The Call of the Mild p-3

by William Rabkin

  For a moment Henry looked convinced. Gus was almost convinced himself. There were only two ways he could see for Shawn to weasel out of the promise, which was at least three fewer than Shawn usually built into such a sentence.

  “I accept,” Henry said after brief consideration.

  “Excellent,” Shawn said.

  “Except for two things,” Henry said. “The deal is binding for as long as I’m on the case, no matter what level of involvement or noninvolvement Carlton Lassiter shares in it. And since we don’t have precise information at this moment on the exact manner of this woman’s death, you will apply the same interdiction to any consideration of any eventuality that led to it, violent or not.”

  Gus was impressed. These were two of Shawn’s best weasels, and Henry had spotted both of them. No wonder Shawn hadn’t been able to talk himself out of a grounding since he turned eleven.

  But Shawn seemed to be taking his defeat in stride. He put out his hand for his father to shake. “You really won’t get fooled again,” he said. “They need you at the police station in the morning.”

  Henry took his hand. “We’ll do right by you, son.”

  “Just make sure you change first.”

  Henry glanced down at his sweat-soaked rock and roll clothes. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’m getting to like this look.”

  The cabin door banged shut and Henry was gone. Gus moved out of his corner, finally feeling free to fill his lungs more than halfway. “What do you want to do now?” he said. “Because if you don’t have any plans, there’s a bookstore in town with a tree growing in the middle of it. I’ve always wanted to see that.”

  Shawn stared at him as if he’d suggested they pass the afternoon at a Wiggles performance. “Are you kidding?” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “On what?”

  “On our case.”

  Gus replayed the last few minutes of the conversation in his head. Shawn’s promise seemed as unweaselable as the nondisclosure agreement Gus’ pharmaceuticals employer had made him sign before they admitted to him that there really was no such thing as restless elbow syndrome and that the only reason they’d sold so much of their drug to treat the disease was a long series of “seminars” in Hawaii they’d paid doctors to attend.

  “You just promised your father that we wouldn’t have anything to do with Ellen Svaco’s murder,” Gus said.

  “And we won’t,” Shawn said.

  “But that was our case,” Shawn said.

  “Never was,” Shawn said. “No one hired us to investigate that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Ellen Svaco hired us to get her necklace back,” Shawn said. “That’s the case we’re working on.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gus and Shawn drove in silence back to the Psych offices. Gus assumed Shawn was lost in thought about how to find whoever was behind the theft of the necklace. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen when Henry found out that he and Shawn were still working on the case. Because, despite Shawn’s rationalizations, Gus knew they were deliberately flouting the agreement.

  It wasn’t until they were back in the office and Shawn was firing up the computer that Gus raised the point. “If your dad finds out that we’re working on this case, he’s going to be really mad.”

  Shawn didn’t even look up from the computer. “I already told you; it’s not the same case.”

  “Yes, as weasels go, this is as close to a ten as you’ve ever come,” Gus said. “But we both know that’s only going to make him even madder. All I’m saying is let’s make sure we stay out of the way of the official investigation.”

  “We will be out of their way,” Shawn said. “Because Lassiter will be running his investigation his way and we’ll be doing ours the right way. Odds are we’ll never cross paths. Now come help me hack into the police department’s computer.”

  “Shawn…”

  “Okay, okay,” Shawn said. “It’s not like we’d learn anything that way, except that Lassie hasn’t won a game of solitaire in five years. What I really need you to do is to hack into the computers of the Descanso Gardens lost-and-found department. If we’re lucky they have a camera positioned above the booth to record the face of anyone dropping off or claiming an item.”

  That was a task Gus didn’t mind tackling. Unfortunately there was one small problem he couldn’t solve.

  “It seems that the Descanso Gardens lost-and-found department doesn’t have a computer,” Gus said after some time of fruitless searching. “Or, if they do, it’s not online.”

