The Art of Detection (51 page)

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 morning. 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

A
fter 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 Husbandry
. 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
KeepingWatch
. 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.

p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90261-7

eISBN-10: 0-553-90261-X

Martinelli, Kate (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Policewoman—California—San Francisco—Fiction. 3. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.I4813 A89 2006
813.'54 22 2006040665

www.bantamdell.com

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