The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Well, enough of this. But Drex’s laugh … it’s the stuff of nightmares.

  Speaking of which, I found an anonymous message from someone in the Genetics Lab waiting for me in my e-mail when I returned from lunch today. I am punching it up, as they say, right into this journal:

  TO: detour@mom.wain.edu

  FROM: worried@genlab.wain.edu

  Dear Mr. Detour: [Sic! Someone in UNINET, the university-wide e-mail system, gave me that designation, a slipup I have been trying without much success to get remedied.]

  I’m sending you this message because I saw you on television after they found Professor [sic] Fessing and you seem like a nice person. I’m sending this message tracer-proof not because I don’t trust you but if it got out that I told you I could lose my job and my pension and everything. There’s stuff going here that’s very hush-hush. One of the technicians told me that they’ve put hidden cameras in sensitive areas that are on 24 hours a day. And Dr. Kaplan who is usually a very nice man got mad at me when I accidentally closed the safe where they keep the protocol notebooks because the safe locks automatically when it closes and they need two people to get it open. I know Dr. Kaplan was one of the senior researchers that didn’t want to contribute to the sperm bank Professor Gottling set up in the specimen lab. I heard Dr. Kaplan complaining about it to Professor Gottling but when Professor Gottling asks you for something it’s like an order. Charlene who’s the secretary at the specimen lab says a lot of the older guys take a long time and don’t come up with much. But she tells them not to worry because she can get some of the maintenance guys to fill in for them. I don’t know if any of this has anything to do with Professor [sic] Fessing’s murder but someone ought to know about it. I have got to go now but I will let you know if I find anything else.

  Worried

  There have been rumors for some time now, somewhat better punctuated and spelled, I hope, than this one (which I cleaned up for the record), that Stoddard Gottling has been bending if not breaking the formal and informal restraints normally placed on genetics research and applications. But I don’t see what that would have to do with the murder of Cranston Fessing. Unless … Unless the consolidation would mean the termination of some project … No, it’s too fantastical. Or is it? In crime as in art and science and life, one must consider all the possibilities.

  I suppose I should send a copy of this communication over to Lieutenant Tracy. But, frankly, I doubt very much that it has anything to do with the Fessing case, about which I can report no breaks. Amazing, isn’t it, how quickly interest in the most hideous of crimes fades away. I haven’t heard from the lieutenant in a week, and life around here has resumed its unpunctuated equilibrium.

  Speaking of the late dean, there have been some rather tasteless jokes circulating about his fate. I hear someone has come up with a “Decanal Cookbook” and is soliciting recipes over the e-mail network. Even my friend Izzy Landes has not been impervious to this ghoulish ribaldry. Last Friday I ran into him in the Club library. Over coffee we got to talking about the dean, and about what had happened and what was happening, when he asked me, with that mischievous sidelong glance of his, what I thought “they served Fessing with.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The wine, Norman, the wine. Was it a red or a white? Red I would think, a Bordeaux, but not a premier cru.”

  I tutted at him, but his face was a moon of mirth. “Really,” he went on, “what are we, after all, red meat or white meat?”

  I tutted again and told him he had been spending too much time with Corny Chard.

  Well, I must say it’s good to get back to this unofficial Log after nearly a week. I feel as though I could go on writing for another hour. Perhaps, though, I am simply reluctant go out into that good night, which will, I know, remind me of Elsbeth, and I will arrive at the Club in a maudlin state and perhaps drink more wine than is good for me.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 16

  Despite a contretemps today with the egregious Mr. Morin and the worthies of the Wainscott Public Relations Office, I have been in an absolute dither of aesthetic bliss since yesterday afternoon. Perhaps I should describe the unpleasantness first.

