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“It’s how he is. He’s totally harmless.”

He nodded with uncertainty. “What were we talking about? Oh, yes, the estate. I did make inquiries. His widow’s lawyer wrote that an inventory was being conducted of all of the man’s collections. I was told that they would get back to us.”

“Did that end your meeting with Heinie?”

“Pretty much. I thanked him. I told him I would let bygones be bygones. I have to tell you, it was a relief to get my dog and get out of there.”

“Did he drive off then?”

“No. I glanced back a couple of times and he was still there.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police with all this?”

“As I said, I didn’t want to get involved. One little taint in our cozy little world and doors start to close.”

I nodded. “Too true.”

“Will you be handing that letter to the police?”

“I don’t know,” I lied again. “I’ll have to think it over.”

He stood up. “You understand that the fact that it’s anonymous makes it all but useless?”

“I do.”

He shook my hand. “You know, Norman, it doesn’t contain anything really damning.” He nodded to Alphus and with some of his old strut intact, then turned and left.

I took out and carefully placed the original letter from X back in its envelope. I sealed this inside a larger envelope that I addressed to Jason Duff, the district attorney who had wanted me held without bail on a charge of first-degree murder. I decided I would take it over to the Middling County courthouse myself and hand it in.

“What do you think?” I asked Alphus.

He shrugged. “He was lying about the gun. The rest is more or less true.”

“I’m a damn fool,” I said. “I should have asked him outright if he had murdered Heinie.”

That afternoon, as Alphus and I sat in the garden each with an iced tea, which we had begun to drink as a way of stalling the start of any happy hours, I related to him my doubts about the Museum of Man. I told him about Laluna Jackson’s description and dismissal of the museum as little more than a trophy house of white male victimization.

I told him I could not dismiss her views as easily as I dismissed her — as a self-righteous, self-indulgent member of the moral class who was building a career on the misery of others. Her accusations had stirred grave doubts. Is the MOM, I asked rhetorically, are most museums, little more than repositories of historic plunder, the victors’ spoils? For all my professions of high-minded dedication to these things of beauty, am I little more than an agent of cultural avarice?

He listened patiently as I went on. No, I answered my own question, absolutely not. She’s wrong. But I wondered aloud if, in the postmodern morass where nothing means anything, her view and my view of the collections and the whole ethos behind them are merely two constructs, one as legitimate, if such a normative term is plausible anymore in these matters, as the other.

At this point he frowned, perhaps because the laboring locomotive of my ratiocination had entered a long, dark tunnel with no hint of light at the end of it. I told him I had read that institutions such as ours merely serve to aestheticize if not fetishize (hideous words) objects torn from their living contexts and mummified in cabinets and categories. It is but a short step from there to exculpating if not valorizing (another hideous word) imperial plunder. In short, all the things I cherish — art, appreciation, research, beauty — are themselves but words, are but the dimming, receding lights ahead of us in the tunnel.

He considered what I had said for a few moments. He sipped from his tall glass and put it down. I could tell from the way he looked at me and then away that I had touched a raw nerve.

“Neither you nor that woman can escape the profound and blind self-absorption of the human species,” he signed. “It is not the white man’s pride or greed that is the problem; it is human pride and blindness. You, all of you, destroy wilderness and countryside to build malls for the endless junk that doesn’t make you any happier. You think nothing of taking a pristine meadow full of living things