The Art of Detection (46 page)

He got out from behind his desk to welcome them, shook hands, offered coffee, and at their refusal, settled them down and returned to his seat. He was wearing his lawyer’s uniform today, brilliant white shirt, slightly daring necktie, and suspenders, his jacket, draped over the back of his chair, dead black with just the faintest hint of a pinstripe in the fabric. On the lapel was a tiny spot of blue: the 221B pin.

Kate and Al took their time sitting down, running their eyes over the view, the desk, the office. On the wall to the right of the desk were two framed pictures: one a lithograph that reminded Kate of those in Gilbert’s house, this one showing a man seated at a desk, talking to another man standing in front of him; the other was a large color photograph of Rutland in a room that again reminded her of Gilbert’s house. The lawyer was sitting in a chair, wearing a silk dressing gown, with a pipe in his hand and a violin held awkwardly across his lap: playing Holmes.

On the wall across from where he sat, next to the door, Rutland had hung a trio of photographs showing, in descending order: the lawyer in running shorts with a number on his chest, crossing the finish line with a pack of other runners of many colors; bent over the handlebars of a racing bicycle, spattered with mud; and emerging from the water in the midst of a crowd of other men, his eyes locked on some goal.

“You do triathlons?” she asked him.

He glanced at the photographs with just the right degree of modesty. “That’s the Iron Man.”

“Impressive,” she said, and sat down.

“I don’t have as much time to train as I used to,” he answered. “Mostly now I just do half-marathons. So, what can I do for the San Francisco Police Department today?”

Hawkin said, “Can you tell us again what you were doing on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of January?”

“The twentieth—wasn’t that the weekend I went golfing in Palm Springs?”

“So you said.”

“Well, I went down with some friends in their private plane. Wheels up out of Oakland at four, forty-eight hours in the sun, and we came back Sunday afternoon around five or six.”

“And you didn’t leave Palm Springs during that time?”

“Not at all. Inspector, it sounds to me like you’re treating me like a suspect.”

“A witness at this point, Mr. Rutland. But I will need the names of your friends and of the hotel where you stayed.”

“We were in a private home.” He began to bristle. “And I don’t know that these are the kind of people I want bothered about this.”

The kind of people, in other words, who wouldn’t be pleased that their upstart friend was being investigated by the police.

“Still, we’re going to need those names.”

“I think I should consult with one of my colleagues before we go any further, Inspector.”

“You really think that’s necessary?” Hawkin asked. Without looking, Kate knew that he was raising one eyebrow, as if to say, Sir, I hadn’t really considered you a suspect until just this moment.

“Before I give you those names, yes. Was there anything else you wanted?”

Kate’s turn. She made a show out of opening the notebook in her hand, flipping the pages, comparing two sheets of completely unrelated scrawl, and finally looking up. “Mr. Rutland, in October of the year 2000, complaint was filed with the California Bar Association by the family of Mrs. Eugenia Baxter, accusing you of having manipulated your client Mrs. Baxter into writing you a remarkably generous settlement in her last will and testament. Similarly, in April of 2002, the family of Rosemarie Upfield—”

“Those charges were dropped!” he snapped.

“True, although I could find no record of an actual investigation by—”

At that he slapped his hand on the desk and stood, so forcibly his chair crashed back into the wall behind him. “I think that’s enough for today, Inspectors.”

As if he had neither moved nor spoken, Kate said, “In regards to the Gilbert estate, I would like to know if your role as executor was Mr. Gilbert’s idea, or something you suggested?”

“I want you to leave.” His face was dark beneath the tan, his voice harsh.

“It just seems so convenient, you being there and ready to step into the position.”

He snatched up the phone, knuckles so white he might have been about to use the receiver as a weapon rather than a means of summoning help. “Yvonne, call building security.”

Hawkin turned to Kate and said, “I don’t think Mr. Rutland wants to talk to us today.”

“I get that impression, too,” she agreed, and stood up.

They left the office riding on a wave of steam.

In the elevator on the way down, Hawkin said, “That was the most fun I’ve had all week.”

Kate had to agree. “It also showed that not only does Mr. Rutland have a quick temper, but that he’s almost as obsessed with the Sherlock Holmes thing as Gilbert was.”

