Disclaimer: I don't own Psych or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Psych-Os like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: K+
Spoilers: Through current episodes, particularly strong from Heeeeere's Lassie and Shawn Rescues Darth Vader.
A/N: You may get the impression, by the end of this story, that I'm something of a fan of the golden oldies. This is true. I do, however, like a wide variety of music from opera to death metal (in extreme moderation, and I have to be "in a mood"), but Lassiter just feels like a golden oldies person to me, not just the crooners of the forties but the rockers of the fifties and sixties to early seventies. Music from the late seventies to the mid nineties…mostly sucks, with the exception of a few exceptionals. ~Carltonesque growl.~
Chapter Three: Crying
"I was all right, for awhile. I could smile for awhile. But I saw you last night. You held my hand so tight when you stopped to say hello… Oh, you wished me well, you couldn't tell that I've been crying over you, crying over you. Then you said so long, left me standing all alone, alone and crying. Crying. Crying. It's hard to understand, but the touch of your hand can start me crying."
Lassiter was not crying, even his earliest childhood had been relatively devoid of tears. But he was no stranger to sadness. A lonely child who'd become a lonely man, the emotion seemed to have been his one constant companion throughout life. He was used to it, really. It was comfortable.
He sat on the couch, listening to records on the hi fi that Shawn Spencer had denigrated so long ago, a Blue Ice cooler pack pressed to his jaw. The television was on but the sound was off, because it was Sunday afternoon, and Sunday afternoons on basic cable sucked. They probably still sucked on a more expensive package, but he didn't care to pony up the green to find out. As long as he had the History channel and Investigation Discovery (he'd had to spring for a slightly better-than-basic package to get that channel, but only slightly) he was pretty well set for exactly how much television he was inclined to watch in the first place, which was rather little. The only reason he had the TV on right now at all was because sitting and staring at a blank screen held disturbing overtones of his initiation to Prospect Gardens and he didn't care to relive even a portion of that. He'd chased Guster through the building all the way to the basement with his saber drawn, and probably would have killed or maimed the hapless pharmaceutical salesman if he hadn't been stopped. He had almost murdered Guster. Probably the least-likely person on the planet to drive him to homicide, despite who he habitually hung out with. The man was as threatening as a Yorkshire terrier puppy.
He kind of looked like a Yorkshire terrier puppy, come to think of it.
"I thought that I was over you, but it's true, so true, I love you even more than I did before, but darling, what can I do? For you don't love me, and I'll always be crying over you, crying over you. Yes, now you're gone, and from this moment on I'll be crying. Crying. Crying. Crying, yeah. Crying. Crying over you."
Roy Orbison's plaintive lament came to its crashing conclusion and the record started to skip, as it always did at the start of the next song on the album which was, if he remembered correctly, "Mean Woman Blues." Sitting listening to a skipping record probably wasn't any saner than watching snowy channel 3 with the DVD player off, but he didn't quite feel energetic enough to get up and fix the needle. But the cooler pack was pretty well defrosted and a listless glance at his wristwatch showed that he could have another dose of ibuprofen so he heaved himself to his feet. He turned off the record player as he passed into the kitchen. As he walked through the small dining room area he noticed that the chairs were once again stacked neatly in a pyramid on top of the table - for the thirty-seventh time since he'd moved in. It was evident that not all of the craziness at Prospect Gardens was contained within the head of Amy Freakadoodle-Doo. He'd simply come to accept it as a part of life.
He put the skin-warmed ice pack in the freezer and grabbed another, then dry-swallowed two large orange store-brand pills from a bottle he pulled out of the same cabinet in which he kept his coffee and mugs. He was tired but restless. If it weren't for the ice pack he'd go for a walk in the park nearby, just to work off some steam and get out of the oppressively gloomy and oversized condo. He'd bought it with the intention of sharing it. Now he was stuck here alone. As always. Before Gilbert O'Sullivan could start whining in his head he went back into the living room and thumbed the mute button on the remote so that the oft-repeated episode of The Devil You Know filled the void of silence in unit number five thirty-six.
