The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man (3 page)

“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.

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.

I could feel my hair whitening as I read the legalese on the attached document. It stated that Mr. Warwick, upon his demise, wished to have his remains mummified “in the manner of the ancient Egyptians” and placed in the collections of the museum in perpetuity, there to be displayed periodically in a sarcophagus that he had chosen from his collection of Egyptiania.

In exchange, he would bequeath an amount of no less than ten million dollars to the museum. An additional five million would be left to the MOM should it create a room in the museum to be called Temple Warwick, which would house not only his
mummy but his collection of ancient Egyptian art and artifacts as well.

What, one might ask, are the objections? After due consideration, I saw many. First, it is not in line with the “mission” of the museum.
(Mission
is one of those buzzwords like
transformative
that I heartily detest, but it serves here well enough.) Whatever our mission, it is not to provide mortuaries for the privileged.

Second, were we to accede to Mr. Warwick’s request, surely others would importune us to allow them to park their mortal remains here. We would become a laughingstock in the museum world. Or maybe not. Others might envy our endowment as it fattened on bequests from the well-heeled waiting to get into our upscale necropolis.

Of course, we could count on the local media to criticize us in no uncertain terms. Especially when the heirs to Mr. Warwick’s fortune challenged the matter in court, as they most surely would.

But, as I thought it over, equivocation began. Egypt is of unparalleled importance in human history. Yet all we have are a few small items in a case next to the Greco-Roman display. Temple Warwick could be done tastefully, a few toned-down inscribed columns in the style of Karnak, but nothing too pharaonic. As well, Elgin is of old Seaboard money and lots of it, mostly in vast tracts of woodland north of here. Old money does come with a patina of respectability when you think about it. And think about it I must. I’ve been up the coast to his mansion by the sea where he has his Egyptian collection on display. The sarcophagi alone stir my museum director’s highly refined and, I like to think, justifiable cupidity. But there is much more there. Statuary from the Second Dynasty; tomb furnishings including a small painted throne, probably for a child; mummified ibises; scrolls; an obelisk of polished red granite.

Some of it could be fakes, of course. Except that Elgin is a sly old fox. He is a large, genial, courtly man whose eccentricities, according to people who have done business with him, are part of an elaborate pose.

So I will do what I usually do in these circumstances. I will stall. I will have Doreen work up a letter stating that I am studying his very generous and interesting proposal in consultation with our general counsel.

I was in the midst of ruminating on this matter when Dr. Harvey Deharo, director of the Ponce Institute, under which auspices the Genetics Lab now operates, called to arrange a meeting with me and Thad Pilty. It seems that, according to the latest research, the skin tones of the mannequins in the Diorama of Paleolithic Life in Neanderthal Hall are not quite accurate.

For those not familiar with this award-winning and very popular attraction at the museum, some years ago, after considerable controversy, we created a lifelike tableau of daily life among what are called Stone Age people. Our models, which move and interact, however minimally, with the visitors, are based on the Gerasimov reconstructions. Not knowing what their pigmentation was at the time, we settled on a dusty hue, more gray than brown, that we hoped would not offend anyone.

Harvey, who was hired to take over the lab nearly two years ago after a lengthy search, told me that researchers have turned up DNA evidence that the Neanderthals were pale-skinned and perhaps red-haired. He chuckled in that soft Caribbean accent of his. “Don’t worry, Norman. This, too, will pass.” But how, I wonder, how? Because there’s no alternative but to confront and resolve the matter. Without at least the attempt at authenticity, we would be providing little more than a circus sideshow filled with fakes.

And, finally, I opened my e-mails to find a missive from
Constance Brattle, the hard-bottomed chair of the University Oversight Committee. She wants to convene a special meeting regarding “disturbing events at the museum.” She mentioned the murder, of course, but also the chimpanzee Alphus, a remarkable beast by any standards. He has been back in the news as a porn star. It seems that the university’s recently established Victim Studies Department and some local animal rights advocates have been complaining to the committee about the matter.