And then Tessa taught Dr. Werjonic and me how to investigate a crime that, by all appearances, could not possibly have occurred.
67
“Dupin,” Tessa repeated. “Haven’t you ever read The Murders in the Rue Morgue?”
“Probably… A long time ago,” I said. “Maybe when I was your age.”
“That would be a long time ago,” she muttered.
The truth was, I did remember reading some of Poe’s writings when I was younger, but I’d never been that interested in him. Now, I suspected I would regret that. “Tessa,” I said, “who is Dupin?”
“Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Poe created him. Wrote three stories about him. In the first one, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there’s these two people who get killed-a woman and her daughter. But they’re not in a morgue, though. It’s the name of a street.
Anyway, the detective is this guy named Dupin, but he’s not really a detective exactly, more like a profiler or something.”
“Hmm, a profiler,” Calvin muttered.
“Yeah,” she said. “And he ends up solving the crime.”
“Well, there you go,” I said. “You can already tell it’s fiction.”
Tessa gave me a headshake. “If Lien-hua were here, she’d drop-kick you for saying that.”
“Quite so,” remarked Calvin, who had chosen to lead us north along the path that led past the Botanical Building. “But I’m sad to say, my dear, this Dupin fellow, he seems to be a pale apograph of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes.”
“Holmes?” Tessa recoiled. “Do not even go there with me. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I can even call him ‘sir,’ totally cripped Poe. The Rue Morgue was written in 1841, Doyle wasn’t even born until 1859. And then, in 1885 when Doyle decides to start writing detective stories, he makes Holmes a complete carbon copy of Dupin.
Holmes thinks like Dupin. Acts like him. Talks like him. Relates to the local police in the exact same way. And Watson is totally based on the guy who narrates Dupin’s cases.” She was getting really riled up. Passion looked good on her. “And then, despite all that, in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Doyle has the effrontery to have his pseudo-creation Sherlock Holmes dis Dupin by calling him ‘a very inferior fellow.’ Doyle is lame. Poe rocks.”
Calvin, a connoisseur of detective stories from the other side of the Atlantic, cleared his throat slightly. “Did you just say ‘effrontery,’ my dear?”
“You’ll get used to it,” I told him. Then I faced Tessa. “Not that I don’t find all this very interesting, but how does this relate to us solving this case?”
“Hold on. I’m getting to that. So, here’s what Dupin does in The Rue Morgue…” She counted on her fingers all of Dupin’s investigative techniques, one at a time. “He looks over the facts, collects physical evidence, studies the wound patterns, analyzes hair samples, does a preliminary autopsy, evaluates the statements from witnesses, interrogates a suspect, and then gets a sailor to confess his involvement in the incident.”
“Sounds like you, Patrick,” said Calvin, “on one of your better days.”
A jogger passed us, pounding up the trail, palm trees on his right, cacti on his left.
“Actually,” Tessa said, looking at me, “Dupin was kind of like you.”
“How’s that?”
“He visited the scene-that was a big deal to him-and he studied how the killer got into and out of the room.”
“Nice,” I said. “Entrance and exit routes.” “He called them ingress and egress, but whatever. And he also managed to get on the nerves of the local authorities.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy.” The trail began its long circuitous loop back to the Alcazar Garden by curving around the outer fringes of the San Diego Zoo. Inside I could hear the chatter of birds and the roar of some large jungle cat.
“The whole entrance/exit thing is actually what helped him solve the case. See, it looks like a robbery, but Dupin, he considers other options. Instead of just looking at the evidence that supports his theory, like the police do, he tries out different ideas that don’t even seem to make sense.”
“The mark of a true investigator,” said Calvin.
“That’s not even all of it. So then, Dupin thinks about the size, body type, and special skills of the killer-who could do this crime, right? And then he uses that to help narrow down the suspects ‘cause he knows the killer has to be really strong, extraordinarily strong, to cause the kind of injuries the victims had, but also, the killer’s gotta be very agile.”
As she spoke, Tessa became more and more animated, like a natural-born storyteller. I’d never seen her this excited about anything, and I didn’t want to stop her. It might have been her way of showing me that I wasn’t so innovative after all, since Poe created Dupin nearly a hundred and fifty years before I was even born, but whatever her reasons, it was good to see her so enthusiastic about something. I let her keep going.
“And as Dupin studied the wound on the dead girl’s neck, he even built, like, this tube to see how big someone’s hand would have to be to make the bruises.”
“Crime reconstruction,” mumbled Calvin. “This chap should teach at Scotland Yard.”
Tessa wavered her finger against the air in front of her. “But, here’s the thing, the wound wasn’t caused by a human hand.”
I suspected Poe had created some type of fictional monster to commit the crimes. An easy solution to the problem. “So, what caused the bruises?”
“Well, instead of just looking at what happened, Dupin, see, he focused on what happened that was unique to that specific case.”
“The more unique a crime, the easier it is to solve,” I mumbled, quoting a maxim I often shared at my seminars. I used to think I’d made it up. Maybe Poe did.
“But this wasn’t a crime,” said Tessa.
“I thought two people were murdered?”
“No, two people were killed.”
“Just a moment, my dear,” said Calvin. “I believe you have yet to explain the bruises.”
“The killer gave them to her.”
I still didn’t get it. “OK, wait. So the sailor did it?”
“No, the ape did.”
“The ape?” Calvin and I both exclaimed.
“Yes, an orangutan from Borneo who was trying to shave the people and accidentally nearly sliced their heads off with a straight razor.” She shook her head slightly. “That part of the story’s not quite as good.”
“What about the sailor?” asked Calvin.
“He owned the orangutan. It escaped.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I said. “An orangutan who was trying to shave the victims?” I didn’t remember ever reading that.
“Hey, you gotta cut Poe some slack. FYI: The Murders in the Rue Morgue was the first detective story ever printed, the first locked room mystery, the first crime fiction story, and the first example of criminal profiling to appear in literature. With just one short story, Poe created four genres of literature that are still around today. Still popular today.”
“Well, in that case,” Calvin said, “consider the slack cut.”
Tessa stepped over a clutter of tumbleweed that had blown into the path. “That,” she said, “and the cool thing is, Dupin actually used the fact that it seemed so unsolvable to solve the case. As impossible as it seemed, it did occur, so it must have been possible.
But the police made the mistake of de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas. But Dupin didn’t.”
I stared at her. “You can’t be serious. When did you start speaking French?”
She looked defensive. Shy. Embarrassed. “I’m just learning. Why?
Did I pronounce something wrong?”
“No,” Calvin said. “I don’t believe so.”
I sighed. “Can you translate for me? My French is a little rusty.”
“ De nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas,” she said again. “‘Ignoring what is and explaining what is not.’ The cops saw a robbery and two murders in a locked room. But in the end, there was no robbery, no murders, no crime, no motive, and the room wasn’t locked.”
I’d never seen Calvin as confused as I did now. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re going to have to walk me through that.”