The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (17 page)

I played the tape alone in the audiovisual room. You can imagine my surprise when I was able to identify the gentleman being fellated as none other than Professor Ossmann. What I found interesting was the manner in which he contorts his face as though in pain or from pleasure bordering on pain as he holds on to the back of the woman’s bobbing head. She had, as far as I could tell — it is a black-and-white print — thick blond hair done in a braid that fell to one side of her neck. The woman is, I’m willing to bet now, Celeste Tangent.

The gentleman behind her is tall, more slender than thin, with dark hair and very white buttocks, which twink, as buttocks are wont to do, with his thrusting motions. I have a distinct feeling the unknown man is Dr. Penrood, but I can’t be sure as I have not been privileged to see him in that situation before. His face does appear in profile, but only for an instant. When their various culminations are reached, to judge from their
motions, parts are disengaged and they move off into shadow and darkness.

I immediately supervised the making of a copy — keeping the screen blank throughout — and sent the original to Lieutenant Tracy by special courier. In an accompanying note I identified Ossmann, but I also wondered aloud, so to speak, about how useful, at this point in the investigation, the information really was. Had Ossmann and the other two been working on some kind of love potion and decided to give it a try? Had he tried again with Dr. Woodley and gotten the dose wrong? Or was the effect of a lethal dose known and for some reason used against Ossmann and Woodley? If so, why experiment on Bert and Betti?

Speaking of whom, the spotlight of unseemly publicity has once again been turned on the Museum of Man. Amanda Feeney-Morin wrote a front-page story in yesterday’s
Bugle
disclosing details from the autopsies of Bert and Betti. She revealed that the biochemical analysis turned up compounds identical to those found in Ossmann and Woodley. Ms. Feeney quoted an unidentified source within the SPD to the effect that the compounds constitute “a blockbuster aphrodisiac.” It sounds like my friend Sergeant Lemure is at it again.

Then Ms. Feeney got to the real point of her story. “Norman de Ratour, Director of the museum, did not return calls.” Of course the woman called me. She calls every day to ask me if I beat my wife or molest donkeys. So of course I don’t return her calls. But that’s not the kind of thing I can include in the press releases I put out stating that no research on aphrodisiacs is taking place in the Genetics Lab. It would get twisted around until it sounded like an evasion.

Which reminds me, I have yet to look at the rest of Corny’s tape.
Why me?
I complain to the air. Why not send it to Murdleston
or Brauer? Because Murdleston’s too foggy and Brauer, who has his own geek show in progress, can’t be trusted.

But none of the above, I must confess, is what has me dithered like a teenager. Sixpak Shakur has moved out, lock, stock, and amplifiers, and while a measure of peace reigns here at home I find myself beset again with the worst kind of temptation.

More accurately, the King of the Redneck Rappers was thrown out by Diantha, for whom I feel heartfelt sympathy, genuine love, and a low, cunning, opportunistic lust. Even when I try to be high-minded, when I lift my head and straighten my shoulders and think, yes, indeed, the breakup will be the best thing for her in the long run, I find myself in the equation. I find my imagination flaring, conflating with images from the video so that I am behind her, in front of her, on top of her … Which is shameful beyond words because the dear girl is, for the nonce, very upset.

Diantha, in fact, was close to hysterics when I came in around seven thirty this evening. She met me at the door, her eyes fetchingly pink from weeping. She fell into my arms, sobbing again.

“Elsbeth?” I asked in alarm, fearing and expecting the worst.

“No, no, no,” she moaned. “It’s Sixy. He’s gone. Sixy’s gone.”

“You poor girl,” I said, taking her in my arms, my relief at the man’s departure mixing with my commiseration for her all-too-evident distress.

“But I still have you, don’t I, Norman,” she sniffled and gave me a big wet kiss on the lips, which I can still feel imprinted, like a stain I want to keep.

I decorously disentangled myself. “Gone,” I said, trying to dissemble the sense of giddy release that kept arriving like pleasant shocks as I hung up my topcoat in the hall closet. “Diantha,” I said firmly, putting my arm around her shoulder. “Tell me what happened. But first, how is your mother doing?”

Diantha nodded, my indirect rebuke and its implied perspective calming her. “Mom’s okay. She’s still sleeping. Do you want a drink?”

