Mind-Altering Murder

by William Rabkin

  Gus spat out the last syllables as quickly as he could, since he could see the giant mass of food moving down Shawn's throat like a rabbit in a python.

  "There is no case here, Shawn, but there is one back in Santa Barbara," Gus said before Shawn could usher the last traces of food all the way into his stomach. "I appreciate your faith in me, but you've got to tell D-Bob that whatever you told him about the serial killer was wrong and that you're resigning as head of security."

  Shawn studied Gus closely. "You're sure about this?"

  "About everything except telling D-Bob," Gus said. "I have no idea how you can stuff that bit of toothpaste back into the tube."

  "Nothing to worry about there," Shawn said. "I wouldn't squeeze that tube if your life depended on it."

  It took Gus a moment to realize what Shawn was saying. "You didn't tell him about the killer?"

  "He was my favorite suspect," Shawn said. "I wasn't going to share my suspicions with him."

  "Then how did you get the job?"

  "The same way you got yours," Shawn said, taking another huge bite out of the burger.

  "You landed this job by spending years working in pharmaceuticals sales and having a unique point of view on the issues that confront our industry in these troubling times?" Gus said.

  Shawn managed to get the wad of beef and bun down his throat. "Wouldn't it surprise you if I said yes?"

  "If by 'surprise' you mean drive me into a such a rage I'd gouge out your eyes with this spoon, then hurl myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, then definitely it would," Gus said.

  "You make it tempting to say yes," Shawn said. "But I have to tell the truth. I did it the old-fashioned way. I earned it."

  "Earned it how?"

  "By lying," Shawn said. "He knew we were old friends from the last time I met the guy. So I told him that your presence in the company had established a psychic link for me to see its aura. And that emanation was pulsing red for danger."

  "He bought that?" Gus said, dismayed.

  "Your boss is kind of a moron," Shawn said. "Unless he's actually the killer. Think we have time for dessert before we go back to the office?"

  Gus slid out of the booth, fished in his pocket, and dropped a couple of bills on the table. "You do," he said. "In fact, you should have dessert for both of us. You don't need to stop by the office before you head back to the airport. I'll tell D-Bob you're on a vision quest or something. He'll like that."

  Shawn took one last suck on his milk shake and scrambled out of the booth to follow him. "I can't go back to Santa Barbara now," he said. "I've got a job to do."

  "Making my life miserable?" Gus said as he pushed open the door and stepped out onto the busy sidewalk.

  "That's part of it," Shawn said.

  That was so astonishing Gus stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. At least until a kid texting on his phone while he rode his skateboard slammed into him, propelling him into the street. Just before he flew into traffic Gus grabbed the pole of a NO SKATEBOARDS Sign and swung himself back into the mass of pedestrians, nearly knocking over a trio of secretaries.

  Shawn waited patiently until his acrobatic display was done, then fell into step alongside him.

  "You're admitting it?" Gus gasped once he had his heart rate back down to sustainable levels. "You only took this job to make my life miserable?"

  "Not only," Shawn said. "Also to make your life happy. And exciting. And boring. And easy. And difficult."

  "Are you planning on doing this in sequence?" Gus said. "Because you could start by making my life a little more lonely."

  "I'll put that on the list," Shawn said. "Along with all the other sorts of things your life can only be if it's a going concern."

  "You're saying you took this job to save my life," Gus said.

  "I took this job because I thought we were going undercover to expose a murderer who had found a way to kill without ever being noticed," Shawn said. "That is, by going after people no one would ever mourn--pharmaceuticals executives."

  "I'm a pharmaceuticals executive," Gus said.

  "That's what I'm saying," Shawn said. "I took this job because I thought we were going undercover together. But I'm keeping it because I'm not going to let you be the next victim."

  "I can't be the next victim, because there haven't been any previous victims," Gus said. "There's just been a series of unfortunate accidents, which is not that surprising when you consider how many thousands of people Benson Pharmaceuticals employs worldwide."

