The Art of Detection (50 page)

“Can I ask one favor?”

“Your favors are about used up, Ian.”

“I’ll give you the gun, but can I walk behind you until we get to the car? I’m sorry, but having all those angry cops standing there, I’d really be happier if you were between me and them.”

“Ian, they’re not going to open fire with me standing there.”

“I know. Intellectually, I know, but going out there first, I’m afraid I would just piss myself. And if I’m behind you, Monica isn’t going to see my face a hundred times on the evening news.”

A little late to think about that, Kate thought. She put out her hand, unwilling to negotiate further. His hand wavered, then the gun tipped and came out to her. She took what felt like her first unconstricted breath in many hours.

She snapped the gun open and knocked the five bullets it held into her palm, pouring them into the front pocket of her pants. The gun itself she tossed backhanded toward the courtyard; it flew across the polished marble of the foyer floor and vanished.

Now she could afford to grant Nicholson his wish.

“You might want to put your hand on my shoulder, so you don’t trip on me if I have to stop.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

She pushed the door open and stepped out; Nicholson moved with her, his left hand resting lightly on her shoulder. She halted, spread her arms, and opened her mouth to shout, “Hold your fire, he’s surrendering, he’s not armed.”

But only the first two words left her mouth. As Kate began to speak, Ian’s fingers tightened on her, pulling her body back. At the touch of his face against her right ear, at the murmur of his voice in her hair, she broke off to turn in his direction. But his hand was already in motion, sliding down and center as if to pat her on the back. When it reached a spot directly between her shoulder blades, he paused for an instant, gathering all the strength in his rugby player’s muscles, then shoved hard. Kate shot forward, staggering open-armed into the street before she fell. She rolled, recovered, and pushed her weight up on one arm in time to see Nicholson snatch a long, dark, gunlike object from the waistband of his jeans and lower it at the nearest cop, who happened to be Al Hawkin.

“NO!” she screamed, feeling his hand sliding down her shoulder, hearing the echoes of that English voice murmuring into her ear:
“Can’t do planes, can’t do jail, I’m very sorry,”
a moment before he propelled her out of harm’s way.

As the fingers of her free hand stretched out to him, the street exploded.

TWENTY-TWO

W
ednesday evening, little more than forty-eight hours after she had watched Ian Nicholson die, Kate lowered herself onto the armchair in her living room and decided that yes, her lungs had decided to go on breathing. She was shaky and fragile and there was still a high-pitched ringing in her ears; she hadn’t managed to choke down an entire meal since Monday; a long, dreary process of departmental hearings lay before her; she was regularly overwhelmed with the self-loathing of having allowed herself to play into Nicholson’s hands; and she knew without a doubt that if Ian Nicholson were to miraculously appear before her, healthy and grinning, she would strangle him with her bare hands for dumping her back into the shit. But she kept reciting platitudes, telling herself that this too would pass, that she would one day feel as if she belonged here once more, that he’d have managed his suicide one way or another without her.

In a minute, Lee came in with a full wineglass in her hand and set it near Kate’s right hand. Kate cocked an eyebrow at it. “I shouldn’t,” she said.

“Days like this are why God invented wine.”

“I like your therapeutic method better than the department counselor’s,” she replied, and swallowed deep. Lee went away. A few minutes later Nora came in and stood with her feet between Kate’s, her two hands braced on Kate’s knees, studying Kate’s face. Kate was struck by an overpowering urge to sweep the child up and wrap her arms hard around that warm little body for an hour or so, but comforting a mother in that way was a burden no child should bear. So instead she ruffled the mop of curls and allowed Nora to climb up into her lap unaided, and after one firm hug, forced her arms to draw back and drape loosely around the child leaning against her chest.

“Are you sad, Mamakay?”

“I’m not sad, exactly. But sometimes you see someone else who’s really sad, and it makes you a little less happy, you know?” The unnecessary tragedy of it all, Gilbert and Nicholson, Raynor and Billy Birdsong, all the lives ruined, for nothing. She pulled herself away from the maudlin reflections of society’s failings.

“So what did my little monkey do today?” she asked into the warm hair.

“I played and I worked.”

“I hope you did both really hard.”

“I did. We looked at paintings in school and I helped Jon and Lalu make cookies and, and Bet’ny’s having a birt’day party and Mamalee says I can go, we’re going to ride ponies down at the beach and have a cake and eat hot dogs!”

At this last revelation, the blond curls came off Kate’s shoulder so Nora could witness her mother’s astonishment, and Kate obediently raised her eyebrows and put her mouth into an O. Satisfied, Nora lay back against her, and Kate smiled: For the daughter of a cook like Lee, hot dogs were every bit as thrilling as ponies.

“When is this magical affair?”

“Sattiday.”

The funeral was scheduled for Saturday, the fall of the curtain on Ian Nicholson’s final performance, a play scripted, directed, and acted by him. The black gunlike object had been a long-barreled butane lighter, all its deadliness in the stance and attitude of the man wielding it. She’d watched the film clip, and even knowing what it was, she would have sworn he had a gun. Not a bad actor, indeed.

From where she lay on the ground, her hand outstretched as if to snatch him back to safety, she had seen five rounds hit him. As the sheets of glass behind him shattered and exploded into the calm marble foyer, she had seen five bullets reach their mark, each impact tugging him this way and that before his muscles gave way.

She had scrambled to her feet and run toward him, careless of the possibility of further shots; knelt beside him; taken his hand—his right hand, the left one being a bloody mess—and held it, looking directly into his eyes. Gray-blue eyes, holding hers as he felt the end come for him; a look of mild surprise, a glimpse of something resembling humor, and the brief pressure of his fingers on hers. Then, nothing.

She blinked, looked into Nora’s green eyes, the child frowning as she shook Kate by the shoulder. “You’re not listening to me,” she accused, and Kate shivered.

“I’m sorry, sweetie, what did you want?”

“I said, can you come to Bet’ny’s party with me and Mamalee?”

“I’ll have to see if I can. I have something I really have to do that afternoon, but if I can come, I absolutely will.”

A moment’s pout, and then Nora was back against her shoulder. A cop’s daughter, she had already begun to learn that sometimes life came first, and sometimes death did.

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.