The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Again, in reviewing this entry into the Log, and glancing over the first one I made, I realize I must sound quite negative about the museum. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do not wish to complain. The fact is, I have spent a singularly happy professional life here at the MOM. While “Recording Secretary” may not sound like much, it is a position of considerable reach and responsibility when exercised as it was originally intended. At a small reception on the occasion of my twenty-fifth anniversary in this position, my good friend Izzy Landes raised a glass and dubbed me the Curator of the Curators, a sobriquet I have worn with pride ever since. Lately, in fact, I have been giving considerable thought to the possibility of writing the history of the museum. I think it’s time that someone told the story of this wonderful place, and to this end I have begun to locate and collect the necessary records and materials. (I didn’t mention this when I met with Malachy Morin today, as he doesn’t strike me as someone who is interested in either the past or the future. I mean, how do you explain to someone like him the impulse to write history, to render an account for the judging God of future generations?)

  The fact is, when I leave in the evenings, I almost never take the little rattling elevator at the end of the corridor; instead I walk the other way to the main core of the building, a glorious atrium that is lit from above during the day by a domed skylight of wrought-iron tracery worthy of Kew Gardens. There, starting with the Greco-Roman/Egyptian-Sumerian Collections on the fifth floor, I descend through the galleries that encircle and open onto the atrium. A rich hush emanates from the delicate potteries, ivory work, and silks of the Far East that take up much of the fourth floor. On the third, of course, is the cream of our justifiably famous collection from Oceania — the canoe, of course, but also the wood carvings, the jade-bladed weaponry, tapa cloth, the fabulous, grotesque masks. There I linger as well over the African display, the Kongo figurines, the incised wooded vessels of the Kuba, the Masai beadwork. The second floor is given over to the Americas, and our strength here, as even the most cursory visit will attest, is the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican display. I walk around each case, sometimes pausing to absorb the beauty of millennia, until I reach the ground floor, which undercuts the galleries. This floor comprises Neanderthal Hall, even though the material displayed here extends back some three and a half million years. Imagine that, three and a half million years! And we always think there is so little time. Most of the specimens are casts of what Professor Thad Pilty calls the usual lineup. There’s Lucy, of course, a gracile australopithecine lady little more than three feet tall, along with some of her robust cousins. There struts early man, Homo habilis, the first, perhaps, to fashion some of the beautiful, bifaceted stone tools, the start, as some have said, of aesthetics. Home erectus, of course, and then neanderthalensis, who are represented by several heavy-browed models based on the Gerasimov reconstructions. I mean, here is the evidence, lovingly labeled and displayed, that where you find man, however primitive, you find art, proof that we are not merely creatures but creators, that we partake … Well, there goes the phone.

  Oh, dear, dear. That was the Seaboard Police Department. Dean Fessing, or pieces of him, at any rate, has been found, and I must go.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 2

  I have just had the most awful day of my professional life. Poor Cranston Fessing, as I reported last night, has been found. Or rather, what remained of him was found yesterday afternoon next to a Dumpster behind Atwood Hall, the gender studies building.

  I am not good at public relations. And, as though sensing it, the vultures of the press lost no time in descending on me. They came flapping down as if out of the sky with their scrawny necks and glistening faces. Or they loped right in, big jawed and brazen. I threw them what few bones I could (forgive me that, Cranston, wherever you may be, in whatever well-regulated heaven or hell deans go to for their final reward), but the Seaboard Police Department is keeping a tight lid on details.

  And I was left virtually alone to deal with the situation. Everyone who might have helped quite simply disappeared. The Wainscott Public Relations Office, an entire floor of nice but very nervous people over in Grope Tower (a suitably hideous erection of concrete and glass), referred all questions to the MOM on the pretext that the dean was on assignment here, was, for the current academic year, on official leave from the university. Someone over in Grope told Amanda Feeney, a reporter from the Bugle, who has already misquoted and misconstrued me twice on previous stories, that the dean had been cannibalized and that expertise in such matters resides here. Which may be true but is surely irrelevant. It’s clear that the university simply wanted to dissociate itself from the grisliness of what has happened. Malachy Morin was no help whatsoever; he had left by nine-thirty after bungling a phone call and acted, if you ask me, quite suspiciously. But then, he always acts suspiciously. I gave the press and the police his home number, not, I’m sure, that he was there. And when I tried to tell Dr. Commer the news, the poor man thought I was arranging for him to have lunch with the late dean. I did manage to gin up a press release, including a paragraph of boilerplate from President Twill’s office praising the dean in terms one usually finds in encomia to retired or deceased faculty and administrators.

