The Art of Detection Page 6

“This is with the dinner group you mentioned, or just as Mr. Gilbert’s guest?”

  “Usually with them. Once or twice we ate here after I’d brought him some papers to sign—nothing formal then.”

  “Your dinner group meets regularly?” Kate asked.

  “Once a month. We call ourselves the Strand Diners. We’re, well, devotees of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Not a BSI scion, although some of us belong to one or another; we’re just an informal group.”

  “BSI?” Williams asked.

  “Oh, sorry. Baker Street Irregulars. That’s the biggest worldwide organization of Sherlockians, or Holmesians as they call themselves in England.”

  “Mr. Gilbert seems to have been a real fan.”

  “The place is really something, isn’t it? Sherlockians don’t usually go quite so far, but it was Philip’s livelihood as well as his passion, so it made sense, in a way.”

  “How do you mean, livelihood?”

  “Philip was one of the world’s leading experts on Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. He had universities drooling to get their hands on some of the things in his collection, and private collectors would kill—” He stopped suddenly on the stairs, looking back over his shoulder. “I don’t mean that literally, of course not. But some of the things Philip has—had, were without parallel.”

  “So who inherits?”

  Instead of answering, the lawyer continued up the last flight of stairs and headed for the study. He glanced curiously at the closed door of the bedroom as he went past, where Lo-Tec and Maria were checking out the walls and furniture, then went ahead into the study, pulling the desk chair over to the low lion’s claw table and leaving the chair and sofa to Kate and Williams. He laid his leather case on the table and took out two stapled sheaves of paper, handing one to each of them.

  “This is Philip’s will. Normally I’d need to wait until you had notified his family, but really, as you’ll see there’s little point in delaying. Basically, Philip wanted his collection to remain intact and attached to his name. You’ll find that I am executor of his estate, and that I am to offer the house and its contents to a number of institutions for bidding. Not to sell outright, but to go to the institution that offers the best support to the collection, in archiving, preserving, and making it available to the public. That last will be the biggest problem, because this house is in a residential area, and the neighbors aren’t going to permit a lot of traffic going in and out. Philip had enough headaches just holding the occasional meeting here.”

  “So his relatives get nothing?” Williams asked, flicking the pages but clearly not intending to settle in and read the entire document there and then.

  “Small bequests, but they were not close, and his two nieces are neither interested in the collection nor are they exactly poor. Their mother, Philip’s sister, married into oil.”

  “What about the ex-wife?”

  “They were married for barely two years, more than twenty years ago. I shouldn’t think she has expectations of much.”

  “When did you last see Mr. Gilbert?”

  “On the fourteenth, a Wednesday. He had some papers he wanted me to go over, and I happened to be coming over to the city, so we met downtown for lunch.”

  “And you haven’t spoken to him since then?”

  “He called me a couple days later to let me know that the papers had arrived and all was well—it had to do with the sale of a little carving, the buyer was being prickly—but that was it.”

  “So you last spoke to him on the sixteenth?”

  “Yes. No—he called briefly about a week later, on Friday, I think it was. He wanted to know if I was free later that afternoon, but I wasn’t. I was leaving town by three. So he said he’d call back on Monday or Tuesday to make an appointment. He never called.”

  “He didn’t say what the appointment was for?”

  “No.”

  Kate let her own copy of the will fall shut, and asked, “Could you tell us something about Mr. Gilbert?”

  “Like what?”

  Start at the beginning, Kate thought. “How did you meet him? What was he like? What did he do?”

  Rutland glanced at her, his mouth twisting in a crooked imitation of a smile. “Hard to think of Philip in the past tense. He was, I don’t know, a little bigger than life. A little smarter, a little more self-assured. Philip could be a pain, but he was…it sounds odd, surrounded by this place, but he was real.

  “We met through the Diners, six, seven years ago. I’d just moved down from Davis, going through a divorce, trying to set up a practice. That first dinner—it was here, in fact, a friend brought me—it was exactly what I needed. Intelligent, friendly people with a sense of humor about the source of their common interest. I wasn’t in period dress, I’d been told it wasn’t absolutely required, and I felt a little uncomfortable because everyone else was. But Philip made some friendly joke about my being undercover and it was fine. The following week he phoned and asked me to set up a will for him, and that’s how it’s been since then.”

  “He was the head of your dinner group, would you say?”

  “Philip has always been the most committed to the Diners. He was one of the founding members, fifteen, twenty years ago. I doubt he’s missed more than one or two meetings in all the years I’ve known him.”

  “How many in the group?”

  “The numbers vary, but at the moment we’re ten. Well, nine without him.”

  “Were any of the others particularly friendly with him?”

  Rutland thought for a moment. “I’d say most of us have met with him occasionally outside the dinners, but I don’t know if that would count as particularly friendly. Philip seems, seemed, to have an amazingly…democratic relationship to people. I mean to say, a couple of times we’ve had members who thought they were becoming close to him personally because they worked with him on some project or another, and both had their noses badly bruised when they came up against his self-protective shield. It just never seemed to have occurred to Philip that some people might think they had a greater claim on his time and energy than others.”

