The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (9 page)

To keep things rolling I made a copy of Dr. Cutler’s latest results on the autopsies and gave it, in strictest confidence, of course, to Nicole Stone-Lee, the young graduate student I hired to review the research files of both Professor Ossmann and Dr. Woodley. We met in Ossmann’s office and briefly discussed its import. I found talking about erections to a very appealing young lady somewhat disconcerting. It didn’t make it easier that she’s the kind of young woman to make an older man wish he had it to do all over again. In any event, she took it all with an admirable
sangfroid
and pointed out that, given the nature of Professor Ossmann’s specialty, almost any of it could apply to research on what she termed “erectile enhancement.” She did ask to hire a
specialist in retrieving deleted hard-drive files, and I told her to go ahead and have the bills forwarded to my office.

The fact is I’m starting to feel some pressure quite apart from anything generated by our immediate circumstances. As I foresaw, the announcement by the Seaboard Police Department that it is treating the Ossmann-Woodley case as a murder has stirred things up again. Robert Remick called this morning. He was, as usual, the impeccable gentleman. But he did say that several Board members had voiced to him concerns about “the adverse publicity” that events at the museum have generated of late. With time one gets adept at listening between the lines, so to speak. Remick’s call, for all the sincere reassurances that the Board has full confidence in my management, left me far more concerned than all the various ploys the Wainscott satraps have concocted against the museum.

And while I have a normal enough ego when it comes to what might be called my own institutional longevity, I truly believe the MOM’s survival as a dynamic, independent museum depends on my continuing as Director. The wrong successor, a few pivotal changes in the makeup of the Board, and we would become a creature of the university. We would cease to be a place where ordinary people can view firsthand the beauty of the ages. We would cease to be what someone has called “the ultimate interpretive center of the human condition.”

Speaking of which, we had something of a cursory visit by young Winslow Lowe. He came in on Saturday and left on Sunday. He’s remarkably like his late father, as Diantha is like her mother. Strange, the way genes for looks and character get handed around in a family. But then, his attendance, however brief, did cheer up Elsbeth.

On a lighter note, Korky Kummerbund came over yesterday, and I must say we had what very nearly amounted to a celebration.
A celebration of what, I keep wondering. But not to cavil. Elsbeth was up and around and, at times, positively jolly as Korky described “a divine new little bistro on Upper Market Street called the Airliner Galley.” Korky went on about how the owner, his friend Jeremy, had taken the bottom floor of the old Tweed Building, a narrow leftover at the corner of Morton, and redesigned it in the shape of a jumbo jet interior. “But all first-class.”

“I want to go,” Elsbeth exclaimed. When I began to frown at the idea, “Oh, God, Norman, I just want to take a break from dying.” She took some of the miracle medicine Dr. Berns had prescribed and a handful of vitamins. Korky called ahead, and we set off, Diantha as well.

We were not disappointed. The seats, apparently from a real airliner, were arranged into two rows of snug booths. Each has a porthole through which you look down at a continuous video of landscapes or clouds that you select on a console just beneath the window. Elsbeth pushed the button for clouds. There was a film playing on an overhead screen that you can listen to with earplugs.

A waiter with a drinks trolley took our order. Jeremy came on over the loudspeaker, welcoming us aboard as special guests. He said the seat-belt sign would remain off for the rest of the flight, the weather was clear and calm at our destination, and we were lost, but it didn’t make any difference. He then asked one of the cabin staff to please bring him a dry martini, up with a twist.

The food, a parody of airline fare only as far as the plastic accoutrements, proved delicious in an old-fashioned kind of way.

At one point I escorted Elsbeth up to the ladies’ room in the back. It had one of those push folding doors, which opened into a roomy vestibule and another door leading to the ladies’
room directly. She had to control the laughter of her delight, as it weakens her.

There was one note of … well, not exactly discord, but of surprise, at least for me. Diantha, sitting next to me in one of the four-seater booths, in the course of the meal entwined the calf of her leg under and around mine. I would be less than honest if I did not admit to being shocked and aroused. Not to pull away, I knew, was to make myself complicit in the gesture, and yet to draw back struck me as a kind of ungallant rudeness. For once, though, I did something quite natural: I leaned toward her, put my arm around her shoulder, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Diantha, who had been subdued through the whole course of the meal, broke down and started to cry. Her mother reached over and took her hand, as did Korky. Diantha dried her tears, smiled, and kissed me back on the cheek.

Indeed, with Diantha now living with us, it is as though, through some strange alchemy of being and becoming, she and Elsbeth are merging into one. There are times when, in my heart, I cannot separate them.

Perhaps Diantha is sad not only because of her mother’s decline, but also because Sixy left a message, which I could barely decipher, dude this and cool that, telling her he would be a few days late. In solving her problem, I’m hoping it will solve mine, which persists like some alluring danger to us all.

Well, I must get back to work on the uncorrected proofs of my magnum opus. Why does it all seem so much in vain? Another dusty book to sit on remote shelves, mute to all save the occasional scholar looking for stones to add to his own little monument of words. But I can’t just put it aside. Ms. Myrtlebaum wants it back next week.

It’s been one of those days — a lot of motion and no movement. Or that’s the way it feels.

