The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  “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.”

  “Do they see a lot of each other?”

  “From time to time. She’s very busy—she’s an actress, she’s just read for a role in a CBS movie—and he doesn’t fly, but when she has the weekend off or something, sometimes they’ll meet halfway. He and I bought her a car together last year.”

  “A yellow Volkswagen bug?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Isn’t it adorable?”

  “Very. Mrs. Bennington, could I have your daughter’s phone number, please?”

  “You need to talk to her, too? This thing that Ian’s…that you think Ian may be caught up in, is it serious?” She sounded nearly as apprehensive about her ex-husband’s involvement as she did her daughter’s.

  “I really can’t talk about it, Mrs. Bennington. He’s just a witness, but you know how things are these days, we have to dot every i and cross every t.”

  “Sure,” she said dubiously, and recited her daughter’s number.

  “And Mrs. Bennington? I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call either Ian or Monica about this for a day or two. It’s mostly a matter of checking testimony, but it might really confuse matters if you talk to them about it first. Okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “Just for a day or so,” Kate repeated, thanked her, and hung up. She looked at the daughter’s phone number, but instead of dialing it, she stood up and went to find some coffee. When she got back, she ignored the piece of paper and logged on to the Internet, hunting down the website for an aspiring young actress.

  The studio portrait on Monica LaValle’s web page showed the same lively blond woman on Ian Nicholson’s wall. Kate stared at the photo until it went out of focus.

  She had seen him kiss the young woman’s fingers: Nicholson had taken Monica LaValle’s hand, kissed it, let it go.

  Kate had read the gesture as a lover’s farewell, and built her perception of Nicholson to include a girlfriend half his age. Running the memory through her mind’s eye, she had to say, if she hadn’t just been told by two people that he was gay, she’d have been inclined to think that Nicholson and his stepdaughter had made a radical and decidedly creepy change to their relationship once Monica hit maturity and the West Coast. A Woody Allen thing.

  However. Could that kiss have been the considerably more casual gesture of, say, a loving dad? Could that pressing of lips to fingers have been a salute of self-mocking formality, an affectionate farewell to a loved adult daughter? One who, moreover, shared the older man’s profession of actor?

  Yes: Don’t forget that. Nicholson had been an actor before his unsaleably distinctive romantic-comedy face condemned him to obscurity. And although Kate had not known too many actors, she had met enough to doubt that any person once consumed by the life would ever fully give up the habits.

  Ian Nicholson had once been an actor: “not a bad actor,” according to his jaded agent.

  Which brought up the question, Was he one still? Did that gesture encompass both things at once, both real and affectation?

  Remember, too: Kate’s presence on that street at that precise time had been expected, might one even say orchestrated? She had come around the corner in time to see Nicholson and the young blond woman standing outside the girl’s car. He had casually reached across her to open the door; she had gotten in; he had picked up the hand resting on the open window and…

  A performance, for Kate’s benefit? She’d felt something of that at the time, only she had thought the intent of Nicholson’s act was that of a middle-aged man demonstrating his virility be
hind a gesture of surface innocence—kissing the girl’s fingers as if to say that he had no need for a more blatant display of manhood.

  What if what Kate had been shown was meticulously choreographed to demonstrate the precise reverse: innocence concealed behind a gesture of middle-aged wolfishness?

  No—not innocence. Because if Nicholson actually had been putting on an act that afternoon, if he had deliberately presented the approaching cop with the image of Monica-as-girlfriend, then there was a reason for the deception.

  She knew now that he was gay, a fact she had not possessed at the time.

  And for the past five years, Nicholson had lived in close proximity—physically, professionally, and socially—to a man whose death Kate was investigating. A man, furthermore, whose own sexuality had been called into question by his friends.

  Her hand hovered over the telephone, stayed by another consideration.

  Question: Had Monica been an innocent player in that deftly acted scene, or had she been in on it?

