The Call of the Mild

Chapter Fourteen

Shawn stared at his father as if he hadn’t heard him correctly. “You do understand that this is my case.”

“I understand that it was,” Henry said. “Now you’ve got to ask yourself what’s more important: that this woman’s murderer be brought to justice, or that you’re the one who does it.”

“How about this,” Shawn said, thinking quickly. “I’ll stay on the case, but Gus will promise not to be involved.”

“Hey!” Gus protested from his corner.

“Like you weren’t looking for a way to get on this without me,” Shawn said.

“Only so I could work as a mole, passing you information from the inside,” Gus said.

“Which is why I wasn’t going to let Gus in, either,” Henry said. “This case is too dangerous.”

This was so outrageous that Shawn bolted up from the bed. And while he didn’t necessarily mean to thrust his face right into his father’s, the cramped quarters of the cabin meant that some portion of his anatomy had to be pressed up against Henry, so he made necessity his accomplice.

“Dangerous!”

“You’ve been on the case less than one day and you’ve already had two guns pointed at you,” Henry said. “At some point, one of those is going to go off.”

“Do you realize how many murderers I’ve gone up against?” Shawn demanded. “I went face-to-face with a serial killer who’d been terrorizing Santa Barbara for years when you were on the force, and I won.”

“And I’m always pleased to read about your exploits in the paper,” Henry said. “Well, most of the time, anyway.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Shawn said. “Just think of this as getting the paper a day early. Except if I were you I wouldn’t use this information for my own personal gain, like betting on horse races or anything, because that never works out well.”

“I think that’s only if some strange metaphysical force sends you the paper so you can use it to protect innocent people from fates they don’t deserve,” Gus said.

“It’s fair to say that I’m as strange a metaphysical force as any of us is going to see,” Shawn said. “So is this settled? We’ll work the case from different sides: You help the police, and Gus and I will do it the smart way. We’ll call you for the summation.”

Shawn headed for the door. At least he would have headed for the door if there had been an inch of space between Henry and the bed for him to squeeze through. But there wasn’t, and Henry didn’t move out of his way.

“I told you, it’s not negotiable,” Henry said.

“Why?”

Henry’s hard grimace softened. “When you were little, I used to worry about you all the time. When you missed curfew, when you slipped out your window in the middle of the night, when you were just a few minutes late for dinner, my heart broke at the thought that something might have happened to you.”

“You certainly hid it well,” Shawn said. “Under all that yelling and nagging.”

“Do you really think that was hiding it?” Henry said. “The point is, once you moved out of the house, I stopped worrying.”

“That was a mistake,” Shawn said. “What I was doing then was much worse than anything I did while I lived with you.”

“I knew that,” Henry said. “But you were an adult. It wasn’t my job to worry like that anymore, so I stopped. It’s the same with your detective work. As long as I don’t know about it until you’ve finished a case, it’s none of my concern. But if I have to watch you putting yourself in danger, it will be just like you’re twelve years old again. And I don’t think anyone wants that.”

“Not if you’re going to make me go to bed at eight thirty,” Shawn said. “I’m still trying to see the second half of the A-Team episode where they went to Africa. They were caught by cannibals and put in a cauldron over a fire, but before I could find out what happened to them, you unplugged the TV and turned off the lights. For all I know they were eaten decades ago.”

“It turned out the cannibals weren’t really cannibals,” Gus said. “It was all a plot by-”

“Don’t tell me!” Shawn said.

“The episode’s been on DVD for five years,” Gus said. “If you cared that much, you could have seen it a hundred times by now.”

“It’s not the same,” Shawn said. “If there isn’t at least one commercial with Jacko urging me to knock a battery off his shoulder, I can’t watch it.”

“And I can’t watch you putting yourself in danger,” Henry said.

“It’s as simple as that.”

Shawn shot Gus a pleading look over Henry’s shoulder. Gus shrugged helplessly. Shawn turned back to Henry. “I’ve got to do this,” he said. “Please.”

