The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  “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 among the suspects?” he asked.

  “Well, there’s Feidhlimidh de Buitliér. But a long shot.”

  “Okay.”

  I checked my watch. I still had a long drive to the cottage. “Anyway, the others would include Merissa Bonne, Max Shofar, Col Saunders, and … well, myself.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Really?”

  “Lieutenant, I want to clear my name …”

  “But you know you didn’t do it?”

  “That’s what I’d like to think. But I think I could have. I certainly wanted to.”

  We stood and got ready to leave. He said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. And, by the way, if you need any help in those interrogations, let me know.”

  • • •

  I had a feeling the weekend with Diantha and Elsie would not go well. I blame myself. Seeing firsthand, indeed, ransacking their snug love nest on the boat reopened the old wound as though I suffered from a kind of emotional scurvy. I sat in traffic and told myself again it wasn’t that Diantha slept with someone else, but the person she chose. Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Might I have been less wrought had she bedded down with a distinguished professor, with someone of charm and wit, with someone, more tellingly, younger than I?

  Not only had the search and talk with the lieutenant taken longer than I’d planned, but the traffic proved treacherous. It being a fine weekend, hordes from the south clogged the coastal interstate heading north. It truly became life in the breakdown lane when bridge work on one of the smaller roads kept me and the old car fuming for nearly half an hour as some piece of equipment, which looked like a giant orange toy, got maneuvered into position.

  “What took you so long?” was the aggrieved greeting from my beloved, who appeared frazzled by the heat, by loneliness, and now, quite clearly, by me. She wore a skimpy halter top, light shorts, and the look of a besieged single mother.

  “I went with Lieutenant Tracy to search the Albatross. We found the original coins.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “In the framed prints in the master stateroom.”

  “Oh” was the best she could manage. Perhaps because she sensed that the visit had revived my old demons. Not that she didn’t have demons of her own, in particular a large, hairy fellow primate. There was no kiss, no offer of a drink. Instead, “Could you watch El for a while. I need some personal time.”

  Isn’t time with me personal time? I wanted to ask. But I knew what she meant. Besides, right then, Elsie and Decker made the best of companions. She sat on one of my bony knees and made very convincing talk with her hands. “Mommy sad.” Then, her little fists striking her chest, “ape,” followed by her right-hand fingers together down into the open palm of her other hand, “at,” followed by the bunched fingers of her right hand from edge of her mouth up to her cheek, “home.”

  “Yes,” I said aloud as, like Alphus, she comprehends spoken words.

  Then a new and favorite project — teaching Decker to respond to sign language. I found some dog biscuits for bribes along with a rough martini for me on the side. To my amazement, the animal already knew “come” — both hands held in front, the index fingers extended, the right in a beckoning circular motion around the other toward the speaker in what amounts, as in a lot of sign language, to the gestural equivalent of onomatopoeia.

  We moved on to “sit,” a command he understood perfectly when vocalized. Elsie, wearing a light summer frock, perched beside me on the wickerware couch. Decker, eyes and ears alert, sat on his haunches facing us, tongue out panting in the residual heat. The problem in teaching him to respond to “sit” was to get him to stand. Which he did eventually. Elsie signed the word, the middle and index fingers of the right hand in a downward motion onto the middle finger of the left. Then I would say “sit.”

  Incredibly enough, after at least half a dozen repetitions, the dear beast got it. Elsie high-fived me after her fashion and then indicated it was her turn for a treat.

  Diantha returned presently having had her personal time, and I asked her if she would like a drink. I could tell something was afoot from her averted manner that somehow managed to combine defiance and beseechment. The drinks, white wine for her and a larger and better-built martini for me, sustained the truce that held through a quite delicious if cold dinner of lobster salad, green salad, and pasta. We remained civil, even friendly, until we had clear
ed the ring by putting Elsie to bed.

  Even then, I detected something contrived in her opening volley, a predictable, nearly pro forma, “Norman, really, when am I going to be able to come home again?”

  I sighed audibly and repeated what I had said before, how I was doing everything in my power to rectify the situation, et cetera, et cetera.

  We were on the porch, the humid, cricket-loud night all around us. I had showered before dinner and put on slacks and short-sleeved shirt. She said, “Someone told me you were seen at The Edge with him.”