In following up on a suggestion of Lieutenant Tracy’s, I called Professor Olof Tromstromer, a well-known pteridologist who came to molecular biology through his research into the medicinal properties of ferns. Tromstromer readily, perhaps too readily, agreed to meet with me and tell me what he knew regarding Professor Ossmann and the unfortunate way he had died. One of those hearty Swedes, well fleshed if not plump, with bright blue eyes, ruddy complexion, and shaggy blond hair, he welcomed me with a laugh and dispelled any notion that he might be mixed up in foul play. I walked over to his office, a virtual greenhouse in the Tetley Herbarium. He asked me to sit down and join him in a glass of herbal tea.

I said yes, and he began answering my questions before I asked them as he fussed with a contraption that hissed and steamed and released a stream of colored liquid. “Well, of course, I had my disagreements with Pip. Everyone did. He was a very poor astronomer.”

“What do you mean?”

“He had curious notions as to where the sun shines.” He laughed, his face reddening. “Sugar?”

“A little. Thank you. What did you disagree about?”

“Everything. Pip would dispute the time of day if you gave him a chance.”

“Do you know if he was working on any kind of substance that could be considered an aphrodisiac?”

The professor made an extravagant gesture meant to be a shrug. He struck me as a large troll, an outsized garden ornament amid the collection of potted ferns, some of them huge, others extravagantly feathered, that surrounded his desk. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Pip liked to imagine himself a ladies man, how would you say it … a kind of sexual gourmet. He saw himself as a great scientist. He wanted to be rich and famous. Last October I put on a real Swedish accent, ya, and called him at a meeting where they had a speaker phone. I told him I was calling on behalf of the Swedish Academy and that he had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I mentioned some piffling little thing he did years ago. He fell for it hook and line, and …”

“Sinker.”

“Ya, sinker.” Professor Tromstromer laughed, obviously blessed with the gift of self-amusement. “He never forgave me for that.”

“Do you know anyone who might have wanted to murder him?”

The big shrug again. “Ya, anyone who worked with him. He disputed everything. He sat on all the important committees and used his position in the administration to bully his colleagues. He stole ideas. We all started telling him things. We set little traps. We sent him chasing wild swans.”

“Could the research you and Professor Ossmann were doing for ReLease be used on a Viagra-like compound?”

“Sure.”

“Can you elaborate?”

He gave a half smile. “That’s what you came here to really ask me, ya?”

“Ya.”

His smile vanished. “Do you want to know if I helped concoct the sex potion that killed Ossmann and Clem?”

“Did you?”

Though only a fraction of a second long, his double take made me think that might have been the case. Or that he knew something he didn’t want me to know. I listened then, trying to decode the cipher of any evasions and half-truths he might resort to.

“Mr. …”

“De Ratour.”

“Mr. de Ratour, things happen in every research laboratory that might be considered … anomalous. People have pet projects they work on after hours. People spy on what other people are doing. People discover things and keep them to themselves. People use themselves as guinea pigs. People are people. Ya, ya, sure. RL is a vasodilator, and Viagra prolongs vasodilation. But they are very different. You’ll be able to get RL off the shelf because its side effects are minimal. Believe me, it relies very much on the placebo effect. Did Pip concoct a love potion and try it out on Clem, who wouldn’t sleep with him? Sure. Why not? Life is short.”

“Do you know anything for sure?”

“No, but there were rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“Ya, ya. Rumors that Pip had something that made rabbits and mice screw themselves crazy. For a while there were a lot of missing animals that got blamed on the cleaning ladies, but I never believed it.”

“Do you have any idea what Professor Ossmann’s substance might be?”

“I don’t know for sure he had a substance.”

I didn’t believe him. But I had neither the interrogation skills nor enough technical background to question him further to any
effect. I thanked him for the time and the tea and took my leave. In walking to my office through the leaf fall and brilliant light, it struck me that Professor Tromstromer, behind his evident bonhomie, was not the jolly fellow he pretended to be. Not that any of us are. I did not list him as a suspect, but I felt sure he was hiding something.

On the other hand, I may only be projecting my own melancholy, which burns the deeper with the beauty of the day. I will be losing Elsbeth, it’s true, however much I hope against hope. But she will be losing all this, the air, the light, the sounds, the beauty. I think it was the Russian writer Vasily Grossman who pointed out that each death is the death of a universe.

I have received another e-mail from Worried, one that confirms what Professor Tromstromer told me about missing research animals.

I think tomorrow I’ll print out a copy of this and take it over myself to Nicole Stone-Lee. She might find it useful. Perhaps I’m being overcautious, but you can’t be too careful about these things falling into the wrong hands.

Speaking of which, despite my initial reservations, the meeting I had this afternoon with Malachy Morin and two gentlemen from the University Office of Development left me quite enlightened. I say “gentlemen” advisedly, as they struck me as the lodge-member types, full of that heartiness that’s always ready for a good laugh. Indeed, the individuals involved, taking their cue from Malachy Morin, carried on in an underlying tone of risibility that I find puzzling and disturbing in retrospect. Perhaps it’s just that I find the annoyance of it all distracting and am in much need of distraction.

We met in the offices of the Wainscott Next Millennium Fund, which are located in the upper reaches of Grope Tower, that architectural wart that … but you’ve heard me on that topic already.
“We’re here, Norm, to help you and the museum,” Mr. Morin began portentously. “We’re here, Norm, to make you a player in the Fund. We’re here to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” To which his two colleagues supplied what sounded to me like canned laughter.

One of them, a Mr. Jeff Sherkin, a short plump young man with black mustache, fresh complexion, and nervous blue eyes, professed amazement that the museum did not have a development program of its own. This, for some reason, got a frown from Mr. Morin.