Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read p-1

by William Rabkin

  “And did you?” the chief asked coolly.

  “It’s on our list,” Shawn said. “All the spirits seem to be working on this project for Dallas Steele right now. Amazing what kind of service a couple billion dollars brings you.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason,” Lassiter said. “Or maybe it’s because you assume the police are stupid and lazy. That we care less about solving crimes and catching criminals than we do settling petty personal scores against people who make us look bad. So you figured that after you humiliated me at the Veronica Mason trial, I’d be thrilled at the chance of accusing you of murder and seeing you put to death.”

  “You did have Gus’ car towed,” Shawn said.

  “And that makes you think I would ignore a real murderer, possibly leaving the general public at great risk, simply to satisfy my own hurt feelings. Let me say I’m shocked at the assumption.”

  “After all the times we’ve worked together, Mr. Guster,” Vick said, “do you really think so little of us?”

  Gus’ head was spinning. Somehow in the space of seconds he’d found himself transformed from the victim of coincidence and a possible police conspiracy into a heartless maligner of his closest friends. The temperature in the office seemed to drop another ten degrees.

  “What about you, Shawn?” It was O’Hara, and she looked personally injured. “Do you share your partner’s despicable view of us?”

  Shawn studied the question carefully, searching for an answer that wouldn’t make the situation worse in one way or another. Then he started to tremble. His fingers twitched, and the spasms seemed to move up his arms.

  “What’s he doing?” Vick said.

  “Looks like the Watusi,” O’Hara said, stifling a yawn. “I hope we don’t have to sit through forty years of dance crazes before he answers a question.”

  “It’s so hot,” Shawn moaned, clutching his head. “The sun blazes down on me. Oh, why won’t they let me have some water? Why can’t I sit down for just one second?”

  “What is it, Shawn?” Gus asked theatrically, thrilled that he was at the very least doing something.

  “The rocks, the rocks, I have to break the rocks.” Shawn scanned the room and found an umbrella stand in the corner. He snatched an umbrella out and raised it over his head. “Have to break the rocks.”

  Shawn brought the umbrella down sharply on the desk. He was raising it for a second blow when Lassiter reached over and pulled it out of his hands. “Use your words, Spencer,” he said.

  Shawn grabbed his forehead and staggered a couple of steps. “The vision was so clear, like it was beaming directly out of the past into my head. I was a prisoner on a chain gang, breaking rocks in the blazing sun.”

  “We wish,” Juliet muttered.

  “Really, Jules, you, too?” Shawn said. Her frosty look answered for her.“I’m trying to make sense of this vision, because it must be some kind of metaphor. It was telling me that the man who was killed at the impound yard was a prisoner on a chain gang, but that’s not possible, because there haven’t been chain gangs in decades.”

  “Hold on for a second, Shawn,” Gus said. “I seem to recall reading that they were using them again for particularly vicious criminals in Arizona.”

  “That’s true,” Vick said.

  “Then that must be what I was seeing,” Shawn said. “The victim was an escapee from a chain gang. Which means he’d need an assumed identity to work for a lot that was licensed to the city.”

  Gus looked from face to face, hoping to find any sign of warming. They stared back, just as icy.

  “That’s a very good insight, Mr. Spencer,” Vick said. “It’s the kind of thing we might never have figured out without your unique talent.”

  “Unless we happened to run the vic’s prints,” O’Hara said.

  “Which we did,” Lassiter said.

  “John Marichal was indeed an escapee from an Arizona chain gang,” Vick said. “A second-generation criminal who’d done time for armed robberies all over Florida, just like his daddy before him. He moved to Arizona and started a new life. Apparently the new life wasn’t much different from the old one, and he got himself arrested for what’s believed to be his second liquor store holdup. He got twenty years on the chain gang, escaped six months ago and fled to Santa Barbara.”

  “Where he managed to snag a hot job right off the bat,” Shawn said. “Got to give props to our local economy.”

