Mind-Altering Murder

by William Rabkin

  "For what?"

  "For reminding us that there's more to life than the occasional bit of violence and misery," Gus said.

  "That's what I'm here for," Jerry said as he pushed his cart toward the door. "Just want to leave the world slightly better than it was when I got here."

  Gus held the door open for Jerry's cart, then let it close behind the mailman before turning back to Shawn. "See?" he said. "That's what I'm talking about. Here's a man who can bring joy to everyone around him because he's not busy running around trying to prove that something statistically absurd has actually happened."

  "I won't argue with you about Jerry," Shawn said. "He's a great guy."

  "And I want to live in a world where a great guy is just a great guy," Gus said. "Where I don't have to think someone like him could ever be--"

  Gus broke off as a dark thought started forming in his head. He pushed it away. He couldn't go down that path. He wouldn't.

  "No way he'd ever be what?" Shawn said.

  "He isn't," Gus said. But the harder he tried to push the thought out of his mind, the stronger it came back. He gave it one last shove and managed to free himself. He breathed a sigh of relief, and the thought rushed back at him like a wave crashing onto a sand castle, obliterating everything in its path.

  It wasn't just a thought anymore. Gus knew the truth. The horrible, awful, inescapable truth.

  Chapter Thirty

  "Are you all right?" Shawn asked. "Because you look like you just swallowed a Volvo."

  Gus was not all right. His head was pounding from the effort of denying what was so obviously right in front of him.

  "This is exactly what I mean," Gus said. "I'm tired of living like this."

  "If you mean like someone out of Mad Men but without any of the good parts, I certainly understand," Shawn said. "If you've got to wear a suit to work every day, at least you should take up smoking and drinking and sleeping around on your wife, so it's all worth it. Of course you'd probably need to pick yourself up a wife, too. And a childhood where you were thrashed daily for not slopping the hogs, and a secret identity no one knows about. I've got to tell you, I don't see how anyone sticks with this corporate life for long. I'm exhausted just thinking about it."

  "What I'm tired of," Gus said tensely, "is seeing murders wherever I go."

  "I thought you'd taken care of that by closing your eyes and refusing to look at what's obvious," Shawn said.

  "I'm tired of looking at the nicest man the world has ever seen and leaping to the conclusion that he must be a murderer because he's the least likely suspect," Gus said.

  It took Shawn a moment to realize what Gus was saying. "Really? Jerry? A killer?"

  "Don't tell me you hadn't already gone there," Gus said.

  Gus thought Shawn seemed completely astonished, although a lifetime spent trying to look innocent whenever he was caught red-handed could have explained that. "Why would I?"

  "Why would you?" Gus sputtered. "Because he's the last person anyone would ever suspect of anything."

  "Exactly," Shawn said. "So why would we start now?"

  "Because that's how it works," Gus said. "You always say the least likely suspect is the one who did it."

  "Doesn't sound like me," Shawn said. "Oh, wait a minute. 'The least likely suspect is the one who did it.' Yeah, it's a little closer when the voice isn't all squeaky and shrill. But still--Jerry? How could you even think such a thing?"

  "I don't want to," Gus said. "That's what I've been saying. I want to be part of the real world where the guy the police catch standing over the corpse with a smoking gun is the guy who pulled the trigger."

  "Now you're just talking nonsense," Shawn said. "Why would you shoot a guy and stand around with a smoking gun, waiting for the police to show up? And how do you get a gun to smoke, anyway? Because today's modern firearms are pretty much emissions-free, if you don't count the bullet, so you've got to be lighting cigarettes and sticking them in the barrel, and anyone who would do that probably doesn't have the intellectual wherewithal to figure out how to pull the trigger."

  "That's exactly what I mean," Gus said. "That's the kind of gibberish that leads us to accuse the Jerry Fellowses of the world."

  "Yes, but gibberish isn't enough," Shawn said. "This is not as easy as you make it sound. For instance, why would Jerry want to kill all these pharmaceutical executives? I mean, aside from the same reasons everyone else who didn't do it has."

