The Art of Detection (49 page)

“But Philip himself was still here?” Kate asked, thinking:
Vacuum cleaner; maybe he forgot the bag: have to tell Crime Scene.

“Bundled into a pair of clean white sheets. But not in here—I’d carried him to the downstairs hallway. Come to think of it, it was the same place I stick a sack of garbage on its way out to the bin.”

It looked as if he was about to weep, so Kate broke in with a distracting piece of practicality. Which incidentally might explain some evidence. “You must have wrapped his head in something, so it didn’t bleed through to the floor. A towel, maybe?”

“Only the one he’d had around his neck. It was already sort of bunched up under his head when he fell, so I just tucked it in a little, more to hide the blood in his hair than anything else. He didn’t bleed very much at all. Then I wrapped him in the sheets and carried him downstairs.”

“Wasn’t he heavy?”

“Sure. But no heavier than what I dead-lift at the gym.”

“What time did you finish cleaning?”

“I don’t know, it was such a frenzy. At least one o’clock, maybe closer to two. I just stopped, utterly exhausted, with the disinfectant spray in my hand.”

“And then you took him out to the car?”

“No. I was afraid one of my neighbors might have been coming home late and would see me staggering around under a body, or catch sight of me on their security monitor—there’s no recording made of that, in case you’re wondering—so I left him downstairs and took his car back to his house. I wore gloves. And a ski hat, which felt dumb but I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. I parked his car in a spot down the street from his house, and let myself in. I knew his alarm code, since I’d been standing right behind him a couple of times when he opened his door.”

“You also know where the switch to the webcam is.”

“The—? Oh right, the HolmesCam. I remembered it just before I stepped out of the foyer. I didn’t know if anyone would be able to see my legs in the dark, or if they could identify me by my shoes or something, but I thought it was better not to take the chance.”

“You spent twelve minutes inside.”

“Was that all? It seemed like forever. I needed to remove anything I could find that might be connected to me, although in the end, there was almost nothing of mine there. And then I saw his cell phone in his desk, and I thought maybe I could use that to lay a false trail, so I took it, along with a copy of the story he had in his desk. The gun is his, too,” he added, looking down at where it lay on his knee. “He kept it in his bedside table.”

“So you left the car there and walked back across town?”

“Took me forever, and I was scared to death the whole time that I’d get stopped and they’d find the gun. I took off the ski cap so I’d look all white and innocent, but I must have sweated a gallon of water. Anyway, I made it back without any problems, and found the place dark and silent, all my neighbors safe in bed. I rolled up my garage door and let up the boot—the trunk—and propped open the entrance door. Then I just carried Philip straight out through the courtyard and across the street and put him in the trunk. I did use some more towels then, in case the blood leaked through the sheets and stained the carpet in the boot, but there wasn’t much by that time.”

“So you drove across the bridge in the early hours of Saturday morning?”

“Oh, no. I left him in the car and went to bed. Well, not to bed; first I bundled everything up in plastic bags—his clothes, the rug he’d fallen on, the cleaning rags, his toothbrush—and put them in the backseat of the car. Then I sort of curled up for a while on the sofa. I may even have slept.

“At eight the next morning I got in my car and drove to Philip’s neighborhood. I kept thinking of him, lying there behind me in the boot. I kept wanting to check on him, as if to see if he was comfortable or something. Anyway, I pulled into a fifteen-minute space in the next block from his house, and I made a call with his cell phone to my home machine, letting it run for a few minutes. As if we’d had a conversation, you see? I know there are records of what tower a call goes through, but I wasn’t sure how accurate the positioning is, so I thought I’d better make it as near his house as I could. Then I came back here, slept for a couple more hours, and then sat just behind my curtains and watched the neighbors. They came and went a lot, since Saturday’s the big shopping day, but about eleven there was a gap of nearly forty-five minutes when they were all either away or inside with their doors shut. As soon as I had my window when I could say, That’s when Philip came to give me the story, with nobody able to contradict me, I left.”

“With him still in the trunk.”

“Unfortunately.”

“But you didn’t drop him then, either?”

