The Memorial Hall Murder

by Jane Langton

  “But, Mr. Ratchit, the point is, he might have had white fat hands, only he played the cello, so his left hand would have had hard calluses on the ends of his fingers, where they come down on the strings, you see, when you play. Maybe you were just looking at the fingers of his right hand?”

  “Oh, no. There weren’t any calluses on that corpse. Not anywhere on his entire physique. Except corns. He had these big corns on his feet. But nothing else. You could tell he didn’t get any kind of exercise. I looked him over good. Because of my hobby, see, being physical fitness. I mean, I’m in a state of perfect physical fitness myself. But you take a person like that, never takes any exercise. He’s bound to get flabby all over. His hands were just soft like spaghetti. You know what I mean. Big flabby pieces of cooked macaroni.”

  “Both hands, Mr. Ratchit?”

  “Well, sure, both hands.”

  “I don’t suppose they took any fingerprints, Mr. Ratchit? I mean, because it never occurred to anybody that there was any doubt about the identity of the body.”

  “Fingerprints? No, nobody took any fingerprints.”

  “Here, just a minute. I’m going to put Miss Van Horn on the phone. She’s a cellist. She knows what the calluses should be like. Here, Vick, it’s your turn.”

  “Mr. Ratchit? I just want to be sure. Do you remember whether or not it was the fingers of both hands that were soft and flabby, or maybe you just noticed one hand, because, you see, the right hand might not have had calluses, because you just hold the bow with the right hand, do you see?”

  “No, no, there weren’t any calluses. Like I said to Mr. Kelly, I told him, both hands. They were like marshmallows all over. Both hands.”

  “Well, then, it couldn’t have been Ham Dow! Homer, it wasn’t Ham! His hands weren’t like marshmallows! Nobody could say that about Ham’s hands. Never! Oh, Homer!”

  “Hey, there,” said Mr. Ratchit, “are you still there?”

  “Mr. Ratchit? This is Kelly again. Look, I think this is probably a difference in language more than anything else. Just a semantic confusion. But just out of curiosity, tell me, if we went to all the bureaucratic trouble of getting an exhumation order, would they still be able to take fingerprints? And do you think a doctor would still be able to tell whether or not a person had calluses on his hands after this amount of time has gone by? It’s been six and a half weeks.”

  “Well, I don’t know. It was you people who didn’t want him embalmed. I mean, I told you he should of been embalmed. So I don’t know how fast he might have decomposed. I mean, he was beginning to sort of deliquesce already. Fall apart into, like, a jelly. But anyway, I’m telling you. I told you before. There were no calluses on that corpse. He was a big flabby slob of a swollen piece of bloated disgusting—”

  “Right. I get the picture.”

  “Whereas, if he’d only gotten some exercise. Just a few minutes of the day. In the privacy of your own home. Or you climb the stairs instead of take the elevator. Now, you take me, for instance …”

  Vick clutched Homer’s arm when he hung up the phone at last. Her eyes were blazing. Her skinny body shook. “It wasn’t Ham! Homer, it wasn’t Ham!” She pounded his chest with both fists. “I told you that shoe didn’t belong to Ham Dow. Remember that shoe? I told you!”

  “Now look here, Vick. Don’t get excited about it. It’s a small thing. A very small thing. I don’t have any way of knowing how reliable an observer that Ratchit guy is. He’s a crank. A faddist. He may have taken one look at the body and just decided it was too fat and flabby to be anything but a horrible example to the world, and he’s making the most of it. And besides, you’re forgetting the most important thing. If the body isn’t Ham, then who was it? Has anybody else turned up missing? Not a soul. And then too, if it wasn’t Ham, where is he? Where the hell is he? Before the explosion he was alive and well and present among us. After the explosion he was gone.”

