The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (19 page)

It was a fine, summery afternoon, the Fourth of July weekend, and I was in a foul mood. Diantha was furious at me yet again. I told her I had to stay in town with Alphus as all my careful plans to have him taken care of had collapsed. “Norman,” she hissed at one point, “I am a young, normal, healthy woman. I need a man.”

Getting a “keeper” for Alphus has proven to be a tricky business. Ape-sitting is not the same as dog-sitting or even babysitting. I suppose I could just let him be by himself. He knows that if he leaves the house unattended, he could be captured and possibly killed. Worst of all, he might end up in the Middling County Zoo, where there are real leopards. But Alphus likes to have someone around he can converse with, that is, someone who can sign. There’s always Ridley, but the young man, as Millicent attested, is not reliable. That means I not only have to get him someone like a graduate student from the university, but also allow him to have visitors from Sign House.

When I intimated very gently to Diantha the possibility of bringing Alphus out to the cottage with me, she could scarcely speak such was her anger. “I watched that beast killing and eating that little dog. God, Norman, you want to subject your child to that! You must be losing it.”

I did not tell her that I suggested bringing Alphus with me because he had broached the subject earlier. In vain I tried to explain to him that my wife did not feel comfortable around
chimpanzees. “Or around monkeys for that matter,” I added, to make general any possible offense.

“I am not a monkey,” he signed with emphatic indignation.

Later, in trying to make amends, I said, “there are mountain lions in the area.” As I believe there are.

“Mountain lions?” he questioned, making up the compound with the sign for mountain and the one for lion.

I nodded. “They are big yellow cats that feed on deer and … well, whatever they can catch. They have also been known to attack and kill people.”

“As big as leopards?”

“About the same size. Perhaps a little smaller.”

That mollified him, but did little for my peace of mind. I decided to bring him with me into the office to get some work done. To wax parenthetical for a moment, I am always amused by those detective narratives in which the principals do little but drive around and meet each other and talk about the crime to be solved. Rather like a Henry James novel in which the characters appear to subsist on little but their refined sensibilities. Nor do fictional private eyes ever get sick or go to the dentist to undergo the indignities of a root canal. At worst, they suffer a kind of tidy angst well suited to Hollywood. But I digress.

Among other things, I had to prepare for a meeting of the Council of Curators on Monday. And while that may not seem like much, I can see that once again Mr. de Buitliér is persisting in efforts to build a bureaucracy where none is needed. The second item on the agenda he sent around reads, “Report of the committee on the motion to form a committee to consider the feasibility of establishing a department of curatorial services within the museum.” It went on from there, mentioning necessary curatorial services, staffing requirements, departmental coordination, synergistic opportunities, and, the red flag, budgetary necessities.

The committee to study the formation of a committee to consider founding a department had been my ploy to stall the whole dismal process of bureaucracy building. Use the system to clog the system, I say. The question is how much longer can I resist, given my compromised position and the necessity for some kind of administrative apparatus for our growing collections, new methodologies, community outreach, public relations, and all that.

I was working away and Alphus had immersed himself in a book on batiks when the phone rang. I was hoping it was Diantha, but was surprised to find Professor Col Saunders on the line. He spoke somewhat gruffly. “You called,” he said.

We had met several times so I didn’t have to introduce myself. I asked him if he had a few minutes to spare, that I would like to drop by and talk to him if he were in his office.

“To what purpose?” He let his voice show impatience. I could tell that, like so many others, I had become something of a nonperson where he was concerned.

“I have received a communication regarding the von Grümh murder. You are mentioned prominently. I thought you might like to see a copy of it.”

“Oh … I see.” His tone changed decidedly. “Well, I’m pretty much free right now. Say in half an hour? I could come there.”

“Very good,” I said. This, I thought, would be an opportune time to test Alphus’s lie-detecting skills. I turned to my hairy friend and explained who was coming over and what I wanted him to do.

“No problem,” he signed with a sudden alertness I took for enthusiasm.