“And,” Hawkin added complacently, “our triathlete has plenty of muscles to be hauling unconscious bodies around.”

BACK in the office, Hawkin got on the phone to see what his many and varied contacts could tell him about Thomas Rutland, while Kate searched for the missing details on the life of Ian Nicholson and waited for the agent to call her back.

Ian Nicholson had been born in a western suburb of London in 1956. He came to the United States two weeks after his graduation from some English university Kate had never heard of, taking up residence with his deceased father’s younger brother in New York.

Like so many before (and after) him, young Nicholson wanted to act. His degree had been in art history, but his heart lay on the stage. Very fortunately, his uncle proved not only a responsible caretaker, but an intelligent one, and although young Ian did indeed land the occasional acting job, his uncle also helped steer him into a job cataloguing old books and letters for a large antiques dealer. After a few years he was working full-time at one of the bigger auction houses; it appeared that he was set on his road.

However, the English lad with the interesting face did not want an auction house, he wanted the stage. After two years of full-time employment, in 1983 he quit the big-name house and joined another, smaller establishment that was pleased to employ him part-time, saving themselves the cost of insurance benefits while it allowed the young man to chase down acting jobs.

Unfortunately, the jobs didn’t do much chasing back. At the time he packed up and moved to San Francisco, in 1999, he had not used his Equity card in nine and a half months.

Nicholson’s ex-agent was a well-established figure, Saul Adler, who seemed to work with a younger partner and the secretary whose voice came on the phone at a quarter to noon, asking Kate to hold for Mr. Adler. Adler’s voice evoked a vivid image of well-chewed cigars, a straining waistband, and the Bowery. Kate figured that he was probably a svelte vegetarian born in the Midwest, but in any case, he knew Ian Nicholson.

“Ian? Sure, he was with me for years. Far as I know, he’s not working anymore.”

“That’s what I understand. Can you tell me why he quit?”

“Came into a little money, inheritance or insurance, don’t remember exactly. Not that money would have made any difference if he’d really wanted to stay, but Ian was, what, forty-two, -three? Hadn’t worked in months—my kinda work, I mean, he had another job somewhere, selling antiques or something—and the money just let him admit it wasn’t gonna happen for him.”

“Not much of an actor, then?”

“Actually, the kid wasn’t bad, and he could play British or American, but Casting had a real problem with his face. He was made for supporting roles in a romantic comedy, and I could’ve built him a solid career, but he wanted drama, and he wanted the lead. I just couldn’t sell his face, especially after he hit forty—not handsome, not ugly enough to be a type, too distinctive to fade into the crowd. Add to that the problem with flying—you know about that?”

“He told me, yes.”

“Something to do with being locked up when he was a kid, I think. In an icebox or something, his wife talked about it once, just a little, to shut me up grousing about having to turn down a part. Anyway, it pretty much left out every job more than a couple hundred miles away. That was the capper. Ian thought about moving to LA and taking up television, but even then he’d have had to turn down anything on location.”

“Was he badly disappointed?”

“Nah, he’d heard it coming. Bright guy, you know?”

“A lot of changes all at once, though.”

“Changes? You mean the move?”

“I was thinking about the divorce.”

The noise that came down the phone line sounded as if the agent had swallowed his cigar stub, but when he kept talking, Kate figured it had been a laugh. “The divorce wouldn’t have troubled Ian. Wasn’t really a marriage in the first place. They were friends, sure, but she needed a man to show her nice Catholic family, he needed insurance—health insurance, you know? Her job gave him Blue Cross, and in exchange he showed up at Christmas and stuff.”

“A show marriage, then?” Kate’s spine began to tingle, as it did when a suspect’s eyes suddenly dodged to one side during questioning.

“I don’t know if that’s fair,” Adler replied. “It was at first, but he and Christy, they were fond of each other, you know? They never lived together, but he moved to the same building, right next door, so he saw a lot of the kid.”

“The kid?” The tingle grew.

“Daughter, what was her name? Cute little thing, I could’ve found her a ton of kid roles if they’d let me, but Ian put his foot down. Monica, that’s it. Monica the Moneymaker, I called her once. Those blond curls—man.”

