The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “I’d like to ask you to explain some of those words, Mr. Brin, but I’m sure our watchers want to get on with the story of your life as a public eye.”

  “Sorry; but it’s a period you’ve got to use its own words for. Anyway, Stef Murch saw that detectives like these private eyes, even if they never existed, could be a perfect adjunct to official scientific criminalists and solid trained policemen. We don’t wear uniforms, we don’t keep office hours, we don’t always even make reports or work on definite assignments. Our job’s the extras, the screwball twists, the— Look: If you wanted an exact statement of a formula you’d have it written by a Mark, wouldn’t you? But suppose you wanted a limerick? We take the cases that have the limericktype switch to them. We do what we please when and where we please. We play our hunches; and God knows it’s scientific heresy to say so, but if you don’t get hunches you won’t last long at the—”

  Suddenly, Brin’s image had vanished mysteriously from the screen.

  “Mr. Brin! Where are you? Mr. Brin, we’re still on the air!”

  “Sorry,” said Fers Brin off-camera. “Tell your watchers they’ve had a rare privilege. They’ve just seen a public eye get a hunch and he’s acting on it right now!”

  His hunch was, Fers realized later, like most hunches: a rational piecing together of known facts by the unconscious mind. In this instance the facts were that Professor Mase was a just and humane man, and that his life-long affection for his brother—quite possibly wilful self-delusion—could not vanish overnight. Conclusion: he would give the lawyer one last chance before turning evidence over to Captain Wark, and there was only one way Dolf Mase would react in selfprotection.

  Resultant hunch: Murder.

  The helicab made it from the casting station to the Professor’s quiet Connecticut retreat in record time; but the hunch had come too late. It might even have been too late the moment when the screen had gone dark during the earlier conversation with the Professor. For, as the prosecution was to reconstruct the case, Dolf Mase had already remembered where there was evidence of his one slip and was on his way.

  It wasn’t usual for a public eye to find a body; the eyes were generally called into the case later. It wasn’t usual for any man to find the body of a man whom he had liked and respected—and whom he might possibly, with a faster-functioning hunch, have kept alive.

  Professor Lu Mase had been killed very simply. His skull had been crushed by a Fifth Dynasty Martian statuette; and long after the bone splinters had driven life from the brain tissue, the killer had continued to strike, pounding with vicious persistence at what he could not make dead enough to satisfy him.

  A shard of the statuette had broken off and pierced the throat. A red fountain had spurted up in the room.

  It was an old-fashioned, even an archaic murder, and Fers Brin found his mind haunted by a half-remembered archaic line. Something about being surprised that the old man had so much blood . . .

  Another level of his mind registered and filed the details of the scene. Another level took him to the phone for the routine call to the criminalistics squad. But the topmost conscious level held neither observation nor reason, but only emotion— grief for the too trusting Professor, rage at Dolf Mase, who had crowned a career of licensing murderers by becoming a murderer himself.

  By the time the squad arrived, the Brin emotions were under control, and he was beginning to realize the one tremendous advantage given him by the primitive brutality of the killing. Dolf Mase had forgotten himself—his life-long hatred of his brother and all he represented had boiled over into unthinking fury.

  Now, if ever in his life, Dolf Mase must have slipped—and the Professor’s death, if it resulted in trapping this damnable sponsor of murder, would not be in vain.

  Within an hour Fers knew the nature of the slip.

  It was a combination of an old-fashioned accident and the finest scientific techniques of modern criminalistics that forged the perfect evidence against Dolf Mase.

  A man was fishing in a rowboat in the Sound. And it was precisely over his boat that the escaping murderer decided he could safely jettison the coat he had worn. The weighted coat landed plump at the fisherman’s feet. When he saw the blood he hastily rowed ashore and reported it. The laboratories did the rest.

  “You ever read about Alexander Wiener, Fers?” Captain Wark asked later that night. “He damned near invented the whole science of serology. Now he’d be a happy man if he could see how we’ve sewed up this whole case on this one piece of serological evidence. The blood on the coat is the Professor’s; the sweat stains on the collar check with all the clothing we found in Mase’s empty apartment. And there’s the case in one exhibit.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” Fers said, “but only eighty years ago a judge threw out a case that depended strictly on serological identity.”

