The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [90]
My evening at that grotesque fortress-cum-mansion still resounds within me. I want, of course, to dismiss everything that madman said, but it lingers, like an intellectual infection. I keep running it around in my head. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, what percentage of our DNA, ontologically speaking, overlaps? Is God a joker? I’m sure the question is hardly a novel one, but I have wrestled with it repeatedly since that weird evening. Did God simply set in motion the awesome machinery of natural selection, then sit back and watch? Does He laugh at us?
It would have been worse, I’m sure, had I stayed the night. But I sometimes wonder. Miss Tangent, her eyes, her hair, her touch, also lingers, so that I suffer a kind of low-grade erotomania in which she and Diantha and Elsbeth tease and tempt and leave me. They invest my sleeping dreams, night visions bizarre and poignant, from which I awake in torments of lust and despair. I would have thought grief something pure, a kind of suffering that renders one innocent.
And then it’s all mangled and mingled with my workaday life, the heavy routine of being a museum director. Not to mention my role as a part-time murder investigator. Who is Freddie Bain? Had I stayed Friday night, might I have found out? Is he Moshe ben Rovich? It hardly seems likely, given his proclivities. How does Celeste Tangent fit into all this? It’s obvious she works for him as a seductress. And Ossmann? Penrood? And myself, had I not suffered the rectitude of indignation that night? What would he want with a powerful aphrodisiac? To sell it as an illegal drug, obviously. What might Diantha be able to tell me when she comes back? If she comes back.
Korky and I went to the ball together, not as dates, of course — I certainly didn’t dance with him. Still, we raised a few eyebrows when we came in. I could hear their thoughts. Is Norman coming out or just swinging on the closet door? But as time goes by, I find myself caring less and less what people think. It has occurred to me, finally, that the standards of yesteryear, for better or worse, no longer apply.
Korky appears to be doing well, considering what he’s been through. We had a drink at my house before setting out. Elsbeth’s absence shouted at us from every cornice and corner. We clung together for a small tearful moment. But said nothing. One word and neither of us would have shut up for the evening. Which might have been cathartic in its own way.
As we drove over together, he confessed he suffers bouts of acute depression. He said he is still very interested in what he calls “the marvelous world of fine food,” but that he can no longer tolerate the thought of anyone going hungry in the world. “I’m torn, Norman, about what to do with my life. I feel like volunteering for an international relief agency, you know, where you fly to one of those wretched villages in Africa to hand out food to the starving. But it wouldn’t be me.”
“A man doesn’t live by bread alone,” I murmured inanely.
Which made him laugh. “No, he needs, baguettes, bagels, boules, franchese, focaccia. It’s the difference between feeding and eating. But I still can’t write about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The Curatorial Ball wouldn’t have been the same anyway. Rather than dismantle the Diorama of Paleolithic Life in Neanderthal Hall, as we’ve done for the past couple of years, we decided to hold the party in one of the function halls of the Miranda Hotel. We decorated it ourselves with streamers and those collapsible ornaments. We had a papier-mâché menorah, some Kwanzaa symbols, and a pagan display provided by a local coven. We moved Herman the Neanderthal into the foyer and decked him out in his traditional Santa suit. And the Warblers, getting just a bit creaky, sang all the old favorites. But it wasn’t the same.
Korky, I was glad to see, met a friend and left the party early. I lingered and