The Art of Detection (20 page)

Kate interrupted the flow with a question. “Can you remember just when this was?”

“It was a Tuesday, and I’m sure it was December. I know it was a Tuesday because I’m closed Monday and Tuesday, and he’d left a message on my day off. But which Tuesday? Oh yes, I know. I was putting up my Christmas decorations, which I always do the first week after Thanksgiving, but I’d had that terrible flu that was going around over Thanksgiving, just knocked me out for two weeks, so it wasn’t until the first part of December that I could manage it. Many of the shops put up their Christmas things before Thanksgiving, so as to encourage the shoppers on the day after, but it just seems to me that Thanksgiving decorations get short shrift, and they’re beautiful on their own, the cornucopias and the gourds and all, that I hate to hurry them out the door just to jolly customers along into thinking about gift giving. Don’t you agree?”

“Er, yes. So the first Tuesday in December. That would have been, let’s see, the second of December?”

“No, that’s too early, I was sick for a good two weeks. It must have been the following week. The ninth, would that be? Anyway, I went in that Tuesday to get a start on the Christmas tree and found the message from him, and when I called him back he asked me if I had the machine that Maggie had sold me, and I said yes, and he said he wanted it in its current condition—didn’t ask first how much I wanted for it, which is always a good sign, you know? Just that he wanted it as it was, and then he sort of remembered and asked how much I wanted. So I told him a hundred dollars, although I probably would have taken forty, and he said he’d give me a hundred fifty dollars for it if it was in its original condition, and he’d come down then and there. But I knew he was in Berkeley because he told me he’d just left Maggie’s house and it was four-thirty and he’d hit all that traffic and I was still tired because of the flu and I wasn’t about to wait around for him at the shop when my cats were used to eating at six, so I told him to come in the morning. And at first he didn’t want to, but then he sort of seemed to think of something and he changed his mind and he asked me what time I opened and I told him and then he asked if there was a secure storage place nearby. Which there is, I use it sometimes when I have something big or the shop is getting crowded.

“But anyway, long story short, there he was waiting on the sidewalk when I came to open the next morning, nice fellow, good clothes, tall and kind of old-fashioned for his age, you know, actually tipped his hat at me—actually wore a hat, come to that, men don’t tend to these days. I took him to the back room and showed him the typewriter, all grubby and a little rusty but not too bad, just a couple of the keys were sticking, and anyway, who uses the things these days, they’re just for decoration and it would clean up nice enough for show. But he takes off his hat and coat and sets his briefcase on this nice étagère I picked up in Lodi last fall and pops it open, and whips out a pair of white cotton gloves and a package of typing paper. He puts on the gloves and feeds a sheet of paper into the machine and starts to type, although of course the thing is practically frozen solid and the ribbon falls to shreds as soon as the first key hits it.

“But that doesn’t seem to bother him a bit. He’s actually humming under his breath as he goes back into the briefcase and pulls out a typing ribbon—the real thing, an actual ribbon. The spools don’t fit, of course, so he very carefully snips the old ribbon with a pair of scissors he’s brought and winds a length of the new stuff directly over it on the spools, and pulls the keys back and forth for a while with his fingers to loosen them up and then rattles off half a page of ‘quick brown dog jumps over the lazy fox,’ or anyway he would’ve rattled it off if the keys didn’t stick so much, but he gets a few lines and pulls it out of the machine and goes back into his briefcase again and pulls out a folder. In it he’s got a page of typing, looks like a photocopy, and some blowups of the same page. And he takes this magnifying glass out of the briefcase and bends over the two pages, the one he brought and the one he’s just done—looks like some sort of Sherlock Holmes there, you know, without the deerstalker cap—and compares the two. And then he sits back with this giant grin on his face—which you know, seeing his face originally you wouldn’t have thought he could look like that, like a kid you’d handed the keys to a candy store—and says that if it wasn’t impolite he’d kiss me, for my impeccable preservation of this gorgeous machine. That’s exactly what he said, my ‘impeccable preservation of this gorgeous machine,’ even though his white gloves were nearly black with the dirt and ink and the bits of disintegrating ribbon.