  “Sure, and five hundred years ago Faurot had a hell of a time making fingerprint evidence stick. But now we’ve got, as Wiener foresaw that long ago, enough identifiable type-factors in blood, sweat, mucus, semen, and the rest to establish exact personal identity with as much mathematical certainty as a fingerprint. Mase has made his getaway and is lying low for the moment; but the dragnet’s out and once we’ve got him, he’s going to face a prosecution case he can’t get out of—not even if he gets Dolf Mase for his lawyer!”

  It was the bright eyes of a passport inspector, three days later, that spotted the forgery and caused Dolf Mase to be jerked at the last minute, in the guise of a traveling salesman for extra-terrestrial insect sprays, off the Venus rocket. He had shed the salesman’s extroverted bonhomie for his normal self-confident arrogance by the time he was booked for murder.

  “I’m reserving my defense,” was his only remark to everyone from Captain Wark to the Intersystem News Service.

  That’s where the case should have ended. That way it would have been nice and simple and eminently moral: villainy detected, guilt punished, and science—for there seemed no doubt that Mase’s reserved defense was a bluff—triumphant.

  Only this was precisely the point at which the case skipped right out of its orbit.

  Fers was puzzled by Captain Wark’s face on the phone. He’d never seen the rugged old features quite so weirdly taut. He didn’t need the added note of urgency in the voice to make him hyperjet himself down to the Identification Bureau.

  All that the Captain said when he arrived was “Look!” and all that he did was to hand Fers a standard fax-floater on a criminal suspect.

  This one was from Port Luna. Jon Do, wanted for burglary in hotel. Only identification, one fingerprint lifted from just-polisheci shoes of victim, who had the curious habit of tucking spare credits away in his footwear for the night.

  “So?” Fers asked. “Don’t know as I ever saw a fax-floater on a more uninteresting crime.”

  The third time Captain Wark opened his mouth he managed to speak. “You know it’s routine to send all stuff like that here; we’ve got the biggest file of single prints in the system.”

  “Yes, daddy,” said Fers patiently. “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “So I punched the data on a card and put it through, and I got an answer. Know whose print that is?”

  Fers looked again at the date of the hotel theft—November nineteenth, the same day his hunch had taken him to Connecticut. “If you’re going to say what I’m afraid you are, I’ll tell you right now I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s a fact. That is the print of the middle finger, left hand, of Dolf Mase! On the day of the murder he was looting a hotel room in Port Luna.”

  “Look,” said Fers. “We live in an Age of Marvels, sure—and I wonder what age Man’s ever lived in that he hasn’t thought that—but I’ve got a funny way of only believing what’s possible. And our Marvels just plain flat do not God-damned well include being in Connecticut and on the moon within the span of a couple of hours.”

  “It’s the perfect alibi in history, Brin. Alibi means elsewhere, or used
to—”

  “And how elsewhere can you get? But hell, Captain, we didn’t see the murder; but we did see Dolf Mase here in this office just an hour before it. According to your fingerprint, that’s equally impossible.”

  “Mase won’t say so. He’ll say we never saw him; that we’re trying to frame him.”

  “Which is an idea at that,” Fers mused. “Is there any real reason why the defense—”

  The Captain smiled grimly. “I was afraid you’d try a little temptation, Brin. And I wasn’t sure how well I’d resist. So before I phoned you I sent a spacegram to the Chief of Port Luna.”

  Fers exploded. “You idiot! You half-jetted hypomoronic—”

  “Hold it, Brin. Identification’s my job. It’s what I know and what I’m good at. If I get a request to identify a print, I damned well identify it.”

  “Even when you know there must be something phony?”

  “There isn’t. I know the Port Luna chief. He’s a good man. There isn’t a known method of forging a print that could get by him. This is for real.”

  “But we saw Mase here!”

  The Captain sighed. “You know, Brin, I’m beginning to wonder . . .”

