The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (15 page)

The words, bad enough, were made worse by a resurgent anger I could not keep out of my voice. We were back to square one. Or completely off the board. Quietly and modestly, she got off the bed and began to dress.

I should have gone to Lieutenant Tracy with what Di told me about Max and Merissa. But there wasn’t really much to go on. And the lieutenant had not returned either of the two calls I made to him. Besides, I could not resist taking a crack at Max Shofar myself.

I called ahead to the Coin Corner, the downtown shop where Max runs his business. Max was in, and I took the twenty-minute walk into old Seaboard, which has undergone something of a revival of late. The Coin Corner is just across the street from Waugh’s Drugstore, where you can still get breakfast over the lunch counter as you could when I was a boy.

Though not impressive from the outside, the Coin Corner turned out to be more than its name implied. A long counter of polished walnut with locked glass cabinets below ran nearly the length of the room, with more glass-fronted cabinets behind it.
There, as below the counter, beautifully mounted and displayed, were coins from all over the ancient world along with early American money, both of paper and metal.

The displays made me feel at home. Though no numismatist — my father did leave me a small collection with some exquisite pieces — I recognized the breadth and quality of what Max had on display.

The place was also uncannily familiar, including a stairway toward the rear with carpeted treads ascending to a balcony on the wall opposite the counter. Here were more displays, interrupted by a substantial doorway with an old-fashioned transom above it. I stopped in my tracks as time pulled a U-turn and I was a teenager again, checking the boy’s section of Sternman’s Books for an overlooked adventure by Zane Grey.

“Mr. Shofar,” I said to the person behind the counter, a young woman with frizzy hair and small diamond studs wired to various parts of her cranial orifices. “He’s expecting me.”

She gave a gesture toward the stairs and made a fleeting adjustment of her face that could be taken for a smile and went back to reading her magazine. I went up the stairs and knocked on the door. A woman of late middle age with a severe gray bun, an old-fashioned gray suit, and blocky shoes admitted me. She did not waste time on pleasantries, either, and showed me into the main office, where Max Shofar sat behind an antique desk in front of a large half-moon window. More coins, presented like pictures, adorned the otherwise plain walls. Another desk with computer gear, hedged in by utilitarian files, reminded the visitor that this was a business, not a hobbyist’s retreat.

“Come in, Norman, come in,” he said, the enthusiasm just a bit forced. A man of medium height and build, with dark hair that looked cultivated, a noble nose, intense blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion, Max Shofar seemed out of place in this
office, in this business. Perhaps it was the impeccably cut and pressed suit of silk and linen, silvery white, and the flash of cuff links, two ancient coins, the hand-painted tie, the expensive Swiss watch a bit too obvious. Coin-collector types tend to wear cardigans, be tolerant of dandruff, and have poor eyesight from years of squinting at the objects of their passion. He struck me as the kind who had followed a passing childhood obsession into a dead end.

His “Norman” didn’t take me by surprise. We had met several times at occasions given by Heinie and Merissa.

“Max,” I said, shaking his bejeweled hand and sitting down in a comfortable chair opposite.

He tented his glittering fingers and let the white gleam of his smile fade to an expression of spurious concern. “I was sorry to hear about the … situation you find yourself in.” His voice went with the eyes, hard, but with the promise of charm. Again, he struck me as too big for this station in life, even if the ample half-moon window, stretching nearly to the floor, gave out on the riverside park where the New Humber wended its way through the city to the harbor.

“Well, that’s why I’m here, Max,” I said, regarding him steadily.

“Really?” His eyes looked away and came back. “How can I help you?” The promise of charm grew more pronounced even as his mouth took on a tentative twist.

“As you know, I’ve been charged as an accessory in the murder of Heinie. Which, in my position, could prove ruinous.”

“I follow you.”

“So I’m trying to find out as best I can what happened the night Heinie was murdered.”

“Okay. But I’m not sure I can help you.”