“So I ask him if he wants to buy the machine and he says yes real fast, but, he says, what I really want is for you to safeguard it for me.

“‘You want to leave it here?’ I ask him, but he sort of looks around—the back of the store isn’t really very tidy, I admit—and he says that it would be better if we could transfer it to the storage facility I mentioned and lock it up. And he’d pay for it all, he says, and pay me for my trouble.

“I said I’d take it down and put it into the storage room I rent, but he said he’d really rather have the typewriter in a room to itself. Which is pretty strange, to rent a place and just have a typewriter in it, but it was his money so I said I guess it was okay, I’d take care of it that evening.

“But he wanted me to do it then and there. I told him I had a shop to run and no help until the afternoon, and with that he pulls out a wallet and starts peeling off fifty-dollar bills. One, two, three, four. We got to six of them, not that I was aiming at three hundred dollars, it just took me that long to realize what was going on, and I told him okay, I’d close the shop and go to the storage place right then.

“Then he brings out this clean white sheet he’s got folded up in his case and wraps the machine in it. I stuck a note on the door saying I’d be back and he carried the machine out to the car for me. We stopped at the hardware store so I could buy a padlock—he went in with me, paid for the most expensive lock they had—and went to the place. I filled out the papers, rather than him, and he insisted on putting my name on it, even though it was him who paid for the first six months’rent. We drove around to the number we were given, he took the typewriter inside, and left it, still in its sheet, in the back of the room. He pulled down the door, had me put the lock in the door—even made me get the thing out of its package, which is always such a battle, don’t you think? Those awful plastic shrouds they seal everything into these days. I fought with it for a while and tried to hand it to him, but he wouldn’t touch it, just gave me his pocketknife and had me saw the package open.

“Then he made me keep both the keys, and when we went back to my shop, he peeled off two more fifty-dollar bills and made me write out everything we’d done since he walked into the shop that morning. Oh, yes, and I signed the page he’d typed on the machine earlier. And then he put the pages into an oversized envelope with some papers in it, and had me drop the keys in, then seal it, and I signed that, too. Across the sealed flap, with the date and even the time.

“Then he paid for the typewriter itself with a credit card, gave me his business card, thanked me, and left. Oh, and he asked me to recommend a good local bank. Then he left, and that’s the last I’ve seen of him. Far as I know, the typewriter’s still sitting there in lonely splendor. I hope he hasn’t been running a meth lab in the storage facility or something?”

The casual reference to everyday crime on top of the winding narrative of a Sherlockian’s antics came as a bit of a jolt, but Kate told the woman that, as far as she knew, no meth lab was suspected. She asked for the name of the storage facility and the bank, gave her own phone number in return, and hung up.

What Gilbert was doing sounded remarkably like a police chain of evidence record, down to his refusal to touch the package containing the keys, lest someone, somewhere accuse him of tampering with evidence. And Kate was not surprised when the Carmel bank told her that the safe-deposit box in the name of Philip Gilbert had not been visited since it had been rented on Wednesday, the tenth of December. She’d bet that it contained not only the keys, but all the statements he’d collected along the way.

So. Gilbert had bought the typescript from Paul Kobata on December sixth, taken it home and read it, seen its potential value, and set off to establish its provenance. He had followed the same trail that Kate had, nearly two months later, from Kobata to Maggie Brook back to the owner of the remodeled house in Pacific Heights, and then he had gone Kate one better, laying claim to a machine that, she was relatively certain, would prove to have been the machine on which the story had been typed. Certainly, Gilbert had thought the type identical, otherwise he would have walked off and left it to Tessie’s Antiques.

He had locked the machine away, and put its keys and the related evidence in a bank. No doubt he had taken care to establish the time of day he had rented the box, to show that he would not have had time, between leaving Tessie’s Antiques and entering the bank, to make a copy of the key.

A huge effort, a major expense (peeling off those fifty-dollar bills to buy Tessie’s time). For what?

The only answer could be, to establish provenance. Or if not that, at least to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that it could not have been manufactured by Philip Gilbert. Each set of hands the story had passed through had signed a statement bearing witness to its passage; the machine on which it was typed had been similarly nailed down.