  “He didn’t exactly apply for the job,” Vick said.

  “The employee of record was one Albert Jones. Apparently Mr. Marichal killed Mr. Jones and simply started showing up in his place.”

  “And nobody noticed?” Gus said.

  “Who would?” Vick said.

  “And even if they did, they’d assume that Jones had quit and Marichal was the new guy,” Lassiter said. “In some ways it was the perfect crime.”

  “Perfect, yes,” Shawn said. “Except that instead of winning him a million dollars in cash and bonds, he ended up with a job so crummy even a dead guy could do it. So what’s the point?”

  “We’re still trying to figure that out,” Vick said.

  “If I get a vibe, I’ll let you know,” Shawn said. “So, anyway, glad we could help, and I guess we could use a ride back to our office.”

  He started toward the door.

  “Not so fast, Spencer,” Lassiter growled.

  “That’s my normal walking pace,” Shawn said. “If you’re having trouble keeping up, you might want to look into a Lark. If you qualify, Medicare will make all your payments.”

  “We didn’t bring you here to ask you about the impound lot murder,” Vick said. “Because we had no reason to connect you with it. Whoever killed Mr. Marichal wiped all the prints off that shotgun-including, apparently, Mr. Guster’s.”

  Those were exactly the words Gus had been longing to hear. They were off the hook. They were free. So why was he still paralyzed by stress? There was something his subconscious had figured out that it wasn’t sharing with the rest of him.

  “Tell me, Mr. Spencer. What do you think about pickles on a burger?”

  Gus could practically hear his subconscious laughing at him. What was about to happen was so much worse than what he’d originally feared, and his conscious mind still had no idea what it could be.

  “Are you ordering lunch? Because we just ate,” Shawn said.

  “Answer the question, Spencer,” Lassiter growled.

  “They’re an abomination,” Shawn said. “You unwrap the paper, and you get that first rich, meaty smell mingling with the yeasty goodness of the bun. Maybe just a hint of toasted sesame. Then you take a bite and the juices flow out onto your tongue, beef fat mingling with the sour-sweet attack of the secret sauce. It’s a perfect flavor combination-and then it’s ruined by the acid tang of decayed cucumber. But no matter how many times you ask, can you ever have your burger made without pickles? No. Because it’s just assumed that even if you beg for a dill-free experience, you couldn’t possibly mean it.”

  “You sound pretty worked up about the issue,” O’Hara said.

  “I’ve considered running for office on the platform,” Shawn said. “But aside from that, it’s not really something that takes up a lot of my time.”

  Vick pulled a file off her desk and handed it to Gus. Inside was a photo of a young man in a white BurgerZone uniform. At least, it used to be white. Now great areas of it were stained red, and Gus was pretty sure it wasn’t with ketchup. His face was barely recognizable under the cuts and bruises.

  “That happened at roughly twelve forty-two this afternoon,” Lassiter said.

  Shawn peered over Gus’ shoulder at the picture. “He fall under a Zamboni?”

  “Apparently he made one small mistake,” Lassiter said. “He was working the grill at the Oxnard BurgerZone and got a take-out order for three burgers with no pickles. Do you know what happened next?”

  “I’m going to guess pickles,” Gus said.

  “Oh, yes,” O�
��Hara said. “Pickles.”

  “The customer wasn’t happy,” Lassiter said. “Harsh words were spoken. And then the customer asked the victim to step out back to discuss the issue.”

  “Why would he agree?” Gus asked, ignoring the terrible feeling that he already knew the answer to his question.

  “Turn the page, Mr. Guster,” Vick suggested.

  The photo felt like lead in Gus’ hand as he struggled to flip it over, desperately not wanting to see what he knew was waiting for him on the next page.

  “Imagine you were a twenty-three-year-old part-time student working a minimum-wage job in order to finish a degree in accounting so you can go on to live a long, boring, lower-middle-class existence in the Valley,” Lassiter said. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do if she asked you?”

