The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (24 page)

“Please, no,” he said at the sight of Alphus. “Please, God, no.”

We finally hailed a taxi. When the cabbie, a hulking, T-shirted man with a shaved skull and a ring in his ear, saw Alphus, he
got out of the driver’s seat and came around to the curb. “Sorry, dudes, but that thing ain’t getting into my cab.”

“He’s quite harmless,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster under the circumstances. “He’s a Seeing Eye chimpanzee.”

“I don’t care if he plays quarterback for the Patriots, he ain’t getting in my cab.”

The driver of another cab we managed to hail proved a bit more reasonable. “It’s an extra ten for the monkey,” he said. “And if he shits, you’re cleaning it up.”

I turned to the girls. “Keep the doggie bags. And here …” I handed them some bills. As they protested, I got into the backseat and closed the door. “Drive,” I said.

Alphus nudged me. He signed, “I’m still hungry.”

“Where to?” the cabby asked.

“The nearest McDonald’s,” I said, trembling with relief.

It seems I have dodged any adverse publicity following our escapade at The Edge. The
Bugle
ran a small, confused item on page three mostly lifted from the police log. It referred to a disturbance involving a large animal at a Clipper Wharf restaurant. Needless to say I was relieved that nobody used one of those ubiquitous little phone cameras to take a picture that would have ended up plastered everywhere.

I put in a call to Lieutenant Tracy to thank him for his help in extricating me from what could have been a veritable debacle. Being out on bail, I am vulnerable to more than embarrassment. He told me he was in the neighborhood and wanted to drop by. I said of course.

He had scarcely sat down after warmly shaking my hand when, brushing aside my repeated appreciation of his intervention, insisted that it was he who was indebted to me for helping him on the Sterl case. “The chief is very pleased. He’s been on the line to the DA daily to get the charge against you dropped. But Jason Duff doesn’t like to let go once he gets his teeth into a case.”

Pausing to change conversational gears, he said, “I’m still wondering if those fake coins have anything to do with the von Grümh case.”

I nodded, but not in agreement. “You mean in terms of a motive.”

“Exactly. Von Grümh could have known something. He could have been murdered to keep him quiet.”

“I suppose that’s possible. But who?”

“I’d like to know how Max Shofar fits into von Grümh’s coin collecting.”

I shrugged with my hands. “Everything. Heinie got a lot of his coins through Max.”

“Maybe von Grümh found out that Shofar was passing him counterfeits. Von Grümh confronts him, threatens to expose him. Shofar, in a panic, shoots him.”

His scenario made me realize how much more I knew about the case than he did. I said, “In fact I’ve already asked Max about that.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me, and I believe him, that the last thing he could afford is even a hint that he deals in fakes.”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Not long after I was arrested.”

“You should have told me.”

“You left me out of the loop, remember?”

He smiled ruefully. “I did. It won’t happen again.”

“So we’re back to square one,” I said equably. “It’s possible, isn’t it, that the counterfeiting doesn’t figure in the murder?”

The lieutenant looked at me doubtfully as though sensing I wasn’t telling him everything I knew. “Anything’s possible. But it doesn’t ring … right to me.”

“There is one way we might clear up the matter.”

“How?”

“Diantha tells me that Heinie … von Grümh was very emphatic about needing the gun to protect something he had on his boat. Let’s say that that something is the original collection of coins, the real ones.”

“We’ve already gone over the boat.”

“How thoroughly?”

He turned thoughtful. “We should have been able to find that many coins.”

“But you weren’t looking for them at the time.”

“True, but what would it signify if we did find them?”

“It would at least clear Max. Of that motive, anyway.”

He nodded slowly. “You’re right. Eliminating suspects is as important as finding them.”

We chatted for a while longer. Then, almost casually, he said, “You’ve got me thinking. We have a guy, an expert on concealment, that we sometimes use on cases like this. If he’s available, we could drive down to the boat this afternoon and go over it one more time.”

“I see,” I said doubtfully. I had planned to leave early for a weekend at the cottage with Diantha and Elsie. And the prospect of rummaging through the scene of my wife’s infidelity did not appeal to me, to say the least.

