The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Speaking of which, I found another of those anonymous messages from the Genetics Lab on my e-mail this morning. Again I have entered it into this record and noted it in my little black book.

  Dear Mr. Detour [sic]:

  I’m sending you another trace-proof message because things are not getting any better over here. Last week Professor Gottling announced that Project Alpha had been concluded and that the lab would now move on to other things. And at first everyone believed him. But just yesterday when I went into Dr. Kaplan’s lab to recalibrate the centrifuge he was sitting at a bench crying with his head in his hands. It wasn’t at all like Dr. Kaplan who is very nice but very dignified. He’s not the only one I’ve seen crying but all the senior researchers walk around like it’s the end of the world. I stayed late last night to use this keyboard to send you this message and I heard Professor Gottling telling Dr. Kaplan who doesn’t want to contribute to the sperm bank that they wouldn’t use any of his on the chimps which are his exact words. So it may have something to do with the pavilion but I don’t know for sure because everything is very secret. I know that Professor Gottling found out about Dr. Hanker and Charlene and is very angry at Dr. Hanker because they’re afraid he could be blackmailed if that tape ever gets out. I know you can’t do much without some real proof. I could probably get you a copy of the tape of Dr. Hanker and Charlene doing it on the couch in the room with the safe because the technician who showed it has made some extra copies but that’s not really proof of what’s really going on over here except for the sperm bank which is supposed to be hush-hush. I will keep sending you these messages anyway because it makes me feel better.

  Worried

  While I have always considered anonymity in such matters to be a sign of cowardice or mendacity, I am beginning to wonder if these little missives don’t fit into a larger scheme of things. My source at the Medical School informs me that no animals in the pavilion have been made available for AIDS research despite many requests. The situation, in fact, has generated a good deal of ill will. Why would Damon Drex and his assistant lie about such a fact? Perhaps there’s more to these communications than I give them credit for. In perusing it a second time, I get this uncanny sensation of a larger design, an inkling of connections, an intuition nearly of beauty. A dark, perverse beauty to be sure, like the sleek lines of a well-made gun.

  THURSDAY, MAY 28

  I believe Lieutenant Tracy has come to think of me as a colleague in the investigation of this Fessing business. Again this afternoon, after I had written up the minutes of the morning meeting of the Council of Curators and was getting ready to spend some time on the history, the police officer came by. He brought me my father’s revolver with a special six-month permit. He told me that he had gotten it cleaned and adjusted and that I should keep it around to protect myself. I might have taken some comfort from the inference that I was no longer a prime suspect were it not for the concomitant suggestion that I was a potential victim. The thought of being killed and eaten by cannibals provoked in me a most morbid curiosity: what would I taste like?

  I thanked the lieutenant and put the revolver in the top drawer on the right of my desk, which I keep locked. For a moment the officer sat there, a study in good grooming and tasteful haberdashery, his hair neatly parted and combed and his suit of dark seersucker crisply pressed. He appeared to be thinking carefully about what he was going to say before he spoke. Finally, after taking out a cigarette, tamping and lighting it, he asked me in a seemingly offhanded manner just how active did I think Cornelius Chard was in the Adventurers’ Eating Club.

  I, too, was silent for a moment, resisting an impulse to reiterate, because I am no longer convinced, that too much stock should not be put in what Professor Chard said or did or said he did. I informed the lieutenant that I had been a member of the Eating Club years before, when the emphasis had been on eating rather than adventure. In those days we considered a hot curry adventuresome enough, unlike the fare today, what with pâté de foie de chien, amanita soup, giraffe heart, baked stuffed elephant trunk, fermented seal flipper, monkey hands, that sort of thing. Attempts at sensation in matters culinary, I said, are bound to disappoint or disgust or both.

