The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  “Then he began rummaging in the back of his car. Spencer tried to lick his face. He pulled out a small briefcase from which he took a sheaf of writing paper. He used a regular ink pen, a gold Montblanc, I believe. His hand wasn’t all that steady when he wrote something like, ‘To whom it may concern, I Heinrich von Grümh, being of sound mind and body, do bequeath to Professor Colin Saunders and the Frock Museum of Wainscott University on my decease a coin in my lawful possession known as the Dresden stater.’ Then he signed and dated it before he showed it to me.”

  “Do you have that document?”

  He took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a photocopy of the words above in very shaky handwriting on monogrammed paper. I read it over carefully several times. When I made to keep it, he held out his hand.

  I handed it back and said, “Have you asked his estate about the whereabouts of the coin?”

  Again he glanced at Alphus. “Why is he staring at me?”

  “It’s how he is. He’s totally harmless.”

  He nodded with uncertainty. “What were we talking about? Oh, yes, the estate. I did make inquiries. His widow’s lawyer wrote that an inventory was being conducted of all of the man’s collections. I was told that they would get back to us.”

  “Did that end your meeting with Heinie?”

  “Pretty much. I thanked him. I told him I would let bygones be bygones. I have to tell you, it was a relief to get my dog and get out of there.”

  “Did he drive off then?”

  “No. I glanced back a couple of times and he was still there.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police with all this?”

  “As I said, I didn’t want to get involved. One little taint in our cozy little world and doors start to close.”

  I nodded. “Too true.”

  “Will you be handing that letter to the police?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied again. “I’ll have to think it over.”

  He stood up. “You understand that the fact that it’s anonymous makes it all but useless?”

  “I do.”

  He shook my hand. “You know, Norman, it doesn’t contain anything really damning.” He nodded to Alphus and with some of his old strut intact, then turned and left.

  I took out and carefully placed the original letter from X back in its envelope. I sealed this inside a larger envelope that I addressed to Jason Duff, the district attorney who had wanted me held without bail on a charge of first-degree murder. I decided I would take it over to the Middling County courthouse myself and hand it in.

  “What do you think?” I asked Alphus.

  He shrugged. “He was lying about the gun. The rest is more or less true.”

  “I’m a damn fool,” I said. “I should have asked him outright if he had murdered Heinie.”

  That afternoon, as Alphus and I sat in the garden each with an iced tea, which we had begun to drink as a way of stalling the start of any happy hours, I related to him my doubts about the Museum of Man. I told him about Laluna Jackson’s description and dismissal of the museum as little more than a trophy house of white male victimization.

  I told him I could not dismiss her views as easily as I dismissed her — as a self-righteous, self-indulgent member of the moral class who was building a career on the misery of others. Her accusations had stirred grave doubts. Is the MOM, I asked rhetorically, are most museums, little more than repositories of historic plunder, the victors’ spoils? For all my professions of high-minded dedication to these things of beauty, am I little more than an agent of cultural avarice?

  He listened patiently as I went on. No, I answered my own question, absolutely not. She’s wrong. But I wondered aloud if, in the postmodern morass where nothing means anything, her view and my view of the collections and the whole ethos behind them are merely two constructs, one as legitimate, if such a normative term is plausible anymore in these matters, as the other.

  At this point he frowned, perhaps because the laboring locomotive of my ratiocination had entered a long, dark tunnel with no hint of light at the end of it. I told him I had read that institutions such as ours merely serve to aestheticize if not fetishize (hideous words) objects torn from their living contexts and mummified in cabinets and categories. It is but a short step from there to exculpating if not valorizing (another hideous word) imperial plunder. In short, all the things I cherish — art, appreciation, research, beauty — are themselves but words, are but the dimming, receding lights ahead of us in the tunnel.

  He considered what I had said for a few moments. He sipped from his tall glass and put it down. I could tell from the way he looked at me and then away that I had touched a raw nerve.

  “Neither you nor that woman can escape the profound and blind self-absorption of the human species,” he signed. “It is not the white man’s pride or greed that is the problem; it is human pride and blindness. You, all of you, destroy wilderness and countryside to build malls for the endless junk that doesn’t make you any happier. You think nothing of taking a pristine meadow full of living things and bulldozing it flat and covering it with concrete or big tacky houses surrounded by sterile, chemically doused lawns.”

  He paused and spelled out some of the words I hadn’t understood. “Think about it. You hunt your nearest living relative for bush meat. Bush meat! We’re not even a delicacy.”

  “But …”

  He swept aside my protest and went on, signing with great emphasis. “The stink of human beings is everywhere now. The world has become one big latrine for your particular excrement, that is to say, for your chemicals, your by-products, your endless garbage, your smoke and fumes, much of which is not biodegradable.

