could have been a sign of nerves at the presence of the police or merely the genetic effusiveness of a redhead, Nicholson had led her into the apartment and up a set of polished wooden stairs; by pleasing contrast, the brick wall at her right hand was soft with wear—clearly the bricks were an original feature of the onetime warehouse. At the top of the stairs lay a light-washed space, one end a wall of glass, the other a sleek and modern kitchen filled with expensive equipment. On the wall beside the telephone was a small screen showing the apartment house’s entranceway. Nicholson turned toward the kitchen; Kate drifted into an open room with tan leather sofas and a fireplace.

“Yes, thanks,” she told him. “I’d like some coffee.”

She heard a cupboard door open and cups rattle as they were being placed on a tray—real cups, with saucers—followed by the suck of a refrigerator door and the gurgle of milk into a pitcher. The living room was a remarkably comfortable space for a modern apartment building, the expanse of glass warmed by the brick and the rich colors of an ethnic rug on the floor. The windows were bare of curtains, and high enough to overlook an expanse of urban life that stretched east nearly to the waterfront; it felt as if the apartment occupied the peak of a cliff above—well, a Tuscan village. A bright splash of paint on a large canvas, meaningless but cheerful, woke up the area above the fireplace; on the other wall was hung a long, precise row of color photographs in identical black frames: a Mexican village market day; an expanse of snowy hillside with two leafless trees, nearly monochromatic; a young woman with blond hair, a beautifully even tan, and enormous gold hoops in her ears, grinning at the camera from her seat atop a stone wall, the sea in the background the precise startling blue as her eyes. A second picture of the woman—girl, really—in a more formal portrait gazed out from a standing frame on the left side of Nicholson’s desk, tucked under the stairs leading to the third-floor loft. On the right side was the fading snapshot of a redheaded teenager wearing mud and a rugby outfit: she’d guessed right about Nicholson’s sport.

Kate spoke over her shoulder. “Do you live here by yourself?”

“At the moment, yes.”

“Is this a friend of yours?”

Nicholson was coming through from the kitchen, accompanied by a tinkle of bone china, and he stopped beside her to look at the photograph of the grinning blond woman. “Something more than a friend, you might say.”

“That’s Baja, isn’t it? Cabo San Lucas?”

“It is, yes. Taken a couple of months ago. Have you been there?”

“Years ago. I hear it’s getting pretty commercial and touristy.”

“Some parts of it are, others are not too bad.” He resumed his path into the living room, and Kate followed, taking one of the chairs while he set the tray on the low table that stood between sofa and fireplace. Watching his masculine hands arrange the delicate cups and pick up the glass carafe, Kate smiled at the contrast, but when she looked at his face, she saw the man’s tiredness slipping through. His clothes were fresh and his short hair slightly damp, but he hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were bloodshot—he’d either driven through the night, or else fallen into bed late and slept badly.

“I was terribly sorry to hear about Philip,” Nicholson said. “As I guessed, most of the messages on the machine were about him. Not that anyone seemed to know anything, other than that he had been found in Marin over the weekend. His name must have been released after you phoned here.”

“Late on Monday, yes, after his family had been notified. Mr. Gilbert’s lawyer said that you and Philip were friends?”

“Ah, you talked with Tom—I wondered how my name had come up. We were friends. As much as Philip actually had friends.”

Rutland had made a similar remark, Kate reflected, although the lawyer had been matter-of-fact about it, whereas in Nicholson she sensed a well of regret. “Mr. Gilbert seems to have led a rich fantasy life.”

At that, Nicholson’s face shifted into a crooked smile, and he reached forward to spoon sugar into his cup. “You’re talking about his house? He did carry it all a good way beyond the necessary.”

“You know him through the Sherlock Holmes thing?” Kate asked.

He finished stirring his drink, set the spoon on the tray, and eased himself back into the embrace of the sofa. “We met about five or six years ago, when I was living in New York. I was at one of the big auction houses, and they’d put me in charge of organizing a Holmes collection for sale. Philip came out for the auction. He has—” Nicholson caught himself, and repeated the crooked smile. “He
had
a good working knowledge of antiquities and collectibles, but my own area of expertise is manuscripts, and there were a couple of letters from Conan Doyle in the lot. They were genuine, although not particularly valuable, and Philip ended up buying them. Then a few weeks later he wrote to me about another set of letters he’d come across, asking if I would authenticate them for him—for a fee, of course. I looked, found that three of the seven were fakes, and he said he’d thought something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what. Anyway, to save you the tiresome details, perhaps two or three times a year he’d either show up for an auction or bring me something to look at—he found some fascinating stuff, had a real nose for it, so to speak. Sorry, bad joke. Anyway, when I moved out here, about five years ago, I started seeing him socially as well. He was a real character, was Philip. He could be difficult, or utterly charming, even at the same time. Not unlike Holmes himself, I have to say. We’re all going to miss him terribly.”

Kate sipped her coffee and listened to the echoes of that last statement. The sentiment was honest, she thought, but there was also a kind of formulaic meaninglessness that concealed the opposite, as if one might also speak of missing a toothache. Certainly it would seem that in general, people’s reactions to Philip Gilbert were complex.

“When did you last see Philip?”

“Just before I left. Which was Saturday. Saturday before last, that is, the twenty, what is it? Twenty-fourth, I guess. I’ve been up in Seattle for a friend’s funeral, and making various duty visits to family in Oregon on the way back down.”

“And you drove? That’s a lot of miles.”

“I don’t like flying.” From the flat tone of his voice, Nicholson meant that he
really
didn’t like flying.

“I see. What time was that, on the Saturday?”

“He called around, oh, eight, eight-fifteen, just as I was loading the car, to ask if I would look at something for him. I told him I’d be gone for a while, he said that in that case he’d give me a photocopy to look at while I was away. He sounded terribly excited, which was unlike him—he invariably cultivated a phlegmatic air. I tried to put him off, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, said I’d regret passing on it, that he’d be here in an hour with the thing. I didn’t much want to wait around, but he was insistent, so I said I would.