  "And one suicide," Shawn said.

  "And one suicide," Gus agreed. "If it makes you feel better I'll promise not to put on a cheerleader's outfit and hang myself in my mother's basement."

  "That's good, because you really don't have the legs for it," Shawn said.

  Gus stopped as they reached the corner of Market Street. He pointed at the long escalator that descended to the subway stop under their feet. "Here's the BART station," he said. "You can take that right back to the airport."

  "Only if you come with me," Shawn said.

  "I'm not coming back," Gus said. "I've got a life here."

  "Sure, but for how long?" Shawn said.

  "Shawn, there is no danger at Benson Pharmaceuticals," Gus said. "How can I convince you?"

  "You can start by explaining that."

  Shawn gestured down Market to the glass-and-steel tower that housed Gus' office. A thick crowd of people had formed outside the lobby doors. As Gus watched, a steady stream of onlookers squeezed forward to get a better view, then pushed their way out of the crowd, looking sick. One woman threw up on the curb.

  Gus was running before he knew he'd meant to. His flat shoes slapped on the bricks of the sidewalk and sent a sharp sting of pain through his feet with every step, but he barely noticed. He reached the edge of the crowd and let his momentum carry him through the close-packed bodies. He could feel the onlookers push back against him, but he kept going, using knees and elbows to clear any obstruction his combined mass and velocity couldn't move. After what felt like an eternity he broke through into a clearing, a wide, empty space on the sidewalk, ringed by spectators.

  But that space wasn't completely empty. The first things Gus noticed were the clear pebbles that littered the sidewalk. He realized he'd been walking on them since before he'd entered the crowd; some of them were still stuck in the soles of his shoes. They looked like the bits of windshield that were left on the highway once a serious crash had been cleaned up.

  Gus could easily have spent the next few minutes thinking about the marvels of safety glass, wondering what kind of technology was required to make it shatter into beads instead of jagged shards. It was thicker than normal glass, true, but was that enough? Or did it have to go through some kind of chemical process? Gus had heard it referred to as tempered glass, but he had no idea how you would go about tempering something. And could a sheet of glass lose its temper the way a person could? That would make a kind of sense, since a person who lost his temper would fly into a rage, and a pane of glass that lost its temper would fly into jagged shards. Maybe this was just an etymological accident. Or perhaps Gus had stumbled onto some great truth about glass or emotions or flying into things.

  Gus wanted to explore all these ideas in detail. All he had to do was turn around and push his way back through the crowd. Then he could walk around the corner to the Drumm Street entrance, take the elevator up to the sixteenth floor, lock himself in his office, and spend the rest of the day in rapt concentration. He might have to ignore the cold wind blowing through the corridors, but he was willing to do that, because the alternative was so much less appealing.

  That alternative was to focus on what lay in front of him, spread out on the sidewalk. And that was the last thing he wanted to do. The last thing, but the only thing.

  Gus forced his eyes to look down at the ground. He tried to avoid taking in the whole picture and instead to focus on the tiny details. Like the cr
acks in the bricks where the shock wave from the body's landing had rippled out across the sidewalk. Or the brown loafer that had come off either in flight or on landing and now lay by its owner's head. Or the tie. That hideous floral tie he had spent so much of the morning staring at across the conference table. The one Steve Ecclesine put on whenever he planned to engage in an act of corporate brutality, as if the cheery flowers could hide the cruelty of his actions.

  There were short bloops of police siren from the street behind him, and Gus felt the crowd jostling as a pair of uniformed cops muscled their way through to the body lying on the ground.

  "Okay, let's move on, people," a gruff voice said from behind him. "There's nothing to see here."

  How wrong that voice is, Gus thought. There were things to see in every direction. If you looked down, there was the body. If you looked up, you could see the hole in the building where the window had popped out of its sixteenth-story frame. And if you looked to your left, you could see Shawn looking right back at you.

  "So," Shawn said. "We still working on that string-of-unconnected-accidents theory?"

