Psych: The Call Of The Mild Part 9

And then there was the mime. He had been desperate to get the necklace-desperate enough to risk a daring daylight robbery. But who was he? They briefly considered the idea that he was the JPL employee who had smuggled the chip out of the lab in the first place and then had developed second thoughts. But while that seemed to simplify things at first, it quickly led to far greater complications. Because if he had put the chip in the locket, then he was probably also the one who'd left it at the lost and found. Which meant he would have known where it was-and the mime hadn't. If he had, there would have been no need to disguise himself and wait for Shawn and Gus to retrieve the necklace before taking it away from them. He could simply have asked for it at the booth.

And then there was the "Rushmore" he'd insisted he was protecting. A Google search of the word turned up multiple references to the mountain, the movie, and a Manhattan condo tower, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with purloined jewelry, public gardens, or the art of mime.

No matter how many times they turned their few facts over, they kept coming back to Ellen Svaco at the center of the mystery. Which was entirely unacceptable, because Ellen Svaco was the one part of the puzzle they weren't allowed to investigate.

If this had been a normal case, Shawn and Gus would have dived into Ellen Svaco's private life. They would have searched her house and car. They would have gone to her funeral to see who else showed up to mourn-and which of the mourners didn't seem particularly sorry to see her go. They might even have attempted to go undercover as subst.i.tute teachers at her school.

But each of those routes led almost inevitably to a single roadblock: Henry Spencer. Shawn had learned the fundamentals of detective work at his father's knee-or sometimes across his father's knee, if Shawn had been the subject of Henry's investigation-and the instincts that would be driving Shawn would also be driving his father. Shawn had promised Henry he'd stay out of Ellen's murder, and unless he could figure out a retroactive weasel, he was stuck with the pledge.

The remaining pathways were much less appealing. The only obvious one was to knock on JPL's front door and ask if they happened to be missing a microchip or two, and if they might happen to know what was on it. But it seemed unlikely that the guard at the front gate would be willing or able to share that information with a couple of guys who happened to walk up to him. In a normal situation they'd try to come up with a way to get into the lab posing as scientists or journalists or any other kind of "ists," but JPL had made national news a few years back for forcing its longtime employees to sign waivers allowing government inspectors to dig into every aspect of their lives from birth onwards. It seemed unlikely that a pair of private detectives could slip into the facility by claiming they'd left their ID badges at home.

That left the mime as the sole loose end they might be able to pick up. But this presented a few problems as well. Like the fact that he was a mime. His face had been completely covered by makeup, his hair by a beret, and his hands by white gloves. Even if they had any idea where to start looking, they'd never be able to identify him unless he hadn't bothered to de-mime himself in the intervening hours.

Shawn and Gus spent the evening trying to find a way into the case, stopping once only long enough to send out for pizza and then again to tear the office apart collecting change when the deliveryman arrived and they realized they didn't have enough cash to cover the check.

By midnight they were both halfway to sleep and no closer to a solution. An hour later Gus was looking for his car keys and declaring he was going home as soon as they'd made a little more progress. Fifteen minutes after that he was snoring on the office couch.

Not that he was slacking, Gus told himself as his eyes fluttered closed. The th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t problems are never solved in the conscious mind; the solutions have to bubble up from the subconscious. And what better way to access his subconscious than to let it have free rein for a couple of minutes? If he napped for just a couple of minutes he would certainly wake up with the answer on the tip of this tongue.

He'd used that argument with himself in the past, and it had never worked. He'd wake up a few hours later barely able to remember which member of En Vogue he was about to marry in his dream, let alone a solution to any problem that was plaguing him when he drifted off.

But this time turned out to be different. Because this time when he woke up, the solution was right there. Only it wasn't on the tip of his tongue. It was on Shawn's.

"I've found the mime," he said.

Chapter Seventeen.

The sun had crested the hills east of Santa Barbara, the fog had retreated to the horizon, and the ocean was sparkling in the morning light. The waves off Hendry's Beach should have been filled with surfers finis.h.i.+ng up their predawn runs.

But the few surfers who were here were out of the water, pressed up against a line of crime scene tape thirty feet back from the berm. Beyond the tape a small battalion of uniformed officers and red-jacketed lifeguards patrolled the sand, keeping the crowd of onlookers away from the wet-suited divers who were emerging from the surf. The only onlooker allowed inside the police perimeter was an ancient man in an electric wheelchair, who sat at the waterline staring sadly out to sea.

Shawn and Gus made their way through the crowd to the tape.

"You still haven't explained what we're doing here," Gus said.

"Because sometimes words aren't enough," Shawn said. "A strong visual can convey all the meaning of pages worth of verbiage in so much less time."

"Does that include all the time since you woke me up to tell me you'd found the mime?" Gus said. "Because it's been more than two hours, and you can fit a lot of words into one hundred and twenty-seven minutes."

"Don't forget, a chunk of that time was spent eating breakfast," Shawn said. "You wouldn't want me to talk with my mouth full. That would be rude."

"In between bites, I'm sure you could have squeezed in an answer to a simple question or two," Gus said. "Like 'what do you mean you found the mime?' "

"You've got a point," Shawn said. "That would have taken only six words: 'I mean I found the mime.' Or I could have answered your follow-up question, 'Where is the mime?' That would have been only three words."

"And if you had taken a break between bites of your breakfast burrito, which three words would you have used?"

"In regard to the mime's current location?" Shawn jerked his thumb towards the divers emerging from the surf. "In the water."

He lifted the crime scene tape and ducked under it. Just as Gus joined him on the other side, a uniformed officer stepped in front of them.

"Hey!" the officer said. "Didn't you see the tape?"

"Of course I saw it," Shawn said. "That's why I ducked under it. If I hadn't noticed it, I'd probably still be stuck in place, trying to figure out why I couldn't move forward."

The officer put a beefy hand on Shawn's shoulder. "Did you happen to notice the words written across the tape?" he said.

"He didn't bother," Gus said. "Because a strong visual can convey so much more than any number of words."

"And a patrol car can convey your a.s.s straight to jail if you don't step behind the tape," the officer said.

Gus glanced down the beach and saw that two other officers had noticed the disturbance and were on their way to a.s.sist. He and Shawn had met a lot of cops in the years since they'd been working as private eyes, but the ones patrolling this scene didn't seem to be among them. Not surprising, since the officer blocking their way had a deep tan and premature wrinkles strongly suggesting he had been working beach patrol for many years, and try as they might to get beachfront crimes, Psych's cases rarely brought Shawn and Gus down to the ocean.

"Maybe we should do what the officer suggests," Gus said.

"That would be the prudent course of action," Shawn said.

"You've got that right," the officer agreed.

"Unfortunately, we're not prudes," Shawn said. "We're private detectives, and we've been asked to meet our client on this very beach at this very time."

"Are you, now?" the officer asked, although the question mark seemed to Gus to be more of a rhetorical device than an indication of true curiosity.

"We are now," Shawn said. "We also were then. And we still will be ten minutes from now, which is more than I can say for you and your present job as a police officer if you prevent me from speaking to my client, who happens to be one of the richest and most powerful men in Santa Barbara."

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 antic.i.p.ate 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 La.s.siter, 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 sh.o.r.e. And then the waters parted and a s.h.i.+ny 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."

Chapter Eighteen.

Gus 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 sh.o.r.e.

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 sh.o.r.e.

"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.

Chapter Nineteen.

The 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.