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“But you’re not positive?”

“Not a hundred percent, but nearly …” I remembered going over it with Heinie at Raven’s Croft, his eager hunger for approval.

“Who is?”

“Our curator.”

“Phil?”

“Exactly, but I don’t want him to know about this, if that’s possible.”

The lieutenant started to say something and stopped. “Okay. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

We waited around as Mr. Randall dismantled the remaining prints and put the mounted coins into evidence bags that the lieutenant sealed. I said, “There’s a highly respected numismatist in Boston named Simons. George Simons. I would suggest we give him the collection along with a catalog for verification.”

“To verify that this is the collection?”

“Yes, and to verify that they’re real.”

“You think …?”

“Once burned.”

“Okay. I’ll leave that in your hands. Take a couple of dozen coins from Randall. He’ll make you sign for them. And send them to your man.”

Up on the sunny deck, the lieutenant looked around at the taut lines, brass fittings, and other nautical paraphernalia of a large and expensive sailboat. He said, “The rich are different, aren’t they?”

“Some are. Not Heinie. Not a lot of them. They are as ordinary as dirt.”

We said good-bye to Mr. Randall and, though it was getting late, dropped into a nearby coffee shop to go over what we had found. We took our coffees to a booth at a window overlooking the boatyard. The lieutenant had one of those involved latte things, which surprised me, but, then, he is considerably younger than I.

“Well, I think we can eliminate this as a motive implicating Shofar.”

He nodded. “And you get your real coins.”

I smiled most ruefully. “The merry widow Merissa will be able to claim them. He gave us the fakes.” And, I thought, another public relations disaster when this story broke.

We sat there for twenty minutes following our new discovery through a rat maze of motives, implications, and hypotheses. We decided it made more sense for Heinie to murder someone to keep the forgery a secret than to be murdered. Disclosure would be more than an embarrassment: He would have faced criminal charges for defrauding the IRS.

We were getting ready to leave when the lieutenant said, “Tell me, Norman, why do you keep this … chimp around?”

I explained in general terms what Alphus was. “He is both more and less than human. If you got to know him, you would find it impossible to put him back in a cage.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean taking him to restaurants.”

“True.” I decided then to mention to my friend and colleague Alphus’s gifts regarding truth telling.

“You might be interested to know that this chimp, Alphus, is a living, breathing lie detector.”

“How can he do that? He doesn’t speak.”

“No. But he understands most of what’s said. We communicate in sign language.”

“Whole sentences?”

“Whole paragraphs.”

“All right.”

“I was thinking that we could arrange to interrogate our suspects with Alphus behind the one-way glass signaling yea or nay to their responses.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “That sounds great. Trouble is, most of them would show up with lawyers who would tell them to say nothing. And, besides, none of it would stand up in court. Think about it. Your Honor, our infallible ape has indicated …”

“I see what you mean.”

“But what you might do is get the prime suspects as you call them to come into your office for an informal updating. And in the course of that you ask them a few pointed questions. You have your chimp there. Sitting to one side. He indicates when they’re telling the truth and when they’re lying.”

“Yes,” I said, enthused now. “I could covertly tape Alphus’s reactions, his hand signals as they answered questions.”

“It wouldn’t stand up in court, but we would know where to dig.”

We decided on the questions I would casually ask along the way. Did you murder Heinie von Grümh? Did you want to murder him? Do you know who did murder him? Do you know where the murder weapon is? Did you see anyone else around the victim that night?

“Who do you include