  Then Homer had an unhappy thought. Maybe there had been two people killed in the explosion instead of one, but the second one had been blown into pieces so small they had been sprayed all over the walls and floor and the high wooden vault of the building in tiny invisible irrecoverable fragments. He opened his mouth to say this, and then thought better of it. “So tell me, what Could have become of him? We know he wasn’t buried in the debris, because they went all through the rubble with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Maybe he ran away.” Vick flung out her arms to show the wide world Ham had run away to. “They were after him. He knew they were after him. He’s somewhere in hiding.” She looked up as the north door burst open and a flurry of snow blew into the dark corridor, followed by a cluster of people streaming in the door, laughing with the excitement of the first snowfall, their breath steaming in front of them. Vick pointed past them at the open door. “He’s out there somewhere. He’s not dead. The dead man wasn’t Ham. He’s still alive, I tell you, Homer. He’s still alive somewhere, somehow. I don’t know where, but somewhere.”

  A snowball flew the length of the long hall. It smacked against the pale patch of new cement in the middle of the floor and disintegrated.

  Homer put his hand to his brow. “Well, oh, God, all right. I’ll see. I’ll look into it. I’ll try to get an exhumation order. I’ll probably fail. But I’ll try.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Homer and Mary Kelly were still in bed when the phone rang on the morning of December second. “Mr. Kelly? This is Oliphant at Cambridge Police. I just thought you might be interested in something that’s turned up at the Harvard Motor House on Mount Auburn Street. Somebody who was there overnight back in October went out in the morning after paying his bill and left his attaché case behind. Then he never came back for it. So they kept it for a while the way they always do, but then when nobody called for it, and he never answered their letter, they opened up this attaché case, and when they saw what was in it they called us. Dynamite sticks and coils of wire and God knows what all. Wait a minute, I’ve got a list here. Wire, heavy-gauge. Electrician’s tape. Miscellaneous clock parts. Staple gun. Sweater. Wrist watch.”

  “A sweater? How big was the sweater?”

  “Oh, really big. You know. Huge. Couple of petrified bananas. Bag of candy. Toolbox. Tools. Couple of keys. Map of Harvard. Piece of paper with a number on it—198.”

  “That could be the room number in the basement of Memorial Hall where the bomb went off.”

  “That’s what we thought. And there was a Philadelphia newspaper, dated—listen to this—October fifteenth.”

  “October fifteenth! The day before! From Philadelphia?”

  “Right. We’re getting in touch with the department down there. He was registered as—you won’t believe this—John Smith of New York City. Funny thing, Mr. Kelly, the wrist watch was still going.”

  “Still going? After six weeks?”

  “It was one of those really expensive electronic watches. You know. You set it by the stars once a year or something. Really accurate to the second.”

  “Was it still keeping good time?”

  “Right on the button.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Oliphant. Did you tell Peter Marley over at Harvard Police?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s the one said to call you. Thought you might be interested.”

  “Oh, I am. I certainly am. I’m very much interested indeed.”

  Homer put the phone down. Then he put his legs over the side of the bed and picked up the receiver again. He stared out the window for a minute. It was snowing again. It was going to be an early winter. He reached for the phone book, but then he remembered the number by himself—1111—because it looked like a row of tombstones.

  “Oh, Mr. Ratchit, I’m sorry to bother you again so early in the morning. It’s me again, Homer Kelly. Did I wake you up? I did? Oh, I’m terribly sorry. There’s just one more thing. Did that guy who got blown up in Memorial Hall have a watch on his wrist?”

  Mr. Ratchit was peevish. “A watch? No,
he didn’t have a watch. Did he have a pink ribbon in his hair? No, he didn’t have a pink ribbon in his hair. Did he have a tattoo on his chest? No, he—”

  “You’re sure? You’re absolutely positive he didn’t have a wrist watch?”

  “Listen, mister, are you accusing me of stealing a wrist watch from the dead? Because if you are, you can just—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, oh, certainly not, Mr. Ratchit. I know you’re the soul of integrity. Old family firm. Totally reputable establishment. There was no wrist watch, then. That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you again, Mr. Ratchit. I’m really deeply grateful.”

  Mary was sitting up in bed, hugging her knees. “What was that all about?”

  Homer looked at her. “You know what I think? I think he blew himself up.”

  “Who blew himself up? Not Ham Dow?”