“Blond. And blue eyes?”

“Like the Caribbean.”

Or like the water at Cabo San Lucas?

“Where does she live, do you know?”

“Probably LA. I saw her not too long ago, a small part on a daytime soap. She’ll get more, I’d be willing to bet—twenty-two or -three now, and God, she’s a stunner.”

“So she’s an actor, too?”

“She was then. You want to talk to her mother about it? I’ve got a number for her somewhere.”

“That would be great.”

He was of the generation that might have dropped the phone on the desk to flip through a Rolodex, but it being 2004, he was talking into a headset and retrieving information from a PDA. However, habits die hard, and he muttered and cursed under his breath as if the receiver were lying on the desk instead of hovering two inches from his mouth. “Where’d I put the damn thing? Christy, Christy, what the hell’s her last name—ah, gotcha, baby.” Then, in full voice, he said, “You still there?”

“Still here.”

“Here you go then, she’s Christy Bennington now, used to be LaValle.” He read out a number; Kate wrote it down.

“Her daughter, Monica. Is her last name Bennington, too, or Nicholson?”

“Not Bennington, that’s the guy Christy married after Ian. Accountant? Stockbroker? He’s in money, anyway. I think the girl kept LaValle. Sounds better than Monica Nicholson.”

And in the acting world, sound and looks were all. “Thank you, Mr. Adler.”

“You see Ian, tell him Saul said he shouldn’t be a stranger.”

“I’ll do so.”

Next up was Christy Bennington, formerly Nicholson, née LaValle. She answered the phone full-voiced with a chorus of dogs in the not-too-distant background.

“I told you I can’t come out, I wish to hell you wouldn’t do this, Lizzie.”

“Um, Mrs. Bennington?”

Silence, but for yips and howls.

“I’m looking for Christy Bennington?”

The phone gave a rustling noise, but even with being muffled against the woman’s body, Kate jerked away from the earpiece at the bellowed “SHUT UP!”

The command took effect instantly, and the woman’s voice said, considerably lower in both tone and volume, “Sorry. Who is this?”

Kate identified herself, explained that she was attempting to get some background information on a witness, one Ian Nicholson.

“Ian? What’s he got himself involved in now?”

“Is he often ‘involved’ in things?” Kate asked.

“Oh, you know Ian,” the woman said with a laugh.

“No, I don’t, actually. I’ve barely met him.”

“Oh, of course. Well, I didn’t mean anything. Just that, when I knew him, he was forever coming up with The Great Scheme.”

“Illegal?”

“No,” she said sharply, but then modified it to, “Well, one or two of them I sort of wondered about, they might have been in grayish areas. But I used to tell him that he’d find himself in a jam one day, when he sank all his money into a one-of-a-kind letter that turned out to be a forgery or something.”

“His ‘great schemes’ generally had to do with manuscripts, his job in the auction house?”

“I suppose it was his way of keeping up his interest in what could be a pretty boring sort of job,” she said, which Kate took as a yes. “He’d probably have made a fortune in it if he hadn’t been so scrupulously honest. You can’t believe what he’d get offered to slant his appraisals.”

“But he wasn’t willing to do that?”

“I used to tease him about being a coward, that he could retire if he was willing to risk a little jail. But he wasn’t.”

Nice to know the threat of incarceration worked some of the time.

“Mrs. Bennington, I need to ask you about the nature of your marriage to Ian Nicholson.”

“‘Nature,’” she repeated, although Kate could hear that she knew quite well what Kate was asking.

“I’ve been told that your marriage was essentially one of convenience.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. At one time, I had my hopes, but as it turned out, Ian just wasn’t wired that way. I was young enough to take it personally for a while, but fortunately I grew up. And as it turned out, it was really for the best: I don’t think he and Monica would have been as close as they became if we’d been your basic nuclear family.”

“So Ian is gay?”

“He practically invented the word. He keeps it under wraps, or did when I knew him, so he didn’t get typecast when it came to acting jobs, but yes, he’s definitely gay.”

“Monica isn’t his daughter?”

“Hardly. She wasn’t yet one when they met, though, and Ian’s the only father she’s known.”