  Gus felt the pounding in his temples ease a little. Shawn was right. Maybe he was nuts. There had to be a motive. And then the same dark thought came rushing back again, only this time it was far more detailed.

  "Orphan drugs," Gus said. "That's his motive."

  "Orphan drugs?" Shawn said. "They've got pills for that now? What do they do--you take one and you grow a new set of parents?"

  Gus sank down in the armchair, lost in dread. "They're not drugs for orphans," he said mechanically, his mind spinning through the ramifications of what he'd realized. "They're drugs for diseases that are too rare to make mass production possible, which means that they're too expensive to produce at all. Millions of people all over the world die of illnesses that could be cured, except that the financial rewards aren't there and--"

  "Okay, this is getting boring," Shawn said. "You're not going to start making speeches like that Quincy guy, are you? Because that show should be an object lesson for all of us: When he was solving crimes and sleeping with day players it was a lot of fun. But once he got all serious and started tackling social issues it got to be just about unbearable. Something to think about."

  Gus considered explaining to Shawn that certain social issues were far more important than whatever entertainment value they might contain for an audience, but he knew that would lead directly to an argument about the value of the very special episode of a sitcom compared to one that was actually funny, and then half the day would disappear. He needed to stick to the subject he started with.

  "The issue of orphan drugs was something I was interested in from my first day here," Gus said. "I really thought I could make a difference."

  Shawn's thumb started twitching. Gus slapped his hand away.

  "Stop that," he said. "You can't change the channel just because I'm talking about something serious for one minute."

  "Another reason real life can't compare to television," Shawn said.

  "Just listen," Gus said. "One day I was talking to Jerry Fellows and I mentioned my interest in the subject. He was thrilled. He said that in all the decades he'd been with the company he'd thought we should have a real program to address the issue. From then on he always asked about my progress. He encouraged me when I was feeling hopeless, cheered me on when I was doing well, and did everything he could to subtly keep me focused on the problem."

  "You sold me," Shawn said. "He's got to be the killer."

  Gus wondered briefly if Shawn felt now the way Gus always had when Shawn announced some ridiculous theory of the crime at hand, and if he'd feel as foolish when Gus proved to be right.

  "Just before my big presentation to the executive committee, he let something slip," Gus said. "Jim Macoby had been working on a plan to address the orphan drugs issue before he died."

  "Jim Macoby?" Shawn asked, and then remembered. "Oh, Mr. Coffee."

  "Steve Ecclesine was my primary opponent on the committee," Gus said. "I'm pretty sure he was planning to do whatever he could to stop me."

  "I'm beginning to see an issue here, but let's keep going with this for the moment," Shawn said.

  Gus didn't need Shawn's permission. He was already at his desk and typing furiously onto his computer monitor. "I knew it!" he said.

  "You can't put a red six on a red seven?" Shawn said. "Because Hank Stenberg made a patch for the Psych computer so that you can put any card on any other card. It's made the long workday a lot more fun, I've got to tell you."

  "Sam Masterson," Gus said. "I've got
access to all his files, and here's one marked 'orphan drugs.' " He tapped twice on the image of the file and it spread open. His face fell. "It's empty."

  "This certainly is a slam-dunk case you're putting together against Jerry," Shawn said. "You've got one dead guy who was all in favor of giving drugs to Little Orphan Annie, one who was opposed to it, and one who was so passionately involved on one side or the other that he couldn't be bothered to invest any more time in the subject than it took to label a new file. I'm definitely seeing a pattern here."

  Shawn might not have seen the pattern, but Gus did. At least he was feeling the general shape of it. The details were still hazy, but he could tell there was something. "Did it ever occur to you that this file might be empty because somebody erased everything in it?" he said.

  "Sure," Shawn said. "And when I buy a frying pan and get it home to find there are no pancakes in it I know it's because some kid ate them all before I could."

  "Jerry Fellows is passionate about the issue of orphan drugs. Can we agree on that?" Gus said.

