William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

“The sounding board is a vital part of any stringed instrument,” Shawn said. “It doesn’t matter how brilliant a fiddler is if you can’t hear him because his violin doesn’t have an f-hole.”

“I’m tired of being the f-hole in this partnership,” Gus said.

“Now, give.”

Shawn fidgeted in his chair. He stood up and crossed the room, then crossed back. “Okay, here’s how I see it,” he finally said. “There was a locket.”

“With you so far.”

“Someone had that locket.” Shawn grimaced. “And then that locket. .. Can’t I just use a couple of rhetorical questions here if I promise not to wait for an answer?”

Gus gave him a stony stare. “Keep going.”

“The someone who had that locket was supposed to pass it on to Ellen Svaco for reasons we don’t know,” Shawn said.

“The someone brought it to La Canada and dropped it off at the Descanso Gardens lost and found.”

“But why come to La Canada in the first place?” Gus said.

“Why not come straight to Santa Barbara if it was meant for Ellen Svaco?”

“Aha!” Shawn leveled an accusatory finger at Gus. “Now you’re doing it.”

“Yes, but my question was sincere,” Gus said. “I wasn’t laying a trap so I could demonstrate the superiority of my thinking.”

“Is that really what you think I do?”

“That’s a question,” Gus said.

“You can’t solve a mystery without asking questions,” Shawn said. “Because the solution to any puzzle lies in the correct phrasing of the problem. If you don’t pose the right questions, you can never reach the right answers. So when I throw my questions at you, it’s not a challenge to your intelligence. It’s me trying to frame the case in the proper context.”

Gus thought this over, then let out a sigh. “I’m going to regret this, but go ahead.”

Shawn beamed. “Okay, first question: Why was the locket in La Canada?”

Gus waited. Shawn drummed his fingers on the desk. Tapped his feet on the chair leg. Cleared his throat. “You need to answer,” he said.

“Why?” Gus said. “If this is an exercise in the proper framing of the puzzle, why do you need me to answer? Just keep on with the questions.”

Shawn stared down at the desk. “I need you to say something stupid.”

“Uh-uh,” Gus said.

“It doesn’t mean I think you’re stupid,” Shawn said quickly.

“But if you don’t give me the wrong answer, I don’t think I can come up with the right one.”

“What if I give you the right answer?”

“Okay,” Shawn said. “What if?”

“Are you saying I never come up with the right answer?” Gus demanded.

“That’s not to say that it couldn’t happen,” Shawn said.

“That would be like saying Jay Leno will never tell a funny joke.”

Gus glared at him. “What if I give you the right answer at this very moment?”

“Then I will give you all the credit for solving the case,” Shawn said. “I will put your name on the door. I will tell people you’re my partner and not my assistant even when you’re not in the room.”

Gus decided to let this pass. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start with the locket. Describe what you saw.”

Shawn closed his eyes and thought back. The locket was a simple gold-plated heart on a chain. It was clearly old, as the plating had rubbed off in one spot, but so cheap it would never be considered an antique. Inside it were facing pictures of two homely people, hand-cropped badly enough so that some of the green plastic backing showed behind them.

“Green plastic,” Shawn said. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“That’s not how this works,” Shawn said. “You were going to give me the right answer.”

“I was,” Gus said. “But now you’ve figured it out. And there’s no way you can keep yourself from telling me about it.”

“Watch me,” Shawn said.

For a moment, the two of them sat in silence. Then Gus got up and gave Shawn’s desk chair a shove, sending him rolling away from the desk. He stood over the computer and typed into a search engine.

“Let’s see,” Gus said as a Web site popped up in response. “Fun facts about La Canada Flintridge. One: While the ‘Canada’ part refers to the Spanish word for gorge or ravine, ‘Flintridge’ refers to nothing at all, since there is no flinty ridge here. Two: It’s the USA’s eighty-fifth most expensive city to live in. Three: Kevin Costner’s ex-wife owns a restaurant here which is locally famous for its breakfasts.”

“That’s it,” Shawn said. “Clearly this is all part of the global conspiracy to get Cindy Costner’s pancake recipe.”

Gus ignored him and kept reading. “Four: There’s a decades-long feud between La Canada and neighbor Pasadena over which city should be listed in news stories as the location of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Five-”

“Don’t stop now,” Shawn said. “I want to know more about the pancakes.”

“JPL is in La Canada,” Gus said, quickly typing in the search engine again. “It’s less than five miles from Descanso Gardens.”

“Amazing,” Shawn said. “If only we had thought to ask why this all happened in La Canada.”

But Gus wasn’t going to take the bait now. Because he had the answer. “And that backing in the locket wasn’t plastic,” he said. “It was silicon.”

There was a lot Gus didn’t like about being a detective. The danger, for one. Although being threatened with imminent doom might sound exciting, after the first couple of times it began to get really old. And then there were the hours. Gus never had a problem with working hard, but he did like to know exactly when he could expect to knock off for the day, and that was rarely the case in an investigation.

For all the inconveniences, though, there were some things about the job that he loved enough to put up with anything. Best of all was the moment when a baffling mystery revealed itself into a crystalline, perfect solution.

This, unfortunately, was not one of those times.

Both Shawn and Gus were fairly certain that they had solved at least one part of the crime. The necklace was being used to smuggle a computer chip full of information out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was a safe bet that whatever that information was it had some sort of national security implications, since it seemed improbable that Ellen Svaco would have been killed simply so someone could find out what the weather was like on Mars.

Beyond that, however, they were stumped.

Clearly, Ellen Svaco had been some kind of courier. She was supposed to have picked up the chip and then delivered it somewhere else. But there was no way to tell whom she was working for, or why they might have chosen an elementary school teacher for the job. Had she even known what she would be transporting? The fact that she had hired Psych to retrieve it from the lost and found suggested she’d known that someone else was after it, but nothing more than that.

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.