In any number of places around their feet, the thin covering of soil gave way before a protruding knob of the substratum. Most were considerably smoother than their brothers in the sea below; some might have been chosen by a man looking for a place to sit and smoke a small cigar while he looked over the moonlit sea.
Hawkin murmured under his breath. “‘I am a young artillery officer, fully dressed, anticipating a difficult interview.’”
Kate picked it up, and said, “‘It is two o’clock in the morning, at thirty-something degrees north, with a moon that is five nights after full.’”
“Lot of changes in eighty years, huh?”
“You think? ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell?’ Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo?”
“Christ, cheer me up why don’t you, Martinelli? Come on, we got a case to solve.”
They fastened the padlock back on the door, restored the crime-scene tape, and wrestled the spare tire between them down to the car’s trunk. The winter green of the hills glowed in the sun as they passed through the headlands. A family with a small child in a backpack waited to cross the road, the infant staring seriously at them. Traffic was picking up on the bridge, and Al dodged through side streets to miss the worst city congestion.
They got back to the Hall of Justice shortly before four o’clock, to find the last month’s bank statement and records from two of Gilbert’s three credit cards waiting for them—an unusually fast response from the paper bureaucracies. Kate dug into those, Al laid out his interviews from Monday and Tuesday, and they worked in relative silence until it was time to go home.
It was just as well they chose the virtue of procrastination; if they had buckled down and built up Gilbert’s final hours then and there, they’d have had to throw out all their calculations come morning.
SEVENTEEN
Hawkin picked up Kate at nine o’clock Friday morning, and drove to the Gilbert house. He had gone past the Hall of Justice to retrieve the Gilbert hard drive from the crime lab, and she connected it to the monitor and various cords, and turned it on. Al sorted the papers onto the low table, and as she waited for the computer to hum to life, Kate noticed the light on the answering machine, which had not been blinking the day before. She stretched out an arm to hit the play button, and the mechanical voice informed her that a message had been left at one-twelve the previous afternoon, a couple of hours after they had been there.
“Mr. Gilbert,” said a chipper soprano voice, “this is Angie from Goode’s Porcelain Repair. We have your bird ready for you, it looks just like new. You can pick it up Tuesday to Saturday from ten to six. Bye.”
They stared at each other for a moment, jaws dropped, before Kate whirled and tugged open drawers in search of the phone book. However, the machine’s surprises were not over yet. Message two, left about half an hour before they had arrived that morning, was another woman. By contrast, hers was a voice haughty with authority, although she sounded to be trying for a more friendly, even folksy, air.
“Hello Philip, this is Louisa Brancusi. You told me to give you a couple of weeks, and since it’s two weeks today, I thought I’d give you a ring. You can reach me today in the office or on my cell, or any day, really. I’m going to be back in the Bay Area next week, I’d love to talk further. I know you have my numbers.”
The machine added, End of messages.
There was no point in speculating while there was information to be had. Kate found the Yellow Pages and discovered, rather to her surprise, that there was such a category as Porcelain Repair. And Goode’s was top of the list.
The chipper Angie answered. Kate identified herself, briefly explained that she was investigating the death of the man who had left an item for repair, and asked what Angie could tell her about it. Angie hesitated, and Kate resigned herself to having to go down in person—some people had no trust, particularly for things that mattered little. But Angie surprised her.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Mr. Gilbert seemed really nice, and he was so upset about breaking his bird. It was a prize of some sort, for a book he’d written. When you say you’re investigating his death, do you mean he was…murdered?”
“It’s possible,” Kate told her. “I’m going to put you on the speakerphone now, Angie. My partner is here, too, and it’ll save me from having to repeat what you say. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“It’s Lieutenant Al Hawkin,” she said, and hit the speaker button.
“Hello, Angie,” Al said.
“Hi.”
“Okay,” Kate resumed. “You say Mr. Gilbert broke the statue by accident?”
