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.