  “Self-centered,” Kate commented.

  “Very. He was a lovely man until you expected him to open up with you, and then you’d find him looking at you with a puzzled expression on his face before going on to whatever bit of business concerned him.”

  “Sounds frustrating.”

  “It could be. But once you got to know him, it was just Philip. Sort of taking British coolness to an extreme.”

  “Was he British?”

  “No, actually he was born in Wisconsin, but he went to the University of London for a couple of years, and kept something of the accent. It was more that he cultivated the Englishness of Holmes in his own life. The eccentricities, the tight focus, the distaste for emotional excess.”

  “Do you know if he had any friends, or regular acquaintances, outside the dinner group?”

  “He never mentioned any to me, but then he wouldn’t have had reason to.”

  “What about professional contacts? I take it from his papers that he made his living as a dealer in Sherlock Holmes…” What was it called? Junk? Paraphernalia? “…collectibles.”

  “In the English system, Philip would be classified as ‘gentleman,’ meaning he did not have to earn his living. He wasn’t wealthy, but there was an inheritance that cushioned life, from early on. I think he worked for a while, a long time ago, but certainly in the time I’ve known him he has been a collector and dealer. As for his contacts in that world, I’d probably know a fraction of them. But that information should be in his things, either in the safe or his computer. Philip was good at keeping records.”

  “What about a PDA?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He didn’t like modern machinery a whole lot. He did have a cell phone, but he usually left it sitting on the charger.”

  They’d found the charger, but not the phone, not in his desk, beside his bed, in a coat pocket, or in his sock
drawer: They had looked. Kate asked Rutland, “Do you have the number for the phone?”

  He took out his own and, after much scrolling, gave it to Kate. She wrote it down, and asked, “He didn’t like cell phones or PDAs, but he’s got a nice computer setup here.”

  “He had to—a lot of his work was done over the Internet—but I think he’d have been just as happy to go back to snail mail and ads in the monthly journals. Basically, Philip disliked the accoutrements of modern life. I’ve actually seen him sit down to that monstrosity of a typewriter downstairs and pound out a letter. With a carbon copy, if you can believe that—I didn’t even know you could still buy carbon paper.”

  “Maybe we should have a look in the safe,” Williams suggested.

  Rutland opened his briefcase again and took out an envelope, laying it facedown on the table between the two detectives. The back flap was sealed, and across it ran the ornate signature of Philip William Gilbert. “I told him it wasn’t necessary for me to know the combination of the safe, and said that he should leave the number in his bank deposit box, but he said he trusted me and that he might need me to gain access, if, for example, he was traveling and wanted something. This was our compromise.”

  “So you never opened it?”

  “I never needed to use it, no.”

  Williams looked at Kate over the envelope, one of those delicate moments of territoriality. He had been first in the house, stepping in to work the door alarm, but there, the security woman had handed him the paper and he’d gone ahead without considering any overtones. Here, the next step lay between them. After a moment, Kate reached out and picked up the envelope, and the Park Police investigator did not object.

  Kate called Tamsin in and waited until the camera was running before she opened the safe. It was built into the wall, eighteen inches square and looking both new and formidable, but it opened without a protest under her fingers. She stepped back so the camera would record the contents.

  Half a dozen file folders stood against the left wall, held upright by an assortment of small boxes, mailing envelopes, and books with shiny clear wrappers. One folder was about an inch thick, some sort of document printed on heavy buff paper. Two were nearly flat. The last one was less than half the thickness of the buff paper, its cover light blue.

  “Last time I saw it, Philip’s ongoing business file was in a sort of bluish folder,” the lawyer told them.

  Kate pulled out the blue file, glanced inside, and carried it over to the low table. The tab had been labeled LEDGER, although it held not a bound book, but perhaps thirty sheets of legal-sized paper fastened together at one corner by an oversized clip; each page had lines running the long direction, cross-divided with the resulting columns labeled: item, source, price paid, appraised value, comments, and price received, all in pinched but immaculate handwriting. In earlier pages, many of the items had every box filled, showing when he had bought a thing, how much he’d paid, and how much he’d sold it for or, occasionally, the laconic note “retained.” In others, the columns were blank when it came to “sold” or “appraised value.” Each step along the way was dated; the earliest transaction was from August, five months before.

  When she ran a finger down the second column, the appraised value of each item, Kate’s shoulders went back in surprise; Williams frankly whistled; Rutland was nodding when they both looked up at him.

  “Like I said, he was a serious collector and dealer.”

  “This stuff’s not all in the house, is it?”

  “Some of it, although he wouldn’t have displayed anything of great value downstairs. Even in the safe, I’d imagine there was nothing worth more than five or ten thousand. You might think he’d want his best things close at hand, but in fact, the real prizes he kept mostly in the bank. He was there regularly.”

  Kate tore her eyes off the open door of the safe and looked back at the printout. “You mean to tell me someone would spend a hundred forty thousand dollars on a magazine?” Moreover, one whose note said “retained.”