  "We can agree to take your word on it," Shawn said. "Then if you turn out to be wrong we can agree to make fun of you for the rest of the week."

  "He's been supporting me and doing whatever he could to help me prepare my presentation to D-Bob," Gus said. "So I'm going to make a leap and say that he would have done the same for Jim Macoby."

  "Leap on."

  "D-Bob was impressed with my presentation--there's no question about it," Gus said. "But Ecclesine managed to derail it at the end. It was obvious he was going to be the biggest obstacle in my way. So he had to go."

  "I'm still with you," Shawn said. "Or I would be if I hadn't already gotten to this point about the time you started down this path. Now I'm up ahead waiting to see if you notice that it plunges off a cliff."

  Gus shot him a scowl. "The big question is Jim Macoby," Gus said. "If he was pushing the issue why would Fellows have wanted him dead?"

  "You're not at the plunge yet, but at least you've skipped through the minefield," Shawn said.

  Gus thought hard until he finally had a glimmer of an idea. He typed furiously and a different file cabinet opened on his screen. He opened the cabinet. "Nothing here labeled 'orphan drugs,' " he said. "But we've already established that it could have been deleted."

  "In the same way we've established what happened to my pancakes," Shawn said. "Which reminds me, where's the kitchen in this place? All this talk about breakfast is making me hungry."

  Gus opened another file. "This is it," he said. "I've got it. Macoby's calendar."

  "If he's got dinner reservations for tonight, let's see if they're for someplace good," Shawn said. "Because if we show up instead of him I don't think he's going to object."

  Gus flipped through screens. "He had reservations, but not for dinner," he said. "It looks like he kept scheduling meetings with D-Bob to talk about orphan drugs, but then they all got canceled."

  "I know I'm not exactly the expert on how business works, but doesn't that happen all the time?" Shawn said.

  "Yes, but from the notations, Macoby canceled the meetings himself," Gus said. "He talked a big game about tackling the issue, but he chickened out every time."

  "And you think Jerry doesn't like chicken?"

  "It makes sense," Gus said. "If Jerry has a real sense of urgency about the issue, then he'd take this as a betrayal. Who knows how much time and energy he put into helping Macoby get his proposal together?"

  "For that matter, who knows if any of this has the slightest connection to the truth?" Shawn said. "Oh, right, nobody."

  Gus wasn't listening. His fingers were flying over the virtual keyboard, and after a few seconds another file opened up. "What about Mandy Jansen?"

  "Well, if she did know, it's not going to do us any good," Shawn said. "Not unless you know someone who can talk to the dead."

  "Like Shawn Spencer, psychic detective?"

  "Exactly," Shawn said. "Just like him, only with actual psychic powers. Give me a call when you find the guy and I'll buy him lunch."

  "We don't need to talk to Mandy Jansen," Gus said. "All we need to know is right here in her file. She said she quit Benson Pharmaceuticals to take care of her mother, and in fact here's a digital copy of the letter she mailed just before I was hired. She said her mother had been diagnosed with mesenchymal chondrosarcoma and that she needed constant care."

  Shawn just looked at him. "You know, I feel like I'm supposed to come up with a witty riposte here, but you've left me completely blank."

  "Mesenchymal chondrosarcoma is a cancer of the cartilage, one of the rarest cancers there is," Gus said. "There haven't even been a hundred cases diagnosed in all the world. So obviously there's no treatment for it."

  "Still waiting for my opening," Shawn said.

  "Don't you see?" Gus wanted to hit Shawn in the face with the facts. Unfortunately they were nothing more than pixels on a screen, so he was reduced to waving his arms in the air to emphasize his point. "Mandy's mother was suffering from an orphan disease. Mandy, who was supposed to take the job that eventually went to me, was the perfect person to lead the charge for the cause in the company. She would have had the passion, the firsthand knowledge, and the moral gravity to force Benson Pharmaceuticals down this path."

