The Murder in the Museum of Man (39 page)

“Win never wanted to, and we always did what Win wanted. Right from the start.” Bitterness curdled the sadness in her voice.

I didn’t encourage an elaboration. I didn’t feel particularly vindicated. It was too late for that. And, anyway, revenge is a dish that grows cold. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Although I suspected as much … when I came out to visit you.”

We were in the kitchen, the cobwebs straining the cold light on the steel sink, the four-burner gas stove, the oilcloth on the table where a few dead flies lay, when she put her arms around me, collapsing against my chest. She was sobbing again, whispering, “Norman, Norman, please don’t hate me …”

I held her in my arms and let her sob, patting her back, saying twice or three times, “Of course I don’t hate you, of course …”
while wondering with a poignancy too exquisite for words whether forgiveness was all she wanted from me.

Indeed, she recovered her composure so quickly I was just a little put out. She suggested we have lunch on the porch, now bright with sunshine. She found a corkscrew and some glasses while I arranged a card table and a couple of chairs. We toasted with our glasses of wine, exactly what I still wasn’t sure. She ate and spoke avidly, waiting to swallow, then talking, one hand moving just a little bit, as though conducting herself, the way she always had. She elaborated, seemed positively anxious and relieved to talk about her life with Winslow. She knew she had made a terrible, terrible mistake, she said, after they had been married only a few months. But by then, through carelessness, she was pregnant with their first child, and in those days you didn’t automatically get a divorce. She elaborated on her late husband’s smallness, his need to control everything, his growing preoccupation with money, his golf. I listened, nodding, wondering what all this had to do with me, when she said something so extraordinary I had to put down the ham and Swiss on rye I had been toying with. “During all those years, Norman, I thought about you every day. I thought about you every night, especially those nights when …”

“When what?” I asked, obtuse to the end.

“When Win wanted to make love.”

“Oh, dear” was all I could manage and sipped my wine. I held her hand. It was as though, through all those years, we had been making love after all. But I couldn’t tell her that, not yet.

A cold wind came off the lake. We went inside and started a fire in the fieldstone fireplace to take the chill off the air. We sat on the wicker sofa in front of the fire and watched it roar and dance. We kissed.

I won’t, gentle reader, even in the privacy of this journal, go into details after she whispered that we should go upstairs.
Suffice it to say that what ensued on her cleanly sheeted and only mildly mildewed bed was touching, passionate, and in its own way hilarious. Elsbeth simply couldn’t believe I had waited.

She has made a complete man of me, and I am so happy that I scarcely resent all those lost years. Because I think all of us, in a way, carry around ghost lives, lives we could have lived with others, in other places, doing other things. But we can’t regret not having lived them, even when they rise up and come back to claim us.

It is with reluctance and foreboding that I trouble these pages with an account of a tragic, unseemly, and suspicious incident here at the Museum of Man. I say “reluctance” as I do not wish to serve as amanuensis to a nightmare. Nor do I wish to prompt iniquity with words. I would rather, on this lovely evening, sit back and gaze out of my high windows at the Hays Mountains, where I can see the first flares of autumn touching with scarlet and gold those rolling, mist-tendriled hills. But write I must. Because yet again I have a presentiment of evil uncoiling itself within the womb of this ancient institution.

Let me start with this morning. Just as Doreen was heading down to the cafeteria for our coffees, Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department appeared in the doorway of my fifth-floor domain. Dapper as ever in charcoal suit, buttondown off-white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, the officer reminded me that he took his coffee black. The amenities of small talk attended to, the door closed, we got down to business.

“I’m here to see you, Norman, about the Ossmann-Woodley case.” His tone indicated that he spoke off the record.

“Ossmann-Woodley,” I repeated with a sigh, not entirely surprised. “I was under the impression, Lieutenant, that the case was too riddled with imponderables to begin an investigation. It’s most unusual, I know, and not a little embarrassing for the museum, given Professor Ossmann’s affiliation.”

Thanks to the tabloids and those television programs devoted
to the tawdry and the sensational (for which my dear wife, Elsbeth, has a decided weakness), much of the world knows that, just a week ago, Professor Humberto Ossmann and Dr. Clematis Woodley, a postdoctoral student, were found dead quite literally in each other’s arms; indeed, in an unequivocally amorous embrace.

Foul play, other than double adultery — they were both married — has not been ruled out. In short, we have two corpses and enough circumstantial evidence to indicate
corpus delicti
. For instance, a security guard found them, not in some comfortable bed or even on the couch available in a nearby office, but on the floor of one the laboratories. There, judging from the disorder — an overturned chair, some smashed pipettes, and a terrified white rat running loose — their lovemaking had been spontaneous and energetic, if not violent. Rape does not appear to have been involved inasmuch as Professor Ossmann was a smallish man, a good two inches shorter and twenty-five pounds lighter than the formidable Dr. Woodley, who played rugby for Rutgers, albeit on the women’s team. Moreover, neither participant had disrobed in a manner suggesting premeditated lovemaking. Professor Ossmann’s trousers and boxer shorts were down around his ankles, and Dr. Woodley’s panties had been clawed off, but by herself, judging from the fragments of matching material found under her fingernails.

Finally, both victims, if that is what they are, entertained a deep and abiding antipathy for the other. Professor Ossmann had blocked Dr. Woodley’s appointment to a tenure-track position a year or so back. Dr. Woodley for her part had taken to calling Professor Ossmann “Pip” to his face, “Pip-squeak” being the nickname colleagues used behind his back.

I know the case in considerable detail, not only from the lurid and often inaccurate coverage in the
Seaboard Bugle
, but
also from briefings I arranged between the SPD and important university officials in an attempt to keep the rumor mills from working overtime.

