The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [63]
Mort said nothing when I told him I wanted to leave the room exactly the way we had found it. He nodded knowingly when I said we were to tell no one about what we had uncovered. Driving home I entertained little fantasies of placing a hidden camera or a microphone in the room, though I had little idea of what I might learn thereby.
22
I received a call today from Mr. Freddie Bain, the restaurateur. He was in quite a state about the news of Corny’s death, which appeared in the Bugle this morning. When I tried to fob him off on the Wainscott public relations people, he turned peevish. “Mr. de Ratour, they are the ones who told me to call you. Please, can you tell me who told you of Professor Chard’s death?”
I told him about Henderson’s visit and his contact with Fernando and that the State Department had received reports to the same effect.
Who was this Henderson? Where might he be contacted? Was he reliable? I answered as best I could. I gave the man a post office box number for Henderson in Manaus and told him that was all I had.
“Are you sure there was no documentation?” he asked, his voice edged with insinuation.
I replied ambiguously, saying that final confirmation was awaited, but that it seemed the worst had happened. I hung up finally in bemusement. It was almost as though the man knew about the tape Corny had sent back. I made a mental note to call Jocelyn to tell her not to let anyone else know about it.
Prejudice, as the Reverend Lopes has remarked, is like excrement: We tend to think of our own as less offensive than that of others. I try to keep Alfie’s dictum in mind when it comes to my feelings regarding members of the legal profession. Not all lawyers, to be sure. When I catch myself wanting to send the whole lot of them to the wall, I stop and recall the good ones I have known. Not many, actually, but a few. I tell myself that it may be something genetic, something over which they have little or no control. I remind myself that in the past members of the de Ratour family have married lawyers or even gone to law school. But that was at a time when it was considered something of an honor to join the profession.
I bring this up because of what happened today when I finally met with the principals of the date rape case that came before the Subcommittee on Appropriateness. After several futile calls, I informed them each that I was assisting the Seaboard Police Department in a matter that their case could have a bearing on, and that our conversations would be off the record and strictly confidential. Pulling one of my own teeth would have been easier.
Ms. Spronger told me they would have to consult “their” attorney, a use of the plural possessive I didn’t pick up on immediately. I increased the pressure at that point, letting them know my requests to see them sprang from the Ossmann-Woodley case, now considered a murder investigation, and involved some urgency.
My action constitutes a transgression of the rules of the subcommittee. Indeed, the whole point of that body is to avoid involvement with the police or the legal system unless absolutely necessary in conflicts between members of the community. I didn’t really cavil with myself on the point. If these young people had been exposed, however inadvertently, to some kind of potion being concocted in the lab, then we needed to find out about it. Still, I was somewhat surprised to learn that a lawyer had become involved; that the rules had already been bent if not broken.
It perplexed me even more that they insisted on meeting me together. For my purposes it made little difference except that important information can be garnered from the differences that inevitably arise in separate accounts of the same incident.
At the appointed time, I made my way over to Sigmund Library, a modern, faceless building of gray granite that exudes an air