“It’s a hard lesson to learn and a hard way to learn it, but you don’t owe this woman anything, son,” Henry said. “She asked you to find her necklace. You did. What happens in the rest of her life-even her death-is simply none of your business.”

“She was our client,” Shawn said. “When a man’s client is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of her. She was your client and you’re supposed to do something about it. ‘And it happens we’re in the detective business. When one of your organization gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.’ ”

For a moment Henry seemed impressed by Shawn’s passion for the profession. But something about the words nagged at him.

“ ‘Partner,’ ” Henry said as the memory fell into place.

“Yes!” Shawn said. “We’ll be partners.”

“No,” Henry said. “It’s ‘when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.’ ”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” Shawn said. “Because I promise if Gus is killed I’ll stick with that case, too.”

“Thanks,” Gus said. “Really means a lot.”

“It’s from The Maltese Falcon, ” Henry said. “You want me to let you stay on this case because of some speech by a fictional detective.”

“I can’t think of a better reason, can you?”

“No, and that’s the point,” Henry said. “Now, if you’re not going to step off this case, there’s a dentist, a lawyer, and a real estate developer who can’t finish their song until I play my drum solo.”

Henry took the two steps back to the cabin door.

“You win,” Shawn said. “We’re off this case.”

“Not good enough,” Henry said, slipping out into the dimming Ojai sunlight. “Too much wiggle room.”

“I promise that as long as you are working with Lassiter on this case that neither Gus nor I will do anything to investigate, explore, probe, scrutinize, deconstruct, interrogate, or in any other way examine the circumstances surrounding the violent slaying of our former client, the late Ellen Svaco,” Shawn said.

For a moment Henry looked convinced. Gus was almost convinced himself. There were only two ways he could see for Shawn to weasel out of the promise, which was at least three fewer than Shawn usually built into such a sentence.

“I accept,” Henry said after brief consideration.

“Excellent,” Shawn said.

“Except for two things,” Henry said. “The deal is binding for as long as I’m on the case, no matter what level of involvement or noninvolvement Carlton Lassiter shares in it. And since we don’t have precise information at this moment on the exact manner of this woman’s death, you will apply the same interdiction to any consideration of any eventuality that led to it, violent or not.”

Gus was impressed. These were two of Shawn’s best weasels, and Henry had spotted both of them. No wonder Shawn hadn’t been able to talk himself out of a grounding since he turned eleven.

But Shawn seemed to be taking his defeat in stride. He put out his hand for his father to shake. “You really won’t get fooled again,” he said. “They need you at the police station in the morning.”

Henry took his hand. “We’ll do right by you, son.”

“Just make sure you change first.”

Henry glanced down at his sweat-soaked rock and roll clothes. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’m getting to like this look.”

The cabin door banged shut and Henry was gone. Gus moved out of his corner, finally feeling free to fill his lungs more than halfway. “What do you want to do now?” he said. “Because if you don’t have any plans, there’s a bookstore in town with a tree growing in the middle of it. I’ve always wanted to see that.”

Shawn stared at him as if he’d suggested they pass the afternoon at a Wiggles performance. “Are you kidding?” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“On what?”

“On our case.”

Gus replayed the last few minutes of the conversation in his head. Shawn’s promise seemed as unweaselable as the nondisclosure agreement Gus’ pharmaceuticals employer had made him sign before they admitted to him that there really was no such thing as restless elbow syndrome and that the only reason they’d sold so much of their drug to treat the disease was a long series of “seminars” in Hawaii they’d paid doctors to attend.

“You just promised your father that we wouldn’t have anything to do with Ellen Svaco’s murder,” Gus said.

“And we won’t,” Shawn said.

“But that was our case,” Shawn said.

“Never was,” Shawn said. “No one hired us to investigate that.”

“Then what?”

“Ellen Svaco hired us to get her necklace back,” Shawn said. “That’s the case we’re working on.”