The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (21 page)

While there was still light, Diantha and I took a walk along the lakeshore to the pines on the point that reaches like a widow’s peak into the mirroring water. Why, I wondered, is there consolation in the beauty of dying nature? All around, the light of the setting sun touched to gold the browns and yellows of the trees, shrubs, and withered grass. I could hear the blue jays of my youth and the chiding of chickadees. I wanted to weep out of sheer poignancy.

Perhaps sensing my mood, Diantha looped her arm in mine, as though to remind me that life goes on. Her gesture both deepened and sweetened my melancholia, because it was exactly the way, over the past couple of years, Elsbeth and I had walked these paths — in a communing bliss so complete we were as one with each other and with everything we could see and hear.

Later, as it darkened and the wind came up, we made Elsbeth comfortable on a bed we had moved into a small room downstairs. Then we sat together on the same wicker sofa Elsbeth and I had courted on when we were young. The sensation for me was not so much of
déjà vu
as of temporal collapse, as though time had contracted and vanished, as though back then and right now were one and the same.

“Do you miss Sixy?” I asked as Diantha sipped an iced Pernod and I toyed with a dry sherry.

She laughed and shook her head, pleased, I think, that I was that interested in her personal life. “Naw. I was outgrowing him, anyway. I can’t believe I ever took that stuff he calls music seriously, never mind listened to it.”

I nodded. “And there are lots of other young men in the world.”

“I’m not sure I want another young man.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s like breaking in a new puppy.” She turned to me, pulling closer, her face animated in the firelight. “They’re very cute and they wag their tails at you and bark and yip and lick your face and other places …” She giggled at her boldness. “But they leave messes all over the place. I think I’m one of those girls that likes older men.”

“Lots of those around, too,” I said, sighing. “Lots of other loose people around these days. I often wonder what they do for Thanksgiving.”

She pulled closer, her hip touching mine. She took my hand. “Let’s promise, right now, Norman, no matter what happens, that we’ll always have Thanksgiving together.”

“Done,” I said, deeply touched.

“You know. I keep thinking about that video clip. You know, of the three people.”

“Yes, it’s strangely moving.”

She gave a giggle. “You mean it makes you horny.”

“Well … yes.”

She tittered. “I love your reticence, Norman. It’s so sexy.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, which made her laugh and give me an affectionate kiss on the side of the lips.

Perhaps to break the spell, to keep my heart and my lips from wandering, I brought up the Ossmann-Woodley case directly. “What I don’t understand,” I said as we both stared into the
flames, “is why anyone would go to the trouble of trying to get their hands on a powerful aphrodisiac.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for starters it’s not possible for someone, even if they got the dosage right, to simply sell it to some company and make lots of money.”

“Okay.”

“The whole research file has to be available, and those files are usually several feet thick.”

“Okay.”

“It’s all very cumbersome, involved, and expensive.”

“But it wouldn’t have to be legal to make money as a drug.”

“What do you mean?” Lights were starting to go on in my dim brain.

“Good God, Norman, there’s like a huge, multibazillion-dollar illegal drug business out there.”

“Even for a drug, if there is one, that induced Ossmann and Woodley to kill each other with sex?”

“That’s why people do Ecstasy.”

“Ecstasy?”

“It’s a drug that makes you feel good about everything. It opens you up, especially if you do it with something else. I still have a little stash …”

“Oh, right,” I said, remembering the autopsies. I wondered for a bewildering moment of she were proposing we try it. “Is that what you and Sixy …?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” Then she put her put her hand to her mouth and gave an embarrassed laugh. “God, the things we used to do.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. One afternoon me and Shelly, she was going with Danko, the drummer, we popped some meth and did a little
blow and the guys swallowed some Viagra and I don’t know what else … Anyway, we ended up doing the whole band.”

“Had sex with them?”

“You don’t think the less of me for that?”

I sighed. “The things I’ve missed.”

The ensuing heavy silence I broke by saying, “So, Di, you think there would be a market?”

