“Did you examine the body again later?”
“No. There was no need.” Another lip-pooch. “The fact is, Judge Shellwin smoked far too much. I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Warned him?”
“That continual heavy tobacco use was unhealthy. Might well have been what brought on his coronary.”
“But Mrs. Shellwin told me he was in perfect health.”
“He seemed to be when I last saw him alive, but appearances can be deceiving.”
“Indeed they can,” Quincannon agreed.
The doctor gestured pointedly at the Seth Thomas clock on the wall opposite his desk. “Your time’s up. Are you satisfied now, sir?”
Quincannon said he was. But he wasn’t.
The Shellwin home was a more elaborately designed structure than Dr. Phipps’s, a gabled and turreted pile more in keeping with the neighborhood’s general architectural motif. Rincon Hill, built around an oval-shaped park that was an exact copy of London’s Berkeley Square, was the first of San Francisco’s fashionable residential districts. But it had begun to lose its appeal to the gentry two decades earlier, in the early 1870s, and while many moderately wealthy families such as the Shellwins continued to live there, the richest and most powerful of the city’s society now occupied more fashionable venues such as Nob Hill.
Quincannon expected his ring to be answered by Margaret Shellwin, the time being exactly four o’clock when he twisted the bell, but it was a man who opened the door. A tall, lean gent of some forty years, dressed in an expensive dove-gray broadcloth suit and highly polished shoes with matching gray spats. Black hair sleekly pomaded, saturnine face adorned with a bootlace moustache and a crop of chin whiskers. Neither his manner nor his stiffly toned voice was welcoming.
“John Quincannon, I presume,” he said.
“Correct. Mrs. Shellwin is expecting me.”
“So she told me. But I’ll have a word with you before you go in.”
“Yes? And who would you be?”
“Jerome Paxson.” He stepped forward onto the porch, pulling the door partway closed behind him. “I want you to know that hiring you was a mistake in judgment brought on by extreme grief. Margaret Shellwin is an emotional woman given, it pains me to say, to fearful fancies at the best of times.”
“Indeed? You seem to know her quite well.”
“Well enough, having been her neighbor and friend for some time. Rupert’s death was tragic, of course, but the cause was unquestionably coronary thrombosis. I was here the night it happened, as Mrs. Shellwin must have told you, and I can attest to the fact. So can her brother-in-law, Peter Lehman. And the physician who examined the body and signed the death certificate, Dr. Mortimer Phipps, will tell you so in no uncertain terms.”
“He already has,” Quincannon said, “a short while ago.”
“You’ve already spoken to him, then. Good. Then you must realize how unnecessary, how potentially damaging to Margaret’s mental health a purposeless investigation is, and you will be so good as to discontinue your efforts.”
“Not before and until my client herself requests it.”
Paxson produced a scowl, the bunching of facial muscles lifting his moustache so as to create the impression that it was about to crawl up into his flared nostrils. “You’re rather an impertinent fellow, aren’t you.”
“When the situation calls for it. I’ll see Mrs. Shellwin now.”
Paxson seemed about to say something more, changed his mind, and turned abruptly to push open the door. Quincannon followed him inside, down a short hallway into a good-sized parlor stuffed with carved mahogany furniture and, somewhat incongruously, a large round card table with four matching chairs. Card playing must have been a regular activity in the Shellwin household.
Margaret Shellwin was seated on an uncomfortable-looking sofa, her hands clasped in her lap. She still wore the black mourning dress but not the hat and veil. She was younger, no more than thirty-five, and even more attractive than he’d thought from his glimpse at the agency; her nose and mouth were small and symmetrical, her eyes a luminous brown, her hair, drawn into a coiled bun atop her head, a rich chestnut color.
She acknowledged Quincannon’s bow with a nod and a wan smile. Paxson, his scowl gone and the moustache back in place on his upper lip, sat down beside her.
“There is no point in wasting time on small talk, Mrs. Shellwin,” Quincannon said, “as I’m sure you’ll agree. So I’ll have my look at your husband’s study straightaway.”
“Yes, of course.” She gestured toward a closed door in the inner wall opposite, beyond a white marble fireplace. “You’ll do so alone, please. I still can’t bear to go in there.”
“As you wish.” He would have requested a solitary search if she hadn’t.
Paxson said, “See that you don’t disturb anything while you’re wasting your time in the study.”
Quincannon swallowed a rude retort, head-bowed to his client, and went over to the study door. Opened it and stepped inside. Window drapes were drawn, the room cloaked in shadows. He located a wall switch, turned it to light a pair of electric ceiling globes.
The door latch and jamb showed evidence of the forced entry, but he examined them to satisfy himself that the door had in fact been secured from within. It had; a large brass key was still in the lock and the bolt had been turned. Then he shut the door and stood for a few seconds surveying the room.
Large, somewhat austerely masculine. Dark wood paneling, one wall covered by bookcases packed with a set of Blackstone and other legal tomes, two oil paintings depicting courtroom scenes on another wall. Furnishings of heavy mahogany similar to those in the parlor — large desk set equidistant between two windows, filing cabinet, a pair of armchairs, end tables. Deep-pile, royal-blue carpeting. The acrid scent of Judge Shellwin’s strong tobacco still lingered; would in fact have permeated all surfaces here over the years so that it would continue to be detectable even after the windows were opened and the study aired out.
Quincannon’s first impression was of orderliness. The judge may have spent a good deal of time working, reading, thinking in here, but he’d done so without disarranging anything. The chairs and tables were all perfectly aligned, as were the law books and a stack of legal journals on one of the tables. Nothing out of place. He had been a tidy man, perhaps even fussily so.
Quincannon went to the windows, drew aside the drapes covering each long enough to inspect the latches. Both were tightly secure; no one could have gotten in or out through either window. He turned then to the desk.
Nothing out of place? Not quite so. The swivel chair behind the desk had been drawn or thrust back at an angle so only two of its metal casters rested on an oriental throw rug laid down to protect the carpet underneath. And the rug was a foot or so to the right of the desk’s kneehole, not squarely centered in front of it. The items atop the desk’s polished surface and blotter were all neatly arranged, however — candlestick telephone, combination pipe rack and tobacco canister, deep glass ashtray partly filled with blackened dottle and burnt matches, brass-bound wooden box, onyx pen-and-ink set, a stack of papers, and a book of California law precedents. Despite the positioning of the chair and rug, it seemed that the judge hadn’t been stricken while seated here...
Ah, but there were indications to the contrary. A closer look at the desktop revealed two significant things: a small, fresh-looking gouge near the right-hand edge, and a few flecks of tobacco ash adhering to the blotter’s lower right-hand corner. Recently smoked ash, judging from the smear of black on Quincannon’s fingertip when he touched the residue.
He found no more ash on the desktop, but there was a sprinkling of blackened dottle in a metal wastebasket alongside. And when he lowered himself onto hands and knees and dipped his head, he spied several additional flecks caught in the nap directly below the gouge mark. Not only that, but a small scorch mark of the sort made by a burning ember. The off-center positioning of the rug caught his eye again; he pushed the chair off and lifted it to peer at the carpet underneath. Another, larger burn mark had been concealed there.