Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

Chapter Eleven

Evidence. It was always about the evidence. Before he retired from the Santa Barbara Police Department, Henry Spencer would spend hours poring over every shred of paper, every scrap of fiber, every drop of ooze until he could piece them together to tell a story. Then he’d tear it all apart to see if he could put it together in another way that would tell a different story. If he could, then he knew he had to keep searching for other clues that could be added to the puzzle until there was only one possible solution.

But the stack of evidence piled in front of Henry now made those challenges pale by comparison. To start, there was far more here than he’d ever had on any case with the SBPD. An entire shoe box of photos going back sixty-seven years, and an additional eight carousels full of slides. Plane tickets. Wedding invitations-the subjects’ own, and dozens more for their scores of relatives and friends. A paper napkin with a lipstick kiss fading after many years. Swizzle sticks from restaurants long gone. A sequence of drivers’ licenses dating back to the days when they were photoless cards, and two expired passports with stamps from countries that had long been wiped off the map. And that was only from the file boxes that Henry had already been through. There were three more stacked beside his dining room table.

The huge amount of evidence was only part of Henry’s problem. Even after he’d been through it all once, categorized it and cataloged it and sorted the useful pieces from the trash, he’d still have to confront the real challenge. What was the story these clues were trying to tell him? How could he put together these tiny scraps in a way that would turn them into a coherent narrative?

At least in a murder investigation, half the story was predetermined. He knew the basic parameters going in. Someone had been killed. Someone else did it. Henry had to figure out who that was. Difficult certainly, but at least he knew the beginning and the end of the tale going in.

This story had no predetermined structure. If it could be said to have a beginning, it was only that the subject had been born many years ago. There was no ending, and there would be none until the subject passed away. And in between there were only random artifacts of the moments that make up any life. It was completely up to Henry to decide which incidents defined a life and which ones were simply trivia.

He’d never intended to start scrapbooking. In fact, if someone had mentioned the idea to him only a month ago, it would have meant nothing more to him than the minor irritant of seeing one more noun recklessly turned into a verb.

That was before Betty Walinski, the still-attractive widow who ran her late husband’s tackle shop, complained over a tray of bait that her fading eyesight was making it hard to sort her old photos into an album for her new granddaughter. She dropped several broad hints about how nice it would be to have some help. Henry suspected that she was less interested in preserving her legacy for future generations than in a chance to demonstrate what an excellent cook and companion she could be to a lonely divorce, but he didn’t object. He had an ulterior motive, too.

When Herman Walinski was still alive, he was legendary for his handcrafted fishing lures. A few of those he put up for sale, but the entire Santa Barbara fishing community still buzzed with legends of the lures he’d kept for himself. Especially his masterpiece, the one he called YTBL3. It was rumored that the very presence of the YTBL3 in any body of water would draw fish all the way from the Atlantic. Henry knew that if he could just get inside Betty’s door, he could sweet-talk her into letting him get his hands on that collection.

When he got to Betty’s tidy bungalow on the inland side of the hills, Henry’s first thought was to make a bit of small talk, eat whatever she might put in front of him, promise to spend as much time as she wanted going through her photos, then subtly change the topic of conversation to her late husband’s lure collection. It was something he’d learned long ago while interviewing suspects-people rarely notice that you’re trying to get something out of them when they think they’re getting something out of you.

That was before Betty placed the shoe boxes full of snapshots in front of him. Out of politeness, and a desire to look like he was helping, Henry leafed through a couple of the yellow mailing envelopes, each containing the product of one roll of genuine Kodak film. At first he barely glanced at the pictures, but when he opened the third envelope he saw something that grabbed his attention-Herman Walinski in a police uniform. Henry stopped in at the tackle store at least once a week for twenty years before Herman’s death, and in all that time, the owner had never mentioned he’d been a cop.

The normal response to a discovery like this might have been to ask Herman’s widow about it. After all, she was standing right over him, asking if he’d like another piece of seed cake crammed with enough poppy to make the entire US Olympic team test positive for opiates. But Henry had known Betty almost as long as he had her husband, and she had never mentioned his law enforcement history, either. It wasn’t a general prohibition on talking about the past, because they’d both told stories about the years he spent driving a tow truck when he originally arrived in Santa Barbara. Forgetting about the lures for the first time since Betty had asked him over to the house, Henry invented a series of reasons why he had to return home immediately-he’d left the water running or the stove burning or the water running onto the burning stove-and asked if he could take the photos home with him to start organizing them.

