The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Mr. Drex said not a word more but regarded me in the most, how shall I put it, feral manner. He stood up and left my office.

  When he had gone I locked the door and took out the revolver. I emptied it of bullets again, aimed it at the coatrack hung with my overcoat, which I pretended was Damon Drex, and pulled the trigger several times. I know this is not like me. Heretofore I wouldn’t have dreamed of holding a gun, much less practicing using it against another human being. But I feel I am right on the verge of solving these murders, and I must remain alive if I am to do it and if I am ever to see Elsbeth again.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6

  This will be a very important entry in this log. I have much to relate, and I need to do it carefully, as what I say will now constitute part of the official record. (Incidentally, I am using the terminal in Malachy Morin’s old office, cheap paneling and all, since mine won’t be habitable again for a while.)

  Where to begin? Or rather, how to end? The events leading up to this denouement began auspiciously enough. When I came in yesterday morning to work, as I have been doing for more than three decades, I found a large manila envelope in my mail slot from the detective agency I had retained. I took the envelope into my office, closed the door, and sat down at my desk. Carefully, with the pearl-handled letter opener I inherited from my mother, I slit it open. What it contained made me slap my forehead. Of course! I should have picked up on it before! I had, finally, the last pieces of the puzzle.

  I immediately put in a call to Lieutenant Tracy and left him some detailed instructions in the form of suggestions. He is a professional to the tips of his fingernails and did not cavil in the least at the role I assigned him. I then placed a series of phone calls, talking to or leaving messages for Damon Drex, Corny Chard, Thad Pilty, Raul Brauer, Alger Wherry, Stoddard Gottling, and the Snyders brothers. I told them there would be an emergency meeting in the Twitchell Room regarding the murders of Deans Fessing and Scrabbe. I told them that nonattendance would be viewed dimly by both the Seaboard Police Department and the Museum of Man. I called Public Programs and instructed them to close the admissions desk at one P.M. for the afternoon. Scheduled groups would have to be rescheduled. I had Doreen call each department in turn and tell them to give all nonessential personnel the day off. I called Izzy and Father O’Gould and left messages that they might want to make the meeting, which I set for two.

  I then sat back to marshal the evidence and my thoughts. I knew, of course, that the whole thing could literally and figuratively blow up in my face. I knew I was taking a risk. I had moments of doubt. Why not just turn it all over to the police? That was their job, after all. Because win or lose, but especially lose, wouldn’t what I was about to do be taken as grandstanding on my part? But anything like personal glory was the farthest thing from my mind. This murderous mess had begun in the Museum of Man, defiling everything it stands for and striking at the very foundation stones of civilization. I was determined that here, in this museum, this horrific plot would be exposed and brought to an end. To this purpose I telephoned the Bugle and left word for Amanda Feeney to be in attendance. For once, I thought, I would use the press rather than be used by them.

  An unusual calm appeared to descend on the museum. I noticed it when I went down early to the cafeteria for a sandwich and lemonade to bring back to the office. Gottling called to ask, “What is this all about?” and I told him to be there if he didn’t want his name taken in vain. I let him sputter on for a while.

  The calm grew to silence after the museum emptied around one o’clock. The silence, which I could hear through my open door, became positively eerie. I made a few phone calls. I paced about a bit. The day being warmish, I opened my window and regarded the blueness of the ocean and the thick rug of forest stretching to the Hays Mountains. Its foliage was well past its gaudiest flamboyance. While thus musing, thinking how I prefer the more mellow browns and yellows of this time to the reds and oranges of the week before, I heard a sudden eruption of shrieks and hoots from Drex’s chimps. But from within, not from below, the noise coming through the open door. I went down the hallway and peered into the exhibition galleries. Damon Drex, followed by a troop of his scampering apes, was making his way up through the exhibits. My first, rather foolish impulse was to yell down to him that museum regulations expressly prohibit, except in the case of Seeing Eye dogs, the presence of live animals in the exhibition or conservation areas.

  Then I knew!

  I raced back to my office, afraid not so much for my life as of what I might have to do to preserve it. My door, a venerable thing, did not lock from the inside without a key, which I didn’t have time to look for. I closed and chained it with an old brass thing that’s been there since ever I can remember. If nothing else, it bought a precious few seconds. I retreated behind my desk and took the revolver from its holster. Not a minute too soon. The beasts came howling down the corridor.

  “Call them off, Damon!” I yelled. “Call them off or I’ll shoot them.” The door jerked open, and two hairy paws curled around the edges. Again I called out, saying I was armed and ready to shoot. In vain. With a terrific crash, the door was pushed inward with such force the frame gave way. “Stop!” I shouted and pointed the revolver at Royd, for that’s who it was, his ape’s mug contorted with naked rage. Drex stood beside him and smirked at my gun. It was that smirk that made me stand up just as Royd started for me, aim the revolver with two hands, and shoot. What a sensation, the way the revolver jolted to life in my hands. I had missed and might have been overwhelmed had the noise not made the animal hesitate for an instant. It screeched horribly and lunged for me again across the desk. I fired again, and the shot must have hit him near the heart because he collapsed onto the floor, blood pluming from his chest. Another large chimp came toward me bipedally, his torso bobbing from side to side. I winged him with a shot to the shoulder, making him howl and skitter away.

