Al gave the young woman a minute to sip her glass of room-temperature, chlorinated water before asking her in a gentle voice, “Ms. Gilbert, can you tell me how you know Matthew?” Formality combined with the intimacy of the victim’s first name, Kate noted, and the emphasis on the relationship, not (yet) the more pertinent facts such as time and place.
“I’m an actress,” she told them. “I met Matty when I was doing a job for his company last year, acting in a piece of film that they wanted to use in their software. I’m really not sure how they do it, something about feeding the film into their computers and using it from there. I think they were using it to demonstrate some editing software they were developing, or something. Anyway,” she continued, relieved that these technical details were out of the way without any questions from her audience, “that’s when I met Matty, when he came by the set one day to watch. We went out to dinner afterward, and, well, you know.”
“What was your relationship with Matthew?”
“My relationship? I loved Matty, or at least I more or less did; anyway, I liked him a lot. I slept with him, if that’s what you mean, but we never lived together.”
Hawkin considered his next question carefully before deciding to ask it. “Did you know that Matthew spent three years in prison for raping a woman?”
“Ms. Gilbert, I’m sorry. Unless Matthew had a twin brother who was carrying Matthew’s ID, your friend is dead.”
Melanie Gilbert pulled back from the edge of the hysterical thoughts she had been about to succumb to, and studied Hawkin’s craggy features. She gave a small sigh, and slumped down into the black sofa. One melodramatic tear ran slowly down her cheek, and her chest heaved impressively.
“Matty? A rapist? God. You really are sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she said, and then in a different voice, one that suddenly recognized the implications, she said, “Oh. Oh my God. Rape? Did he hurt her? I mean—”
“No. Kidnapping and rape, but not battery.”
“But still. Shit, I was sleeping with a
Kate suddenly had enough of the sexy young actress’s attempt to find out how she ought to be feeling, and stood up to go to the kitchen and find the coffeemaker. She suddenly realized that they hadn’t stopped for lunch, that she was tired, hungry, edgy, and depressed, and was fed up with this young airhead with the twinkle of gold in her navel who was trying to talk herself into being shocked when she was really more than half titillated. Al Hawkin’s voice went on as Kate found a gleaming gold French press coffeemaker, a bag of Italian roast coffee (pre-ground, for which Lee would have deducted points), and instead of a kettle, an attachment on the sink that dispensed near-boiling water. Kate spooned grounds into the coffeemaker and ran steaming water on top, and while she waited the requisite couple of minutes for the grounds to subside, she leaned against the tiled counter listening to the conversation in the next room.
“Ms. Gilbert, did you ever hear Matthew say anything about being harassed or threatened, either here or at work? Receiving letters or phone calls, anything like that?”
“No, I don’t think so. Matty never talked much about work, though I know that his new boss is a real bitch. And, hey—somebody at work keyed his car back near Christmas, left a really nasty scratch. And there was somebody here in the apartments that kept stealing his parking place, but since they’re not really assigned or anything, he couldn’t do much about it.”
“He never found who scratched his car?” Gilbert shook her head. “What about the argument over the parking place? Did it ever escalate? Did the two of them ever have words about it?” Scratched paint, territorial disputes— murders were committed every day for even stupider reasons.
“I don’t think so,” Gilbert repeated. Still, Hawkin dutifully got from her what little she knew about the intrusive neighbor, which was little more than he, she, or it drove a red Porsche (she pronounced it
“So he knew whose car it was?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, he never told me her name, but he knew who she was.” Then Gilbert added thoughtfully, “But you know, they might of had a fight after all, ”cause the last couple weeks the Porsche hasn’t been in his spot, and when I said something about it to Matty, he just kind of nodded his head but he seemed, like, satisfied. You know?“
The coffee, pre-ground or not, smelled intoxicating, so Kate shoved down the handle, poured three cups, and carried the tray back into the living room. Melanie declined, saying virtuously that she had given up coffee, which was bad for the skin.
Kate nodded, took a large and satisfying swallow from her cup, and asked where Banderas bought his coke.
The actress blushed and tugged her cropped shirt down, covering a fraction more of her admirably flat stomach and revealing a little more of her round breasts. (Implants, or one of those push-up bras? Kate speculated. Or could those possibly be natural?) “What do you mean?” Gilbert said, trying for innocence.
“We found the cocaine in the bathroom cabinet. I wondered if you knew where he got it, if he was in the habit of buying it in San Francisco. We’re not interested in prosecuting him for it, and I’m sure you had nothing to do with it. I just wondered if you happened to know if he bought it locally, or in the City?”
“Urn. Should I, you know, talk with a lawyer or something?” asked this child of the television age.
“We’re not interested in your drug use, Ms. Gilbert, or even Matthew’s. Only in knowing if there might have been some drug-related reason for his being out near the Legion of Honor last night.”
“Where’s that?”
“You know that art museum on the cliff out near the ocean?” Kate offered. “Lots of high school classes go there.”
The pretty face cleared. “Oh yeah, I remember that place. Sculptures and things, I think.”
“That’s the place.”
“And that’s where Matty was? At the museum?” From the sound of her voice, it was not a place she connected with her boyfriend’s lifestyle.
“Nearby. The museum itself was shut.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless he was meeting someone there. But I wouldn’t have thought he went there to score. He usually— that is, I think there’s someone, um, local.”
In the apartment complex, Kate interpreted; what a surprise.
Melanie Gilbert had nothing much more to add to their scant pool of knowledge. She had never seen another face to Banderas, never glimpsed a brutal or violent side to him: he had always been polite to her, even when drinking or doing coke. She confirmed that he was a diabetic, with “all kinds of things” he couldn’t eat, and that she had never known him to consume anything as sweet as a bar of chocolate, even when he had been smoking dope. She did not know the names of any of Banderas’s previous girlfriends, and thought his family was in Southern California somewhere, though she had never met any of them.
Hawkin then circled back to the topic of the Banderas rape charge, asking as delicately as possible about the man’s sex habits. The young woman protested that there had been nothing at all kinky about Matty, but the vehemence of her denials indicated that some questioning note had sounded in the back of that pretty head, and she was beginning to doubt herself. It was something that needed going into more closely, but not, thankfully, by two visiting SFPD homicide investigators. Hawkin had reached the same conclusion, and let the topic go, to Melanie’s obvious relief.
“And you’re sure, Ms. Gilbert, that Matthew wasn’t receiving any threatening phone calls or letters, anything like that?”
“No. Well, he did have a few wrong numbers, rude people in the middle of the night, things like that. Who doesn’t?”