“Yes, he said he bumped against it on a shelf and it fell onto the floor. Broke in about a dozen pieces. Like I said, he was terribly upset, because although the thing isn’t very attractive in itself, and it probably cost a fraction of what I’d had to charge for repairing it, the value’s in what it means to the owner, you know?”
“I understand. Can you tell me what day this was?”
“Sure, just a minute.” There was a sound of paper rustling, then Angie’s voice. “The tag says January twentieth. That was a, let’s see, a Tuesday. And it was the afternoon, if it matters. Not too long before closing. That’s not on the tag, but I remember.”
“Great. Now, Angie, can you tell us anything more about what he said, how he acted? Just anything that made an impression on you.”
“He was tall and he had a big nose, I remember that. A little snooty but kind of embarrassed too about his clumsiness. Polite. And he made a face over the estimate but he didn’t try to argue me down. People do.”
“Can you tell me about the statue?”
“Well, like I told you, it sat on a high shelf and he knocked it onto a hardwood floor, so it was pretty smashed up. He may not have realized how fragile it was, it looks very solid, although of course it’s hollow. He brought it in a cardboard box, like they give you at a print shop, you know? The kind that store flat and they pop up to put your print job in? His was open and he carried it carefully, but he’d still lost a small piece somewhere along the line. We had to fill it in, but it’s at the back and the color’s good, he’ll never know. Or he would never have known,” she amended sadly.
“We found that missing piece. It fell behind a filing cabinet.”
“Did you? Well, too late now. He probably stopped looking after he’d sliced open his finger.”
Kate looked at Al; Al looked at Kate. “He cut himself, you say?” Al asked.
“He sure did. People don’t realize how sharp porcelain can be. I had to clean blood off a couple of the pieces before I could cement them together.”
“And which hand would that have been, do you remember?”
“Um, let’s see. His…his left hand. The middle finger of his left hand. He had a Band-Aid on it.”
“Thank you very much, Miss…?”
“Goode. Angie Goode. My father started the business, but it’s mine now.”
“Thank you. One of us will be down in the next day or two to take a statement, but you have been a great help.”
“I hope you find out what happened. He seemed like a really nice man. Um, I don’t suppose you know if anyone will want the statue now, do you?”
“We may need it as evidence, but if it isn’t pertinent to the case, we’ll turn it over to the executor of Mr. Gilbert’s estate.”
Kate hung up and found the number of Gilbert’s housecleaner, Nika Kilanovitch. She reached the recorded voice of a young girl with an American accent, repeating the number and inviting her to leave a message. She did so, asking Kilanovitch to call her cell number.
She looked at Al; while she was on the phone, he had been paging back through the autopsy report. Now he pushed the document toward her on the table, tapping one paragraph before he stood up. Kate bent her head to read it, and indeed, the pathologist had been thorough, for under marks and scars was included: recent scar on middle finger of left hand.
The phone rang, and a heavily accented voice said,
“This Nika Kilanovitch. I see message from you?”
“Thank you for calling me back, Ms. Kilanovitch. May I ask, you cleaned Mr. Gilbert’s house on Thursday the twenty-second of January, is that right?”
“Is last time, yes.”
“Had he broken something up on the top floor?”
“Yes, black bird. Not real bird, it—”
“A statue, I know. I wish I’d thought to ask.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. You vacuumed up the pieces?”
“No pieces, or small, small pieces. Use paper towel on floor, I not want pieces, how you say…?”
“You didn’t want him to get splinters of glass in his feet.”
“Splinters, yes.”
“And you emptied the vacuum bag?”
“Always empty bag, take to can.”
“And you took the paper towels to the can as well.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you,” Kate said, and flipped her phone off.
She looked up to see Al lowering himself to the floor between the chair and the door, in the place where a statue on the shelf would have hit the ground. His left hand came up to rest on the back of the chair, precisely where the Luminol had revealed a smear of blood; he wagged his middle finger, which rested half an inch from where Crime Scene had scraped a trace of Gilbert’s blood.
