The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  I stood, ready to give up, when Mort, with the flashlight, pointed out the drawer in the table. I tried to open it and found it locked. That didn’t faze Mort. He took out a smaller ring of keys, and on the fourth or fifth try unlocked it. With some trepidation I lifted out a binder-size black zippered case. I lay it on the table and opened it carefully, with Mort again holding the light. The loose-leaf paper, running about fifty pages, was filled on each side with encrypted entries. It seemed to be a journal of sorts.

  I was frustrated again. I was also in a quandary. Should I confiscate this notebook and turn it over to the police? It probably wouldn’t take them long to break the code. Or should I just put everything back the way it was, alert Lieutenant Tracy, and have him come with a search warrant to carry it all off legally? While thus musing, I noticed a slight bulge in the side pocket of the case. It was a slim package of photographs, five by seven in black and white. As I began to go through them, my heart beat so violently I had to sit down. In the shaky illumination of the flashlight I saw, arranged against a dramatically rising precipice and filling the foreground of the photograph, Raul Brauer, Corny Chard, and Alger Wherry, all holding, quite distinctly, pieces of a human body. Chard had a foot, Wherry a forearm with attached hand, and Brauer what looked like a heart. One of the other pictures showed the three of them sitting on a mat with natives of rank actually eating these things! I was glad I was sitting down myself, for my vision blurred for a moment and I thought I would pass out.

  A moment later my head cleared and I acted decisively. I replaced everything exactly as I had found it. I rang the SPD from Wherry’s phone and was patched through directly to Lieutenant Tracy. I explained exactly what I had discovered and suggested that he obtain a search warrant. He agreed immediately, and we arranged to meet him at the main entrance to the museum. Extraordinary, really, how soon the sirens began and with what flashing fanfare several cruisers and one unmarked car pulled to a wrenching halt in front of the museum. I have to confess I had been very gratified by the note of respect in the lieutenant’s voice as he showed me the warrant and asked that I lead him to the room with the Green Door.

  Mort found the override switch, and we got the lights turned on. There were the usual nervous wisecracks from the team as we made our way through the collection. Mort opened the Green Door again, and the police, carefully, with gloved hands, removed every item, with the exception of the table and chairs, from the room. They took the Skull, and I asked the lieutenant that it be treated with every respect. At my suggestion, he called in and got a supplementary warrant to go over the prep room. All the while the lieutenant deferred to me, asking my advice, putting in an occasional question. The supreme compliment came when, taking one of the more egregious photographs, he asked me to accompany him to Brauer’s residence to help with the questioning.

  It had started to rain and it was getting late in the evening, but I agreed, if not with alacrity then with a keen, disquieting anticipation. I must say I was glad that I was not doing it alone and that the lieutenant was armed.

  Brauer lives a ways out of town in what looked like a converted barn set well back from the road. We hadn’t called, and I told the lieutenant he might not be at home as he still traveled a great deal. But there were more than a couple of cars in the yard and several lights on. Under an umbrella we stood together and waited for someone to answer our knock. We were greeted by a very striking young woman with a fetching combination of Polynesian and European features, especially the thick black hair that fell over her shoulders. When the lieutenant asked to see Professor Brauer, the woman turned and called up a nearby stairwell, “Dad, someone to see you.”

  Brauer, in a dressing gown of flamboyant scarlet silk worked with zoomorphic forms in black, came down the stairs with the face of a man half anxious and half irritated. The lieutenant introduced himself, shook hands, and said, “You probably already know Mr. de Ratour. He’s assisting me with the investigation of the murders of Deans Fessing and Scrabbe.” Brauer nodded curtly at me and led us down a hall into a barn-beamed study hung and set about with a collection of Polynesian art and artifacts — jade weapons, bark cloth, wood carvings, statuettes — worthy of any museum. The considerable computer equipment in evidence didn’t seem out of place, even with the rain tattering clearly on the roof above. From behind a desk of intricately carved rosewood, he produced a bottle of Dalwhinnie, offered us a drink, which we both declined, poured himself several fingers, and asked, in an impressively deep, confident voice, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  The lieutenant was silent for a moment, as though preoccupied. “You can tell us about the contents of a room in the Skull Collection at the Museum of Man that has a green door.”

