The Memorial Hall Murder

by Jane Langton

  No, no, that was wrong. It wouldn’t do any good to call through the pipe. It was a matter of simple physics. It wouldn’t do any good to make standing waves of air inside the pipe unless by some wild stroke of luck the pipe came to an end against somebody’s ear. But if the pipe itself were vibrating, then the noise would be heard all along its whole length, not just at the end.

  Ham got up off his knees and kicked his way slowly along the floor until he found a brick. Then he knelt down and hit the pipe with it. BANG BANG. He put his ear to the pipe and struck it again. The blow rang in the metal. It sounded musical and loud.

  He began with the call for help in Morse code.

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing …

  Chapter Twenty-four

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing

  Jerry Crawley woke up. He turned over on his side on the sofa, lifted his head, and stared at the pipe rising from floor to ceiling in the corner of the room. Jeez, the thing was making a hell of a racket. Mr. Crawley pulled his hat down over one ear and huddled his head down in the crevice of the sofa again.

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing

  bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing

  Christ, you didn’t get no peace. He got up off the sofa, took his coat from the hook on the door, settled down on the sofa again with the coat over his head, and went back to sleep.

  BANG bingbangbing! BANG bingbangbing!

  bingbingBANGbing! bingbingBANGbing!

  bingBANGbingBAAANG BANG

  In the room above Mr. Crawley’s office, the Messiah of Memorial Hall paid no attention to the rhythm of the “Hallelujah Chorus” thundering in the pipe in the corner of his room. His attention was elsewhere. He was squatting naked on his sleeping bag reading the Book of Revelation.

  He who testifies to these things says,

  “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The building was a dark mountain blotting out the night sky.

  “Look,” said Homer. “There’s a light in that room right over Crawley’s office. That’s where Jesus lives. He’s got a really cozy little apartment.”

  “And, Homer, look up there. Way at the top. Jack-o’-lanterns. Two of them. Somebody’s hung a couple of pumpkins up there at the top of the tower.” Mary Kelly pointed upward.

  Homer looked up too and saw the grinning faces glowing orange at the corners of the bell chamber. “Wow, they must be a hundred and fifty feet up. Hanging on those gargoyles that stick out up there. Halloween was two weeks ago. You’d think they’d rot and fall down.”

  “What a crazy thing to do,” said Mary. “They might have broken their necks, climbing up there. Crazy kids.”

  “How do you know it was kids?”

  “Well, who else would do a dangerous charming thing like that? Oh, don’t they look marvelous.”

  “How did they get up in the tower at all? That’s the question,” said Homer. “More crazy people are running around with keys to every nook and cranny in Memorial Hall.”

  There was a concert in Sanders Theatre. From the memorial transept Homer and Mary could hear the plangent chords of a harpsichord, and through the windows in the doors they could see the audience listening solemnly on the benches at the side. In the corridor a girl was selling tickets at a small table, almost lost in the dim vastness of the long dark hall. “You want to hear the second half?” she said. “I’ll sell you a couple of tickets half-price.”

  “No, thank you,” said Mary. “We’re just trying to get into the basement. I guess we’ll have to go in by way of the service entrance on the other side. Right?”

  “I’m afraid so. The great hall is all locked up.”

  A delivery ramp was mounted beside the stairway in the service entrance. “Look at that,” said Homer. “They must have had one like that in the old days. When the old kitchen was down here. Imagine the sides of beef coming in, the cases of milk bottles, the barrels of apples.”

  The door to the basement corridor at the bottom of the stairs was open. A light glimmered around a corner to the left. “Listen,” said Mary, taking Homer’s arm. “You can’t actually hear anything, but the place is alive. It hums. I can almost feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “People. It just feels inhabited. And look at the way the light flickers and changes down there at the end of the hall. Something’s going on down there. Listen! Did you hear that? Somebody laughed.”

  “Oh, go on. That was outside.”

  “No, I could swear it was down this hallway.” Mary walked to the corner. “Right about here.”