Gilbert had broken the Maltese Falcon himself; Gilbert’s hand, not his head, had bled on the chair. Their entire theory of his death collapsed before their eyes.
But that was what an investigation did, promising pathways ended in washed-out dead ends.
Hawkin pulled himself up on the chair back, and brushed off his hands both literally and metaphorically. “Louisa Brancusi,” he said.
“I don’t remember the name from his address book.” Kate went back to Gilbert’s computer. She typed the first name into his e-mail finder without result, but the last name came up with three from LBrancusi, all in the past five weeks.
Brancusi was one of three partners in (as Kate found, making a detour to the website of the firm name given on the signature of the e-mail) a small but prestigious auction house based in New York. Profiles had been written about her in half a dozen important magazines, including a piece in the New Yorker that compared Brancusi’s techniques with those of two men in other houses. The phrases “sweet-tongued tigress” and “walking the edge of ethics” made it clear that Louisa Brancusi met the boys on their ground, and then some.
For some reason, Gilbert had chosen to approach Brancusi, sending her an e-mail on January sixth (Wasn’t that Sherlock Holmes’s birthday? Kate thought) that said:
Dear Ms. Brancusi,
We met at the Victoriana auction your house held in November; you may remember me as the person who bought the two Kipling letters.
I have come into an item of what I believe to be considerable importance to the world of Sherlockiana, and would like to talk about the possibility of putting it up for auction through your house. If you are coming to the West Coast at any time soon, I would like to get together with you and talk it over face-to-face.
I realize this may not be convenient, but I would prefer not to describe it prematurely in any great detail, particularly via the Internet. If you know who I am, you may consider the weight of my judgment when I say this is the sort of thing for which a reserve price in the mid six figures would not be at all unreasonable.
Yours, Philip Gilbert
Brancusi’s response was immediate and positive, although she tried hard to convince him that an actual meeting was unnecessary, and asked him for further information about the item in question. Gilbert flatly refused, and her third letter, dated the eleventh of January, gave in to his demands, telling him that something had come up to require her presence in San Francisco at the end of that very week, and suggesting that he might like to join her for dinner at a restaurant she’d heard was good. Gilbert had written back confirming the place and time.
Kate went back to the phone book, called the restaurant, played the privacy game with the woman with the French accent, and for the second time that morning managed to get the information she needed without driving across town for it: Yes, an L. Brancusi and guest had dined at the restaurant on Friday the twenty-third of January.
“Can I ask,” Kate said, “do you serve a dish that has white beans and meats in it?”
“But of course,” said the French accent, sounding offended. “Chef Martin’s cassoulet is our signature dish.”
“And I’m sure our dead man enjoyed every bite,” Kate told her, and hung up.
Brancusi’s auction house was shut, although it was not yet one o’clock in New York, and offered a voice message service. Instead, Kate hung up and tried the cell number Brancusi had given Gilbert in case he needed to reach her while she was on the road. There, too, a woman’s voice suggested that she leave a message for Louisa Brancusi, and this time Kate did.
“Ms. Brancusi, this is Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department. I need to speak with you about a dinner you had last month with Philip Gilbert. Would you please call me on my cell phone, or if you prefer, you can leave me a message at the San Francisco Hall of Justice.” She gave the general number for the Hall, as proof that she was indeed a cop and not some competing house’s sneak.
With a sigh, she looked at the notes she had begun to make for the reconstruction of Philip Gilbert’s final days. She drew a line across the entire thing, and started again.
It took several hours, hunting down phone numbers, following the sequence of e-mails in his virtual out-box, referring to witness statements, and comparing charges on his credit cards with receipts in his physical in-box, before they had the following time line:
Friday, January 23:
7:02–7:30: E-mails to eleven potential buyers for three different items (a pipe owned by Arthur Conan Doyle; a Sherlock Holmes cookie jar dating to 1924; and a first American edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles from 1902).
