The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (7 page)

“Even sinners deserve mercy,” Father O’Gould said gently.

“…  and so that big price-gouging companies like Pyramed can make billions in profit …”

“We don’t torture animals,” I replied coolly.

“I think inducing fellow creatures to drink alcohol to excess could be called torture,” said Ms. Brattle, the expert on blame.

“What did you give him to drink?” asked Izzy.

“Vodka in orange juice.”

“And you don’t call that torture?” Ms. Schanke demanded.

Ms. Doveen, an unexpected ally, turned to Ms. Schanke and asked, “How do you know? Maybe he liked getting high. I mean all they do is sit around all day like prisoners.”

“Well,” I said, correcting her gently, “we do have an exercise yard where they spend considerable time together.”

“How do you keep them from breeding?” Professor Athol asked.

“The females are fixed,” I replied, without thinking. “With the exception of one or two that are on special medication.”

“You spayed them?” Ms. Schanke asked with outraged incredulity.

“Yes.”

“Without their permission?”

I shook my head, wondering what Alice in Wonderland realm I had stumbled into.

“Why didn’t you fix the males instead?” Ms. Brattle joined in, sensing blood.

“We followed the recommendations of a respected consultant.”

“A man, no doubt,” said Ms. Schanke.

I ignored her and said something to the effect that the committee might be interested to learn that the museum had had in place for some time a deacquisition program regarding the chimps.

Which opened me up for another round of abuse led by Ms. Schanke. “Right, right. Now that the lab is finished torturing the poor beasts, you’re going to get rid of them.”

I explained in detail how we were placing and repatriating the chimps in the most humane way possible. What I could not admit to before the committee right then is the fact that I have profound misgivings myself about any kind of experimentation on animals, however humble their rank on the evolutionary ladder. I am privately very embarrassed by what happened to Bert during the trials for ReLease. Indeed the treatment of our animals is one area in the Genetics Lab where I am stickler for protocol.

The fact is that under Elsbeth’s gentle suasion, I have become far more sensitive to the rights and sufferings of our fellow creatures. We regularly have several “vegetarian” days a week now. But right then was not the time for a soul-baring confession.

As though sensing my thoughts, Father O’Gould held forth that the time had come in the moral evolution of our species to consider the possibility of moving beyond the use of animals for our food and fiber needs.

Near the end of the meeting Ms. Brattle announced that
early next week there would be an executive session of the Subcommittee on Appropriateness regarding a very sensitive case that had arisen between two employees in Sigmund Library, which serves the Psychology Department. The subcommittee, on which I serve — another gesture of goodwill — investigates and arbitrates on sensitive issues dealing with ethnic, gender, dietary, class, language, olfactory, and sexual orientation conflicts arising among students, faculty, and members of the administration.

The meeting concluded in a muddle of inaction, good intentions, and declarative excess, the way most such meetings end. I simply stopped trying to explain anything. The pall of impending grief that I had held at bay all afternoon descended like a bleak cloud. How trivial everything before me seemed, how like shadows on a stage that had come and would go, leaving no trace. My dear, precious Elsbeth is under sentence of death.

Well, I must call it a day. Or a night. I must go home now and help, as much as I can, Elsbeth into that other, endless night that awaits us all.

I am upstairs in my study again. The night is cold, dark, and silent. I am not only staggered with a sadness beyond description, but I am in thrall to new and disturbing thoughts and feelings that I had never expected to contend with.

This afternoon I went out to our sophisticated little airport — it handles smaller passenger jets with alacrity — to pick up Diantha, Elsbeth’s daughter. The dear girl could scarcely keep from weeping when she saw me, falling into my arms, clinging to me, her wet face buried in my neck. I was glad to be of comfort and cared not one whit for the stares of passersby. I tried to reassure her as we waited for her luggage — three huge pieces — to come up the conveyer belt as though from Hades and start its clockwise stagger around the oval track of interleaved metal plates. I can tell from my prose that I am already equivocating.

To witness Diantha’s shock and pity at seeing her mother in such evident decline opened afresh my own wound. I stood with my eyes damp as mother and daughter embraced and cried and then, not so strangely, started to laugh, as though life, deep down, even at its tragic worst, is comic, the joke of a whimsical creator.