  Brauer’s face paled, and the hauteur of his expression, seemingly innate, collapsed into uncertainty, even fear. But only for a second. He sipped his single malt, which appeared to restore him, and said, “Some files and a few artifacts. I go there sometimes to study and to … contemplate. There’s no phone and” — he allowed the lieutenant a confiding laugh — “and not many people come looking for you down there.”

  “Have you ever indulged in cannibalism, Professor Brauer?” I asked, surprising myself but not, strangely enough, the lieutenant.

  The professor all but sneered at me. “What would give you that idea?”

  With exquisite timing and with a gesture nearly threatening in its authority, Lieutenant Tracy produced one of the photographs and handed it to Brauer.

  The anthropologist was silent as the blood drained again from his face, showing suddenly a sad man gone jowly with age. He drained his glass, but the whiskey didn’t restore him this time. In a slow, clear voice, he began to talk.

  “I want to make it understood, Lieutenant …”

  “Tracy.”

  “Lieutenant Tracy … and Mr. de Ratour, I want it understood that I have had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders and what happened afterwards to Fessing and Scrabbe. I also do not think any of my immediate colleagues has had anything to do with the murders of the deans. But they can answer just as well for themselves. I can explain that picture and the others you no doubt found with it. Where were they, by the way? I’ve been scouring the museum and this house …”

  “In a pocket of the zippered case,” I said.

  He nodded ruefully. He reached behind him to a cabinet and pulled out a loose-leaf binder. “Here is an original, an unencrypted version of what’s in the other notebook. It’s an account of what happened offstage, so to speak, during the nineteen-seventy expedition to Loa Hoa, as you might already have guessed. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?”

  I accepted, and the lieutenant asked if he might smoke. Brauer poured me a generous tot of the malt and found an ashtray. All the while he spoke, his voice, though rueful and world-weary, gained confidence, perhaps from the relief of confession or the rebound of his arrogance. “There was, in fact, as rumor has had it, a young man, a drifter of sorts, not quite sane, not that any of us were in those days. We did joke one night around the campfire, while he was off chanting in his tent, about killing him and eating parts of his body to re-create one of the important and more or less suppressed rituals of the Rangu. But it was a joke. We were all a little drunk on honey beer and far gone on the kind of potent marijuana that grows at high elevations. We were joking, but I’m afraid that one of our local helpers, who happened to be very devoted to us and would do, it turned out, literally anything for us, took the joke seriously.”

  “What was his name?” asked the lieutenant, who was taking notes.

  “Freddy Hiva. It doesn’t matter. He’s dead now. Anyway, the killing and eating of Bud, short for Buddha, as he called himself, became a kind of running joke. He even joined in, made wisecracks about how he would taste. He was a blond fellow, of medium height with a slight build. One of those harmless, clueless creatures. I was, naturally, quite horrified when, coming back to camp one afternoon, Freddy told me there had been an accident
. Bud had fallen off one of the nearby cliffs and been killed.”

  He stopped and poured himself another measure of whiskey. “I was both horrified and excited. Once a philosopher twice a pervert, I have always thought. Not that, in those days, I didn’t welcome the second appellation as well. When I asked Freddy if he had done it deliberately, he gave me a look of mock horror and said, no, no, no! It was against the law. I know I should have contacted the authorities, but I fancied myself an outlaw scientist, a Nietzschean for whom no experience was taboo, not even the eating of human flesh. And I still do.” He glanced up at us defiantly. “I did it for research.