I looked out the window for a moment at a woman walking
a Great Dane along the embankment. I could feel my jaw tightening as my personality morphed into that of the blunt-talking private investigator. In this persona, my diction grows more clipped and my gaze becomes relentless. It is a version of myself that I don’t particularly admire, but which I know is necessary if people are going to take me seriously.

I said, “When did you learn that de Buitliér was investigating the collection Heinie gave to the museum?”

“When I read it in the paper. Same as most everyone. How is it relevant?”

“I’m going to be frank, Max …”

“Of course. All cards on the table.” But he gave me a poker smile.

“I’m interested in motive. Who might want Heinie dead?”

“Okay. And you think I gave Heinie a collection of fakes. He found out about them and threatened to expose me. To keep him quiet, I shot him.”

“Something like that.”

He laughed and shook his head. His voice had just a hint of condescension in it when he said, “Norman … I run an international mail-order coin business serving some of the top collectors in this country, in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The world is full of suckers, but the people I deal with are not among them.”

“Except, perhaps, for Heinie?”

“Especially not Heinie. He may have been a fool in other ways, but not when it came to coins. He had what I would call ‘the touch.’ He turned down what I considered high quality at times, and upon further examination he almost always proved right. Indeed, when anything I thought dubious came over the counter and I needed a second opinion, I held my nose and turned to Heinie.”

“How do you explain the wholesale duplication then of the collection he gave us?”

“I suspect he had his cake and got to eat it. He gave you coins, got a huge tax break, and got to keep the originals.”

“Who might have made the forgeries for him?”

Max shrugged in a way that told me he wouldn’t tell even if he knew. “The best forgeries used to come out of Italy. Then Bulgaria. The Lipanov stuff. Now it’s gone high-tech.”

“What about around here?”

“Oh, I’m sure there are people doing it. Some of them as a hobby. There are fake coin collectors, you know. Or, rather, collectors of fake coins.”

I nodded, satisfied. Then I said, “You and Merissa were and are having an affair.”

“So? What, motive again?”

I leaned into him. “Max, I have it on good authority that Heinie came right into this office not long ago, took out a revolver, and threatened to kill you if you ever saw Merissa again.”

Max’s attempt at a derisive laugh shriveled to a
huh, huh
sound. He shook his head most unconvincingly.

“He insulted you, didn’t he, Max? He called you a conniving Jew, didn’t he?”

“Look, Norman …”

“Is that what made you want to murder him?”

“I didn’t murder him.”

“But you had a motive. You needed money because of that failed Franklin Mint deal.”

He said nothing.

I pressed on. “You and Merissa talked several times about getting rid of him. You discussed drugging his whiskey, getting him disabled and throwing him overboard while sailing on the
Albatross.”

He still didn’t respond except to look at me with his eyes like pieces of polished turquoise.

“Merissa never could keep a secret, could she?”

“Listen …:

“You talked about shooting Heinie with the very revolver he waved in your face, shooting him and making it look like a suicide.”

He sat there pale, the swell gone out of his shoulders. I had touched a nerve and for a moment I thought I had my man. Until he smiled and shook his head. “Merissa has a habit of voicing her fantasies aloud and then attributing them to the person she is talking to. Not only that, but she has a rich imagination. I’m surprised she didn’t tell Diantha about ‘our’ scheme to find Heinie’s hidden gold, which she tells me he buried somewhere under his lawn, and escape on his boat and spend the rest of our lives sailing around the world.”

I had to smile. “Do you sail?”

“Yeah. My idea of sailing is the
Queen Mary
. The one that’s docked.”

I believed him if only for the implicit self-disgust he betrayed about his weakness for the crass, lovely, scatterbrained Merissa. And perhaps because he had, if only by silence, indulged her fantasies.

But I still had a trump card and played it. “You met with Heinie just around the time he was murdered.”

“I told you, Merissa makes up things …”

“True. She told Di that. But I also met with Heinie the night he was murdered, and he told me he was on his way to see you.” I spoke with enough vehemence to cover my lie. I could tell I had struck home.

