The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King Page A

Again she used a Russian phrase, then tried in English, “Put on furniture, yes?”
    “Polish?” Kate offered. “Wax?”
    The front door of the house across the way opened, and Simon Wallace came out with his dog on a bright yellow leash. She watched him as Kilanovitch was talking, and was not in the least surprised when, coming out of his gate onto the sidewalk, he made a show of perusing the street, saw Kate, and did a double take worthy of vaudeville. She waved her free hand, he waved back happily with his free arm, and walked on, slowly, down the street.
    “Furniture polish, yes. Old kind, come from Europe, cost—phew! Part of game, you know? For the smell?”
    “He wanted you to use special cleaning materials in order to make the house smell authentic? Like an old house?”
    “Yes! He say, sorry if this a problem, I say no problem for me, I not have to pay all that for little bit of wax, but sorry back, because it hard to clean good using just old kind things, mop and broom and rags, you know? So, some days when I finish he say, ‘Next week I going to be on walk.’ And next week he let me in, he go for walk, I use vacuum not just on top floor but through whole house, rugs and furniture and curtains, then put away vacuum, he come home from walk, everybody happy.”
    Kate laughed, inexplicably relieved at this indication of Gilbert’s mental flexibility and perhaps even humor. A stickler for detail, but willing to turn a blind eye for the sake of practicality, and for the sake of his cleaner’s pride.
    However, the cleaning woman could tell Kate little about Gilbert’s visitors. “He have party there three, four times year. One last month, a Wednesday. He clean before, I clean day after.”
    “Did he ever have houseguests?”
    “One, maybe two times a year.”
    “What room did the guests stay in?”
    “Guest bedroom second floor,” she said without hesitation. “Room used twice in year, silly. Waste, you know?”
    “I know,” Kate agreed. She explained that Kilanovitch would need to sign a statement and provide some fingerprints so they could eliminate her from the household, added her standard request to be called if the woman thought of anything else, and closed the phone, raising her face to the winter sun.
    No sign of enemies yet, no greedy relatives, no love life, even.
    So why had Philip Gilbert ended up in a deserted gun emplacement on the Marin headlands?
    The sun did not tell her, so she dusted herself off and went inside to see how Crime Scene was getting on.
    This time, they had turned the study inside out, scrutinizing not just the walls, but the floor, the underside of the desk, and all the room’s furniture. Almost immediately, they had discovered the remnants of a bloodstain along the headrest of the tufted leather chair. The chair had been thoroughly wiped (with, it later turned out, an old sponge from the bucket of cleaning supplies kept under the bathroom sink across the hall) but Luminol showed an outline of where the blood had been, a rough smear approximately four inches by two. They found no fingerprints at all along the top of the chair, and only those of Gilbert and one other (who turned out to be the cleaning woman) on the bucket. In fact, there were a limited number of prints from the rest of the top floor as a whole, most of those Gilbert’s with an assortment of others in the study itself. The ground-floor rooms gave forth a daunting number, but that would be expected, if he used the rooms as his meeting room and showplace. The basement held an impressive collection of wine, but little else, and most of the surfaces were so dusty that they could not concern the events of the past two weeks.
    The sheets on most of the beds had been clean and unused, the exception being Gilbert’s bed on the third floor. Those sheets had shown no indication of sexual activity, and there had been nothing of interest in the laundry basket.
    However, on an upper shelf in the closet attached to