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

by William Rabkin

  After that, a sequence of photos showed Herman’s slow recovery, the sale of a house in Florida, a trip across Europe-Henry assumed he’d reached some kind of cash settlement with the Miami PD-and the businesses he ran in Santa Barbara, starting out as the owner-operator of a one-truck towing company until he became the dominant player in the area, then cashing out and buying the tackle store.

  It took Henry almost two full weeks to put the whole story together in an album, complete with subplots about the couple’s friends, their siblings’ children, and all the other people who drift in and out of a life.

  When he was done, Henry drove the album over the hill and presented it to Betty. She was thrilled. She was just leaving for a week to visit an old friend in Montana, but she promised that when she got back, she’d have something very special for him.

  Henry could almost taste the fish Herman’s lures were going to catch for him. But it turned out that what he considered special and what Betty did were two very different things. What she wanted to give him was a recommendation.

  It turned out that all of Betty’s friends wanted books just like hers. She was willing to set him up in business. She even had a name for him-the Memory Detective.

  Henry tried to decline politely. He told her he had time-management issues. That he was concerned a pay-check might interfere with his police pension. Finally he came flat out and told her he’d rather die.

  That was when the first lure came out. And what it caught wasn’t a fish-it was a retired Santa Barbara police detective. Betty understood that he didn’t want to do this anymore, but she had promised her best friends, the Perths, that Henry would do a scrapbook for them. She couldn’t let them down. So she was willing to make a deal-if he did her this small favor, he could choose three of Herman’s lures. Any three-even the YTBL3.

  He had no choice once that lure was dangled in front of him, any more than the shovelnose guitarfish Herman caught off the pier with it had. Henry had to bite.

  Now that he was hooked, he was about as happy as one of those guitarfish. Rod and Elaine Perth had lived contentedly together since their wedding in 1962. They were as devoted to each other today as they had been on the first day they met. They’d spent just about every minute of the last forty-seven years together, and they’d documented it all in loving detail. And somehow, in those entire forty-seven years, they had managed to do absolutely nothing that was of any interest to anyone.

  Henry surveyed the endless landscape of photo mailers and keepsake boxes littering his living room. He’d been through them all twice, and he couldn’t find anything that even looked like a story. Apparently the Perths had spent the last five decades sitting happily on their living room couch drinking tea-or, when they were in a mood for a wild time, coffee. Occasionally Elaine ventured out into the garden to pull a weed or two; apparently Rod did his work as an accountant at a desk in the den while Elaine knitted next to him. Even when they traveled overseas, all they seemed to do was sit on foreign couches. The only things that changed in all the pictures were the gray hairs on their heads and the wrinkles on their faces. These people didn’t need a scrapbook to document their lives together; any one picture grabbed at random would have told the story just as well.

  Henry pushed his chair back from the table irritably. He’d spent enough time on this project. He should just slap in a handful of random pictures, put a ribbon around the album, and call it done.

  But the Perths wouldn’t let it be done. Every day since he’d taken on Rod and Elain’s lives, they’d dug up another box of identical photos they wanted him to go through. Every afternoon there’d been a knock at the door, and when Henry opened it, he’d find the Perths’ unbelievably unmemorable grandson standing on his porch with another delivery. The first few times Henry was excited, hoping that the new arrival would bring something of interest. But he’d been disappointed so many times that he’d come to dread the young man’s knock.

  Which was why he almost chose to hide in the kitchen when there was a firm rapping on the door this time. Maybe if he didn’t answer, the kid would leave the box on the porch, and Henry could claim it had been stolen before he got home.

  He was halfway to the kitchen when the rapping came again. He stopped at the sound. The Perths’ grandson’s knock was as uninteresting as anything else about him. It was more like the kid was brushing his knuckles across the wood, as if an actual blow was too assertive for him. But this series of raps was firm, assertive, urgent. Either the kid had stopped on the way over here to get a spine, or this was someone else. If Henry was really lucky, it was an ex-con he’d put away years ago who’d come to kill him and put him out of his Perth-induced misery.