  “Nobody here now.” Homer took a flashlight out of his coat and looked at the closed doors lining the corridor on either side. “This place is just one little cubbyhole after another. Ecology Action Committee. The Worshipful Companie of Freemen of the Shire. What on earth is that?”

  “Tolkien.” Mary laughed. “It must be a bunch of Hobbits.”

  “Christian Science Youth. Harvard-Radcliffe Gay Students Organization. You know what it’s like? A huge hotel. My father’s house hath many mansions. Well, not mansions exactly. These little rooms must be about the size of closets.”

  “Listen,” said Mary. “I hear flute music. Back there where we came in.”

  “It must be from the concert upstairs.” Homer cocked his head. “No, no, you’re right. You couldn’t hear anything from upstairs down here in the basement. It’s somebody playing a flute down here.” They stood still and listened to the thin silvery sound of flute music purling down a scale then breaking off.

  “They know we’re here. Somebody’s spread the word,” said Mary. “I can feel it. They’re everywhere. Behind all these doors. Waiting for us to go away. Where are we now? I’m lost.”

  “We must be under the corridor upstairs. You know, the memorial part, the transept, that big hall that runs all the way through the building. Look, there’s where the bomb went off.”

  “Where? You mean where those boards are nailed up?”

  “That’s right. They boarded it all up. They dumped all the debris back in the hole and boarded it up down here at both ends. Maderna told me they’re going to clear it out in the spring and turn it into a new office. They’re going to open up all the little rooms into one big space. Harvard’s always looking for more room. Institutional elephantiasis.”

  Mary plucked Homer’s sleeve. “I saw somebody. A man with a broom. He saw us, and then he just faded away.”

  “It wasn’t Crawley?”

  “No, no. He was taller than Crawley.”

  “Must be the nighttime custodian,” said Homer. “A tall bald guy? I think I know who you mean. I saw him once upstairs, only in the daytime.”

  They explored the basement of Memorial Hall for half an hour, wandering up and down the corridors from the curtained windows of the radio station at one end to the shuttered counter of the copy center at the other. The locked doors of WHRB to the east and the Harvard Personnel Office to the west looked businesslike and uninhabited, but everywhere else there were snatches of music, voices, laughter. Doors closed ahead of them at the ends of narrow vistas. Lights flickered and went out. There were warm fragrances of coffee and cigarettes. The spaces behind the doors thrummed with life, with breath that seemed to be held as they moved past, and then exhaled again.

  At last they found their way back to the service entrance on the north side. Homer opened the door and followed Mary up the stairs. “It’s true, then,” he said, “about the woodwork. People coming out of the woodwork. I mean, it isn’t just that Jesus freak who’s found a free place to live up there over Mr. Crawley’s office.”

  “No,” said Mary, “it’s Ham’s Rats. Dozens of them. They’re all over Memorial Hall.”

  “They’re living here. It’s a bloody orphan asylum. They’ve got the run of the whole place, from the cel
lar to the tower. It’s a kind of enormous apartment house for squatters, and Ham was its mad landlord. No, no, it’s more like Sherwood Forest, and Ham was Robin Hood. Everybody was invited to move in and settle down with the rest of his raffish band of outcasts, debtors, excommunicants, and thieves.” Then Homer staggered and threw up his hands and clutched the back of his head. “Good God, what was that? An arrow! You see, I was right!”

  “Oh, Homer, you poor dear.” Mary turned back and picked up the object that had come hurtling through the open door behind them to strike its target straight and true. It was a blue plastic Frisbee.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Homer sat at his desk beside a sunny window in the bedroom of the flat on Huron Avenue and called Peter Marley. “It’s just a failing in my education, you see, Peter. I don’t know enough about criminal psychosis. I mean, I don’t have the faintest idea how it’s related to other kinds of insanity. Delusions, for instance. What do you call it when people think they’re somebody else? You know, like Napoleon Bonaparte? Would somebody like that be harmless, or would he be a dangerous lunatic and try to take over East Cambridge by force of arms? What I’m leading up to is this character I ran across in Memorial Hall the other day. He thinks he’s Jesus Christ in the flesh. You’re laughing. It’s not funny. Listen, Marley. Well, I admit in a way it’s kind of funny, but in another way—”

  “Listen, Homer, we know all about him. He’s a well-known Cambridge fruit cake.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Freddy Fulsom. Harmless as the day is long.”

