The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  Shawn pulled open the stall door and stuck his head out. The mime was gone. And so were their clothes. Shawn checked every stall and tore through all the trash cans, but the mime hadn’t left them so much as a sock.

  “What do we do now?” Gus said.

  “We’re taking him down.” Shawn bolted to the door.

  “You can’t go out there,” Gus said as Shawn reached for the door handle.

  “Watch me.”

  “It’s not me who’s going to be watching,” Gus said. “It’s all the moms out there with their little kids.”

  “So what do you suggest? That we just stay in here until everyone has gone home and we can slip out without anyone seeing us?”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Gus said. “But my car keys were in my pants pocket. So even if we do get out of here, we’ve got to walk through one of the San Gabriel Valley’s least progressive suburbs stark naked. How long do you think we’ll last out on those mean streets without any clothes?”

  “I’m still waiting for a suggestion.”

  “There are a lot of people out there,” Gus said. “Sooner or later, most of them are going to need to use the bathroom. And when they come in, we can beg them for a piece of clothing. It may take some time, but we can piece together enough clothes to walk out of here.”

  “Because most people who come to a public garden wear an extra pair of pants just in case.”

  Gus fumed. Of course Shawn was right, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant to have his only idea shot down.

  “Maybe if we wish really hard, the magical elves will hear us and weave us a new set of clothes,” Gus said.

  Shawn beamed as if Gus had said something brilliant. “That’s it,” he said.

  “Elves are it?”

  “Not elves,” Shawn said. “We’ll make our own clothes.”

  Chapter Seven

  When Gus was four years old, his mother dressed him up as Cupid for a Valentine’s Day party. He wore a fluffy cotton diaper, a pair of wings, and a halo. And nothing else. She paraded him through a houseful of adults, all of whom cooed over the adorable little cherub.

  For the rest of his life, Gus treasured that memory. Not because he enjoyed the evening; it was as miserable an experience as anything he’d ever suffered. But from that night on, no matter what happened to him, no matter how great the humiliation, he could always think back and tell himself, “At least it wasn’t as bad as being Cupid in a diaper.”

  That thought never failed to make him feel better. When he was in first grade and spilled water down his pants, giving the entire school the impression that he’d wet himself, he took solace in the knowledge that this moment was less embarrassing than parading around in a diaper and wings. When he mistimed a kiss aimed at Santa Barbara High School’s third-string cheerleader Missy Summerland at a victory rally and ended up locking lips with a wide receiver, he knew that this was not as bad as being naked Cupid. Even the time that he and Shawn gave a lengthy and thorough reveal to a baffling case only to be informed that a different suspect had confessed hours before, Gus comforted himself with the thought that at least he wasn’t wearing a diaper and wings while presenting the conclusion.

  But that memory could do him no more good. Because he’d finally experienced something more humiliating than that Valentine’s Day appearance. And it involved diapers, too.

  These weren’t the fluffy, opaque, completely secure diapers his mother had dressed him in. No. These were made out of flimsy paper toilet seat covers. Flimsy, near-translucent paper toilet seat covers.

  Shawn had emptied the dispensers from all the stalls and both men had done their best to wrap the covers around their midsections in such a manner that they’d stay up on their own. But without tape or pins, there was no way to keep them together, and Shawn and Gus had to walk out of the men’s room clutching wads of paper to their fronts and backs. If there was a single person in the Gardens who didn’t stare at them until they were out of sight Gus never noticed him.

  The humiliation might have been terminal for Gus. Fortunately, the burning sun had heated the asphalt path almost to the melting point, and he could use the agony he felt every time he set down one bare foot to take his mind off the embarrassment.

  Beyond the mortification of both soul and flesh, there was one other major problem Gus was wrestling with: What were they going to do once they reached his car? He supposed they could use a brick to smash one of the windows, if there happened to be any bricks lying around the parking lot, but smashing wouldn’t get the car started. That was, if the mime hadn’t used Gus’ keys and driven off in the Echo.

  He hadn’t, which was the first good thing that had happened to Gus all day. But when they got to the parking lot, Shawn didn’t go to the Echo. Instead he started looking in the trash barrels that stood outside the park’s wrought-iron fence. The first two were empty aside from trash. The third, however, held their clothes.

  “How did you know they’d be here?” Gus said as he pulled his underpants on under his tissue paper diaper.

  “I sort of figured that not even a mime would risk life in prison to steal some clothes he could buy at Goodwill for under a buck,” Shawn said, slipping on his jeans before he stepped into his shoes.

  “Then what was that all about?”

  Shawn dug in his pockets. “Not my wallet,” he said, fishing it out and flipping through it. “Or any of the four dollars left inside it.” He checked Gus’ pants before tossing them to him. “Or your wallet, or your car keys.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense at all,” Gus said. “Could it all have been some bizarre mime initiation ritual?”

  Shawn dug in his pants again, and his face turned grim. “The necklace is gone,” he said. “We’ve been set up.”

  Chapter Eight

  The freeways on the drive back to Santa Barbara were nearly empty, the sky was a vivid blue, and dolphins were dancing in the waters off the Pacific Coast Highway. But Gus didn’t notice any of that. His foot was jammed down on the accelerator and his eyes locked on the road ahead.