He gave me a sharp look of entreaty. “I thought you might be able to help us. You’ve been on board before.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t want to make a career out of it.”

“Short and sweet,” he smiled. “I promise you.”

So, packed for the weekend, I arrived a bit early at the dock and waited for the lieutenant, who showed up not long afterward with the expert, a small, dapper middle-aged man introduced to me as Mr. Randall. The manager of the marina, an old-salt type with whiskers and belly, made some protesting noises as a matter of form. He glanced over the search warrant and dug out the keys we needed. He seemed accustomed to having boats searched, perhaps because of the drug trade.

As we boarded the vessel over an aluminum gangway, I began to fully understand my reluctance to be there. It wasn’t just that
this vessel was the venue of Diantha’s infidelity. On the deck of tightly joined hardwood, the nightmare of my possible guilt rose around me like a dark miasma. Because there are moments when I am not only glad that Heinrich von Grümh has been murdered, but would’ve liked to have done it myself. And perhaps did. Upon entering the master stateroom with its gleaming metal and waxed maple banality and taking in the very place where he and Diantha had been naked and lascivious in one another’s arms and legs, I knew for a certainty I could have held a gun to the man’s head, tormented him with words, and pulled the trigger.

Or could I have? Gradually, as I stood there amid the decor of what amounted to an upscale recreational vehicle, the significance of their encounter dissipated to what it had been. Sex without passion or love is about as meaningful as a rectal exam when you think about it. I realized anew that if I had murdered the man it was because of his subtle, patronizing taunts.

I collected my wits and got to work. It is extraordinary how many nooks and crannies there are inside the finite space of a sixty-foot sloop. With Mr. Randall’s help, we found drawers within drawers, spaces within spaces. There was a series of brass-fitted compartments with covers that hinged up or down or slid smoothly sideways. We made some interesting discoveries, including a cache of exotic erotica, judging from the foreign-language titles on the videos.

I took a moment to thumb the folder of woodblock prints done in the Shunga style by Utamaro. They were mostly of extravagantly clothed couples in various positions with their salient parts exposed and their expressions impassive. Strange to me that the Japanese do not appear to associate the erotic with the nude. No Greek ideal of the human figure. The prints were valuable, I guessed, unless they, too, were fakes.

One well-recessed cabinet contained a regular pharmacopoeia.
We also found the holster to my gun along with extra ammunition in a trick drawer of a bedside table in the guest stateroom. The lieutenant photographed the items
in situ
before putting on a pair of latex gloves and placing the items in plastic evidence bags, which he sealed.

“That may very well be exculpatory,” he explained when we were by ourselves in the lounge. “It’s at least circumstantial evidence that von Grümh had the weapon in his possession.”

We were on the point of resorting to the cordless drill to start unscrewing bulkheads and decking when I checked again the pictures in the master stateroom. They were a series of eighteenth-century prints depicting warships under full sail. They had been affixed to the walls by an ingenious-looking device to keep them from slipping or falling during rough seas.

After a moment of fiddling with the device, I struck upon the right combination of flicking and pushing. The picture tilted forward in such a way that I could take it down. When I lifted it off the wall, I noticed a small lever, not part of the mechanism, that protruded slightly from the wall in the middle of it.

“Lieutenant,” I called. “I think I’ve found something.”

He came in with the expert. They watched as I gently moved the lever from a down position to an up position. Nothing seemed to happen. But Mr. Randall, poking about, noticed that the sill under one of the two rectangular portholes that flanked either side of the bed, had lifted ever so slightly.

Donning a pair of latex gloves himself, he lifted the solid piece of hardwood, which hinged back against the inner glass of the porthole. As I watched with a giddy sense of expectation, he pulled out two zippered canvas bags of rugged construction, each approximately eighteen by twelve by six inches in size. He placed the bags on the bed next to the picture I had removed and shone his flashlight into the cavity. “That’s all,” he said.