  Upon arrival this morning I learned that the university has appointed someone named Oliver Scrabbe to succeed Cranston Fessing as Visiting Dean to the Museum of Man. All well and good. (Although I had hoped that the university might desist in its plans after what happened to Fessing, not that good should come from evil, although it often does.) At any rate, a Mr. Bells or Balls in the Wainscott Public Relations Office called to tell me that he was faxing over Dean Scrabbe’s CV and that I was to draft a press release announcing the appointment and send it over to them for approval. I refused on the simple grounds that I do not report to anyone at Wainscott and that the appointment is being made by the university and not by the museum.

  As I should have expected, they went over my head to Malachy Morin, who came lumbering into my office with a “what’s this about our not writing the press release for the new dean?” I told him quite simply that I don’t see why we should do their work for them, especially since they, along with everyone else, deserted me when there was a real public relations crisis. I insinuated that his toadying to the Wainscott bureaucracy was a form of cowardice, especially for someone as big and strong as he was. It was enough to make him beat a quick retreat, and I nearly felt sorry for him when his secretary, Doreen, an attractive but hard-faced, gum-chewing type, brought me a page of the most pathetic copy. Apparently he had tried to get her to write it. I finally decided to help them. It would have been just like him to put the thing out under my name, and I don’t want to get off on a poor footing myself with Oliver Scrabbe, who must be a brave man, considering Dean Fessing’s fate.

  I don’t really know much about the man. He doesn’t play tennis, as far as I know, and I haven’t seen him at the Club. It would appear from his curriculum vitae that he is another scholar turned administrator. The title of his Ph.D. thesis, “Elements of Philo-Semitism in the Writings of Adolph Schicklgruber: A Deconstructionist Reading of Mein Kampf,” indicates he is some kind of language theorist. I assume he will be going over the late dean’s files, including copies of my memoranda to Dr. Commer and the Board. Somehow I will have to call his attention to my views on the proposed consolidation in a way that doesn’t sound repetitious. Perhaps I could talk Dr. Commer into a response to the Interim Status Report, which I will write, of course, and in which I will stress our wholehearted endorsement of the late dean’s recognition of our unique status vis-à-vis the university. Perhaps I can get to it next week, although I will be spending more time with Malachy Morin, interviewing another batch of candidates for the press assistant position. All this busywork. I simply must find time if I am to start work on the history of the museum.

  But I also have some good news. I received by registered mail yesterday morning a miniature Ming Buddha carved in ivory. It’s no more than an inch and half high in a full lotus position, and the ivory has aged beautifully, giving the Gautama’s genial face an old and wise aspect. And while it’s going to cost me a small ransom (I have it on spec from Remstein’s of New York), I have such a perfect place for it that I will simply have to have it. The wonderful thing about collecting is that one can indulge and invest at the same time, although I cannot conceive of cashing in a single one of my precious things before I cash in myself. Anyway, I showed the piece to Esther Sung Lee, whose office is right next to mine. I know it is genuine, of course, Eliot Remstein being who he is; but I don’t think I have seen Esther so enthusiastic about a piece of mine since the white Qing snuff bottle with a dragon carved in blue overlay that I acquired some ten years ago. (Esther also knows that my collection will go to the museum.)

  I left work early and hurried home with my treasure safely tucked under my arm in its packing box. I knew exactly where I was going to put it. For several years now, I have been nurturing a small grove of red cedar bonsai arranged in a semicir
cle at one end of a redwood planter measuring roughly two by three feet. The sides come up about six inches, giving it the appearance, what with soil, moss that passes for grass, and sand that simulates gravel, of a walled garden. Not long ago I found for it a shallow dish of milky jade that I set into a bed of tiny pebbles so that it looks exactly like a goldfish pool. Well, I cannot tell you how exquisitely my little Buddha fits in, seated just on the lawn in front of the trees contemplating the pool. If only I could find some tiny, tiny goldfish!

  The arrangement is such a success I have placed it on the gateleg table in the window alcove of the living room. I think it calls for a dinner party. On the other hand, perhaps it doesn’t. I already think of my little garden as a refuge, a place in my mind where, serene as Buddha, inhaling the fragrance of cedars, I contemplate the peace of the void.