They spoke for hours, it seemed. I served as bartender, cook, waiter, and sommelier, uncorking one, then two bottles of a plangent Graves that Izzy recommended. It went brilliantly with the seafood lasagna that Elsbeth taught me how to make.
(The touch of fennel and rosemary is the secret.) We all got a little tipsy, but I think it helped Elsbeth and Diantha heal any lingering rift between them. They both turned to me on occasion during the course of the evening, each time with something akin to surprise and not a little pleasure in their faces. I like to think they found my presence comforting. It was a great relief not to act as referee, an office I reluctantly undertook during their last meeting and which had earned me, I sensed, Diantha’s antipathy.

Now I have the strange, unnerving feeling that a whole new aura has entered the house. In an uncanny way, it’s as though Elsbeth’s replacement has shown up, a kind of premature reincarnation. Not that I know Diantha that well. She did come to the wedding, but her visit was brief.

We had a chance, doing the dishes together, to chat. “Your mom tells me you’re in show business,” I said by way of an invitation to her to tell me about herself.

She shrugged. “I’ve done some acting. Some modeling. I have an agent. I’ve had gigs and a zillion near misses for the big time. But that’s not really what I do.”

“What do you do?” I asked, noticing that she stacked the dishwasher exactly the way her mother does.

“I have this knack for sorting out programming problems that confuse people with a lot more smarts than I ever had. It’s a kind of idiot savant flair. Even the high-end providers keep making the same mistakes.” She laughed at herself. “They pay me lots of money and it leaves me enough time to screw up the rest of my life.”

“I’m sure you underestimate yourself.” I rinsed off Elsbeth’s dish, noticing that she had eaten very little.

“Yeah, so I’m told. It’s better than having other people do it for you. Mom says you’re working on another murder.”

“We’re not sure they’re murders.”

“She says it’s juicy stuff. Two people fu … did themselves to death.”

“Yes. It seems there was … intercourse of some violence.” In speaking I attempted to maintain the tone of objectivity, however spurious, that allows one to talk of prurient matters without the appearance of indulging in the prurience.

Diantha laughed one of her mother’s laughs, a bright, mischievous hiccup. “It sounds like a great way to go.”

“It wasn’t a pretty scene.”

“You were there? Afterward?” Her voice had a touch of awe to it.

“I looked at the crime scene photos. And the crime scene video.”

She bent to put a glass in the dishwasher with, I thought, an exaggerated motion. “So you really get into it.”

“I’m helping the police with inquiries, as the British put it, but not as a suspect. Not yet anyway.”

She beamed at me. “That is so cool.”

“That remains to be seen. I could just botch things up for them.”

“Now you’re the one underestimating yourself.”

I smiled. “What did you say before? It’s better than having other people do it for you.”

As we closed up the kitchen for the night, she took one of my hands in hers. “By the way … Dad … Do you mind if I call you Dad?”

“I’d be honored.”

“I want to thank you for taking such good care of Mom these last couple of years.” Her eyes were bright and dark with sincerity, establishing as much as the warmth of her hand the closeness she wanted to have with me.

“She has taken care of me, too, you know. She has made my life …” At which point, for the first time all evening, I had to stop and take a deep sigh.

But there remains a jagged, nagging note to this sad and yet curiously jubilant occasion that I have been skirting around throughout this account. In saying good night to Diantha in the hallway upstairs, I leaned down to give her a chaste peck on the cheek only to find myself kissed full on the lips with a sensuality the sensation of which I cannot quite shake. I found myself reeling down the hallway in a kind of sensual time warp, every nerve alive, my imagination full of conjurations, my pulse racing. Though nearly six decades along in life, I find myself still burdened with a persisting virility, as though marriage to Elsbeth has re-endowed me with the manly vigor of youth. I thought the momentary pulse of lust, distressing enough, would pass as I came to my senses. But it lingers and I find myself beset with images and forbidden desires.

