The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man Read Online Free

happiness together. Given Elsie’s condition, we are both growing fluent in signing, indeed resorting to it between ourselves from time to time. So that not only our little girl, but her condition, draws us close and keeps us together.
    I can hear Diantha now, walking around with the cell phone to her ear. It scarcely sounds like she is consoling a grieving friend. More like a regular chat, more like a good laugh together.

2
    Heinie von Grümh’s murder could not have happened at a worse time for the museum. (I suppose for him, as well, but who can tell?) The fact is, we have reached a critical and delicate juncture in our endeavor to be free once and for all from any claims by Wainscott University. And whatever the legal basis of our cause, public perceptions do count, particularly regarding the competence of an institution like the MOM to govern itself.
    Alas, the effects of crime splatter like blood, besmirching the innocent as well as the guilty. The headline from the
Bugle
proves my point: “Murdered Curator Found on Museum Grounds.” Then the tagline: “Killing raises concerns for safety at Museum of Man.” In vain did I point out to Amanda Feeney, who wrote the story, that von Grümh (he insisted on the umlaut, by the way) was an honorary curator and that, technically speaking, the road between the parking lots of the museum and Center for Criminal Justice belongs to no one. But then, the
Bugle
takes every opportunity to disparage me and the museum.
    In short, I and the MOM are left vulnerable to the campaign by Wainscott to “reinforce the historic ties,” to employ the current euphemism for their efforts to take us over.
    It doesn’t help that we have not been doing as well financially as we had hoped. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve the aphrodisiacs Lubricitin and Priaptin, the development of which here in the Genetics Lab led to so much mischief,though I’ve heard there’s a booming market in generic knockoffs. (A firm in China is apparently marketing the latter under the trade name
hu gao wan
, which translates roughly as “tiger testicles.”) Nor has ReLease, the hangover pill, sold as well as expected. Attendance is up, it’s true; but running a museum, even one as well endowed as the MOM, is an expensive undertaking.
    Malachy Morin has proved to be a far more wily and tenacious adversary than might be gauged from his hale-fellow half-drunk demeanor, not to mention his huge and growing bulk, his red face and bulging eyes. A Falstaff on the outside and a Cassius on the inside, he has been using the law like long-range artillery. Wainscott’s suit to claim the museum as part and parcel of itself has dragged on now for several years with a battery of lawyers — certainly on their part — filing and counterfiling before a sleepy, incompetent judge who has been heard to mutter that he regards the whole matter as “academic.”
    Mr. Morin, who is University Vice President for Affiliated Institutions, not only snipes at us through articles his wife Amanda Feeney writes for the
Bugle
, but also has provocateurs here in the museum ready to betray us when the time comes.
    Nor is our case in the courts a foregone conclusion whatever its merits. The legal tangle of thorns has been complicated by the bequests that have come in from benefactors over the decades who appear to assume that the university and the museum are parts of a single entity. The phalanx of attorneys from a private firm, hired by the university at great expense, contend that these generous individuals, many of them prominent and prosperous members of the community, would not have endowed the museum had they not considered it integral to Wainscott, their
alma mater
in many cases.
    Felix Skinnerman, our general counsel, has argued persuasivelythat the confusion in the minds of these worthy people, many of them long dead, does not alter the documentary evidence of the founding charters.
    I do not wish to go into the