Paths of Life

"Private detective? There's no such thing in this day and age," he told me. "You've got to be crazy if you think that this idea out of the past is one that you truly expect to make your life out of. I can understand that you feel you're operating in the shadow of your heroic brother, but that's not a way to live your life, looking to be a hero. When you get serious and realistic, then we'll talk about the money again."

"No, I am serious," I argued. "There's definitely still a need for criminal investigators. Look at today's newspaper. There are plenty of crimes that the police never got around to solving, such as this story about the fifth anniversary of the theft of the Cassieopian living jewels from the New City Museum. Or worse, look at the crimes they're not even bothering to solve. This murder at the circus. The police think they've got their man, but I'm not so sure."

My father's eyebrows arched, and he read the article I had pointed out. "'Acrobat Fingered in Death of Tiger Tamer. Police have arrested Thel Fezzle, a Plieadean acrobat at the Myron Mason traveling circus, for the murder of animal trainer Gordon Wilson. Wilson, who has been an expert animal trainer for years, was recently hired by the Mason circus and his tiger act immediately became the top-billed act in the show. He was found dead in the animal tent, partially eaten by one of his tigers, which he must have been training at the time. Police, believing that Fezzle was jealous and upset at losing the top billing, searched his tent and found a loaded dart gun and a vial of Aggrivane, a drug normally used to agitate unconscious people's brain waves to make sure they're not brain dead and perhaps even induce consciousness, but which could, according to animal experts, cause a beast to go into a killing rage. Animal-control experts spotted the tiger three miles from the circus several hours later and killed it, ending the potential danger to the surrounding community.' What about this article leads you to believe that the acrobat isn't guilty as charged, son?"

"They found the acrobat with the dart gun and the drug, but the article makes no mention of having recovered the actual dart. Presumably, it was stuck in the tiger, and the tiger was killed, so shouldn't this evidence have been mentioned...if it was found?"

My father was impressed, but unconvinced. "Maybe you're right," he said, "but I'm not going to let you ruin your life based on a maybe. If you can solve one of these two mysteries that you just pointed out to me, I'll accept that you're serious about this."

"Ummm...I'll need the money in order to supply myself with the proper equipment, dad."

"Okay, you can borrow against the fund I set up, but use it prudently."

I thanked my father and got to work. I decided to start with the murder, since it was more recent and someone's life could be at stake. I used some of the money to hire a lawyer to represent Fezzle, since as a private citizen, I had no rights to any information or evidence gathered by police, nor any right to contact my client. The lawyer agreed to act as a figurehead to enable me to investigate the case, and I soon met Thel Fezzle himself.

I began with the most basic question. "Did you murder Gordon?"

"No," he told me, and I believed him. "I couldn't have...wouldn't have done anything like that! Sure I was a bit upset that I had lost top billing, but I knew that the circus would make more money with him as the headliner. More money for the circus means more money for me, and for all of us! I wouldn't put my pride ahead of that!"

"Then what about the dart gun and the aggrivane? What were they doing in your tent?"

"I'd never seen them before in my life," the accused acrobat replied. "Anyone could have gotten into my tent and planted them; circuses aren't high-security areas. We're all friends and we seldom lock our tent flaps. Someone is trying to frame me. I'm not crazy enough to want to send a tiger into a killing frenzy! What if it tried to kill me? Pump up a wild animal with that kind of drug, and it'll kill anything in sight!"

My next stop was the police evidence locker. I carefully examined the dart gun and the vial, and immediately knew that something was wrong. A call to a doctor that I knew confirmed my suspicions. "The vial you're describing sounds like a standard human dose of the stuff," he told me. "To get a rise out of a beast as massive as a tiger you'd need a much larger amount."

So not only were the police wrong about the murder suspect, they were wrong about the method of murder. The tiger, I was willing to bet, hadn't been drugged at all, and was probably an innocent victim of the frame up as well. I was planning on looking at the corpse anyway, but this bit of information made that more urgent.

"The corpse itself was sewn back together as best as the morticians could do it and shipped back to his family," the Police Chief Martin told me. "Here are the crime scene holos. They're 3-D images, so they should help you with almost everything you need. I should warn you, they're very gory. I was a paramedic before joining the police department, and let me tell you, I don't think I've ever seen a body this horribly mutilated."

"Was the wound site tested for foreign substances?"

"No point in it. Tiger saliva would have already done its work on the body tissue and broken down into its component elements. In order to officially declare the cause of death as a tiger bite, we took a cast of the wound area and showed it to a zoologist, who agreed that it conforms to the dentition of a tiger."

"But what if the killing was done a different way, with some kind of weapon, and made to look like the tiger did it?"

He looked at me like I was crazy. "I don't know about you, Hawkins, but when I see a tiger bite and a freed tiger, nothing else comes to mind."