  Gus and Shawn stared down at a police artist’s sketch of a beautiful young woman in a tight T-shirt and tiny shorts. Even though the sketch was in pencil, Gus could practically feel the redness coming out of it.

  “We didn’t bring you down here to discuss the murder at the impound lot,” Lassiter said.

  “Although we do appreciate your belated honesty on the subject,” Vick said.

  “We brought you here because we need to answer a very important question,” Lassiter continued.

  “Is it about pickles?” Shawn said.

  “In a way.”

  “Any particular way?”

  “We know you asked Tara Larison to bring you back lunch from BurgerZone. She mentioned your name several times at the pickup window. And we know that you specifically asked for your burger without pickles. Our question is, did you tell Ms. Larison to beat this man half to death if he got your order wrong, or did she just assume that you’d want her to?”

  “Is there another way to put that?” Shawn said.

  “Certainly, Mr. Spencer,” Vick said. “We need to know if you’re merely harboring a deranged psychopath, or if she’s acting under your direct orders.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Evidence. It was always about the evidence. Before he retired from the Santa Barbara Police Department, Henry Spencer would spend hours poring over every shred of paper, every scrap of fiber, every drop of ooze until he could piece them together to tell a story. Then he’d tear it all apart to see if he could put it together in another way that would tell a different story. If he could, then he knew he had to keep searching for other clues that could be added to the puzzle until there was only one possible solution.

  But the stack of evidence piled in front of Henry now made those challenges pale by comparison. To start, there was far more here than he’d ever had on any case with the SBPD. An entire shoe box of photos going back sixty-seven years, and an additional eight carousels full of slides. Plane tickets. Wedding invitations-the subjects’ own, and dozens more for their scores of relatives and friends. A paper napkin with a lipstick kiss fading after many years. Swizzle sticks from restaurants long gone. A sequence of drivers’ licenses dating back to the days when they were photoless cards, and two expired passports with stamps from countries that had long been wiped off the map. And that was only from the file boxes that Henry had already been through. There were three more stacked beside his dining room table.

  The huge amount of evidence was only part of Henry’s problem. Even after he’d been through it all once, categorized it and cataloged it and sorted the useful pieces from the trash, he’d still have to confront the real challenge. What was the story these clues were trying to tell him? How could he put together these tiny scraps in a way that would turn them into a coherent narrative?

  At least in a murder investigation, half the story was predetermined. He knew the basic parameters going in. Someone had been killed. Someone else did it. Henry had to figure out who that was. Difficult certainly, but at least he knew the beginning and the end of the tale going in.

  This story had no predetermined structure. If it could be said to have a beginning, it was only that the subject had been born many years ago. There was no ending, and there would be none until the subject passed away. And in between there were only random artifacts of the moments that make up any life. It was completely up to Henry to decide which incidents defined a life and which ones were simply trivia.

  He’d never intended to start scrapbooking. In fact, if someone had mentioned the idea to him only a month ago, it would have meant nothing more to him than the minor irritant of seeing one more noun recklessly turned into a verb.

  That was before Betty Walinski, the still-attractive widow who ran her late husband’s tackle shop, complained over a tray of bait that her fading eyesight was making it hard to sort her old photos into an album for her new granddaughter. She dropped several broad hints about how nice it would be to have some help. Henry suspected that she was less interested in preserving her legacy for future generations than in a chance to demonstrate what an excellent cook and companion she could be to a lonely divorce, but he didn’t object. He had an ulterior motive, too.

  When Herman Walinski was still alive, he was legendary for his handcrafted fishing lures. A few of those he put up for sale, but the entire Santa Barbara fishing community still buzzed with legends of the lures he’d kept for himself. Especially his masterpiece, the one he called YTBL3. It was rumored that the very presence of the YTBL3 in any body of water would draw fish all the way from the Atlantic. Henry knew that if he could just get inside Betty’s door, he could sweet-talk her into letting him get his hands on that collection.

