The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Copyright © 2010 by Alfred Alcorn

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,

  Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Alcorn, Alfred.

  The counterfeit murder in the Museum of Man : a Norman de Ratour mystery / Alfred Alcorn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58195-238-4

  1. Museum curators — Crimes against — Fiction. 2. Museums — Fiction. 3. Murder — Investigation — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.L29C68 2010

  813′.54–DC22

  2010006856

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For Margaret and in memory of Bill

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  1

  It struck me as strange the way the car had been left there, not quite aligned on the rough road separating the museum’s parking lot from that of the Center for Criminal Justice. It looked like it had come to a stop rather than having been stopped. And while I usually mind my own business in such matters, I went over with Decker, our black retriever, to investigate.

  The closer I approached the vehicle, the more I sensed something amiss. It might have been Decker, straining at the leash and making those low whines that from a dog sound so articulate. The car itself, oddly familiar to me, didn’t quite fit the scene. It was a sleek late-model maroon Jaguar, so polished that I could clearly see in its brilliant surface the reflection of my own tall figure and that of the straining dog. Indeed, as I drew closer, I could discern the features of my face, my thinning hair a bit mussed, my pale eyes quizzical above the rather too prominent nose, my mouth resigned to apologize for intruding on, say, some vehicular lovemaking.

  I remember it all in vivid detail — the crunch of gravel underfoot, the midmorning, early-May air moist and bright, the breeze just strong enough to be chilling, the mottled forms of the scattered maples in the chartreuse effusion of their leafing sliding up the mirroring window as I moved closer. I remember especially my own audible gasp of incredulity as the glass of the car shifted from reflective to transparent and I looked in at the body of a middle-aged man slumped over the wheel, a patch of dried blood on his prominent temple where the bullet had gone in. From the swept-back iron-gray hair and from the strong jaw, I recognized the still-impressive form of Heinrich von Grümh.

  Shading my eyes, I peered around the front seat area but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. I resisted an impulse to open the car door, to reach in and try to render assistance. Because I was sure he was beyond help from the utter stillness of his body, from the bemused stare of the opened eyes, and from that sense of how each dead person holds inviolate within the mystery of life.

  I backed away, talking to Decker. “Come on, boy. We need to call Lieutenant Tracy.”

  And so, with a sharp sense of urgency, with a world-weary sigh, and with a quickening of the blood as the hunt begins, I opened the mental notebook I keep ready and began to take notes, to begin, however unofficially, an investigation into another apparent murder here at the Museum of Man.

  To be frank, as director of the museum, one of my first concerns, ignoble as it may sound, was for the adverse publicity a murder on the premises would engender. Strictly speaking the murder of Heinrich “Heinie” von Grümh did not occur on museum property, but in an area between the two parking lots, a kind of access right-of-way that only nominally belongs to the MOM. More to the point, Heinie served as Honorary Curator of Numismatics in the museum’s small but exquisite collection of Greco-Roman coins and had proved a generous contributor over the past few years. It didn’t matter. As director of the MOM, I would be involved. There was to be no shirking this responsibility.

  Though loath to leave the vehicle and its very still occupant unattended, I turned to go up to my office to call the police. Were I more of my time, I would have been carrying one of those pocket phones people are incessantly talking into in the most noisome way. But I have never been much of a “phone person,” preferring in solitary moments to converse with myself rather than with others, that is, to think.

  My office occupies a corner on the fifth floor of the magnificent old pile dating from the nineteenth century that houses the museum. As I walked toward its gentle, redbrick conflation of Gothic and Romanesque styles, I felt that once again it had become haunted by evil. Once again, somehow, somewhere, a murderer lurked among the ancient galleries and oaken cabinets full of priceless objects. Or in among the state-of-the-art, highly digitized premises of the Genetics Lab, which is part of the museum and the crucible of so much mischief.

  I took the rattling elevator up to my office, put through a call to Lieutenant Tracy’s private number, and left a message. I was scarcely back downstairs and heading across the deserted parking lot, it being relatively early on a Sunday morning, when the first cruiser came careering off Belmont Avenue like a blue flashing banshee and headed straight for the death car.

  As I approached on foot, I was appalled to see the two uniformed officers charging around the vehicle in a way that would have compromised any clues left in the surrounding gravel. One of them, a brash-faced young man with a waxed crew cut, looked up as I drew near and said, “This is a crime scene. You can’t hang around here.”

  I stopped well short of the car and replied, “I’m the one who called it in. And if I do say so, I think you should both stand back and wait until Lieutenant Tracy and the crime scene unit arrive.”

  They both huffed and puffed at me for a moment, but they knew I was right and withdrew rather gingerly to stand at a distance. One of them, rather portentously, told me I should wait as well, to give a statement if nothing else. I replied that it was exactly what I intended to do.

