The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Ah well, despite such a beginning, my natural ebullience withered as soon as I crossed the Lagoon Bridge and the museum came into sight. What heretofore had been a cause of delight — the view of five stories of elegant brick rising above the blush of budding sycamores on Belmont Avenue — filled me with boding instead. I suffered the awful presentiment that Cranston Fessing’s killer was not merely in the Museum of Man but of it, an endemic sickness, part of our killer genes.

  It didn’t help to find that Lieutenant Tracy had called. I tried to call him back, but he wasn’t available. I don’t know why it should make me nervous that he called. I know I am innocent, at least of Fessing’s murder.

  Indeed, as part of my own investigation of that murder I went down to the archives in search of the files of Raul Brauer’s expeditions to Loa Hoa in the late sixties and early seventies. Imagine my surprise, my foreboding, my excitement, to find the whole section missing! I summoned Mrs. Walsh, the archivist, a woman notorious for her lack of organization, and she could give me no satisfactory answer as to where they might be. They could be out on loan, she said, with the incipient panic of the naturally disorganized, rummaging around her cluttered desk. I signed out some files on the early history of the museum, calmed Mrs. Walsh into a state of coherence, and asked her would she, with utmost discretion, make inquiries for me as to what happened to the materials from the Brauer expeditions.

  I returned to my office in a perturbed state of suspicion. I could understand if, say, one or two of the files had been missing. Or, say, if some legitimate researcher had signed them out in good order. Or had they been misfiled, perhaps under Polynesia or Oceania. They belong, rightfully, in the extensive Marquesan section, which is arranged chronologically. But they were simply gone. I am loath to raise a ruckus about the matter because to do so might alert certain parties that I am on to their game. And quite aside from not wanting to tip my hand, I do not look forward in the least to sharing Dean Fessing’s fate.

  My state of mind wasn’t helped much to find another of those anonymous messages from the Genetics Lab in my e-mail.

  Dear Mr. Detour [sic]:

  I was hoping something would happen after I sent you that first message. I was serious when I told you something is going on over here that someone should hear about. Maybe the Pope was right when he said it was wrong to use artificial fertilizers. You know when they take an egg from a woman and a sperm from a man and mix them together in a test tube. When they were doing it to find bad genes for diseases I thought it was okay. Now I think they’re doing something else, but I don’t know enough about it to tell you. All I know is that Professor Gottling stays here even more than he used to and is even more grouchy than he usually is. He works nights and keeps things secret even from Mr. Onoyoko and Dr. Bushi. Dr. Bushi is very polite and bows a lot but he doesn’t smile as much as he used to. I found out one person has been fired because they recorded her on one of the secret cameras using the phone in Professor Gottling’s lab without permission. They also have a whole section of tape showing Dr. Hanker and Charlene doing it on the couch in the office with the safe. Charlene must have taken him in there to help him get his contribution to the sperm bank because she had one of those little collection cups, but it doesn’t look like a whole lot got into the cup. One of the technicians made a copy of the tape and has been showing it on the monitor in the basement. It’s about twenty minutes long and there’s no sound but you can really see everything and all the different positions they tried even though they didn’t take all their clothes off. It surprised everyone because Charlene is kind of fat and has a funny little mustache and Dr. Hanker’s wife is supposed to be very pretty and rich and thin. I don’t know if telling you this is whistle-blowing or not, but I’ll let you know more when I find out.

  Worried

  I’m not sure what to make of it as there have been so many grumbles and rumbles and rumors coming out of the lab over the past couple of years. Marge Littlefield has told me that ever since Professor Gottling and Onoyoko Pharmaceuticals established an independent institute within the Genetics Lab the place has been running virtually on its own, institutionally ducking, so to speak, behind the MOM or behind Wainscott, as suits its purposes. I’ve printed the communication out and clipped it into my Fessing notebook, though how any of this fits into a larger paradigm of suspicion is beyond me at present. The assumption of university control over the museum would entail the same for the lab and the Primate Pavilion followed by some rigorous and perhaps retroactive oversight and regulation. A motive, perhaps, for doing away with the dean? But why all the haute cuisine? Is the culinary aspect part of an elaborate smoke screen or an attempt to embarrass a university all too sensitive to its public image? How might all this fit in with the Brauer cult? Why do I sense in this whole affair a mad imagination at work? Or am I letting my own imagination, fired by suspicion, run away with me?

