William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

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.

Look 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.”

“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.