  I didn’t answer her. “You should know, Diantha, if you were to spend ten minutes with Alphus it would change your opinion of him completely.”

  She also ignored what I said. And then lobbed her little bombshell. “You should know,” she said, echoing my diction, “that I have been invited by Sixy to a concert in Foxborough next weekend.” Sixy, Sixpack Shakur, to be exact, is King of the Redneck Rappers and her former swain.

  “Where exactly is Foxborough?” I asked calmly. Perhaps I would make her ex-boyfriend into an ex-person by holding my instrument of death against his shaven skull and …

  “South of Boston. It’s where the Patriots play,” she said, her duh in the tone of her voice. “He’s opening for the Stones.”

  The gallstones? I nearly said. “And you plan to go?”

  “Merissa and I would drive down together. Bella’ll take care of Elsie. I would have invited you, but I don’t see it as your scene.”

  True. What is my scene? I wondered. “You’ll be staying overnight down there?”

  “I have to. The concert’s in the late afternoon. It would be stupid to drive back then.”

  What rankles in a situation like this apart from the threatened breach in our marital arrangements is the reduction to smallness implicit in any spousal objection on my part. And, really, how could I object? As sophisticated, upper-middle-class Americans, we don’t start throwing dinnerware against the wall. We conceal our clenching hands and murderous thoughts and say things, as I did, like, “Do you think that is a good idea?”

  To which she responded with the maddening catchall, “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, given your history with Sixy …”

  “Oh, Norman, you really are being tedious.”

  So that I might have wrecked the place with my bare hands. Instead, I poured more gin over ice and pretended it was a martini. “Tedious,” I repeated. “That’s a big word for you.”

  “Then try ‘f*ck you’ on for size.”

  “Di …”

  But the floodgates of invective had been breached. Did I know what people were saying about me? Did I know I was the laughing stock of Seaboard? Did I know …

  Nadirs are never trustworthy. You can and will sink lower. But in the fire and ice of our exchanges, I forbade my imagination from including Diantha in any execution scene I might conjure for her paramour. We tried to back off, but it turned into an evening of too many drinks, too many words, and very little love.

  I slept by myself in a bedroom said to be haunted by a local crone who died under suspicious circumstances. I woke from a dream about Heinie the night he was murdered. We spoke to each other in flawless French about Merissa, who was hovering nearby and terrifying me even though I was watching the whole thing on a television screen with the name Anna Gramma scrolling beneath the scene. “Gnats,” I said aloud, waking to the buzz of a mosquito in my ear.

  I took a sunrise walk around the mist-shrouded lake to calm myself. I heard the haunting, mocking call of a loon. I should have been reassured by the sight of an osprey gliding out of the sun to disappear into the brightening murk. I usually smile at the scolding chatter of chickadees. But nature availed me of nothing that day.

  I managed, I think, to stay civil as I packed up for an early return. I told Diantha that I was making every effort to find a place for Alphus. I told her that if she chose to consort again with her ex-lover, that I could not foresee the consequences, but that they would be dire, certainly for myself.

  16

  North of here, on our stern and rockbound coast, on a grassy knoll overlooking a particularly beautiful sweep of ocean, islands, and forested points, Izzy and Lotte have their weekend cottage. It was there on an azure day of sunshine and breeze that I drove for the Landeses’ annual summer picnic.

  Ah, to be among friends who take you for what you are or might be. No obloquy here, subtle or otherwise, as I unloaded the back of my car — some bottles of good wine, and a cornucopia of fresh fruit and berries. No shunning here. Indeed, the welcoming smiles, grips, and kisses were perhaps a little too hearty, too reassuring.

  Not that I minded having Harvey Deharo’s arm around my shoulder. Or the Reverend Alfie’s bowing graciously and extending both hands. Or Father (“Oh, please, ‘S.J.’ ”) O’Gould, elegant even in casual attire, joking about hearing my confession. Then Izzy and Lotte, of course, their son and his family, their friends from the city, and a few summer neighbors.

