Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild (11 page)

There was a flash of uncertainty on the cop’s face. An officer on beach patrol spends his life confiscating beers, finding lost children, and putting out bonfires. None of these activities brings him in contact with the elite of Santa Barbara, who either own their own beach or know someone who does, and therefore he is rarely threatened with the force of the local political establishment. This cop didn’t seem particularly intimidated by Shawn’s warning, but he was intrigued enough to signal his fellow officers to back off a step.

“Are you threatening me?” the officer said.

“Of course not,” Gus said before Shawn could answer.

“I don’t threaten people, Officer,” Shawn said. “My lawyer does. Of course most of the time the person he’s threatening is me because I haven’t paid my bill. But the point remains, that scrunched-up old geezer in the wheelchair is my client, and if you don’t let us through to see him, all sorts of bad things are going to happen.”

“Like what?” the officer said.

“Well, for one thing, a late-model automobile is going to rise up out of the bay like the
Red October,
” Shawn said. “And do you really want to hear Sean Connery trying to sound Russian? Wasn’t the Spanish accent in
Highlander
painful enough for you?”

Up until this moment, Gus had been feeling pretty good about the new day. As frustrated as he was by Shawn’s refusal to explain what they were doing at the beach, the idea that he really had found the mime promised that today would be substantially better than the previous one. But now the officer was fingering the snap on his holster, and Gus was beginning to anticipate a second day of staring into gun barrels.

The other two uniformed officers joined them at the tape. One of them was as tanned and lined as the first, but the other, Gus was pleased to see, was both pale and wrinkle-free.

“What’s going on here?” the pale cop said.

“These two clowns claim they’re private detectives,” the first officer said.

“Actually, only this clown claimed to be a private detective,” Shawn said. “The other clown is too much of a chicken to have said anything, and in fact is wishing that I had never woken him up this morning.”

“Really?” Gus said. “You think it’s better to be a clown than a chicken?”

“People rarely coat clowns in batter and drop them into boiling oil,” Shawn said.

“There’s always a first time,” Gus said.

The pale officer looked at Shawn, then at Gus. “I’ve seen these two around crime scenes before,” he said. “I think I even escorted them off one once at the instruction of Detective Lassiter, but he had me bring them back right after. So what is it you want here?”

“I was trying to ward off disaster,” Shawn said. “But it looks like I’m too late.”

A dozen yards beyond the surf’s edge, the bay had begun to boil. At least that’s what it looked like to Gus. The surface of the water was bubbling; waves seemed to be breaking far from shore. And then the waters parted and a shiny black object bobbed to the surface. As the water poured off it, Gus could see it was a long Town Car floating on an enormous inflatable raft.

“I’m warning you, if Alec Baldwin steps out of that thing, no one tell him he’s been replaced by Harrison Ford,” Shawn said. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention the name Ben Affleck.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

G
us stared at the floating car, amazed. Not so much at the car itself, of course. He’d lived in Santa Barbara long enough to understand what he was seeing here. The car had driven off the cliffs that towered above this beach and fallen into the water. A team of rescue divers had been sent in to bring it up. They would have spent the last hour painstakingly stretching the uninflated raft underneath the car’s tires. And then, when the vehicle was situated exactly in its center, they would have inflated the raft. The buoyancy would have brought it, and the car, up to the surface, where it could be towed to shore.

No, what amazed Gus was not the way the police were able to get a car off the bay’s floor. It was that Shawn knew it was going to happen. More precisely, it was that Shawn knew it was going to happen and hadn’t bothered to mention it to him.

“Do you have something to do with that car?” the pale officer asked.

“Only to the extent that it’s registered to the law firm of Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss,” Shawn said. “And that Oliver Rushton is sitting down at the water’s edge waiting to find out what it was doing in Peter Tork’s locker.”

“He means Davy Jones’ locker,” Gus explained quickly, before any of the officers could start using the clubs they carried on their belts.