He heard a knock at the door. He rolled his eyes and went to answer it. There was only one person who could be standing on the other side of that door that he might actually be a little bit glad to see, and she would call, not simply pop by. And she was probably slurping a mango raspberry smoothie and watching a Stargate SG-1 marathon with her idiot boyfriend and Guster.
He couldn't see much of anything through the spy hole in the door, but he thought he caught a glimpse of white hair. Art, the Korean war veteran who was grouchy and anti-social enough to make Lassiter seem warm and friendly? But no, when he opened the door he found the Turkel twins, Bea and Birdie, spinsters who'd managed to live for seventy-odd years without developing the slightest sign of individual personality. They'd severely creeped him out when he was under the influence of the drugs the psycho man-eater put into his ventilation system, and they still creeped him out now, but they were just elderly and rather pleasant ladies with unfortunate fashion sense. With their white hair and bright blue eyes they kind of looked like his mother, actually, minus the perpetual glare of suspicion, but that may have been exactly why they creeped him out. One of them - he had no idea which was which, and wasn't certain they even felt that it mattered to begin with - held a covered tureen in her arthritic hands.
"Can I help you?" he mumbled around the pain in his jaw.
A conversation with the Turkels was an interesting experience. Sentences wound out of one mouth and then the other and back again without hesitation or apparent collusion, as though they shared a single brain or hive mind. "Hello, Detective. We saw you were feeling poorly so we thought we'd bring you some nice soup," they said, trading off seven times. "We know what toothaches are like, so we figured you didn't feel much like eating anything solid."
He hadn't eaten anything at all in two days. "Uh…thank you, ladies. How did you know I had a toothache?"
They looked at each other and giggled simultaneously. "It's in your aura, Detective," they said, as though that were the most obvious thing in the world. Lassiter nodded slowly. Aura. Right. He should have guessed.
Whackaloons.
They handed over the tureen and curtsied - actually curtsied, who the hell did that these days? - themselves away. Lassiter closed the door and took the ornate silver soup bowl into the kitchen. The chairs in the dining room were back where they belonged.
"Thank you," he said to the empty condominium, just another part of his Wild and Crazy Life. The door of the kitchen cabinet wherein resided his coffee and mugs and NSAID pain relievers swung outward slightly and then closed again, as if in acknowledgement of the courtesy. The condo wasn't haunted, that was ridiculous, but still…he preferred to err on the side of caution. As long as the activity was limited to artistic stacking of dining room chairs, and as long as he wasn't sitting in one of them when it happened, he was content to let it go. The blood in the ceiling fixture hadn't recurred since that first time, and it appeared that had been the work of the Mad Man-Killer.
He'd hoped the chair-stacking was her handiwork as well, or a drug-fueled hallucination, but what can you do?
He took the lid off the tureen and a puff of fragrant steam hit him in the face. The soup was some sort of tomato-base, rich with herbs and finely-chopped vegetables - celery, he thought, though he couldn't be sure at a glance. His stomach growled like an angry rottweiler. He didn't eat food brought to him by relatively random strangers, even if they were colleagues, and especially if they lived in this loony bin. Crap on a cracker.
He debated death by abscess versus death by poison and found the proposition a virtual toss-up. But the abscess wasn't going to kill him any time soon. The Turkel twins looked like understudies from Arsenic and Old Lace, and some poisons would kill him very quickly. The abscess wasn't quite bad enough yet to make that sound like a good thing. With a heartfelt sigh he poured the soup down the disposal and put the tureen in the sink to wash later. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the single cup of coffee he'd attempted to drink that morning hadn't gone down too well, as the heat made the bad tooth howl in agony. Hot soup would be no better. He went back to the living room to watch ID and tried not to think about cold, refreshing gazpacho.