I then did something undoubtedly unethical and shrewd and, under the circumstances, justified: I rigged up a digital voice recorder I happened to have in my desk.

Col Saunders showed up twenty minutes later. A small handsome man, he was dressed just short of dandyism in a beige summer suit, pink shirt, and blue patterned tie. When I’d once pondered aloud to Di about his youthful looks, she told me he had obviously had a face-lift along with a hair transplant that looked a tad too reddish. His wide, lifted face, now tanned, and his eyes, which matched his tie, smiled at me as though we were close colleagues.

“Norman, good to see you,” he said with false heartiness, his voice still redolent of time spent at Cambridge. He shook my hand and did a double take upon seeing Alphus over to one side with an open book on his lap.

“This is Alphus,” I said. “Alphus, this is Professor Saunders.”

They nodded at each other. Then Saunders took a chair in front of the desk. We exchanged the smallest of small talk before he said, with feigned disinterest, “So what’s this about a letter?”

I took a copy I had made for him and slid it across the desk.

He read it rapidly, frowning and then consciously, I thought, making his face blank. He read parts of it twice. He looked up at me. “Have you given the original to the police?”

“I haven’t yet.”

“Do you intend to?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “It will depend …” I paused. “On what you tell me.”

He harrumphed. “I don’t really have much to tell.”

“Then you have no objection to my sending the original along to the authorities?”

“Obviously, I don’t want to get involved in this mess.”

“Nor do I want to have obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and lawyers only know what else added to the charges against me.”

He nodded but without any empathy. He said, “The man couldn’t even die without screwing it up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Professor Saunders,” I said, my voice confiding and portentous at the same time, “why not just tell me what happened. Later on, if you need me to substantiate your … statement, I would be only too willing to.”

He considered my offer for a moment. He glanced uneasily at Alphus who was watching him with seemingly neutral curiosity. He then looked around at objects in my office that I had borrowed from the collections. Abruptly, but still with an air of
arrière pensé
, he said, “In fact I did encounter Heinie that night.”

“Do you remember at what time?”

“Just about eight twenty-five.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“I recall it because I had a call coming in from a colleague in Bangkok at nine fifteen on my landline. I kept checking my watch.”

When a pause on his part turned into a hesitation, I prompted, “So how did you happen to see Heinie?”

“Well, just a few minutes earlier I left my town house to walk Spencer, he’s my Irish setter, which, as the letter indicates, I do around that time in the evening if I’m home. And I take a plastic bag along for you know … There’s a Dumpster near the work they’re doing on the Center for Criminal Justice. After Spencer had answered the call of nature, I took the results and tossed it into the Dumpster. Just then, I noticed a car on the gravel right-of-way between the parking lots. It seemed out of place somehow. Maybe it was the way it was parked and the way it
had its motor and high beams on. I was heading home when it reversed and backed in my direction. The window rolled down, and Heinie called to me.”

“How did he seem to you?” Again, Alphus’s attention appeared to make him uneasy.

“I could tell he had been drinking. I mean his face was flushed and he sounded very agitated about something.”

“What did he say?”

“He called to me. He said, ‘Col, you’re just the man I need to talk to.’ ”

I waited as he decided what to tell me next.

“So I walked over to the passenger side and said hello. ‘Get in’ he said, opening the door. Spencer, a friendly dog, jumped in before I could stop him and went right over the seat into the back. As I was apologizing and trying to pull him out, Heinie said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m used to dogs. Get in.’ ”

“So you got in?”

“I didn’t want to, but I did.”

“Why didn’t you want to?”

He glanced at me suspiciously. “Well, everyone knows that Heinie and I have a history. The letter spells that out.”

“Did he have a gun?”

He hesitated just long enough for me to think he was lying. He said, “No. I didn’t see one. I mean it could have been there. On the floor or between the seats.”

“So you were parked near the Dumpster? The one you mentioned.”

He glanced at me warily. “Not that close. What are you getting at?”