  The lieutenant paused a moment before he said, “Are you aware, Mr. de Ratour, that every other month the club holds a ‘mystery dinner’ that is provided by one of the members?” Did I know, he went on, that immediately following the meal there is a round of guessing as to what they have just eaten and that the person guessing correctly wins a bottle of fine port? I nodded, saying it was precisely that sort of thing — a chewy meal of baked aardvark, in fact, in a sauce of diced ants, palm oil, and black olives — that had led me to resign from the club when I did. The lieutenant leaned forward as though to impart something of a highly confidential nature. “On Thursday, March eighteenth, not long after Dean Fessing was reported missing, the club held its semimonthly mystery dinner. The member in charge of the dinner that night was Professor Chard.”

  I sputtered a bit and shook my head, faltering again when it came to suspicion. “Do you really expect me, Lieutenant, to believe or even suspect that Corny Chard killed Dean Fessing, cooked him gourmet style, and fed him to the other club members? I simply cannot believe they would ever eat a sitting dean. Certainly not a whole one.”

  Lieutenant Tracy took another document from his attaché case and pondered it for a moment. “According to the club minutes, prepared by its secretary, Sheffield Brownaway, Professor Chard was in charge of the mystery dinner on the night in question. Let me quote: ‘No one present, except, apparently, a special guest, could guess what had been prepared for us, and there were loud groans and some protests when Professor Chard told us we had just eaten, as an exercise in “virtual cannibalism,” a large male chimpanzee.’ ” He let it sink in. I took out my notebook. “Not only that, Mr. de Ratour, but the descriptions of the various dishes are remarkably like those in the coroner’s report.” I was still shaking my head, but doubts were hovering. Lieutenant Tracy went on: “Professor Chard is unable to document where and how he got the chimpanzee. He said he procured it on the sly in contravention of various state health regulations.”

  Appalled, I said, “Was the chimp dead, I mean when he procured it?”

  “Who knows? Chard says it died accidentally in the zoo of a large midwestern city.”

  I was, to say the least, dumbfounded. I felt again the inadequacy conferred by a belief in respectability. That is to say, I could not suspect with any conviction a person of Corny Chard’s position of committing a crime so dastardly. “No, Lieutenant,” I said, “it can’t be Corny Chard. He is …” One of us. I didn’t utter the words, although I may as well have.

  The officer shrugged. “Human beings are human beings, Mr. de Ratour. You would be amazed at what the most respectable of people get up to.”

  “Have you confronted Professor Chard with this yet?” I asked. I could see looming another public relations disaster, the reporters swarming, the headlines. “Professor Claims Eaten Dean Was Chimp.”

  “We had him at headquarters last night.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He denied everything. He’s something of a tease. He told us he was used to working with evidence and we really didn’t have any. He said that while he did serve a sort of ‘rack of chimp,’ he did not use the little paper caps reported by Dr. Cutler and that he served more of a ragout than a bourguignonne. Of course, even if he could prove that he received the chimp carcass, it doesn’t mean he didn’t dispose of it and use Dean Fessing in its place.”

  “Do you have any real evidence then?” I asked.

  The lieutenant gazed by me, out the window. “Not really. But he remains under very active investigation. There are a lot of holes in his story.” After a slight pause, he reached into his attaché case again and produced a list of the members of the Adventurers’ Eating Club. He asked if I knew any of the people on it.

  Extraordinary, I said, glancing
over the list, how few of the names I still recognized. All these new people. (There are always new people, I’ve found.) “Who was the special guest?” I asked out of curiosity.

  The lieutenant checked his notebook. “Raul Brauer,” he said, his whole face tensed for any reaction I might betray. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Again I felt a shiver of excited foreboding, but I successfully maintained, I think, a poker face. “An anthropologist, retired now.” I was acutely tempted to blurt out what I had heard about a cannibal cult centered on Brauer and about the missing archives. I kept silent instead, tormented by conflicting scruples. What if there was nothing to it? What if someone like Amanda Feeney got wind of it? We would never hear the end of it. I did not want another man’s good name sacrificed to the media’s insatiable lust for sensation.

