Gus was not all right. His head was pounding from the effort of denying what was so obviously right in front of him.
“This is exactly what I mean,” Gus said. “I’m tired of living like this.”
“If you mean like someone out of Mad Men but without any of the good parts, I certainly understand,” Shawn said. “If you’ve got to wear a suit to work every day, at least you should take up smoking and drinking and sleeping around on your wife, so it’s all worth it. Of course you’d probably need to pick yourself up a wife, too. And a childhood where you were thrashed daily for not slopping the hogs, and a secret identity no one knows about. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t see how anyone sticks with this corporate life for long. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.”
“What I’m tired of,” Gus said tensely, “is seeing murders wherever I go.”
“I thought you’d taken care of that by closing your eyes and refusing to look at what’s obvious,” Shawn said.
“I’m tired of looking at the nicest man the world has ever seen and leaping to the conclusion that he must be a murderer because he’s the least likely suspect,” Gus said.
It took Shawn a moment to realize what Gus was saying. “Really? Jerry? A killer?”
“Don’t tell me you hadn’t already gone there,” Gus said.
Gus thought Shawn seemed completely astonished, although a lifetime spent trying to look innocent whenever he was caught red-handed could have explained that. “Why would I?”
“Why would you?” Gus sputtered. “Because he’s the last person anyone would ever suspect of anything.”
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “So why would we start now?”
“Because that’s how it works,” Gus said. “You always say the least likely suspect is the one who did it.”
“Doesn’t sound like me,” Shawn said. “Oh, wait a minute. ‘The least likely suspect is the one who did it.’ Yeah, it’s a little closer when the voice isn’t all squeaky and shrill. But still-Jerry? How could you even think such a thing?”
“I don’t want to,” Gus said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. I want to be part of the real world where the guy the police catch standing over the corpse with a smoking gun is the guy who pulled the trigger.”
“Now you’re just talking nonsense,” Shawn said. “Why would you shoot a guy and stand around with a smoking gun, waiting for the police to show up? And how do you get a gun to smoke, anyway? Because today’s modern firearms are pretty much emissions-free, if you don’t count the bullet, so you’ve got to be lighting cigarettes and sticking them in the barrel, and anyone who would do that probably doesn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to figure out how to pull the trigger.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Gus said. “That’s the kind of gibberish that leads us to accuse the Jerry Fellowses of the world.”
“Yes, but gibberish isn’t enough,” Shawn said. “This is not as easy as you make it sound. For instance, why would Jerry want to kill all these pharmaceutical executives? I mean, aside from the same reasons everyone else who didn’t do it has.”
Gus felt the pounding in his temples ease a little. Shawn was right. Maybe he was nuts. There had to be a motive. And then the same dark thought came rushing back again, only this time it was far more detailed.
“Orphan drugs,” Gus said. “That’s his motive.”
“Orphan drugs?” Shawn said. “They’ve got pills for that now? What do they do-you take one and you grow a new set of parents?”
Gus sank down in the armchair, lost in dread. “They’re not drugs for orphans,” he said mechanically, his mind spinning through the ramifications of what he’d realized. “They’re drugs for diseases that are too rare to make mass production possible, which means that they’re too expensive to produce at all. Millions of people all over the world die of illnesses that could be cured, except that the financial rewards aren’t there and-”
“Okay, this is getting boring,” Shawn said. “You’re not going to start making speeches like that Quincy guy, are you? Because that show should be an object lesson for all of us: When he was solving crimes and sleeping with day players it was a lot of fun. But once he got all serious and started tackling social issues it got to be just about unbearable. Something to think about.”
Gus considered explaining to Shawn that certain social issues were far more important than whatever entertainment value they might contain for an audience, but he knew that would lead directly to an argument about the value of the very special episode of a sitcom compared to one that was actually funny, and then half the day would disappear. He needed to stick to the subject he started with.
“The issue of orphan drugs was something I was interested in from my first day here,” Gus said. “I really thought I could make a difference.”
Shawn’s thumb started twitching. Gus slapped his hand away.
“Stop that,” he said. “You can’t change the channel just because I’m talking about something serious for one minute.”
“Another reason real life can’t compare to television,” Shawn said.
“Just listen,” Gus said. “One day I was talking to Jerry Fellows and I mentioned my interest in the subject. He was thrilled. He said that in all the decades he’d been with the company he’d thought we should have a real program to address the issue. From then on he always asked about my progress. He encouraged me when I was feeling hopeless, cheered me on when I was doing well, and did everything he could to subtly keep me focused on the problem.”
“You sold me,” Shawn said. “He’s got to be the killer.”
Gus wondered briefly if Shawn felt now the way Gus always had when Shawn announced some ridiculous theory of the crime at hand, and if he’d feel as foolish when Gus proved to be right.
“Just before my big presentation to the executive committee, he let something slip,” Gus said. “Jim Macoby had been working on a plan to address the orphan drugs issue before he died.”
“Jim Macoby?” Shawn asked, and then remembered. “Oh, Mr. Coffee.”
“Steve Ecclesine was my primary opponent on the committee,” Gus said. “I’m pretty sure he was planning to do whatever he could to stop me.”
“I’m beginning to see an issue here, but let’s keep going with this for the moment,” Shawn said.
Gus didn’t need Shawn’s permission. He was already at his desk and typing furiously onto his computer monitor. “I knew it!” he said.
“You can’t put a red six on a red seven?” Shawn said. “Because Hank Stenberg made a patch for the Psych computer so that you can put any card on any other card. It’s made the long workday a lot more fun, I’ve got to tell you.”
“Sam Masterson,” Gus said. “I’ve got access to all his files, and here’s one marked ‘orphan drugs.’ ” He tapped twice on the image of the file and it spread open. His face fell. “It’s empty.”
“This certainly is a slam-dunk case you’re putting together against Jerry,” Shawn said. “You’ve got one dead guy who was all in favor of giving drugs to Little Orphan Annie, one who was opposed to it, and one who was so passionately involved on one side or the other that he couldn’t be bothered to invest any more time in the subject than it took to label a new file. I’m definitely seeing a pattern here.”
Shawn might not have seen the pattern, but Gus did. At least he was feeling the general shape of it. The details were still hazy, but he could tell there was something. “Did it ever occur to you that this file might be empty because somebody erased everything in it?” he said.
“Sure,” Shawn said. “And when I buy a frying pan and get it home to find there are no pancakes in it I know it’s because some kid ate them all before I could.”
“Jerry Fellows is passionate about the issue of orphan drugs. Can we agree on that?” Gus said.
“We can agree to take your word on it,” Shawn said. “Then if you turn out to be wrong we can agree to make fun of you for the rest of the week.”
“He’s been supporting me and doing whatever he could to help me prepare my presentation to D-Bob,” Gus said. “So I’m going to make a leap and say that he would have done the same for Jim Macoby.”