William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

“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 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.”

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 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.”