The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  I thought at first he had asked to meet with me at the instigation of Malachy Morin, who I assumed had warned him that my interest in preserving the integrity of the museum requires at least minimal acknowledgment — a five-minute lecture and dismissal.

  The dean quickly disabused me of that notion. Hardly had I sat down when he asked me in a tone that sounded like sarcasm born of exasperation, “What exactly does Malachy Morin do here at the museum?” I was tempted to shrug at the man and his unpleasantness, but it was one of those occasions when I couldn’t resist being candid. I said I didn’t know with any detail what Mr. Morin did at the museum, but I was under the impression that whatever it was it wasn’t much. Dean Scrabbe regarded me for a moment with a baleful stare, as though Mr. Morin’s shortcomings were my responsibility. He went on to vent the opinion that the Executive Director “appears to lack the most elementary understanding as to how this institution functions or how its finances operate.” I said I could not answer for Mr. Morin insofar as I had been increasingly and in direct contravention of the Rules of Governance excluded from meetings where financial matters were decided. That did little to mollify the Visiting Dean. I began to think that it was perhaps the arrival of Scrabbe that had reduced M. Morin to such a jittery mess.

  Quite abruptly, the dean changed tack, dumping the wind out of his own sails, so to speak, in assuming a less accusatory tone. What, he asked, did I know about the Onoyoko Institute? Again I wasn’t much help. I said I had not been made privy to the institute’s workings, its disbursements, invoicing procedures, et cetera, as it was a private body with no formal connection to any part of the MOM. I assumed, I said, that it had been established to fund what is called technology transfer. “But isn’t it in fact funding all sorts of things?” the dean asked. It would appear that way, I answered, in a tone meant to convey that I found his question stupid. Why don’t you ask them? I said. There must be records. “Oh, there are records and records and records.” He pointed to several cardboard file boxes stacked next to a filing cabinet. “We have a regular paper trail of invoices, disbursements, expenses, grants, refunds that appear, from initial glance anyway, to go in circles.”

  I asked, “Is this something Dean Fessing was working on?”

  The dean regarded me for a moment as though trying to decide whether or not to take me into his confidence. “Did Cranston talk to you about this aspect of his work at all?” Before I could shake my head in the negative, he had spun the video screen of the computer around in my direction. “Let me show you something,” he said, working the keys so that a list of files appeared on the screen. He pointed to one labeled “ONOBILPRCDS/FST.” Then he called it up. It was blank. He did the same with another one called “GENDREX/INV.” It too was blank. Then again with “EXPNS/SCL.” He kept a skeptical eye on me as he handed me a printout. “This is a hard copy of Cranston’s program file he printed out a week before he disappeared,” he said. Underlined were all of the programs brought up on the screen. The first showed it had used nearly thirty thousand bytes of the disk capacity, the second more than seventy-five thousand, and the third about forty thousand.

  At that point I took out my small black notebook and jotted down some notes. Scrabbe’s eyebrows gave an inquiring lift. “A little investigation of my own,” I said. “No backup?” I asked, distracted by the screen and a file labeled, I think, “RATOURISM.” Of course, it could have been “RE:TOURISM.” My eyes are not what they used to be.

  “Nothing I’ve been able to find,” he said and pivoted the screen back to where it was.

  “Have you told the police about this?”

  “I mentioned it to one of them, but he didn’t seem interested. He told me to keep him posted.”

  We lapsed into the kind of silence that signals the end of a meeting. I was about to bring up the future of the museum when, as though remembering something incidental, he told me he had read my memoranda to Dr. Commer that had been copied to the late dean. In a rather dismissive way, he gave me some pro forma assurances that, whatever the future relations between Wainscott and the MOM, the museum would remain open to the public. But on what basis? I asked. Ten hours a week to let people wander through a couple of rooms festooned with a few bits from the collections? This, I told him, was not what the founders had in mind and would not meet the requirements of the charter; which, I reminded him, were subject to the law.

