Chapter 39: Monday, Jan. 29

In which the story concludes, all the loose ends (except some) are tied up in messy, peculiar fashion, and you'll never guess who reappears, though not entirely.

By Alfred Alcorn

Oct 10, 2001 | The repercussions of the Love Potion Case, as this curious tale has come to be called, are going to reverberate for some time for myself, for the Museum, and for the larger Seaboard community. There has been considerable media hoopla. There were calls from some quarters for a full investigation of Freddie Bain's death even after it became apparent that I had "taken out" a major drug lord.

Then, as more details came to light, I had to endure the fickle adulation of the media. At the same time there remains some concern for the safety of both Diantha and me in terms of possible mob revenge. Actually, I am more worried that some distant relative of Mr. Bannerhoff/Bannerovich/ben Rovich/Bain will show up with a lawyer in tow claiming wrongful death.

I would like to have it generally known that I do not feel smug in the least about killing Freddie Bain, however richly he deserved to die. Though under duress at the time, though fearful for my own life and Diantha's, I question my motives now. I fear that I shot him in the heat of an argument. And that is the way despots win arguments -- by imposing the ultimate silence. I take some small comfort in the more likely possibility that I killed him because of Diantha, that it was, ultimately, a crime of passion. Who will ever know? In life, unlike in art, loose ends seldom get tidily tied up.

What happened to Celeste Tangent, for instance? She quite simply disappeared. Perhaps she had divined earlier than most that her erstwhile colleague, Manfred aka Freddie, was going off the rails. When the Seaboard Police, armed with a warrant, searched her apartment, they found evidence that she was long gone. I trust that, given her wiles and other endowments, she will survive quite well.

Lieutenant Tracy tells me that the SPD, now pretty much under the thumb of the FBI in this investigation, has a good idea of how Mr. Bain conducted his business. For some time various Federal agencies had been suspicious about the shipping coming and going at Clipper Wharf. The theory, promulgated by the FBI, was that he was using the import and export of highly aromatic spices to mask a far more lucrative drug trade. Apparently not. Instead the wharf, the restaurant, and the spice trade were merely a distraction. Most of his contraband came in on one of the larger trawlers using another dock. This ocean-going vessel "fished" specially wrapped and buoyed bundles of narcotics dropped off by tramp freighters far out to sea. Those little GPS devices come in handy for ill as well as for good.

Indeed, it turns out that Mr. Bain's castle in the woods contained only his private supply of controlled substances. This was found, cleverly hidden, in a chamber quarried out of the mountain's granite core, where he maintained a shrine dedicated to the Third Reich. Along with bits and pieces of Wehrmacht memorabilia, the usual flags and rags, there was a fountain pen supposedly used by the Führer and an ornamental dagger with a handle of early plastic, remarkably like ivory, adorned at the top with a swastika inside a circle.

It's quite clear from the evidence gathered so far that Mr. Bain planned, as he told me on that fateful day, to export the powerful aphrodisiac being developed covertly at the Lab in exchange for illegal drugs. What he intended to do with the enormous sums generated by such commerce remains a secret he took with him to his grave.

Dr. Penrood, I regret to say, has been deeply implicated in this matter. Among his papers in the Genetics Lab, investigators found a detailed account of how things transpired. It appears that Professor Ossmann, in his work on the hangover drug ReLease, came across a compound -- first noted in the research of Dr. Woodley and Professor Tromstromer -- which he dubbed JJA-48. It reportedly triggers the vascular dilation needed for an erection far faster and more aggressively than anything in Viagra, for instance. He combined this with other compounds and with a cocktail of psychoactive drugs that act directly on those parts of the brain involved with sexual urges.

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