  Well, to change the subject completely, I’ve often wondered what our children would have been like had Elsbeth and I ever married. I mean, we were something of a contrast, perhaps even a mismatch: she is scarcely five feet and I am well over six. I was and remain quite lean, and she, alas, always quite generously endowed, has gotten a tad plump since marrying, although I haven’t seen her in fifteen years, not since that disastrous visit I made to Philadelphia. And while I am pale eyed, blond, and thinning on top, with a nose of Roman dimensions, Elsbeth has dark, alluring eyes, lustrous, nearly black hair, and generally pretty if somewhat blunt features. I imagine the boys would have had my long legs and slender frame. Of course, they could have turned out short and stocky, like Elsbeth, while the girls, had we any, might have gangled like me. Or perhaps something in between. One of them surely would have had my mother’s russet coloring, the strawberry redness of her hair tingeing so delicately the features of her face. Poor Mother never quite approved of Elsbeth. “Don’t you think she’s a bit common?” she once said to me. “I mean, her father is a car dealer.” Mother, I’m afraid, was a bit common herself, common, I mean, in her consideration of social standing. And a bit mad as she got on. She didn’t want me to marry Elsbeth or anyone else for that matter, but she did complain in her dotage of not having grandchildren. I told her you couldn’t have one without the other, not in those days anyway. These days it happens, I’m told, even among respectable people, as we slide back toward some state of nature. I suppose it won’t be long before people start coupling in public, like dogs.

  Speaking of which, I mustn’t forget the first of the Oversight Committee meetings on the Paleolithic diorama is set for Thursday. Thad Pilty came in late this afternoon to ask me to sit in on the meetings and record them. He can be quite disarming when he wants to be, but there was a disingenuous note in his voice, a kind of false confiding when he told me that “political considerations” had prompted him to agree to the committee’s request for the hearings. He said, his eyes not really meeting mine, that in the wake of what happened to Dean Fessing he felt any resistance to the committee’s request would be seen in the wrong light. Still, had he followed my advice, contained in a memorandum sent to Dr. Commer and copied to him, the issue might have been limited to the legitimacy of the committee’s purview, rather than the form and content of his precious diorama. At the very least the issue would have been the venue. But Professor Pilty conceded even that, and the hearings are to be held in the Twitchell Room.

  This happens to be a more serious matter than he realizes. Mason Twitchell, a pioneering giant in the field of ethnopaleosiphonapterology, which is the study of fossil fleas, was a benign presence at the MOM for many years and a powerful advocate for its independence even as he occupied one of the university’s most venerable chairs. His portrait, a very good likeness in splendid academic plumage, showing his kindly but intense blue eyes, his persuasive jaw, and the backward sweep of his abundant white hair, dominates the round table in the room named for him. Of course when I knew him (we sometimes had coffee together in the wonderful old cafeteria o
n the second floor, which has since been turned into offices), he was getting on in years but still had that twinkle in his eyes and was quite gracious to everyone. But I’m sure he is turning in his grave at the thought of the room being used for a hearing by an oversight committee from the university.

  I am still trying to arrange a dinner party in honor of my little shrine. What immense, vicarious peace that tableau affords me! Strange, the little things that keep us going.

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 6

  Unannounced, dapper as ever, Lieutenant Tracy appeared in my office just after eleven this morning, and, with a politeness that produced a small moment of melodrama, asked if he could shut the door. I acquiesced, and he sat before my desk and requested permission to smoke. I nodded, and he took out a cigarette, lit it with a flick and snap of his lighter, and, exhaling toward the ceiling, said, “Tell me, Mr. de Ratour, “what do you know of the relationship between Professor Pilty and Dean Fessing?”

