The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [30]
“Do you know anything for sure?”
“No, but there were rumors.”
“Rumors?”
“Ya, ya. Rumors that Pip had something that made rabbits and mice screw themselves crazy. For a while there were a lot of missing animals that got blamed on the cleaning ladies, but I never believed it.”
“Do you have any idea what Professor Ossmann’s substance might be?”
“I don’t know for sure he had a substance.”
I didn’t believe him. But I had neither the interrogation skills nor enough technical background to question him further to any effect. I thanked him for the time and the tea and took my leave. In walking to my office through the leaf fall and brilliant light, it struck me that Professor Tromstromer, behind his evident bonhomie, was not the jolly fellow he pretended to be. Not that any of us are. I did not list him as a suspect, but I felt sure he was hiding something.
On the other hand, I may only be projecting my own melancholy, which burns the deeper with the beauty of the day. I will be losing Elsbeth, it’s true, however much I hope against hope. But she will be losing all this, the air, the light, the sounds, the beauty. I think it was the Russian writer Vasily Grossman who pointed out that each death is the death of a universe.
I have received another e-mail from Worried, one that confirms what Professor Tromstromer told me about missing research animals.
Dear Mr. Ratour:
I found out what happened to the guy that asked me to bury the rabbits. He’s still around town and I’d give you his name but then he’d tell you who I was and I don’t want to get involved in this thing any more than I already am. So I called this guy and asked him about what was going on. And I think he’s telling the truth because I told him I was getting pressure from the cops and that if he didn’t come clean with me he’d have to deal with them. Anyway, he tells me that the rabbits weren’t part of any experiment, just a couple left over from a thing they were doing on hair grooming. So one morning he comes into work and there are the two rabbits, a male and a female, dead in a cage together. He says it looked like they had been fighting. He says there’s some kind of state regs that make you find out what happened when an animal dies for no reason even when they’re not part of some experiment. He says it’s a pain in the ass. You got to have them examined. You got to do paperwork. You got to file the thing in triplicate. So he cleans out the cage, puts the things in a bag, and gives them to me. Anyone asks questions it’s hey, maybe the Haitians took them. I mean that’s the joke around here with the cleaning ladies. When anything’s missing, rats, mice, anything, the Haitians took them, you know, for lunch, for voodoo, for whatever. Anyway, I think the guy’s telling me the truth. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.
Worried
I think tomorrow I’ll print out a copy of this and take it over myself to Nicole Stone-Lee. She might find it useful. Perhaps I’m being overcautious, but you can’t be too careful about these things falling into the wrong hands.
Speaking of which, despite my initial reservations, the meeting I had this afternoon with Malachy Morin and two gentlemen from the University Office of Development left me quite enlightened. I say “gentlemen” advisedly, as they struck me as the lodge-member types, full of that heartiness that’s always ready for a good laugh. Indeed, the individuals involved, taking their cue from Malachy Morin, carried on in an underlying tone of risibility that I find puzzling and disturbing in retrospect. Perhaps it’s just that