A Fatal Frame of Mind

by William Rabkin

  “Kitteredge is about to make his point,” Gus said. “The one that’s going to tie this whole thing together. And probably even unmask the killer.”

  Shawn stared through the glass. All he saw was Kitteredge talking while Lassiter held his head in pain. “How do you know that?”

  “Didn’t you catch his tell?” Gus said.

  Shawn looked again and this time noticed that Kitteredge’s hand was fishing around in his left coat pocket. After a moment, he pulled out his old meerschaum and knocked it gently on the table.

  “You mean the pipe?” Shawn said.

  “Every time he makes a significant point, he takes that pipe out of his pocket,” Gus said. “In class, all the students knew they’d better write down whatever he was saying when it came out. Once he moves on to details, the pipe goes back into his pocket. I’m surprised you didn’t catch that.”

  Gus turned the volume back up to hear Kitteredge’s voice reaching a crescendo. “In fact, one of the core beliefs of the founding Pre-Raphaelite brothers was that everything Reynolds taught at the Royal Academy was corrupt. They believed that art had to draw its inspiration not from other artists but from truth, from nature, and from the beauty of the world.”

  Shawn stifled a yawn. “I did see him playing with the thing,” he said. “It just never occurred to me that any one of his endless sentences was supposed to be more important than any other. Of course now that I understand that the plebiscite brothers hated Reynolds Wrap, or whatever he just said, it all becomes clear.”

  “So much for the brilliant powers of observation,” Gus said.

  “Observation has nothing to do with it,” Shawn said. “It’s a matter of authorial discrimination. Simply spewing out every stray bit of information lying around is not a sign of wisdom.”

  “There is nothing stray about what Professor K is saying,” Gus said. “Something important is about to happen here and now.”

  “Wait. You mean something even more exciting than what we just heard?” Shawn said. “I have a hard time imagining what that could be.”

  Gus felt a momentary flash of pity for his partner. Shawn was so talented in so many areas, so brilliant about so many subjects, but he was also so completely blind to anything that didn’t fit into his narrow set of interests. He could, as he had attempted to prove earlier in the evening, spend hours discussing every aspect of the cinematic career of a former child star whose major claim to fame was that he’d managed to become a has-been without ever actually having been anything. But there was so much that simply never grabbed him, and he refused to put any effort into anything that wasn’t immediately appealing.

  And yet there was so much in life that offered rich, full rewards only after you’d put in a little work. Russian novels were like that, or so he’d heard. Expensive wine and smelly cheese—not that Gus had much of a taste for either type of delicacy. Foreign movies, if the critics were to be believed. And most of all, the study of art history.

  But this didn’t seem to be the time for Gus to give Shawn a lecture on the sophisticated pleasures of life. For one thing, Shawn had already sat through the longest lecture either of them had ever heard, and the experience didn’t seem to be inspiring him to study further.

  For another, this lecture was about to reach its climax. Gus moved his chair closer to the glass. “This is it,” he said.

  “Yes, I can see Lassiter is about to fall over dead from boredom,” Shawn said. “I only hope I can hold out one second longer than him.”

  Again, Gus had to repress the desire to educate Shawn. “The pipe comes out whenever Kitteredge has a substantial point to make,” Gus said.

  “It’s amazing how much more interesting that is the second time you tell me about it,” Shawn said. “Oh, wait; it isn’t.”

  “That can happen easily a dozen times in a normal lecture,” Gus said. “But he’s got another tell, too. When he’s about to make his ultimate point, when he’s about to utter the words that will tie everything he’s said together and astonish you with his brilliance, only then does he bring out his lighter and light up.”

  “Which is good, because then Lassiter will have an excuse to throw him in jail forever,” Shawn said. “The no-smoking statutes here are tough.”

  “If you’ll apply your justly praised powers of observation, you’ll notice that Professor K’s hand is moving toward his right jacket pocket,” Gus said. “That means the lighter is about to come out. And that means—”

  “That he’s almost ready to stop talking?” Shawn said.