  I did take some small satisfaction in keeping certain details from the press. It appears that the dean, after having been murdered (presumably), was butchered and cooked quite expertly before being eaten (presumably). The coroner, Dr. P. M. Cutler — a familiar figure here at the MOM, having used for forensic purposes specimens from our considerable collection of human remains — took unseemly relish, I thought, in relating to me some of the details of the autopsy. Indeed, he sounded more like Rick Royick, the Bugle’s food critic, than a coroner. The dean’s buttocks, it appears, were baked with a cinnamon honey glaze; there was a veritable roast rack of dean, complete with those little paper caps, one of which the doctor kept twisting in his hand; there were (I am paraphrasing Dr. Cutler) medallions of thigh dressed in a basil curry beurre blanc that had been served with a thyme-infused purée of white beans and black olives in a marinade of citrus and fennel; there was evidence of a bourguignonne; and the dean’s head, while intact, had been partially emptied, with gross violation to the foramen magnum, where traces of nutmeg were found. I must say that if the doctor was indulging in levity at my expense, it is a levity I find in the worst possible taste, and no pun is intended. But in fact, I believe he was being entirely serious. When I betrayed the least incredulity, he asked me if I wanted to see the evidence firsthand. I said no, thank you. It appears the remains had been ravaged by dogs (Seaboard still does not have a leash law) and perhaps raccoons, judging by gnaw marks on some of the bones.

  I did arrange to have four of us take questions at a hastily convened press conference. We were obliged to cram into Margaret Mead Auditorium on the second floor of the museum after the university refused permission to use one of their larger lecture halls. Someone in President Twill’s office told me he didn’t think a press conference an “appropriate use of university property.” I am going to write a very strong letter about this matter to President Twill for Dr. Commer to sign, with a copy to each member of the Wainscott Board of Regents. Cranston Fessing was, after all, a Wainscott dean, and while I would normally be among the first to keep the press at a distance from any university business, I thought in this case that anything smacking of a cover-up would only make matters worse. And matters are bad enough as it is.

  The press conference turned out, despite my best efforts, to be something of a travesty. Before I knew it, there were coils of cable lying all about the place and glaring lights and glaring ignorance. Perhaps it’s just the arrogant, knowing way in which reporters ask the most banal of questions. I took their questions along with Chief Francis Murphy of the Seaboard Police Department, Dr. Cutler, and Professor Cornelius Chard. Corny Chard, as most people know, is the Packer Professor of Primitive Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology and a public advocate of anthropo
phagy. A compact, cocky, red-faced man with a short, grizzled beard and a head both balding and closely shorn, Chard is best known for two popular (in the sense of nontechnical) works, The Cannibal Within and An Anthropophagic Credo: Let Us Eat What We Are. I had not realized when I invited him to answer questions at the press conference that he was (and remains) a principal suspect. With unusual acuity, one of the wire service reporters pounced on that possibility with an insinuating question. Chief Murphy parried it adroitly, saying that no one was above suspicion. (To me afterwards Professor Chard remarked that he would never eat an old dean like Fessing, what with all that vitriol building up in him over the years.)

  What possible motive could someone have for killing and eating the dean? The coroner shrugged and said, “Hunger?” He explained that one couldn’t determine from the evidence that the dean had been either murdered or eaten, only that he had died and been cooked. In other words, he went on, it was possible, but not very probable, that the dean had died of natural causes and been subsequently “scavenged.” After a thoughtful pause he added that most of the meat we eat — after processing, hanging, canning, et cetera — is the equivalent of carrion.

  When someone asked if the dean had enemies, I responded, paraphrasing Winston Churchill I think, to the effect that any good man has enemies, but none, I hoped, to this degree. Matters were not helped much by the presence of Amanda Feeney, who fancies herself literary and covers the university as part of her cultural beat. She all but accused me of being “locked in conflict” with the dean over the “university’s efforts to buy the MOM.” I explained as well as I could that the museum was not for sale to anyone; that I differed with the dean about the terms and extent of future relations between the university and the museum; and that having differences with someone did not necessarily make that person an enemy. My response did not mollify Ms. Feeney in the least. In what might be called the journalistic voice — accusative interrogatory — she said, “Isn’t it true that Dean Fessing was delving into some very sensitive issues at the museum and may have come across something that could have proved embarrassing had it become public?” I replied as civilly as I could that the dean, with the consent of the Director of the museum, was evaluating the possibility of incorporating the MOM as an integral part of the university. I pointed out that Dean Fessing, in his Interim Status Report to the Select Committee on Consolidation, had not alluded to any matters that might be construed as embarrassing to the museum.

  The question of how the dean had been cooked was brought up by a young woman from National Public Radio deploying a curiously toneless accent in vogue in that organization. Chief Murphy took that one, saying that, for investigative purposes, certain details were not being divulged. Dr. Cutler did answer an inquiry as to how the remains had been found. It seems a retired doctor had been out walking his dog, and when the animal came back to him carrying one of the dean’s humeri, he recognized it as human.

