When the wine was gone, Kate could feel its warmth but did not lust for more, which was a relief. Nora stayed with her, on her lap, although usually she would be off and racing about. Kate was grateful for the child’s willingness to be hugged, but when Lee came through a while later, she gave her partner an expression very like a grin.
“Your daughter is a born therapist,” she said.
Lee knew in an instant what Kate was talking about, and she compounded the therapy session by scooping up Nora, then sitting down herself on Kate’s lap with a now-squealing child on top of both her mothers. Kate said, “Oof,” then did her best to wrap her entire family in her inadequate arms until all three were giggling and they ended up in a heap of arms and legs on the floor in front of the chair.
The phone rang. Lee’s hand was closest, so she picked it up, then had to extricate herself from the pile in order to hear.
“Sorry, what was that? Oh, I don’t know that this is a really good time.”
“Time for what?” Kate spoke from the floor.
Lee told the receiver, “Just a minute,” and cupped her hand across the mouthpiece. “It’s Maj. She wants to come over, says she can bring a pot of white beans and homemade sausages she’s been working on for days.”
Kate felt a twinge at the phrase “white beans” but repressed it firmly. “I don’t mind. Tell her to come ahead.”
“You sure? I thought you’d want a quiet night.”
“I do, and I don’t.”
Again, Lee knew precisely what she meant. She uncovered the phone. “Maj? Come on over. I was going to grill some things, we can have your beans with them. About an hour?”
The grill was sizzling, the beans were warming, the kids were transforming the living room into a sheet-and-cushion fortress, when Roz descended on the house like a psychic whirlwind. Kate took one look at the invader, formally suited, her priest’s collar in place, and wearing an expression of almost incandescent happiness, and she raised the barbecue tongs in an unconscious but heartfelt gesture of defense.
“Roz, what the hell are you up to now?”
Roz swept across the patio and pounced on Kate, wrapping her arms around the smaller woman and picking her up off the ground to whirl her in a circle. That she had already done the same to the other two women was clear by their bemused expressions as they looked out from the door to the kitchen.
When Roz stood away from Kate, she stooped a bit to look straight into Kate’s face, then turned to the other two women with the same intensity. “You haven’t heard any news today?”
“Roz, I’ve been pretty tied up,” Kate said. Some political prisoner had been freed from a long and oppressive incarceration, she thought, or a closely fought piece of legislation had squeaked past. Three women stood there with identical fond smiles on their faces, waiting for Roz’s effervescence to boil over as she told them all about it, but to their surprise, she did not. With a spark of anticipation, she appeared to shove a cap on her excitement, and instead of spilling all, she said, “Promise me you won’t listen to the news tonight. Promise me? And if someone calls and asks if you’ve heard, you’ll hang up on them—promise?”
“Heard what?” Kate asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Just promise me, please?”
She sounded so like Nora—please please PLEEEASE?—that Kate had to smile through the inner darkness. “Sure, if somebody calls to tell me any good news, I’ll hang up. For how long?”
“Just tonight. Honest, you’ll be so glad you did, I promise.”
And that was all she would say about it that night.
But the next morning, Kate sat up in bed at some ungodly hour, the chimes of the doorbell fading in her ears. She glanced at the bedside clock, realized that it was not all that early, and then the bell went again.
She grabbed her robe and scurried down the stairs, but the bell was going again before she reached the door. “For Christ’s sake,” she sputtered as her bare feet slapped on the wood of the stairs, and “Shit,” when the fourth ring came as her right hand made contact with the doorknob and her left the deadbolt lock.
“What the fuck—Maj? What’s wrong?”
But as soon as she focused on Maj’s face she could tell that nothing was wrong. In fact, it was just the opposite: Maj looked as if she had caught whatever happy bug had infected her partner the night before. She bore a large white bag in her hand. Behind her stood Mina with a carrier tray from Peet’s Coffee; behind Mina came Satch with another white bakery bag. The fragrant procession pushed past Kate; as they went by, she noticed that Maj was wearing a skirt, Mina was dressed for church (looking considerably older than her sixteen years), and nine-year-old Satch had a necktie on.
“What the hell is going on?” Kate said, closing the door and following them through to the kitchen.
“You need to get up and get dressed,” Maj said. “And get Lee and Nora up, too—oh, there you are. We need to go in ten minutes.”
“Go where?” Kate demanded. Hearing the simultaneous echo of the words coming from the bottom of the stairs, she looked and saw the two sleep-rumpled Leonoras. One of them had a thumb in her mouth and red pillow-wrinkles on her face; the other just had the pillow-wrinkles.
“You’ll see. Come on, have a latte and a muffin, and get some clothes on.”
“Not until you tell me what is going on.”
“I will tell you when we get there. Oh, please, Kate, trust me. It’s not one of Roz’s schemes, I promise you’ll love it. But it’s best if you don’t know until you see it. I swear.”