  “That he’s ready to make his point,” Gus said. “I think we should listen in, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you listen in?” Shawn said. “You can take notes, and then in the morning you can write it all up in a big report. And then I can use that as a pillow in case we’re ever stuck in an observation room all night again.”

  Shawn dropped his chin to his chest and pretended to be falling asleep. Gus turned the volume back up.

  “. . . wasn’t afraid of the public’s opinion,” Kitteredge was saying. “He refused to exhibit at a new gallery opened by his friends simply because members of the Royal Academy had pictures there. To him, the only thing that mattered was the truth of the painting itself.”

  Shawn mumbled as if in sleep. “Oh, yeah, definitely worth waiting for.”

  Gus ignored him and focused all his attention on his old professor. “If Rossetti refused to allow this painting to be shown in public, there had to be a reason,” Kitteredge said. “And it clearly wasn’t an aesthetic issue. We’ve all had a chance to look at the work now, and we’ve seen that it might be his masterpiece. So the only reason it’s been hidden away from sight for one hundred and fifty years is because it contains a truth so powerful, so dangerous, he couldn’t afford to let anyone see it outside a select few.”

  Even if Kitteredge’s right hand hadn’t been plunging into his coat pocket, Gus would have known this was the moment they’d all been waiting for. He jabbed Shawn in the side with his elbow. “This is it,” he said. “This is the moment where it all comes together.”

  Shawn roused himself sleepily. “As long as it doesn’t involve talking, I’m in,” he said.

  “Just listen for one more minute and I promise you we’ll learn something important about this murder,” Gus said.

  “I can’t listen for one more minute,” Shawn said. “Because that would require that I’d listened to any of the rest of it.”

  “Then listen for the first time,” Gus said. “Because something big is about to happen.”

  Reluctantly, Shawn turned his attention to the professor. If there was about to be a breakthrough in the case, the momentousness of the moment was escaping Lassiter, too, who was using his index fingers to prop his eyelids open.

  “I have been working up to this slowly and cautiously, Detective, so that when I reached the incredible truth you would have no choice but to believe. Because that truth is the key to a conspiracy that reaches across the seas, across the centuries, and that is without a doubt behind the murder of poor Clay Filkins.” Having delivered this final, determinate statement, Kitteredge proudly pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket.

  But when he held his lighter to his meerschaum, his thumb couldn’t find the trigger. It slid down the sticky, wet handle. Kitteredge thumbed it again, then realized something was wrong.

  If Lassiter hadn’t been using his eyes to count the holes in the acoustical ceiling tiles, he might have been faster to notice what Kitteredge was holding.

  Gus did see, but it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. He expected to see that flame-jet pipe lighter sparking as if it had been newly forged, the same way it had so many times in class. Instead, the professor was holding what looked like a metal tube that had been sloppily dripped in wet paint.

  Then Kitteredge’s thumb found a button, and a long, thin blade shot out of the handle with a snik sound so loud that even Shawn had to look up.

  Lo
ok up and see that Professor Kitteredge wasn’t holding his lighter. Instead, he was holding a switchblade knife covered in blood.

  “What’s that?” Gus said, even though he recognized the thing in the professor’s hand. His mind simply refused to accept what his eyes were seeing.

  “I’ve got to give it to you,” Shawn said. “I didn’t think he could make it happen, but when he got to the end, he really did tie up the entire murder.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Shoot him!”

  Carlton Lassiter tensed his muscles and waited for the lead to slam into his flesh. If he was going to die, let it be at the hands of his fellow officers.

  Because he was going to die. There was no way around it. This was the kind of situation no one walked away from. Professor Langston Kitteredge had him pinned against his body with one of his massive arms; the other was pressing the bloody switchblade against his neck. Facing them was a line of guns, each in the hands of a member of the Santa Barbara Police Department. Either Lassiter was going to be brought down in a storm of police bullets or the knife at his throat was going to slit him open.

  “Hold your fire!”

  Lassiter tried to turn his head to see who was speaking, but the blade dug into his flesh, stopping him. It didn’t matter—he’d know that voice anywhere. It belonged to his partner.