  That got a Dracula grimace out of him and the observation that nothing lasts forever. Except bureaucracy, I countered, and told him it would be little more than cultural vandalism to turn the atrium into dull little offices for the creation of paperwork.

  Well, he really showed me his fangs on that one. Did I have any idea, he asked me, what a financial mess the MOM was in right now? Did I realize that the museum was operating under at least five separate budget systems? He ticked them off for me, taking evident relish in describing the mess: there was the old MOM budget, dependent on income from a shrinking and badly managed endowment and declining admissions. There were the parts of the museum underwritten by contracts with Wainscott, an arrangement confused by separate accounting systems for archaeology/anthropology, primatology, and molecular biology. And that was all quite aside from the MOM’s tangled relationship with the Onoyoko Institute and other funding sources. Despite what appear to be heroic efforts by Marge Littlefield and her staff, he went on, none of the accounting procedures conforms to federal regulations, which daily grow more byzantine, with the result that grants from NIH, NEH, NSF, and IMS are all in a paperwork limbo of extravagant complexity. “The danger, Mr. de Ratour,” he said, leaning toward me with his amazing fangs, “is that the MOM, unless Wainscott steps in, will simply go bankrupt and disappear.” And he added, “I can assure you that that is a distinct possibility.”

  I was, as you can imagine, quite taken aback by all of this. It often amazes me how different reality is from the way one imagines it to be. Not that I haven’t known the MOM’s financial arrangements to be complicated. We are part of the university’s telephone and computer network, after all, and our employees, depending on their health plans, are allowed to use Keller Infirmary, all of which is quite aside from the hodgepodge of systems whereby the museum is paid for lab space, use of the collections, and so on. But over the years I have relied on a financial statement of some detail from Marge Littlefield to include in the MOM Annual Report.

  With as much dignity as I could muster, I retreated from Dean Scrabbe’s office and made my way down to Accounting, where Marge and her two assistants attend to numerous forms in an eye-blinding fluorescent glare. Margery and I go back to when she was Margery O’Donovan, one of five gorgeous O’Donovan sisters, and before Bill Littlefield came along … But then I’ve always been a little slow where women are concerned. She must be fifty now, and I still find myself having thoughts, although I’m not sure I like the way she’s done her hair of late — cut short so that she appears, despite her freckled snub of a nose and her quick green eyes, rather mannish. Maybe it’s the shoulder pads.

  I poked my head into her glassed-in cubicle. “Got a minute?”

  She glanced up from a folded coy of the Bugle. “Norman. Of course. I was just taking a break with the crossword. I’m stumped. What’s an eight-letter word for three of a kind?”

  I didn’t even try. I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue.”

  She put the paper down and dazzled me with a smile. “So what brings you here, dear Norman?”

  I wasn’t sure how to begin. “I’m told there’s reason to be concerned about the museum’s financial condition.”

  “Oh,” she said, with that delightful little hiccup of a laugh, “you’ve been talking to Scrabbe. The poor man has no accounting experience whatsoever. It’s all Greek to him. His background is literary something or other. He likes to make things complicated. He’s also an academic manqué, and quite bitter about it. I think he was Dean of Student Affairs or some such thing before he came over here.”

  “B
ut are we on the verge of financial collapse?” I asked.

  “Oh, Norman, we’ve been on the verge of financial collapse for twenty years, ever since J. C. Pullman talked the Board into putting a sizable chunk of the endowment into a South American fur-farming operation.”

  She was holding an unlit cigarette and waving at the air in front of me, and I was thinking what a lucky man Bill Littlefield was.

  “Then what Scrabbe says is true?” I asked.

  She shrugged her padded shoulders. “The big problem, Norman dear, is the Onoyoko Institute. We have no control over its disbursements, its billings, its purchasing, or any of its accounting procedures.” The situation, as she related it to me, was that funds from other private sources that heretofore had gone through her office were being funneled through the Institute without any real accountability. And in fact federal regulations did change practically on the hour and grant writing, which already took more time than the research it was meant to support, had become an arcane specialty. She waved that away and smiled and asked, “So what’s new with you?”