  “Think for a moment how alien and dangerous your cities are to other species. Listen to your environmentalists. They plead with humanity to save the wild places for what? To benefit humanity. To find more useful compounds. You want to clean the air and the water and the very soil from the mounting pile of civilization’s filth for the sake of what? For the sake of people …”

  “But …”

  “No buts. You cannot see it because you are part of it. Your museum and its collections merely add to the cacophony of human self-applause that is loud, everywhere, and unceasing. Look at your religions, your touching faith in a god. You actually believe that some omnipotent force created the whole universe just for you. Small wonder you think humans are the only living things that matter. You assume you are the only ones with the capacity to suffer. You have no regard for the other creatures that must live in your effluence. The biosphere is sick and getting sicker. It has a cancer called people.”

  He paused in his emphatic signing long enough for me to say, “That’s pretty dire. You see no hope at all?”

  He gave me a wicked grimace. “Your internecine conflicts were once hopeful signs for the rest of the planet. But for all their death and damage, wars have scarcely impacted the scourge of more and more people. The best hope for the real world, and by that I mean the natural world, is a sustained, recurring pandemic that will get rid of all if not most people.”

  He sipped without relish his iced tea. He signed, “Present company excepted, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He went on, “The great fear is that human beings will have turned the world into one big cesspool before some virus arises to wipe them out.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Thank you for putting my doubts about the museum into a much larger and damning perspective? Push back? We are trying. Human life does have intrinsic value. We can and are doing something about the mess we have created.

  But I would not have argued with much conviction. My own footprint — two homes, two vehicles, jet travel, decent wine, and plenty of meat — is sootier than most whatever gestures I make with new lightbulbs and recycled bits of paper and plastic.

  “Alphus,” I said at length, “you should include these views in your memoir. The human world needs another voice, one lik
e yours, to join the discussion.”

  “I might mention them, but I’m already thinking about a separate book.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ll be honest with you. I’m writing my memoirs to make money. Bags of money, as the Irish say.”

  “What will you do with it?”

  “I will buy my freedom. I know I’ll always need a keeper although the word companion would be nicer. I want my own house. A really comfortable tree house. I want a decent car of my own. One of the older BMWs. They had class. I want a really good stereo. I want …”

  “Be careful. People sometimes define themselves by what they have. And it’s never very satisfying. Besides, isn’t that the consumerist trap the rest of us have fallen into and which is polluting the planet?”

  He thought for a moment. “You know, you’re probably right. I should do a book on the environment. From the inside.”

  “You could be the voice of outraged nature,” I volunteered.

  He nodded thoughtfully. He picked up and looked at his empty glass.

  “More?” I offered.

  He shook his head. “Time for a real drink.”

  We opened a bottle of chilled white and returned to the garden. Without preamble, he signaled, “I may not be a human being but I am someone.”

  Once again we were discussing the question that gnaws at him more than any other: Who and what exactly is he? He has tried to joke about it. What are chimps that we are so mindful of them? The proper study of chimps is chimpkind.

  When I tried, not for the first time, to explain that a lot of people ponder the same question, he shook his head. “I am a freak. I am no longer a real chimpanzee. I would rather be fed to the leopards than live among members of my fellow species. They are stupid and loathsome beyond measure. But I am not one of you, either. And never will be.”

  “That makes you unique.”

  “I don’t want to be unique.”

  What could I say? He is a living, breathing lie detector, and he instantly reads my halfhearted affirmations and denials, dismissing them with a snort.

  But he can’t help picking at this running sore. He mulls over all the attributes of people — their freedom, their things, their work, their happiness, and, above all, their vistas for the future.

  Later that afternoon, Ridley came by to work with Alphus on his memoirs. I happened by and watched the latter dictating with rapid gestures as Ridley typed in the words with extraordinary speed. I noticed that when they had done a couple of pages, Alphus would read it over on the screen of his laptop, making small edits with his hunt-and-peck method. He has promised to let me read a section “when it’s ready.”

  I kept resisting a temptation to call Diantha. And say what? You must suffer because of my better nature? Or my weakness? Not that I didn’t suffer. As the day waned, I realized that, instead of a lakeside cookout with Diantha and Elsie and some local friends, I would more than likely go with Alphus and Ridley to some fast-food outlet. Alphus has been asking me lately to take him to a restaurant, one of those places you see in old movies where there are chandeliers, where the ladies are coiffed and gowned and the gentlemen spruced in their tuxes, where the waiters bring you the wine to taste, where life looks like a dream of grace.

  I have told him that it’s impossible, that he is still classed as an animal, and that health codes are such that he would have trouble getting served a hot dog by a street vendor.

  The best I can do is to take him to one of those eateries that litter the malls like structural confetti. (Not that the malls aren’t themselves a kind of litter.) There, parked outside, Alphus consumes the wretched fare I bring to him. He is partial to cheeseburgers, which he eats with french fries dosed with liberal amounts of ketchup. He also likes a mammoth paper cup full of cola, which he slurps through a straw.

  So there we were with Ridley in the backseat, going through the drive-by place, picking up our food, and parking where we could see the whole brightly lit interior. Sitting on his haunches so that he could observe everything that was happening, Alphus ate his meal looking longingly at the people inside.