  “No. The man from Philadelphia. Somebody came up from Philadelphia the day before, a hired killer, I think, and he got the thing all set up. He stapled his dynamite sticks up on the ceiling of Room 198, with the timing device set to go off the next day at eleven-thirty. And then the next day he went back to Memorial Hall for some reason, only he forgot his watch, so he made the mistake of getting too close at the wrong moment, and he got himself blown up for his pains. He was a big fat guy like Ham, so when his head was blown off, everybody assumed this giant dead body was Hamilton Dow.”

  “But it wasn’t?” Mary jumped out of bed and threw her arms around Homer. “Oh, Homer, then Ham Dow is still alive. Vick’s right. He’s not dead after all.”

  “Well, if he’s not dead, where is he?” Homer rubbed his face in his wife’s thick hair. “You know, I feel nothing but foreboding about that. I’m afraid nothing good can have happened to the man. He wasn’t the kind of guy to just up and disappear. I must say, I’m not really very hopeful.”

  Mary picked up her bathrobe and stuck one arm in a sleeve. “Homer, I don’t see why he came back to Memorial Hall at all. I mean, the man from Philadelphia. You’d think he’d know enough to stay away. Especially when he didn’t have a watch and didn’t know what time it was. Wasn’t that an awfully foolish thing for him to do?”

  Homer put his hands on the window sash and stared at the snow piling up on the railing of the back porch. Then he slammed the window down with a crash. “But he did know what time it was. He knew! Only he was wrong! The clocks, the new tower clocks, they were wrong! They had just been set into motion the day before. There was a little ceremony the day before in Sanders Theatre, and Cheever made a speech and pushed the button, and then the clock works began whirring for the first time, only they were sluggish, and the whirligigs were still in the clutch of inertia, and the two spiral coils that wind back into the past and forward into the future weren’t working right yet, and the little gears weren’t really loosened up and twirling around fast enough and notching their little notches into the little slots on the other little gears, and the sprockets and spindles and thingamabobs were all delayed just a whisker, so the whole damned mechanism was slow by ten whole minutes the next day, and all four clock faces, looking east, west, north, and south over the city of Cambridge, were wrong, and everybody in the whole city was late to class or to work or they missed their trains and planes and opportunities for advancement and who knows what all. So the man from Philadelphia thought he had another ten minutes before the thing would go off, only he was wrong. Dead wrong. The deadest wrong of all.”

  “I see,” said Mary. “He had just come up from Philadelphia, is that it? So it didn’t occur to him that the clocks weren’t accurate, since he didn’t know how new they were, and he’d be bound to think that any clocks as big and important-looking as they, were would certainly be exactly right, so he trusted them, only he shouldn’t have.”

  Homer shook his head and laughed. “Too much respect for Harvard. These outsiders, they really think this ancient institution is dedicated to veritas, the way it pretends to be. They think it’s dishing out veritas by the bushel. Only of course Harvard is just another bunch of fallible fools working on lucky hunches or wild guesses or august mistaken theories inherited from the past. Just a miscellaneous batch of mortal souls scattered all up and down the great chain of being from the bottom to the top.”

  “Oh, Homer, look at it snow. Doesn’t it make you think of Christmas. Homer, darling, what do you want for Christmas?”

  Homer looked balefully at the snow blowing in small whirlpools between their own back porch and the porch of the house next door. “I’ll tell you what I want for Christmas. Hamilton Dow. I’d like to find a big slob of a man named Ham Dow stuffed into my Christmas stocking. The trouble is, I may meet him altogether sooner than I’d like to. I’m going over to the Cambridge City Hospital first thing this morning and talk to that pathologist. The exhumation order finally got handed down by the judge and they’ve dug up the poor wretch from Mount Auburn Cemetery and taken him over to the hospital.”

  “Oh, Homer, let’s hope it’s the man from Philadelphia.”

  “I hope to God it’s the man from Philadelphia. But if there are any calluses on those decomposing fingers, I’ll get my Christmas present a whole lot sooner than I want.”