  In the passenger seat, Shawn snapped shut his cell phone in frustration. “I can’t believe Lassie hung up on me again.”

  “When he understands what’s happening, he’ll listen.”

  “That’s the problem,” Shawn said. “Before he can understand, he has to listen first. And as soon as I start to tell him the story, he bursts out laughing and hangs up.”

  “If you tell him we were held up at gunpoint—”

  “In a public men’s room by a killer mime who stole our clothes.” Shawn finished Gus’ sentence for him. “Last time I tried that he put me on hold, then forwarded my call to Papa Julio’s Casa de Pizza.”

  “What did he say when you mentioned Ellen Svaco?”

  “One word,” Shawn said. “Who?”

  Gus tried to make sense of this. Had Lassie simply forgotten he’d sent the teacher to see them, or did this suggest something more ominous? “There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “You can start by getting off the freeway here.”

  Gus had been so agitated he hadn’t noticed they were almost at the Los Carneros Road exit into Isla Vista. Giving his rearview a quick scan, he tore across four lanes and flew down the ramp, slamming on the brakes for the stop sign at the bottom. Making sure there was no cross traffic, he turned left onto Los Carneros and headed into town.

  “Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” Gus said. He could see the traffic light at Hollister straight ahead. It was red. He gunned the car, figuring to make the next green. “How do we know this was a setup?”

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  Gus checked to make sure Shawn was wearing his seat belt. He was. Which meant there was no point in slamming on the brakes to watch him go flying through the windshield. Instead he pressed his foot on the accelerator as he turned right through the green light onto Hollister.

  “Are you asking if I have to ask why anyone would send us to a
public garden to be held up by a mime?” he said through clenched teeth.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Shawn said. “Because the answer is so obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention.”

  “I guess I’ve been a little distracted,” Gus said. “Little things like being kidnapped do that to me.”

  “You should work on that,” Shawn said. “You let the bad guys know they can throw you off with a little gunplay and you’ll never have a moment’s peace.”

  “That’s good to know,” Gus said in a close approximation of the tone his mother used to use when she caught him feeding his brussels sprouts to the dog. “Thank you so much for the advice.”

  The light ahead was turning yellow. Gus floored it and made a fast left onto Storke Avenue.

  “It’s the least I can do,” Shawn said. “As an experienced private detective, I have a duty to train the generation that’s going to follow me.”

  “You’ve been a private detective for five seconds longer than me,” Gus said. “And that’s only because you said my fly was unzipped when we were walking up to the licensing window, and I stopped to look, so you got your license first.”

  “Which is why I feel I should share my experience and knowledge with you,” Shawn said. “So let’s walk through what we already know.”

  Gus didn’t want to walk through anything, but he knew he’d never get any answers unless he played along. “Ellen Svaco lost her necklace, so she went to the police to ask them to find it,” he said. “They wouldn’t help, so she came to us. We did find it, but then it was stolen by a gun-wielding mime.”

  “Very good,” Shawn said. “You’ve got it all exactly right. Except for one small detail.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All of it,” Shawn said.

  Gus turned right onto El Colegio Road and immediately slammed on the brakes. There was an unbroken line of cars in front of him. He cursed to himself, remembering why he hated coming to Isla Vista. Home of the University of California- Santa Barbara, and situated along some of the most beautiful coastline in California, Isla Vista needed to cram tens of thousands of penniless college students into some of the world’s priciest real estate. That meant packing dozens of people into apartments barely big enough for one, which gave the town a population density somewhere between that of Lower Manhattan and central Beijing. And since rents even for those cramped spaces were so high, very few of the students could afford a car. That meant the streets were flooded with alternative modes of transport—all ridden by people who sincerely believed that traffic laws applied to everyone on the earth except them.

  Fortunately the address Ellen Svaco had given them wasn’t too much farther, and they’d have to cover only a few blocks of the town’s main business district before they’d turn right, so there would be no need to cut across lanes of traffic. But Gus knew it could easily take fifteen minutes to go a quarter mile through the area, and there was no other way to get there.

  Gus resisted the urge to punch the pedal and simply shove the other cars out of his way and tried to put his adrenaline rush to work understanding what was going on.

  “I was there for all of it,” he said. “I remember it as if it happened today. Because it did.”

  “Lassiter had no idea who Ellen Svaco was,” Shawn said.

  “She never went to the police. She told us that story to manipulate us into helping her.”

  “Why all this intrigue? She lost her necklace on a field trip.”

  The car inched forward.

  “I don’t think it was lost,” Shawn said. “I don’t think she’d ever had it. And I have a feeling if we asked at her school, we’d discover that the Descanso Gardens field trip was her idea. But it wasn’t really a field trip.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “A handoff,” Shawn said. “She brought the kids there as cover so she could collect the necklace.”

  “From the tree?”

  “From the lost and found,” Shawn said. “I’m sure someone turned it in a few days before.”

  “Why so long?” Gus said. “And why the lost and found? Why not just give it to her?”

