boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

388 Anthony Boucher
“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 self-
protection.
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.