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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.”
    “How many in the group?”
    “The numbers vary, but at the moment we’re ten. Well, nine without him.”
    “Were any of the others particularly friendly with him?”
    Rutland thought for a moment. “I’d say most of us have met with him occasionally outside the dinners, but I don’t know if that would count as particularly friendly. Philip seems, seemed, to have an amazingly…democratic relationship to people. I mean to say, a couple of times we’ve had members who thought they were becoming close to him personally because they worked with him on some project or another, and both had their noses badly bruised when they came up against his self-protective shield. It just never seemed to have occurred to Philip that some people might think they had a greater claim on his time and energy than others.”
    “Self-centered,” Kate commented.
    “Very. He was a lovely man until you expected him to open up with you, and then you’d find him looking at you with a puzzled expression on his face before going on to whatever bit of business concerned him.”
    “Sounds frustrating.”
    “It could be. But once you got to know him, it was just Philip. Sort of taking British coolness to an extreme.”
    “Was he British?”
    “No, actually he was born in Wisconsin, but he went to the University of London for a couple of years, and kept something of the accent. It was more that he cultivated the Englishness of Holmes in his own life. The eccentricities, the tight focus, the distaste for emotional excess.”
    “Do you know if he had any friends, or regular acquaintances, outside the dinner group?”
    “He never mentioned any to me, but then he wouldn’t have had reason to.”
    “What about professional contacts? I take it from his