  “How about the snack bar?” Shawn said. “Can you get into their computer?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know if they’ve restocked their ice-cream sandwiches yet,” Shawn said. “If we’re going to have to schlep all the way down there again, I want to know there’s at least going to be a tasty treat at the finish line.”

  Gus dropped into a guest chair. “This is crazy.”

  “I know, I know,” Shawn said. “It’s much cheaper to buy our own ice-cream sandwiches at the supermarket and bring them with us, instead of paying the ridiculous markup they charge at tourist traps like Descanso. But even if we bring a cold bag, they’re still going to be pretty melty by the time we get to La Canada.”

  “I don’t understand why we’re going to La Canada in the first place,” Gus said. “Do you really think the killer mime is still out there, waiting for someone else to walk by with a necklace for him to steal?”

  Shawn was about to respond, but just before the first word left his mouth he cut it off.

  “What?” Gus said.

  “You’re right,” Shawn said. “Why La Canada?”

  “Well,” Gus said, suddenly wondering if he’d been too hasty, as he always did when someone actually took his advice. “There might have been someone who saw the mime and can help us identify him. Better yet, we could get the names of all the people who paid their admission with credit cards that day, track them down, and see if they took any pictures that have the mime in them.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Shawn said. “Obviously we’d go to La Canada because that’s where the crime happened. The question is why did it happen there?”

  “Because that’s where the necklace was?”

  Shawn let out a deep sigh. “I’m going to try this one more time,” he said.

  “Why?” Gus said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you going to try one more time?” Gus said. “Why are you going to drop one more vaguely suggestive clue phrased as an open-ended question? Why don’t you just come out and say what you’re thinking?”

  “It’s called the Socratic method,” Shawn said. “It’s a form of teaching that involves asking questions to stimulate thought and debate. Although why Professor Kingsfield would name an entire method after some obscure alternative rock band from New Jersey is beyond me. Why are you staring at me?”

  Gus was staring at Shawn-staring with a mixture of awe and horror. “How is this possible?” he said finally.

  “What’s that?”

  “How can one body contain such a mixture of arcane knowledge and sheer ignorance?” Gus said.

  “That’s what they say about the Internet, and it’s doing all right,” Shawn said. “Didn’t you have a point a while back?”

  “I didn’t have a point,” Gus said. “I was hoping that you did, and if that was indeed the case you would share it with me rather than asking a bunch of rhetorical questions.”

  “Then how will you ever leave here thinking like a lawyer?” Shawn said.

  “I’m about to leave here thinking like a pharmaceuticals salesman,” Gus said. “Not to mention a former detective.”

  “Okay, okay,” Shawn said. “Let’s work this through together.”

  “You already worked it through on your own,” Gus said. “Just tell me so we can get on with our lives.”

  “Just tell you?”

  “Yes.”<
br />
  “Without any questions at all?” Shawn looked troubled.

  “I’m sure you can handle it.”

  “I can’t say I share your confidence, but I’ll try,” Shawn said. He took a breath. “Okay, here’s what I was getting at. The backstory, if you will. All the stuff that happened before we got involved. Some of which took place in La Canada. The question is-”

  “Not an appropriate part of speech for this conversation,” Gus said.

  Shawn glared at him. “You’re supposed to be my sounding board.”

  “I’m supposed to be your partner,” Gus said. “You treat me as your sounding board. You say things to me so you can hear them echoed back to you louder.”

  “The sounding board is a vital part of any stringed instrument,” Shawn said. “It doesn’t matter how brilliant a fiddler is if you can’t hear him because his violin doesn’t have an f-hole.”

  “I’m tired of being the f-hole in this partnership,” Gus said.

  “Now, give.”

  Shawn fidgeted in his chair. He stood up and crossed the room, then crossed back. “Okay, here’s how I see it,” he finally said. “There was a locket.”

  “With you so far.”

  “Someone had that locket.” Shawn grimaced. “And then that locket. .. Can’t I just use a couple of rhetorical questions here if I promise not to wait for an answer?”