“Yeah,” Satch chimed in, “there’s all these—”
Mina whirled on him with a loud “Shhh!” as Maj said, “Satch! You promised.”
The boy clapped one hand over his mouth, but his eyes were dancing. Kate knew she could get it out of him in two seconds flat, but instead she stepped forward without a word, took two of the cups, handed one to Lee in passing, and started up the stairs.
Behind her, Maj called, “You might want to wear something nice.”
A minute later, the elevator rumbled and Lee came into the bedroom.
“Do you know what this is about?” Kate asked her.
Lee stood still with her shirt half-unbuttoned. “I think so,” she said at last. “Can I not tell you?”
“You want to go along with Roz on this?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Just so long as it’s not going to get me fired,” Kate said, and pulled a departmental T-shirt out of the drawer. Then she noticed Lee, surveying the closet with a frown on her face. Kate looked at the T-shirt, put it back into the drawer, and carried a clean, ironed white shirt and black jeans to the shower instead.
It wasn’t any ten minutes, but soon they were assembled again downstairs, awake now and beginning to take on something of the inexplicable excitement of the others. They all climbed into the minivan that Maj had bought the year Satch entered preschool.
They had, in fact, slept later than usual that morning, and the streets were already thick with the morning commute, both in and out of the city. Maj headed downtown, then shifted up Van Ness toward the Civic Center.
When they got to City Hall, Kate spotted a Chronicle photographer trotting up the steps, and her eyes narrowed.
“Maj, what is going on?”
In answer, Maj pulled over to the curb, although she made no move to open the door. They sat and looked at the gilded entrance of City Hall. Another reporter scurried inside, following close on the heels of two women, one dressed in a tuxedo, the other in long white silk.
“Is this some kind of a party?” Kate asked.
“You could say that,” Maj answered. Mina grinned at her mother, Satch giggled merrily, and Nora piped up from the child seat.
“Is there a birthday party?”
“Better than that, sweetie,” Maj told her, and Satch bounced around as if his skin were too small.
There appeared to be very little business as usual around City Hall that mor
ning. The standard contingent of homeless gazed in astonishment at the activity, which would have made an upturned ant’s nest look calm by comparison: Two men, hand in hand, ran up the steps, both wearing tuxedos; a minivan pulled into a red zone out in front of the Hall, a uniformed patrol looking on benevolently as the van’s driver and two passengers unloaded armloads of flowers.
“Why the hell is the entire gay commun—” Kate started to ask, but then she saw the bakery van and the decorated cake, and it hit her.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Maj?”
By way of answer, Maj popped open her door, and a kid in a red jacket pulled himself off the low wall and trotted forward. He opened the driver’s door with the gesture of a valet, and Maj turned around to look into Kate’s face.
“Roz thought that you and Lee might like to be among the first legally married lesbians in San Francisco.”
Kate could say nothing, just sit with her mouth open.
“Absolutely legal,” Maj replied, reading the sense behind the silence. “Thanks to his advisors, our new mayor has decided that discrimination is unconstitutional. If you want a marriage license, it’s here for you.”
Lee had twisted around in the front seat to watch Kate. Kate stared at her, and slowly found herself beginning to grin. “I’m not even going to ask if you will marry me,” she told Lee, “because I’ve already done that and you said yes. So I guess now’s the time to make good on your promise.”
“We’re going to get married?” squealed Nora’s voice from the back. “Really married?”
This, Nora seemed to think, was even better than a birthday party with hot dogs and ponies combined.
And Kate couldn’t argue with that. She seized Lee’s hand, stuck her other one back for Nora, and said, “Yes, my sweetheart. We’re going to get married.”
Some time later, standing at the door to the County Clerk’s office with Lee and Nora, Roz and Maj, Jon and Sione, clutching the hastily photocopied form that read “first applicant/second applicant” where “bride/groom” had once stood, Kate glanced back down the growing line of men and women waiting their turn. Their faces were young and old, dark and light, male and female; they wore bow ties and T-shirts, white silk and blue denim, velvet and battered leather, tiaras and hand-knit hats; they carried backpacks and flowers, folded newspapers and small jeweler’s boxes; they had kids of all sizes or were little more than kids themselves. But all the people in the line, every one of them, wore just the same expression: stunned with joy, incredulous and expectant, and absolutely certain of what they were doing.
And for an instant, Kate caught a glimpse of someone she knew, or thought she knew. Down where the hallway turned, a tall young man with close-cropped blond hair and eyes the color of lapis lazuli stood gazing down at his brown-skinned, green-eyed beloved.
For an instant, the blue eyes came up and touched Kate’s, and then the crowd shifted, and they were gone.