  Henry crossed the living room quickly and pulled the door open. The woman standing there smiled up at him shyly.

  “Can I help you?” Henry said. “Miss…?”

  “You are Henry Spencer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “And you are?”

  “So excited to meet you.” She held out a hand.

  Henry lived his life by a few simple rules. Number seventeen was this: If you ask a stranger for his name twice and he still doesn’t answer, he’s hiding something. Henry knew he should slam the door in this woman’s face and, if she didn’t leave on her own, have the cops cruise by and check her out.

  Somehow the door didn’t seem to slam. Henry’s left hand remained frozen on it. Like any man who finds himself violating lifelong beliefs when confronted by a beautiful woman, he could come up with dozens of reasons why he should let her in. Maybe she was lost. Maybe she had car trouble. And anyway, it was hard to imagine that she could be hiding anything. Her bright red T-shirt and shorts were so tight she couldn’t conceal a dollar bill without his being able to read the serial numbers.

  Henry extended his right hand and took hers in it. He felt a tingle running up his arm as if she’d given him a minor electric shock.

  “I can see the resemblance,” the woman said, peering intently into his eyes.

  Henry felt a slight tang of disappointment as he realized that she was here looking for Shawn. Probably some girl he’d met in a bar and never bothered to call back. Although blowing off a woman this beautiful didn’t seem to fit Shawn’s standard operating procedures.

  “Shawn’s not here.” Henry tried to withdraw his hand, but she wouldn’t let go.

  “I know.” Her voice was like a seduction. “He sent me.”

  “I see.” Now Henry was getting annoyed. It was one thing for Shawn to call the health department and report a toxic plume coming from Henry’s house that time he had tried to brew his own beer. That was funny-at least after Henry had retaliated by reminding the head librarian at the Santa Barbara Library that Shawn still hadn’t returned the copy of Harriet the Spy he’d checked out in 1984 and that he owed fines running into the thousands of dollars. But sending a hooker to Henry’s house went far beyond the realm of the prank. This was a crime, and he wanted no part of it. “I think you’d better run along now.”

  “But I have a message from Shawn.” She still didn’t let go of Henry’s hand. Despite his irritation, he found the electric tickle from her touch was still running up his arm, and that made him even more annoyed.

  “What’s that? He’s embarrassed to see me dating women my own age and thinks I should be going out with children?”

  “He doesn’t like you doing the scrapbooks. He thinks it makes you look like an old lady.”

  The tingling in Henry’s arm got stronger, and he realized it wasn’t sexual attraction at all. It was electricity. Before he could pull away, she tightened her grip on his hand and sent eight hundred thousand volts through his body.

  Chapter Twelve

  Over the days since John Marichal’s melting body had been scooped up and taken out, the stench in the tin impound shack had begun to dissipate. But the room was still stiflingly hot, and every atom of oxygen seemed to carry a small piece of decayed flesh with it.

  As soon as
Shawn had sliced through the yellow crime scene tape and pushed open the shack’s door, he passed quickly through toward the rear exit. But before he could get out into the lot, Gus had stopped to peer around the small office.

  “What are you doing?” Shawn said.

  “Looking for evidence,” Gus said. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  Actually, it wasn’t. The real reason they’d come here after their long session in Chief Vick’s office was because they needed to find Tara. They had to turn her over to the police so they wouldn’t get blamed for any other assaults she might commit. But, as Shawn pointed out, Tara had a car and they didn’t, which meant that any attempt to find her was really just hoping for a lucky break. That they could do anywhere. Shawn’s first choice was an air-conditioned movie theater, preferably the revival house currently running a Jessica Alba film festival. Second choice was Eagle’s View, where Shawn and Gus could chill with Dallas Steele over a frosty Coca-Cola Blak. When Gus ruled out that option on several grounds, starting with the impossibility of getting there, the impound lot made a pretty good runner-up. Not because they actually expected to run into Tara there. But they had as good a chance of finding her here as anywhere, and this way they might also uncover clues to the murder of John Marichal. Solving that crime might buy them some goodwill with the department. At the very least, it would remove them from the list of suspects.

