The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (11 page)

But the lieutenant put a different spin on it. “Perhaps,” he said, “they’re trying to hide something.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s a possibility.” And while using that, so to speak, as a cover for my managerial impotence, I seriously wondered, thinking back to my confrontation with Ms. Cowe, if there might be something to his suggestion.

The lieutenant took down the particulars and said he would get right on it. And now I can’t get it out of my head that Malachy Morin and Maria Cowe are all mixed up in this together.

But that may be just a measure of how desperate I’m getting, clutching at straws and strawmen. For instance, I received a personal and confidential memorandum today regarding the matter pending before the Subcommittee on Appropriateness that has me perplexed. It’s a strange affair, to say the least. As Professor Athol, the Chair of the subcommittee, outlines it, both parties are accusing the other of date rape. The matter is further complicated by the facts that the woman is an outspoken lesbian activist involved in social issues while the man is an African American born-again Christian confined to a wheelchair. To avoid an expensive and prolonged legal wrangle, the two individuals have agreed to appear before the subcommittee to present his-and-hers sides of the story and to abide by any findings we make.

Now, we have dealt in the past with situations of nearly intractable sensitivity, but nothing, I daresay, approaches what we have before us now. And I feel tempted to “vent” (a word I’ve picked up from Diantha) my usual indignant homiletics about modern mores: If young people cannot be trusted to act civilly while alone in one another’s company, then we need to bring back chaperones and all that entails.

Athol’s memorandum has triggered in me an awareness of something both anomalous and at the same time integral to an emerging, still nebulous larger scheme. Could this incident have anything to do with the Ossmann-Woodley case? I don’t know. But I am nearly tempted to jump the gun and go interview these two individuals by myself. On the other hand …

Well, the thumping from the nether regions of the house has finally subsided. Though it won’t surprise me if a different kind of thumping starts up down the hall from my own, now monastic bed.

There has been a shocking development. Bert and Betti, two of our remaining chimpanzees, were found dead in a cage this morning under circumstances remarkably similar to those of the Ossmann-Woodley case, only worse. They were discovered by Dr. Angela Simone, the very responsible young woman who took over from Damon Drex as Keeper of Great Apes. The poor woman was in a state of considerable shock when she phoned me at home just after eight this morning to tell me the news.

I came over immediately in a cab and secured the area as a crime scene before calling in the Seaboard Police Department.

Dr. Simone took a moment to compose herself. But she is a tough professional, and she soon related to me the simple facts. Upon her arrival she sensed immediately that things were amiss. Lights, normally dimmed, were on full. Doors normally closed were open. The other animals were in a state of considerable agitation. Then she discovered Bert and Betti dead in the cage.

We went into the area, and I can tell you it was not a pretty sight. I forced myself to look at it carefully and take mental notes. Betti lay sprawled in one corner of one of our larger cages, most of her left ear missing, one eye hanging from its socket. From her bloodied mouth protruded what might have been the genitals of Bert, who lay facedown in the opposite corner, his hands clutched at his crotch. In their struggle they had wrecked the exercise tree and tipped over the water bowl. There were blood and feces everywhere.

“What about Mort?” I asked, referring to the security guard who has kept watch over the Pavilion and the museum proper since before I came on board more than thirty years ago.

“I haven’t seen him,” she said, alarm making her eyes go large. “I hope he’s okay.”

We were just about to go down the spiral staircase to the basement where Mort has his office when Lieutenant Tracy arrived with his crime scene crew. We left the crew in charge and clattered down the steps with the lieutenant to the enclosure equipped with an array of television monitors that Mort watches when he’s not out making his rounds.

He was slumped in his chair, his old graying head back, his mouth wide open. I feared the worst. “Mort,” I said, shaking his arm. “Mort, wake up.” As the lieutenant and I stood over him, he opened first one and then the other eye. He sat forward, his disorientation obvious as he moaned and put his hands over his eyes.

