Boyce shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”
Two blonde women came in from another room. Boyce glanced at them and smiled, then turned back to us. “This is Clarisse, my wife,” he said, gesturing, “and Becky, a friend of ours.”
They were both nearly as muscular as Boyce. “We’re heading over to the gym,” Clarisse said.
“Wanna come?” Becky asked, reaching out to touch his shoulder.
Boyce shook his head. “These guys are trying to help find out what happened to Wheelau. I’m going to talk to them for a bit.”
“Well, if you get hungry, there’s still some spaghetti left from last night,” Clarisse said. She turned to us. “Good luck catching the bad guys. See ya.”
“Bye,” Becky added, as they went out the door.
“Where did you see Wheelau?” I asked. “Did he come over here, or did you go see him?”
“He came over here nearly every morning. We’d talk for a while before I went to work. Then I’d go see him in the afternoon, over there at the park.” He grinned. “It’s not really a park, I just call it that because they keep it so neat and clean over there.”
“So you saw Wheelau often?” I asked.
Boyce nodded. “Oh, yeah All the time. All of them, really. Hooth, Benait… whoever had time to chat, but Wheelau mostly.”
“And you never heard of anyone who wanted to hurt any of them?”
The expression on his face seemed to indicate that he thought the question a waste of time. “Not once, not ever, no way, no how.”
On the way home, Martin kept shaking his head. “Why would someone kill an Erintie everybody liked?” he kept asking, over and over. “Victor, this just doesn’t make any sense. He had to know something. Just had to.”
Finally, he did the thing I dreaded most—he started trying to use logic. It’s not that logic doesn’t work. The problem is with Martin’s approach to logic. He begins with a perfectly reasonable scenario, then spins an ever more elaborate web until he has ensnared every living creature in the Universe as a possible suspect. Unfortunately, this means that he ends up looking for a needle in a haystack as he seeks out the actual perpetrator of the deed.
“There are three possibilities,” he began. “The first is that Wheelau was murdered by a human. The second is that he was murdered by another Erintie. The third is that he was murdered by himself.”
I gave him my best approximation of a skeptical look. “Run that last one past me again.”
“Suicide, in other words.”
“Ah! Much better.”
“Now, if he killed himself, then we really only have only one suspect, namely Wheelau, himself. If he was murdered by another Erintie, then there are a fair number of Erintie on Earth, but it was most likely someone he knew, unless, of course, another Erintie came over here from another colony, which would add to the number of suspects. But then, you’d think someone would notice if a new Erintie showed up in town. Maybe we should ask the Erintie if they’ve had any visitors. On the other hand, if an Erintie was bent on doing Wheelau in, then he probably wouldn’t advertise his presence in town, but someone else might have noticed. Do you think we should check the bus station? How do Erinties travel, anyway? Getting one seated on an airplane would be—”
Time to put a stop to this before he lost himself in recursive theories, like putting two mirrors lace to face. “Martin—”
“Do you think if they went first class, that—”
“Martin!”
“Maybe they could push the seats back. Or maybe they could just slide in sideways, but then they’d take up two seats and that would be expensive.” He frowned. “For that matter, where would an Erintie get the money for two seats? Surely, they don’t—”
“Martin!”
He looked hurt. “Did you have to yell? I’m not hard of hearing, you know. All I was saying was that—”
“listen, two eyes, I know what you were saying! You were on the verge of implicating the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, plus sundry accomplices, pre and post facto. In another twenty minutes, you’d have hauled the entire living population of the Universe, their ancestors, and any potential progeny, up before the judge. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but there isn’t a jail big enough to hold that many people.”
“But—”
“Besides,” I added “with everyone in the hoosegow, who would guard the joint?”
He, of course, had no answer for this, and subsided into uneasy grumbling for the rest of the ride home. Even with my acute hearing, I wasn’t able to catch much, but I did get the impression that he thought I was ungrateful for his so-called help in trying to unravel the case.
Life with Martin is not always easy.
The next morning, I was spared the task of waking Martin. The telephone did the job for me.
I could hear Martin’s sleepy voice answer. It did not remain sleepy for long.
“What?”
A pause.
“When?”
Another pause.
“Hooth?”
The handset slammed back into its cradle. Martin’s feet shook the floor of the apartment as he came racing out of the bedroom. “Victor!” he shouted.
“I’m right here,” I said quietly from a foot away. “What happened?”
“They scragged Hooth!”
“As in killed? Another corpus delectable? Hooth? But he was a nice—”
Martin’s face screwed up, and he flapped his hands in my direction. “Yabba, yabba, yabba… for God’s sake, don’t start telling me what a great guy he was, or we’ll never get anywhere.” He scowled down at me. “Don’t just stand there, Victor… make me some coffee… do something!”
“Coffee?”
“I need to be in top shape. My mind needs to be primed and ready to go.” He paused, thinking. “Forget the coffee,” he said decisively. “Let’s go. I’ll worry about coffee later.” He started for the door.
I simulated the noise humans make when clearing their throats. “Um… Martin, don’t you think you better put on some clothes before you go charging out into the world?”
He looked down at his naked body, then sheepishly back at me. “Right. Knights in shining armor are expected to wear shining armor.”
As he padded barefooted back into his bedroom, I heard him muttering to himself about how nice Hooth had been.
“Throat slit, probably not long after dark,” Pete was saying, shaking his head. We were standing under the trees at the Erintie colony.
“Nobody heard anything?” I asked.
He shook his head some more. “Not a thing.”
“Nobody saw anything?” I asked.
Pete sighed. “As soon as the Sun goes down the Erintie go to sleep. It’s a physiological necessity. They’re helpless. They shut down completely. They’re dead to the world.”
“Pete!” Martin protested sharply.
He looked apologetic. “I guess that was a pretty poor choice of words.”
“If they were all asleep, we can rule out any Erintie as a suspect,” I observed.
“Oh, absolutely,” Pete agreed.
“But with,” I glanced around, estimating the number of Erintie, “say, sixty or seventy Erintie out here in the trees, how would the murderer know which one was which?”
“I had a bit of trouble asking that question. With Wheelau and Hooth gone, it turns out that none of the other Erintie know English very well. Eventually, Benait managed to get across that each Erintie stakes out a preferred spot. Rain or shine, they always sleep there.”
“And with Hooth dead, it’s beginning to look unlikely that Wheelau killed himself,” I added, giving Martin a significant glance.