The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [64]
I was working away and Alphus had immersed himself in a book on batiks when the phone rang. I was hoping it was Diantha, but was surprised to find Professor Col Saunders on the line. He spoke somewhat gruffly. “You called,” he said.
We had met several times so I didn’t have to introduce myself. I asked him if he had a few minutes to spare, that I would like to drop by and talk to him if he were in his office.
“To what purpose?” He let his voice show impatience. I could tell that, like so many others, I had become something of a nonperson where he was concerned.
“I have received a communication regarding the von Grümh murder. You are mentioned prominently. I thought you might like to see a copy of it.”
“Oh … I see.” His tone changed decidedly. “Well, I’m pretty much free right now. Say in half an hour? I could come there.”
“Very good,” I said. This, I thought, would be an opportune time to test Alphus’s lie-detecting skills. I turned to my hairy friend and explained who was coming over and what I wanted him to do.
“No problem,” he signed with a sudden alertness I took for enthusiasm.
I then did something undoubtedly unethical and shrewd and, under the circumstances, justified: I rigged up a digital voice recorder I happened to have in my desk.
Col Saunders showed up twenty minutes later. A small handsome man, he was dressed just short of dandyism in a beige summer suit, pink shirt, and blue patterned tie. When I’d once pondered aloud to Di about his youthful looks, she told me he had obviously had a face-lift along with a hair transplant that looked a tad too reddish. His wide, lifted face, now tanned, and his eyes, which matched his tie, smiled at me as though we were close colleagues.
“Norman, good to see you,” he said with false heartiness, his voice still redolent of time spent at Cambridge. He shook my hand and did a double take upon seeing Alphus over to one side with an open book on his lap.
“This is Alphus,” I said. “Alphus, this is Professor Saunders.”
They nodded at each other. Then Saunders took a chair in front of the desk. We exchanged the smallest of small talk before he said, with feigned disinterest, “So what’s this about a letter?”
I took a copy I had made for him and slid it across the desk.
He read it rapidly, frowning and then consciously, I thought, making his face blank. He read parts of it twice. He looked up at me. “Have you given the original to the police?”
“I haven’t yet.”
“Do you intend to?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. “It will depend …” I paused. “On what you tell me.”
He harrumphed. “I don’t really have much to tell.”
“Then you have no objection to my sending the original along to the authorities?”
“Obviously, I don’t want to get involved in this mess.”
“Nor do I want to have obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and lawyers only know what else added to the charges against me.”
He nodded but without any empathy. He said, “The man couldn’t even die without screwing it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Professor Saunders,” I said, my voice confiding and portentous at the same time, “why not just tell me what happened. Later on, if you need me to substantiate your … statement, I would be only too willing to.”
He considered my offer for a moment. He glanced uneasily at Alphus who was watching him with seemingly neutral curiosity. He then looked around at objects in my office that I had borrowed from the collections. Abruptly, but still with an air of arrière pensé, he said, “In fact I did encounter Heinie that night.”
“Do you remember at what time?”
“Just about eight twenty-five.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I recall it because I had a call coming in from a colleague in Bangkok at nine fifteen on my landline. I kept checking my watch.”
When a pause on his part turned into a hesitation, I prompted, “So how did you happen to see Heinie?”
“Well, just a few minutes earlier I left my town house to walk Spencer, he’s my Irish setter, which,