“We should call an ambulance,” Lieutenant Tracy said.

Mort shook his head. “No ambulance. No hospital. No doctors. I’m fine.”

Dr. Simone disappeared for a moment and came back with a cup of black coffee. Mort sipped the coffee, rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck, and answered our questions.

We determined that Mort, who came on duty at midnight to work a twelve-hour shift, as is his preference, found everything normal as of 2:30
AM
when he went to the staff room for the lunch he had brought with him. There, in a refrigerator used by the staff, he had left a sandwich and a large bottle of Coke with his name taped to it. He said he warmed his sandwich, a cheese and tomato, in the microwave, poured himself a paper cup full of Coke, and brought it back down here. He ate the sandwich and drank the soda and that’s the last thing he remembers.

I asked him if he’d noticed then that the monitor covering the area of the cages had gone blank. He replied that he was certain all the monitors were in working order when he started his meal.

After directing one of the crime scene officers to secure the Coke bottle in the staff refrigerator, and after seeing that Mort had a ride home, Lieutenant Tracy and I went with Dr. Simone into her office.

Taking notes, the lieutenant with firm gentleness took Dr. Simone through what she had found upon arriving at work. I must say I admired again the thoroughness of his questioning. However, I was able to make one important contribution. I asked if Bert had been in the larger cage alone when she had left in the evening.

Dr. Simone nodded. “He still gets moody, and at night we usually put him in that cage by himself.”

“How would someone have enticed Betti to leave her cage and go into Bert’s?”

“They may have used M&M’s.”

“M&M’s?” the lieutenant asked.

“M&M’s were used in the writing program that was in place before I came here,” Dr. Simone explained. “Betti participated in that program and, like the others, developed a craving for them. We still use them as little bribes to get the animals to do things.”

“Who would have known about that?” I asked.

She made a shrugging gesture with her hands. “Anyone who worked with the chimps. I mean people in the lab.”

“Could you possibly get us a list of names?” the lieutenant asked.

“I’ll try,” she said. “It might not be complete.”

The lieutenant thanked her in leaving and paused to commiserate with her, letting her know in a subtle way that he realized her charges were something more to her than mere animals.

We stopped by the crime scene again so that the lieutenant could tell one of the crew to keep an eye out for M&M’s.

“We’ve already found some,” the officer said, and indicated a clear plastic bag with some of the candies in it along with a distinctive brown smear.

Next we met with Hank, the technician in charge of audiovideo security. He indicated the camera, an unobtrusive black device with a short lens that covered the cage area. As he showed us, the cable from the camera to the monitor and the digital recorder had been not only cut but also reconnected to a router programmed to a device attached to the pay phone in the booth next to the visitor cloakroom. A sign on the booth said
OUT OF ORDER
. The thing was wired into the phone in a way that made Hank, a burly fellow with an engaging face, shake his head. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”

“What do you mean?” Lieutenant Tracy asked.

“I’d say, when they wanted to see what was going on and to tape it at the same time, all they had to do was dial this number.”

“Wouldn’t the phone company have a record?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You could try them, but I doubt it. They probably phoned from another booth. There’s other ways around it as well.” He attached a small video screen to the device on the telephone and showed us how the video camera had been adjusted to take in just the cage where Bert and Betti were found.

The lieutenant and I finally went up to my office. Doreen brought us coffee. I could not sit still. I paced diagonally corner-to-corner while the lieutenant watched me pensively.

“The two cases are obviously related,” I said, stating the obvious.

“But not really the same.”

“Yes.” But for the moment I was too agitated with anger and
frustration to think straight. I sat down and took a couple of deep breaths.

Lieutenant Tracy went on. “The Ossmann-Woodley case could be murder. This looks more like an accident.”

“Yes, yes, but a kind of deliberate accident.”

The lieutenant’s frown eased as he picked up on my meaning. “The way accidents occur when someone is testing something.”