“Are you kidding? I mean once they get it right, if that’s what they’re trying to do. Think of all those Chinese who can’t get it up unless they’re eating parts of endangered animals. You whip up a concoction, call it Tiger Balls or something like that. I mean the Asian market alone is incredible. They all seem to suffer from limp dicks.”

The light went on very brightly. I sat forward. “You’re a dear,” I said. I leaned over to give her a little kiss. “You’re a very smart dear. And now I must go to bed before I have another one of these and make a fool of myself.”

Diantha stood up with me and gave me a real kiss. “I’ll never think of you as a fool, Norman.”

But of course I am a fool, an utter, low fool. The very next morning I watched her as she left the upstairs bathroom with a small towel draped so haphazardly over herself that I could not but help seeing her naked form in its every robust detail. My breathing all but stopped. I suppose she doesn’t realize what this does to me. I am not one of those casual males where displays of this kind are concerned. As someone once said, the beauty of women makes good men suffer. Not that I count myself good. Because I find myself utterly infatuated. Can one love two women at once? Can one love a mother and daughter simultaneously, love them like a man loves a woman?

We came back on Saturday to find that Amanda Feeney-Morin had done a long “think” piece in the
Bugle
, dredging up the
Bert-Betti and Ossmann-Woodley cases, linking them together, of course, rehashing the details with insinuating, subtle invective, and speculating about the management of the Museum of Man, “which has resisted efforts by the university to provide modern institutional leadership.” She then quoted President Twill of Wainscott to the effect that he has “ongoing concerns with the policy directions underway at present in the Museum of MOM [sic].” The man doesn’t even know what we’re called.

I have written to Don Patcher asking him to assign a more unbiased reporter to cover the university and the museum. I pointed out to him that Ms. Feeney is married to Mr. Morin and is doing nothing more than serving as a mouthpiece for Wainscott in its continuing attempt to take us over. As it stands, I wrote, you might as well put Malachy Morin’s byline next to hers. I don’t know whether that will do any good or not, but it is right and proper to respond to these matters.

Well, Lieutenant Tracy and I have taken the bulls by the horns, so to speak, and confronted Dr. Penrood and Celeste Tangent about their relations with Professor Ossmann.

In turns out that Ms. Tangent’s possible involvement takes on added significance in the light of certain aspects of her background. Indeed, the lieutenant’s briefing on the matter provoked in me a heuristic arousal bordering on the unseemly. According to his sources in New York, both of the establishments mentioned prominently in her CV — the Caucasian Escort Service and the Crazy Russian — were controlled or owned through dummy corporations by one Moshe ben Rovich, a leading figure in the Russian-Jewish mob in Brooklyn with connections to Tel Aviv and Moscow. A leading figure, that is, until he crossed Victor “Dead Meat” Karnivorsky and disappeared a couple of years ago.

The lieutenant and I discussed strategy at some length. We decided to try to “break” Penrood first, using tactics somewhat less than gentlemanly. To that end, I put in a call to Dr. Penrood first thing yesterday morning, saying that I needed to see him in the Twitchell Room on a matter of some urgency. He said he could spare some time around eleven. I said that would be fine.

Penrood’s evident if subtle English annoyance turned to a decided wariness upon his arrival at the Twitchell Room, where I introduced him to Lieutenant Tracy. I said the meeting was part of our investigation of the Ossmann-Woodley case. We
needed him to look at some video footage. The play’s the thing and all that.

So after I had closed and locked the door and turned down the shades, we watched for several minutes in silence Professor Ossmann and two other persons in sexual congress. There was enough light for me to notice that Dr. Penrood’s complexion went from considerable color to a decided pallor and back again.

When the tape ended, I turned the lights back on. Lieutenant Tracy pulled his chair closer to Dr. Penrood’s and leaned into him. “This footage is dated September eighth. The man facing the camera is quite obviously Professor Ossmann. And we have reason to believe, Dr. Penrood, that the woman involved in this arrangement is Celeste Tangent — and the man with his back to the camera is you.”

I took my seat to one side and watched Dr. Penrood wrestle with what to say. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t want to say anything without a lawyer present.”