  When the lieutenant stood up to go, there was a skeptical glint in his eye. “I want you to spend some time thinking and trying to remember everything you can about the last few weeks before the dean disappeared. If you remember anything, anything at all, that might shed light on this case, please call me immediately.” At the door, just before he opened it, he told me that whoever had killed Fessing was probably still around and would likely strike again. He told me to be very careful.

  The phone immediately started ringing with calls from members of the press. Someone had leaked the chimp story. I’d had enough. I dialed the central switchboard and told them that all press-related calls henceforth would have to be put through to Malachy Morin’s office because I was no longer taking them. I then went straight down to Mr. Morin’s office to tell him what I had done. Getting in to see the Pope might have been easier. His door was closed, and Doreen had to buzz him twice before he came and opened it, peeking through to see if it was really I who was there to see him. I told him that there was a messy new story connected to the Fessing case and that I no longer had time to deal with the press. He sat down, stood up, sat down again, all the time nodding, his eyes shifting around the place as though looking for something. When I mentioned that he ought to interview other applicants for the job if that young woman we had agreed upon was not available, he went into a near palsy and kept agreeing with me, but in a manner that gave little assurance he would do anything about it. When I left, I was in such a state of perplexed frustration that I caught myself thinking about the gun up in my drawer and how satisfying it would be simply to bring it down and point it at this man and make him do what he’s supposed to do.

  Well, if only to get away from the noise of the chimp literati in full voice five floors down, I think I will wend my way over to the Club bar. I’m very much in the mood for a double Scotch, no ice and easy on the soda, the way I learned to drink it at Jesus.

  SATURDAY, MAY 30

  I have happened upon a very, very interesting bit of information regarding the Fessing case. I found it in, of all places, the MOM Library, which wraps around the exhibition space on the north and west sides of the second floor. It was all by such happenstance that it makes me doubt my abilities as a detective. Indeed, when I arrived this morning to work on the history, I was resolved to put that whole sordid business aside for the nonce. I confess to being in a mood to escape the present into the lost possibilities of the past. On my way to the museum I chose a path that took me by what used to be the women’s dormitories of Wainscott. Ah, such scenes, such tender regret stirred in my heart as I walked by Bramble Hall! It was months after I came back from North Africa before I could even walk through Marvell Gardens. Elsbeth and I spent so many memorable hours there, especially during her junior year, when she took a course on landscaping botany and studied the differences, for instance, between white oak and mockernut hickory. It was in autumn, and the foliage had just erupted into an inferno of flaming maple, orange oak, and yellow beech, with the lowlands daubed with scarlets and burnished purples. Elsbeth collected leaves, which she pressed into the notebook where she had sketched the vase shape of the doomed elm, the muscular bole and limbs of the beech, and the sycamore in its camouflage fatigues. Together we walked hand in hand through autumn’s dazzling, untidy beauty, and I thought then that it would ever be thus.

  In winter, when Kettle Pond froze over, we joined other merrymakers in skating parties. And though somewhat ungainly, I used my long legs to good advantage as we raced together in the biting air. Indeed, I was not above striking poses — hands clasped behind my back, nose in air — and Elsbeth once had, perhaps still has, a photograph of me remarkably similar to Raeburn’s painting of the Reverend Robert Walker skating. Elsbeth was an excellent skater, and I was quite moved to watch her spin off by herself, twisting and jumping and sashaying backwards in her form-fitting slacks. I’m not sure the pond freezes over anymore, what with our mild, unnatural winters of late. Most of the skating is done at the Wainscott Rink, where, even in summer, there are piles of dirty artificial snow melting outside.

  Bramble Hall, Elsbeth’s dormitory, opens out onto the rose arbor of the Gardens. It was, I remember, a genteel sort of place. In those days a gentleman was expected to wait in the roomy parlor for his date to come down, and he was expected to bring her back at a respectable hour. No more, I am told. When I walk by there now, a kind of syncopated doggerel, said to be music, issues from high windows. And even the bathrooms, I’m told, are shared by men and women, who each year, I must confess, look more and more like girls and boys when you can tell them apart.