  Gus gave him a stony stare. “Keep going.”

  “The someone who had that locket was supposed to pass it on to Ellen Svaco for reasons we don’t know,” Shawn said.

  “The someone brought it to La Canada and dropped it off at the Descanso Gardens lost and found.”

  “But why come to La Canada in the first place?” Gus said.

  “Why not come straight to Santa Barbara if it was meant for Ellen Svaco?”

  “Aha!” Shawn leveled an accusatory finger at Gus. “Now you’re doing it.”

  “Yes, but my question was sincere,” Gus said. “I wasn’t laying a trap so I could demonstrate the superiority of my thinking.”

  “Is that really what you think I do?”

  “That’s a question,” Gus said.

  “You can’t solve a mystery without asking questions,” Shawn said. “Because the solution to any puzzle lies in the correct phrasing of the problem. If you don’t pose the right questions, you can never reach the right answers. So when I throw my questions at you, it’s not a challenge to your intelligence. It’s me trying to frame the case in the proper context.”

  Gus thought this over, then let out a sigh. “I’m going to regret this, but go ahead.”

  Shawn beamed. “Okay, first question: Why was the locket in La Canada?”

  Gus waited. Shawn drummed his fingers on the desk. Tapped his feet on the chair leg. Cleared his throat. “You need to answer,” he said.

  “Why?” Gus said. “If this is an exercise in the proper framing of the puzzle, why do you need me to answer? Just keep on with the questions.”

  Shawn stared down at the desk. “I need you to say something stupid.”

  “Uh-uh,” Gus said.

  “It doesn’t mean I think you’re stupid,” Shawn said quickly.

  “But if you don’t give me the wrong answer, I don’t think I can come up with the right one.”

  “What if I give you the right answer?”

  “Okay,” Shawn said. “What if?”

  “Are you saying I never come up with the right answer?” Gus demanded.

  “That’s not to say that it couldn’t happen,” Shawn said.

  “That would be like saying Jay Leno will never tell a funny joke.”

  Gus glared at him. “What if I give you the right answer at this very moment?”

  “Then I will give you all the credit for solving the case,” Shawn said. “I will put your name on the door. I will tell people you’re my partner and not my assistant even when you’re not in the room.”

  Gus decided to let this pass. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start with the locket. Describe what you saw.”

  Shawn closed his eyes and thought back. The locket was a simple gold-plated heart on a chain. It was clearly old, as the plating had rubbed off in one spot, but so cheap it would never be considered an antique. Inside it were facing pictures of two homely people, hand-cropped badly enough so that some of the green plastic backing showed behind them.

  “Green plastic,” Shawn said. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s not how this works,” Shawn said. “You were going to give me the right answer.”

  “I was,” Gus said. “But now you’ve figured it out. And there’s no way you can keep yourself from telling me about it.”

  “Watch me,” Shawn said.

  For a moment, the two of them sat in silence. Then Gus got up and gave Shawn’s desk chair a shove, sending him rolling away from the desk. He stood over the computer and typed into a search engine.

  “Let’s see,” Gus said as a Web site popped up in response. “Fun facts about La Canada Flintridge. One: While the ‘Canada’ part refers to the Spanish word for gorge or ravine, ‘Flintridge’ refers to nothing at all, since there is no flinty ridge here. Two: It’s the USA’s eighty-fifth most expensive city to live in. Three: Kevin Costner’s ex-wife owns a restaurant here which is locally famous for its breakfasts.”

  “That’s it,” Shawn said. “Clearly this is all part of the global conspiracy to get Cindy Costner’s pancake recipe.”

  Gus ignored him and kept reading. “Four: There’s a decades-long feud between La Canada and neighbor Pasadena over which city should be listed in news stories as the location of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Five-”

  “Don’t stop now,” Shawn said. “I want to know more about the pancakes.”