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  "I quit," Gus said.

  "A bold statement," Shawn said. "Forcefully spoken. Brief and yet eloquent. If I could give you the tiniest smidge of advice, I'd just say that it would be more convincing if you weren't on your knees while you said it."

  Gus looked back over his shoulder at Shawn, who was spread out over one of the sofas in his office. Then he turned back to the carpet in front of him and pulled another stretch of silver duct tape off the roll. He laid the top half of the tape along the bottom edge of the closed curtain, then pressed the bottom of it against the floor.

  "As long as I'm within ten feet of this window, I'm keeping low to the ground," Gus said. "The lower my center of gravity, the less chance I'll plunge to my death if the glass falls out."

  "First of all, if the glass does fall out a strip of duct tape and a curtain won't stop you," Shawn said. "If Goldfinger could get sucked out through that tiny airplane window, there's no way you're not going out a hole the size of a billboard."

  "That would be true if we were two miles in the air," Gus said. "As it is, explosive decompression is just about the only thing I don't have to worry about."

  "You also don't have to worry about whether you're such a man that one romp in the hay is enough to make a criminally oriented lesbian aviatrix turn straight in both ways," Shawn said. "And also you don't have to worry that the glass will come out," Shawn said.

  "Says the company's chief safety officer," Gus said.

  "Exactly," Shawn said. "I commissioned an inspection of every window in these offices, and they are all firmly glued. Or however they're stuck in there."

  That was at least partially true. There had been an inspection and it had cleared all the windows, although it had been performed by engineers working for the building's owners and their insurance company. The fact that they still had no explanation for the sudden failure of Steve Ecclesine's window did tend to undercut Gus' confidence in the security of his own, however.

  Gus pulled another strip of tape off the roll and overlapped it on the piece holding the curtain to the carpet. "That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence."

  "Then this should," Shawn said. "The killer hasn't repeated himself yet. Skiing accident, electrocution, suicide. I don't think he's going to feel that the window gag was so good he needs an encore."

  "That's great," Gus said. "As long as there really is a killer. I'm still not convinced this isn't one more in a tragic series of accidents."

  "Yes, you are," Shawn said. "You just don't want to be."

  Gus got up on his knees, then hurled the roll of tape directly at Shawn's head. Shawn ducked and the tape bounced off the wall behind him.

  "All right, I am," Gus said. "I'm convinced."

  "Don't forget, I'm also right that you don't want to be," Shawn said.

  "I haven't forgotten." Gus slid across the carpet on his knees until he reached an armchair opposite Shawn's sofa and pulled himself into it. "Believe me, I'm never going to forget that. Because I want this job. I want to stay here."

  "No, you don't," Shawn said.

  Gus might have jumped out of his chair and grabbed Shawn's shirt to shake some sense into him if that hadn't required standing up within a football field's distance of the window. "You don't know what I want," he said. "You only know what you want."

  "That's right," Shawn said. "But we always want the same thing, so what difference does it make?"

  "It's not that we want the same thing," Gus said. "You always manage to get what you want, and I find a way to convince myself that that's what I'd wanted all along."

  "So everyone's happy," Shawn said.

  "One of us is happy and one of us is pretending to be," Gus said.

  "That works, too," Shawn said.

  That was enough to propel Gus out of his chair. Let the window blow out if it wanted to. He couldn't sit here and listen to this.

  "Not anymore," Gus said. "I've got to have my own life. You can stay ten years old forever if that's what you want, but I've got to grow up."

  "I'm sure your voice will change one of these days," Shawn said calmly.

  Gus stalked over to the door. It would be so easy to fling it open and walk out, never to see Shawn's face again. Of course it would have been easier if they hadn't been sitting in Gus' office, to which he would have to return sooner or later. All Shawn would have to do to foil Gus' plan was to continue to sit on the comfortable guest couch.

  And it wasn't what Gus wanted, anyway. At least it wasn't what his calm, rational side wanted, and he'd never been able to shut up that part of him, even in the heat of rage.

