The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man Read online

  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.

  “How did she …?”

  I thought I detected more curiosity than concern in her eyes and voice.

  “Shocked, of course. And surprised.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “Of course it was just …” I let it dangle.

  “I’m going to call her. Will you watch Elsie for a minute.”

  I nodded that I would and sat there, trying to amuse the little one, who has a finely honed instinct for knowing when her mother wants to be alone. I tried my foolproof ploy. I signed a familiar sentence. “Let’s take Decker for a walk.” Which worked. It meant getting his leash and snapping it on his collar. Then, with great ceremony, we went out into the garden, where I had begun to prepare the flower beds.

  Despite her affair or whatever it was with Heinie, Diantha and I are doing well enough. That had happened during a spell when Di had grown restless. She talked of wanting to move to New York City. We had the kitchen renovated. We bought a new car for her of truck-like dimensions and sturdy enough to survive a direct hit from a howitzer.

  Our tastes differ in some important things. She is indifferent, with a couple of exceptions, to objects and antiques, while I, more and more, cherish them. On evenings at home, she will watch a police drama on television while I read. Like her mother, she cannot abide Brahms, whose music for me grows more sublime as I grow older. She is fond of Broadway musicals while I remain all but clinically allergic to the things, a few caterwauling bars of which send me into something approaching anaphylactic shock. But then, I suppose there are inherent difficulties in any marriage where the age differences are as pronounced as ours.

  Diantha has her moods. It’s been obvious for a long time that motherhood is no longer enough for most women of her station. Nor, it seems, is her profession. She has what she calls an idiotsavant facility for solving intricate computer programming problems for which companies large and small pay her generous sums of money. At the same time, she yearns for a larger world without quite knowing what.

  Out at the lake she likes to lounge on the new deck we’ve put up, while I work in the garden, which I have enlarged considerably with hedges of high bush blueberries, a long lattice of climbing roses, and some dwarf apples espaliered against a south-facing wall. I had to put in a pergola of rough-hewn hickory poles for the wild Concords that grow like great clinging weeds all over the property. Di likes to potter about as well, but with nothing like my newfound enthusiasm. She all but accused me of “crucifying” the apple trees as I gently pruned or eased back their limbs and tied them to the tautly strung wire.

  For all that, and despite our ages, we enjoy remarkable stretches of happiness together. Given Elsie’s condition, we are both growing fluent in signing, indeed resorting to it between ourselves from time to time. So that not only our little girl, but her condition, draws us close and keeps us together.

  I can hear Diantha now, walking around with the cell phone to her ear. It scarcely sounds like she is consoling a grieving friend. More like a regular chat, more like a good laugh together.

  2

  Heinie von Grümh’s murder could not have happened at a worse time for the museum. (I suppose for him, as well, but who can tell?) The fact is, we have reached a critical and delicate juncture in our endeavor to be free once and for all from any claims by Wainscott University. And whatever the legal basis of our cause, public perceptions do count, particularly regarding the competence of an institution like the MOM to govern itself.

  Alas, the effects of crime splatter like blood, besmirching the innocent as well as the guilty. The headline from the Bugle proves my point: “Murdered Curator Found on Museum Grounds.” Then the tagline: “Killing raises concerns for safety at Museum of Man.” In vain did I point out to Amanda Feeney, who wrote the story, that von Grümh (he insisted on the umlaut, by the way) was an honorary curator and that, technically speaking, the road between the parking lots of the museum and Center for Criminal Justice belongs to no one. But then, the Bugle takes every opportunity to disparage me and the museum.

  In short, I and the MOM are left vulnerable to the campaign by Wainscott to “reinforce the historic ties,” to employ the current euphemism for their efforts to take us over.

  It doesn’t help that we have not been doing as well financially as we had hoped. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve the aphrodisiacs Lubricitin and Priaptin, the development of which here in the Genetics Lab led to so much mischief, though I’ve heard there’s a booming market in generic knockoffs. (A firm in China is apparently marketing the latter under the trade name hu gao wan, which translates roughly as “tiger testicles.”) Nor has ReLease, the hangover pill, sold as well as expected. Attendance is up, it’s true; but running a museum, even one as well endowed as the MOM, is an expensive undertaking.