  More sirens sounded presently, and it wasn’t long before an unmarked sedan with one of those stick-on roof flashers pulled up and Lieutenant Tracy got out and came over to me. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. It was the first time I had ever seen him in casual clothes — chinos, sneakers, and a wind-breaker over a turtleneck jersey. He then approached the Jaguar, but carefully, and peered inside. He conferred briefly with the two officers before returning to me.

  Decker sniffed and wanted to lick him, but I kept the leash tight.

  “Anyone you recognize, Norman?” he asked.

  “The real estate developer Heinrich von Grümh,” I said. “He’s also one of our honorary curators.”

  The lieutenant looked at me and shook his head. “What is it about this place, anyway?”

  His reference to a series of bizarr
e and unsavory murders at the museum gave me an inner wince. I managed a shrug. “It’s the last thing we needed.”

  When the crime scene crew pulled up with their new van and began unloading technical gear, Lieutenant Tracy accompanied me into the museum. It being a Sunday, there were plenty of visitors in the galleries, but backstage it was deserted as we took the elevator. When we got to my office, the police officer, an old friend by now, took a moment to gaze westward toward the Hays Mountains and then to the north, to Shag Bay and the breeze-brittled water dotted with the taut sails of pleasure craft.

  “A beautiful day,” he said, sounding a rueful note as we got down to business.

  He sat in front of the desk, and I pulled open the drawer where I keep files on all our curators, actual or honorary. I took out that of Heinrich von Grümh and slid it across to him.

  “One of Seaboard’s richest men, if not the richest,” I said.

  “Old or new money?” He was writing, taking down address and telephone numbers.

  “Both. He inherited Groome Securities from his dad, Albrecht Groome. The old man anglicized the name when he came here in the midthirties, a Gentile refugee from Hitler. Heinie, Heinrich, was something of a snob. He Germanized the name back to its original and added the von. He claimed he found it while climbing around in the family tree. He never tired of telling people you pronounced it fon. People began to call him Fonny, which elided easily enough into phony. My own father …” I trailed off, not wanting to go into family history. “Anyway, Heinie, as he was usually called, sold the firm for a very good price and went into the real estate …”

  “Next of kin?”

  “That would be Merissa, Merissa Bonne. His wife. His third wife, actually. She’s considerably younger. My wife Diantha and Merissa know each other. I think you could call them tennis friends.”

  “So you knew the victim himself?”

  “Quite well. We served together on a Cold Stream Prep alumni fund-raising committee. I’ve been to his home several times socially. For parties mostly. And, of course, he was Honorary Curator of Greco-Roman Numismatics. He donated some very fine specimens of his own recently. Indeed, that’s why he was named an honorary curator.”

  “I suppose his donations helped with his taxes?”

  “To say the least. But he was not above the vanity of the thing.” I began to add something and stopped.

  As a matter of fact, my relations with Heinie were considerably more involved than the edited version I gave to the officer. Indeed, my last encounter with the man remained freshly and vividly impressed on my mind, making unreal if not surreal the very palpable fact of his violent death. But at the expense of some scruple I decided not to disclose any of my other connections to the victim. They could hardly have been germane to the case.

  If the lieutenant caught my hesitation, he didn’t let on. He said, “I see …” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, Norman … You wouldn’t mind accompanying me over to see the widow. It might make it easier on her.” The wryness in his voice told me it would also make it easier on him.

  “Of course.” I glanced at Decker.

  The lieutenant smiled. “He can come, too.”

  So the three of us set out on that fine Sunday morning in May for a drive that took us out to the bypass and then southward, along the coast to Bayville, a gated community on Purdy’s Neck, on which Heinie had made a mighty bundle. It has, I’m told, a very good golf course for those given to that kind of tedium. The new marina, full of sleek white sailboats and cabin cruisers, pennants snapping smartly in the breeze, looks like it belonged in Florida. The old fishing village has been malled, to use a Diantha term, with a lot of little boutiques specializing in authenticity.

  As my good friend Father S.J. O’Gould, S.J., has remarked, the human species has become something of a weed, ecologically speaking; he likens us to an “invasive exotic.” Which doesn’t sound like a man of God, though the God of this particular Jesuit is not your run-of-the-mill deity. And, of course, in a hundred years, when some new developer comes along and starts tearing it all down to put in a jetport or whatever, sentimentalists like me will be protesting the loss of the old, the familiar, and the real.

  To be fair, Heinie did leave some of the land in a conservation trust, and the gestures toward a bygone bucolia have been tastefully preserved. Perhaps a bit too tastefully.