Lieutenant Tracy leaned back, nodding as though in sympathetic agreement. “It’s that bad?”

“No, it’s not that bad.”

“Of course, Dr. Penrood, you have the right to remain silent and the right to consult an attorney …”

Marvelous, I thought, the way the detective was using the Miranda warning as a kind of insinuation.

He leaned even closer. “If you do decide to get an attorney before helping us, as my colleagues in your country would put it, it could get very messy. You won’t have to tell us much, true. But you see, Dr. Penrood, Ms. Tangent has documented connections with organized crime in New York. That will help us considerably when we go before a judge, show him this footage, and ask for all different kinds of surveillance as part of our investigation into the Ossmann-Woodley murders.”

“Murders …?”

“That’s what we’ve announced.”

“Of course, of course,” Dr. Penrood said, his nervousness obvious now.

When Dr. Penrood had lapsed into silence for a good while, the lieutenant quietly leaned forward again, his voice low and nearly cold. “I can also assure you, Dr. Penrood, that if you help us we will make sure that no one else gets to see this footage. Because, as Mr. de Ratour can tell you, the Seaboard Police Department can turn into a regular sieve when it comes to leaks. Despite our best efforts.”

Dr. Penrood stiffened. “Are you threatening me, Lieutenant?”

“No. I’m only trying to reassure you. I want to know what happened the night you and Ms. Tangent and Professor Ossmann had sex together.”

Dr. Penwood wavered awhile longer. It was obvious, I think, that he was trying to figure out what to tell us and what not to tell us. Finally he sighed. “First, I want it established that my relations with Ms. Tangent are strictly my own business and I am only telling you what I know to help clear things up.”

“Of course.”

“On the night in question, Dr. Ossmann and Ms. Tangent dropped by my office for an after-work drink.”

“Had you been intimate with Ms. Tangent before this incident?”

Dr. Penrood hesitated. “Yes.”

“When did your relations with her start?”

“About six months ago.”

“After she came on board?”

He hesitated. “Before that.”

“Did you hire her?”

“I … As a matter of fact … I mean I was only one of several to interview her.”

“Had she been intimate with Professor Ossmann before the incident with the three of you?”

“I don’t think so. But … she has a life of her own.”

“As do you.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, Dr. Penrood, what did everyone have to drink on the evening in question?”

“Sherry. That’s all I keep in the office.”

“Who poured it?”

I think I detected a look of cunning come into the researcher’s eyes. “Actually, it was Professor Ossmann. He was well acquainted with the cabinet where I kept the sherry and glasses.”

“You knew Professor Ossmann well then.”

“Not in any real social sense. He was always in here, usually complaining. The drink placated him.”

Lieutenant Tracy looked up from the notebook he had been writing in. “How much sherry did you have?”

“A couple of glasses each.”

“And Professor Ossmann poured all of them?”

“Yes.”

“Over at the cabinet?”

“Yes.”

“And in each case he could have slipped something in the glasses had he wanted to?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me exactly what happened after you each had several glasses.”

Dr. Penrood colored a little and cleared his throat. “It’s hard to remember exactly. Celeste … Ms. Tangent … was sitting
between me and Professor Ossmann on the couch. We all just … started getting amorous.”

“Are you bisexual, Dr. Penrood?”

“No. It wasn’t that way. I and, I think, Professor Ossmann were only interested in Ms. Tangent.”

“What happened then?”

“I said something to the effect that if we were going to get carried away, I knew a better place in the building.”

“The staff smoking room?” I asked.

He nodded.

“So you went there?”

“Yes. It’s just down the hall from my office.”

The lieutenant took the edge off his voice. “Did you ever feel at any point that you were under the influence of some … drug … or potion?”

Dr. Penrood did a very good job right then of feigning what might be called the ignorance of innocence. He shook his head, appeared to think back, made a grimace. “I can’t really tell. It did happen quite … suddenly. At the time I just thought it was … Celeste.”

“Do you know if Professor Ossmann was working on any kind of aphrodisiac? I mean, on the side.”

Again he hesitated, but only for a moment. “He could have been, but I doubt it.”