Free The Murder in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn Page A

I finally left them to theirfoolishness. What I simply cannot understand these days is why everyone thinks the Royal Family is such a joke.

FRIDAY, MAY 1

    Suspicion, I’ve decided, is something like temptation: One naturally inclines to give in to it. It is not an entirely enjoyable state because ordinary decency forfends one from enjoying the perverse excitement of nearly but not quite knowing that someone, especially someone one knows, has done something very, very wrong.
    It began earlier this evening when I joined the Landeses for a drink at their table after dinner. I had been describing my visit to the Primate Pavilion over a postprandial concoction that Kevin, the Club’s excellent barkeep, has been trying out. (Gorillas in the Mist I think he called it — a mixture involving coffee liqueur rising from the chartreuse depths of a chilled glass. Sounds like a hangover, the good Lotte remarked, and kept to her brandy.) Well, when I recounted my encounter with the chimp masters and what they were attempting, Izzy could not decide whether to be appalled or amused and succeeded in being both, his eyes starting, his face opening with incredulous laughter. Chimp-lit, he called it, saying it was about the silliest thing he had ever heard about and wondered aloud if it was just age that made him think the world had gone bonkers. Lotte simply shook her head and smiled wisely.
    I told them with a lowered voice that I had visited the pavilion to see if there were any indications that Drex and his minions might be involved in what happened to Cranston Fessing. In a cursory way we touched on what the consolidation processmight mean to the pavilion and how, in this instance, the killing of the messenger might have been a message in itself. It was then that Izzy made a remark that left the hairs on the nape of my neck standing. “If I were investigating this thing,” he said matter-of-factly, “the first person I would make inquiries about would be Raul Brauer.”
    “Raul Brauer,” I said, “the expert on early Polynesia?” A sick excitement began within me. “I thought he had retired, had moved out there.”
    Lotte snorted. “That old goat.”
    Izzy held his drink up to the light, sipped and nodded, and said, “He still gets back here. He has a house of sorts out beyond the bypass.”
    “Really,” I said, keeping my voice low, “you don’t believe all that stuff about that … cult?”
    Lotte smiled, and Izzy regarded me over his half-moon spectacles with a skeptical, knowing gaze. “That, Norman, is the conventional wisdom, based on the dubious assumption that some things are too grotesque to be true. I’ve always thought there was more to the Brauer cult than fantastical rumors.”
    I sipped my drink again and found in its clashing taste something that appealed to me. I glanced around at the genteel furnishings of the Club — the glassy chandeliers hanging from the corbel-edged ceiling, the glinting brass sconces on the fleur-de-lis wallpaper between the oil portraits of distinguished, long-gone personages, the layerings of linen on tables, on side tables, and on the arms of waiters, the well-groomed men and women talking and dining, and the heavy drapes swagged back to show it all richly reflected in the windows, as though part of the darkness beyond. It is one thing to entertain theoretical doubts about colleagues, it is quite another to have the force of real suspicion fall on one like a hammer blow. I shook my head. “No, Izzy, not in academia.”
    He merely smiled at me and murmured, “You have the gift of innocence, Norman.”
    I have had to return to the office to pick up my house keys, and as I sit here in the quiet (Mort just checked in to see if everything was all right), I have been brooding about Raul Brauer. Come to think of it, I have seen him around lately. He’s unmistakable, being a tall, heavyset man with a massive, voluptuously bald head and the pale, staring eyes of a predator. I never