  We pulled up to “Raven’s Croft,” one of the pricier “units” in Kestrel Meadows, where there are no longer any kestrels or meadows. It was a big rambling affair hedged in by dutiful pines and fronted by an immaculately kept lawn with clipped, funereal shrubs, mostly rhododendrons and azaleas, snug against the foundation. I noticed a drive that went around to a garage large enough for a small airliner. It wasn’t the first time I had been to Raven’s Croft. The house oppressed me with its stonework, lattice, and Palladian touches. I once remarked to Diantha that it could serve nicely as a funeral home for the newly rich newly dead.

  Nor did I look forward to the lugubrious office that had brought the lieutenant and me there. I confess to a certain unease should the widow, in her shock, disclose any of my own complicated relations with the deceased.

  It took a while for Merissa, casually elegant in jeans and boatneck sweater, her painted toes elegant in heeled sandals, to answer the door. Her smile at my appearance turned quickly to puzzlement. Perhaps it was the lieutenant, right behind me as we entered and went through the usual pleasantries of greeting. “Norman! What a wonderful surprise,” she exclaimed, ushering us into a wainscoted parlor with large windows giving out on the bay and brilliant parquet flooring under Turkey carpets.

  The place reflected with Germanic punctilio the tastes of Heinie Grümh. The very smells seemed newly minted to go with the new house, new cars, new, expensive replications of antiques, and gorgeous new wife. Merissa Bonne is a striking woman of dark red hair, appraising gray-green eyes, a nose too perfect for nature, and a lush mouth given to frequent, ephemeral smiles, as though she found life to be a series of small jokes. I sometimes wondered if she considered me among them, in part because I’ve always had a weakness for her, for her beauty and her crassness.

  “Whatever brings you here …?” The smiles were gone as concern rearranged her pretty features.

  I coughed. I sighed. I said, “Merissa, this is Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department. I’m afraid we have some dreadful news for you.”

  “Heinie …?”

  Lieutenant Tracy nodded. “Your husband was found dead about an hour and a half ago. In his car.”

  Her eyes grew large with horrified incredulity. “No!” she cried. “No.”

  “I’m afraid so …”

  “How …?”

  “A preliminary investigation indicates murder.”

  Despite my own involvement in the emotion of the moment, I could not help but remark an odd note in her surprise, and in her ejaculation “He wouldn’t!” before she covered her mouth with her hand. She appeared shocked not only by her husband’s untimely and unseemly death, but by something half expected.

  I took her by the arm and helped her to a sofa, an imitation antique love couch in the French style with the back sloping down halfway across to seat level to allow the comfortable arrangement of one’s limbs for whatever contingencies arose. Lieutenant Tracy pulled up a chair and gently went through some preliminary questions.

  “Mrs.… or is it Ms. Bonne?”

  “Ms. Bonne. But call me Merissa.” She took my handkerchief, which was clean if a little starchy, and wiped her eyes with it.

  The lieutenant nodded. “When was the last time you saw your husband?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  She shook her head. “He said something about going into Seaboard to see someone and then working on the Albatross … that’s his sailboat. He keeps it at the marina.”

  “I see. And you didn’t find it strange that he didn’t come home?”

/>   Merissa sighed and shook her attractive head. “He calls it his bolt-hole. His boat. It’s where he goes when he wants to duck out.”

  “And why would he want to duck out?”

  She dabbed with the stiff hankie. “We had a little spat …”

  “You argued?”

  “Yes.”

  “About …?”

  “About personal things. Very personal things.”

  “I see.” The lieutenant was taking it all down, flipping the pages of his reporter’s notebook. “Ms. Bonne, do you know anyone who might want to murder your husband?”

  She glanced at me, but not in any accusing way. She shook her head. “No. I mean he had enemies, Lieutenant, but no one …” Again she shuddered.

  “Would you like me to get you coffee or something?” I asked. I wanted to feel useful.

  “There’s a pot just brewing,” she said. “I’d ask the maid, but she has the day off …”

  Assuring her I could find things, I went down the main hallway to their vast kitchen, a place with enough immaculate counter space and high-tech gadgets to pass for a working lab. It gave onto a semicircular conservatory, the French doors of which opened onto a sloping lawn and another sweeping view of the bay.

  I do not like to snoop among other people’s personal effects whatever my proclivities as a sleuth. Indeed, I usually would rather not know the titillating or embarrassing details of another’s life, especially if that person wants them kept private. But in this case my investigative instincts had been stirred, and I poked around for the coffee things with my antennae positively bristling.

  In finding a tray, a black-lacquered affair with a stenciled rose pattern, some modern Danish mugs, a set comprising a pewter creamer and sugar bowl, antique sterling spoons with a raised monogram I couldn’t read, some Christmas cocktail napkins, and the lower half of the coffee contraption — I felt more like a butler than a detective. The place appeared utterly clueless, as, perhaps, it was.