The postmortems, done by the venerable Dr. P.M. Cutler, have provided only preliminary findings. The Medical Examiner reported gross inflammation of the genitals of both parties, who otherwise presented no signs of trauma or assault. Professor Ossmann succumbed to a coronary thrombosis while Dr. Woodley died of massive systemic failure when her blood pressure, for which she was taking medication, dropped below what is necessary for life. Curiously enough, according to Dr. Cutler, despite prolonged sexual activity, no evidence of ejaculate was found. Whether Dr. Woodley had experienced a physiological orgasm could not be determined with any certainty. Assays on blood chemistry, other bodily fluids, stomach contents, and organs are presently being conducted and should tell us a lot more as to what happened on that Friday night in early September when the lab was deserted except for those two.

Sergeant Lemure, Lieutenant Tracy’s blunt-spoken deputy, put the matter in words of a characteristic crudity, which I will refrain from repeating here.

The lieutenant regarded me closely. “Officially, Norman, it is a low-priority case because we cannot determine whether it’s a murder, an accident, or some kind of bizarre suicide pact. But something about this case reeks.”

His remarks struck a chord, if nagging doubts can be said to resonate. Despite myself, I have acquired of late a knack for suspicion. It’s related, no doubt, to my work with the Seaboard police on what have come to be called the Cannibal Murders, which gained Wainscott University, the museum, myself, and others such notoriety a few years back. Indeed, the account of those grisly events that I kept in my journal at the time was
subsequently entered as evidence in the case against the Snyders brothers. Published initially over my objections, it was well received in those circles devoted to the “true detective” genre.

Moreover, I have found that working as a private sleuth — or a public sleuth, for that matter — sharpens one’s apprehension of those slight discordances that indicate the presence not so much of clues but of what might be termed “negative clues” — the dog that doesn’t bark. It makes one aware of anomalies within anomalies, life being full of the anomalous, after all. And this case, if a case it be, is loud with silent hounds.

While I was thus cogitating, Doreen came in with the coffee. The dear girl had been offered a higher salary to go back to her old boss, Malachy Morin. But she told me she wouldn’t even consider it, calling the man “a serial groper.” She has a new beau and has finally ceased inflating out of her mouth those gaudy-hued, condom-like bubbles of gum.

After Doreen had withdrawn and closed the door, I noted the obvious. “We have no real evidence of foul play. At least not until the lab tests come in.”

The lieutenant lifted an eyebrow at the implied collaboration in the “we,” as though both realizing and acknowledging that we were once again, however unofficially, a team.

“No real evidence, it’s true,” he said. “It’s as though someone got there before the bodies were discovered and tidied things up.”

“Really?” I was somewhat taken aback. I had not been told of this before.

“Yes, and there are a few other details you might be able to help us clear up.”

“Well, I’m at your service, Lieutenant,” I said, trying to dissemble a shiver of excitement as my pulse quickened. The lieutenant’s request for assistance made real what had heretofore
been little more than a premonition. Indeed, I have developed a keen predilection for the blood sport of murder investigation. For that’s what it is, at bottom, a blood sport. And deeper, in the darker reaches of my heart, I could also feel that strange craving for the reality of evil, if only for something to confront and vanquish.

Lieutenant Tracy smiled. He has one of those smiles the scarcity of which makes it the more appealing. “I knew I could count on you, Norman. And also on your discretion. My visit here, strictly speaking, is unofficial.”

I nodded. “What is it that I can tell you that you think will be of help?”

“Could you tell me, what exactly was Professor Ossmann’s connection with the Genetics Lab?”

His question made me frown. The Genetics Lab has over the past couple of years changed beyond all recognition. The Onoyoko Institute, suffering in the general stagnation of the Japanese economy and the blaze of bad publicity in the wake of the Cannibal Murders, has long since gone, replaced by the Ponce Research Institute. Though nominally nonprofit, the Ponce has proved an absolute boon to the museum. It has given us the wherewithal to resist persistent attempts on the part of the university to take us over on terms other than those ensuring the integrity and longevity of this institution as an actual public museum.

I chose my words carefully in responding to the lieutenant’s question because, truth be known, I was not entirely certain what constituted the late professor’s connection with the lab. I cleared my throat. “Professor Ossmann, as you know, was a consultant at the Ponce, as the institute is generally called. He worked on therapies having to do with the cardiovascular system, which was his primary research interest.”

As I paused, the lieutenant leaned forward. “You seem skeptical of your own description.”

“I am,” I said. “This can go no farther than this room, but I’ve suspected for some time, Lieutenant, that Professor Ossmann was as much an
agent provocateur
for the university administration as an active consultant.”

“In what way?”

“He played an active role in the higher councils of the university. He served on the New Millennium Fund Steering Committee. He was on the somewhat controversial Benefits Subcommittee of the Faculty Reform Committee. He also served for a while as chair of the Steering Committee on Governance. In fact, it was during his tenure in that last position that he and I had one or two significant disagreements.”

The lieutenant said nothing, but his listening appeared to intensify.

“The same old story,” I said. “Wainscott wants to take us over. We, the museum, were the subject of a long report by Ossmann’s committee. My own Board of Governors rejected the report outright.”

“How did he end up over here?”

“We have a goodly number of consultants from the university who have contracts with the institute. It remains something of a sore issue between the university and the museum.”

“Why is that?”

“Money,” I said and smiled. “Lieutenant, I don’t want to bore you with the endless petty politics that go on in institutions of higher learning, but it’s clear to me now that the university is trying to get its hands on the museum for nothing less than the income it can derive from the research done in the Genetics Lab under the auspices of the Ponce Institute.”