  Gus ducked under the counter and swore under his breath. “The laptop’s gone.”

  “We knew that,” Shawn said. “Lassiter said it was missing. And if it had been here, the cops would have taken it. Now can we get out of here?”

  Shawn pushed open the back door and stepped out into the bright sunshine. He took a deep breath of clean, corpse-free air and looked out over the lot. It stretched out as far as he could see, acres of abandoned cars slowly rusting away in the salty air. In the center, the gigantic crane stood idle, iron jaws hanging open like a drooping flower.

  “And what exactly do you think we’re going to find out here?” Gus said as he stepped up next to Shawn.

  “For one thing, air.” Shawn took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “For another, the answer.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “That is a question.”

  “What?”

  “That’s another question. And where did it get us? Nowhere. Whereas I actually have an answer.”

  “Fine,” Gus said. “Congratulations.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that one, too.”

  “I can’t help but notice a small tone of hostility in your voice ever since we left the police station,” Shawn said.

  “Why would I be hostile?” Gus said. “Just because you’ve gotten us mixed up with a psychotic stalker?”

  “Gus, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that Tara would turn out to be crazy.”

  “I could have,” Gus said. “And you know how I know that? Because I did. And I warned you. But it was convenient for you to ignore the fact that she was a raging psycho because she was doing your laundry.”

  “And doing a good job, too.” Shawn rubbed the fabric of his shirt. “She really managed to get my clothes soft.”

  “Maybe they’ll let her launder our prison uniforms,” Gus said.

  “We’re not going to prison, because I’ve found the answer,” Shawn said. “Look.”

  He pointed out at the crane in the distance.

  “That’s not an answer-that’s a crane.”

  “It’s both,” Shawn said. “It’s the reason John Marichal was killed.”

  Gus stared at the crane. It stood on thin legs and had a yellow metal operator’s cab between the base and the jib. He tried to imagine it in action, the great jaws falling on a car, crunching through the windows as they lifted it through the air and dropped it into the crushing mechanism. He’d never seen one working in real life before, but he knew he’d seen one in a movie. It came to him in a flash: Goldfinger. Bad guys put another bad guy in the trunk of a car and sent it to the crusher. That was where Shawn had found his answer.

  “There’s no way that fat creep was planning to rob Fort Knox,” Gus said. “And why is it that movie keeps coming up?”

  “It’s a coincidence,” Shawn said. “Or maybe it’s enemy action. Anyway, you don’t need to jump all the way to the denouement to figure out what’s going on here. Stop at the ‘bad guy in the trunk’ moment. Imagine that as an ongoing business concern.”

  “How many agents of the British Secret Service do you think there are out here?” Gus said. There just didn’t seem to be much of a market for such a service.

  “He was disposing of bodies,” Shawn said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Let’s say you’re a killer. You knock off your victim, and you’re looking for a way to get rid of the evidence. You bring it down to Marichal, he sticks it into the trunk of an abandoned car, and crash, crunch, it’s part of a metal cube heading for the smelter.”

  Gus had to admit, it sounded like a plan. But there were too many loose ends. How would you market a scheme like that? It was true, according to Chief Vick, that Marichal’s father was a crook, too, so there might be some old family friends in the business. But that was all the way across the country. Marichal had only been here a few months. It wasn’t like he’d had time to build up a large social network.

  Still, as Shawn said, it was an answer. Maybe it would do for now. He looked over at the crane again, and his heart sank.

  “Nope,” Gus said.

  “What do you mean nope?” Shawn said. “I give you a perfectly worked-out theory, and all you give me is ‘nope’?”