  “Whoever had it must have been worried he was being followed,” Shawn said. “He couldn’t take a chance on meeting Ellen Svaco in person. And then something happened—maybe he caught a glimpse of whoever was following him. He panicked. He ran—but first he stopped by Descanso Gardens and turned the necklace in to the lost-and-found booth. Somehow he let her know it was there.”

  “So why didn’t she just go pick it up?” Gus said as the car moved forward another couple of inches.

  “She must have thought there was a chance she was being followed, too,” Shawn said. “If she was, it might seem suspicious for her to zip off to La Canada a day after her contact disappeared from around there.”

  “That’s why you said the necklace had been there a couple of days.”

  “You can’t just slap together a school field trip in an afternoon,” Shawn said. “And she needed the cover.”

  “So she went to Descanso Gardens, but she didn’t pick up the locket.”

  “Something made her suspicious,” Shawn said. “I’d guess it was having her other necklace stolen.”

  “There’s another one?”

  “Yes, but this one is just a regular necklace,” Shawn said.

  “Remember there was a scratch on her neck? I thought that was from her snagging the chain on a tree. But what if whoever was following her got a little ahead of himself and tried to steal her necklace—only it was the wrong one?”

  “So she sent us,” Gus said.

  “Only they followed her to our office, and then they followed us the rest of the way,” Shawn said.

  “Who is ‘they’?” Gus said. “Was the mime in league with Ellen Svaco or against her? And who or what is this Rushmore he claimed he was protecting?”

  “Those are three of the questions we’re going to ask her.” Shawn drummed on the dashboard like Desi Arnaz with a bongo. The traffic in front of them moved forward, and Gus saw they’d reached Ellen’s street. He made a hard right turn onto a treelined residential boulevard and pressed the accelerator to the floor. Within seconds they’d reached Ellen Svaco’s address, a small bungalow a block from the ocean. The were three shallow steps leading up to a small porch in front of the door. And on the porch, facing the door, was a man.

  If you had only one word to describe the man, it would be “average.” Average height. Average weight. Average suit. The only remarkable thing about him was his hair, which looked like it had been designed for the Romulan incarnation of Mr. Bean.

  His hair and the gun he held in his right hand.

  Chapter Nine

  Shawn jumped out of the car and ran up to the house, with Gus following. The average-looking man tensed at the sound of the car door, but when he spun around to see who was coming, he dropped his gun to his side.

  “Lassie!” Shawn called to Carlton Lassiter, head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department. “What are you doing here?”

  Lassiter scowled. “You called me repeatedly,” he said. “You begged me to come here.”

  “And you refused. You thought it was a prank.”

  “I did,” Lassiter said. “But if I have to choose between the chance you’ll make a fool of me and the possibility of helping a citizen in danger, I’ll risk my dignity every time.”

  It was a straight line like none Lassiter had ever given Shawn. But Shawn was so pleased at the help that he let it pass.

  “What changed your mind?” Gus asked.

  “It wasn’t the fifteen subscriptions to Guns and Ammo you two took out in my name,” Lassiter said. He pointed down at the door latch. “It was that.”

  Shawn and Gus followed his gaze.

  “The door is open,” Shawn said.

  The door was indeed unlocked and slightly ajar.

  “Maybe she’s expecting us,” Gus said.

  “This is a beach community
and a college town, full of drifters and druggies,” Lassiter said. “No one leaves their door unlocked in a place like this.”

  “She’s an elementary school teacher,” Gus said. “Maybe she doesn’t have anything worth stealing.”

  “At least nothing that wasn’t already stolen from us,” Shawn said.

  Lassiter gave him a sharp look. “You will be making a full report.”

  “Right after we see what we’re going to be reporting,” Shawn said.

  Lassiter nodded curtly, then rapped on the door with the barrel of his gun. “Ms. Svaco?” he said. “Police.”

  There was no answer from inside. He rapped again. Still no answer.

  “Ms. Svaco?”

  The only sound was the crashing of the waves against the shore a block away.

  “Don’t just stand there, Lassie,” Shawn said. “We’ve got to do something.”

  Lassiter nodded, then holstered his gun and pulled out a cell phone.

  “I meant do something useful,” Shawn said.

  “I am doing something useful,” Lassiter said. “I’m calling Judge Napoli to request a warrant to enter the premises.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “We’ll meet you inside when you’ve got the paperwork figured out.”

  Shawn reached for the door, but Lassiter positioned himself in front of it. “I can’t let you do that, Spencer,” he said.

  “We called you for help.”

  “And I came,” Lassiter said. “But if you request official police help, it comes with official police rules. Rule number one is you can’t search private property without a warrant.”

  “Unless we’ve got a really good reason,” Shawn said.

  “Not unless,” Lassiter said. “Not despite. Not because. Not even if.”

  “There is such a thing as an exigent circumstance,” Shawn said.

  “Technically true,” Lassiter said. “If I had reason to believe there was a crime in progress or a person in imminent danger, I would be able to go through this door. But I’ve already walked around the property, and the blinds are down on all the windows, so I couldn’t see inside.”