POSTSCRIPT
After the ceremony, the joyous celebrants piled into various cars and drove across the City to Fort Mason, where they took over a large portion of the vegetarian restaurant on the water and ate organic salads and festive-looking entrees while looking out over the boats, the sea lions, and the Golden Gate Bridge; the north side, where the bridge came back to earth at the joining place of Forts Baker and Barry, was draped in grass so green it hurt the eyes. The room was loud with the lunch crowd: Roz was on her feet half the meal, making the rounds of the restaurant’s other patrons; Nora and young Satch spent two hours giggling together; and Kate and Lee sat with their hands joined most of the time.
Married.
Somewhere between the champagne toast, made to the health of wise politicians, and the candle-strewn dessert, created hastily at Roz’s request just for the occasion, a fax machine on the other side of town wheezed into life. The machine was in the Hall of Justice, occupying a precarious niche of the crowded Homicide Detail. It grumbled and hesitated, as if disapproving of the effort, but in the end, it generated a single page.
The sheet bore the heading of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, and read as follows:
Kate—
I know we’re finished with the Gilbert case, but just for your files, I meant to tell you that I finally got a chance to search the records for Fort Barry, and going back thirty years, I could find no report of a body discovered or an assault committed anywhere in the vicinity of Battery DuMaurier.
Funnily enough, I did find a short mention of something close, though it’s way too early for our purposes. I was glancing through the journal of one of Fort Baker’s early base commanders, and he mentions that the body of one of his officers was found in a gun emplacement—no names, no details, just that. Odd coincidence, but like I say, it’s too early to have anything to do with the Gilbert case.
I think the date was 1924.
Chris Williams
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is hardly fair to blame America for the state of San Francisco, for its population is cosmopolitan and its seaport attracts the floating vice of the Pacific; but be the cause what it may, there is much room for spiritual betterment.
—Arthur Conan Doyle,
Our Second American Adventure
I have, I fear, tinkered with the headlands landscape just a little and added one gun battery, surplus to requirement, to the already considerable maintenance tasks of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. Battery DuMaurier is located along the cliffs to the south of Battery Mendell, and looks, as Ranger Culpepper says, very similar to Battery Wallace. Those interested in the history of the guns and Fort Barry as a whole will find information and links on my website, www.LaurieRKing.com.
One of the joys of being a writer is the opportunity to meet new and enthusiastic residents of the various worlds one temporarily occupies. In the GGNRA—the Marin Headlands National Park—thanks go particularly to a trio of rangers: Roxi Farwell, whose unflappable response, upon being informed that a mystery writer wished to stash a dead body in her park, was that said writer would require a Special Use Permit; John Porter, who showed me where the bats live and the soldiers slept; and John Martini, who knows where the bodies are buried.
In the world of the real-life SFPD, I am grateful for the time and expertise given me by Inspector Holly Pera and Inspector Joseph Toomey of the department’s Homicide Detail. Why busy people like that put up with the questions of writers, I’ll never know.
Thanks, too, to Marybeth McFarland, Law Enforcement Specialist with the GGNRA, for leading me through the convolutions of the Park Police. If I have nudged the question of jurisdiction beyond the realm of likelihood, it’s not her fault.
In the world of Sherlockians, particular thanks to the ever-patient, always forgiving, eminently well-balanced, and yes, quite real Leslie S. Klinger, Peter E. Blau, and Richard Sveum.
Stuart Bennett, antiquarian bookseller, helped with the arcane details of the collector’s world.
Abby Bridge again permitted me to pepper her with questions about historical San Francisco.
Leah Garchik kindly allowed me to drop a Sherlockian mention into her excellent column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
John A.T. Tiley again aided in introducing me to the subtleties of things military.
The real Chris Williams, whose generosity to the Youth Literacy Program of Chicago’s Centro Romero ended her up here, in an alternate existence.
And as always, the patient and supportive staff of the McHenry Library, University of California, Santa Cruz, helped with a thousand and ten details. Particular thanks are due to Margaret Gordon and Paul Machlis.
To everyone who lent a hand, named or not: Thank you. And I’m sorry if I listened with a deaf ear and mangled all your tidy facts; we writers are such a contrarian lot.
Finally, lest the reader imagine the legal inquiries made by Lieutenant Raynor to be a convenient fiction, I mention the excellent Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment by Rose Collis, subtitled A Tale of Female Husb
andry. In it, Ms. Collis describes the life of Colonel Victor Barker, born Valerie, and includes a photograph of the official marriage certificate issued in Brighton, England, to “Victor” and his wife Elfrida in November 1923.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR LAURIE R. KING is the only novelist other than Patricia Cornwell to win the prize for Best First Crime Novel on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of her debut thriller, A Grave Talent. She is the New York Times bestselling author of eight Mary Russell mysteries, four contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the bestselling novels A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. She lives in northern California, where she is at work on her next novel, Touchstone.
Other Mystery Novels by
LAURIE R. KING
Mary Russell Novels
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
Kate Martinelli Novels
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
And
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
THE ART OF DETECTION
A Bantam Book / June 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Laurie R. King
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
The art of detection / Laurie R. King.