  Yes, Gus realized, he wanted to leave childhood behind and step with both feet into the adult world. But he didn't want to leave Shawn back there in his preadolescent days. He wanted to bring his best friend along with him. Would that even be possible? He had no idea. But he owed it to their friendship to give it at least one good try.

  Gus turned back from the door. "It is a string of coincidences," he said. "Tragic accidents and a suicide, all completely unconnected except by happenstance."

  "You know that's not true," Shawn said.

  "I know part of me wants it not to be true," Gus said. "That's the part of me that wants the world to conform to my idea of fun. Where there are Russian spies working behind the counters of dry cleaners, pirates plotting to take over oil rigs, and serial killers hiding inside every corporate office."

  "Why would a Russian spy go undercover in a dry cleaner's?" Shawn said. "It would make much more sense to operate out of a shoe store."

  "See?" Gus said. "If I gave that one second of thought, I could probably find a way it made sense."

  "People are at their most vulnerable when they've got their shoes off," Shawn said. "Combine that with--"

  Gus slapped his hands over his ears. "Stop!"

  Shawn shrugged. "Okay, but don't blame me if you find yourself blabbing state secrets next time you go in for a pair of Keds."

  "I don't wear Keds anymore, Shawn," Gus said. "And that's kind of the point. We're not in The Goonies. There isn't a pirate ship wrecked in a cave under every abandoned restaurant."

  "You never know if you don't look," Shawn said.

  "I don't want to look for what's underneath anymore," Gus said. "If a sea lion washes up on shore, I don't want to check to see if it was murdered, because it wasn't."

  "Except for Shabby."

  "A couple of years ago all the sea lions disappeared from Fisherman's Wharf here," Gus said. "No one knew why."

  "They were all murdered?" Shawn said.

  "The next year they all came back. Because that's what sea lions do in the real world," Gus said. "Just like people ski into trees or get electrocuted by bad wiring or even hang themselves when life gets to be too much for them."

  "Of course they do," S
hawn said. "That's why all those things make such good cover for murder."

  "One out of a million times maybe it's murder," Gus said. "I want to live in the world of the nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine, not the crazy world where the one just might possibly be right."

  "What fun is that?"

  Gus took a deep breath. This was the hardest thing he'd ever tried to explain, and if he didn't get it right he'd have lost the chance to bring Shawn along. "It's not fun," Gus said. "It's not supposed to be fun. It's real."

  "Real." Shawn rolled the word around in his mouth as if he'd never heard it before.

  "I need to accept the real instead of jumping after the fun," Gus said. "Because while I've been chasing that one in a million, I've been missing what everyone else has. I don't want to spend my time wondering if an accidental death is actually a murder. I don't want to meet a perfectly nice new person and immediately jump to the conclusion that--"

  There was a knock at the door. Then it cracked open. Jerry Fellows stuck his smiling face into the office. "Is this a bad time, Mr. G?" he said.

  "I guess not, Jerry," Gus said. "Come on in."

  Jerry wheeled his mail cart to Gus' desk and deposited a stack of letters. "Ah, I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were meeting with our new safety officer," he said. "Are we still on for later, Mr. Spencer?"

  "That we are, Jerry," Shawn said.

  "Anything I can do to help end this string of terrible accidents," Jerry said. "Although if you don't mind my saying so, Mr. G, poor Mr. Ecclesine's passing may end up doing the world a world of good, bless his soul."

  "What do you mean?" Gus said.

  "Of all the senior executives around here, he was the one most opposed to your orphan drugs campaign. Did the same back when Jim Macoby was pushing his own plan. So maybe now that he's gone you've got a chance."

  "Hate to have it come at such a price," Gus said.

  "Too true, too true," Jerry said. "But on the other hand, if you've got to suffer through such a terrible tragedy, it's a blessing that some good can come out of it."

  "Thanks, Jerry," Gus said.