The Art of Detection (7 page)

“This is Tom Rutland,” said the voice, which bristled with a lawyer’s inborn suspicion. “My service said you were trying urgently to get in touch with me.”

Kate thanked him for calling her back, and explained that she had found his name on a letter addressed to a person whose death was under investigation.

“Who is that?” he said, as if she might be trying to put one over on him.

But when she said the name Philip Gilbert, Rutland went silent.

“Mr. Rutland? Is Philip Gilbert your client?”

“God.
Philip?
What happened?”

“All I can tell you is the death is under investigation. At the moment, I’m in his home trying to find the name and location of his next of kin.”

“He doesn’t really have family. I can’t believe it. Are you sure it’s him?”

“He had a medical necklace and his doctor confirmed his general appearance. We’ll need someone to identify him, when we can find the family.”

“He doesn’t…You say you’re in his house? How did you get in?”

“A neighbor gave us the name of his security company. Mr. Rutland—”

“I think I better come over there. I’m his executor, I’ll bring you what information I have. I’m at home in Berkeley, I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr.—”

But Rutland’s mind was made up, and if he really wanted to spend his Saturday afternoon driving across the Bay, Kate wasn’t going to bar the door against him. She asked him if he had the code to the safe, and he said he’d bring it with him.

She closed the phone, looking distractedly at a framed photograph of Philip Gilbert with a television actor who had played Sherlock Holmes: Gilbert was a head taller, thinner of nose and sparser of hair, and looked more the character than the professional did.

She was looking at the photograph, but she was thinking about lawyers. Helpful lawyers were a rare breed, in her experience, and she’d never come across one willing to drop everything for a dead client—foot-dragging was an entire section in the bar exam. Too, Tom Rutland’s reaction to the news had been more personal than professional, with his voice going tight, his thoughts distracted.

She called to Williams that they were going to have a visitor, and returned to her search.

The desk itself contained a minimum of paper, mostly paid bills and catalogues from auction houses all over the world. The answering machine held eleven messages, most of which sounded like business, since the callers left their full name and numbers and had invariably phoned during weekday work hours. The only exceptions were the second and seventh calls, both left by the same English voice, identifying himself merely as “Ian.” Ian’s first message had come at 8:21 the previous Monday morning:

“Philip, this is Ian. God, man, this is really something, but honestly, you can’t be serious. Can you? Anyway, give me a ring on my mobile.”

Then at 7:49 Thursday evening he had called again:

“Philip, I don’t know if you got the message I left the other day, but do ring me when you get a chance. I’ll be back the first of the week, but call me any time. I need to talk to you about this before it goes any further.”

Williams made note of the names, numbers, and times they had been left. The earliest one was the previous Sunday, January the twenty-fifth, the latest yesterday, Friday the thirtieth.

They also found Gilbert’s keys, to the house and to the Lexus parked up the block. They were in a small bowl on the back of the desk, a bowl that, going by the scratches and nicks in its surface, was where they usually lived. Kate picked them up curiously. “Don’t you think it’s odd to keep your house keys up on the third floor?”

“Maybe he has another set downstairs.”

But if he did, they couldn’t find them. Maybe he had left in a hurry, and couldn’t be bothered climbing upstairs to get the keys; hence the unturned dead bolt on the door.

Kate happened to be looking out of the window when a brand-new, glossy black BMW purred past the house, searching for a parking space. It found one up the block, and a vigorous, thickset man in his forties got out, dressed in expensive designer jeans, leather loafers worn without socks, and a gleaming black leather bomber jacket over a shirt printed with a sort of Balinese design, carrying a slightly less pristine leather briefcase in his hand. The entire package read: lawyer called in on his day off. His hair was carefully styled to hide the fact that it was going thin on top, and the tan of his face in winter testified to either a Mexican holiday or hours on the slopes. One hand jabbed his controls at the car, which responded with a flash of lights. Kate heard him call a greeting to the rose pruner across the street as she opened the door to let him in.

