A Fatal Frame of Mind

Chapter Four

Despite his irritation at Shawn’s horror of museums, Gus hadn’t actually set foot inside one in years, except for a few times when he’d had to go on a case, and then he’d spent his entire visit looking for clues, not admiring the art.

But there had been a time when he was prepared to devote his life to the study of art history. Granted, it could only be considered a “time” in the way a grain of sand can be thought of as a boulder, but for the four or five weeks of his college career during which he intended to major in art history, Gus was completely enthralled by the subject. He was already planning a career hopping the globe, revealing minor artworks hidden under major masterpieces and discovering the true provenance of pieces never before believed to be the work of the old masters, when he took his first midterm and realized that he’d been so busy astonishing the art world in his mind he’d completely forgotten to memorize the names, dates, or painters of the several dozen works of art he was expected to identify in a slide show. Humiliated by his failure, Gus dropped the survey course and moved on to a new major.

But during that period when his interest had been riveted on art history, the prime riveter was a professor named Langston Kitteredge. Professor K, as he was known to his graduate students, was to his field what Indiana Jones had been to archeology, with the slight difference that Kitteredge was not fictional and therefore looked more like the animal on California’s state flag than like a movie star. He had a love for art that spilled over into a passion for adventure, and he made the two seem like one.

It was an adventure that Gus almost became a part of. Gus had stopped by his office to ask a question one afternoon as Kitteredge was explicating the theory behind his next research expedition in hopes of persuading some of his more promising students to come along with him. The professor, an expert in the Pre-Raphaelites and their work, had been studying a painting of Hamlet’s drowned girlfriend, Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, with particular emphasis on the setting. The picture, painted in the second half of the nineteenth century, was famous for its realistic depiction of the flora of the river and riverbank, and Kitteredge had hoped to prove that its setting was not, as was commonly believed, the banks of the Hogsmill River in Ewell but some other mysterious location. He was about to explain exactly why he found this so crucially important-and why he was particularly interested in the image of a water vole that had originally swum beside Ophelia’s corpse but had later been painted out-when his TA brought in the test scores so that Kitteredge could discover just how little promise Gus actually showed in the field.

Gus had found an excuse to slink out of the office before his shame could be revealed, and ran directly to the registrar’s office to drop the class. That was the last time he’d seen Langston Kitteredge.

But it was the rare month that went by without Gus thinking about his old professor. It wasn’t that he regretted not spending his life in the study of old paintings. But he’d rarely met anyone whose passion for life, whose devotion to his obsessions, was so total. He couldn’t help but wonder every now and again what he might have done with himself if he had actually spent a few minutes studying for that midterm.

When Gus had received the letter, he’d been stunned. Not so much at the fact that Kitteredge was asking for help, but at the very idea that the professor had any idea who he was. With all the students that passed through his classes every year, with all the yearning souls desperate to join the ranks of slavish acolytes, it was amazing that he would have any memory of a kid who’d sat in the fifth row of his lecture course for a half a quarter more than a decade earlier.

Amazing or not, Professor Kitteredge had reached out to Gus for help, and now he was in serious trouble. It was up to Gus to help him.

“Say, exactly what is the case we’re here for?” Shawn said.

“I don’t know,” Gus said. “The letter only said it was of vital importance. But now that Lassiter and Jules are here-”

“That means it’s in our wheelhouse,” Shawn said. “Although why you’d put wheels on a house is beyond me. Unless it’s just to annoy people driving behind you on the freeway. But we should talk about traffic patterns later. There seems to be some kind of crime here.”

Shawn set off across the landing, and Gus found himself scurrying to keep up. “Wait for me!” he hissed.

“I’m going to distract the detectives so you have a chance to talk to Lowfat Creamer,” Shawn said “Langston Kitteredge,” Gus said.

Shawn waved a hand dismissively back at Gus, then lifted it to greet the detectives.

“Jules!” Shawn called out before he’d crossed half the distance to the detectives. “Hey, Lassie! What brings you here?”

Lassiter and O’Hara stepped forward to intercept him before he could reach Kitteredge.

