The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man Read Online Free Page A

attorney Felix Skinnerman, who was referred to me by Robert Remick, the chair of the Museum’s Board of Governors. In the wake of the Cannibal Murders, we were in desperate straits. The Onoyoko Institute, which had indirectly been subsidizing a lot of our operations, withered to a mere name with the virtual collapse of Onoyoko Pharmaceuticals. It is no exaggeration to say that we were on the brink of total capitulation to the university. And our submergence into Wainscott would have left us without a shred of real identity.
    In this crisis the Board gave me complete discretion and some sound advice. Remick, who spends most of his time now in the Virgin Islands, not only put me on to young Skinnerman but advised me as well to take careful stock of the museum’s assets and possibilities before consigning them to the university.
    I have to confess I had my reservations about hiring Felix. In the course of a routine background check, I found that he had been fired from his father’s company. Izzy, who knows the Skinnermans, told me the story. After finishing law school, Felix reluctantly joined the family’s gift business, a firm, apparently, to whom people of means “outsource” their present buying for holidays and special occasions. It appears that Felix, bored with employing his considerable talents handling consumer complaints, inserted a bogus ad into the firm’s online catalog for a “tastefully embossed gift certificate for the services of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the perfect present for that elderly loved one who has lingered too long.”
    It caused quite a row in the family, according to Izzy, but also generated a good number of serious inquiries. It was only the first of several pranks. The following Christmas he listed in the catalog a “Cheeses of Nazareth,” which he called a “Selection of dairy products from the Holy Land tastefully packaged on its own cheeseboard in the shape of a cross.”
    Felix, who has the charm of being slightly oblivious to his immediate surroundings and the marred, rugged good looks resulting from childhood acne, told me at our first meeting to sign nothing until we had done an assessment. How the scales fell from my eyes! True, we had debt, but people were coming in droves to see the Diorama of Paleolithic Life so that, as Felix put it, gate receipts were up. More than that, he convinced me we were sitting on a gold mine. We had “name recognition,” office space to rent in the Pavilion, and state-of-the-art systems already installed in the Genetics Lab.
    It was on that basis that we began negotiating with the Ponce Research Institute. The terms include a share of the royalties for any new treatments developed in the lab by the Polymath Group, its main research arm. The institute moved in and withindays was hiring, on a consulting basis, researchers from the Medical School and Wainscott’s highly respected Department of Biochemistry, many of whom had previously worked for the Onoyoko Institute.
    Not only does the Ponce pay us a princely sum for renting the premises — it is a four-story structure, after all — but we have already received substantial royalties on NuSkalp, a biosynthetic hair transplant available in what the literature calls “designer tints.” The institute has recently begun human testing of ReLease, a morning-after medication for hangovers that has, admittedly, caused some controversy.
    The university threw an absolute fit in the course of all this, and the aftershocks of its continuing attempts to coerce us into a misalliance by resorting to legal measures can still be felt. Wainscott even tried to keep its faculty from signing up, but to no avail. So all in all the MOM is doing quite well, but we must remain ever-vigilant.
    On quite another topic, the whole Raul Brauer escapade continues at full tilt. Readers of the account of what happened a couple of years ago will recall that Professor Brauer and several other Wainscott worthies admitted to