  “Freddy Fulsom? He’s not one of the Boston Fulsoms?”

  “Oh, yes, he certainly is. Fine old Boston family. His mother came and got him. She swept in there and took him by the ear and cleared him out and took him home to Mount Vernon Street. She said she worried about his laundry more than anything else, and whether or not he was keeping himself sanitary. I wonder about that myself. The nearest bathroom must have been ten miles away. She brought him down here and told me all about it. Made him promise me he wouldn’t be naughty any more. As a matter of fact, she said his psychiatrist is quite pleased with this new phase of Freddy’s. I mean, apparently Freddy used to think he was some kind of little nocturnal animal that lives in trees. A potto, or something like that. So it’s a step up for Freddy to think he’s Jesus Christ. I mean, at least he’s not sitting on top of the bureau any more.”

  “A step up.” Homer laughed. “I’ll say it’s a step up. It’s President Cheever’s great chain of being again. Good for Freddy! He shot from the bottom to the top in one lifetime. You know, Peter, he was living in there. Right up there over Crawley’s office. That little balcony over the transept was his front porch. How do we know he didn’t blow the place up?”

  “Oh, no, not Freddy. He doesn’t have the wit or the know-how.”

  “Well, I suppose he was just another one of Ham’s Rats. Ham must have felt sorry for him and found a place in the building where he could stay.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Homer. He didn’t know Ham Dow. I don’t think he really focuses on people at all. He’s up in the clouds all the time. You know what I mean.”

  “Well, then, maybe it’s true that he came in because of the music, the way he says. Maybe he did just move in a couple of weeks ago. He heard the music and decided it was all in his honor, and he just moved right in on his own. A long time after the bombing. So I guess he didn’t have a bomb factory in that big trunk of his. We don’t have to go in there and look around.”

  “I’ll tell you the place I’d like to turn inside out,” said Marley. “Cheever’s office. If I had the gall, I’d do it this weekend, because Cheever’s going to be away. I’d just go in there and take a look. Because I’m still curious about why he and Tinker lied to you that day. But of course that’s just an insane notion on my part. It’s not something you do behind the back of the President of Harvard.”

  “Cheever’s going away?”

  “Yes, he’s going to Chicago with Tinker. It’s some conference of college presidents. They’re off for the weekend. Say, listen, Homer, there’s another thing. Something else has turned up. You’ll be amused to learn that Ham Dow left a funny will. It turned up in his house. Pasted to the refrigerator. He added new beneficiaries every day.”

  “He did? What kind of a crazy will is that? Did he have a lot of property to bestow? I suppose he must have had a pretty good salary, being an associate professor at Harvard University. Right?”

  “Well, maybe he did, but I don’t think there was much of anything left for anybody to inherit. He was always spreading it around all over the place. I think it was just a few personal possessions and the house itself. It’s true, he owned the house free and clear.”

  “His house is on Martin Street? Could I go there? I mean, I admit, I’m just curious. I can’t help it. The man intrigues me.”

  “Well, I don’t see why not. Of course, his estate is in probate court, I understand, but I think one of the kids is still living there. Why don’t you just knock on the door and see what happens? Sixty Martin Street.”

  “Well, maybe I will.”

  Homer hung up and tried to get back to work. He was supposed to be finishing the last chapter of the textbook, The Great Cloud Darkening the Land, which was growing out of the course of lectures. But he was bored with the last chapter. It was the index that really captured his interest. The index was going to be the best part. It was going to be the most informative, garrulous, cross-indexed index there ever was. A magnificent index. At the moment the index was only a crawling swarm of three-by-five cards, proliferating all over the table. Homer put his hand into the pile at random and plucked out a single card. The telephone rang.