  Kate thought about it: the mild surprise on the girl’s face when Nicholson had turned and opened the Volkswagen’s door; a playful trill of the fingertips as she accelerated away.

  Either Monica LaValle was a twenty-three-year-old Judi Dench, or it had been no act.

  Kate glanced at her watch, wondered if one in the afternoon was a good or a bad time to reach a young actress, and decided there was only one way to find out.

  It was a cell number, and the young woman answered with the professional tones of a person who might be talking to a casting director unawares: half breezy, half throaty. “You’ve reached Monica.”

  Kate identified herself in the dullest possible terms—as a cop, yes, but in bored tones and with a flat recitation that she was confirming the statement of a Mr. Ian Nichols that his daughter Monica Lavel was in San Francisco in the middle portion of January 2004 and could she confirm that statement?

  “Er, no,” the girl said. “I mean, if you’ve, like, got our names right. He’s Nicholson, not Nichols, and my name’s LaValle, but I wasn’t in San Francisco the middle of last month, just last week. What’s this about?”

  “I am not at liberty to say,” Kate rattled off. “Questions should be addressed to the investigating officer, Inspector Alex Hawkin.” Al’s name was Alonzo, but using a slightly wrong name was the way they alerted each other to the need for extra care. Kate’s name in such instances was Kayla. She stepped away from the bored-clerk voice and asked, “Um, wait a minute. Could I have the dates you were here? Some of these guys couldn’t type numbers if their lives depended on it.”

  “I drove up Monday night, had a filming Tuesday morning, and came back to LA on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t think I was up there at all in January.”

  “Tuesday the third and Wednesday the fourth of February,” Kate repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “That explains it. It says here ‘Tuesday and Wednesday, three and fourteen,’ with just the numbers, you know? January three and four were a weekend, and thirteen and fourteen February isn’t until next week, so I thought it might be thirteen and fourteen January. The typist just screwed up. Hope the weather was decent for you.”

  “It was awesome. I even got a little sunburn, driving back with the top down.”

  “Better here now than it is in July,” Kate commented. “So Ian Nichols—sorry, Ian Nicholson—is your father?”

  “That’s right. Well, originally my stepfather, if you want to get technical, but he’s my dad now.”

  “Okay, well, if we need anything else we’ll call, thanks.” Kate broke the connection before the young woman could turn any questions on her.

  When Al Hawkin walked into the homicide room five minutes later, he stopped dead at the look on Kate’s face.

  “Either you ate something that really didn’t agree with you or you don’t like where this is going.”

  She did, she realized, feel more than a little queasy, but the problem was with the information she was working to digest, not the lunch she had eaten. “Al,” she said grimly, “we have to talk with Ian Nicholson.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The first hitch to a clean interrogation of Nicholson as a suspect came at his door. Kate stared through the reinforced glass of the entrance foyer, then bent her head to the speaker again, putting on a voice of one Sherlockian to another. “Ian, please. We need to talk with you.”

  “You don’t want to talk with me, you want to arrest me,” his voice said from the speaker. “I can see the uniformed people you’ve brought with you.”

  “Ian, remember, I knew the security cameras would show you the uniforms. I came here openly, to talk to you.”

  The speaker was silent. Kate looked at Al, then at Chris Williams, who had asked to be in on the arrest; by the looks of him, he’d been up all night reading their reports. “Ian?” she repeated.

  The two uniforms shifted uneasily, eyeing the glass as if measuring it for resistance to their rams. “Please, Ian, you’re an intelligent man, you can see we’re not going to just go away. Let us in and we’ll talk.”

  “Okay,” said the speaker, and even through the tinny reception they could hear the grim resignation in his voice. Five cops unclenched their hands—prematurely, as it turned out. “I’ll talk to you, and you alone.”

  “I can’t do that, Ian.”

  “Sure you can. You come in here alone, we’ll talk about what you have against me and what we can do about it, or else I get on the phone to my lawyer and you get nothing from me, absolutely nothing.”