“Exactly. They may be trying to calculate exact doses or ratios of that mix Cutler described for us. Which is what may have happened to Ossmann and Woodley. But … if both cases were deliberate and made to look like accidents, experiments gone wrong …” I paused, and the lieutenant waited. “Then what exactly would the motive be unless … unless it is part of some grotesque scheme to get me out of the museum.”

“How realistic is that?”

“I don’t know. They want the lab and the revenue it brings in. The university itself would never sanction such means, but there’s a cabal doing everything it can to discredit me. But you’re right, Lieutenant, it’s a stretch. At the same time, you might want to question Malachy Morin …”

“The fat guy involved in the death of Elsa Pringle?’

“The very man.”

“We’ll bring him in.”

“Good. And have someone leak the timing of his arrival to the television newspeople.”

He gave one of his rare smiles. We spoke about what to do next. I called one of the mammalian specialists in the Biology Department and asked him to assist Dr. Cutler in a postmortem.

With the lieutenant’s assistance I dictated a news release to Doreen setting out the facts as tersely as possible. We checked it over and had her fax it to our priority list. The phone started
ringing immediately. Amanda Feeney-Morin, in that peremptory tone of hers, demanded to know every last detail. I told her the matter was under investigation and that I would keep her and others up to date with any developments. She persisted, asking a lot of insinuating questions designed to make it seem we are covering things up.

The lieutenant agreed with me that, given the implications of what had happened and the intense media interest, it would be best to hold a press conference. Accordingly, I secured Margaret Mead Auditorium for one in the afternoon and had Doreen contact our list with that information. Lieutenant Tracy, after talking to Chief Murphy of the SPD, agreed to conduct the conference with me. As best we could, we went over probable questions and arrived at responses we deemed as candid as we could make them.

In the midst of these preparations, Malachy Morin called to ask me why I was conducting a press conference without his authorization. I’m afraid I lost my temper. I told the man that he was a poor deluded wretch to think that he had any authority over anything that happened at the Museum of Man. I told him he was perfectly welcome to call a press conference of his own and share his considerable ignorance with anyone so feebleminded as to take seriously anything he would have to say about anything. I then gently hung up the receiver.

Now, I want to go on record as saying that, in the course of my career in dealing with the press, I have met many thoughtful, diligent, intelligent, and responsible journalists. And it is clear that a democracy cannot function without an active Fourth Estate. But even in a community as small as Seaboard, there appear to be hordes of them. And so many of them are benighted beyond redemption, crude beyond credibility, and so openly hostile as to be comic. One young man, after making a dramatic entrance in
a long, swirling overcoat that looked like a bathrobe, asked me in a challenging manner some long unintelligible question with the phrase “sex torture” thrown in. I simply shook my head and said I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another, wearing raked-back hair and those squinty little glasses you see in photographs of W.B. Yeats, asked me if Bert and Betti were a “breeding pair.”

I answered that we no longer had a breeding program at the Pavilion and that the two chimps had been placed together in a single cage by persons unknown and without any authorization.

“If the chimps are not allowed to breed, how do they take care of their sexual needs?”

When I responded facetiously that we did not disclose details about the sex lives of our chimpanzees out of respect for their privacy, I was taken entirely seriously.

“Was Bert still in a program for recovering alcoholics?” someone else asked.

“No. Bert completed that program and had been sober for more than three months at the time of his death.”

Amanda Feeney-Morin sat right up front, poised, I knew, to make slurs disguised as questions. Right on cue, she stood up. “Given what’s been happening at the Museum of Man over the past few months, Mr. de Ratour, are you going to resign as Director?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Have you considered, given what’s been happening, turning over administration of the museum to the university?”

“Absolutely not.”

To be fair, the journalists did ask some pointed, pertinent questions that it was our responsibility to answer. One of the network reporters, who had flown from Boston, asked the lieutenant if
the deaths of the chimps confirmed his suspicions concerning the Ossmann-Woodley case.