A Werewolf Among Us

THREE: Suspects

Seven limited-response mechanicals rolled out of the wide kitchen doorway, two abreast except for their gleaming leader, Jubal's personal waiter, who preceded them by ten feet. They split into two columns at the head of the table, precisely as they had done at the start of each of the many courses of the dinner, and, in a moment, stationed themselves beside and to the left of their respective masters. The long table was alabaster. The dishes were black. The silverware was silver. Simultaneously reaching into their seven identical body-trunk storage compartments, the robots placed clear, crystal dishes, filled with bright crimson fruit, on the small black plates before the diners. White, black, red, and the gleam of silver… As if satisfied by the simplicity of the setting and the color scheme, the mindless mechanicals turned as a single unit and retraced their path back to the kitchen, the door hissing shut behind the last of them.

"This is a native fruit," Jubal said, using a long-handled, tiny-bowled silver spoon to scoop up a chunk of it. "It grows on trees in a shell, much like a coconut, but it tastes like a combination of watermelon and blackberries."

It was quite good, juicy and sweet.

They finished dessert in silence and retired to the main drawing room for after-dinner liqueurs, while the mechanicals cleaned up the dirty dishes behind them. At first, through the soup and the meat courses, everyone had been talkative, though no one had touched on the subject that was foremost in all their minds. Later in the meal, the conversational mood passed as fewer and fewer topics remained that avoided reference to the murders. St. Cyr had found it umprofitable to attempt to steer the talk into a rewarding channel, had accepted that such things must wait until after the meal, but was by now considerably tense. Wearing the bio-computer, he seemed to have less patience with the rituals of daily existence and the rigid rules of protocol and manners than when he was not in his symbiotic role.

He accepted an amber liqueur from Jubal Alderban, who was doing the honor of personally pouring for the family.

"At times," Jubal said, "one longs for a respite from all this mechanical, loving care."

St. Cyr tasted the drink. It smelled like burnt plums and tasted like minted cherries.

He sat down in one of the many form-fitting black chairs spaced in a cozy ring by the fireplace, felt it shift and writhe under him as it explored his structural peculiarities and adjusted to an optimum mold. The others, except for Jubal, who was still serving, were already seated, watching him with only thinly disguised anxiety.

In a moment, when they all had drinks and were comfortably fitted by their chairs, St. Cyr broached the subject. "Business," he said.

Alicia, Jubal's wife, sighed. She was a pretty woman, petite and dark, possessed of that noticeable glow of health that indicated the use of rejuvenation drugs of some sort. "I suppose you'll want the whole thing, step by step." Her tone was practiced weariness on the surface, something much more personal and sad beneath.

"Step by step," St. Cyr affirmed.

Alicia paled, blinked at him stupidly for a moment, licked her lips and attempted to regain her composure. She had clearly expected him to say that, but she had been hoping against the necessity of a retelling.

"I'm sorry," St. Cyr told her. "But all that I've heard thus far is what Mr. Alderban posted in the light-telegram, and what Teddy told me."

"You questioned Teddy?" Dane asked incredulously. He was a tall, lean boy with a dark complexion, black eyes, and thin, pale lips. When he spoke he kept his head tilted downwards, looking up over the shelf of his brow at the detective.

"Of course I questioned him. He's unemotional, scientifically logical, a good source for first impressions."

"No, a bad source," Dane said, sure of himself. He laced his long, bony fingers around the tiny glass of liqueur. "This is an emotional subject, after all, not a dry one. The du-aga-klava is real."

"You think so?" St. Cyr asked.

He wished that Dane would raise his head. As long as he sat in that position, on the edge of the couch, his shoulders hunched forward, it was difficult to tell anything of what he was thinking by examining his face and eyes.

"It's real enough," Dane said.

"Bullshit," Tina Alderban said, ignoring the angry look her brother directed at her.