  Kate let go of the speaker button and put her back to the eye of the security camera. She looked at Hawkin. “What do you think?”

  “Bad idea.”

  “Hard to justify breaking the door down.”

  “He killed a man.”

  “This is not a violent offender, Al,” she argued. “He bashed Gilbert on the head in what will probably turn out to be a lover’s quarrel, and when Gilbert died he got rid of the body. He’ll serve me coffee and talk and start crying and I’ll politely cuff him. He’s not about to suddenly turn nasty in my face.”

  Williams volunteered his two cents’ worth. “I haven’t met the guy, of course, but from everything I read, he sounds pretty reasonable.”

  “I want to talk with him, Al, and if this is the format that makes him comfortable, let’s take it as the first step.”

  He looked from her to the camera, and his hand came up to rub his mouth as if in thought. Through his fingers, he said, “If he tells you to leave your gun outside, you come out again. And you keep your phone on while you’re in there.”

  “Will do,” she said, and reached for the intercom button.

  “Ian, my partners here don’t much care for it, but they’ve agreed to let me come in and talk to you for just a little while. You want to buzz me in?”

  “Have the others stand back.”

  Making the others stand back was no guarantee that they wouldn’t rush the door before it closed, but Kate took the command as an encouraging sign of Nicholson’s lack of criminal sophistication. She waited until the others had retreated, and when the buzzer sounded, she opened the door and stepped through.

  The moment she was out of sight of the security cameras, Kate pulled out her phone, pushed the automatic dial for Al’s number, muted the sound reception, and dropped it into her jacket pocket. It would be muffled, but loud voices would get through, and loud voices would be what Al would need to hear anyway.

  The courtyard fountain was on, with no birds today, and dark with the slant of the afternoon sun. Somewhere in the complex music played. The door to Nicholson’s apartment was standing open, but there was no sign of the man himself. Inside the door, Kate stopped and called, “Ian? You want me to shut the door?”

  “Oh, just leave it open. If those brutes you have with you need to break it down, it’ll cost me a fortune to replace the lock.”

  “Whatever you want. I’ll come upstairs, shall I?”
r />   “The coffee’s on.”

  She walked up the stairs, conscious of cool air flowing all around her. The fire was going, she saw when she reached the sitting area—a real fireplace, with wood, a necessary counterpart to the wide-open windows that explained the breeze along the stairs. He was in the kitchen, wearing an oversized sweater with a lot of cables running up and down the front of it, and she moved in his direction, hands openly displayed but not formally up in the air: Keep it casual.

  “Thanks for seeing me, Ian,” she said easily. “I know you’re concerned about out intents here, but this really is for the—”

  The phrase strangled in her throat and the world shuddered into something slow and eerily focused: Nicholson’s hand came up above the dividing wall with a gun in it. She’d had a gun pointed at her before, but it got no easier with repetition. The cool air went icy, and the sweat started under her arms and in her hair. “Ian,” she said, in a voice that would have sounded loud even if she hadn’t been trying to make it so, “you don’t want to be holding a gun on me.”

  Small comfort, knowing that Al would have heard her words, that all the machinery of police support would begin to move in about five seconds. The gun was a .38, but it seemed the size of a cannon, and held steady. She thought of Nora, and Lee, and then she shoved away fear and love and everything but necessity, and became a cop again.

  “I’m really sorry about this, Kate,” he said; she would have sworn he meant it, too.

  “Ian, put that down and we can talk.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to lay your gun on the desk and go sit on the chair in front of the fireplace,” he told her.

  “I can’t do that, Ian.”

  “Kate, please?”

  For some reason, the plea brought her up in a way that threats would not have done. She made an effort to look past the rock-steady length of steel to his face, that interesting and unsaleable face of his. His expression, she finally noticed, was apologetic rather than aggressive, a touch nervous but very far from panic. Kate’s anxiety retreated a fraction: Twitchy nerves were even worse than open rage when it came to pressure on a trigger.