“A sunny Saturday in Point Bonita? Never. I drove north, stopped at a motel at the far side of Lake Shasta, the Something Lodge”—Lakefront, Kate silently provided—“and checked in with a credit card, then turned around and drove back to Point Bonita.”

“You had dinner first.”

“I did, didn’t I? I had to leave signs that I was there, too late to fit in a drive back to the Bay Area. Did you talk to the waitress?”

“Not yet.”

“If so, ask her what I was doing. I did a very nice impression of a man wrapped up in the typescript he was reading. I’d hate to think my performance was wasted.” He added it with a touch of his old spirit.

Not a bad actor,
his agent had said.

“And as soon as you signed for the meal, you left.”

“It was dark by then, and no one would notice my car gone from the car park.”

“Interestingly enough, someone used your room’s Internet connection while you were away.” Kate watched him closely, since there existed still the possibility of conspiracy here, but instead, his face went boyish with a smile of delight.

“It actually worked, didn’t it? Astonishing, considering my lack of skill on the computer, but a friend used to set hers to send an e-mail at a given time, and I figured that if it could do e-mail, it could do other things as well. I found the scheduler function and set it to download some enormous files, and, amazingly, it did. I take it you didn’t look at how much actual web surfing the machine was doing?”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “We would have eventually.”

“And I could have told you I fell asleep for an hour and a quarter.”

“But instead, you drove five hours south to Point Bonita.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you go the ocean road, or through the tunnel?”

“I was afraid someone would hear me, so I went down the cliffs, and Christ, what I would have given for a full moon. It was absolutely black and I was scared shitless, certain I’d go over those cliffs. I’d been out there a couple of weeks earlier with Philip—no doubt he was looking into that story, although he didn’t tell me that—and I knew all too well how high those cliffs are. It was starting to rain and I had to use the parking lights a few times when my nerves got too bad. But I made it, and broke open the lock—oh, I forgot to mention, I stopped at one of those enormous hardware stores off Highway Five and bought a pry bar, a pair of bolt cutters, and some other things, paying cash of course—and left him where the story said he should be left.”

“It couldn’t have been easy, moving him out of the car.”

“It was a fucking nightmare. I opened the trunk and thought I was going to pass out. He smelled. Like a meat shop. And he’d gone all stiff, inside the trunk, so it took me forever just to haul him out without scraping him on the car and leaving behind evidence. I left the sheets and towels in the car, sort of peeled them back so they wouldn’t drop anything from their outer surface onto him, and I put on gloves and a giant shirt and a knit hat that I’d bought earlier, so as not to leave my hairs or fingerprints on him. And then I pulled and yanked at him until I finally could get myself underneath him. I nearly dropped him then and there.

“I’d backed the car up to the emplacement, so I only had to move him about thirty feet, but I thought I’d rupture something by the time I finished. The only good part of it was that by the time I’d wrestled with him I was angry at him again, which helped.

“When I’d left him there, still all curled up like he’d been in the car, I put the padlock back on the door and hoped nobody would notice it for a while. I couldn’t face going back up the cliffs, so I drove very, very slowly out past the houses and through the tunnel, with my lights off until I was on the main road. I made it back to Lake Shasta at about five in the morning. I tell you, a motel bed never felt so good. But I only allowed myself to sleep for an hour, so I could sign for breakfast and check out early. Sunday was an absolute hell of exhaustion. By the time I reached Seattle I was a wreck—I only got there by drinking gallons of coffee and driving with the windows wide open, singing loudly all the while. A truly macabre journey.”

“What did you do with Philip’s clothes, the sheets, all that?”

“The clothes I dropped in a Goodwill box. And one of the places I stopped for coffee on Sunday, in southern Oregon, had a Laundromat a few doors down. I dumped a whole bottle of stain remover and some bleach into the wash cycle, ran it on cold, then put the stuff in the dryer and fed in a lot of quarters and drove away. They were good sheets, and as far as I could see the stains were nearly gone—someone will have quietly helped themselves to the lot.”

“What about the cell phone?”

