The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (2 page)

To be fair, Heinie did leave some of the land in a conservation trust, and the gestures toward a bygone bucolia have been tastefully preserved. Perhaps a bit too tastefully.

We pulled up to “Raven’s Croft,” one of the pricier “units” in Kestrel Meadows, where there are no longer any kestrels or meadows. It was a big rambling affair hedged in by dutiful pines and fronted by an immaculately kept lawn with clipped, funereal shrubs, mostly rhododendrons and azaleas, snug against the foundation. I noticed a drive that went around to a garage large enough for a small airliner. It wasn’t the first time I had been to Raven’s Croft. The house oppressed me with its stonework, lattice, and Palladian touches. I once remarked to Diantha that it could serve nicely as a funeral home for the newly rich newly dead.

Nor did I look forward to the lugubrious office that had brought the lieutenant and me there. I confess to a certain unease should the widow, in her shock, disclose any of my own complicated relations with the deceased.

It took a while for Merissa, casually elegant in jeans and boatneck sweater, her painted toes elegant in heeled sandals, to answer the door. Her smile at my appearance turned quickly to puzzlement. Perhaps it was the lieutenant, right behind me as we entered and went through the usual pleasantries of greeting. “Norman! What a wonderful surprise,” she exclaimed, ushering us into a wainscoted parlor with large windows giving out on the bay and brilliant parquet flooring under Turkey carpets.

The place reflected with Germanic punctilio the tastes of Heinie Grümh. The very smells seemed newly minted to go with the new house, new cars, new, expensive replications of antiques, and gorgeous new wife. Merissa Bonne is a striking woman of dark red hair, appraising gray-green eyes, a nose too perfect for nature, and a lush mouth given to frequent, ephemeral smiles, as
though she found life to be a series of small jokes. I sometimes wondered if she considered me among them, in part because I’ve always had a weakness for her, for her beauty and her crassness.

“Whatever brings you here …?” The smiles were gone as concern rearranged her pretty features.

I coughed. I sighed. I said, “Merissa, this is Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department. I’m afraid we have some dreadful news for you.”

“Heinie …?”

Lieutenant Tracy nodded. “Your husband was found dead about an hour and a half ago. In his car.”

Her eyes grew large with horrified incredulity. “No!” she cried. “No.”

“I’m afraid so …”

“How …?”

“A preliminary investigation indicates murder.”

Despite my own involvement in the emotion of the moment, I could not help but remark an odd note in her surprise, and in her ejaculation “He wouldn’t!” before she covered her mouth with her hand. She appeared shocked not only by her husband’s untimely and unseemly death, but by something half expected.

I took her by the arm and helped her to a sofa, an imitation antique love couch in the French style with the back sloping down halfway across to seat level to allow the comfortable arrangement of one’s limbs for whatever contingencies arose. Lieutenant Tracy pulled up a chair and gently went through some preliminary questions.

“Mrs.… or is it Ms. Bonne?”

“Ms. Bonne. But call me Merissa.” She took my handkerchief, which was clean if a little starchy, and wiped her eyes with it.

The lieutenant nodded. “When was the last time you saw your husband?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

She shook her head. “He said something about going into Seaboard to see someone and then working on the
Albatross
 … that’s his sailboat. He keeps it at the marina.”

“I see. And you didn’t find it strange that he didn’t come home?”

Merissa sighed and shook her attractive head. “He calls it his bolt-hole. His boat. It’s where he goes when he wants to duck out.”

“And why would he want to duck out?”

She dabbed with the stiff hankie. “We had a little spat …”

“You argued?”

“Yes.”

“About …?”

“About personal things. Very personal things.”

“I see.” The lieutenant was taking it all down, flipping the pages of his reporter’s notebook. “Ms. Bonne, do you know anyone who might want to murder your husband?”

She glanced at me, but not in any accusing way. She shook her head. “No. I mean he had enemies, Lieutenant, but no one …” Again she shuddered.

“Would you like me to get you coffee or something?” I asked. I wanted to feel useful.