“A martini would do the trick.” I rootled around the drinks cabinet and made myself a strong one. Diantha poured herself a glass of white wine. For a strange moment it seemed we were an old established couple going through the routine of homecoming.

“So tell me what happened,” I urged her as gently as I could.

She sat demurely on the couch, one shapely knee pertly crossed over the other, and took a sip of her wine. “I threw him out. I told him to get out before I called the police.”

She began to grow tense again. I went over and sat beside her and put my arm around her shoulders. “It will be all right,” I said.

She put her face into my chest and snuffled. “I came in from shopping around four and found him screwing that little slut Candy Dolores from next door. Right in my own bed. In our own bed.”

“Oh, dear.”

“They didn’t even stop when I came into the room and started screaming at them. And her little sister, Shirleen, the one with the braces, she was standing there watching them. She was probably in line.”

“I’m not surprised, frankly,” I said, saying, I’m sure, the wrong thing. “It’s happened before, hasn’t it?”

She snuggled closer, and I felt the fullness of her breast nudging into my ribs. Oh, to find out what a loathsome, crawling monster one is! To find out that pity can be as much allied with lust as with contempt! Or is it just natural? To want to transform those sobs and sighs of hurt into moans of pleasure? Or is it all a matter of self-sophistry? Because right then I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms, kiss her tear-wetted
lips, and roger her silly, as the English say. And, indeed, she did pull even closer, her hips against mine, and kiss me full on the lips. How in that moment I kept my hands to myself I simply cannot explain.

But resist I did. Diantha suffered another outbreak. “I mean, Dad, they were both buck naked and f*cking like fiends. And no apology. He just got off the bed, steaming from that little slut, and telling me to ‘chill out, baby, chill out. I was just helping the chick find her groove.’ ”

I stayed with her, sensing that her tears and the flood of angry words gave her some release, a kind of purgation. I don’t remember what I said, nothing, really, just comforting noises disguised as words.

Until finally she calmed, wiped her eyes, beamed at me with a most endearing smile, very much like her mother’s, and said, “Go wake up Mom. I’m going to make us all one fabulous dinner.”

So that, despite everything, a new spirit descended on the house. I certainly felt liberated. And Elsbeth, poor dear, waking from her drugged sleep, caught something of the mood. I helped her to the bathroom. I helped her wash. It is painful to see how Elsbeth is wasting away. But what spirit. What courage! I helped her into what she calls her “frolic” clothes, a smart turtleneck jersey and a wraparound skirt. We chatted. Yes, she had heard the commotion. “Frankly, I’m glad he’s gone. The poor boy had begun to believe in his own wigger fantasies, as Di says.”

“Wigger?” I asked.

“It’s a Di word. She said we wouldn’t understand.”

Elsbeth shrugged, took another of her pain pills, and I helped her into the dining room.

Diantha served up a delectable seafood dish and a salad of fresh greens that we had with a deal of wine, a robust California Zinfandel Izzy had recommended. When we had finished, she
excused herself to go upstairs and “hit the
RESTART
button on a whole new life.”

Elsbeth and I, mostly I, finished off the second bottle. And as I rinsed the dishes for the dishwasher — I must say I am enjoying the new kitchen very much despite my hesitations — Elsbeth said plainly and simply, “I want you to take care of Diantha after I’m gone.”

When I started in about how she still had a fighting chance, she repeated what she had said.

“But, of course, darling, I’ll take care of Diantha. She’s my daughter, after all.”

“I didn’t mean as a daughter.”

I told her straight out that I would hear no more of that kind of talk. At the same time, I suffered from such a sense of possibilities that I was left dizzy with a kind of experiential vertigo. And while I wanted to ascribe Elsbeth’s amazing statement to fatigue and perhaps even a low-grade delirium brought on by the medications for her illness, I could tell from her smile that she knows I fight the fiends within me when it comes to her daughter.

I still cannot quite believe what I witnessed earlier this evening, but the proof is there, in stark, horrific images. Yes, I have finally found the courage to watch the rest of the Corny Chard tape. It wasn’t easy, but I fortified myself for it.

First, I left work early to be with Elsbeth for a while. She is so appreciative of the time I give her, even if it was spent mostly watching soap operas that, for me, blend one into the other, with the same people saying the same things to one another again and again. (Perhaps they are more realistic than I give them credit for.)

