Whip Chatterly is a murder aficionado who approaches Shawn and Gus as they are trying to reconstruct the death of Bob White. When they tell him they are investigating a possible murder, he laments that on the one night a murder occurs so close by he happened to be asleep despite his insomnia. He offers his services and only realizes who he's talking to when Shawn says they work for the SBPD. He says he's a huge fan of their work and tells them he's the owner of the True Crime Bookstore ("Murder from A to Z") across the street. He invites them in, tells them a few stories, shows them his hidden room with his camera surveillance system and even gets Shawn to autograph his book on Mr. Yang. He wants to tag along with their investigation as their "secret weapon", and Shawn and Gus grant him his wish when he offers to pay for their snacks.
At Phat Thai Jones, Whip immediately proves useful when he recognizes the coupon Bob left Singh on the night of his death. He takes our duo to a retro dime-a-dance hall, where he tells them someone must have hand-picked Bob. He dances with Ella to ask her about him, but when he pulls out a photograph of Bob and asks whether the image "incites" anything in her she misinterprets the question and tells him she doesn't do three-ways.
Fortunately Sandy does know Bob and where he went next, pointing Shawn, Gus and Whip to her psychic friend Ivana. She tells the three that she lied to Bob to make him feel better and told him his feelings for Penny Chalmers were mutual. The three are outraged, and Whip slams his hand down on a stack of tarot cards. When Ivana notices the top card is now misaligned, she turns it over and is shocked to see Death. She tells Whip she sees death in him and that the Reaper will come to collect his soul. Whip is flustered and says this must be because death is his business and he also has both a dead tooth and a black toenail. However, Ivana is very frightened and tells the three to leave immediately because they are bad juju. Outside, Whip is clearly upset and decides to leave the investigation ("Maybe it's time I leave the residue of this deadly cryptogram to those far more equipped to decode it than I").
When their investigation eventually leads our duo to a mural, Shawn spots one of Whip's stamps and realizes that he also saw that stamp at the bus station, Phat Thai Jones and the dance hall. It now seems obvious that Whip is the murderer they were looking for all along and that he wanted to be immortalized like all of the killers he has read about. When he killed Bob but it was ruled an accident, he must have severed Bob's ear post-autopsy to launch a murder investigation and ensure he would get caught.
Shawn, Gus, Lassiter and Juliet rush over to Whip's place and find him dead in a black Impala, the same car they already know the murderer drove that fateful night. They also find a suicide note in which Whip thanks Shawn and Gus for catching him. The case seems done and dusted, but shortly afterwards Shawn realizes he has a missed call from Whip. He plays the voice mail and in it our duo not only hear Whip being shot but also the closing of a car door. They realize Whip cannot be the killer and certainly didn't kill himself, so they go back to his book store. They check the surveillance footage and notice Whip had been watching several fragments of the same person leafing through his books. From a tic Shawn recognizes her as Grace Larsen, the mortician who claimed Woody had made a mistake during Bob's autopsy. Shawn realizes that she must have killed Bob and pinned it on Whip, drugging him with sleeping pills before using his stamp and his car to mislead the police.
Meanwhile, Woody and Grace are wrapping up Whip's autopsy when Woody finds a small metal capsule in Whip's esophagus. They find book fragments inside, and Grace knows the jig is up when Woody says he wants to test them for fingerprints. She threatens Woody with a gun and explains she killed Bob, pinned the murder on Whip and cut off Bob's ear to muscle in on the investigation and hopefully take over Woody's job. Fortunately, the police arrive in time and arrest her, and it is clear Shawn and Gus greatly respect Whip for being able to leave the clues they needed to find Bob's real killer.
Trivia[]
- Given that he runs a bookstore, and has a need for notoriety, it would seem plausible that "Chatterly" may well not be his given name, or at least the one he was born with. It may simply be derived from the D.H. Lawrence novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover".
- He claims to have read all books about murder written since 1850, and the book on Mr. Yang 100 times (he admits that he thought Mary was the killer).
- He uses shampoo with tea tree oil in it.