“I never liked Davy Jones much,” Shawn said. “He was always too pretty for me to believe him as a struggling musician. Plus, how big a star could he have been if he had time to play Marcia Brady’s school dance—and for free, at that?”

The pale officer studied Shawn again, and then jerked his thumb back at the man in the wheelchair. “If Oliver Rushton is waiting for you, then you’d better go see him,” he said. “But I’m keeping my eye on you.”

“You really believe this guy?” one of the other beach patrol officers said. “Maybe we should escort him down.”

“Believe me, if Mr. Rushton doesn’t want to talk to him, we’ll know pretty fast,” the pale officer said. “And if he does, you don’t want him to know the name of the cop who kept them apart.”

The tanned officer grimaced, but he moved aside and let Shawn and Gus walk down the beach towards the man in the wheelchair.

“What are we doing here?” Gus whispered to Shawn as soon as they were out of the cops’ earshot.

“You know as much as I do,” Shawn said. Then he slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, no, you don’t. Because while I was doing intensive research, you were sleeping.”

“The only kind of intensive research you’ve ever done is copy off my test paper,” Gus said.

“Not entirely,” Shawn said. “Remember when we had to do that book report on
The Three Musketeers
and you wouldn’t let me read what you had written?”

“Because the time before, you copied my report and turned it in first, so I got blamed for stealing from you,” Gus said.

“That was the first time I had to do my own intensive research,” Shawn said. “And it taught me a valuable lesson I still follow today.”

“You were so worried, you stayed up half the night flipping channels,” Gus said. “And by sheer luck you found a station showing a movie of
The Three Musketeers,
so you wrote your report on that, which might have worked, except you kept referring to D’Artagnan as Logan and speculating about why the Sandmen didn’t take out Cardinal Richelieu, since he was clearly over thirty.”

“Exactly,” Shawn said. “Which is what I did last night. Only without the whole
Three Musketeers
movie thing, which is too bad because I was hoping to pick up a few fancy fencing moves. But, instead, I came across a report on the early-morning news about a high-speed car chase that ended with a Town Car flying off the palisades and into the ocean.”

“That explains what the car is doing in the water,” Gus said. “And it explains why the police are here. But it doesn’t explain why you thought this had anything to do with the mime.”

“During the chase, the police were able to run the Town Car’s plates and discover that it was registered to the law firm of Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss. Which, if you were extremely familiar with the firm and didn’t feel like using its entire name every time it came up in conversation, could easily be abbreviated as Rushmore.”

“No, it couldn’t,” Gus said.

“I’m pretty sure it could,” Shawn said. “Let’s see—you take the first part of Morelock. That’s the ‘More.’ And then you slap that together with the first part of Rushton. That gives you

‘Rush.’ You put them together and you get something like—wait for it—More Rush. No, better still: Rushmore.”

“But that’s not how law firms abbreviate their names,” Gus said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not,” Gus said. “Maybe it’s because the senior partners like to hear their names said out loud. If Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss is too long, they’ll just call it Rushton Morelock.”

Out in the water, Gus could see divers tying nylon ropes to eyes in the raft. One of the divers gathered all the ropes together and started swimming towards the shore.

“Are you sure about that?” Shawn asked.

“I’ve read every one of John Grisham’s books,” Gus said. “And that’s how they do it.”

“Well, then, there are two possibilities,” Shawn said. “One is that John Grisham isn’t always right—which you have to admit seems a lot more plausible after that book about the football player who went to Rome and ate pizza.”

“What’s the other one?” Gus said.

“That we’re about to make a mortal enemy out of one of the most powerful men in Santa Barbara,” Shawn said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he man in the wheelchair didn’t seem to notice Shawn and Gus as they came up behind him. His eyes were fixed on the spot in the water where the Town Car bobbed on the waves. But before they were within a dozen feet of him, he spoke out in a voice that was cragged with age and grief.

“I said I wanted to be alone,” he said, without looking around to see who was coming up behind him.

