William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

Of course, this was work that could easily occupy two detectives full time, and he was burning to jump onto the more useful parts of the investigation. But he needed to finish up with Kitteredge first, even if that meant spending the rest of his natural life span stuck in the interrogation room.

Lassiter took a deep breath and was attempting to brace himself for the onslaught of useless knowledge when the door to the observation room swung open and Detective O’Hara put her head out. He could see Shawn and Gus sitting behind her, smirking at his failure.

“Are you almost done, Carlton?” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do on this case, and we don’t have all night for chitchat with the prof.”

“If you think you can do it faster, be my guest,” Lassiter said.

“Not after you’ve spent all this time building rapport with the man,” O’Hara said. “Now get moving. There’s a murderer out there, and we’ve got to stop him before he kills again.”

For the past five hours there had been nothing for

Shawn and Gus to do besides listen to Kitteredge expatiate on a series of subjects, each of which managed to be less interesting to Shawn than the one before. At least, Gus kept telling Shawn there was nothing else for them to do.

For his part, Shawn could think of plenty of other things. They could go home and go to bed, for instance. Or they could swing by the Bijoux and see if C. Thomas Howell’s appearance fee at the festival included sweeping up after the show. Or, as Shawn suggested after a particularly riveting aside detailing the chemical composition of oil paint and how it had remained remarkably unchanged over several centuries-unless it had changed equally remarkably over that same period, Shawn thought he’d dozed off somewhere in the middle of this passage-they could throw themselves off Santa Barbara Pier and see if they washed up in Japan before Kitteredge finished talking.

When Lassiter stepped out to take his break, Shawn was ready to drag Gus out of the observation room even if it meant clubbing him over the head with a chair first. But his mood changed when he saw the detective heading back into interrogation. Lassie looked so defeated, so close to cracking, that Shawn knew whatever happened next was going to be good.

Shawn pulled his chair up to the glass next to Gus’ and lowered the volume on the speakers as O’Hara stepped out to start making calls to museums on the East Coast, which would be opening for business about now.

“Don’t tell me you’re finally going to admit this is interesting,” Gus said.

“Don’t worry. I won’t,” Shawn said. “But maybe it will be in a minute. I think Lassiter got his gun during the break.”

A look of concern flashed over Gus’ face, but he quickly dismissed the thought. “You just watch,” he said. “Professor K is going to tie this entire case up in the next couple of minutes.”

“Professor K couldn’t tie his shoelaces without explaining the entire history of footwear,” Shawn said. “He hasn’t even begun to talk about the last century, let alone the current one.”

“That’s his genius,” Gus said. “He talk and he talks, throwing out more fascinating facts than you think any one man could ever hope to know. And then, just when you think you’re going to float forever on an aimless sea of knowledge, he comes up with the one tiny piece of information that pulls it all together. It’s kind of like what you do in your summations.”

“Except that my summations are never longer, duller, and more pretentious than The Matrix Revolutions,” Shawn said. “In fact, until tonight I didn’t think anything could be.”

“Pretentious?” Gus was astonished. “Professor K doesn’t have to pretend anything. He’s the real deal. Everything he says is valid and important.”

Shawn didn’t say anything. He reached over and flicked the volume back up again. Professor Kitteredge’s voice filled the small room. “You have to understand that according to the “Fifteen Discourses” that Reynolds delivered to students at the Royal Academy, the only way for a young artist to learn to create works of high moral and artistic worth was to copy the old masters and to sketch from-”

Shawn flipped the volume down again. “Valid and important,” he said.

But Gus was leaning forward in his chair, eyes lit up with excitement. “This is it,” he said. “Watch.”

“Watch what?” Shawn said. “Is Lassiter finally going to use his nightstick?”

“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.