Captain Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes” of the Sandersonville Police Department, was enjoying an afternoon of bliss. It was bliss because his wife’s cell phone was being upgraded, which, he hoped, would take a century but, in fact, would only take an hour or so. His nemesis, the Sandersonville Commission of Homeland Security, was hobnobbing with the elite, i.e., the Board of Directors of the Sandersonville Chamber of Commerce at a retreat, so he — in this case, both Noonan and the Commissioner — were electronically incommunicado. Ah, afternoon, of crime-fighting with no interruptions, domestic or political!

He had just picked up a cold case file when the phone — the communication equipment on his desk, which had a wire connecting to a wall socket — purred. It purrs, Noonan thought hopefully, because it was an incoming case.

He was correct.

“Uh,” the voice on the line started, “I’m, uh, calling for Captain Heinz Noonan. Are you Captain Noonan?”

“I’m paying his bills,” Noonan said with a smile. “So I must be him.”

“Well, this is, is, odd. See, I’m not in the crime business, so I’ve never called a police officer before.”

“First time for everything. What’s your name?”

“Dr. Theobald Santorini.”

“MD or Ph.D.?”

“Both. But probably not in the way you interpret it.”

“OK, interpret it for me.”

“I’m a professor of evolutionary biology at a prestigious university on the East Coast.”

“Harvard?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I did. Go on.”

“This is odd, you know. Me talking to police.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Well, in this case, it’s odd because I’ve got the crime and the perpetrator, I think that’s the term for the criminal, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Everyone knows what’s going on, but no one is doing anything about it.”

“How can I help?”

“You can help by giving me advice on what to do.”

‘I’ll do what I can. What’s the crime you are talking about?”

“Bird skin feather plucking.”

* * *

Noonan stalled for a moment.

Then he repeated the crime slowly. “To make sure I’m writing this correctly, you said ‘bird skin feather plucking.’” He wrote all of the words carefully in his notebook.

“Yyyeess,” Santorini said. “And this is not a joke. I’m very serious.”

“Explain.”

“Bird specimen, that is, birds are not collected in the round, so to speak. When an evolutionary biologist collects a bird . . .”

“You mean kills it?”

“We say ‘collect;’ you say ‘kill.’”

“OK. Collects.”

“When an ornithologist collects a bird, he or she, there are female ornithologists, you know.”

“I’m sure there are.”

“When the ornithologist gets a specimen, only the skin with the feathers is taken out of the field. The skin is dried with the feathers still in place. For the public, these are bird skins. To us, the evolutionary biologists, they are specimens for scientific research.”

“What’s the plucking part?”

“This will take some time.”

“I’ve got time,” Noonan said. “Feather plucking sounds interesting.”

“Making a long story short, all of the bird skins in the museum here . . .”

“At Harvard.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“OK, all of the bird skins, go on.”

“All of the bird skins have specific geographic identities. With the museum records we know exactly where and when every skin was collected. Since the university has been collecting specimens over the decades in many of the same locales, we can see if there have been any evolutionary changes over the years.”

“Go on.”

“But recently we have discovered there is another use for the skins, one we were not aware of until about six months ago.”

“And that is?”

“Fly fishing.”

“Fly fishing? With bird skins?”

“No. Bird feathers. See, flying fishing enthusiasts, the ones with money, the big bucks, want flies that are indigenous. That is, if they are fly fishing on an island in a remote part of the Pacific, they’d like to have a fishing fly that comes from a local bird.”

“Fish are that knowledgeable? I thought fishing flies were, well, just generic.”

“They may be. I don’t know. I’m a biologist, not a fisherman. But the point is, rich fly fishermen think the fish are more likely to eat flies made with the feathers of local birds.”

“So someone has been plucking feathers from bird specimens, making flies that are authentic for a location, and selling them?”

“Actually, it’s the other way around. Fly-fishing expeditions with very wealthy clients will contact the individual I am calling about and pay him to send them feathers from bird skins collected in that area. The individual gets a few hundred dollars and goes into the museum storeroom and pulls some feathers off the specific birds from that area.”

“Won’t people know he’s taking feathers?”

“Not really. The museum has thousands of bird skins. We could miss 30 or 40 skins and not know it. For years. We don’t inventory every specimen every year. But he’s not taking the whole skin, just feathers and leaving the skins in the storeroom.”

“How did he get caught? You did catch him, yes? That’s why you are calling.”

“We, I, actually caught him because he left cash on his desk over a holiday. I came into his office, spotted the cash and receipt. Then I put two and two together, checked some specimen files, and figured out what he was doing.”

“Did you report him?”

“Oh, of course! But nothing happened. He’s the biggest name in the department, brings lots of grant money so, no, no one did anything.”

“He was stealing specimens from Harvard, and no one said anything.”

“I didn’t say, Harvard.”

“OK, he was stealing from a university, and no one said anything?”