Clearly, to Philip Gilbert, the story with the unlikely beginning had been of enormous importance, from the moment he’d laid eyes on it.

Still behind the wheel of the parked car, Kate took out her cell phone and called Al. He answered on the second ring.

“Hey,” she said. “You come up with anything?”

“A hell of a lot of fresh air and a whole lot of nothing. One woman was up with her baby and might have heard a car go by in the middle of the night, but she couldn’t swear whether it was Friday or Saturday night.”

“Where was she?”

“She lives in one of those houses along the road between the visitor’s center and the tunnel.”

“Right on the road.”

“Yeah, but it was raining and there was a bit of wind, so she couldn’t be sure.”

“Was it raining both nights?”

“A little bit Friday night, then it cleared most of Saturday, but it started raining seriously Saturday night, then continued Sunday morning and the whole rest of the week.”

“Helpful.”

“What about you?”

She outlined her day’s activities, considerably more productive than his own.

“You’ve got the story?” he asked at the end of it.

“I let Nicholson make me a copy. I didn’t see that we needed the exact one Gilbert made for him, and he was very reluctant to give it up. Looked to me like the same exact thing that’s in Gilbert’s safe-deposit box. I thought I’d swing by the bank on my way home and check.”

“Other than that, you’re finished for the day?”

“More or less. I’ll take a look at the story tonight.”

“Good. The autopsy’s first thing tomorrow. I may be working at home if you need me, or call the cell.”

Kate switched off the phone and turned the car’s key, this time without interruption. The bank was shut to customers, although by tapping on the window with her badge, she summoned a gatekeeper who let her in. It was the work of two minutes to compare the old typescript with the photocopy Nicholson had given her, but when a dozen randomly chosen pages matched the original exactly, she was satisfied.

At last, she pointed the car’s nose toward home, and invited her family out to dinner.

Later that night, after sushi, after bath, toothbrushing, and bedtime stories, Kate retrieved the folder Nicholson had given her and settled into one of the living room chairs to look it over. Before she had done more than remove the clip, Lee stuck her head in and asked, “You want a cup of tea?”

“Uh, sure. I’ll make it.”

“You just sat down. I’ll get it.”

Some faint edge in Lee’s voice advised Kate not to press the matter, so she subsided, with a meek “Thanks, hon.”

Kate could tell that Lee had had a long day, because she was using the cane. The doctors said that Lee would always have problems with her balance, but she’d never once fallen while carrying Nora, and hadn’t fallen on her own in months.

However, one of the rules was that Kate did not offer to help for everyday things like carrying a single bag of groceries in from the car or fetching a book from the next room. Or bringing cups of tea. Even now, ten years after a bitter and frightening separation that lasted several long and dreary months, when Lee had gone away to test her own strengths and boundaries, Kate regularly found herself biting her tongue, reminding herself that Lee needed to do things for herself.

Allowances were made. The mugs Lee chose from the shelf were generally those with deep handles, suitable for steady carrying even when held two to a hand. And the tea when it came would be nowhere near the top of the cup, since the two-in-one-hand carry combined with the lurch of the cane tended to dribble liquids across the floor. Such things were classed with sensible precautions such as a baby stroller sturdy enough to take some leaning on, a car with automatic transmission, and a walk-in shower level with the floor: things decided upon, then forgotten.

Lee put the cups onto the low table and lowered herself onto the sofa, stifling a small grunt.

“Hard day?” Kate asked.

“I need to start swimming again.”

And not walking two miles round trip to the park, Kate did not say aloud. “Good idea. Maybe we could find a time that worked for both of us—I’d like to swim, too.”

“Your schedule being so amenable to regular dates. Would you shove my laptop over here? Thanks.”

Lee stretched her legs out on the sofa and settled the machine onto her lap. Kate had a brief picture of the tall, big-nosed Philip Gilbert bent over an ancient typewriter, pounding stiff-fingered at its round black keys—
Sitting down to that monstrosity of a typewriter downstairs and pounding out a letter,
as Rutland had described it. Kate heard the sleek little machine in Lee’s lap whine as it woke up, and shook her head in amusement.