  A reporter from the local television station asked if the Adventurers’ Eating Club, which has a loose affiliation with Wainscott, was being investigated. Chief Murphy said that all parties would be investigated impartially and that, for the moment, members of the eating club were under no particular suspicion. I added that while it’s rumored that certain members of the club had enjoyed the dubious pleasure of consuming human flesh while abroad (a very private club in Hong Kong, I’m told), the bylaws expressly forbid the preparation and consumption of human remains on the club premises.

  When asked what in fact was left of the dean, Dr. Cutler replied, “Scraps,” and on that rather irreverent note I declared the conference over. I suppose it was arbitrary on my part, but I think they would still be there listening to themselves if I hadn’t cut it off. I’m sure the whole thing will be covered in all the papers tomorrow and on the television news this evening. I find it difficult to imagine that I will be on television. I have an old black-and-white set that my dear mother was watching when she died. I should probably dig it out and try to keep myself au courant. It is all too tedious.

  It’s been a sad day for the museum and for the university. And of all nights, I suppose this is one when an appearance at the Club is most necessary for the sake of appearances. I can only hope they haven’t run out of the vegetarian special.

  FRIDAY, APRIL 3

  As a matter of routine, I supposed at first, I had a visit this morning from a Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department. It turned into a most disturbing encounter. Dark haired, square jawed, ruddy faced, the young man evinced a demeanor both respectful and skeptical as he said he wanted to ask me a few questions in the privacy of my office. I tried to be as straightforward as possible with the plainclothesman (actually he was wearing a well-cut tweed jacket and a silk tie hand-painted with linked triangles) when he asked me about my relations with the late dean. I readily admitted that I had disagreed from the very start with the objectives of Dean Fessing’s mission to the MOM. I explained that the assignment of a “Visiting Administrative Dean” to an institution already associated with Wainscott has come to signal the start of a more formal consolidation.

  Wainscott, he might remember from news accounts, had been publicly criticized for its so-called anomalous relationships with affiliated institutions, and this had become a matter of some concern in light of the auditing that attends federal funding, not to mention the sensitivity to adverse publicity given the plans for a major capital campaign. I recalled for him that a visiting dean had been at the Thornton Arboretum just before that fine institution was trimmed back to a mere sprig of Wainscott’s Department of Botany. I told Lieutenant Tracy, who was all the time taking meticulous notes, that I was not opposed in every case to this practice. Wainscott’s acquisition of the old City Observatory made sense as the place had become decrepit, and the university does have an established and well-respected Department of Astrophysics. But, I said to him, did anyone really think it was in the public interest for Newhumber Conservatory, a financially sound, well-administered school of music (I was on the board of trustees), to be reduced to a mere appendage of the Wainscott Music Department? I admitted to him that I am no great admirer of the present director, Arnie Beaumont, whose little confections I find scarcely transcend the category of random noise.

  Lieutenant Tracy took all this down, and I went on to explain to him that the MOM is still not technically part of Wainscott, however complex and intertwined the affiliation has become over the years, particularly between the university and the Genetics Lab. For complete union to occur, the Board of Governors would have to dissolve itself by unanimous vote, and even then it would be possible to challenge the matter in court. I said I had spelled out my objections to the consolidation in several memoranda to Dr. Commer and to the Board itself, pointing out the clause in the Rules of Governance enabling the Recording Secretary “from time to time and in an appropriate manner [to] inform and advise the Board relative to matters he [the Recording Secretary] deems important to the sound operation of the museum.” I told Lieutenant Tracy that I had been very frank, in a cordial way, of course, with the late Dean Fessing regarding my views. And I believe I had more than a little influence on his. I showed Lieutenant Tracy the dean’s Interim Status Report to the Select Committee on Consolidation, which, while citing continuing concern for the financial situation at the MOM, especially its growing reliance on the institute founded by Onoyoko Pharmaceuticals, also indicated that a way should be considered to maintain, and I quote, “the unique character of the museum, which makes it a place attractive to scholars and public alike.” Those are, in fact, my own words.

  The officer appeared to contemplate all this for a moment before asking who, besides myself, in what he called “the museum complex” might not want the university to take over.

  To answer that I had to explain how the Genetics Lab and the Primate Pavilion were really only affiliated institutions of the MOM, that is, theoretically under the Board of Governors but in reality constituting a kind of acade
mic free zone between the university and the museum.

  The lieutenant lifted his chin just a fraction, and I thought I could detect a glint of significance in the steely, noncommittal blue of his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘academic free zone’?”

  “Well, for instance,” I replied, “many of the researchers in both the lab and the pavilion are Wainscott faculty. But when it comes to fund-raising, say, or benefits, bonuses, patent rights, they use their extramural affiliation to do pretty much what they want to. Quite aside from that, the resulting budgetary process is skewed, I’m told, beyond the reach of chaos theory. It’s the real reason, I think, the university wants to take us over. And frankly, sir, they are more than welcome to both of the other institutions, but the museum, qua museum, cannot be absorbed without a unanimous vote by the Board, as I’ve said.”