  When Homer left the house on Huron Avenue, snow was still falling in flurries, collecting in the branches of the spindly trees, blowing eastward in gusts from the flat roofs of the three-deckers. But when he came back from his mission to the Cambridge City Hospital and stepped shakily off the bus at Harvard Square, the low winter sun was beginning to glare through the thinning clouds. The tinsel bells hanging over Boylston Street and Brattle swung sparkling in the sunlight. The bells and the tawdry Christmas decorations entwined around the light poles were the contribution of the city of Cambridge, and therefore they were Town, whereas the square itself was really a province of the university, and therefore it was Gown, so the tinsel bells didn’t fit in at all. But in a vulgar way they added something to the particolored daftness of Harvard Square at this season of the year. The place throbbed and palpitated with its own skewed version of the Christmas spirit.

  Homer’s own mood was sepulchral. He walked feebly across the street when the light said WALK, telling himself that of course he should really be rejoicing, because, after all, that pathologist had found no calluses on the hands of the corpse dug up from Mount Auburn Cemetery. He hadn’t found any fingerprints either, but he had looked at Homer solemnly over the putrefying mess on the table and said that if there had ever been calluses on those hands he would have found evidence of them still. So that was good news. But, oh, God, the body of the man from Philadelphia had been unspeakable. Those damn kids and their idealism about embalming and their sanctimonious opinions about just letting nature take its course! Homer staggered up on the sidewalk on the other side of Mass Av and groaned aloud. It was his blood sugar, he told himself. He had thrown up his breakfast, and his blood sugar was down. It needed pumping up with something really solid and substantial, like a nice little second breakfast at Elsie’s. And after that he would run right over to Memorial Hall and tell Vick the results of the exhumation. Vick would be conducting a final rehearsal of the orchestra and chorus, getting ready for tonight’s performance. She would be overjoyed by Homer’s news.

  But no. There was something else he should do first. Before he went over to Mem Hall to talk to Vick. Just for the hell of it. Just a crazy notion. Just a nutty crazy thing he felt like doing.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Homer had never seen Elmwood before. He had lived in Cambridge most of his life without ever finding himself on this short byway off Brattle Street. And yet he should have had a historical curiosity about the place, because James Russell Lowell had lived there. Lowell had been Longfellow’s successor at Harvard. And he had been one of those truculent abolitionists who had made everybody so mad. Well, his house was a splendid residence for the President of Harvard. Homer pushed through the front gate and walked boldly up to the front door. It was still early. The President of Harvard would proba
bly still be eating a leisurely Saturday-morning breakfast.

  But James Cheever was just coming out. He paused in the open door and looked blankly at Homer.

  “Oh, good morning, sir. I was just passing by. I thought I would drop in and make a brief report on a new development in the matter of the bombing at Memorial Hall.” Homer looked inquisitively over Cheever’s head at the presidential front hall, and caught a glimpse of a table on which was displayed a small piece of alabaster sculpture, something picked up from the rubble of a ruined temple, a broken torso through which the lamplight shone. Homer wanted to exclaim in wonder, but Cheever was closing the door in his face, shutting off the view.

  “A new development?” said President Cheever. “What new development?” He moved away from the door and started down the brick walk.

  “Well, sir, I’m sure you’ll be as amazed as I was to learn that the man who was killed in the explosion was not Hamilton Dow.”

  James Cheever stopped in his tracks and looked sharply at Homer. “It was not …? Surely you are mistaken.”

  “No, sir, it’s a fact. It was a man from Philadelphia. The bomber himself. He planted the bomb the day before, and then blew himself up by mistake.”

  Cheever began walking quickly forward again. He pushed through the gate and slammed it shut against Homer’s knee. “But if that’s true, then where is Hamilton Dow? Whatever happened to Dow?”

  Doggedly Homer opened the gate. “Who knows? Beats me. Maybe he’s still buried under all that brick.”

  President Cheever slipped on the snowy sidewalk, then regained his balance and drove his legs forward once again. “But they searched the debris so thoroughly. I have been assured of that. Unless of course”—Cheever looked at Homer and uttered a dry laugh—”unless he was buried and rose again. Perhaps he rolled away the stone. Sloan Tinker is of the opinion that the man had a messiah complex, so of course that sort of thing would have come naturally. Perhaps he simply rolled away the stone.”