  “Call them off, Mr. Drex, or you will be next.” I aimed the revolver directly at his head and cocked the hammer. He had turned white. He snarled at me like one of his beasts. “Don’t make me kill you,” I said, amazed at my own calm, which sprang from a deep, cold anger. Was this how poor Fessing had met his end — pulled apart by deranged apes in the sway of a madman? For several seconds, as we stood eye to eye, the issue was in doubt. Then Drex staggered, covered his face with his hands, and leaned against the wrecked doorjamb. The animals milled around behind him as though confused. “Take them downstairs and lock them up,” I said when he had recovered some composure. “I’ll be walking right behind you.”

  Something of a crowd had gathered at the bottom of the staircase in Neanderthal Hall. “Everything’s under control,” I said to the upturned, alarmed faces. By then I had slipped my gun back into its holster under my jacket. I could tell from the utterly crushed Drex that I wouldn’t need it. To Sergeant Lemure, who just happened to have come in, I said, “Officer, make sure this man locks up these animals. One of them needs medical attention. Then arrest him and bring him to the Twitchell Room. Lieutenant Tracy, who’ll be arriving shortly, will show you where it is.”

  “What’s the charge?” he asked, skeptical.

  “Assault with deadly animals. Attempted murder.” Then I turned and headed back up to my office to retrieve some papers I needed. Royd lay on his side, and I might have felt some pity for the beast were his eyes not open and his fangs bared and menacing even in the stillness of death. I stepped around the carnage, picked up the papers, and left. Downstairs I told a uniformed officer that there was a dead chimp in my office and it was to be treated as evidence in a murder case. He said he would inform one of the detectives.

  By two o’clock, to my grim pleasure, all of the parties I had called were present. Thad Pilty looked quizzical. Raul Brauer, his baldness gleaming, appeared restored to his usual self. Corny Chard joked with one of the several uniformed officers in attendance. Damon Drex sat handcuffed and pale faced. Amanda Feeney arrived, bustling in with a somewhat
better-groomed Malachy Morin in tow. Ariel Dearth followed them, his expression decidedly officious for the occasion. The Snyders brothers, dressed identically in black, looked like mirror images of each other. Alger Wherry was his usual, averted self. Izzy, accompanied by Father O’Gould, showed up, a half smile playing around his eyes as he regarded me with puzzlement. Professor Gottling came at the last minute and demanded to know if it would take long. I told him he could leave now if he wished. He flustered about and finally took a seat, glowering at the ceiling. Others had gotten wind of the meeting, and the room started to fill up. I noticed Marge and Esther had come in, along with several of the curators. Lieutenant Tracy arrived last, nodded imperceptibly to me with the faintest of smiles, and closed the door behind him.

  Precisely on time I began, a quiet anger subduing my nervousness while slowing and deepening my voice. “I have called all of you here because for the past eight months we have been subjected to a reign of terror that has been horrible in its gratuitousness and insidious in its effects, a threat to the very basis of a civilized order. For the longest time this grotesque plot, for that is what it is, has baffled the best minds of the Seaboard Police Department and frustrated my own, admittedly bungling efforts to get to the bottom of it. Much of the difficulty has arisen from the initial grit of irrational inspiration around which this rough, dark pearl of evil has accreted itself. Some of our failure has stemmed from the human predilection to see things in black and white. In fact, there is black and white in this case. But there are also lots of grays, dark, somberly tinted grays as well.”

  I looked up into the circle of faces and took them in in a long sweep, eye to eye. I cleared my throat. “Most of you now know that there has existed, right under our noses, right here in the museum, a cult of cannibalism.” Corny Chard smiled. “Professor Brauer did indeed carry his ‘re-creational’ practices to their grisly extremes during one of his expeditions to Loa Hoa. The proceedings of the Société de Couchon Long will prove interesting reading not so much to anthropologists as to students of abnormal psychology. And the spate of ensuing books will no doubt pander to a public taste for such things. But even if these materials were found earlier behind a locked door in the Skull Collection, along with what might be called the founding skull and paraphernalia of a kind associated with juvenile behavior, it would not have led to a resolution of the case. Cannibalism itself isn’t a crime in our beautiful state. I presume that our aversion to the consumption of human flesh is so deeply a part of our ethos that there has been no need to outlaw it as such. Therefore, I can accuse Raul Brauer, Corny Chard, and Alger Wherry, and any of their fellow dupes, of nothing worse in their abominations than the worst possible taste.

  “No, ladies and gentlemen,” and here I paused for effect, “the real culprits are not the members of this ludicrous, grotesque cult but a person or persons who knew about the cult. This person or persons, possessed of uncanny knowledge and access to all aspects of the museum and university, knew that the presence of the cult would divert attention away from them. This conspiracy, more hellish even than that of the long piggers, blossomed like poison fungi in a petri dish under the corrupt and lax administration of Malachy Morin, a man whose own brutish self-indulgence not only resulted in the death of an innocent young woman but sidetracked the investigation of the murders for several critical weeks.” I glanced in his direction, but he was smiling, as though glad for the attention. “This poison blossomed rankly in the lack of oversight of the Genetics Laboratory and the Primate Pavilion, where ambitions silly and profoundly disturbing were let fester unchecked.

