them.
Shawn rapped on the counter. “My good man, we are here to collect a car. Prithee, hasten and fetch it!”
“Prithee?” Henry said. Mindy, who had wrapped most of her limbs around him, beamed at his interruption.“Are we flashing all the way back to the sixteenth century?”
“First, all good drama includes the word ‘prithee,’” Shawn said. “Second, you should be ashamed of yourself. That girl’s a third your age.” He turned back to the counter. “Hasten already.”
Lassiter glanced at his script. “That will be six thousand dollars.”
Gus clapped his hands to his cheeks in full Macauley Culkin. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Then get lost.”
Shawn touched his fingertips to his forehead. “Wait. I’m getting an emanation from the beyond. The spirits are speaking to me. They’re telling me you’re not who you claim to be. You are not the legal holder of this position in an impound lot licensed to serve our fair city. You are in fact a convict who has recently escaped from a chain gang.”
Lassiter checked his script, then dropped it on the counter. “I am not going to say this.”
“You have to,” Shawn said. “Gus stayed up all night working on that script.”
“You’d think it was easy, but it turns out good dialogue has to advance both the story and the character, while providing a break from straight exposition,” Gus said.
“Just say it,” Detective O’Hara said. “We’re never going to get out of here until you do.”
Lassiter muttered something under his breath, but he picked up the pages and read from them. “Oh, you are indeed a wise and powerful psychic. How it pains me to know that my own master plan depends on depriving the rest of the world of your geniusssss.”
He took a shotgun out from under the counter and aimed it at them. Shawn motioned to Alicia, and she glissandoed them back to the present.
“End scene!” Shawn said. “I’d like a special round of applause for our volunteer from the audience.”
No one clapped. Chief Vick said, “Mr. Spencer, what was the point of that? We already know what happened when you came to get Mr. Guster’s car.”
“Do we?” Shawn said. “Do we really?”
“Yes,” Gus said. “We already told them.”
“Oh,” Shawn said. “Sorry we wasted your time, then. Come on, Gus.” He pushed through the crowd of astonished and angry faces to the door.
“I’m waiting for my apology, Spencer,” Coules shouted at him.
Shawn stopped and turned back. “You know, I don’t think we did tell you what this refugee from a chain gang was doing here.”
“I don’t believe we did,” Gus said.
“Remember, he was serving time in Arizona,” Shawn said. “After he escaped he came directly to Santa Barbara and murdered the real impound lot attendant so he could take over his position. It’s a safe bet that a second-generation criminal with a history of armed robbery wouldn’t be that excited to land a minimum-wage job. He was here for a specific reason.”
“Yes, Mr. Spencer, the police were also able to reach that astonishing conclusion.” Chief Vick was finding it hard to hide her frustration in the heat of the shack. “We simply couldn’t figure out what that reason was.”
“That’s because you weren’t looking in the right place,” Shawn said. “Alicia!”
Lassiter raised the shotgun. “I swear, Spencer, if you start another flashback, I will beat you to death with this. And I guarantee you there won’t be a single witness who’ll say they saw me do it.”
“No more flashbacks,” Shawn said. “Just a little traveling music.” He signaled to Alicia, and she launched into a jaunty tune. Shawn took a moment to appreciate the music, then walked around the counter and out the back door to the impound lot. The others followed.
Shawn waved at the acres of cars in front of them. “John Marichal came all the way across the country to die here.”
“If you consider the next state over to be all the way across the country,” Coules said. “He escaped from a chain gang in Arizona.”
“Only because he was caught holding up a liquor store to finance the rest of his journey,” Shawn said. “He originally came from Florida. Miami. Isn’t that where you’re from, Bert?”
“Me and Detective O’Hara and eighteen million other people.”
“Good point. And among those eighteen million people were Herman and Betty Walinski.”
“Didn’t he used to run the tackle shop down on the pier?” Lassiter said.
“Before that, he ran a small fleet of tow trucks,” Shawn said. “Which he then contracted to the city, and used that connection to open the impound yard, later expanding it into one of the few combined impound-and- wrecking yards on the West Coast. When he’d made his fortune here, he used some of it to open his tackle store, where he spent a happy retirement.”
“Thanks for the lesson in local history,” Coules said. “Is there a point?”
“Dad?” Henry stepped up and handed Shawn the scrapbook. Shawn flipped it open to the picture of Herman as a young police officer. “It turns out that before Herman moved to Santa Barbara, he was an officer on the Miami PD. He went undercover with some bad cops and managed to bust them for participating in the biggest race track heist in Florida history, the Calder Race Course robbery of nineteen seventy-two.”
Shawn flipped the pages over and showed them headlines about the robbery from Miami newspapers. “But after that heroic act, Herman turned his back on law enforcement. He quit the force, took a long vacation in Europe, and then settled here, where he never told anyone he used to be a cop. Wonder why.”
“Because cops don’t like cops who inform on their fellow officers, even if they deserve it,” Detective O’Hara said. “That robbery happened before I was born, but there were still people upset about it in the department when I was there.”
“That’s what my dad assumed,” Shawn said. “It’s probably what any cop would assume. But Gus and I aren’t cops.”
“And we can all thank the city of Santa Barbara for that,” Coules said.
“The money from the race track robbery was never recovered,” Gus said, trying to get things back on track.
“Three million dollars,” Shawn said. “You can bet that the people who planned the heist never stopped looking for it. But all the crooks were caught, and no one had a dollar. Imagine what it would be like to spend twenty-some years in jail with nothing to do besides trying to figure out who’d taken your money. And when you finally did, to know there was nothing you could do about it until your sentence was up.”
Shawn stopped to take a breath, and Gus stepped into the breach. “Then, when you got out, you were too old and too feeble to go after the SOB who stole your money. But if it couldn’t help you, at least you could pass the information to your son, who’d followed you into the armed-robbery business.”
Lassiter stared at them suspiciously. “You’re saying that John Marichal’s father was part of the Calder heist?”
“It’ll be pretty easy to check out,” O’Hara said. “I can call one of my buddies out there.”
“So let’s go with it for now,” Shawn said.
“And he was looking for the money here?” Henry said. “You’re not going to try to tell us that Herman was one of the thieves. He was a friend of mine.”
“And yet in all those years of friendship, he never mentioned his past in law enforcement,” Shawn said. “Because the fewer people who knew about it, the fewer people would think to connect him to the money. But John Marichal’s father did, and he sent his son to get it. Unfortunately, by the time the lad got off the chain gang, Herman had died of cancer, so John was going to have to search for the loot himself.”
“Here?” Chief Vick said.
“Where better to hide three million cash than in acres of abandoned automobiles? Marichal killed the original attendant and took his place so he could take his time and search every car in the yard. He would have started with Florida plates and tried to move on from there.”
“This is ludicrous,” Coules said. “Why would the money still be there after all this time?”
Shawn turned to his father. “I think you can figure out why.”