If I ever needed proof that there was a place for a private eye in the world, that was it. "Speaking of the tiger, was its corpse taken as evidence? Was its system tested for the drug? Was the dart found?"

The chief looked like he was running out of patience with my constant questions. "The tiger's body was immediately destroyed due to danger of certain feline-carried infections," he told me. "The animal-control folks offered to let us look at it, but I felt we had too much evidence without it to justify the health risk of not destroying the corpse as soon as possible."

With that, he took leave of me and I studied the corpse. The chief was not kidding around when he said it was gory. While I expected blood to have spurted out, I didn't expect so much body tissue to be away from the immediate wound area...almost as if it had been knocked away by a bludgeoning force. On the other hand, if the tiger had actually bitten into him, I would have expected less body tissue to remain. Even if the tiger wasn't particularly hungry and was merely driven to attack by a drug or some other outside influence, I'd think it would have continued attacking the corpse rather than wander off after a single killing bite. I also found it odd that despite the presence of a circus full of performers and animals, the supposedly enraged tiger didn't attack anyone else there, but went hunting elsewhere.

My mind began to build a theory. The tiger was framed as well as the acrobat, but someone had taken great pains to make the death look like a tiger attack. Probably the murderer had a weapon custom made that would, when it struck a man, leave marks resembling a tiger's bite. The murderer swung this weapon at Gordon Wilson, leaving the marks implicating the tiger, but the force of the blow or blows spattered flesh all about. The murderer then freed the tiger using keys stolen from Gordon and planted the phony evidence and fled.

If this was the method, and almost anyone who could employ this method had the opportunity, as there was little security around the circus, what could have been the motive? I wondered. The acrobat was innocent, and Gordon wasn't at the Myron Mason circus long enough to have earned the kind of hatred required for a murder. Fezzle seemed to be the only one at the circus with any reason to be jealous. I began to entertain the idea that the murderer was not a member of this circus, but was someone outside the circus that had a grudge against him, specifically someone right here in or around New City. Sure, the killer could have followed the circus around, but why, then, would he wait until the circus was here? The killing couldn't have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, considering the elaborate setup the murderer had arranged. No, I concluded, Gordon Wilson must have made an enemy in the New City area at some point in his past, and his past would hold the clues to who it is. Also, the weapon must have been custom made, and even though it was possible that it was made somewhere else for someone in New City, it might not be a bad idea to check out metal workers around the city to see if I could find out through that who might have had such a thing created.

This, I decided, would be my strategy. First, I sent out a call to every craftsman in the New City area that might have been able to create the weapon. Then I went and looked at the newspaper's obituary for Gordon Wilson and read it. "Gordon had a rapport with animals," one of his colleagues had said. "Big cats, primates, reptiles, elephants...somehow, he was able to get all of them to follow his commands." Although his most spectacular acts involved tigers and other dangerous creatures, other animal trainers regard his taming of the lunar baboon as his most fantastic achievement. The odd primate, bred on Earth's moon, has extensible arms which enable it to stretch them to attack anyone close enough to threaten it with a whip, but Wilson, who seldom needed to use a whip, was able to earn its cooperation, earning him the nickname, the "Lunar Babooner" amongst his professional colleagues. Before joining the Myron Mason circus less than a month previously, he had belonged to the All-Europe circus for eleven years.

Did anyone from that circus hold a grudge over the loss of the money that Gordon's performance used to bring in? I wondered. I called the manager, Maria Della Florenza, and she denied any bitterness. "Sure we were a bit upset at his departure," she told me, "but we received a nice compensation package. We couldn't stop Gordon from leaving, as his contract had expired, but we forced Myron Mason to pay us enough for Gordon's trained animals to make up for the revenue we'll lose until we can find a bigger star. After all, Myron expected immediate payoff from his large investment in Gordon, and to obtain wild animals and have Gordon train them to performance standards could have taken years. No, if anyone's bitter, it would be Myron...but after investing all that money in Gordon and his animals, he surely wouldn't kill him."

"Did your circus ever perform in New City?" I asked Gordon's former employer.

"Yes," she told me. "The last time was five years ago, almost to the day."

I ended the conversation. The phrase "five years ago" stuck in my head for some reason. After a short review of the past few days, I realized why. The other case I had pointed out to my father was about the unsolved theft of the Cassieopian living jewels...five years ago. Could the cases actually be connected? I decided that a look at the local newspaper's archives from five years ago would be in order.

The article describing the theft was extremely thorough. "I don't know how anyone could have accomplished it," the museum's security director, one James O'Rourke had been quoted as saying. "The door to the gem display room is locked at night, and there's no other way to get into the room. Even the guards, who have the access codes in case they hear something, couldn't have performed the theft. The floor of the room is pressure-sensitive and is connected to a device that records the DNA pattern of whoever walks on it. This recording is transmitted directly to our private security firm's headquarters, which means that it couldn't have been tampered with by a guard. And, I should add, our guards are trusted security professionals, with excellent references. However, the recording from last night shows nothing! We are extremely baffled."