  It was Julia Chamberlain. “Hello, Homer? I hope it’s all right to call you Homer? And please, for heaven’s sake, call me Julia. I loathe being called Mrs. Chamberlain. Homer, I wonder if you and your wife would like to come to the cocktail party in the ballroom at 17 Quincy Street as my guests after the game tomorrow.”

  “The game? There’s some sort of game tomorrow?”

  “Some sort of—Listen, you ninny, it’s the Harvard-Yale game. Didn’t you know that? Homer Kelly, you amaze me. I’m really surprised. Anyway, how about it? It’s a sort of big ceremonial party for all the bigwigs who come up from Yale for the game. I want to introduce you to Jim Cheever. I mean, I think it’s important for him to get to know new members of the faculty, especially really refreshing ones like you, Homer. And I’m eager to meet your wife. I understand she’s a peach too.”

  “Well, of course, we’d love to come. But President Cheever is going to be away. Peter Marley just told me on the phone, there’s a conference of college presidents in Chicago this weekend. Cheever’s going to be there, and so is Tinker.”

  “They are?” There was a pause. “Well,” said Julia Chamberlain.

  “So maybe you’d rather withdraw your invitation,” said Homer. “Mary and I would be glad to be sociable another time.”

  There was another pause. “Oh, yes. Well, maybe. Well, yes, I guess, as a matter of fact, I will. I mean, if Jim isn’t going to be there, I may not go myself.”

  “Very good, then,” said Homer politely, and then he waited for Julia to begin the little ceremonial exchanges of courtesy required for a telephone farewell.

  But instead there was an awkward pause. The conversation seemed to have come to a dead halt. Homer sensed that the woman on the other end of the line was staring into space. Sportingly he pitched in, casting about for something to say. He brought up the stained glass. He wondered how that campaign was going. He hoped they’d find enough money somewhere to replace the stained glass in Memorial Hall.

  Then Julia Chamberlain laughed and came back to life. “Oh, good Lord, who knows what will happen about the stained glass? The only progress so far is an estimate from Connick Associates in Boston. If you could call that progress. Because it will be two hundred dollars a square foot. Do you know how much that c
omes to altogether? Three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Three hundred thousand—my God.”

  “The entire building only cost four hundred thousand, back in the 1870s. I haven’t dared mention it to anybody yet. Certainly not to Jim Cheever. He’ll have a fit. You say he’s going to be away? How long? Did Peter say how long?”

  “All he said was they’d be away for the weekend.”

  “Mmmmmm. Well, so long, Homer. I’ll be calling you and your wife pretty soon about something friendly. Good-bye.”

  Homer put the telephone down, picked up a handful of index cards, and began sorting them by color. The colors stood for chapters. He spread them fanwise in his hand and began plucking them out one at a time, a pink one, a pink one, a blue one, a green one. Then he pulled out too many at once, and the entire fistful of cards slithered to the floor. Homer cursed and got down on his hands and knees and scrabbled them together and slapped them on the table. Then he snatched up his coat and went out, persuading himself that what he needed most right now was a breath of fresh air. A brisk walk. A nice hike over to Martin Street. He glanced at the map of Cambridge before he burst out the door, and was surprised to discover that Martin Street wasn’t one of the polite streets of large houses running off Brattle Street, where any right-thinking Harvard professor would want to live. It was way the hell and gone out Mass Av on the way to Porter Square. But it wasn’t so far from Huron Avenue. He could make a shortcut past the Radcliffe Quad.

  Ten minutes later Homer turned into Martin Street and made his way to number 60. It was a small wooden-frame building with a narrow porch close to the sidewalk. Homer guessed it belonged to the same era as Memorial Hall.

  Jennifer Sullivan opened the door. Homer remembered Jennifer. She was a member of Vick’s chorus, and even in that miscellaneous collection of people she would have been hard to miss. She was a frail-looking moth of a girl in a swollen maternity jumper.