  “Oh, the party, Saturday night,” I said, making her smile. But as I sat there, making noises, looking at her pretty face, I realized there really hadn’t been anything new with me for thirty years.

  MONDAY, MAY 25

  Lieutenant Tracy dropped by this morning to tell me I should come down to the station, apply for a permit, and reclaim my father’s revolver. I took his gesture as a small vote of confidence, but I’m not sure I really want to. I have this feeling that once you introduce a weapon, in life as in art, the Chekhovian dictum applies. The lieutenant sounded a rather apologetic note regarding the whole affair. I assured him that I did not take his participation in the ransacking of my home personally. He informed me in strictest confidence that there may be a break in the Fessing case. It appears that some young man, another former student, had blackmailed or attempted to blackmail Fessing for indiscretions allegedly committed while this young man was in his charge. The lieutenant mentioned a name and asked if I knew anything about this individual and where he might be located.

  I took out my black notebook, which he eyed with a covetous glance, and wrote down the name. I reiterated in a tone meant to convey my disappointment in the paltriness of the “lead” that I did not move in those circles. I assured him, however, that I would make inquiries as best I could. I think this time he believed me, and I thought I detected in the young man’s sharp blue eyes a glimmer of appeal. Indeed, I had the distinct impression that the investigation had run into the proverbial blank wall and that he was asking me to help him in ways beyond those expected of an ordinary citizen. Mind you, the appeal and my acquiescence were so subtle — I merely leaned forward, returned his gaze, and nodded briefly — as to be easily denied. At the same time I resisted, out of practicality and hubris, bringing up Raul Brauer or suspicions about the Primate Pavilion or the communications I had received from the Genetics Lab. I wanted to be able to present the lieutenant with something solid, a piece of evidence, a real motive, some convincing circumstantial proof. I like to think that, as he shook my hand in leaving, he understood that he could count on me to do some real behind-the-scenes digging and to let him know when I had come up with something solid.

  On quite another subject, I would like to report a development that has brightened my whole existence. At my little dinner party — which was an unqualified success, by the way (everyone just loved my little Buddha and Esther’s steamed buns and braised shrimp with broccoli) — Izzy came up with a brilliant suggestion. I had been grousing, as is my wont, about not having enough time to work on the history. Nonsense, Norman, he said, there is always time for history. Why not, he asked, devote the next few issues of the Quarterly to more or less finished drafts? In fact, I could simply devote the considerable time usually spent assigning, assembling, editing, and laying out the various profiles of MOM people, reports on research, accounts of expeditions, the rather thin “MOM Calends,” and so on to researching and writing the history. I am going to put out an announcement to this effect in the next issue, which is nearly ready to go to the printer. That will simultaneously alert the readership, which has been declining of late, and commit me to the enterprise.

  Not that I needed committing. Indeed, I have been in a state of delectable excitement ever since I came in yesterday to start organizing my research. I already have some of the archives right here in the office, and there are materials in the basement that have yet to be sorted through, never mind cataloged. Not only is the museum at a crossroads in its destiny but of late it has suffered from what is called bad press, and the time is propitious, I think, for an unbiased account of its rich history. Such a book, amply sprinkled with portraits of the founders and chief personages, as well as with illustrations from the collections, all carefully executed by Wainscott Press, would keep our course straight and true. The only extant work on the subject that I know of is a rather sketchy monograph penned in 1911 by Phinneas McIsaac, the museum’s fifth Recording Secretary. This little publication, written in an archaic style, does little to illuminate a neglected but important chapter of the nation’s cultural history.