  When he got to Betty’s tidy bungalow on the inland side of the hills, Henry’s first thought was to make a bit of small talk, eat whatever she might put in front of him, promise to spend as much time as she wanted going through her photos, then subtly change the topic of conversation to her late husband’s lure collection. It was something he’d learned long ago while interviewing suspects-people rarely notice that you’re trying to get something out of them when they think they’re getting something out of you.

  That was before Betty placed the shoe boxes full of snapshots in front of him. Out of politeness, and a desire to look like he was helping, Henry leafed through a couple of the yellow mailing envelopes, each containing the product of one roll of genuine Kodak film. At first he barely glanced at the pictures, but when he opened the third envelope he saw something that grabbed his attention-Herman Walinski in a police uniform. Henry stopped in at the tackle store at least once a week for twenty years before Herman’s death, and in all that time, the owner had never mentioned he’d been a cop.

  The normal response to a discovery like this might have been to ask Herman’s widow about it. After all, she was standing right over him, asking if he’d like another piece of seed cake crammed with enough poppy to make the entire US Olympic team test positive for opiates. But Henry had known Betty almost as long as he had her husband, and she had never mentioned his law enforcement history, either. It wasn’t a general prohibition on talking about the past, because they’d both told stories about the years he spent driving a tow truck when he originally arrived in Santa Barbara. Forgetting about the lures for the first time since Betty had asked him over to the house, Henry invented a series of reasons why he had to return home immediately-he’d left the water running or the stove burning or the water running onto the burning stove-and asked if he could take the photos home with him to start organizing them.

  If Betty’s quick assent gave Henry a reason to reconsider her motives for inviting him over, he didn’t spend too much time mourning the loss of the possible relationship. Instead he loaded up his truck with boxes of her old photos and got away before she could change her mind.

  That was when the detective work started. Using the photo of Herman as his starting point, Henry began to build a time line of his life stretching out in both directions from that moment. He worked slowly and methodically, organizing the photos not only chronologically but also thematically, so he would have parallel histories of Herman’s career, his vacations, his children
, and the various weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, fishing derbies, anniversaries, and holidays that made up his life in pictures.

  The story that began to emerge out of the photos was one that bore almost no relation to the Herman Henry had thought he’d known. The man behind the counter at the tackle shop had been a jovial backslapper, apparently uninterested in anything that couldn’t be used to persuade a fish to swallow a hook. The private Herman, the prefishing Herman, was a much more complex soul. Starting with the pictures and concluding with a long bout of Googling, Henry met a young police officer on the Miami force who’d started out with great promise, and then had been teamed up with a corrupt partner. As far as Henry could piece together, Herman had initially tried to switch partners, and then for reasons that weren’t apparent in the photographs, he had decided instead to help Internal Affairs clean out the department. He worked undercover long enough to learn that his partner and several officers were tied to the thieves who pulled off a daring daytime robbery of the Calder Race Course. The officers and the criminals were all believed to be captured, even though the money was never recovered. A few months after the picture that sparked Henry’s interest had been taken, Herman testified to a grand jury about corruption in the Miami PD.

  There was one picture of Herman shaking the hand of someone who must have been the chief, while a graying man, most likely the mayor, smiled down on them, but that was the last image of Herman in uniform. In fact, that was the last image of Herman of any kind for the next six months of his life. The next time he showed up in one of the yellow envelopes, he was smiling cheerfully from a hospital bed, his arms and legs in traction.

  That was a story Henry could figure out without additional information. Herman had informed on his fellow officers, and the rest of the force had frozen him out. Henry couldn’t say for sure how he’d ended up in that hospital bed, but it was easy to assume that Herman had called for backup on a dangerous assignment, and none of his brother officers had bothered to show up. That was the most positive version Henry could come up with.