“The same thing that brings me to every crime scene I visit,” Lassiter said. “The faint hope that maybe, just once, you won’t be there.”

“You forget who you’re dealing with, Lassie,” Shawn said. “After all, you’re only a normal detective. You can’t get to a crime scene until the crime has been discovered. But as a psychic, I can sense where the crime is going to happen and make sure to be there first. Also, I know when Happy Donuts is going to put out a fresh batch and get them while they’re still warm.”

Lassiter’s eyes narrowed. “So you know about this particular crime, do you?”

“Is that a trick question?” Shawn said.

“Is that a trick answer?” Lassiter said. “No, don’t answer that. All of your answers are trick answers.” He scanned the crowd. “Isn’t there an officer who can escort this man away from here?”

Apparently all the uniformed officers were occupied with keeping Santa Barbara’s best and brightest from turning into a mob and storming the museum, because no one stepped up to haul Shawn away. He turned to Detective O’Hara.

“If I’d known you liked art, I would have invited you up to see my etchings a long time ago,” Shawn said. “Well, not my etchings, actually, because I haven’t etched in ages. But I would have shown you my Etch-A-Sketch.”

She gave him a patient half smile. “Not a good time, Shawn. Things are about to get ugly here.”

Shawn cast a glance down at the mob on the stairs. “I can hold the fire hose on them if you turn on the water.”

“It’s not the crowd, Shawn,” she said. “This is a bad crime scene and you shouldn’t be here. It’s not going to be one of those fun murders.”

“There was a murder?” Shawn said.

“No, Spencer,” Lassiter snapped. “Santa Barbara’s two top homicide detectives are here because we had a tip Happy Donuts was about to deliver a fresh batch to the cafe here.”

“Let’s see, then,” Shawn said.

“I’ll make sure to bring you back a cream-filled,” Lassiter said. “Better yet, I’ll have Officer McNab drop it by your office.”

Shawn risked a quick look behind him and saw that Gus was still creeping along toward Kitteredge. He waggled his hand behind his back to urge him to hurry, then leaned in conspiratorially to the detectives. “You could do that,” Shawn said. “Or I could just tell you the identity of the killer right now.”

As the detectives leaned in to hear what Shawn had to say, Gus slipped behind them and walked up to Kitteredge. “Professor?”

Langston Kitteredge looked at him like he’d just awakened from a deep sleep. “I am Langston Kitteredge,” he said.

“I know you are, sir,” Gus said. “I’m Gus. Burton Guster.”

Kitteredge looked blank. “Burton Guster?”

He must be in shock, Gus thought. He dug into his breast pocket and pulled out the letter Kitteredge had sent him. “You wanted to meet me here tonight,” Gus said, pointing to the important parts of the letter. “There was something crucially important you needed to discuss with me. Although from the looks of things I’m a little too late.”

“Why do you say that?” Kitteredge said.

“Well, generally you want to call a private detective before things get so bad the police are involved,” Gus said. “But my partner, Shawn Spencer, and I will do everything we can to help you now.”

A small light of curiosity shone in Kitteredge’s eyes. “So you’re a son of Vidocq?” he said.

If it hadn’t been for those weeks in Kitteredge’s class, Gus might have been thrown by a reference to someone he’d never heard of. But if he’d learned anything in the course, it was that there were huge amounts of things he’d never heard of-and that Kitteredge not only had heard of most of them but could always find ways to work them into conversation. He’d watched other students flounder helplessly as they dug for definitions of random phrases while the lecture went on above their heads. So he chose to handle this one the way he had the others-by ignoring it and moving on to the main point. “What exactly is going on here?”

“Something terrible,” Kitteredge said sadly. “I fear the worst.”

“And the worst would be…?”

“That.”

Kitteredge leveled a heavy finger at the museum entrance, where a uniformed officer was accompanying a tall, skinny man in a tuxedo out of the lobby. The man shook so hard he could barely stand up; he dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief in a way that suggested most of his energy was going into not throwing up.

The officer marched over to Lassiter. “We’ve secured the scene,” he said. “There’s no one inside.”

“Thank you, Officer,” Lassiter said. “In that case, let us proceed to see the body.”