  Malachy Morin has proved to be a far more wily and tenacious adversary than might be gauged from his hale-fellow half-drunk demeanor, not to mention his huge and growing bulk, his red face and bulging eyes. A Falstaff on the outside and a Cassius on the inside, he has been using the law like long-range artillery. Wainscott’s suit to claim the museum as part and parcel of itself has dragged on now for several years with a battery of lawyers — certainly on their part — filing and counterfiling before a sleepy, incompetent judge who has been heard to mutter that he regards the whole matter as “academic.”

  Mr. Morin, who is University Vice President for Affiliated Institutions, not only snipes at us through articles his wife Amanda Feeney writes for the Bugle, but also has provocateurs here in the museum ready to betray us when the time comes.

  Nor is our case in the courts a foregone conclusion whatever its merits. The legal tangle of thorns has been complicated by the bequests that have come in from benefactors over the decades who appear to assume that the university and the museum are parts of a single entity. The phalanx of attorneys from a private firm, hired by the university at great expense, contend that these generous individuals, many of them prominent and prosperous members of the community, would not have endowed the museum had they not considered it integral to Wainscott, their alma mater in many cases.

  Felix Skinnerman, our general counsel, has argued persuasively that the confusion in the minds of these worthy people, many of them long dead, does not alter the documentary evidence of the founding charters.

  I do not wish to go into the antecedents of the Museum of Man, which can be found profusely documented in my own well-received The Past Redeemed. Nor do I wish to repeat in any detail here why I oppose our submergence in the corporate monolith into which Wainscott University has evolved. Suffice it to say that the Museum of Man would suffer an irreparable decline were it to become a subsidiary or operating unit of Wainscott, Inc. All one has to do is look at the university’s Frock Museum. Once considered a first-rate if small institution, it has of late both grown and stagnated. It has launched an ambitious fund-raising effort for a new building. For additional exhibition space? No. For more curatorial work space? No. It wants something on the order of twenty million dollars for a new addition for administrative offices for the panoply of staff, which has grown in direct proportion to the
means available to support it.

  Blindfolded Justice remains blind to these apprehensions on our part, as perhaps she should. But due notice should be given by the courts to the university’s conduct as litigation proceeds. It is no exaggeration to say that the Wainscott apparatchik, in the gross person and character of Mr. Morin, has waged an unscrupulous and unrelenting campaign to undermine my management of the museum. I am reluctant to rake over the still-smoldering coals of that man’s ignoble history, which includes, at the very least, a case of manslaughter, a veritable sale histoire. Suffice it to say that the Museum of Man once more stands endangered as a vital, independent institution and a living link to our common past.

  Having said this, I would like to affirm, yet again, that I want the living links between the museum and the university to remain strong and meaningful. Wainscott faculty work with our curators and with the collections to great mutual benefit. The research staff at the Ponce Institute include a good number of university professors and postdocs. Yet as long as I am in charge, the Museum of Man will remain a separate entity as in law and reality it always has been.

  Which is why I roll my eyes, inwardly at least, when people, upon hearing what I do, begin to wax exclamatory about what an interesting job I must have. All of those beautiful and fascinating things. All of those interesting people. And even when their reactions are accompanied by a dismissive smile, I detect a note of envy, summed up on one occasion by an aging, oblivious socialite who volunteered, “What a plum you have, Norman.”

  Ah, if they only knew. Quite aside from answering media calls regarding the murder of Heinie Grümh, three other headaches landed on my desk this morning. In my mail there was one of those large, ominous-looking envelopes from Limpkin, Limpkin, and Leech, Seaboard’s preeminent law firm. I knifed it open to find a friendly note scrawled by Elgin Warwick on notepaper with an embossed letterhead. Elgin is the scion of an old and wealthy family, a member of the Board of Governors, a generous supporter of the MOM, and a true eccentric if not barking mad.