St. Cyr turned toward the girl, waiting for something more. She sat in an overstuffed fur chair, made more petite by the size of it. She was dark like Dane, though more olive than brown, and her face was more open, her eyes more wide-set than his, her lips sensuous and heavy, whereas Dane's lips were thin and serious. Her black hair dropped straight over her shoulders, curled around the tips of her small breasts, as if accentuating them. At eighteen, she was one of the most interesting women that St. Cyr had ever seen. He wondered if he would have an opportunity to seduce her before the case was finished…

Negative, the bio-computer informed him.

Still and all, she was a charming creature, with—

Negative. Too many familial complications would result from such a rash act, obstructing your conduct of the case.

"I'll tell him the whole thing," Jubal said, sliding forward on his chair. The seat and arms of the chair rippled, gauged his new position, firmed up around his buttocks and thighs.

"No, Jubal," Hirschel interposed.

He had only spoken once before that evening, and then only to offer St. Cyr an obligatory welcome. He was quite like Jubal, heavy in the chest and shoulders, over six feet tall, leonine with a mane of hair and muttonchop sideburns. The chief difference was in the lines of his face. Where Jubal was soft, his cheeks smooth and the angles of his face pleasantly rounded, Hirschel was hard, cut deep by character lines, his skin tanned and leathery. Also, while Jubal was white-haired yet somehow young, Hirschel was black-haired and old, infinitely old despite his young man's constitution. Perhaps, actually, Hirschel was only a couple of years Jubal's senior, and certainly no more than a decade older; in experience, however, in knowledge and cunning, he was Jubal's great-great grandfather.

The simple statement of the negative had drawn everyone's attention to the older man. He said, "I'll tell it, because I don't have nearly the degree of emotional involvement that you do, Jubal."

Jubal nodded. "Go ahead."

Hirschel turned to St. Cyr, smiled slightly, looking quite unlike the rider in the storm, the man with the pig heads slapping bloodily at his hip. Succinctly, he related much the same story that St. Cyr had gotten from Teddy, though with no extrapolation whatsoever.

"You were living here at the times of both murders?"

"Yes," Hirschel said. "I arrived a month before Leon's death; needless to say, a good part of this visit has not been a happy time for me." However, if he actually did agonize over the deaths of his niece and nephew, he did not indicate his inner turmoil in any way beyond this brief statement. He appeared healthy and happy, without the dark lines of anxiety around the eyes and mouth that characterized both Jubal and Alicia Alderban.

Correctly projecting the line of thought St. Cyr was then pursuing, Hirschel said, "And, also needless to say, that puts me on your list of suspects."

"How absurd! "Jubal said.

"Really, Hirschel," Alicia said, "I doubt that Mr. St. Cyr—"

"But he does suspect me," Hirschel said. "And he should. Just as he suspects all the rest of you."

Jubal seemed twice as outraged at this. He turned to St. Cyr, his thick white brows drawn together over his eyes in one snowy bar. "Is this true? Do you think we'd murder our own children — brothers and sisters?"

"Hirschel is correct," St. Cyr affirmed. "I suspect everyone until I have the data to logically eliminate suspects."

"I won't have it that way," Jubal said, putting down his cordial.

"Of course you will," Hirschel said quickly, before St. Cyr could speak. "You wanted a cyberdetective because you wanted a complete investigation, a thorough investigation. Now, you're going to have to take the sour with the sweet."

"Hirschel, after all—" Jubal began.

Then something he saw in the older man's expression cut him short. His voice died in volume and conviction until he only sighed, shrugged his shoulders and picked up the tiny glass of liqueur again.

St. Cyr wondered what had passed between the two men. Clearly, Hirschel exercised some power over Jubal, though he was not a tenth as wealthy as the younger man and hardly old enough to pull a routine about being older-and-wiser-than-thou. Was it only his personality, so much more dominant than Jubal's, that had quieted the family head, or was there something else here? File it for consideration.

