The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (12 page)

I suppressed an impulse to go to the headwaiter and tell him that he was a jerk of the first order and walk out with dignity. But I managed to calm down. I began to understand in some small measure what Jews, blacks, and other historically despised groups had suffered over the years. Not that it helped a whole lot to place my hands on the table before me, bow my head, and submit to this exercise in public shame.

It wasn’t humility that finally made me hold my head up and wait; it was pride. I knew who and what I was, and that was all that mattered. When I had had enough, I rose and, with as much dignity as I could muster, quietly walked out of the place.

In the wake of this small debacle, things at home came to a head. We had a cruel exchange in which I drew tears if not blood. Diantha asked me, as it were a matter of idle curiosity, if I had murdered Heinie.

Again that question caught me off balance. My automatic “Of
course not” sounded hollow, and fear of possible guilt seized my heart along with a recollection of the awful wrath that could have made me murderous. I chafed that wound, nearly wanting the pain of it as I snarled, “Did you talk to him about using it on me?”

For a moment something akin to shock registered in her swollen eyes. She said, “Never.” Then she gave me a look of sincere loathing. “For Christ’s sake, Norman, I’ve tried to explain. It was a fling. It wasn’t even that. I was bored. I drank too much. I smoked some dope. I couldn’t wait to get away from him. The second time … He begged. He turned pathetic. It was a … mercy f*ck.”

“I wish I could believe you, Diantha,” I said quietly. “I wish …”

“What do you wish?”

Her tone of bored annoyance maddened me. I couldn’t resist saying what I had said before. “You told me, you swore that you had stopped seeing that ridiculous man.”

“So that’s what it comes down to. I screw a guy a couple of times and you can’t get over it.”

“You swore to me you wouldn’t see him again unless I was there.”

“Look, I wasn’t seeing him like that. I never ‘saw’ him after that stupid weekend on the boat. He kept calling. What could I do, close the door in his face? So I gave him a drink and listened to him complain yet again about Max and Rissa. He knew you had a gun. He said he needed it to protect himself because he thought they were plotting to have him murdered …” She broke off as though having said something she meant not to.

She quickly resumed. “Anyway, It was getting late in the afternoon and I didn’t want you to come home and find him here. So I said screw it and gave him the gun just to get rid of him. How
was I to know someone would get it from him and shoot him with it.”

I might have missed her lapse had not my penchant for sleuthing twitched into operation. I took a moment to calm myself. “Diantha,” I said with as much quiet authority as I could muster, “please tell me everything you know about Max and Merissa and what Heinie said about them.”

It only exacerbated things. “God, Norman, please don’t play detective with me.”

“Diantha, I am not playing anything with you. You told me before that he needed the gun to protect things on his boat. Now you say he wanted it because he felt threatened by Max and Merissa.”

“I thought I told you that before.”

“No, you didn’t. But isn’t Max well off if not wealthy?”

“Yeah, maybe. But Heinie told me he had found out through friends that Max had lost a bundle on some sort of Franklin Mint coin deal. You know, a replica of an old gold dollar. He didn’t lock it in when the price of gold was a lot lower than it is now. It kept rising, making the thing too expensive for most collectors. The ones that watch television ads. Anyway, he lost his investment.”

It all fit neatly. Max loses a bundle. He takes up with Merissa, and then murders Heinie for his money. It fit too neatly. “I’m not sure it signifies,” I said. “Still, I wish you had told me.”

“I suppose I should have.” Her tone, like mine, had grown conciliatory. Then she said, “Norman, I think I’m going to take Elsie and spend some time at the cottage.”

I nodded, not wanting her to say what she said anyway.

“I really can’t stand being around you when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know. You don’t trust me anymore. You don’t look at me anymore. You don’t touch me or smile. I feel like a … leper. In my own house.”

I wanted to protest, but I knew she was right. Better than I, she understood that this latest betrayal revived the other one. Although our life together had resumed quickly and facilely after her affair, the wound had yet to heal completely. Now it opened again, magnified into something allied with the tangible consequences I faced.

