The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  The university threw an absolute fit in the course of all this, and the aftershocks of its continuing attempts to coerce us into a misalliance by resorting to legal measures can still be felt. Wainscott even tried to keep its faculty from signing up, but to no avail. So all in all the MOM is doing quite well, but we must remain ever-vigilant.

  On quite another topic, the whole Raul Brauer escapade continues at full tilt. Readers of the account of what happened a couple of years ago will recall that Professor Brauer and several other Wainscott worthies admitted to cannibalizing a youth on the Polynesian island of Loa Hoa back in the late sixties as part of a “re-creation” exercise in anthropology.

  Just as the ruckus created by the publication of Brauer’s book, A Taste of the Real, was receding, Amanda Feeney-Morin of the Bugle tracked down Marilyn Knobbs, the woman whose high school graduation picture was found among the effects of the young man murdered and eaten on that remote island so many years ago. Ms. Knobbs of Beaumont, Texas, no longer young, of course, remembered the boy, saying he was one Richard “Buddy” Waco, also of Beaumont. Well, there was this thing staged on television between the family of the victim and the three gentlemen who, in the name of science, had eaten parts of the boy while participating in a ritual among the Rangu.

  There, in front of the whole world, Brauer, Alger Wherry, who is Curator of the MOM’s Skull Collection, and Corny Chard all renounced and related with unseemly relish their parts in the sordid affair. Brauer, his head hairless and gleaming like a pale bowling ball, actually hugged the poor old mother, and then the thing degenerated into a regular tearfest. One of the victim’s sisters demurred, accusing the men of being murderers, but even that seemed staged, as though there had to be some kind of conflict, some ruffled feathers for the show’s hostess, a woman with an iron face and awful voice, to soothe over. The word tasteless does not do it justice. While I am no longer quite the old stick in the mud I used to be, thanks largely to Elsbeth’s influence, I found the event quite simply hors concours.

  Now, according to this morning’s Bugle, a film is in the works, something that will only reignite another media conflagration. The film, I’m sure, will star some Hollywood notables and lots of native women running around in the buff, as we used to say.

  Well, I have finally convinced Elsbeth to go to Keller Infirmary for a checkup. She has been feeling poorly for more than a week now. And as ghastly as the food was at the Green Sherpa, surely its effects couldn’t persist for that long. So, I must make my way homeward and try to be of some comfort. Concerned as we both are, it seems that she does more reassuring of me than I of her.

  4

  I met this morning with Rupert Penrood, the Director of the Ponce Research Institute. He’s British, with the long face of a royal, and just a bit too well dressed for a research scientist. I mean in his attention to detail, the silk-patterned tie matching the perfectly folded pocket square in his navy blazer. But then a lot of scientists are businessmen these days.

  Dr. Penrood had, previous to the meeting, sent me a folder describing all the research projects under way in the lab. It’s quite extraordinary what they get up to these days. Dr. Penrood assured me that the time wasn’t long off when they would be able to take a cell from your body and alter a few genes to make you smarter or taller or sexier. You then pop the nucleus of that altered cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed — and voilà, you have an embryo that is a new and improved you. I told him I wasn’t sure I liked the idea, whatever the improvements, though God knows we could all use some.

  I am able to recount in these pages our conversation because I have near-perfect recall, at least in the short term. It’s a knack I found useful during three decades as Recording Secretary. Indeed, my memory is very nearly auditory, allowing me to rehear entire conversations in my mind.

  Dr. Penrood, for instance, spoke with the ripe, plummy intonations of a British aristocrat, saying, “You understand, Norman, we may be the last generation to die.”

  “Then we may be luckier than we think,” I replied, not entirely as a witticism. But I didn’t smile long. I looked up and said directly, “Dr. Penrood, I have it on good authority that you were present at a somewhat heated argument between Professor Ossmann and another party with what was described as a Minnesota accent not long before Professor Ossmann and Dr. Woodley were found dead in those strange circumstances.”