“You don’t have any proof.”

“I’m not saying you murdered him, Max. But if I’m going to
clear myself, I need to know everything that happened that night between the time I saw him and the time he was shot.”

He turned his head and glanced away, a tic a lot of contemporary actors use. But I could tell he was thinking about what to tell me. He said, “If you tell the police what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”

“Fair enough.”

“I did see Heinie that night.”

“At what time?”

“Ten. A little after.”

“But he was …”

“Yeah, he was dead. The fact is, we were supposed to meet at the Café Club for a drink. But I blew him off. I knew it would be more of the same, and I was tired of his bullshit, his whining, his threats. I went to the club and had a drink. The waitress can verify this much. About ten minutes before he was to show, I left. I had a … date. I was taking a shortcut through the parking lot of the Center for Criminal Justice when I heard what sounded like a loud bang.”

He paused as though having second thoughts about telling me any of this.

“Anyway, I’m no hero. I kept out of sight for … I don’t know, five minutes. Then I got curious. I stayed in the shadows. I made my way over. I recognized Heinie’s Jag. I also noticed someone, a man of medium to small size, walking away from the car in a hurry.”

“You couldn’t tell who it was?”

“Not a chance. The lighting gives out at the edge of the lot, and it was a dark night.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went over to the car. I carry one of those little pinch lights. I looked through the window. I could tell he was dead. But I
reached in anyway and took his pulse. Nothing. I wiped any prints I might have left, and walked away from it.”

“Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

“What? And become a suspect? Police question coin dealer in murder of coin collector. No thanks.”

I had no choice but to believe him. Or pretend to. I stood up to go. “I’ll keep this to myself, Max. At least for now.”

“I’d appreciate that.” He shook my hand. “You know, Norman, you wouldn’t make a bad cop.”

Upon waking this morning, I felt that my whole being had become a hyperdelicate organism in which even thinking had to be done slowly and tentatively. Recovery did not seem possible as I lay alone on my marital bed, my imagination vulnerable to waking nightmares inspired by imperfect memory.

Recollections of what led to this state thumped into my consciousness like barbed arrows of shame. My outward winces and muffled groans as I lay there merely signified deeper, more nebulous hurts. I could see that my life with its claims to probity, high-mindedness, community spirit, and general
gravitas
had begun to unravel. The moral high ground to which I aspired had turned into a slippery slope.

It began the night before with the arrival of Ridley in a celebratory mood and a bottle of single-malt of the kind Alphus particularly likes. What we were celebrating was never made clear, not that it mattered. We began, slowly, even decorously. One doesn’t “do shots” with Lagavulin; one sips it slowly, appreciatively. Even I, no lover of Scotch, could appreciate this distillation of barley to its essence of pale gold. Besides, signing means that your hands are not free. And my friends were in a talkative mood.

Alphus put his glass down after a long, deliberative sip to explain how Lagavulin is an island malt made with the local grain, peat, and water. How it was then aged in old wine casks permeable to the sea air that wafts into the storage sheds, lending the final
liquor its subtle tincture of iodine. He was required to spell out this last word as I certainly had no idea what he was signing.

Indeed, our evening began as a quite civilized little party in the living room, which is the grandest space in the house with several elegant antiques, a Turkish rug, and a chandelier fashioned of Lalique glass early in the last century.

Alphus had dressed for the occasion in his longest trousers, which came just below the knees, a long-sleeved pin-striped shirt, and his special sandals.

I should mention that neither Alphus nor Ridley handles alcohol very well. Not that I should talk. I soon switched to martinis, a drink Alphus dismisses as tasting like “distilled piss.” It wasn’t long before their sips of malt turned into shots with far less signage about complexity and finishes.

Ridley, slurring his gestured words, recited the Porter’s speech from
MacBeth
about the effects of drink. It took me a line or two to catch on. Then I chimed in to make it a duet of signs and voice, “… Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him to a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.”