I understood what she meant because I could barely stand being around myself. I felt like the road of my life had turned into a dead end after all. Worse, an ambush. I stood and took her by the hands. “Let’s not lose each other,” I said. “Go, but don’t go.”

She collapsed against me tearfully. “I’ll go and not go,” she repeated. “Just for a while. If you need me, I’ll be there. I’ll wait for you.” She turned away, wiping away tears, and I already missed her.

We began the sad task of splitting up, however temporarily, sorting through stuff for her and Elsie to take with them for an extended stay at the cottage. I helped Diantha load her big vehicle. It tore at my heart and almost made me relent, to watch her and Elsie drive away.

So I’m alone in this great shack of a house, licking my wounds like some trapped and dying beast. I did make a large and powerful martini to assist me in my self-pity. But I only took a sip before placing it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. Because …

Because I have found self-delusion is preferable to self-pity — if only because the former can lead to action whereas the latter leads to more of itself. Thus, for a few heady moments, I saw
myself as the character who, falsely accused, must venture forth to prove his own innocence. I made a mental note to drop by the Coin Corner and have a chat with Max Shofar.

At least for now the reporters have gone. It appears there’s been a suicide that the police are investigating. According to the
Bugle
, the body of Martin Sterl, who recently sold his high-tech firm for a tidy bundle, was found slumped over the wheel of his Mercedes by his young wife of some six months. “Although an apparent suicide, police are treating it as a suspicious death.”

That may be a sop to the man’s children by his first wife. In a tearful appearance at a press conference I happened to watch on television, the man’s grown daughter vehemently denied that her father had committed suicide. “I talked to Dad the day before. I’d never seen him happier. Except for that … woman …”

As for
that woman
, the news clip showed a petite, pixie-haired gamine in black averting her eyes from the camera. How well I know that response. At the same time, I realized that I had seen her before. The name Stella Fox did not ring a bell. And I had met but did not know her late husband, who had been much older than she. But where had I seen her? The recollection tantalized. I racked my memory. I cut her picture out of the
Bugle
. I went online and copied the news footage of her in dense shades as she hurried away from the blaze of lights. I studied them. Of course it may be just that my detecting instincts had been triggered. Not, I told myself, that I didn’t have a far more pertinent mystery to solve.

Alphus has come to stay with me for the time being. Despite our best efforts, no suitable place has been found to lodge the animal, a word I use with inner quotation marks. I went over to Sign House with every intention of telling Millicent Mulally that Alphus would have to go back to the Pavilion with the other chimps. I was going to tell her that she and other members of Sign House could have visiting rights, could even come and take him out for afternoon forays. But I now understand exactly what she means: It would be like sending an innocent man back to jail.

It’s not simply that he and Millicent exchange signals at a rapid and decisive pace; he responds appropriately whenever I say anything vocally to him. I did some signing, but I couldn’t follow all of his deft answers, a problem I have when practicing my awkward French on native speakers.

In person, the first impression Alphus gives is of a hairy, good-natured individual. His clear, amber eyes are deep-set beneath thick supraorbital ridges. His brow slopes back to thick, coarse hair, which he parts in the middle and which might be reminiscent of an old-fashioned style except that he combs it over his ears to minimize their marked protuberance. He has freckled skin that ranges from tawny to dark, an insignificant nose with small nostrils, and a prominent upper lip that bows out over a wide mouth set in what appears to be a permanent smile. A bristly beard, flecked with gray, frames his face and covers his
slightly receding chin. The habit he has of resting an index finger against his cheekbone makes him appear thoughtful.

Which I found him to be. Indeed, Dr. Simone had told me not to be surprised at his intelligence. It turns out he had been involved in a risky procedure conducted by the demented Dr. Gottling when he was trying to genetically engineer a new human prototype. The operation, something called peripheral vascular angioplasty, killed two of Alphus’s fellow chimps but apparently worked for him. It is a procedure in which a catheter is inserted into the main artery leading to the head. A balloon is then introduced into the catheter and inflated in successive stages along the artery, enlarging it and concomitantly increasing the flow of blood to the brain.