  "Instead she decided to stay home and take care of Mom," Shawn said. "How selfish can you get? No wonder she killed herself."

  "That's what I'm trying to tell you," Gus said, arms flapping so hard that if the glass had fallen out of the window right now he could have flown down to a safe landing. "She didn't kill herself. She committed the same sin that Jim Macoby did: walking away from the cause. And for that sin she was murdered."

  "By Jerry Fellows."

  "By Jerry Fellows," Gus agreed. "Don't you see? It all makes sense."

  And for one brief, shining moment of clarity, it did. He had found the pattern. But that was only the first step. After he found it he needed to prove it, which meant using the pattern as a guide to find another instance that would fit. And he had done that, too. Gus had solved a series of terrible crimes when no one else had even suspected that the crimes had been committed, except for Shawn, and that didn't count.

  So why didn't he feel that sense of triumph that always used to come with the solving of the puzzle? Where was that satisfaction as the last piece snapped into place and proved him right?

  It wasn't there. And, Gus realized, it wouldn't be there. Because he hadn't actually solved anything, except theoretically. Yes, everything he said held together, and he could connect every one of his dots to make a sound, logical case.

  But there was nothing real about it. Nothing tying these bold rhetorical declarations down to reality. It was all fine as a word puzzle, but if he took it any further it would actually impact people's lives. Living people, breathing people, people with hopes and dreams, all of which might be shattered by his little game. It might be fun to calculate where the train leaving New York at eighty miles an hour would meet the one heading out of Los Angeles at twice that speed, but once you realized that both of them were running on the same track and their meeting would entail the deaths of hundreds of innocent passengers, it seemed irresponsible to keep calculating instead of doing something to stop the catastrophe.

  And Gus had caused enough catastrophes in exactly this way. When Professor Langston Kitteredge had come to him for help in battling the global conspiracy that only he knew about, Gus had leaped to his aid and worked out an entire theory about who had murdered the museum's curator and why. It was logical, it was plausible, and all the pieces fit together.

  The only trouble was that it was all based on a faulty assumption, and because of that everything he'd come up with afterward had been completely wrong. Logical, defensible, and wrong. And a man had died because of it.

  Now he was doing exactly the same thing. He had taken a set of incidents and strung them together into a pretty pattern. But that
didn't mean the pattern represented what had really happened. It just meant that he was really good at coming up with arguments he could use to persuade himself.

  When he stepped back and looked at what he was really talking about, he could see how stupid and dangerous the exercise was. And not just because he was already falling into the least obvious suspect trap. The theory about Jerry Fellows killing Benson executives rested on one necessary assumption--that a string of accidents and one suicide were actually murders that no one had noticed. Which was, of course, the most ludicrous part of the whole argument. There was no evidence to suggest that all these deaths were anything other than what they appeared. Shawn had skipped over that by simply assuming its opposite, and Gus had started piling details on top of that declaration.

  Gus could feel the fear overtaking him again. His palms were sweating; his heart pounded against his ribs.

  He wouldn't do this again. Not to himself, and certainly not to Jerry Fellows. There was a reason Gus had given up working as a detective, and this was it. What was fun in the abstract could destroy people's lives once he started to pretend he knew what he was doing.

  That was why he was here at Benson Pharmaceuticals. That was why he had put on a suit and a tie, why he had decided to live as a grown-up in the grown-up world.

  And it was why he would refuse to play the detective game anymore. If it turned out he was wrong and there was a mysterious murderer killing people, then let someone who knew what he was doing figure it out. He would do the job he was being paid to do.

  Gus forced his mouth into a grin. "Got you with that one, didn't I?" he said. "You have to admit, it sounded pretty good for a while."

  Shawn didn't smile back. "Not all of it," he said. "But it sounds like you got some of it right."

  Gus tried to keep the grin on his face, but he could feel it sagging away. "No," he said. "I was making it all up. It was all a joke. None of it was real."

  Shawn gave him a long, hard look. "You don't believe that."

  "I do," Gus said. "More than I've ever believed anything."