  Speaking of voids, the fog appears to have kept Mr. Drex and his beasts at bay for the night. And there’s a concert at the Conservatory to look forward to, even though the Newhumber Players will more than likely make a hash of the Dvořák Piano Quintet in A, and there’s the obligatory piece of noise by a student of Beaumont, and then one of those infinitely sad, infinitely beautiful late pieces by Brahms. Strange, when I think of it, how Elsbeth never cared much for Brahms.

  TUESDAY, APRIL 21

  A gorgeous cardinal and a flock of neatly bibbed chickadees, which looked in contrast like clergy of a lesser rank, curates, perhaps, graced my bird feeder this morning. One of those quirky late-season storms had mantled the scene — porch railing, feeder, rosebushes, and hedge of hemlock — with an inch or so of snow. And as I sipped tea and contemplated it from the kitchen table, a wonderful tranquillity descended on me. My back garden is one of the things that keeps me in this old place that Mother bought after Father died. It’s really too large for my personal needs — I could easily do most of my entertaining at the Club. But there’s my collection, and I feel I’ve grown into the place, a modest enough Federalist structure at heart that came out of the Greek Revival of the mid-nineteenth century with a colonnaded entrance, pediments galore, and half-moon windows set into the tympanums at either end of the house.

  My Neoclassical tranquillity didn’t last very long. By the time I started for work, the sun had turned the snow to slush, and I arrived to find Lieutenant Tracy standing in my office perusing on the wall opposite the bookcase some of the awards and citations I have received over the years. (In 1977 I was named Recording Secretary of the Year by the American Association of Recording Secretaries, and in 1982 I received the much-coveted Order of Merit for Undocumented Excellence, just to name a few.)

  The door was open, he said to my rather frosty good morning. As a professional lawman he remained apparently impervious to any sense of trespass. I had scarcely hung my overcoat on the coatrack that stands sentinel near the door when he had his little spiral notebook out and had started in. It all seemed quite routine, the blandness and repetition of the questions, I mean. I nearly yawned when he flipped back through pages of his notebook, paused, then said, “You told me, Mr. de Ratour, that you don’t cook except for a boiled egg and tea in the morning.”

  Although not a shrugger, I shrugged. “I can make a tuna fish salad sandwich, and I know how to heat a store-bought chicken pot pie in the oven,” I replied. I glanced at my watch to indicate the soupçon of irritation I was beginning to feel.

  The lieutenant remained nonplussed. “I’ve been told you give very good dinner parties.”

  “Oh,” I said, getting the drift of his questions and controlling with an effort a welling sense of dread, “but I don’t do any of the cooking, any of the real cooking.” I explained how Marge Littlefield sometimes drops by beforehand to help out, or, if I’m having more than a few people in, how I get Yvette and her husband, Gideon, to come over. They’re excellent cooks, especially of this blackened Cajun stuff, although they do leave quite a dent in the sherry. I said I have used caterers, but I find the food, despite all the froufrou, a bit insipid.

  The lieutenant, tweedily enough dressed to suggest he was trying to go undercover in academia, took this down and flipped again through his notebook. “I’ve been told you make a very good pesto sauce.”

  For a moment I didn’t know quite how to respond. I was both gratified to hear my pesto praised and appalled that someone, presumably a friend, would tell the police about it. The dread grew to a kind of nausea. I became acutely aware that I was being “grilled” as a suspect, that this other person — however much it was his duty — thought it possible that I was a murderous cannibal. And as I hadn’t told the lieutenant earlier about my pesto sauce, I began to feel perversely guilty, not of murder or cannibalism but of withholding evidence. I tried to frown but laughed guiltily instead. “Lieutenant,” I said, attempting to sound nonchalant, “making pesto is more like mixing a drink than cooking.” I explained to him how I use nothing but a few handfuls of fresh basil, which I render with olive oil in the blender to a kind of green slurry. To this I add grated pecorino, crushed walnuts, a touch of pressed garlic, salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon, and — my secret ingredient — some finely chopped dried tomatoes.