“I smashed it underfoot, then fed its pieces into Puget Sound, along with the bolt cutters and the pry bar. And I even remembered to phone Philip a couple of times and send him an e-mail, as an innocent man would have done. It was eerie, hearing his voice on the answering machine.”

“Which leaves you with the gun.”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “I know. Have I told you everything you want to know?”

“Philip’s pocket watch?”

His face shifted, and all the sorrow that had been kept at bay by telling the story swept in. He swallowed, blinking to keep his gray-blue eyes from filling. “I…Philip loved that watch. It had once belonged to one of Conan Doyle’s sons, or so he was told. Anyway, I couldn’t bear to smash it. It’s in my top drawer, downstairs.”

Which about covered it all. Except for one thing.

“You haven’t told me about Monica.”

The sorrow fled instantly from his face, replaced with raw fear; for the first time, the man with the gun looked as if, friendship or no, he might use it. “You leave her out of this. She had nothing to do with any of it.”

“I didn’t think she did. You did, however, make use of her visit to lead me astray. You wanted us to think she was a girlfriend.”

After a minute, his body grew less taut, his hand allowed the gun to lower again. “I hesitated to do that. I didn’t want to bring Monica into it in any fashion at all, but she happened to be in town filming a two-second bit on a television drama, and so she was convenient.” He added modestly, “Improvisation was one of my stronger points in my days as an actor. But I promise you, she did not know anything.”

“I believe you.”

He studied Kate’s face, and decided that she meant it. “So, was there anything else?” He was beginning to look cold, despite the sweater, but Kate did not want to distract him by suggesting that they close windows.

She cast her mind back, and came up with small and insignificant details. “You didn’t use a wheelbarrow to move Gilbert to the emplacement?”

“A wheelbarrow? Good heavens no, how would I have got it in the car? I slung him across my shoulders. It wasn’t far, and as I said, I can dead-lift more than he weighed.”

“So,” she said, trying hard to conceal her apprehension behind a matter-of-fact question. “What now?”

“Now we go and meet your friends outside.”

“Really?” she said, her voice coming far too near to a squeak of surprise for an eighteen-year police veteran.

“Sure. I think we’re finished here, and I’m sure they’re itching to take a look at my floorboards.”

“They’ll give you the warrant as soon as you’re outside.”

“No need for a warrant. You’re welcome to look anywhere. Just please don’t leave too much of a mess.”

He stood up, and looked around as if to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. “Shall we go? You first.”

“Ian, leave the gun here. Please.”

“I’ll carry it with me to the door, thank you very much. Once we’re out in the open, with witnesses, then I’ll let you have it. I promise.”

“You must give it to me then, Ian,” she told him. “Cops really don’t like it when a suspect walks out with a gun in his hand.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Go on now.”

Her spine crawled with tension, walking with a gun at her back, but he stayed too far behind her to give her an opening to seize it, and there were no distractions as they crossed the courtyard. The place was utterly still, even the earlier music now fallen silent; Kate knew that there would be a sniper and other officers out of sight throughout the apartments overlooking the courtyard. However, Nicholson took no notice, because the apartment complex was always still.

They reached the front door, the broad expanse of glass. Outside, silent as the courtyard, was an expanse of humanity: uniforms and plainclothes arrayed behind a sea of marked and unmarked departmental vehicles. In the distance, behind police tape, the inevitable pack of press. Al Hawkin stood in front of it all, out in the open next to Chris Williams. He was holding the phone to his ear with one hand, while the other rested on his gun. His weight was forward on his toes, ready for the approach he had heard coming.

Ian hesitated, stared out at the crowd. Kate measured the distance to his gun, but as if he had heard her, he shifted it. “God bless me,” he said. “Where did they all come from?”

“I told you, cops really don’t like it when you draw a gun on one of them. Al has been listening to us this whole time.”

“You’re wearing a mike?”

“It seemed a good idea,” she said, not exactly a lie. “Now, Ian, give me the gun.”

She thought he was going to argue, or maybe just turn back to the building. But he moved his hand an inch in her direction, then stopped.