  He showed puzzlement, perhaps feigned, and then thoughtfulness. “Yes, I do recall now that you mention it. Yes, Ossmann and Tromstromer, Olof Tromstromer, he’s Swedish. They have been working on the final stages of RL … ReLease.”

  “The morning-after pill for tipplers,” I said, dissembling that elusive sensation, spinal in its origin, that comes over me when I get a whiff of quarry. Dr. Penrood was hiding something. “What was the bone of contention?”

  “Well, as you know, Norman, RL has advanced to human trials. I think it should prove quite lucrative. Pyramed, the pharmaceutical concern, has already started working on the ad campaign. As for Ossmann and Tromstromer, when the breakthrough occurred there was the usual jostling for credit.”

  I nodded as though satisfied. For all his old-school self-possession — Cambridge, I believe — Dr. Penrood evinced an undeniable edge of arrière pensée in his hesitations. But what, if anything, could he be hiding?

  We reviewed the principal projects under way at the institute. Dr. Penrood explained how a new version of NuSkalp, the biosynthetic scalp transplant, could be used to replace hair on other parts of the body. “It has enormous potential. There’s sure to be a lot more real blonds around.” He gave a curious little laugh, and again the double take.

  He went on. Chicken without feet; MelSus, the clean transgenic swine; possible therapies for inherited disorders; and deciduous beef.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, yes, very interesting. We’re trying to get an Angus to grow an extra set of ribs, one that could be cleaved off with a minimum of blood and trauma, leaving the animal alive to grow another.”

  “And Mel …”

  “MelSus. It’s a pig that produces virtually no dung. The feed-to-meat ratio approaches one. They produce lots of gas, but that gets harvested and used to heat their pens.”

  “And these pharmaceuticals?”

  “Yes. As you can see, a lot of antibiotics. We’re going sub-molecular. It’s a war out there. I’m not sure we’re going to win it.”

  Dr. Penrood qualified an attitude of impeccable deference with the remark that, of course, he had gone over all of this with the officers from the Seaboard Police Department.

  I admit to being a bit disingenuous in invoking at that point an upcoming meeting with the Oversight Committee, implying that I had to report to a higher authority than even the law.

  Penrood appeared to relax, as though academic politics explained everything. He even allowed that, given the range, complexity, and duplication of research conducted in the labs, there could be room for “freelance activity.”

  I asked if there might be some unobtrusive way to monitor such activity.

  “Well, it’s all rather difficult, you understand, but we have stepped up our in-house monitoring. I wouldn’t exactly call it security, because that is not really the issue, if indeed there is an issue here.”

  I nodded vaguely, thinking to myself that the “monitoring” could work both ways were something untoward transpiring in the labs.

  “Speaking of which,” he continued in a tone smacking of the stiff upper lip, “I must protest the changing of the locks in the offices of Professor Ossmann and Dr. Woodley.”

  “That,” I replied, “is official police business. Or, if not quite official, something that can be made so with a phone call. At this point Ms. Stone-Lee is merely making an inventory. Best, right now, to handle it quietly and … unofficially.”

  He agreed, reluctantly. Then, as though taking me into his confidence, he said, “You understand, of course, that Pip … Professor Os
smann … was not very popular among his colleagues. He liked to poke his nose into things. I’m not saying this had anything to do with his demise, but it’s something you should be aware of.”

  I drew him out about Ossmann’s relations with others in the lab while jotting down some notes. At the end of our interview I told Dr. Penrood to stay in touch; I was counting on him to help us in our investigation.

  After he left, I spent several moments pondering the man. I could not shake the impression that he had not been candid with me. There is a fine line between professional discretion — the reticence of those in positions where confidentiality is a necessity — and the kind of dissembling that attends efforts to cover up some malfeasance. Perhaps my antennae are too finely tuned, but I concluded that something, somehow, was going on in the Genetics Lab, and I determined to find out exactly what.

  In this regard I received another e-mail from Worried.