Turning from the hunter, St. Cyr addressed the entire family. "Whose room is nearest the one Leon had?"

"Mine," Betty said.

She was demure, not quite as stunningly attractive as her sister but lovely in her own right. Her hair was yellow, her eyes blue, her features Roman in the traditional "classic" beauty that made good marble statues. When she spoke, her voice was so soft that St. Cyr found himself leaning forward in his chair to hear what she said.

"You sleep in the room next to the one in which Leon was killed?"

"That's right."

"You were in your room that night?"

"Yes."

"Did you hear anything?"

"No." She looked down at her hands, tried to hide them in each other, fingers kicking like spider legs. "We have such excellent soundproofing here."

Half an hour later, St. Cyr had asked fifty questions and listened to fifty variations of Betty's excuse: "The walls are thick here"; "Sound doesn't travel well from one level of the house to another"; "After all, Mr. St. Cyr, the gardens are huge, and even if I happened to be out for a stroll at the same time poor Dorothea was murdered, I could hardly be expected to see or hear…" The bio-computer stored the answers, replayed them to itself, juxtaposed them, searched for a slip-up in someone's story, an odd clash of details. It found nothing out of the ordinary. St. Cyr, absorbing the family's rich emotional impressions, achieved no more than his mechanical comrade. The fifty questions might just as well never have been asked, the answers never given.

"I believe," the cyberdetective said, "that will be all for the night. In the morning I'll want to see the dead boy's room, the place in the garden where Dorothea died, other things." He turned to Hirschel as the others stood to go, and he said, "If I might have a word or two with you, I would appreciate it."

"Certainly," Hirschel said, sitting down again.

Jubal sat down too.

St. Cyr looked at the white-haired patriarch, then at Hirschel. "I wanted to speak with you alone."

"Come along to my quarters," Hirschel said, rising, unfolding like a paper toy until he towered a few inches above St. Cyr.

They had reached the door to the drawing room when Jubal spoke to their backs. "You're wrong."

St. Cyr turned. "Perhaps."

"You should be looking outside the family."

"I will."

"You're wasting time."

"Perhaps."

Jubal looked at Hirschel, saw that same undefined power that had quieted him before, was quieted again by it.

"See you in the morning," Hirschel said.

"In the morning," Jubal echoed.

They opened the door, left the room, closed the door behind them.

"You must forgive him," Hirschel said.

"For what?"

"His behavior, of course. It's just that he's so on edge."

"I understand that; it's natural; there's nothing to forgive."

Hirschel nodded, turned. Over his shoulder, as he walked for the nearest elevator, he said, "Come along."

Hirschel's rooms were no larger or smaller than St. Cyr's and were also on the fifth level of the mansion. The color scheme here was browns and greens instead of various shades of blue, providing an effect not unlike an open forest, heavy boughs, grasses, growth. The hunter dearly belonged here.

The walls were decorated with the mounted heads of half a dozen animals: deer, large cats, and a wolf that must have been a hundred pounds heavier than Hirschel himself. Each of the creatures stared over the heads of the two men, its gaze fixated on something beyond the walls of the room.

"Will the boar heads go here?" St. Cyr asked.

Hirschel looked surprised.

"I was on my balcony, watching the storm, when you rode in this afternoon."

Hirschel smiled, looked at his trophies. "Yes, the pigs will give the collection balance; nothing can look more fierce than a wild boar with its teeth bared."

"Could it have been a wild boar that killed Dorothea in the garden?"

"Hardly. You're forgetting the wolfs hair they found. Besides, was it a wild boar that came quietly into the house, sought out Leon and slaughtered him without a sound?"

"No," St. Cyr said. "But was it a wolf either?"

Hirschel shrugged.

'You don't believe this du-aga-klava story, do you, as Dane does?"

"I think it sounds like nonsense. However, I've lived long enough to know never to completely discount any possibility."