  “Merry enough to be a wedding,” someone remarked as, already well wined, we sat around two long tables bibbed and tuckered for a surfeit of lobsters, steamed clams, fresh corn, Lotte’s potato salad, and a marvelous white Graves that Izzy had found at a bargain. I nearly wanted to make a toast as I looked up and down the table at the happy people. Then I made a toast.

  I stood up and rapped my glass. “To Lotte and Izzy,” I said. “And to us, their lucky friends.”

  Afterward, while others occupied themselves in various ways, Izzy and I took a walk on a rugged path that led through an evergreen forest and then along the shore where waves crashed and seabirds called. I had told him back in town that I needed to talk to him. So now, as we made our way along a sandy beach in a cove where sailboats lay at anchor, he said, “Talk.”

  “Easier said than done,” I quipped. Then I hesitated, not sure how to broach the subject on which I wanted his advice, namely Elgin Warwick’s proposal for his mummification and all that might entail. When I finally managed to get it out, in bits and pieces, making his brow knit and smooth until he stopped and burst out laughing.

  “Old Warwick as a mummy! My God, that will be worth seeing.”

  “Felix not only wants to accept the offer, he wants us to open up a mortuary wing. For a fee, anyone could join the permanent collection, with niches and shrines of various sizes for cremated remains. Even funerals and receptions. He said it would be a cash cow.”

  “A regular herd.”

  “But …”

  We had stopped and were watching a small sailboat with a party of three casting off its mooring, the sound of its snapping main coming over the water.

  Izzy, his abundant white hair lofted by the wind, was shaking his head in mirth. “How about a deal for me and Lotte?”

  I smiled at him, suddenly relieved. The alchemy of friendship is the greatest balm. “You’ll have your own temple,” I said. “Right next to mine.”

  We paused again to catch our breath and take in cormorants on a shoaling rock looking imperial with their wings spread to dry.

  “The fact is,” I said, “human remains have to be old before they become interesting, at least to a museum.”

  “Yes. And the older the better. It’s the paradox of death.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that the past is the future for all mortal beings.”

  “Put that way, it doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve always half lived in the past.”

  “Like most of us. What’s that old saw? I don’t mind being dead, it’s dying I don’t look forward to.”

  We resumed our walking. “So I take it you have doubts,” he said when the path widened to allow us to amble side by side.

  “I am absolutely torn, my friend. Everything Felix says is true. He says we would make a killing, no pun intended. Nor am I a disinterested party in all this. Elgin is on our Board of Governors. The board is meeting on the twenty-fourth to decide whether or not I continue to serve as director …”<
br />
  “Given your recent contretemps?”

  “Exactly. I will be putting myself in professional jeopardy if I continue to dawdle or say no.”

  “What do you want to do? In your heart of hearts?”

  “I want the museum to prosper, even to grow, but not in that direction. I do not want it to become the Mausoleum of Man.”

  He laughed again. Then he stopped and took me by the arm. “Then don’t do it, Norman. Because, if you do, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  He was telling me something I already knew, but his saying it gave me the courage of my convictions. I felt a weight lift as we climbed to a high bluff and followed the path along the edge of a precipice buffeted by a clean, salt-smelling breeze.

  In wending our way back to the party, we spoke about what had become known as the “coin crisis.” That led to observations about what is genuine and what is false. After some desultory rambling on the subject, Izzy said, “I used to think that finding and championing what’s real was the most important thing a historian could do. That is, I thought that the best way to expose the fake, the exaggerated, and the meretricious was to establish the real and the valuable.”

  We paused to watch an eagle turning in a gyre over a sunlit headland. When we resumed our walking, Izzy went on, “Alas, Norman, relativism and fads have grown so persuasive in my discipline that it now matters more who said or wrote something than what is said or written. And if the real, in the form of truth or beauty, is no longer believed to exist, what’s the point in searching for it?”

  We rejoined the party for a last glass of wine. We clinked glasses. “In vino veritas,” he proffered.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes.”

  Now, as I try to record the events of the day, I find myself sinking into a depthless funk. Was it Izzy’s pessimism, I wondered, sitting there in the growing gloom of a summer evening. It could have been the invidious comparison between my wifeless, childless state and the happy people at the party. I was in thrall to Hamlet’s plaint, “How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable / seem to me all the uses of this world.”