“Inspector Martinelli? Tom Rutland. Sorry to make you wait for me.” He didn’t sound in the least sorry; still, in spite of her instant antagonism it was all Kate could do not to reach out and caress the sumptuous leather of his jacket. His casual day-off shirt was either silk or heavy rayon, and just under the fold of the collar was a small pin that read “221B.” He had no goggle marks around his eyes: Mexico, not ski slopes.

“No problem,” she replied easily, standing back to let him in. “This is Inspector Williams, from the Park Police.”

Hands were shaken, then the lawyer arranged his face into a suitably mournful set, lowered his voice, and said, “I was shocked to hear of Philip’s death. He was a friend, as well as a client. What happened? Not an automobile accident—I saw his car outside.” He directed his question to Williams, and Kate allowed the Park Service man to answer.

“No,” Williams said. “Mr. Rutland, there appears to be a possibility that Mr. Gilbert was murdered.”

“
Murdered?
Philip? A break-in, oh God, I told him he should upgrade that alarm system of his—”

“We’ve found no signs of a break-in, Mr. Rutland, and his body was found elsewhere.”

“Then, what?”

“As I said, it’s under investigation. Were you friends?”

“Murdered?” Rutland repeated, working to get his mind around the idea. Clearly, the lawyer’s practice did not embrace a lot of criminal law.

“You say you were friends?” Williams prompted. This time, to effect.

“Yes. Not close friends, but I suppose about as close as Philip had. The kind of friendship that, when he needed to consult me about something, he’d schedule it for late morning and when we finished we’d go for lunch. Mostly I saw him at a dinner group we both belonged to. I’d be seeing him next week. I’ll have to tell the others about it. Christ, it’s hard to believe.”

“Mr. Rutland, do you know of any business Mr. Gilbert might have had in the parkland just north of the Golden Gate Bridge?”

“What, on Point Bonita? Not that I know of. He isn’t—wasn’t—much of an outdoorsman.”

To say nothing of the fact that he was in his pajamas, thought Kate.

“Why?” the lawyer asked. “Is that where he…where you found him?”

“Yes,” Williams answered, “although it would appear that he died elsewhere.”

“Murdered. Jesus.”

“It is only a possibility,” Williams reminded him. “Is there at least some family?”

“He has a cousin somewhere in the Midwest, two nieces in Texas, an ex-wife in Boston. I don’t think he was close to any of them. If it’s someone to identify the body you need, I could do it.”

“Thank you. In the meantime, if you could let us have the family’s names and phone numbers, we’ll at least need to talk to them.”

“I didn’t bring that information with me. I’ll put it together for you when I get back, and e-mail or fax it to you. But I did bring a copy of the will, I figured you’d need me to go over it with you.”

“That was very thoughtful.”

Rutland looked around, as if realizing for the first time that they’d been standing in the gloomy entranceway all this time. “You want to go up to the study, where there’s light?”

“Um, let me just check if the room’s clear.” Kate left Williams and the lawyer downstairs and trotted up to stick her head inside the door to the study. “The lawyer’s here, has some papers he wants to go over. How long until we won’t be in your way?”

“We’re pretty much finished in here. Lots of prints, a drinking glass and an ashtray, nothing else obvious. You want me to collect all the stuff in the desk?”

“Let’s go over it first, see if there’s anything there.” Anything like a threatening letter or evidence of a crime, but she didn’t think Philip Gilbert had been a white-collar crime lord. “Mostly I’d just like Tamsin to record the safe when we get it open, then as far as I’m concerned, you guys can go.”

Kate went back downstairs and said to the lawyer, “We can go up now.” She held out her arm to indicate that he could lead the way, and he did.

“You seem to know the house fairly well, Mr. Rutland,” Williams commented as they trooped upstairs.

“Sure. I’ve been here a lot, for business and the occasional dinner.”

“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.”