  “We had to act quickly. I told Freddy to keep the news absolutely secret. I immediately informed Chard and Wherry about what had happened and how we now had an opportunity to re-create one of the basic rituals of the Rangu culture. They agreed, and together we approached Thad Pilty, all the while keeping up the fiction that it had been an accident. Thad wanted nothing to do with it. He said as far as he was concerned he had heard nothing and he wanted to hear nothing more about it. We left him in charge of the camp and, taking some supplies, including the camera, went to the site where the body lay. Bud’s neck was broken, but he appeared otherwise unhurt by his fall. I didn’t question Freddy about it. What was done was done. With help from a few trusted locals, we tied the body to a makeshift litter and headed over a rough trail deep into a high valley where few if any whites had ever penetrated. It took us nearly a day. We arrived at a taboo site made of large stones forming a sizable platform. It wasn’t easy, being accepted, I mean, by the local chiefs. But I knew the language, and in native dress with my tattoos I could pass.

  “It’s all in the notes that I took, the magic chants, how Bud’s heart tasted. But you should know it wasn’t an exercise in depravity. It was enormously exalting in a way, not just a symbolic sacrament but the real thing. It was only later, as the significance began to sink in, that the doubts started. We all dealt with it in our own ways. My misgivings have been minimal. I would do it all over again. Poor Alger shriveled into his little morbid job. Corny tried to joke and rationalize his way out of it. We would meet and talk about it. We couldn’t publish anything about it, of course. Without perishing. We began meeting in the little room in the Skull Collection. We called ourselves the Société de Couchon Long as a kind of joke. I think it was as much a shrine to Bud as anything else. We never did find out who he was. The wooden box contains everything he had. Some books on Buddhist teaching and drug paraphernalia and a picture of a girl.”

  “That’s why you didn’t destroy anything,” I said.

  He nodded. “I have nearly finished a book that I planned to have published posthumously.”

  The lieutenant glanced up from his notes. “Was anyone else involved with the group?”

  “We tried to interest Thad Pilty at one time, but he wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “Did either Dean Fessing or Dean Scrabbe know or learn anything about this incident?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did they know anything about your … society?”

  “I don’t know. But someone knew about it.”

  The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “We keep a very fine thread fixed over the green door, which we replace every time we go in there. Some time ago we found that it had been broken.”

  “Why did you keep the Skull in there?” I asked.

  He sighed, looked weary. “As a kind of fetish, I suppose. A surrogate Bud. I don’t know.”

  We got up to leave finally. I could tell the lieutenant was skeptical. “Thank you, Professor Brauer,” he said with stiff formality. “I would like to have a team come here this evening and do a thorough examination of these premises and those of your office at the museum. If you would grant permission, it would save our having to get a search warrant.”

  Brauer bowed his affirmation of the request. “I have nothing to hide. But I would prefer you did it in the morning.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Do you mind if I use your phone?”

  It was all very businesslike. The forensic team showed up. Brauer signed some forms and gave the officer in charge the key to his office at the museum. I called Mort to tell him to let the police back in. As the lieutenant drove me home, I could tell that he was disturbed. “I don’t understand …” He shook his head. “People with the kind of education …” We parked for a moment outside my house. He said, “I think he’s lying about Fessing and Scrabbe not knowing. They knew something, and I think Brauer knew they knew.”

  I demurred. It was a possibility. I said I thought Chard the most likely suspect if that group had anything to do with the murders.

  As I got out he thanked me. “That was a real piece of work, Norman.”

  I thanked him in return and asked a favor: could he do everything possible to keep this out of the press until there was more conclusive evidence that the suspects were involved?

  He told me he would do all he could but added that word about such things leaked out pretty quickly.