Then, deliberately, almost self-indulgently, giving myself plenty of time, I dressed in a tuxedo in preparation for Father O’Gould’s presentation of the first Fessing Memorial Lecture and the dinner to follow. I kissed Elsbeth good-bye and drove over to the museum. From a bottle of good Scotch that I keep in the office closet, I poured myself a healthy double. I took the Scotch and Corny’s video down through the deserted exhibitions to the Twitchell Room.

I think being dressed in a tuxedo and sipping neat Scotch definitely helped as I inserted the tape and pressed the button and rewound it just a bit, a final delaying action. I saw again the figure in an elaborate headdress dancing to the pounding log drum and then appearing in front of Corny, who has had his clothes cut away. I hear Corny say, “Ferdie, keep the camera on
the shaman in the cockade of red macaw feathers. Oh, God, I think he’s doing the cleansing dance right now.”

Then we see the man in the brilliant headdress and painted near-naked torso dancing around and bending over an object on the ground. Corny comes into view again and a harsh, familiar sound is heard off camera. Corny gasps. “Oh, God. That’s a chain saw. Bricklesby said nothing about that. It’s not in the tradition. Oh, God. Or am I hallucinating?”

I held my breath and resisted the impulse to hit the
STOP
button as the shaman appears with the old chain saw. It sputters and spews smoke. And I forced myself to watch as in one horrific motion, the saw is brought up under Corny’s outstretched left arm. Corny screams as the whirring blade slices off the arm through the biceps, spewing blood and bits of bone. I turn away.

Incredibly, it is Corny I hear next. “Follow the arm, Ferdie,” he says, his voice weak and choking. “Get a close-up on the ceremony. I think … I think it’s going to the ceremonial grill.”

As I watched, amazed and horrified, the camera closes to where the severed arm is being sanctified before being placed over the sacred fire. Corny is heard again. “Ferdie. Keep the camera on the ceremony. They’re going to keep … chopping me up. Get as much as … you can. Especially when they come for my heart. Try to … get it down … especially the cutting ceremony …”

The camera swings back to Corny. One native has successfully tied a tourniquet of leather thong around the stump of Corny’s severed arm, while another paints the bloody stump with a thick dark paste from a gourd.

Corny keeps talking, more breathless than ever. “I’m not really in any great pain. I know they are taking me in parts. They want to keep me alive as long as possible. It’s only death. I’m … I’m … like the center of the universe now. Their universe. This is a true honor. Groundbreaking. I smell my own flesh cooking.
I know I couldn’t eat any. Not that auto-anthropophagy is unknown.”

Ferdie pans back with the camera. The shaman is dancing around again with the chain saw. It’s turned off. As though part of the ritual, he pulls the cord. It doesn’t work. He pulls again, and the infernal thing roars to life with a great belch of smoke. The camera swings back to focus on Corny again. He’s breathing in gasps. “God, I hurt. And this is just the beginning. But this has got to be the first for an anthropologist. Norman, don’t let Joss see this. Promise me. Here comes the shaman for more of me.” Corny screams again as the shaman, not as neatly this time, saws off his right leg halfway up the thigh with another spewing of blood, bone, and flesh.

I have to cover my eyes. I knock back the Scotch. The drumming reaches a fever pitch. There are whoops. Incredibly, Corny speaks again. “I’m still okay. Ferdie get the, get the …” Like his arm, the stump of his leg is tied off again and anointed with the dark paste. “Bricklesby will have to be revised. They don’t start with the genitals and the … How … how could they, and keep the sacrifice alive? My God. This is a amazing.”

Mercifully, right then, Corny passes out. He sags in the crude stanchion, horrific and yes, strangely glorious, stirring within me some atavistic recognition of what we are. A few minutes later he manages to open his eyes and say, quite clearly, “Norman, no copyright.” And while the shaman is dancing around the chain saw and trying to start it, the tape goes blank.

I ran it for a while longer, but there was no more on it. I couldn’t have gone on watching it anyway. I was in shock. I felt half crazed. Is this the heart of darkness? Who is worse, those savages or Corny himself, making himself complicit in their debauchery? What are we?

I have no real idea what to do with this truly incredible piece
of documentation. I suppose I should make a copy and then clear its legal status through our attorney. I mean, while the MOM did not contribute very much to underwriting the trip, is it possible that Jocelyn and their children will be able to sue the museum for wrongful death or some such thing. Strange how, in our lawyer-infested society, the first thing you need think about in a situation like this is liability.