The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [11]
In this regard I received another e-mail from Worried.
Dear Mr. Ratour,
I thought you’d be interested in that video of the babe doing the two profs. The guy who has it says he doesn’t want to get into trouble for invasion of privates and that sort of thing. He also says it takes a lot of time and he’s gotta rent some real hi-tech stuff to do it. Anyway, he says he could probably get you a pretty good copy for about three and half C’s. Let me know and I’ll tell him to get started. By the way, there was something that happened a couple of months back that you might find interesting. There was a guy in custodial, he’s no longer here, and he asked me if I wanted to make an extra hundred bucks. Sure, why not? Here, he said, and gave me a grocery bag. Take this home and bury it in your backyard and don’t say anything about it and don’t ask any questions. I said, look, I got kids, and I ain’t burying nothing in my backyard until I know what it is. Okay, he says, it’s a couple of dead rabbits. Okay, I says, but I want to make sure they don’t have dangerous chemicals or radiation in them. No he says, they’re clean, you could stew them and eat them if you wanted to, we’re just trying to avoid a lot of paperwork. So, I took the dead rabbits home and threw them in the Dumpster where they’re taking the asbestos out of the old firehouse. I could probably dig out the guy’s name if you wanted to talk to him. Hope this helps.
Worried
Three and a half C’s. Strange how Roman numerals have persisted in slang.
It’s clumsy and perhaps transparent, but I have sent out another e-mail to the entire list addressed to Worried, saying yes and yes.
On a more positive note, I have just gone through several contact sheets of head-and-shoulder shots of yours truly. From them I must pick an image of myself to bequeath to posterity on the flyleaf of my upcoming book on the history of the MOM. It’s a procedure for me that involves a rare and uncomfortable self-consciousness. I mean, how to look authorial but not pretentious, thoughtful but not gloomy, open but not callow; how to evince, in short, the expression of one who leads the examined life but not the overly examined life.
It’s an odd sensation, really, gazing at several dozen pictures of yourself, as though there were all of these versions to choose from. The full frontal, I decided, wouldn’t do, not with my ears. I have, at Elsbeth’s behest, cultivated a rather dignifying, very thin mustache on the lower portion of my somewhat long upper lip. The dear woman says it makes me look as worldly and distinguished as I am.
There is a good three-quarter view in which I am resting my chin on my fisted hand. I like the expression very much; it shows me as open yet reserved, dispassionate but not implacably so. The only problem is that the fist under the chin looks posed, which of course it is, deliberately evading the problem of what might be called the posed unposed look. I took the trouble to white out my hand. The results were encouraging. Thus altered it makes me appear as though I have my nose in the air, but in some ways that does capture the essence.
It certainly goes with the book, The Past Redeemed: The History of the Museum of Man. I had wanted to title it The Solace of Beauty, but Myra Myrtlebaum, my editor at Wainscott Press, talked me out of it. No matter, you shouldn’t judge a book by its title — or by the face of the author, for that matter. To tell you the truth, I am both pleased and not a little doubtful about my first real book. I found it easy enough to encapsulate the museum’s remarkable history, its founding by the intrepid Remicks of Remsdale. I devoted a whole chapter to the Skull and the role it played in the founding of the museum. I reveled