It’s as though my dear Elsbeth, lying in our bedroom suffering through a drugged, fitful sleep, has become a ghost, replaced in life by Diantha, who is the very embodiment of her mother at a younger age. She has the same full-bodied figure, the same dark glowing eyes, the same pretty if somewhat blunt features, and even, at times, the same dark timbre of voice intimating the essential mischievousness of life.

I may, of course, be reading too much into the incident. For Diantha it was no doubt a kiss that got away. Or perhaps that’s the way people in show business comport themselves. Disport themselves more like it. Or perhaps she is needful of an affection that, under the right circumstances, can inflame one to more tangible desires. It may also be that the presence or probability of individual finality stirs us in ways that are only superficially grotesque. As Father O’Gould has reminded us on more
than one occasion, it is easy to forget what we are descended from.

Speaking of which, Malachy Morin accosted me in the Club at lunch on Friday and I couldn’t get away from him without agreeing to meet with him and “the big-money guys” from the Wainscott Office of Development. I do not consider myself a snob, but it seems to me the Club ought to be one of those places you can go to avoid people like Mr. Morin.

Although it is still early in the afternoon, I have closed the door and asked Doreen to hold my calls while I peck at these keys and at a crabmeat salad sandwich we had sent in. I usually don’t interrupt my workday to make entries into this subfile. But Lieutenant Tracy came in around eleven accompanied by Dr. P.M. Cutler, the Medical Examiner, and Dr. Arthur ffronche, a forensic endocrinologest from the state crime lab, and I want to record our conversation while it is still fresh in my mind.

Dr. Cutler, as those who read the account of the Cannibal Murders may recall, specializes in analyzing the stomach contents of individuals who have met a suspicious end. A professional gentleman of the old school, Dr. Cutler parts his abundant white hair in the middle, perches his half-moon spectacles on his nose, and wears bow ties bordering on the flamboyant.

Dr. ffronche, a large man of frowning if mischievous mien and extravagant hair in the style of Einstein, spoke English with a noticeable Irish accent.

Dr. Cutler gave us each a copy of his report, and, speaking in one of those Brahmin drawls that go with old silver, he took us through some of the more arcane findings.

“As I reported earlier, the victims, and I think we can safely assume they were victims, more than likely ingested the poison, or the substance that acted as a poison, with what might be called ‘snack’ amounts of recognizably ethnic Chinese food. These included dim sum, vegetarian spring rolls, and pork strips.

“Further analysis reveals the presence of a potent cocktail of both neurophysiological and biomechanical agents. That is, substances that work on both the brain and the sex organs.”

“Unlike Viagra,” Lieutenant Tracy put in.

“Exactement,”
said Dr. ffronche. “This potion must work on the libido and, how do you say, the plumbing.” He went on, “Sildenafil citrate, the active ingredient in Viagra, acts, in these prescribed amounts, as a vasodilator in the penis.”

The Medical Examiner, raising his calm gray eyes to both of us, said, “Not to bore you with the details, it prevents the breakdown of a compound, cyclic guanosine monophosphate, and that, apparently, releases nitrous oxide, which is what causes the smooth muscle cells of the arteries to relax, increasing the flow of blood.”

Dr. ffronche nodded his agreement. “That is to say, it enables and prolongs, but does not cause, an erection.”

“For that, you would need a psychoactive substance,” Dr. Cutler explained.

“Unless the individuals involved were lovers,” Dr. ffronché put in. “And in this case that is not the case, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, “most emphatically not the case.”

“Which leads us to the more problematic part of our report.” Dr. Cutler glanced at his colleague as he spoke.

Dr. ffronche knit his brows together. “Absolutely. In this case we have a veritable cocktail, as you say.” He picked up his copy of the report. “We have found evidence of cannabis as well as an extract from the herb
Turnera aphrodisiaca
, a shrub of the south said to possess, as its Latin name suggests, aphrodisiac powers. We have also found a significant level of ring-substituted amphetamines, that is to say, MDMA.”

“MDMA?” I asked.

“Methylenedioxymethamphetamine,” Dr. Cutler explained.

“Ecstasy,” the lieutenant put in. “The drug of choice at raves …”

“Raves?”

“Club dances. Users mix it with Viagra or Cialis and call it sextasy.”