  “Don’t listen to her!” Lassiter shouted at the assembled police. “Take him down!”

  “Hold your fire!” O’Hara commanded again. “We are going to end this with no bloodshed.”

  Not a chance, Lassiter thought. There was going to be blood, and lots of it. His and his captor’s.

  Lassiter didn’t mind dying. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. In fact, he had lots of things to live for. First up, he had tickets to see the newly re-re-reformed Journey in a week, and he was hugely curious to see if new lead singer, Angel Pineda, could fill the shoes of Jeff Scott Soto, who had failed to fill the shoes of Steve Augeri, who had in turn failed to fill the enormous vocal shoes of Steve Perry.

  But though he yearned for life, Lassiter knew that death was preferable to the alternative—that a murderer go free because of him.

  This was entirely his fault. There was no other way to look at it. He’d had Langston Kitteredge in his custody. He should have cuffed him to the table and forced the truth out of him. But he’d been lazy. Weak. Foolish. He’d ignored the first law of the homicide detective—to treat everyone as a suspect until proven innocent. Instead, he’d assumed that Kitteredge was a friendly witness, and failed to notice the warning signs until it was too late.

  How could he have been so blind? The way Kitteredge had droned on and on, avoiding the slightest trace of useful information while drowning him in a sea of historical trivia—in retrospect, it was so obvious that this was the professor’s way of lulling him into complacency, or even into a coma. But Lassiter had treated it as if it were nothing more than an irritating tic. Now he was paying the price.

  He’d had his chance to act. There was that one second when Kitteredge pulled the bloody knife out of his pocket and flicked open the blade. Lassiter hadn’t been wearing his gun in the interview room, of course—that would have been an unforgivable breach of protocol. But he was trained in hand-to-hand combat, and he had no doubt that if he’d acted swiftly enough he could have disarmed the professor. Especially since Kitteredge had spent the first couple of seconds staring down at the blade in feigned surprise, as if he’d originally hoped to convince the police that he had no idea how it had ended up in his pocket.

  But before Lassiter could leap into action, the professor did. He grabbed the detective and jammed the knife’s blade against his throat.

  “You did this to me!” Kitteredge whispered savagely into his ear.

  “Drop the knife!” Lassiter commanded, but the professor didn’t seem to hear him.

  “I know who’s behind this,” Kitteredge said. “You’re just a pawn. It’s Polidori. It’s the Cabal!”

  Before Lassiter could come up with an answer, the door to the interrogation room flew open. For one brief second Lassiter’s heart leaped at the thought that SWAT was coming to take Kitteredge out. Then those idiots, Spencer and Guster, burst in.

  “Professor Kitteredge, what are you doing?” Gus said.

  “He’s part of it!” Kitteredge shouted.

  “If you mean part of the reason American policemen have such a bad reputation, I can’t argue with you,” Shawn said. “Beyond that, I don’t think he’s part of anything.”

  “He’s part of the conspiracy,” Kitteredge said. “They killed Clay Filkins and now they’re framing me for it. And he knows who’s behind it.”

  “Lassie?” Shawn said. “He doesn’t know who’s behind anything. The music. The green door. The Valley of the Dolls.”

  “I think that last one is beyond,” Gus said.

  “He doesn’t know any beyonds, either,” Shawn said. “In fact, he really doesn’t know much of anything. Which he’ll be happy to demonstrate if you’ll let him go.”

  “I can’t!” Kitteredge said. “I’ve gotten too close to them, and they’ll do anything to stop me. But I won’t let them.” Kitteredge’s blade dug deeper into Lassiter’s throat. “I don’t want to hurt him, but I will if I have to.”

  “Get out of here, Spencer,” Lassiter said, feeling the air pressing back against the knife as it struggled up through his constricted throat. “I can handle this.”

  “Yes, I can see you’re right on top of things,” Shawn said. “Sorry we interrupted.”

  Shawn turned back toward the door. Gus grabbed his arm. “We can’t just leave them here.”

  “You heard what Lassie said,” Shawn said. “He’s got it under control.”