  Dear Mr. Ratour,

  I thought you’d be interested in that video of the babe doing the two profs. The guy who has it says he doesn’t want to get into trouble for invasion of privates and that sort of thing. He also says it takes a lot of time and he’s gotta rent some real hi-tech stuff to do it. Anyway, he says he could probably get you a pretty good copy for about three and half C’s. Let me know and I’ll tell him to get started. By the way, there was something that happened a couple of months back that you might find interesting. There was a guy in custodial, he’s no longer here, and he asked me if I wanted to make an extra hundred bucks. Sure, why not? Here, he said, and gave me a grocery bag. Take this home and bury it in your backyard and don’t say anything about it and don’t ask any questions. I said, look, I got kids, and I ain’t burying nothing in my backyard until I know what it is. Okay, he says, it’s a couple of dead rabbits. Okay, I says, but I want to make sure they don’t have dangerous chemicals or radiation in them. No he says, they’re clean, you could stew them and eat them if you wanted to, we’re just trying to avoid a lot of paperwork. So, I took the dead rabbits home and threw them in the Dumpster where they’re taking the asbestos out of the old firehouse. I could probably dig out the guy’s name if you wanted to talk to him. Hope this helps.

  Worried

  Three and a half C’s. Strange how Roman numerals have persisted in slang.

  It’s clumsy and perhaps transparent, but I have sent out another e-mail to the entire list addressed to Worried, saying yes and yes.

  On a more positive note, I have just gone through several contact sheets of head-and-shoulder shots of yours truly. From them I must pick an image of myself to bequeath to posterity on the flyleaf of my upcoming book on the history of the MOM. It’s a procedure for me that involves a rare and uncomfortable self-consciousness. I mean, how to look authorial but not pretentious, thoughtful but not gloomy, open but not callow; how to evince, in short, the expression of one who leads the examined life but not the overly examined life.

  It’s an odd sensation, really, gazing at several dozen pictures of yourself, as though there were all of these versions to choose from. The full frontal, I decided, wouldn’t do, not with my ears. I have, at Elsbeth’s behest, cultivated a rather dignifying, very thin mustache on the lower portion of my somewhat long upper lip. The dear woman says it makes me look as worldly and distinguished as I am.

  There is a good three-quarter view in which I am resting my chin on my fisted hand. I like the expression very much; it shows me as open yet reserved, dispassionate but not implacably so. The only problem is that the fist under the chin looks posed, which of course it is, deliberately evading the problem of what might be called the posed unposed look. I took the trouble to white out my hand. The results were encouraging. Thus altered it makes me appear as though I have my nose in the air, but in some ways that does capture the essence.

  It certainly goes with the book, The Past Redeemed: The History of the Museum of Man. I had wanted to title it The Solace of Beauty, but Myra Myrtlebaum, my editor at Wainscott Press, talked me out of it. No matter, you shouldn’t judge a book by its title — or by the face of the author, for that matter. To tell you the truth, I am both pleased and not a little doubtful about my first real book. I found it easy enough to encapsulate the museum’s remarkable history, its founding by the intrepid Remicks of Remsdale. I devoted a whole chapter to the Skull and the role it played in the founding of the museum. I reveled in describing how those canny Yankee captains scoured the world to collect, no doubt at bargain prices, priceless objects from every known culture. I chronicled the way we have grown, persevered, and kept our independence.

  Where I may have failed, I’m afraid, is in my attempts to render for the reader the subtle glory of the treasures we have so carefully collected, curated, and put on display. As of old, when I leave in the evenings, I descend through the galleries that encircle and open onto the atrium, which is lit from above during the day by a domed skylight, a web of wrought-iron tracery worthy of Kew. From the delicate potteries, jade work, and silks of the Far East, to the masks and figurines in our Africa display, from the glories of our Oceanic Collection to case after fabulous case of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, I find affirmation that, in our instinct for the beautiful, in our very need for beauty, we partake of the Godhead, that we are not merely creatures, but creators.

  Of course it was these kinds of effusions that Ms. Myrtlebaum at the Press kept putting her pencil through. Politely, of course, and with what sounded like good reason. But I do wish I had insisted on one unfettered declaration from the heart, whatever the risk of mawkishness, if only to lighten the darkness that pervades so much of life.