“Let’s hope it’s not booby-trapped,” the lieutenant said as he helped unzip the bags and spread apart the openings. I watched intently as they extracted several of what looked like those heavy leather stationery folders you find in the rooms of expensive hotels. He gave one to me, and carefully, on the bed, I undid the clasp that held it shut and opened it.

It didn’t surprise me for some reason that it contained no coins in the variously shaped circles cut into the matting in the interior of the covers. It hadn’t been heavy enough. The rest of them, ten in all, were empty as well. At the same time, something nagged at me.
Something
was heavy enough. And with that excitement that comes with discovery, I lifted up the print of the USS
Boston
under full sail. It was too heavy, considering that it was a reasonably simple if strong assemblage of wood, glass, and paper.

I handed it to the expert. “What do you think?”

“Yeah,” he said, and produced one of those knives with a retractable razor. With precision and care, he sliced the brown paper glued in place over the back of the frame. Beneath that was a fitted piece of thin cardboard. Using the edge of the blade, he gently pried this up. And there, in their custom-cut holes under a thin piece of transparent plastic, were at least two dozen ancient coins.

“I think those are they,” I said. “In fact, I recognize several of them. That one is a Mesembria War Helmet hemidrachm. And that is a Julian the Second bronze.”

We dismantled a few more prints, of which there were a goodly number. When the Dresden stater turned up in a smaller print all of its own, I said, “I’m sure this is the collection.”

“But you’re not positive?”

“Not a hundred percent, but nearly …” I remembered going over it with Heinie at Raven’s Croft, his eager hunger for approval.

“Who is?”

“Our curator.”

“Phil?”

“Exactly, but I don’t want him to know about this, if that’s possible.”

The lieutenant started to say something and stopped. “Okay. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

We waited around as Mr. Randall dismantled the remaining prints and put the mounted coins into evidence bags that the lieutenant sealed. I said, “There’s a highly respected numismatist in Boston named Simons. George Simons. I would suggest we give him the collection along with a catalog for verification.”

“To verify that this is the collection?”

“Yes, and to verify that they’re real.”

“You think …?”

“Once burned.”

“Okay. I’ll leave that in your hands. Take a couple of dozen coins from Randall. He’ll make you sign for them. And send them to your man.”

Up on the sunny deck, the lieutenant looked around at the taut lines, brass fittings, and other nautical paraphernalia of a large and expensive sailboat. He said, “The rich are different, aren’t they?”

“Some are. Not Heinie. Not a lot of them. They are as ordinary as dirt.”

We said good-bye to Mr. Randall and, though it was getting late, dropped into a nearby coffee shop to go over what we had found. We took our coffees to a booth at a window overlooking the boatyard. The lieutenant had one of those involved latte things, which surprised me, but, then, he is considerably younger than I.

“Well, I think we can eliminate this as a motive implicating Shofar.”

He nodded. “And you get your real coins.”

I smiled most ruefully. “The merry widow Merissa will be able to claim them. He gave us the fakes.” And, I thought, another public relations disaster when this story broke.

We sat there for twenty minutes following our new discovery through a rat maze of motives, implications, and hypotheses. We decided it made more sense for Heinie to murder someone to keep the forgery a secret than to be murdered. Disclosure would be more than an embarrassment: He would have faced criminal charges for defrauding the IRS.

We were getting ready to leave when the lieutenant said, “Tell me, Norman, why do you keep this … chimp around?”

I explained in general terms what Alphus was. “He is both more and less than human. If you got to know him, you would find it impossible to put him back in a cage.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean taking him to restaurants.”

“True.” I decided then to mention to my friend and colleague Alphus’s gifts regarding truth telling.

“You might be interested to know that this chimp, Alphus, is a living, breathing lie detector.”

“How can he do that? He doesn’t speak.”

“No. But he understands most of what’s said. We communicate in sign language.”

“Whole sentences?”

“Whole paragraphs.”

“All right.”

“I was thinking that we could arrange to interrogate our suspects with Alphus behind the one-way glass signaling yea or nay to their responses.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “That sounds great. Trouble is, most of them would show up with lawyers who would tell them to say nothing. And, besides, none of it would stand up in court.
Think about it. Your Honor, our infallible ape has indicated …”