  In my day, in one of the reception rooms, on one of the love seats placed discreetly in one of the alcoves, we would read together. Elsbeth was an English major, and I remember her reading to me from Hopkins. I can’t say I listened to the words as much as to the sound of her voice sweetly telling the lines. “ ‘… all things counter, original, spare, strange …’ ” She laughed. “Just like you, Norman, strange, counter, spare.” And she laughed again when I tried to steal a kiss. “Not here, you silly, not here.”

  I especially remember the music room, where, as I plonked away on an old upright Vose, she would sing in her tremulous soprano from a book of lieder. She used to tease me with Schubert’s Die Unterscheidung, her eyes bright and mischievous as she sang,

  Und willst du mich durch Küsse lehren,

  Was stumm dein Auge zu mir spricht,

  Selbst das will ich dir nicht verwehren

  Doch lieben, Norman! kann ich dich nicht.

  How the memory of that music mocks me now! Teach me with kisses what my eyes speak! That, she would not deny me, but love you, Norman, that she couldn’t do! Was I naive to think then that exactly the reverse pertained?

  I very nearly proposed to her the night of the senior prom. We had left the main party at Union Hall to walk by Bramble into the rose arbor, which had been decorated with Japanese lanterns. There, within earshot of the big band flourishes from the dance — Lester Lanin’s, I believe — we sat on one of the benches, a frilly old thing of cast iron painted white. There we inhaled the sweetness of alyssum, which presaged the bouquet of the budding rosebushes, and dreamed of our future together. Other couples were doing the same, but the maze of hedges kept all of us virtually alone, and tradition has it that a good many Wainscott marriages were proposed and not a few prematurely consummated in that fragrant place.

  I remember our own night there so vividly, it nearly makes me weep. The perfume of the tiny flowers, the softness of the air, the distant sound of some popular love melody, Elsbeth’s hand in mine, the low cut of her ball gown showing off her creamy shoulders, gorgeous neck, and, I must admit, quite unnerving décolletage. We sat as in a dream on one of those antique benches in a bower of our own. I told her how beautiful she looked, how her eyes were like dark jade, how … “Kiss me, Norman,” she said with a finger to my lips. And we leaned toward each other and kissed. “No!” she expostulated, drawing back. “Really kiss me!” And with a sensation I had not experienced till nor since then, her tongue pushed into my mouth and entwined with mine. I confess I lost all restraint. Fed upon, I fed back. My
hand dropped to her breast, down over it, nudging (how easily those formidable-looking garments give way!) until the incredible fullness of it was in my hand. I’m not sure what would have happened had not another couple, somewhat drunk, burst into our magic nook and begun, with crude and boisterous comments, to applaud our embrace.

  I stood up immediately if somewhat awkwardly and would have thrashed the male member of this party had Elsbeth not restrained me. And when they finally left, I of course apologized profusely for the liberties I had taken, saying that our momentary lapse in no way lessened my respect for her. I very nearly proposed to her then, not only because I loved her but to cast our moment of illicit passion in a salutary light. But I was afraid she would think I was only doing the honorable thing since, in all but the ultimate sense, our intimacies had begun. But a certain coolness had descended on Elsbeth’s manner, which confirmed my sense of trespass. And the more I tried to apologize and accommodate her feelings, the more distant she grew until, back at the dance and emboldened by a few too many glasses of champagne punch, she blurted, with a crudeness she had developed of late, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Norman, stop your damn whimpering.”

  The fact is I still cannot walk by the arbor in front of Bramble Hall, especially when the roses are in their glory, without a tinge of bittersweet regret. I have never gone back into the nooks and enclosures, which, I am told, are no longer safe, even during the day. And even if I did, I’m not sure I could find the exact spot where, uninhibited, our passion had such a brief and fruitless bloom.