  “JPL is in La Canada,” Gus said, quickly typing in the search engine again. “It’s less than five miles from Descanso Gardens.”

  “Amazing,” Shawn said. “If only we had thought to ask why this all happened in La Canada.”

  But Gus wasn’t going to take the bait now. Because he had the answer. “And that backing in the locket wasn’t plastic,” he said. “It was silicon.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  There was a lot Gus didn’t like about being a detective. The danger, for one. Although being threatened with imminent doom might sound exciting, after the first couple of times it began to get really old. And then there were the hours. Gus never had a problem with working hard, but he did like to know exactly when he could expect to knock off for the day, and that was rarely the case in an investigation.

  For all the inconveniences, though, there were some things about the job that he loved enough to put up with anything. Best of all was the moment when a baffling mystery revealed itself into a crystalline, perfect solution.

  This, unfortunately, was not one of those times.

  Both Shawn and Gus were fairly certain that they had solved at least one part of the crime. The necklace was being used to smuggle a computer chip full of information out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was a safe bet that whatever that information was it had some sort of national security implications, since it seemed improbable that Ellen Svaco would have been killed simply so someone could find out what the weather was like on Mars.

  Beyond that, however, they were stumped.

  Clearly, Ellen Svaco had been some kind of courier. She was supposed to have picked up the chip and then delivered it somewhere else. But there was no way to tell whom she was working for, or why they might have chosen an elementary school teacher for the job. Had she even known what she would be transporting? The fact that she had hired Psych to retrieve it from the lost and found suggested she’d known that someone else was after it, but nothing more than that.

  And then there was the mime. He had been desperate to get the necklace-desperate enough to risk a daring daylight robbery. But who was he? They briefly considered the idea that he was the JPL employee who had smuggled the chip out of
the lab in the first place and then had developed second thoughts. But while that seemed to simplify things at first, it quickly led to far greater complications. Because if he had put the chip in the locket, then he was probably also the one who’d left it at the lost and found. Which meant he would have known where it was-and the mime hadn’t. If he had, there would have been no need to disguise himself and wait for Shawn and Gus to retrieve the necklace before taking it away from them. He could simply have asked for it at the booth.

  And then there was the “Rushmore” he’d insisted he was protecting. A Google search of the word turned up multiple references to the mountain, the movie, and a Manhattan condo tower, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with purloined jewelry, public gardens, or the art of mime.

  No matter how many times they turned their few facts over, they kept coming back to Ellen Svaco at the center of the mystery. Which was entirely unacceptable, because Ellen Svaco was the one part of the puzzle they weren’t allowed to investigate.

  If this had been a normal case, Shawn and Gus would have dived into Ellen Svaco’s private life. They would have searched her house and car. They would have gone to her funeral to see who else showed up to mourn-and which of the mourners didn’t seem particularly sorry to see her go. They might even have attempted to go undercover as substitute teachers at her school.

  But each of those routes led almost inevitably to a single roadblock: Henry Spencer. Shawn had learned the fundamentals of detective work at his father’s knee-or sometimes across his father’s knee, if Shawn had been the subject of Henry’s investigation-and the instincts that would be driving Shawn would also be driving his father. Shawn had promised Henry he’d stay out of Ellen’s murder, and unless he could figure out a retroactive weasel, he was stuck with the pledge.

  The remaining pathways were much less appealing. The only obvious one was to knock on JPL’s front door and ask if they happened to be missing a microchip or two, and if they might happen to know what was on it. But it seemed unlikely that the guard at the front gate would be willing or able to share that information with a couple of guys who happened to walk up to him. In a normal situation they’d try to come up with a way to get into the lab posing as scientists or journalists or any other kind of “ists,” but JPL had made national news a few years back for forcing its longtime employees to sign waivers allowing government inspectors to dig into every aspect of their lives from birth onwards. It seemed unlikely that a pair of private detectives could slip into the facility by claiming they’d left their ID badges at home.