The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [106]
What happened to Celeste Tangent, for instance? Well, she simply disappeared. Perhaps she had divined earlier than most that her erstwhile colleague, Manfred aka Freddie, was going off the tracks. When the Seaboard police, armed with a warrant, searched her apartment, they found evidence that she was long gone. I trust that, given her wiles and other endowments, she will survive quite well.
Lieutenant Tracy tells me that the SPD, now pretty much under the thumb of the FBI in this investigation, has a good idea of how Mr. Bain conducted his business. For some time various federal agencies had been suspicious about the shipping coming and going at Clipper Wharf. The theory, promulgated by the FBI, was that he was using the import and export of highly aromatic spices to mask a far more lucrative drug trade. Apparently not. Instead the wharf, the restaurant, and the spice trade were merely a distraction. Most of his contraband came in on one of the larger trawlers using another dock. This oceangoing vessel “fished” specially wrapped and buoyed bundles of narcotics dropped off by tramp freighters far out to sea. Those little GPS devices come in handy for ill as well as for good.
Indeed, it turns out that Mr. Bain’s castle in the woods contained only his private supply of controlled substances. This was found, cleverly hidden, in a chamber quarried out of the mountain’s granite core, where he maintained a shrine to the memory of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Along with bits and pieces of Wehrmacht memorabilia, the usual flags and rags, there was a fountain pen supposedly used by the Führer and an ornamental dagger with a handle of early plastic, remarkably like ivory, adorned at the top with a swastika inside a circle.
It’s quite clear from the evidence gathered so far that Mr. Bannerhoff/Bain planned, as he told me on that fateful day, to export the powerful aphrodisiac being developed covertly at the lab in exchange for illegal drugs. What he intended to do with the enormous sums generated by such commerce remains a secret he took with him to his grave.
Dr. Penrood, I regret to say, has been deeply implicated in this matter. Among his papers in the Genetics Lab, investigators found a detailed account of how things transpired. It appears that Professor Ossmann, in his work on the hangover drug ReLease, came across a compound — first noted in the research of Dr. Woodley and Professor Tromstromer — which he dubbed JJA-48. It reportedly triggers the vascular dilation needed for an erection far faster and more aggressively than anything in Viagra, for instance. He combined this with other compounds and with a cocktail of psychoactive drugs that act directly on those parts of the brain involved with sexual urges.
Dr. Penrood found out about the experiments through a routine inquiry into the disappearance of the small mammals Professor Ossmann was working on. When Penrood confronted Ossmann with his suspicions and threatened a thorough review by a committee of his peers, the latter decided to include the Director in his scheme. Basically, they were to repeat some of the experiments openly and proceed through the usual channels in developing and testing the aphrodisiac.
Freddie Bain found out about the experiments through Celeste Tangent. She, in her role as a provider of escort services, had “escorted” Dr. Penrood on one of his trips to a research conference in Atlanta. Penrood, smitten with her, not only told her what was afoot, but took her on as a laboratory assistant. She, Bain’s sex and drug slave, in turn made Penrood her sex and drug slave. I certainly cannot excuse Dr. Penrood’s behavior, but I think I understand it.
There remain other details yet to be cleared