“There’s a pot just brewing,” she said. “I’d ask the maid, but she has the day off …”

Assuring her I could find things, I went down the main hallway to their vast kitchen, a place with enough immaculate counter space and high-tech gadgets to pass for a working lab. It gave onto a semicircular conservatory, the French doors of which opened onto a sloping lawn and another sweeping view of the bay.

I do not like to snoop among other people’s personal effects whatever my proclivities as a sleuth. Indeed, I usually would rather not know the titillating or embarrassing details of another’s life, especially if that person wants them kept private. But in this case my investigative instincts had been stirred, and I poked around for the coffee things with my antennae positively bristling.

In finding a tray, a black-lacquered affair with a stenciled rose pattern, some modern Danish mugs, a set comprising a pewter creamer and sugar bowl, antique sterling spoons with a raised monogram I couldn’t read, some Christmas cocktail napkins, and the lower half of the coffee contraption — I felt more like a butler than a detective. The place appeared utterly clueless, as, perhaps, it was.

But as I started out of the kitchen in the direction of the parlor, I noticed a wall phone with a hanging pencil and a pad of paper on the sloping shelf beneath it. The top leaf was clear but with an obvious and perhaps decipherable imprint on it. Putting the tray down, I quickly and delicately removed the square of paper and slid it into the side pocket of my jacket.

In walking back toward the parlor, I hesitated when I heard Lieutenant Tracy ask those awkward, necessary questions of one who is presumably grieving. “Can you tell me where you were yesterday evening, Ms. Bonne?”

“I was here.”

“The whole night?”

“Not all of it.”

“I see. And what time did you leave and return?”

“I left around seven thirty and returned … not long after midnight.”

“About what time?”

“One. Perhaps one thirty.”

“Was anyone else here with you?”

“No. Not when I came home.”

“And were you with someone else during the time you were away?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind telling me who that was?”

Perhaps because I was not directly present, her hesitation seemed the more pronounced before she said, “Yes. Until I’ve spoken to him.”

I took that opportunity to make my entrance. I came into the room and put the tray down on a faux antique Sheraton coffee table. As I did so, I noticed a Pissarro over the fireplace very much like his
Chaumières au Valhermeil
, which I had seen in a private collection. It’s a stunning oil, with an impressionistic gauze muting the scene, a marvelous rendering of thatched cottage, curving road, stone wall, red-bonneted figure, and trees against a blighted sky. Indeed, I forgot the circumstances of our visit altogether in going up to it and examining it closely.

“When did you get this?” I asked, quite amazed.

“Oh, we just got it. It’s what Heinie calls, called, a real fake.” She got up and came around to stand beside me.

“A real fake?”

“Yes. I mean I guess somewhere along the way, a very good artisan copied the original. We have some dupes of Sargent watercolors done with permission back in the nineteen twenties. And upstairs we have a Monet done by an Italian just after World War Two that would fool an expert. They’re valuable now.”

Merissa sat back down and attended to the coffee things. She appeared to have composed herself quite well. Until, in continuing,
as though her husband were still alive, she said “Heinie says …” and her face again constricted, but more, I thought, in horror than in sorrow.

Lieutenant Tracy brought us back to the grim business of murder investigation with a new line of questioning, delving gently into von Grümh’s relations with his present and past business partners. He recalled for Merissa the dispute her husband’s company had had with a local Indian group as to exactly who owned the land. There was speculation that the Native Americans in this case were fronting for a mob-based syndicate out of New Jersey that wanted to build a casino, a big gaudy thing called Pocahontas North.

Merissa prettily and tragically sipped her black coffee and shook her abundant chestnut hair. “Heinie never talked to me about his business dealings. He might have had enemies. Sometimes he complained about a Jeb Jordan he did a deal with down in the Caymans. But that was last year.”

“What kind of a deal?” the Lieutenant asked.

“Real estate. A development of some kind …” She started to say something else and then hesitated. The lieutenant cocked his head, waiting.

“When he was doing the Neck … this place … he got a couple of really nasty calls from some eco-nuts.”

“The Green Terror Brigade?” I put in.

She nodded. “That’s what everyone thought at the time.”

“Did your husband own a gun?” The detective picked up his coffee and took a sip.

“Several. He has a high-powered rifle with a scope for elk hunting.”