If Betty’s quick assent gave Henry a reason to reconsider her motives for inviting him over, he didn’t spend too much time mourning the loss of the possible relationship. Instead he loaded up his truck with boxes of her old photos and got away before she could change her mind.

That was when the detective work started. Using the photo of Herman as his starting point, Henry began to build a time line of his life stretching out in both directions from that moment. He worked slowly and methodically, organizing the photos not only chronologically but also thematically, so he would have parallel histories of Herman’s career, his vacations, his children, and the various weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, fishing derbies, anniversaries, and holidays that made up his life in pictures.

The story that began to emerge out of the photos was one that bore almost no relation to the Herman Henry had thought he’d known. The man behind the counter at the tackle shop had been a jovial backslapper, apparently uninterested in anything that couldn’t be used to persuade a fish to swallow a hook. The private Herman, the prefishing Herman, was a much more complex soul. Starting with the pictures and concluding with a long bout of Googling, Henry met a young police officer on the Miami force who’d started out with great promise, and then had been teamed up with a corrupt partner. As far as Henry could piece together, Herman had initially tried to switch partners, and then for reasons that weren’t apparent in the photographs, he had decided instead to help Internal Affairs clean out the department. He worked undercover long enough to learn that his partner and several officers were tied to the thieves who pulled off a daring daytime robbery of the Calder Race Course. The officers and the criminals were all believed to be captured, even though the money was never recovered. A few months after the picture that sparked Henry’s interest had been taken, Herman testified to a grand jury about corruption in the Miami PD.

There was one picture of Herman shaking the hand of someone who must have been the chief, while a graying man, most likely the mayor, smiled down on them, but that was the last image of Herman in uniform. In fact, that was the last image of Herman of any kind for the next six months of his life. The next time he showed up in one of the yellow envelopes, he was smiling cheerfully from a hospital bed, his arms and legs in traction.

That was a story Henry could figure out without additional information. Herman had informed on his fellow officers, and the rest of the force had frozen him out. Henry couldn’t say for sure how he’d ended up in that hospital bed, but it was easy to assume that Herman had called for backup on a dangerous assignment, and none of his brother officers had bothered to show up. That was the most positive version Henry could come up with.

After that, a sequence of photos showed Herman’s slow recovery, the sale of a house in Florida, a trip across Europe-Henry assumed he’d reached some kind of cash settlement with the Miami PD-and the businesses he ran in Santa Barbara, starting out as the owner-operator of a one-truck towing company until he became the dominant player in the area, then cashing out and buying the tackle store.

It took Henry almost two full weeks to put the whole story together in an album, complete with subplots about the couple’s friends, their siblings’ children, and all the other people who drift in and out of a life.

When he was done, Henry drove the album over the hill and presented it to Betty. She was thrilled. She was just leaving for a week to visit an old friend in Montana, but she promised that when she got back, she’d have something very special for him.

Henry could almost taste the fish Herman’s lures were going to catch for him. But it turned out that what he considered special and what Betty did were two very different things. What she wanted to give him was a recommendation.

It turned out that all of Betty’s friends wanted books just like hers. She was willing to set him up in business. She even had a name for him-the Memory Detective.

Henry tried to decline politely. He told her he had time-management issues. That he was concerned a pay-check might interfere with his police pension. Finally he came flat out and told her he’d rather die.

That was when the first lure came out. And what it caught wasn’t a fish-it was a retired Santa Barbara police detective. Betty understood that he didn’t want to do this anymore, but she had promised her best friends, the Perths, that Henry would do a scrapbook for them. She couldn’t let them down. So she was willing to make a deal-if he did her this small favor, he could choose three of Herman’s lures. Any three-even the YTBL3.

He had no choice once that lure was dangled in front of him, any more than the shovelnose guitarfish Herman caught off the pier with it had. Henry had to bite.

Now that he was hooked, he was about as happy as one of those guitarfish. Rod and Elaine Perth had lived contentedly together since their wedding in 1962. They were as devoted to each other today as they had been on the first day they met. They’d spent just about every minute of the last forty-seven years together, and they’d documented it all in loving detail. And somehow, in those entire forty-seven years, they had managed to do absolutely nothing that was of any interest to anyone.