  “But this is all a terrible mistake,” Gus said. “Professor K thinks Lassie framed him, Lassie thinks the professor is a murderer, and unless we can convince them they’re both wrong, somebody is going to get hurt. Or killed.”

  “That’s why I said we should have gone to the C. Thomas Howell Film Festival instead of the museum,” Shawn said. While he was talking he started to move around the edges of the room. “Very few people have ever died watching CyberMaster, and those who have all worked on the film and realized only while they were watching the credits that they forgot to request to be listed by their pseudonyms. Whereas everyone knows that nine-tenths of the murders in the free world happen in art museums.”

  It took Gus a moment to figure out what Shawn was doing, but then he realized. He was trying to get behind Kitteredge.

  “What are you talking about?” Gus said. If there was any chance for Shawn’s plan to work, Gus had to keep the professor’s eyes on him. “This isn’t about museum crime. This is about a global conspiracy—one that’s already claimed one victory tonight and is about to take two more. We can’t let that happen.”

  Kitteredge turned to Gus with gratitude in his eyes. For a moment, the hand holding the knife seemed to relax.

  “Now!” Gus shouted. Which might have been exactly the right thing to say if Shawn had been the only one in the room planning to make a move. Because at Gus’ command, Shawn leaped across the room to tackle Kitteredge.

  Unfortunately, Shawn wasn’t the only one in the room planning to make a move. Lassiter was, too. And as he felt the knife slacken away from his throat, he drove an elbow straight back into Kitteredge’s stomach. The professor doubled at the point of impact—and Shawn flew right over him, crashing onto the table, then sliding off and landing hard on the floor.

  Lassiter struggled to free himself, but even as he gasped for breath the professor wouldn’t let go. He jammed the knife back against the detective’s throat as he pulled himself upright again.

  Kitteredge dragged Lassiter to the interrogation room door. “We’re getting out of here,” he said. Then he turned a baleful eye on Gus. “You don’t understand the forces you’re dealing with.”

  Kitteredge shoved Lassiter to the door, pulled it open, and dragged him thro
ugh, making sure it closed behind them. From inside, Lassiter could hear Gus, and then Shawn and Gus, pounding to be let out.

  The squad room was still only about half full as the night shift filtered out and the day watch began to check in. But there were at least twenty police officers and detectives between Kitteredge and the front door. And there was no way Lassiter was going to allow him to get away. Not even if it cost him his life. “He’s got a knife!” Lassiter shouted.

  From across the squad room, guns flew out of holsters, of drawers, of lockers. They were all pointed directly at Kitteredge—and at him.

  “Put down your weapons,” Kitteredge said. “No one needs to get hurt.”

  “Don’t listen to him!” Lassiter commanded, bracing himself for the sweet sting of lead. “Shoot!”

  “Hold your fire,” O’Hara said.

  She stepped into Lassiter’s line of sight. She wouldn’t look at his face, though. No doubt she was as ashamed of what he’d allowed to happen as he was. She stared directly over Lassiter’s shoulder into Kitteredge’s eyes.

  “Professor Kitteredge,” she said as calmly as if she were going to offer him a stick of gum, “I need you to drop the weapon.”

  “I can’t do that,” Kitteredge said. “They’re coming for me.”

  “And we can protect you,” O’Hara said.

  “Like you protected Filkins?” Kitteredge said. “He was killed right under your noses.”

  “We didn’t know about the conspiracy before,” O’Hara said. “Now we do, thanks to you. And with your help, we can shut it down for good.”

  “Stop talking to him,” Lassiter barked. “Move away and shoot him.”

  “You’re not helping, Carlton,” O’Hara said. “Besides, Professor Kitteredge needs you alive, because you have special knowledge about the conspiracy. If you die, it dies with you.”

  “There is no conspiracy,” Lassiter nearly shrieked with frustration. “There’s just a lunatic with a knife at my throat—and you can’t let him get away!”

  O’Hara shot him a brief, chiding look, then turned her attention back to Kitteredge. “We can help you, Professor,” she said. “We can work together to figure out who killed Filkins, and who put that bloody knife in your pocket.”