  Nothing of note happened on this holiday evening until a blind man with a white stick and a Seeing Eye dog came in and, like the other customers, stood in line to order. Alphus stopped sucking on his Coke and sat straight up. He nudged me and signed, “What’s that about?”

  “A blind man,” I signed back, improvising a gesture for blind by running a finger across my eyes.

  He corrected me as he often does with the proper gesture, two fingers to the eyes then pulled away. He remained motionless as the dog led the man over to a table. Presently a young waitress brought them over a basket of fried chicken parts along with a drink and french fries.

  Alphus remained calm in an agitated way until the unsighted man, who was tall and gaunt, began feeding bits of his meal to the dog, a German shepherd, which lay placidly at his feet. Alphus began signing so vehemently, I could scarcely keep up with him. “It’s not fair. That animal gets to eat in there and I can’t.”

  Ridley from the backseat egged him on.

  “It’s a Seeing Eye dog,” I said aloud.

  Alphus put his food down so he could keep signing. “I don’t care. Dogs are nowhere as high on the evolutionary ladder as we are. We share ninety-eight percent of the DNA of people. How much do dogs share? Only they know how to fawn and wag their tails and pretend to be happy. They get to go into restaurants and get fed.”

  “It’s a Seeing Eye dog,” I repeated. “They’re used to help …”

  “I know that. But they let it in the restaurant.”

  “Of course. Public access and all that.”

  He turned and signed something to Ridley in the back that I didn’t get. Then he slid down into his seat and put on his seat belt. I could tell that he was, to use his expression, “biting mad.”

  13

  Hank from Security stood in the doorway to my office with an expression that looked like good news.

  “I think I found it, Chief,” he said coming in. But I noticed he carried nothing in his hands. Of course not. He came around the desk to lean over my laptop. With a few strokes, the familiar scene from the Diorama of Paleolithic Life appeared.

  Then there she is, the alluring Stella Fox in clear, full focus walking toward the camera. She appears deep in conversation with a young man of cropped hair and brutal good looks, a villain right out of Central Casting.

  The couple pause. The man gesticulates, his lips moving emphatically. After about a minute they walk out of that camera’s range. Another, more distant camera picks them up. But again, there are clear shots of both of their faces.

  I thought, watching with increasing excitement, that a forensic lip-reader should be able to decipher what they were saying.

  Then, in what seems a cameo appearance, my own tall figure appears. I am in full stride and preoccupied, but not so much as to resist the temptation to give Ms. Fox an appreciative once-over.

  Another camera picks them up as they leave the area, but it is a back view.

  “Are the date and time … reliable?” I asked Hank.

  “Stand up in court. It’s hard to disprove when you’ve got all the stuff before and after. You could also testify that you walked through the area at that time and saw her. I mean you’ve got proof of that.”

  “Great work, Hank. Excellent. Could you make a couple of copies on disks?”

  “Sure.” He took several blanks from Doreen and made duplicates of the sequence for me.

  As he worked, I said, “Remember, this has to stay strictly confidential.”

  He nodded. “I understand.” He pointed to my screen and a little red icon. “It’s right here, on your desktop. It’s under the same name on the disks, but you can call them anything you want.”

  I noticed his bloodshot eyes. “How much time did you put in on this?”

  He laughed. “Lots. I accessed it from home. My wife thought I was nuts. I don’t want to look a
t television for a while.”

  I stood up and gestured him to follow me out to Doreen’s desk. “Doreen, would you kindly get a requisition slip for five hundred dollars made out to Hank? On second thought, it’s not a museum expense.” I went back to my desk, wrote out and gave him a personal check for a thousand dollars, and thanked him again.

  I sat down to contemplate what to do with what I had. Send it on to Jason Duff? Send a copy as well to Channel Five? Would that be tampering with evidence? But I had found it. It was my evidence.

  I was pondering all this when Doreen announced that Lieutenant Tracy had arrived, was on the line.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I’m downstairs. I need to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “The von Grümh case.”

  “All right.”

  He came in alone, not quite hat in hand, but with a little less of his usual self-possession.

  I remained seated behind my desk. I did not offer to shake hands. I said, “What can I do for you?”

  He took the chair to the left and produced a copy of the letter regarding Colin Saunders that I had forwarded to the district attorney’s office. “Duff turned this over to us.”

  I regarded him steadily. “Okay?”

  “I would like to get some background on Saunders.”

  “I see. I’m sure they would be able to help you over at the university news office. He works at Wainscott.”

  “Norman …”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but I do not like having my communications ignored. I am already enough of a nonperson around here.”

  He nodded. “Until the chief got this letter from the DA, I was under strict orders not to have any contact with you.”

  “The courtesy of a note to that effect would have sufficed.”

  “I realize that now. But I also don’t like to blame others for what I have to do.”

  “Did you agree with Chief Murphy?”

  “Under the circumstances, yes. But I was wrong. And I apologize. If you want to work with someone else on this, I’ll understand.”

  When a man like Lieutenant Tracy apologizes, you know he means it. I felt the steam of the indignation I had been stoking slowly deflate. I shook my head. “No. I accept your apology.”