7:46–8:11: Online searches of two auction houses and various items on eBay, where he registered half a dozen bids.
8:16–8:38: Phone calls to Ian Nicholson, Thomas Rutland, and Jeannine Cartfield of the Holmes dinner club. Looking back at the interviews, they found that Rutland had said Gilbert phoned about an appointment for late the following week—an appointment not actually made, he’d just been checking on Rutland’s schedule. Nicholson had last spoken to Gilbert on the Saturday morning, so hadn’t mentioned this Friday call; Kate phoned him and asked. He had a hard time remembering the subject of the call, but then decided that Gilbert had wanted to know if he was going to be around that weekend, and when told of the Seattle memorial, said that he might have something for Nicholson before he left, and asked when Nicholson planned to leave.
9:52: Credit card charge of $25.34 at the local dry cleaner’s. There was no receipt for this in the in-box.
10:03: Credit card charge of $87.56 at a nearby stationer’s, with a corresponding receipt in the in-box giving the details of a double-pack of black printer cartridges, a package of twelve ballpoint pens, and two reams of some rather pricey paper. They found the pens, still unopened, in the desk drawer; the packaging of one cartridge, the box from one ream of paper, and a used black cartridge, in the wastebasket under the desk; and the other box of buff-colored, high-cotton paper, open and partially used, on the shelf beneath Gilbert’s printer.
11:44: Credit card charge for sixteen and a half gallons of gas at a station one mile south of the Gilbert house; the Lexus’s gauge showed the needle all the way at the top.
8:00: Gilbert met Louisa Brancusi for dinner.
Saturday, January 24:
8:38: Gilbert made a call on his cell phone to Ian Nicholson’s number, talked for three minutes, then went silent, forever. He was next heard from when his body was found on Point Bonita, precisely one week later.
Kate started to return the phone records to the file, then had a sudden tho
ught. She looked back through them for the middle of January, and there she found the familiar number.
“It was Gilbert himself who phoned the tip to Leah Garchik,” she told Hawkin with satisfaction. “He must have decided that fanning the flames of the rumor mill was the best way of promoting it.”
Louisa Brancusi phoned Kate back a short time later, admitting that she had checked the other number first, just to be sure.
“That’s fine, Ms. Brancusi. I need to know about your dinner with Philip Gilbert.”
“Has something happened to Philip?”
This was tricky, since the woman was apparently the last person to see Gilbert alive, but there was no helping it: The SFPD was not about to fly Kate to New York for an interview. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but yes, Mr. Gilbert died a couple of days after you met with him.” She waited while the woman made noises of distress, which sounded almost genuine, then resumed. “First of all, Ms. Brancusi, can you tell me what Mr. Gilbert had for dinner?”
“He ordered the cassoulet,” she said without hesitation. “Apparently it’s the specialty, but it’s too heavy a dish for my taste. I had soup and a salad.”
“And what did you talk about?”
“Philip wanted to explore the possibility of giving us an item for auction. He wanted to make an event of it, the central lot in the auction, and wanted us to time it in May, to get in before the Christie’s and Sotheby’s London auctions. He wanted a dozen pages in the catalogue and a commitment to a certain level of advertising. I can’t go into the details, in part because he hadn’t yet told me what he had—he’d promised to talk to me in two weeks. I assumed he was shopping around the other houses in the meantime, although nobody was going to agree to what he wanted sight unseen.
“It was a frustrating meeting, to tell you the truth. I’d flown all the way from New York just to talk with him, and came away with nothing but vague promises. He just kept saying that it would be worth my while, and nothing else. If it had been anyone else, I’d have thought he was playing me, but I’ve had some dealings with him before, and he has a good reputation, although he can be a bit of a drama queen, thinking his stuff was like a Fabergé egg or something. But I didn’t really have a whole lot of choice, so I bit my tongue and told him I’d wait until I heard from him. I assume you got my name from the message I left on his phone yesterday?”