  Brin’s temperament is a mercurial one. Suddenly the public eye snapped his fingers and beamed. “The serological evidence! We’ve got him cold on that coat! And you yourself said blood-typing and sweat-typing are as certain identity evidence now as fingerprints.”

  “And you yourself said it was only eighty years since a court threw out serology. Which evidence will it believe now? The new-fangled proof, or the fine old proof that ninety per cent of all identity work is based on?”

  Fers slumped again. “It has to be some kind of gimmick of Mase’s. The only other possibility—”

  “The only other possibility,” said Captain Wark flatly, “is that the whole foundation of the science of identification is one vast lie.”

  The public eye rubbed his red pate and frowned. “And the only way to find out which,” he said softly, “would seem to be at Port Luna . . .”

  Port Luna was erected as the first great non-terrestrial city. It was intended as the great pleasure dome of Man, the dream city of everyone from the millionaire to the stenographer saving up for her vacation by skipping lunches.

  But rocket travel developed so rapidly that pleasure-planning Man said to himself, “What’s the moon? It’s nice to be under; but what do I get out of being on it? Let’s go to Venus, to Mars—”

  And the pleasure dome became the skid road of the system, untended, unrepaired, unheeded. The observatory crew lived under a smaller dome of their own. So did the crews of the space strip. Passengers were rushed from space liners to the Terra Shuttle without even seeing the city of Port Luna. And in the city were the bars and stereos and other needful entertainment for the barracked crews and all the shattered spacemen who drifted back this far but could not quite bring themselves to return to Terra.

  It would take a good man, Fers reflected, to be Police Chief in Port Luna.

  “The Chief left on the last shuttle,” a uniformed sergeant told him. “You must’ve crossed him. He’s gone to Terra to pick up a hotel sneak thief—and say: Guess who our little old Port Luna sneak thief turned out to be?”

  Fers sighed, but not audibly. He registered proper amazement when the sergeant revealed the startling news, registered it so satisfactorily that from then on, as far as the sergeant went, Port Luna was his.

  But even the confidential files on the case were no help. The victim was a salesman from Venus, ostensibly traveling in microbooks but suspected—according to a note in the dossier—of peddling Venusian pictures on the side. The amount stolen was approximately what Dolf Mase might charge for five minutes of consultation in his office.

  “I’m beginning to get an idea,” Fers said slowly. “I don’t like it, and I can’t get rid of it. Sergeant, I want you to do something for me.”

  “Sure. I got a kid who’s crazy about public eyes. He’s gonna get a big blast out of this. What you want I should do?”

  “Got some omnidetergent here? Good. Now watch me wash my hands.”

  “Huh?”

  Very carefully Fers scrubbed, rinsed, and dried his hands. “Now write down that you saw me do that, and put it through the time stamper. Then lock it in your safe.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I’m not too damned sure I do myself. But I’ve got to try. Now which way’s that hotel?”

  The Luna Palace was at the corner of Tsiolkovsky and Oberth, only a short walk from the station. Fers was relieved, both because he hated to walk wearing gravity soles and because he loathed these streets of cut whisky and tenth-run stereos, of cheap beds and cheap bedmates.

  The Palace was a barely perceptible cut above the other hives of bedding-cells, exactly right both for the Venusian peddler—who wanted to display a touch of swank to his customers—and for the sneak thief—who would find the pickings too slim elsewhere.

  The girl behind the desk might have been the mociel for whom Minoan designs were revived. Fers was pleased; it was easier to work among attractive surroundings.

  “My name’s Bets,” she stated.

  “That’s nice,” said Fers. “Is the manager in?”

  “I get off at five o’clock,” Bets announced.

  “If that means that he comes on then, maybe I better stick around. Mind if I linger over the desk?”

  “Nobody comes in here much,” Bets revealed.

  “Good place for a spot of quiet brooding then. Bets, I’ve got me a problem—one they can’t solve by criminalistics. One that maybe disproves crim-inalistics.”

  “Not even in the lobby,” Bets further disclosed.