  “Pilty and Fessing?” I repeated. I shook my head most emphatically and told him that I had had on more than one occasion the pleasure of meeting Theresa Pilty and their two lovely children. But knowing how little appearances count for these days, I threw in some gossip I had heard about Pilty and a female graduate student with whom he apparently had a fling during one of those long, arduous forays in the field, when any kind of comfort is at a premium.

  The lieutenant was in turn shaking his head before I finished. “I mean strictly professional. What do you know of their differences over some kind of exhibit Professor Pilty wants to build?”

  I informed the lieutenant that the dean had attempted, upon his appointment, to forestall the initiation of any major projects pending the completion of his one-year term and his final report to the Select Committee on Consolidation. I said that this stance had generated resistance from those departments — principally the Primate Pavilion and the Genetics Lab, but also the MOM proper in the person of Professor Pilty — that had begun or were about to begin major undertakings. I noted that I had played a small if complicated role in some of these tussles by sending Dean Fessing carbons of my memoranda to the Board and Dr. Commer.

  “Complicated in what way?” The police officer was watching me closely and taking notes. I had to resist an impulse to produce my own notebook and do the same.

  “I say ‘complicated,’ Lieutenant, because while opposed myself to the dean’s mission, I was also opposed to the installation of the diorama on Paleolithic life and did not particularly welcome support from what I consider inappropriate sources.”

  Lieutenant Tracy finished a note he was making of my remarks before reaching into a trim attaché case and extracting a folder of correspondence between Pilty and Fessing that he had culled from the latter’s files. Well, I must say, the memoranda showed the fur really flying between those two. While the dean began politely enough regarding plans for the diorama, it wasn’t long before Thad Pilty sounded rather like I sound, saying that the dean’s mission at the MOM was “evaluative and as such should concern itself with neither museum policy or [sic] administration.” Mind your own business, in other words.

  I told the lieutenant I felt curiously vindicated but hardly saw in these exchanges, notwithstanding the dean’s less than veiled threat “to take the matter to a level of authority in such a way as to make the diorama problematic even in the long run,” a cause for murder.

  He made the tolerant nod of a professional listening to an amateur and asked me how valuable I estimated the diorama to be to Professor Pilty.

  I hesitated to respond, all the time aware that hesitation signified the contrary of what I really thought rather than what I had to say. I took a deep breath. I said, “The diorama is very important to Thad Pilty. Through it, I believe, he wants to dramatize his discovery and interpretation of Lucille and her family, a Neanderthal group from the middle to late Paleolithic. But I can’t see …”

  The lieutenant was still watching me closely, his cigarette smoking on the ashtray, his pen poised over his spiral notebook. I tried, not very successfully I’m afraid, to dissemble a rush of disquieting thoughts, not just about Pilty but about what I had, or rather hadn’t, found out about Raul Brauer. I’m not sure now why I told the officer nothing of my suspicions. Loyalty to the institution? A sense of the information being proprietary? The fact that I really had nothing to go on but rumors, conjectures, will-o’-the-wisps? He finally stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “What’s surprising, Mr. de Ratour,” he said, stopping at the door, “is how little we sometimes know about the people we think we know. Give me a call if anything occurs to you about Professor Pilty that might help us.”

  His words had their desired effect. I sat in the wake of his singular scents — aftershave, cigarette smoke, gunmetal oil — having doubts about Thad Pilty. The man is extraordinarily ambitious. He may have perceived Fessing as a threat. He wouldn’t be squeamish about carving up a body as he is an expert on human anatomy and has been called in by the state police to lend his expertise to some very messy cases. And he did concede rather easily to the demands of the Oversight Committee to hold hearings. And the lieutenant is right, isn’t he, about how little we sometimes know about each other.

  THURSDAY, MAY 7

  I can only report that if the first meeting of the Oversight Committee provides any indication of what’s to come, Thad Pilty is in for some very choppy times with his diorama of Paleolithic life. I do not wish to gloat, but I cannot deny a certain grim satisfaction at what happened today.