  He took this down, nodding as though with approval, as though he were going to try it himself. “What kind of a food processor do you use?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to be helpful, “just the old Waring blender my mother had.” Only then did it occur me what he was doing. Extraordinary, I thought, the way a detective’s mind must work, the way suspicion gets raised nearly to an art form.

  A forlorn art form. When the lieutenant finally left, going in the direction of Malachy Morin’s office, I fell into a state of what I can only call nervous depression out of which nothing — my Buddha, my collection, the museum, thoughts of friends, the work on the history — nothing could rouse me. The very air seemed blighted. Not only my own life but all life seemed a beastly, futile attempt to rise above itself. That another person, even though it was his duty, could consider me capable of such depravity left me crushed beyond words. I answered the telephone — a routine call about scheduling a meeting — and spoke like an automaton. I shriveled inwardly until there seemed nothing left of my spirit but a dying ember of anger.

  It didn’t die. I wouldn’t let it. I nursed it to a flame of real anger, a kind of unfocused rage against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. I quite worked myself into an elated anger, or perhaps an angry elation, during which I resolved, with a solemn inner vow, to find the murderer myself. I got quite carried away with the idea. In classic style I saw myself assembling the likely suspects in, say, Neanderthal Hall, or, better, the Twitchell Room, where, with my clues and evidence marshaled and with ineluctable deduction, I would expose the foul miscreant. And then, having allowed myself the sour pleasure of this fancy, I felt committed to undertake what at first glance I am not in the least suited for. I doubt, for instance, that I have the lieutenant’s knack for suspicion. Nor do I have what’s appropriately called “the killer instinct.” I have neither a badge nor a gun, which is to say authority. On the other hand, am I not a trained archaeologist, that is, an investigator, one given to literally digging for evidence, sifting for clues, even though it probably was, in my case, a sublimated search for beauty?

  With an agitation now invigorating, I stood and began to pace the diagonal of my office, which is exactly ten of my indoor strides. I moved as though to keep up with my mind as it pondered more deeply the murder and mutilation (which is what cooking is, after all) of Dean Cranston Fessing. Why the good dean? Why the elaborate disposal of his remains? Why no attempt to effectively hide the remains of his remains? Was he simply the chance victim of some demonic cult? Or was it done to make it look that way? Or — and this is when I started to feel truly excited — both! I began, like Inspector Morse, to see the outlines of a design, a kind of fearful symmetry, a perverse beauty wherein not merely the dean’s demise but the manner of it was precisely what his mission to the Museum of Man had, perh
aps inadvertently, threatened. In murdering and disposing of the dean the way they did, the perpetrators had, so to speak, their cake in the very eating of it.

  I sat down and began to compile a list of suspects, if only because suspicion is my weak suit. To suspect someone of such depravity, after all, takes a kind of imagination, a kind of creative paranoia. I began with Corny Chard because he is, conventionally, the most obvious suspect and therefore the least likely to be guilty. Moreover, he lacks, as far as I know, a motive in the specific case of Dean Fessing. I certainly put Damon Drex down, but without a whole lot of conviction. He’s too obsessed with his apes.… Although any consolidation with the university could have adversely affected his operation. And the culinary aspects. Unless he’s some kind of closet gourmet. Then Thad Pilty. Again, my powers of suspicion failed me. And yet, of all of them, Thad has the most to lose from merger with Wainscott. The late dean had put all major projects on hold, including Thad’s plans to turn Neanderthal Hall into a dioramic monument to his own research. I listed Malachy Morin as well, but more out of spite than conviction. I can, if I really try, imagine Morin and his pals sitting around like savages with cans of beer and feasting on the dean — had he been, say, roasted whole on a spit. Otherwise the cuisine is all wrong.

  I concluded the morning in a state of rare self-satisfaction. I determined not to let my “investigation” interfere either with my regular duties or with my plans to write a history of the museum. I determined to become, in the tradition of all amateur sleuths, a deal more sensitive to seemingly irrelevant details, to keep, in short, my eyes and ears open.