He sounded, St. Cyr thought, like Teddy, as if he were purposefully trying to plant certain doubts in the cyberdetective's mind.

He is only properly qualifying his responses.

"As I understand it, everyone in the family has some artistic talent or other."

Hirschel said, "Yes, even Teddy."

"Teddy?"

Hirschel slumped into an antique chair that made no attempt to form itself around him, motioned St. Cyr to the chair across from his. "Jubal's main interest is sculpture, but he designs cutlery, dishes, goblets, what-have-you, as a diversion. In order to spare himself all the manual labor involved in molding and machining the finished product, he programs his designs into Teddy. The Reiss Corporation, as an option, has especially designed and programmed Teddy to perform well in all phases of silver-working. He has his own workshop on the first level, near the garage."

"And you?" St. Cyr asked.

"No talents," Hirschel said, smiling. The cyberdetective noticed that the large, rugged man curiously resembled the head of the wolf behind him when he smiled.

Immaterial.

"Why is that?"

"I'm not a resident in the house, merely a biannual guest. I never came under Jubal's influence when he was on this hypno-keying kick many years ago."

"You sound as if you thought that hypno-keying was a bad idea."

"Depends on what you want out of life," Hirschel said.

"What do you want?"

"The same thing that I traipse from world to world in search of every year of my life — adventure, danger, excitement."

"And the artist has none of that?"

"Only secondhand."

"If you have so little in common with the family, why do you return every other year to visit?"

"They're my only relatives," Hirschel said. "A man needs a family now and again."

St. Cyr nodded. "How old are you?"

"Sixty."

"Six years older than Jubal." When Hirschel nodded, the cyberdetective asked, "Are you wealthy?"

The big man evidenced no dissatisfaction with St. Cyr's prying. "Quite wealthy," he said. "Though I'm not as wealthy as Jubal, by even a fraction." He smiled the wolfs smile again and said, "That still makes me suspect, doesn't it? Perhaps even more than before."

"Are you mentioned in Jubal's will?"

"Yes," Hirschel said, still smiling. "I receive the least of all those included — unless, of course, I'm the only survivor."

St. Cyr looked at the wolf. For a moment he felt that its glass eyes had shifted their dead gaze, stared directly at him. He blinked, and the eyes were where they should be, fixed on the air, cold, dry.

"I guess that will be all for tonight," he said, standing.

Hirschel did not rise to see him to the door, but the panel slid open as he took a few steps toward it.

At the door St. Cyr turned and looked at the wolf, looked at Hirschel, said, "The wolfs head there…"

"What of it?"

"It's one of those now extinct?"

"Yes."

"And is that how the du-aga-klava is supposed to appear in its animal shape?"

Hirschel turned in his chair and examined the long-snouted, wickedly-toothed beast. "Pretty much that way, I suppose, though a deal larger and far more ugly."

St. Cyr cleared his throat and said, "Why did Climicon label the wolf for extinction?"

"It was a predator, a very dangerous animal," Hirschel said "It was not at all the sort of thing you'd want running loose in the woods on a rich man's paradise."

"Then why let the boars live?"

Hirschel clearly had not considered that conflict before. He looked surprised, turned to examine the wolf again, frowned. "You've got a good point there, for a boar can be twice as deadly and mean-tempered as any wolf."

"No ideas?"

Hirschel shook his head; his black hair bounced, fell back into place. "You'll have to ask Climicon about that, but they surely had their reasons."

"I'll find out in the morning," St. Cyr said.

"Let me know what you learn."

"I will. Good night."

St. Cyr stepped out of the room, oriented himself by the paintings on the walls and walked the length of the long corridor to his own suite.

In his bedroom, stretched out full length on the enormous waterbed, he said, "I've still got nothing concrete to go on, no base to build the case from."

A few things.

"Nothing."

Bits and pieces.

"Like Hirschel's curious resemblance to the wolf when he smiles?"

Immaterial.