  It has cleared since this morning, when a spring storm lashed us with a bright rain, producing in the corridor outside the Twitchell Room a flowering of taut umbrellas and a few small puddles under the coatrack. I arrived a bit late to find the attendees already inside and still animated with the exhilaration of weather as they settled in. Some were pouring coffee for themselves from the urn at the side table or saying cheery hellos to those they knew.

  The meeting itself began equably enough. I took my seat, as customary, facing Mason Twitchell’s portrait. Someone suggested that we introduce ourselves, and so we did, going around the table clockwise for self-descriptions the length of which varied according to status (the more important the personage, the shorter, I’ve noticed). Constance Brattle, the rather hard-bottomed chair of the committee, began by describing herself as Director of Gender Studies at Wainscott. (Professor Brattle, who serves on many committees, is the coeditor of Blame: Source and Resource, a compendium of scholarly articles about a subject on which she is a nationally recognized figure.) Next to her was Randall Athol, a specialist on ethics at our sad little Divinity School. Dr. Commer, at his turn, simply sat in the vacant silence that attends the declining old until Athol tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “Who are you?” Dr. Commer, ever the gentleman, shook the educator’s hand and whispered back, “Dr. Commer.” But we all heard it. Next was Dr. Gertrude Gordon, an oncologist at Wainscott’s small but excellent medical school. An impressive woman of middle years, she wore the impatient expression of someone who has better things to do. I then introduced myself and explained what I was doing. Thad Pilty sat to my left, followed by Cornelius Chard, whom everyone seemed to know, then Professor John Murdleston, a shaggy-haired little man who is Curator of the Ethnocoprolite Collections in the MOM. These latter two, like Dr. Commer, were in attendance as representatives of the museum. (I had expected Malachy Morin there in that capacity, but he has a knack for avoiding these kinds of meetings.) Marlene Parkers, a black woman of considerable presence, represented the university’s Office of Outreach. I was surprised to see, sitting next to Ms. Parkers, Mr. Edo Onoyoko, who was introduced by his translator, Ms. Kushiro, a winsome young woman of his nation, who then introduced herself. Bertha Schanke, quite preoccupied with the plate of donuts in front of her, simply stated her name followed by the word bitch, standing, I think, for BITCH, a coalition of local victims’ groups. Next to her was the ubiquitous Ariel Dearth, the Leona Von Beaut Professor of Situational Ethics
and Litigation Development in the Law School. Then my friend Israel Landes, Smythe Professor of the History of Science, who was sitting next to his good friend Father S. J. O’Gould, S. J. Father O’Gould holds a joint appointment in paleontology and philosophy and is well-known for his revival of the ideas and ideals of Teilhard de Chardin, a fellow Jesuit. Last year Father O’Gould came out with his long-awaited Wonderful Strife: Natural Selection and the Inevitability of Intelligence. One reviewer, I remember, castigated him as “an out-and-out unreconstructed neo-optimist,” but the book was, surprisingly, well received.

  Professor Brattle, following a perfunctory note of gratitude for the use of the room, went on to make it clear that the hearing would be anything but salubrious for Professor Pilty’s project. The committee, she said, reported directly to President Twill, who, she added, dropping her chained glasses for effect, took the committee’s findings and recommendations “very seriously.” Prim and proper in brooched blouse and no-nonsense business suit (the shoulder pads did make her look a bit like a bespectacled football player), Professor Brattle stated that, as chair of the committee, she had been distressed to learn about the plans for the diorama at such a late date. She said the form and content of the diorama represented “an area of profound sensitivities” and that the Museum of Man, “the very name of which makes it suspect from a genderist’s perspective,” had acted without regard for “significant and increasingly powerful marginalized constituencies within the university community.” She even dragged in poor Cranston Fessing, insinuating that the “climate” at the museum had had something to do with the dean’s fate and intimating that the committee might be compelled to extend its purview into areas beyond the project under discussion.