  Well, I’m heading over to the Club for dinner and, I hope, a postprandial with Izzy and Lotte. It’ll be all I can do not to tell them about the room behind the Green Door. I find I’m quite proud of what I’ve done. I wish Elsbeth was here already so that I could brag a little to her. Although, to tell the truth, I wish I could be as certain as Lieutenant Tracy that we have found the culprits.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14

  There is a bit of wisdom, of rabbinic origin if I’m not mistaken, that states you must choose carefully what you think you want in life because there is a good chance you will get it. At the conclusion of an impromptu teleconference on Friday, the Board of Governors announced that Dr. Commer would step down as Director to become Director Emeritus and that I was named, effective immediately, “Director, with extraordinary powers for the duration of the present crisis at the Museum of Man.” At the end of the meeting, Robert Remick called to tell me that he and the Board had complete confidence that I would “get to work and clean up the mess.”

  The first job I assigned myself, of course, was firing Malachy Morin. How many times I have dreamed of doing just that I cannot tell you. There have been nights when merely the thought of seeing the last of that man has kept me going. But now, granted the power and the cause to fire him, I find I have little stomach for it. I suppose I should have done it right away, immediately after the meeting, when he was still in a state of stupefaction at what had been announced. The way he looked at me, with that awful smile, his jowls quivering, fear and surprise mingling in a kind of low-grade, grudging respect. The fawning way he grabbed my hand, and his pathetic words of congratulations. I should have smothered all his overtures with a quick and decisive meeting in my office. But it was after four-thirty, and I did have a five o’clock tennis match at the Club.

  I remained nervous all night, thinking and dreaming about it. And it was worse when I arrived here this morning. How do you kick someone who is licking your boots? How do you shoot a cringing dog? I did at least tell him there would be a drastic reorganization and was about to intimate that his position was at best tenuous when he interrupted me, saying we had worked well together in the past and would make a great team in the future. It was not an auspicious start for my career as an administrator.

  I found it nearly as difficult to be straightforward with Thad Pilty. I met with him just after lunch and told him that I planned to write a letter to Constance Brattle to let her know there would be no further meetings of the Oversight Committee regarding the diorama of Paleolithic life. Well, you would have thought I was interfering with the affairs of the museum rather than the committee. I kept my course, however, and his tone grew more conciliatory. He implored me “for political reasons” to allow the upcoming meeting, set for next Tuesday, to go forward as planned.

  In acquiescing to his plea, I mentioned that I personally had reservations about the diorama — not so much its for
m and content, which I said struck me as original and instructive, but its usurpation of space traditionally reserved for temporary exhibits. After a rather stiff silence, he said he would be willing to meet with Edwards, the likable and resourceful young man in charge of exhibits, to see how best to make the exhibition removable and storable. He added, however, that unless the diorama was established “on a semipermanent basis,” he would go to the Board himself and even hinted that he might offer it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I simply nodded, saying nothing about the Curatorial Ball. But I have in fact called around to arrange a meeting of the Ball Committee, so that we can get things rolling, as they say.

  I scheduled a meeting of all MOM staffers in Margaret Mead Auditorium, with coffee and sweet rolls laid on. I am going to tell them what has happened and to apprise them, as far as is prudent, about what steps I will be taking to improve security and boost morale, which has hit an all-time low, at least in my tenure here. I also want to hear what they have to say.

  Of course, to accomplish this there will be some toes, some well-protected toes and some quite precious toes, that I will have to step on. I may have to bring in an expert consultant to straighten out the financial mess. I have in mind a joint Wainscott-MOM committee to consider the status of the Genetics Lab. If the future of that establishment has had anything to do with the murders of Fessing and Scrabbe, then a committee would be the best instrument to effect change. The murderer or murderers would have difficulty, one presumes, with dispatching a large and active committee. I have sent a note to Professor Gottling informing him of my appointment and requesting a meeting as soon as possible to discuss a range of issues, not least the relations between the lab and the pavilion. Closing down that latter entity will, by itself, save enormous amounts of money. (Speaking of which, I returned to Damon Drex his draft “press packet” with a note telling him that he ought to have a thorough check done on his computer and his programmers.)