“You don’t know how universities work.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Universities are like banks. Bankers do not go to jail. Whatever wrong a bank does gets hidden in the red tape and bank records. No one really regulates banks, and no one really regulates universities. A large university is like a cash register. It gets lots and lots of money from foundations and corporations and alumni. In the case of this individual, he has an international reputation as an evolutionary biologist. So the university uses his name to get large grants. Let’s say the university got a $500,000 grant for a book on the history of evolutionary biology.”

“That’s quite a bit for a book not many people are going to read.”

“Not really. It’s peanuts. I’m just using the $500,000 as an example.”

“OK.”

“The university loves this kind of money because it’s virtually free. See, the university will give the professor’s department $100,00 and bank the rest.”

“Bank?”

“Invest.”

“OK. So the professor gets the $100,000?”

“The Department does. The professor gets about half.”

“Then he writes the book?”

“Supposedly. Usually, he doesn’t do any writing at all. Graduate students do. He just supervises and puts his name on the finished product.”

“So it’s free money for him?”

“It’s his name that got the grant, so you can’t say he did nothing.”

“But he didn’t write the book that has his name on it.”

“That’s the way the profession works. Everyone knows and everyone is happy.”

“And the money keeps coming in?”

“And the money keeps coming in.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Santorini took a long breath. “Because this individual has been a penny-ante chiseler for years. He cooks up schemes, figures a way to cash in, and then pushes the limits. For example, a few years ago, he hired a historian from the West Coast to do the research on a book on the history of evolutionary biology.”

“West Coast? Why not at the university?”

“I’ll explain. The historian came all the way from Los Angeles and started not doing research.”

“NOT doing research? Did I hear that correctly?”

“Yes. The historian got to the university and was given nothing to do for six, seven months. Just long enough for the professor to get his full payment for the grant. Then he fired the historian. The historian had no connections in the university, so he had to go back to Los Angeles. He was kept on payroll just long enough for the professor to get his grant money. Then the historian was fired. The historian went to the other coast, so there was no one to spread the bad word about the professor at the university. It was, as they say, a freebie.”

“And the university did nothing?”

“Did nothing. Is doing nothing. These antics have been going on for a very long time. Nothing is happening. This professor has such a sterling reputation that he attracts a lot of money. Money talks and the museum is listening. The university is not going to poison the well for $100,000 while they are getting millions. Per year.”

“Well, if the university is doing nothing, what do you want me to do?”

“You have a reputation as the ‘Bearded Holmes.’ I’d like you to tell me what to do.”

* * *

A week later — and dozens of phone calls on the Tool of Satan later — Harriet, Noonan’s administrative assistant, came into his office with a small box. She let it drop on his desk, and a poof of feathers erupted from within and slowly settled.

“Pray tell what’s this?” Harriet pointed to the feathers.

“Feathers,” Noonan said, looking up from a cold case file. “I’d recognize them anywhere.”

“Well,” Harriet said, “in this case, they are from Boston. Did you go bird hunting in Boston?”

“Only birds you can hunt in Boston drink dry Martinis. Let me guess, it came with a note.”

“Yup. It just says, ‘He retired.’” Harriett paused. “No, give.”

“Ah, Harriet,” Noonan said with a knowing smile. “A tale of greed and subsequent punishment. Seems a man of great repute got greedy. But he was making a university so much money they turned a blind eye to his peccadillos.”

“And you helped them see the light,” she said flatly.

“Oh, no. That would not be possible. You cannot tell people the error of their ways. They have to learn on their own. You only provide helpful illustrations of the price of the errors of their ways.”

“How,” Harriet snickered and looked up at the ceiling tiles, “does one do that?”

“Illumination, Harriet, Illumination. You cannot tell someone a truth; you must let them experience it. For instance, if a finance regulator at, say, a big university, refuses to see evil she must be shown the price of evil, in a coin she understands.”

“And,” Harriet snickered, “do you get the individual to see the evil she is not seeing?”

“Who knows? But I have been told a day or two in federal jail waiting for charges to be filed can do wonders to one’s eyesight.”

“You had someone arrested?”

“Arrested? Perish the thought! I merely suggested to the federal authorities someone was not seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars of possible fraud. She was thus a person of interest.”

“And a flight risk?” Harriet shook her head.

“Could have been. I don’t know. But what I do know is that the federal people do not think anything is funny. They are not bound by, shall we say, local custom. They’ll arrest anyone.”

“Local cops wouldn’t do anything, so you called in the feds.”

“Could have happened that way. I hear it works.”

“After two days in a jail cell, I’d change my ways.”

Noonan pointed to the box of feathers. “Apparently, it worked.”

Harriet chucked. “Appears to be so. But I do have a joke for you. Looked it up when the feathers came in. What kind of a saloon only serves black birds?”

“I have no idea.”

“A crowbar.”

Noonan chuckled and pointed to the box of feathers. “What kind of a bird has wings but cannot fly?”

“I’ll bite.”

“A dead one.”

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