  “And I think I’ve got the answer,” Fers went on. “I’m almost sure I’ve got it if I can find out how to prove it. Did you ever read a whodunit, Bets?”

  “I get kind of hungry around five,” Bets admitted.

  “I like that period—the Twentieth Century, not around five—partly because of Stef Murch, I guess, and partly because I had a great-great-grandfather who was a private eye. I’ve read a lot and they keep saying they couldn’t write a detective story about the ‘future’—meaning, say, now—because everything would be different and how could you be fair?”

  “I like steaks,” Bets proclaimed.

  “And the answer I’ve got is one you could have figured out even in the Twentieth Century. It’s a problem that couldn’t happen till now, but the answer was in their knowledge. They had a writer named Quinn or Queel or something who used to issue a challenge to the reader, and this would be the place to do it.”

  “The best steaks are at the Jet,” Bets explained.

  “Challenge,” Fers mused. “What brought Dolf Mase’s left middle finger to the Luna Palace? And how am I going to prove it?”

  “Only lately,” Bets annotated, “there’s too many crooks hanging around the Jet so I go to the Spacemen’s Grotto.”

  Fers leaned over the desk and bussed her warmly. “Bless you, Bets,” he said. “I knew our conversations were bound to meet eventually! And if this works, you get the biggest steak on the whole damned moon!”

  The sergeant looked with some dubiety at the public eye, who held on to a chair to steady himself with his right hand while keeping his left hand carefully in the air.

  “I don’t think,” Fers observed, “that I could pass a sobriety test. Call of duty. Got me into a little drinking more along the standards of a private eye. But I’ve got some jobs for you. Got an ultraviolet light, first of all?”

  The baffled sergeant followed instructions. Perplexedly he assembled the dossier on the sneak-thief, the time-marked slip from the safe, the ultra-violet lamp.

  He flashed the lamp, at Fers’ behest, on the public eye’s left palm, and stareci at the fine set of hitherto invisible fingerprints.

  “Notice the middle one,” said Fers. “Now look at the sneak-thief’s.”

  After a full minute of grun
ting study, the sergeant looked up. He might have been staring at a Venusian swamp-doctor in the flesh.

  “And remember,” Fers went on, “that my hands were scrubbed with omnidetergent three hours ago. I shook hands with that man and got his prints on this invisible fluorescent film some time in the last three hours. Therefore he’s on Luna. Therefore he isn’t Dolf Mase, whom your Chief is probably still interviewing on lerra.

  “Then—then there’s two guys with the same print!” The sergeant lookeci as if his world were collapsing around him.

  “It makes sense,” said Fers. “It’s crazy but it makes sense. And don’t worry— you’re still in business. And I wonder whether another drink would save my life or kill me?”

  Doggedly the sergeant had fought his way through his bewilderment to the immediate problem. “Where is he? If he’s here, I gotta arrest him.”

  “How right you are. He’s at the Jet and his name’s Wil Smit.”

  “That son-of-a-spacesuit! We been trying to pin something on him for years!”

  “I thought so. It had to be somebody you’d never actually arrested and printed, or you’d have had him on file and not needed to send out a fax-floater. So when I learned that the Jet was in favor with the criminal set this season, I wandered around there—if you can call it wandering in these damned gravity-soles. I threw around the names of some criminals I know on Terra—little enough to be in his league but big enough to be familiar names out here. I said I needed a guy for a hotel job only it had to be somebody with a clean record. It was around the seventh drink that I met Wil Smit. When we shook on the deal I got all drunk and obstinate and, by God, if I was left-handed, he was going to shake left-handed too.”

  “But you ain’t left-handed. Or are you?” added the sergeant, to whom nothing was certain any longer in a system in which the same print belonged to two different guys.

  “Right-handed as a lark,” said Fers airily, and then paused to contemplate his statement. He shook his head and went on, “You go get Smit. Suspicion of theft. Book him, print him, and then you’ll have him cold. About that time I’ll be back and we’ll take the next shuttle. Meantime, I’ve got a date with a couple of steaks at the Spacemen’s Grotto.”