A whodunit at the museum

NEW YORK — An assistant museum curator who questioned the authenticity of a Leonardo da Vinci has been killed. Before he died, he left a code in his appointment calendar and a cryptic trail of clues connected to secrets in works of art that point to the killer.

Now, would-be gumshoes must figure out what drove one of four suspects to kill him. Was it greed? Fame? Lust? Or revenge?

That is the plot of “Murder at the Met,” a murder-mystery scavenger hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York run by Watson Adventures, a private company offering a series of such games at 27 museums in seven U.S. cities.

On a recent Saturday, 40 people gathered in a basement room of the museum for the “whodunnit” challenge. Divided into 10 teams, they received a map, directions to specific galleries and 22 questions linked to 22 works of art. They were told that the curator’s notes contained blanks and underlined words. Their assignment: Find the works, fill in the blanks and figure out the references to the underlined words.

Each team then headed in a different direction, crisscrossing dozens of galleries in an exhilarating and competitive two-hour hunt. (Hint: Read the wall labels to make sure you’re in the right place and looking at the right piece.)

The winning team correctly answered the most questions, determined the motive and decoded a set of corresponding numbers that exposed the murderer’s name.

The suspects were the chief curator who was about to announce the acquisition of the rare Leonardo, a multimillionaire who put up a big chunk of the purchase money, the dead curator’s wife and an art dealer who specialized in Old Master paintings.

(Sorry, no spoilers here. Watson Adventures refused to allow a reporter on the hunt to keep a set of questions and answers to the mystery - and extracted a promise from her not to reveal the killer’s name.)

“I really like the level of difficulty,” said Matt Fuhrman, 22, a college graduate from Columbus, Ohio, who took part in the Met hunt. “I read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and all the Dan Brown books. It was very much like the books.” His team discovered a message inscribed on the back of a sculpture of the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

Founder Bret Watson said the company grew from his love of art, history and writing and a fascination for finding funny and bizarre details in works of art such as a figure of a saint in a stained-glass window in the museum’s medieval gallery who is a dead ringer for Mick Jagger and whose name is St. Roch (pronounced like the stone). The scavenger hunt question for that work is: “Which stained-glass pane looks like he ‘Can’t get no satisfaction?’ “

The hunt involving the slain curator is tailored to a museum’s collection and is also offered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The method for cracking the code is different at each.

Other Watson Adventures hunts include “Naked at the [fill in museum name].” No, participants don’t run around naked, but they do track down works of art that include randy Romans, peeping Toms, bathing beauties, sultry sirens and even a god with Venus envy. These are pun-based, requiring participants to solve devious and humorous questions.

Mr. Fuhrman’s friends Christine D'Amore, 20, of Miami, and Megan Moran, 21, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., said the hunt opened their eyes to new areas of the museum.

“I’ve been here over five times, and there were places I’ve never been to before, rooms that I loved [such as] the Egyptian tombs that I never noticed before,” Miss D'Amore said.

Miss Moran said she liked that the scavenger hunt focuses on lesser-known works.

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