  “Yup.”

  “I refuse to accept that,” Shawn said.

  “Then maybe you should accept this.” Gus took off across the lot, leading Shawn through a maze of autos, first the recently impounded vehicles the police had towed in for repeated parking violations, then generations of dead cars, killed by head-ons, rollovers, and plain neglect. As they walked, shapes changed from soft curves to sharp corners and back to curves again. Colors came and went as fashions changed. It was like an open-air museum of automotive styling, as long as you could look past all the crumpled metal.

  Finally they reached the area directly under the crane. Nothing here seemed to have been made after Richard Nixon’s second inaugural.

  “Look at this,” Shawn said, peering at the license plates. “New Mexico, Utah, Florida, Minnesota, Delaware. It’s like cars from all across the country came out here to die.”

  “More like to rest in peace,” Gus said. “And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for decades.” He pointed at the tires on a few of the cars. They’d decayed away until they were barely shreds hanging off the wheels. “They’re not doing a lot of car crushing here.”

  Shawn looked so deflated, Gus almost felt guilty for bringing him out here. Shawn’s theory was good. The only real problem with it was that it wasn’t true. Not that that was going to stop Shawn.

  “Maybe Marichal was planning to go into the body-disposal business,” Shawn said. “And a rival wanted to stop him before he got started.”

  “Or maybe we should look for a new theory,” Gus said.

  Something whistled past Gus’ ear. Metal popped behind him. At first, he thought Shawn had chucked a headlight at him. But Shawn was looking around for the source of the sound, too. He pointed at the trunk of a sixty-nine Ford Fairlane.

  “Was that hole there before?” Shawn said.

  Gus bent down to peer at the small round hole in the trunk just as the rear windshield shattered over his head.

  “Duck!” Shawn grabbed Gus and pulled him down to the concrete behind a yellow sixty-five Thunderbird with Florida plates.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!”

  Three more holes blossomed in the cars around them. Shawn poked his head above the hood, then dived to the ground as the rearview mirror shattered.
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br />   “Who is it?” Gus said. “Could you see anything?”

  Shawn shook his head. “He must be behind one of these cars. We’ve got to find a way to sneak up on him.”

  “How can you sneak up on a guy when you don’t know where he is?”

  Shawn thought that through for a moment. “One of us needs to stand up to draw his fire. The other one can see where the shot comes from.”

  “Go ahead,” Gus said. “Stand.”

  “I would,” Shawn said. “But he’s already shot at me once. He probably wants a new target.”

  “That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.”

  “Really?” Shawn said. “I thought it showed some ‘outside the box’ thinking.”

  “‘Outside the box’ is where we need to be,” Gus said. “We’ve just got to figure out where that box is.”

  Shawn was about to answer when they heard the faint sound of a cell phone ringing across the lot. “That’s him!”

  The phone rang again. Shawn pointed across the lot at the place it seemed to be coming from. Then he pointed to Gus and swept his arm around to the west. Gus would creep up on the assassin’s left flank. Shawn thumbed his own chest and indicated he’d go around the other way. They gave each other a grave thumbs-up, and each duck-walked in his chosen direction, making sure to keep his head below the level of the cars.

  Gus crept forward, his knees screaming at the strain, using the sound of the cell as his homing beacon. As he squeezed through the gap between two rotting Cressidas, the phone stopped ringing. He froze. Now what? He was about to lift his head above the trunk line in hopes of catching a glimpse of the shooter when the phone started ringing again.

  Gus started toward the noise. Now another question began to gnaw at him. Why didn’t the killer answer his phone? Or if he wasn’t going to pick up, why not just turn it off? Why did he let it keep ringing like this? For one triumphant moment, Gus realized they must have taken him out. But then he remembered that they had never returned a shot, and in fact didn’t even have a gun. It seemed extremely unlikely they’d scored any kind of hit, let alone a kill shot. Could it be a trap?