  “I fault myself as well. There were hints and clues that I should have followed up. I should have been more sensitive to names. My German has never been very good. Had I investigated the diet of chimpanzees I would have found, as I did within the past week, that they hunt monkeys and other small game in the wild, and even indulge in cannibalism. I should have asked Dr. Cutler to examine more closely the gnaw marks on Dean Fessing’s remains. I’m sure they’ll prove consistent with the dentition of Pan troglodytes.”

  There was a stir of ohs and ahs.

  “Still, I do not accuse Damon Drex, even though, because I would not sanction his hunger to bask in the bright, false light of media attention, he tried just before this meeting to unleash his chimps on me. Whether a willing or an unwilling accomplice, Mr. Drex was little more than a dupe, a puppet strung along like one of his hairy charges.

  “Nor do I accuse Professor Gottling, who was funneling large amounts of money from the Onoyoko Institute to the pavilion in return for access to animals for experiments in the human genotype, experiments that will be placed under close and immediate scrutiny.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the geneticist said, rising from his chair.

  “Perhaps, Professor Gottling. But as we speak a team from the state Attorney General’s Office is in your lab starting their investigation.”

  Professor Gottling immediately left.

  I waited for the room to quiet, looking down at my notes before glancing around at my audience. But I did not need any notes. It was all inside me, poised like a verbal dagger.

  “As you can see, none of these parties is completely innocent. But neither are they guilty of the murders of Cranston Fessing and Oliver Scrabbe. No, ladies and gentlemen, that guilt lies” — I stopped and pointed — “directly with the Snyders brothers.”

  They started, as though they might attempt to flee.

  “It’s useless to try to escape. Every door of the museum is secured with heavy police guard.”

  “We have alibis,” they said in unison. “You have no proof.” And they smiled their wicked smiles.

  I smiled back. There was a hubbub of hushed voices. Amanda Feeney was scribbling furiously. I waited until order was restored.

  “Yes, of course, I know both of you have airtight alibis for the time Dean Scrabbe was knocked on the head and taken from his office. Too airtight for my liking. That one of you was at the Northside police substation precisely at that time asking to use the phone was overdoing it just a bit much. I called the garage that towed your car, and they said they found nothing wrong with it. And I fault myself for not getting a better copy of the CV’s the Personnel Department faxed me. The reference to the restaurant you owned at 333 Backbay Street in Boston came over graphically garbled as Dri Brat or Prat and something sten, the best I could make it out. Dri Brat Worsten? It didn’t make sense. Even when I called for and received a clean copy and saw the name of the restaurant was Drei Bratwursten, I still didn’t catch on. Drei Bratwursten. The Three Franks. That’s right, not just two Frank Snyderses but three. Identical triplets.”

  To another outbreak of exclamations and murmurs, Lieutenant Tracy opened the door, and the third Snyders brother came in, handcuffed to a large uniformed officer.

  “The Three Franks,” I repeated when order once again had been restored. “Franz, Francis, and Frans, born in Baltimore thirty-four years ago. And practical jokers, right from the start. Am I not right?”

  “We’re not saying anything until we talk to a lawyer,” they all said in unison. Then they laughed, identically, creating a creepy effect.

  “You worked your way up the coast, playing games, a habit that started early, harmless enough at first, this ability to be a single, a double, and especially a triple. People gaped and gawked and couldn’t believe their eyes. You got thrown out of college for cheating when you didn’t have to. You were arrested in Philadelphia for running a con game with old ladies in a retirement home. You won endurance bets, dance contests, even a marathon in New York. Not for money, just for a joke.

  “And when you came here after the Health Department in Boston closed you down for having cats, raccoons, and a dog as well as ‘unidentified meat products’ in your restaurant freezer, you found a situation ripe for the hoax of your wildest dreams. You found Damon Drex allowing Professor Gottling to have chimps for experimentation for practically
nothing. So you started the biggest practical joke of your careers. You launched the program, funded by the Onoyoko Institute, to teach chimps how to write. And just when the joke was coming to fruition, Cranston Fessing showed up and, being the shrewd old dean he was, smelled a rat, or three rats in this case. At that point you decided to take the joke one ghastly step further. You killed and cooked the dean and fed him to the chimps. And when your murder and mutilation of Fessing didn’t deter the university, you repeated your ghastly joke, using Scrabbe’s skull to point suspicion at the Skull Collection and the antics of the Long Piggers. All the while you could barely stop laughing. You were able to get away with your wretched pranks because you were one person in three, miraculously capable of being in three places at one time. Or, more to the point of your hubris, three persons in one, which made you think you were invincible, a veritable god. What you didn’t count on, what all murderers big and small don’t count on, is that a civilized society will only take so much. You carried your joke too far, and your pride went before your fall.