Author's notes:
Thank you to two great writers and friends, make-mine-a-kiaora and Sue Shay, for their help. Be sure to check out their stories - I have favorited them in my profile for easy access.
I do not own the TV show The Mentalist and get no compensation from it. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes only.
Please note: The final four chapters, Chapter 16 ("One For My Baby"), Chapter 17 ("Gimmie Three Steps"), Chapter 18 ("Cheerful Little Earful"), and Chapter 19 ("Something With A Ring To It") are published all at the same time.
Chapter 17 - "Gimmie Three Steps"
The first thing Henry felt was pain. Throbbing, pulsing pain. On the side of his face.
The second thing Henry felt was tightness. Around his wrists. Something bound his hands together.
The third thing Henry felt softness. A hand brushed across his face. Someone was caressing him.
And that someone was cooing to him.
"Henry. Oh, my Henry."
It was Annabelle.
"Trumble, why don't you untie her so she can tend to her husband? She won't try anything, and she's an EMT." Henry heard Professor Marbray's voice nearby.
"No. Shut up, Marbray. You should be glad I didn't just shoot him…or all three of you for that matter." Trumble looked at Henry.
When Henry got his bearings again, he realized that his head was resting on Annabelle's shoulder. He needed to see what was going on. Raising up, he moaned.
"Take it easy, Henry." Annabelle voice carried a mix of concern and command. Henry turned his gaze to her to find that she looked back at him with wet eyes.
"Listen to your wife, Officer Karson. I should have shot you when you lunged at me," said Trumble.
"But you didn't shoot him, did you, Trumble? That speaks well of you." Professor Marbray broke into the conversation.
"Shut up, Marbray. I hope my hitting him with the gun barrel impressed on all of you that you need to let me finish my work."
Henry looked around. He and Annabelle, their hands tied, sat on a bench. Professor Marbray, his hands tied as well, stood between them and Trumble. Trumble himself stood by the far wall of the basement, picking at it with a crowbar.
Marbray took a step to his left - and fell to the floor, knocking a half-empty whiskey bottle off the table next to him. The bottle shattered as it clanged to the floor. Trumble wheeled around, gun raised. When he saw the professor sprawled on the floor, he lowered his gun and groaned.
"I should have shot you too, Marbray. I don't need your silly distractions."
"Ease up, Trumble. Since my hands are tied, I lost my balance." Henry heard the professor scrap his hands behind him. "Give me a second to get up."
Trumble waved the gun at Marbray to hurry him along. As Marbray struggled to get off the floor, he kept his hands out of Trumble's sight. Henry could see them though. He spied something shiny in the professor's hand - a shard of glass from the broken whiskey bottle.
"I don't trust you, Marbray. Stand right there."
"Yes, sir. You're the man with the gun."
"Remain still. If you interrupt me again, I will shoot you."
Trumble went back to tapping on the wall with the crowbar. Marbray looked over to Henry and Annabelle. He winked. From where Henry was sitting, he could see Marbray's hands pushing and pulling the edge of the broken glass across the rope that bound them.
"I've figured out what you're doing Trumble. You've orchestrated quite a bit."
"Ugh-huh." Trumble grunted while he concentrated on the wall.
"You sent those three big drones over the city park to distract the townspeople and the police," said Marbray.
Trumble glanced at the professor. "Obviously I didn't do a complete job if the three of you are here with me."
"You were surveying this building with that original drone."
"Yes."
"Looking for something."
"I suspect you know now what I was looking for."
"Fitzgerald Cumming's collection of 78rpm records."
"Correct."
Henry glanced at Professor Marbray's hands. The shard of glass had begun to fray the edges of the rope around his hands.
"You had Owen Myer working for you too - from the inside."
"Yes."
"Not that I'm disappointed, but why did you kill him and not us?"
"I did not wish to take his life. I do not wish to take your lives. However, Myer got greedy. He tried to renegotiate our deal. I cannot tolerate that in any aspect of my life."
"He wouldn't reveal the exact location of the vault until he got a better deal, would he?" asked Marbray.
"Myer had a simple mind. He didn't realize that he had already given away the general location of the vault."
"You knew from what he told you that it was here in the basement."
"Yes. Further, he tried to blackmail me. Myer failed to realize that after today I cared not who knew what I had done."
"Fitzgerald Cummings didn't die a natural death, did he, Trumble?" asked Marbray.
"No. It looked like a heart attack. The reality was that I had dinner with Cummings in New York. I slipped a liquid into his Earl Grey tea that mimicked a heart attack. With his health history and his advanced age, no one suspected foul play."
"It's a sin to kill a man with a hot cup of tea." Marbray scrunched up his nose. Despite their dicey situation, Henry chuckled to himself. The professor took his tea seriously, and Trumble's use of it to poison Cummings irked him.
Trumble shrugged his shoulders.
"By any means needed is my mantra, Professor."
"Why kill Cummings?" asked Marbray.
Henry glimpsed the professor's hand as it continued to work the shard of glass across the ropes.
"Greed again, Marbray. I had befriended Cummings. I moved into the house here in town for the purpose of getting to know him." Trumble stopped working and turned to Marbray. "Believe it or not, I did not wish to hurt him."
"Yet you did."
"Did you not hear me before? I did it because of his greed. And arrogance."
"Because he wouldn't sell you his record collection?"
"The general collection was nice, but all I wanted were his 78s of Perk Perez. Those records brought him to my attention," said Trumble.
"What I don't understand is why you've gone to all this trouble to get them. Even if the 78s are collector's items, you've spent millions to get at them. Far more they'll ever be worth even at auction."
Henry heard Trumble's voice catch before he replied to Professor Marbray.
