The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn Page B

does imagination conflate with and confuse memory. In the syntax of what may or may not have happened, I cannot parse what I did from what I dreamed of doing. But, I tell myself, I did not kill my wife’s lover. I’m sure of it. Until doubt, as right now, begins to seepin like a cold, deadly fog. Because, like Hamlet, I could accuse myself of such things it were better my mother had not borne me.
    In brief, as I had the motive, the occasion, and the capacity to murder Heinie von Grümh, I must consider myself a suspect in this case until the murderer is found.
    It pains me to realize that I have completely vitiated, through my lack of frankness, my friendship with Lieutenant Tracy. I fear I will also forfeit the trust the board has had in me as director. And while Diantha will no doubt continue to voice her support of me, I don’t blame her if she is having second thoughts.
    As, no doubt, are you, my reader and, next to God, who probably doesn’t care, my final judge. Am I a reliable narrator? I am certainly not an omniscient one. Mostly, I fear that I have given you little basis to believe what I write in this account or, anywhere else, for that matter. To paraphrase a wordsmith far superior to me, if you don’t believe me, I won’t exist.
    I would fain entreat you to consider me, at the very least, a naive narrator, one, that is, who doesn’t have all the facts or know what to do with the ones he has. But in my own defense, would it not have been a more egregious naïveté to reveal in this journal everything I knew about the circumstances of Heinie’s murder?
    And was it really naive that I didn’t know that my young wife, in the confused aftermath of her liaison with this man, would be so foolish as to lend him my revolver? (And I’ll leave to those thus inclined to ponder the symbolistic implications therein.)
    Even if the police believe Diantha’s story, and I’m not sure they will, it’s still my gun that killed the man. Thereis nothing I or any sort of defense witness can do to alter that fact. I am, to lapse into the argot, not so much an unreliable narrator as a screwed one. I am the naive, the unreliable, the shortsighted, the cuckolded, the venal, even the pompous narrator. But I swear on everything I hold holy that I am not an evil narrator.
    Unless, of course, I did murder Heinie von Grümh.
    (Felix, playing with my name, once pointed out that the lower-case French preposition it contains, if transformed, as it was in the case of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce, into the English definite article, I become The N.A. Ratour. Which, under the circumstances, gives me little comfort.)
    I have not been entirely honest, it’s true. But I really did not recognize the death car on that morning when I discovered Heinie’s body. I have a blind spot when it comes to cars and the vast, tedious subject of how people convey themselves from one place to another.
    Yet I was truly more shocked than surprised to look through the rolled-up window to see the still form of the honorary curator. He had been most careless with my weapon the night before. I could at several points have taken it away from him. And there is a detail, a maddening, pertinent detail to this whole affair that I cannot for the life of me recall.
    I scarcely know what I would have done without Felix. He showed up as the day began to wane along with hope of freedom before nightfall. He and his colleague had pushed for and gotten a bail hearing.
    Jason Duff, the district attorney, a surprisingly young manwith gelled hair and a complexion of steroid pink, shuffled papers at the table to the right of Judge Arlen McHenry, who glared out from his perch with the jaundiced look of one who has spent a long life weighing human foibles.
    The proceedings began so abruptly, I scarcely realized that Mr. Duff was claiming he had enough evidence to have me charged with first-degree murder and held without bail.
    Counsel for the defendant demurred. “Your Honor, I