The Call of the Mild

Chapter Three

Ellen Svaco didn’t have dripping fangs, her hair wasn’t a nest of hissing vipers. Her arms weren’t pus-filled tentacles.

But the instant she walked through the doors of the beach bungalow that housed Psych’s offices, Gus knew she was a monster. And not just any monster, but the worst kind.

Ellen Svaco was the sort of monster who would call a second-grader up to the blackboard and make him stand there until he correctly spelled the fiendishly difficult name of California’s state capital no matter how many times he had already failed and no matter how many of the other students were laughing at him and no matter that the lunch bell had already rung. Gus had met one such ogre before, and the encounter had scarred him so badly it took many years before he could bring himself to say the word “Sacramento” without a shudder and a stutter.

Like that other creature, Ellen wore her graying hair tied back so tightly it stretched every centimeter of her skin across the contours of her skull. Her shapeless shift looked like it came from the sale rack at the Mormon Fundamentalists’ thrift shop. She could have been forty or four hundred or anywhere in between.

“My name is Ellen Svaco and I’m looking for a detective named Spenser.” She said the name in a tone that made it sound like she was referring to a skunk that had crawled under her house to die. “With an ‘s’ like the poet. At least that’s what I was told.”

Shawn barely glanced up from the newspaper photo of Detective Carlton Lassiter he was busy defacing with a ballpoint pen. “Whoever said that is playing some kind of joke on you,” he said as he added eyeballs to the ends of the springy antennae he’d drawn on Lassiter’s forehead. “There is no ‘s’ in ‘poet.’ ”

Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tighten in irritation and felt his hand shooting up in the air. He tried to stop it before his fingers had cleared the desk, but he had spent so much of his school years saving Shawn from academic selfimmolation that it had become a reflex as impossible to restrain as jerking his leg when the rubber hammer hit his knee or fleeing from a movie theater when they started showing a trailer for any movie where Eddie Murphy played more than two roles.

“Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, is considered one of the most important Elizabethan poets,” Gus said.

“That’s nice for him,” Shawn said. “But can he fit all one hundred and twenty different colors of Crayons in his mouth at the same time? Because I can.”

That was true, as Shawn had proven only the night before. Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tightening even further. He felt his pre-adolescent terror of any teacher’s disapproval rising in his chest.

“This is Shawn Spencer, and he is a detective,” Gus said. “How can we help you?”

The woman glared at Gus. “I’m having a very hard time believing that you are a walking weapon, the physical incarnation of street justice, and the unstoppable id to Spenser’s superego,” she said.

“It’s amazing how many people have that same problem,” Shawn said. “I told him not to stop shaving his head.”

“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Gus said.

“More like blatant misrepresentation,” the woman snapped. “Are you or are you not Hawk?”

“My name is Burton Guster. Most people call me Gus.”

“Which is a kind of hawk,” Shawn said.

“It is not,” Gus said.

“Gus the Hawk. I remember you showed it to me on some flag when you thought you wanted to be a flexitriloquist.”

“First of all, the bird on the flag of the Azores is the Goshawk, not Gus the Hawk,” Gus said. “And a scholar who studies flags is a vexillologist.”

“Then what’s a flexitriloquist?” Shawn said.

“There’s no such thing. You just made it up.”

“I’m pretty certain I saw an ad for it on Craigslist,” Shawn said. “Are you sure it isn’t someone who can throw her voice while she does Pilates?”

Ellen Svaco let out the kind of sigh that could paralyze a class of second-graders within seconds. “But you’re Spenser?” she said to Shawn.

“With a ‘c,’ like the shell,” Shawn said. “Or should that be like the saw?”

The woman breathed silently for a moment, and Gus had the sudden desire to find the nearest elementary school so he could report to the principal’s office.

“I can’t believe that policeman lied to me,” she finally said. “He said this Spenser was America’s finest detective, his street-smart sidekick was as lethal as he was loyal, and for proof I had to look no further than a seemingly endless series of fictionalized accounts of their cases.”

For the first time, Shawn looked interested. “And how exactly did this come up in conversation?”

“I went in to see the police about a very serious matter,” she said. “It was serious to me, in any case. Apparently the detective in charge thought it was some kind of joke.”

“Did this detective have a handlebar mustache, thick glasses, and eyeballs on stalks protruding from his head?” Shawn said.

“Of course not.”

“Well, if he did,” Shawn said, slipping the newspaper across the desk to her, “would he look something like this?”

She gave the paper a quick glance, as if years of practice had taught her to see pictures through layers of defacement. “That’s him.”

“Lassie sent her here?” Gus said. “Why?”

“Because he knows when a case is too big for him,” Shawn said. “He realizes that there are some things that are so explosive, so filled with pitfalls and dangers that a mere policeman can’t be expected to handle them.”

“Or he’s trying to get back at you for having Papa Julio’s Casa de Pizza deliver seventeen pineapple-and-anchovy pizzas to his house.”

“Or that,” Shawn conceded. “I guess we’ll know when Ms. Svaco tells us what her case is about.”

“Why should I tell you anything?” she said. “I have no idea who you are, and I have no intention of being the butt of some policeman’s practical joke.”

“As I said, this is Shawn Spencer and I’m Burton Guster,” Gus said. “We are Psych, Santa Barbara’s premier psychic-detective agency.”

Ellen Svaco stared at Gus as if he’d just shot a spitball at her. “Psychic detectives? You people must really think I’m an idiot.”

She turned and walked towards the door, her sensible pumps thwocking hollowly on the linoleum. Gus felt a huge sense of relief to see her go-until he glanced over at Shawn and saw that his partner was studying her carefully as she walked away. Studying her in the way Gus knew meant that he was observing all sorts of tiny details that no one else would ever notice, details that Shawn would put together to tell a story about her. Just as her hand hit the doorknob, Shawn grabbed his forehead with both hands and let out a moan.

“Murder!” he wailed. “Murder most foul!”