  “Oh, man, October was a hell of a great month for Philip—apparently he’d been working that old man for years to get his hands on the Beeton’s Annual—nobody else even knew the fellow had it, Philip tracked it down, God only knows how. That magazine is the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in the world, one of maybe thirty still in existence. And of those, only two or three were signed by Conan Doyle. Plus, to top it off, it was in excellent and original condition—almost all of the survivors have been bound into hard covers at some time, to preserve them. Oh, it was worth every cent of what he paid. And prices are shooting up—you could get twice that today, easy. Hang on to it for a couple years, that magazine could hit a million dollars.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Chris Williams breathed. “Makes me wish I’d kept some of those comics I used to collect when I was a kid.”

  Kate studied the number of zeros on the list of Philip Gilbert’s possessions—and this showed only those transactions of the past five months. She shook her head: a whole lot of motive here for murder, had the beneficiary been an individual rather than an institution. “What about that list of associates?”

  “Their names are under the column ‘sources,’” Rutland pointed out.

  “Didn’t he have an address book or Rolodex, something like that?”

  “There were so many, he’d probably have them all in his files, either in the cabinet or on the computer. Oh, and you’ll want his password for that as well. It’s Sigerson.” He spelled it for them, explaining, “That’s one of the false identities Sherlock Holmes constructs. A Norwegian explorer.”

  “Right. And these sources will all be business partners of some kind?”

  “Philip didn’t have what you’d call partners, just contacts—antiquarian book dealers, other collectors, auction houses.”

  “And no real friends, you’d say?”

  “A wide number of acquaintances, certainly, he knew by first name most of the prominent Sherlockians here and abroad, but as far as I know, when it came to actual friendships, those of us in the dinner club were pretty much it. If he even knew anyone outside the Sherlockian world, I never heard him speak of them.”

  “No romantic relationships?”

  “Like I said, he was married once, in his late twenties, but she left him after two or three years, and I don’t believe he’s even heard from her in, oh, ten years. Maybe longer. I only know about her because I wrote his will. And they didn’t have any children. As to any current relationships, I wasn’t privy to his personal life. All I can say is, there weren’t any permanent enough to earn a place in his will.”

  “Was he gay?”

  Rutland shrugged, a gesture that as often covered discomfort as it expressed uncertainty. “He could have been, or he might have been asexual, as Holmes himself appears to have been. I just couldn’t say.”

  “Well, maybe we could just get the names of the dinner club members, then.”

  “Sure, I’ll send them along with the names of his family. Although he may have a file for them on his computer. Want me to look?”

  “We’ll do that, Mr. Rutland. I may phone you to confirm that we’ve got them all.”

  “Sure. I’d start with Ian Nicholson, if I were you. He’s probably the member Philip was closest to—although, come to think of it, Ian’s out of town for a few days. He’s sure to be back by Wednesday, that’s our monthly dinner night. Unless we cancel it because of…Well, I’ll have to consult the others about that.”

  “Now, just to check, Mr. Rutland: You live and work in Berkeley, is that right?”

  “My office is actually just inside the border of Oakland, but yes.”

  “But you come to San Francisco regularly.” Kate waited until he had said yes, then asked, “And you know the Marin headlands.”

  “Only to walk around. It’s a great place to take out-of-town visitors, to get a perspective on San Francisco. Blows them away.”

  He answered without hesitation, and with n
o apparent awareness of having made an admission. However, people who left bodies invariably chose a place within their comfort zone, generally fifteen or twenty miles from where they felt at home. The problem here was, the Marin headlands were fifteen or twenty miles from half the population of northern California.

  There was not much more they could ask the lawyer just then, and little point in detailed inquiries as to his alibi without a closer idea of when Gilbert had died. They did ask, and he told them, that he had last spoken to his client on the morning of Friday, January 23, before leaving at 3:30 for a weekend with golfing friends in Palm Springs. (Palm Springs, Kate noted; not Mexico.) They thanked him for his assistance, gave him their cards with e-mail addresses for the information he’d promised, and Kate saw him to the door.

  They finished a cursory search of Gilbert’s desk, noting his various numbers—phone, credit card, bank account—for the warrants they would need and to request that the banks be on the lookout for any uses, then packed up the records for Lo-Tec to take away with him.

  In another room, a little tune played, a tune Kate had heard before. She was not surprised when Lo-Tec appeared in the doorway.

  “I checked out the car, no signs of disturbance, I don’t think we need to take it in. Are we about finished here?”

  “Yeah, I think so. That was your phone I heard—you got another call?”

  “Break-in, practically around the corner. It can wait if you need us.”

  “No, I’m just boxing these files for you.”

  “What about the hard drive? You want me to take that?”

  “We found the guy in his pajamas, it’s far more likely to be sex than his business records. Let’s leave it for the time being.”

  “Okay.”

  They carried their collection of evidence out to the van. Kate closed up the safe, logged everyone out, set the door alarm, turned the deadbolt lock on the front door, and posted seals across the front and back doors. Williams drove her home, turned down her offer of something to drink, and said he’d phone her the next day.

  Kate left a text message for the lieutenant, to follow up on his conversation with Hawkin that afternoon.