Henry surveyed the endless landscape of photo mailers and keepsake boxes littering his living room. He’d been through them all twice, and he couldn’t find anything that even looked like a story. Apparently the Perths had spent the last five decades sitting happily on their living room couch drinking tea-or, when they were in a mood for a wild time, coffee. Occasionally Elaine ventured out into the garden to pull a weed or two; apparently Rod did his work as an accountant at a desk in the den while Elaine knitted next to him. Even when they traveled overseas, all they seemed to do was sit on foreign couches. The only things that changed in all the pictures were the gray hairs on their heads and the wrinkles on their faces. These people didn’t need a scrapbook to document their lives together; any one picture grabbed at random would have told the story just as well.

Henry pushed his chair back from the table irritably. He’d spent enough time on this project. He should just slap in a handful of random pictures, put a ribbon around the album, and call it done.

But the Perths wouldn’t let it be done. Every day since he’d taken on Rod and Elain’s lives, they’d dug up another box of identical photos they wanted him to go through. Every afternoon there’d been a knock at the door, and when Henry opened it, he’d find the Perths’ unbelievably unmemorable grandson standing on his porch with another delivery. The first few times Henry was excited, hoping that the new arrival would bring something of interest. But he’d been disappointed so many times that he’d come to dread the young man’s knock.

Which was why he almost chose to hide in the kitchen when there was a firm rapping on the door this time. Maybe if he didn’t answer, the kid would leave the box on the porch, and Henry could claim it had been stolen before he got home.

He was halfway to the kitchen when the rapping came again. He stopped at the sound. The Perths’ grandson’s knock was as uninteresting as anything else about him. It was more like the kid was brushing his knuckles across the wood, as if an actual blow was too assertive for him. But this series of raps was firm, assertive, urgent. Either the kid had stopped on the way over here to get a spine, or this was someone else. If Henry was really lucky, it was an ex-con he’d put away years ago who’d come to kill him and put him out of his Perth-induced misery.

Henry crossed the living room quickly and pulled the door open. The woman standing there smiled up at him shyly.

“Can I help you?” Henry said. “Miss…?”

“You are Henry Spencer, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Henry said. “And you are?”

“So excited to meet you.” She held out a hand.

Henry lived his life by a few simple rules. Number seventeen was this: If you ask a stranger for his name twice and he still doesn’t answer, he’s hiding something. Henry knew he should slam the door in this woman’s face and, if she didn’t leave on her own, have the cops cruise by and check her out.

Somehow the door didn’t seem to slam. Henry’s left hand remained frozen on it. Like any man who finds himself violating lifelong beliefs when confronted by a beautiful woman, he could come up with dozens of reasons why he should let her in. Maybe she was lost. Maybe she had car trouble. And anyway, it was hard to imagine that she could be hiding anything. Her bright red T-shirt and shorts were so tight she couldn’t conceal a dollar bill without his being able to read the serial numbers.

Henry extended his right hand and took hers in it. He felt a tingle running up his arm as if she’d given him a minor electric shock.

“I can see the resemblance,” the woman said, peering intently into his eyes.

Henry felt a slight tang of disappointment as he realized that she was here looking for Shawn. Probably some girl he’d met in a bar and never bothered to call back. Although blowing off a woman this beautiful didn’t seem to fit Shawn’s standard operating procedures.

“Shawn’s not here.” Henry tried to withdraw his hand, but she wouldn’t let go.

“I know.” Her voice was like a seduction. “He sent me.”

“I see.” Now Henry was getting annoyed. It was one thing for Shawn to call the health department and report a toxic plume coming from Henry’s house that time he had tried to brew his own beer. That was funny-at least after Henry had retaliated by reminding the head librarian at the Santa Barbara Library that Shawn still hadn’t returned the copy of Harriet the Spy he’d checked out in 1984 and that he owed fines running into the thousands of dollars. But sending a hooker to Henry’s house went far beyond the realm of the prank. This was a crime, and he wanted no part of it. “I think you’d better run along now.”

“But I have a message from Shawn.” She still didn’t let go of Henry’s hand. Despite his irritation, he found the electric tickle from her touch was still running up his arm, and that made him even more annoyed.

“What’s that? He’s embarrassed to see me dating women my own age and thinks I should be going out with children?”

“He doesn’t like you doing the scrapbooks. He thinks it makes you look like an old lady.”

The tingling in Henry’s arm got stronger, and he realized it wasn’t sexual attraction at all. It was electricity. Before he could pull away, she tightened her grip on his hand and sent eight hundred thousand volts through his body.