  The origins of the MOM are in fact quite picturesque, involving as they do the Remicks of Remsdale, a prominent seafaring family in these parts. (Robert Remick is on the Board of Governors, but he lives in the Virgin Islands, and I seldom hear from him.) Very early in the nineteenth century, the original Remick, yclept Othniel, an original as far as the MOM is concerned, left the family farm in the upper reaches of the Newhumber Valley to try his luck as a seaman. In the summer of 1814, Othniel shipped aboard the Rapier, a converted privateer that, bearing a cargo of dried cod, set out in the direction of the West Indies on a voyage of trade and barter that was to make its owner, Spaulding Goodfellow, a deal of money. Over the next few years the young Othniel accounted himself very well, rising through the hawse-hole, as it was said, to become a captain and part owner of a ship by the age of twenty-four. By his early thirties, he was “one of the established merchants of Seaboard,” to quote from McIsaac’s little tract, with a house of “generous and graceful proportions on Upper Market Street.” Indeed, the house, a Neo-federalist clapboard mansion graced with an elegant widow’s walk, still stands and houses, if I am not mistaken, a drug rehabilitation program and a refuge for shattered women.

  Othniel in the meanwhile had married Goodfellow’s daughter, Sarah, and their considerable issue over the next ten years included three sons, two of whom, Nathaniel and Eben, followed their father down to the sea. (The third son, George Washington Remick, attended West Point, answered Lincoln’s call to arms, and fell at Antietam.) Nathaniel, alas, also died young, when he was shipwrecked in 1854 off the coast of Loa Hoa during a typhoon of great magnitude. The sole survivor of that tragedy told a tale of such savagery and cannibalism on the part of the native inhabitants that he was judged somewhat less than compos mentis and restrained in an asylum, where he raved into ripe old age.

  According to McIsaac, it was in 1876 that Eben, in part as a memorial to his two brothers, donated the land, ten thousand dollars, and a veritable warehouse “full of curios, artifacts, and objects of wonder from the four corners of the world” toward “the erection of an institution where these objects may be properly appreciated, classified, and studied.” The other merchants and seafaring families of Seaboard not only proved generous in their subscriptions to what was originally and somewhat alliteratively to be called “The Museum of Man in His Many Manifestations” but also found in their own warehouses, cellars, attics, and sheds treasures from a century of worldwide trading and importing. For decades these shrewd sea captains, with an eye for beauty as well as worth, had been bringing back in their ships porcelain and jade from China, scrollwork, netsuke, and kakemonos from Japan, Javanese batiks, native carvings from Borneo, statuettes from Africa, a whole gamut of material. Hannibal Richards, “the Bernini of Seaboard,” was commissioned to design the building. His gentle confla
tion of neo-Gothic and neo-Grecian flourishes has not been entirely ruined by the bastardized wings. As the amount of money and material grew, so did plans for the museum. After debates worthy of the Continental Congress, the Rules of Governance were agreed upon and a self-perpetuating Board of Governors selected. On a “drizzling day” in April of 1879, Byam Parkhurst, the first Recording Secretary, took the minutes of the first meeting of the Board and entered them into what was called, in a gesture to the seafaring tradition, “The Log of the Museum of Man.”

  And that is only a sketch of the origins. There was an attempt by Wainscott in the course of McIsaac’s tenure to take over the museum, a development that caused a schism among the leading families of Seaboard. Still, a fruitful affiliation did spring up in which the museum and the university’s departments of anthropology and archaeology (I’ve always preferred the archaic spelling of that latter word) cooperated on various digs and collecting expeditions. And I think this affiliation has remained fruitful precisely because the museum has stayed independent, a theme that could be developed quite without bias.

  I will need considerable time if I am to give this project the attention it deserves, and if I am going to get to the bottom of this Fessing mess. I also need Malachy Morin to follow up the interview we had with that competent young lady so that I can be relieved from talking to the press. Alas, when I mentioned it to him again this morning, he started to burble incoherently, and for a moment I thought he was going to weep. Oliver Scrabbe seems to have utterly cowed and demoralized the man. Still, I will not be deterred. Strange, isn’t it, how you need time to go back in time, to escape to the past and thereby achieve some perspective on the present.

  I suppose somewhere in my history I’ll have to include accounts of the Genetics Lab and the Primate Pavilion. Of course, both could be handled in appendices, but that in a way would simply be a distortion of a distortion. At any rate, I am not going to let their existence ruin a perfectly good story.