The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [13]
I arrived at the office to a waft of a distinct, musk-edged men’s cologne. Doreen broke off a giggly phone conversation with one of her friends to tell me that a Mr. Freddie Bain had shown up unannounced and had left behind his card along with his scent.
“Did he say what he wanted?” I asked, trying to recall when I had heard the name before.
“No. Just said he’d be back.”
For all my presentiments, I have little to report on the Ossmann-Woodley case. I forwarded the two e-mails I have gotten from Worried to Lieutenant Tracy. He dropped by, and we went over the contents of the Worried missives and what they could import. He agreed with me that it might be very useful to learn the identities of the individuals who were involved in what he termed “the threesome.” But more than that, he said he would really like to talk to the person who had asked Worried to bury those rabbits.
I said I had already asked Worried to help us on both of those accounts. I also related to him the essence of my interview with Dr. Penrood, but kept to myself the tincture of suspicion that meeting occasioned in me. I did tell him, however, that I thought it entirely possible that something out of the ordinary might be going on in the Genetics Lab.
The lieutenant sympathized when I told him I was to meet with the University Oversight Committee. In the wake of the Ossmann-Woodley matter, the committee, in all fairness to it, has, through the university administration, come under pressure from a local group calling itself the Coalition Against the Unnatural. He nodded ruefully at the mention of the name. The same group has been lobbying the Mayor’s office to have everything in the Genetics Lab opened to general public scrutiny. We live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it.
And, I reminded him, it’s not just the Ossmann-Woodley strangeness that has attracted undue attention to the lab. Bert, one of our remaining chimps, is back in the news. In a so-called exposé in this morning’s Bugle, Amanda Feeney-Morin repeated the canard that Bert “was tortured with forced intoxication” during the final stages of animal testing for ReLease, the Ponce’s promising new drug. RL, as I may have mentioned, is a morning-after medication for those who have imbibed too much. It combines, among other things, a drug that affects the elasticity of the cardiovascular system, a high dose of vitamin B, and a powerful analgesic. Its commercial potential is said to be enormous.
Ms. Feeney-Morin claims in her article that Bert is now the pongid equivalent of a recovering alcoholic. She claims, erroneously, that Bert has been sent to a program that deals in post-traumatic stress syndrome among animals subjected to “inhumane” experimentation.
I have been over to the Pavilion myself to check on Bert. To be honest, he does appear quite depressed; he has, tinged with self-disgust, that hankering, haunted look in his eyes that many of us can identify with. As Father O’Gould once remarked in another context, there are times when low self-esteem may be a sign of intelligence.
In fact, another chimp, one named Alphus, also took part in the experiment and showed no ill effects whatsoever. But then, Alphus is an exceptionally intelligent member of his species. He apparently succeeded in letting his keeper know that he wanted to participate.
Be that as it may, with this morsel of misinformation Ms. Feeney-Morin has given herself the pretext to rehash yet again the whole so-called controversy revolving around the development of RL. For instance, about six paragraphs into her skein of fabrications, she trots out the “ethical issues” she and others claim attend the development of a “hangover” pill. Given all the other ills of the world, the argument goes, should we really be diverting the time and resources to contrive a medication that encourages people in drinking by ameliorating its more immediate and tangible consequences?