  5

  Elsbeth is not well. I fussed about this morning, making her breakfast, pampering her, trying to relieve an awful anxiety until she shoved me out the house, telling me I had more important things to do.

  Though late in leaving, I walked to work through Thornton Arboretum as has been my custom for decades now. I walked at a pace brisk enough to do my heart and lungs some good. It takes nearly half an hour. Descending Bridge Street, I turn left through the Oakdale section, formerly a patchy area of rundown redbrick housing that has undergone a dramatic revival. Gentrified, I believe, is the appropriate term of opprobrium for such improvements. Then, after crossing at the lights on Merchants Row, I ascend through an area of well-lawned affluence to the granite gates of the arboretum.

  I have never cared much for the gaudy death bloom of our northeastern autumns. I prefer the aftermath, the subtleties of yellows, golds, and browns, the baring branches, the crunch underfoot, the rustle of wind, the smell of sweet decay. The world was thus this morning, with the sky a forbidding gray rendering the agitated waters of Kettle Pond a dull pewter.

  A like agitation stirred my own heart as I walked along, as though more in haste than with the purposeful stride of the health-conscious. The geese paddled the cold water, the crows flew against the palled sky, and the jays called, sounding like augurs of disaster. The very trees, my old friends, might have been watching me, mute, as though in warning. My pulse quickened as I crossed the Lagoon Bridge and saw the museum, its five stories of elegant brick with neo-Gothic and neo-Grecian flourishes, rising into view behind the browning sycamores that line Belmont Avenue. Was that beautiful structure, designed by Hannibal Richards, “the Bernini of Seaboard,” harboring another brood of murderers?

  Of course, if there is a criminal conspiracy, it’s no doubt festering in the Genetics Lab, housed in the bastardized wing that, added later, squats to the left. To the right, appropriately enough, is the new Center for Criminal Justice, all glass and beige bricks, another monument to architectural hubris.

  All of this foreboding, of course, is nothing next and no doubt related to the dread that now shadows my life. I am worried sick about poor Elsbeth. We will have the results of her tests the day after tomorrow, and I fear the worst. She has all but stopped eating. Her face is drawn and pale. Her eyes still shine, but it is only her essential goodness showing through. T
oday, at the first meeting of the Curatorial Ball planning committee, I had an awful premonition that she would not be with us. I shook the notion immediately, of course. She may simply have one of those pernicious viruses that abound these days. Dr. Berns will probably give her a shot or a prescription, and I will have my Elsbeth back in glowing health once again.

  I arrived at the office to a waft of a distinct, musk-edged men’s cologne. Doreen broke off a giggly phone conversation with one of her friends to tell me that a Mr. Freddie Bain had shown up unannounced and had left behind his card along with his scent.

  “Did he say what he wanted?” I asked, trying to recall when I had heard the name before.

  “No. Just said he’d be back.”

  For all my presentiments, I have little to report on the Ossmann-Woodley case. I forwarded the two e-mails I have gotten from Worried to Lieutenant Tracy. He dropped by, and we went over the contents of the Worried missives and what they could import. He agreed with me that it might be very useful to learn the identities of the individuals who were involved in what he termed “the threesome.” But more than that, he said he would really like to talk to the person who had asked Worried to bury those rabbits.

  I said I had already asked Worried to help us on both of those accounts. I also related to him the essence of my interview with Dr. Penrood, but kept to myself the tincture of suspicion that meeting occasioned in me. I did tell him, however, that I thought it entirely possible that something out of the ordinary might be going on in the Genetics Lab.

  The lieutenant sympathized when I told him I was to meet with the University Oversight Committee. In the wake of the Ossmann-Woodley matter, the committee, in all fairness to it, has, through the university administration, come under pressure from a local group calling itself the Coalition Against the Unnatural. He nodded ruefully at the mention of the name. The same group has been lobbying the Mayor’s office to have everything in the Genetics Lab opened to general public scrutiny. We live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it.