There seemed, to me, to be a hole in this ultra-secure room a mile wide. I called up the security director, who had, by some miracle, managed to keep his job despite the spectacular failure of that night. After explaining the reason for my call, I asked him, "Couldn't someone have used a robot in the theft, which wouldn't have a DNA pattern to record?"

"No," he responded. "Due to the unique nature of the living jewels...they're really animals which look jewel-like, not inanimate minerals...we were able to protect them in a way that would not work for any other valuable items. We surrounded them with a force field that would disintegrate anything not alive that got within three feet of them. Not only does this rule out a robot, but also the use of a lasso or grappling hook from afar. No living being could have gotten to them without stepping on the recording floor."

"Can I see the room?" I asked. He invited me to do so, although the tone of his voice suggested that he didn't think I'd be much help in solving the mystery.

Before I left to check out the museum, one of the calls I made to track down the weapon was returned. "I think I made the object you're describing," the metalsmith told me. "The guy who brought in the tiger's skull told me he wanted to make a cast of it as a hunting trophy. There wasn't a handle on it, but that could have been added later; it would only require a minor welding job."

"Do you have his name?" I asked.

"Not here," he told me. "I keep my old records in a safe at home rather than clutter up my store's computer with stuff I'm not likely to need any longer." I arranged to meet him at his house later that night.

I got to the museum and met O'Rourke, who led me through the museum to the room where the living jewels had once been kept. It did indeed seem like an impossible job to steal anything from it. As he had told me earlier, the solid door was the only way of entering the room. It had no windows. Of necessity, there was a vent and a light fixture in the ceiling, but they were both quite narrow and the ceiling was extremely high. It seemed to me, though, that, unlikely as they seemed, they offered access to this room. "What's on the floor above this ceiling?" I asked the director.

"That would have to be one of the animal displays," he responded. "This is a natural history museum, after all; gemstones are hardly our only exhibit, although they are the most valuable."

"I'd like to see that," I told him, and I was led up to the floor above, where a large variety of animal skeletons were mounted. I mentally calculated where the vent and light fixture in the living-jewel room would have been and stooped down to examine the floor. The floor was made of a strong plastic that simulated the look and feel of marble, to give the ambience of an ancient storehouse of knowledge. The plastic panels were lined with electromagnets on the other side and were thus fastened to an iron grid under the floor, which held them so tightly that the panels didn't move at all, even though they were quite light. This was a rather common arrangement; it allowed maintenance crews to access pipes, cables and connections between floors without having to do a major job in opening up the floor and resealing it. I felt around the floor panel and found the switch to turn off its electromagnet. James O'Rourke was surprised that I knew how to do it, and watched closely as I shined a small light through the iron grid, revealing the tops of the screws that fastened the vent and light fixture to the ceiling of the room directly below us. Removing the vent would offer a hole of approximately 300 square centimeters that opened to the display room where the living jewels were kept. Removing the light fixture would have created a smaller hole. "There's your point of entry," I told the security director.

"But who could have taken advantage of it?" he asked, not believing that a novice like me could quickly find what he had overlooked for years.

"I have my suspicions, but I'd better keep them to myself for now," I told him. "Meanwhile, if you don't mind, I'd like to see a listing of who was on duty that night." Having seen what a good job I could do, he was extremely cooperative. I took down the names, hoping that one of them would match the name I received during my meeting with the metalsmith later that night.

However, that meeting turned out much differently than I had expected. As soon as I approached the house, I could sense in the air that there was something wrong. The house was very quiet, and I had a feeling that it was not normally this way. I was scared that someone else was present, possibly someone hostile, and I took my ray gun out of its hidden holster in case I would need to defend myself. Minutes that felt like hours passed by as I hid in the shadows near the house. Using the sonic aiming device on my gun, I quietly circled the house, aiming it at every angle to see if I could detect any heartbeats that indicated the presence of a living human being, but I couldn't. If there was anyone alive in that house, he or she was very well hidden. This had to be bad news; the metalsmith assured me he'd be home at this time. I decided to risk revealing my presence and ring the doorbell, but no one answered. I broke in, and searched the house, only to find the reason for my presence dead, his safe blasted open and its contents destroyed...by a ray gun that I noted with alarm was extremely similar to my own. My worst fears were soon realized when seconds later, several police officers burst in and yelled, "Freeze, murderer! You're under arrest!"

"Not to worry," I told her. "The murderer was a lot better at killing people than at successfully pinning it on others. Like his framing of the acrobat, his plan had a flaw. I pointed out the warmth of the metalsmith's body, which indicated that he had been murdered within the last fifteen minutes, and the coolness and full battery charge of my gun, which proved that it hadn't been fired recently. The officers admitted that they had no basis to arrest me and let me go."

And for the first time in five years, human beings laid eyes on the living jewels.