One of his Pavilion mates went utterly mad and had to be euthanized in the recovery room. One died of a brain hemorrhage, and Alphus, already a very bright animal, underwent what one researcher called an increase in intelligence of several magnitudes. Once he had recovered from the procedure, it became obvious to everyone involved that he had become not merely smart but smart by human standards. Indeed, it was this enhanced IQ that allowed him to escape.

We were sitting in the small parlor of Sign House each with a cup of tea when I told them what my original intentions were. They both listened gravely. Then, when I said I had changed my mind, they gave each other that raised slapping handshake you see athletes using.

We discussed practical details. Alphus understands that if he leaves the house unattended he will be apprehended, forcibly if necessary, by the authorities. Millicent told me in simple signage that Alphus had friends at Sign House who would be willing to come over from time to time, especially during the day, to keep him company and take him for walks.

She then quickly wrote a message on what looks like a pocket computer and showed it to me. It read, “A. has a very close friend named Ridley living here. He is a very nice young man, but he is still not quite mature enough to have him be responsible for A.”

She showed the communication to Alphus. He nodded.

At that point we went around the house, meeting some of the residents, including Boyd Ridley. A stocky young man with blondish hair, a handsome broad face, and blue eyes touched with glints of manic mischief, Ridley, as he likes to be called, hails from a prominent and quite wealthy family in Tennessee. He is also mathematically gifted, according to Millicent.

We packed Alphus’s belongings — a lot of CDs, books, and clothes, including some shirts, two ties, and a suit jacket. When I noticed him carefully wrapping a bottle of expensive single-malt Scotch, I looked quizzically at Millicent. But she just shrugged.

I won’t deny I found it unsettling to have a chimpanzee sitting next to me in my ancient Renault with his seat belt buckled on. But then, even with people gawking and pointing at us, it quickly grew to seem normal. Especially when, indicating the radio and signing “okay?” he tuned in the local classical station and we listened to a Brahms clarinet trio.

“Nice place,” he signed as we entered my empty house.

I had planned to let him have what had been, in my parents’ day, the maid’s small room. Located toward the back of the house, it has its own minimal bathroom and a narrow stairway leading into the kitchen.

Alphus looked at me dubiously. He shook his head. He pointed to the door leading up to the attic. “Can I look?” he signed.

I said why not and led him up. I didn’t want to give up my own eyrie. But he wasn’t interested in that. He went directly across a jumbled storage area to a door that opened into a small
round room, the upper part of the turret that had been stuck on the house in Victorian times. “Okay?” he asked.

I said fine. An hour later, we had the room, also full of odds and ends, cleared and even cleaned using the vacuum and a damp rag. There was an electrical outlet and a table, but not much else.

I took out a notebook and wrote, “We can get you a mattress for the floor, if that’s okay?”

He shook his head. From a duffel I hadn’t noticed, he took a hammock and two strong screw-in hooks. With admirable skill and real strength, he twisted the hooks into the sloping rafters of chestnut high above the floor. On these he slung the hammock, which was made of closely netted cord. On this he spread a down comforter with a leaf-green cover. He turned to me and signed “leopards.” When I didn’t get that, he signed “big,” hands together then pulled apart; “cat,” hand pulling at figurative mustache; and “spots,” closed fist held next to face, then pointing with index finger. When I didn’t quite get that, he spelled it out for me, letter by letter.

I explained to him that there were no leopards loose in Seaboard. And that, even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to get into the house at night as all the doors and windows are secured.

He wagged his finger at me and shook his head. The tedium of having to explain the obvious came across in his signing, which had slowed down and become exaggerated. Patiently, he told me that there were leopards everywhere, we just don’t see them. Not only that, but there was virtually no place they couldn’t get into. He told me he remembered how they were even in cities, right in people’s houses.