“No pistols or revolvers?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

We concluded not long afterward. Lieutenant Tracy asked her if it would be all right to bring in some technicians to go over the house. When she hesitated, he said it would be a matter of routine for him to get a warrant, but that, well, it would look better all around if she simply consented. At that she nodded numbly and again her face was touched with a kind of dread I found puzzling. But, of course, I’ve never had anyone close to me murdered.

“Do you want me to call Diantha and have her come over?” I asked.

She shook her head. “My brother Paul …”

We took our leave and drove back to the city proper. I mentioned my impression of Merissa’s initial reaction.

The lieutenant nodded noncommittally and stared out at the beautiful day. He said, “She knows a lot more than she’s telling us.”

On the drive down to Merissa’s, I had used Lieutenant Tracy’s phone to call Diantha and leave a message to the effect that I would be late in returning from walking the dog as something had come up. Even so, she said, “You were gone a long time,” as I came in the door with Decker. “I made soup for lunch, if you want some.”

I nodded, gave her a kiss, and asked her if she wanted a drink. I told her I had something horrific to report. Just then Elsie, who is two and a half, tottered in, but showed more interest in the dog than in me, which is no doubt natural.

Di’s evident excitement at the prospect of hearing bad news I took to be a measure of how dreary her life had become.

Anyway, I, with a gin and tonic English-style — no ice — and
she, with a glass of chilled Chardonnay, went into the solarium that, because of the old hemlocks outside, seldom gets much sun, but has pleasant wicker furniture.

“Mommy has to talk to Daddy right now,” Di signed to Elsie, trailing in after us. Elsie, who suffers from an inexplicable mutism, is named for Elsbeth, Diantha’s mother and my late wife, who died more than three years ago.

“Decker wants cookie,” Elsie said, her little hands amazingly articulate.

“Okay, darling.”

Di, looking quite trim and fetching in jogging shorts and a leotard top (she has been following a rigorous regime of late), got up and brought in some dog biscuits, giving one to Elsie to hand gingerly, dropping it and laughing, to Decker.

In the midst of this tender scene, I said, “Heinie has been murdered.”

It was as though I were speaking to her from a distance because the words seemed to register a measurable time after I had uttered them.

“No … 
No!”
She put both hands to her throat, as though to protect herself, and her lips went thin as her face knotted with pain. “Poor Heinie. Oh, my God. Merissa …”

I got up and sat beside her on the small sofa. I put my arms around her. Di’s grief, I knew, was something more than vicarious. Because, you see, what I was reluctant to tell Lieutenant Tracy is that, about a year after Elsie was born, Diantha had had an affair with Heinrich von Grümh.

It wasn’t a protracted, passionate thing. Or so Di tells me. Indeed, she refuses to call it an affair. It came and went during a weekend when she went down to Bayside for an overnight cruise on the
Albatross
. She went with Elsie and Bella, Elsie’s
nanny. I didn’t go because, frankly, I found Heinie to be, over long stretches, something of a bore if not a boor. I went out to the cottage instead and did some gardening. It happened that Heinie and Merissa were going through a bad patch at the time — and well, all the ingredients were there.

“When?” she said, lifting tearful eyes to mine.

“Sometime last night or early this morning. They’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report for a precise time.”

“How?”

“Gunshot. In the temple at close range. With what looked like a medium-caliber pistol.” My voice sounded mechanical.

“A revolver?”

I frowned at the question for some reason. “Or an automatic.”

“Oh, God, God …”

“I’m very sorry.”

She composed herself. “I’ll have to call Merissa.” Then: “How did you find out?”

I sighed, knowing that my story would take its toll on her just as it was taking its toll on me.

“I was the one who found the body.”

She gasped audibly. “Where?”

“On the roadway between the parking lots behind the museum. He was in his red car.”

“The Jaguar?”

“Yes.” I’ve noticed before that details take on an exaggerated importance in circumstances like these.

“Oh, Norman. I’m so sorry. It must have been …”

“It’s okay.” I was touched by her concern. “I drove out with Lieutenant Tracy to inform Merissa. I told her you would call her later.” I found I was drinking my gin and tonic without tasting it.