“And I said I wanted my breakfast burrito with no meat, but when Patty the waitress brought it, it had more bacon in it than anything else,” Shawn said. “And you know why that is? Because Patty knows that when I say ‘no bacon,’ what I mean is stick in as much of the pig as can possibly fit inside a tortilla, including the snout and the trotters.”

Now the man did turn around. If he was surprised to see Shawn and Gus, he didn’t betray it with even the slightest look. Typical, Gus figured. A guy like this probably hasn’t been surprised by anything since Pearl Harbor.

“And which part of the pig are you?” he said, giving them a long, appraising look.

“I’m Shawn Spencer,” Shawn said. “I’m a private detective. And this is my henchman, Bertie O’Myrmidon. Or he’s my myrmidon, Bertie O’Henchman. I keep getting that confused.”

Normally Gus would have jumped in and given his real name at this point in the conversation. But one look at Rushton suggested he might be better off if the old man didn’t know who he was. Even confined to an electric wheelchair that had sunk an inch into the sand, he seemed to tower over Shawn and Gus. His hand-tailored gray suit, his perfectly symmetrical fingernails, his shoes cobbled from the hides of several endangered species—all these announced his great wealth. But there was something else about the man, something money couldn’t buy, that exuded power.

Up the beach, a winch started up with a loud whine, and the raft began to float in towards the shore. The old man turned back to watch its approach.

“I’ve hired and fired the best private detectives in the country,” Rushton said. “I’ve never heard of you.”

“Yes, you have,” Shawn said.

If he thought he could do it without Rushton’s noticing, Gus would have kicked Shawn. Or at least held his head under the water until he stopped struggling. Until this moment they had been doing just fine without antagonizing one of the few men in Santa Barbara whose name scared even your average beat cop. He didn’t know what kind of enemy Rushton would turn out to be, but he wasn’t so curious he felt compelled to do the research.

“You overestimate yourself, Mr. Spencer.”

Gus winced. Bad enough he was rich and powerful; he had to have a good memory as well.

“Not at all,” Shawn said. “Guy like you wants to hire and fire the best, first he’s got to make sure they’re really the best. Which means studying all the competition, just in case there’s some new best guy you could brag about firing instead.”

Gus had the strong sensation that if Rushton lifted his arm and spoke the right word, lightning would flash down out of the clear blue sky and strike Shawn dead. Or, with Shawn’s luck, miss him and strike Gus dead instead. But when he sidled around the wheelchair to get a glimpse of the old lawyer’s face, Gus thought he could see a trace of a smile there.

“Maybe you’re right,” Rushton said. “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here, unless you’ve tracked me down simply to give me a baseline for comparison.”

“We’re here for the same reason you are,” Shawn said. “Because while we know the truth, we’re still hoping against hope that it’s actually some unlucky joyrider in that Town Car, and not one of your closest and most dedicated employees.”

The raft had reached the shore a few dozen feet away from them. Rushton didn’t waste a glance on Shawn. He hit a lever on his armrest and the wheelchair powered out of its rut, cutting two deep lines in the sand as it headed towards the Town Car.

“What are you doing?” Gus whispered to Shawn as they followed Rushton’s chair.

“Same thing we’ve been doing since yesterday,” Shawn said. “Looking for a necklace.”

By the time they reached the Town Car, one of the police divers was already reaching for the handle on the driver’s-side door. Gus noticed that before he pulled it he glanced at Rushton, and waited until the lawyer gave him a curt nod of approval.

The diver yanked on the door handle and jumped back as salt water flooded out of the interior and soaked into the wet sand. As he jumped back to keep his shoes from getting soaked, Gus saw that there was a man belted into the driver’s seat. His white shirt and khaki slacks were, not surprisingly, soaked through; his dark hair was plastered to his head.

One of the cops stepped in Gus’ line of sight, so he didn’t have a chance to get a good look at the dead man’s face. But he saw enough to be pretty sure it wasn’t covered in white makeup, and there was no doubt its owner wasn’t wearing a blue-and-white-striped shirt, white gloves, and a beret. If this man was their mime, there didn’t seem to be an easy way to prove it.