It was my turn to lie. “Nothing. Really. I’m trying to nail down a detail.” In fact I was thinking that the Dumpster would
be a good place for the murderer to drop the gun. With an inner wince I dissembled with a frown, I wondered if that was where I had put it after I had used it on Heinie.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, he started right in apologizing. He said he had nothing personal against me, that the ‘misunderstanding’ about the chair was really between himself and his father.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Not really. I was more embarrassed than anything else. He got profuse, repeating himself. Then he started abusing you.”

“Really? About what?”

“He said you were trying to destroy him professionally by having the authenticity of the collection he gave the MOM tested. He said he had made a mistake giving it to you, that all the MOM had was a lot of native junk.”

I nodded. “That does sound like Heinie when he gets going.”

“Oh, there’s more. He apologized for grabbing the Dresden stater before I, I mean the Frock, had a chance to bid on it.”

“What did you say to that?”

“Nothing really. Something like what’s done is done. Then he shook his head. His voice was quaking. He said, ‘Listen, if you want the Dresden, it’s yours. I’m not going to give it to that son of a bitch Ratour!’ ”

I could not suppress a smile. This part of his story rang true.

“Then he began rummaging in the back of his car. Spencer tried to lick his face. He pulled out a small briefcase from which he took a sheaf of writing paper. He used a regular ink pen, a gold Montblanc, I believe. His hand wasn’t all that steady when he wrote something like, ‘To whom it may concern, I Heinrich von Grümh, being of sound mind and body, do bequeath to Professor Colin Saunders and the Frock Museum of Wainscott
University on my decease a coin in my lawful possession known as the Dresden stater.’ Then he signed and dated it before he showed it to me.”

“Do you have that document?”

He took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a photocopy of the words above in very shaky handwriting on monogrammed paper. I read it over carefully several times. When I made to keep it, he held out his hand.

I handed it back and said, “Have you asked his estate about the whereabouts of the coin?”

Again he glanced at Alphus. “Why is he staring at me?”

“It’s how he is. He’s totally harmless.”

He nodded with uncertainty. “What were we talking about? Oh, yes, the estate. I did make inquiries. His widow’s lawyer wrote that an inventory was being conducted of all of the man’s collections. I was told that they would get back to us.”

“Did that end your meeting with Heinie?”

“Pretty much. I thanked him. I told him I would let bygones be bygones. I have to tell you, it was a relief to get my dog and get out of there.”

“Did he drive off then?”

“No. I glanced back a couple of times and he was still there.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police with all this?”

“As I said, I didn’t want to get involved. One little taint in our cozy little world and doors start to close.”

I nodded. “Too true.”

“Will you be handing that letter to the police?”

“I don’t know,” I lied again. “I’ll have to think it over.”

He stood up. “You understand that the fact that it’s anonymous makes it all but useless?”

“I do.”

He shook my hand. “You know, Norman, it doesn’t contain anything really damning.” He nodded to Alphus and with some of his old strut intact, then turned and left.

I took out and carefully placed the original letter from X back in its envelope. I sealed this inside a larger envelope that I addressed to Jason Duff, the district attorney who had wanted me held without bail on a charge of first-degree murder. I decided I would take it over to the Middling County courthouse myself and hand it in.

“What do you think?” I asked Alphus.

He shrugged. “He was lying about the gun. The rest is more or less true.”

“I’m a damn fool,” I said. “I should have asked him outright if he had murdered Heinie.”

That afternoon, as Alphus and I sat in the garden each with an iced tea, which we had begun to drink as a way of stalling the start of any happy hours, I related to him my doubts about the Museum of Man. I told him about Laluna Jackson’s description and dismissal of the museum as little more than a trophy house of white male victimization.

I told him I could not dismiss her views as easily as I dismissed her — as a self-righteous, self-indulgent member of the moral class who was building a career on the misery of others. Her accusations had stirred grave doubts. Is the MOM, I asked rhetorically, are most museums, little more than repositories of historic plunder, the victors’ spoils? For all my professions of high-minded dedication to these things of beauty, am I little more than an agent of cultural avarice?