"Those records mean more to me than all the riches I ever gained. Did I not make clear to you and Chief Lisbon that this world holds no allure to me anymore?"
"So this has to do with your wife."
Trumble wiped a tear from his eye with the sleeve of his shirt.
"I told you that my wife gave meaning to my life. Without her, I live in an empty shell."
"I still don't understand the connection between your wife and Perk Perez."
"Her voice." Trumble halted his work and sighed.
"What?" asked Marbray. Trumble's words perplexed Henry too.
"Do you remember when I told you the circumstances of my wife's death? The car wreck?" Henry saw Marbray nod. "Evangeline was on her way to record her voice for the first time. All those years I had dissuaded her from doing so."
"But…"
"But then she died. And I was bereft of the only person I ever cared for in life. Gone. And by my own selfish need to keep Evangeline all to myself, I never let my wife record her voice. In denying her to the world, I denied myself."
Thump. Thump. Whack. Trumble banged the crowbar harder on the wall. Henry saw a vein raise on Trumble's forehead, and the skin on his knuckles paled as he gripped the crowbar harder. Henry glanced at Annabelle to see her face creased with even greater wrinkles of worry. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Professor Marbray work more furiously at the ropes around his hands.
"You still haven't told me the connection to the Perk Perez records." Marbray kept up a cool tone while his hands worked on his ropes.
Thwack. Trumble slammed the crowbar against a random spot on the wall.
"Perk Perez' recorded voice is as close to my wife's as I can ever get. Evangeline's voice teacher told us about Perez and how their two voices sounded alike. The short snippets of Perez' voice that I heard confirmed that."
"Your problem is that Perez left hardly any recordings, at least publicly."
Trumble nodded.
"Correct. I began to hunt down anything that Perez left behind. I heard rumors that she had in fact recorded a series songs on a small record label. Those rumors proved true."
"And Cummings had those recordings."
"A complete set. And among that set was the Perez version of 'Cheerful Little Earful.'"
"That means something special to you, doesn't it?" asked Marbray.
"Evangeline loved it. Each year on our anniversary she woke me in the morning with that song then sang me to sleep with it that night."
Henry saw Marbray slow his pace of sawing on the ropes for a moment.
"I'm sorry, Trumble."
Trumble wiped his eyes.
"So you see, professor, I have to do this. I have to salvage the recordings."
"You didn't have to do it this way."
Whamp. Trumble banged the crowbar so hard against the wall that broke through.
"Do you not remember how Cummings refused to deal with me?"
"But once you get the recordings, what will you do with them? You'll be a wanted man."
"It doesn't matter. I made plans. When I leave here with the records, I will helicopter out of my compound. A ship awaits to take me to exile. Somewhere beyond this country's extradition pull."
"But you'll leave behind…" Marbray couldn't finish his thought because Trumble cut him off.
"I leave behind nothing of value to me. All I care about is the memory of my wife. I want to be alone with her memory and my agony."
"I pity you."
"If you want you and your friends to live, you'll shut up. You distract me. Yours and Chief Lisbon's inquiry hastened my plans."
Trumble focused on a corner of the wall behind a table. Moving closer, he pulled out the table. Behind it was a small latch. Trumble stuck the crowbar through the latch and tugged until it broke.
"If I were you, I'd be careful," said Marbray.
Trumble raised his gun at the professor.
"You are in no position to tell me what to do and what not to do."
Marbray refused to be cowed by Trumble.
"If that's Cummings vault, no doubt it's booby-trapped. He designed a smaller one for his daughter's office. That one's booby-trapped."
Henry remembered what Marbray told him about Isadore Totty's vault at Deverell College.
Trumble grabbed the collar of Marbray's shirt to pull him close. He jammed the gun barrel under the professor's chin.
"My patience with you has almost run out." Trumble tugged lightly on his gun. "Shut up."
Marbray nodded.
"I will. But I did warn you."
Trumble released the professor and stuck his gun back in his pocket. As Trumble turned back to the vault, Henry saw a flash of movement that Trumble didn't. His hands now freed from the ropes, Marbray slipped his fingers into Trumble's pocket and pulled out the gun.
Eager to get into the vault, Trumble focused all his attention there. He yanked open the door to peer inside. Reaching in, he pulled out a vinyl record. After a moment of close inspection, he let out a cry.
"Yes! I found it." Trumble's eyes grew wide as he held the record aloft.
Before Marbray could do anything with the gun, the sound of a buzzer sliced through the air. Trumble, Marbray, Annabelle, and Henry all looked around. The smile plastered across Trumble's face fell.
With a loud rumble, the whole basement began to shake. Dust began to drift down from the ceiling, and rocks that formed the wall on the unfinished section of the basement came loose and fell to the ground. Wooden beams above them creaked then snapped.
"You may have just killed us all," said Professor Marbray as dust began to cover his shoulders and hair. He moved away from Trumble and towards Henry and Annabelle.
"What are you doing?" asked Trumble as he reached in vain for the gun that used to be in his pocket.
"Moving three steps away from you, you idiot."
A large rock lodged above the vault came loose. Before Trumble could react, it crashed down on his head. A rain of timber, bricks, and rocks fell from the rafters. The last thing Henry saw was Professor Marbray hurling himself on top of Henry and Annabelle.
Then Henry's world went black. Again.
To be continued.
Author's notes:
Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant wrote "Gimmie Three Steps," and the band Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded it.
Readers interested in the music used as chapter titles in the story can check out the playlist "Mentalist - Cheerful Little Earful - playlist for fanfic" in Youtube.
Thank you for reading the story and I'd love to hear from you.
Up next: "Cheerful Little Earful"
