The Memorial Hall Murder (9 page)

Ham opened his eyes. His tongue was thick in his mouth and his head throbbed. It was the middle of the night, pitch black. He closed his eyes and drifted off again into painful dreams. Some time later he became conscious that his face was resting on something uncomfortable. He tried to roll over, but he couldn't move. Something was weighing down heavily on his back. His head was pounding. His body ached in every limb. He turned his head to one side and tried to spit out the grit that was pressing into his mouth, and then, straining to lift his head, he stared into the darkness.

Where was he? Where, in the name of God?

Chapter Fourteen

Homer was supposed to appear at the meeting of the Harvard Overseers at ten. He had allowed himself an extra hour to spend with the Harvard Police Chief. He galloped across Mass Av, panted for a moment on the cement island where a green statue of Charles Sumner gazed vaguely down on the raging traffic, and then plunged across the rest of the avenue and entered the Yard. Beside the old brick front of Harvard Hall he stopped to look at his map. Homer was not yet at home with the lay of the land. He knew a lot more about the place from books than he' did from experience. Of course, he had long been familiar with the vast staircase of Widener Library, and the layers of stacks and the call desk and the card catalogue, where he hardly needed to glance at the signs to know on which side of the aisle to find T for Thoreau or V for Jones Very or C for Christopher Pearse Cranch. But he knew the rest of the buildings and their history only from book learning. He knew, for example, that Henry Thoreau's grandfather (A.B. 1767) had led a student rebellion against the quality of the college butter. He knew that Henry himself had lived in Hollis Hall. He knew that President Dunster had been forced to resign in 1654 because he didn't believe in infant baptism. Homer knew which of his favorite abolitionists had been to Harvard. He knew Theodore Parker had run into a tree while reading a book and knocked himself out he knew Oliver Wendell Holmes (a latecomer to the cause of emancipation) had assisted in the dismissal of three black students from the medical school. Wendell Phillips and Thomas Wentworth Higginson had graduated from Harvard. Longfellow and James Russell Lowell had taught here. Homer knew all these things, but he didn't know where Grays Hall was. He squinted at the map and batted it to keep it open in the wind. Oh, there was Grays, way off to the right.

Homer pocketed his map and turned south. He was moving through the oldest part, of the Yard. Some of these buildings had been here practically forever, solid hulks of brick. Homer looked at the men and women walking past him now, heading for Holyoke to study Celtic, or Mallinckrodt for a class in biochem or Sever Hall for Afro-American Studies, and they began to turn a little filmy and dim and transparent. Homer couldn't help but see them in a kind of stop-motion movie; they were racing by, their legs twittering along the path. He speeded up the film still more, and now they were merely pale mothlike figures, streaks of color, whizzing back and forth, class after class, generation after generation, century after century, while the massive houses stood fixed and permanent, their brick chimneys poking through time. Homer wondered pompously to himself whether the fleeting streaks of color were of any use or value at all, those moths existing but for a day, dashing themselves headlong at the flickering lamp of learning. He didn't know. He couldn't swear to it. He felt a little dim and uncertain himself, fumbling around the corner of Grays Hall, looking for the office of the Harvard Police.

He was just going to get a report on things from Harvard Police, and pass it along to the Overseers. That was all he would do. Because it really wasn't his responsibility in any way. He was really out of it. He would just get a general picture of the overall situation and pass it along to Mrs. Chamberlain and the rest of them at ten o'clock in University Hall.

It was clear that the incident was over. Except for the awful fact of the death of Ham Dow, the bomb had hardly disturbed the calm of the university. Donald Maderna's crew had cleaned things up and opened the building, and they were beginning to rebuild the floor. Professor Parker's immense classes in The Great Age of Athens had been forced across the street to the Lowell Lecture Hall only once. Students were taking shortcuts through Memorial Hall once again, dodging around Maderna's sawhorses, finding their way in the dim light of the chandeliers even in the daytime, because the windows were darkened with huge sheets of plywood. Things were pretty much back to normal.

The door to the Harvard Police Department was down a flight of basement stairs. Homer opened the door, trying to remember the name of the man in charge. It was something Dickensian. Marley, that was it. Like Marley's ghost, clanking his chain up the steps to Scrooge's bedchamber, crying,
Ebeneeeezer
,
Ebeneeeezer.

The girl at the counter looked up at Homer. “Mr.…?”

“Scrooge,” said Homer. “No, no, I'm sorry. Kelly. Homer Kelly. I have an appointment with Mr. Marley.”

“Oh, yes, go right in, Mr. Kelly. Mr. Marley's office is at the end of the hall to the right.” The girl had to speak up over the noise of the police radio in the switchboard behind her.

Peter Marley stood up as Homer entered his office. “Come right in, Mr. Kelly. I've been wanting to tell you how glad I was to meet you last week. I mean, I read all about that case out in Concord. And that girl on Nantucket during the eclipse of the sun, the one who—”

“Oh, no, my God, never mind. I tripped all over my own big feet both times. Hideous mistakes. Ghastly errors. And I'm staying out of this one altogether. But I'm supposed to make some kind of explanation to the Overseers. Mrs. Chamberlain, she's asked me to tell them whether or not I think Harvard's going to get blown off the map.”

“Oh, no, I don't think so, do you? We're not worried about it. Of course, we've had a few false alarms since last Wednesday, but they didn't amount to anything. We get them all the time. Here, take a look.” Peter Marley picked up a computer printout from his desk and showed it to Homer. It was an index of police statistics for the week, and the kinds of crimes were listed separately:
HOMICIDE, ASSAULT, ROBBERY, RAPE, OBSCENE CALL, BOMB THREAT, BREAK & ENTER, BUILDING TAKEOVER …

“Building takeover.” Homer laughed. “Well, I guess you people have your own special little problems in your war against crime.”

“Look here, under ‘Bomb Threat,'” said Marley. “Seven of them. Of course, the one in Memorial Hall wasn't a threat, it was the real thing. But the others were just nutty calls. We get them all the time. Yes, Judy, you want something?”

A woman in a blue uniform was looking in at the door. “Excuse me, Pete. We thought you'd like to know there's been another bombing in Bridgeport. Big insurance company. And the Nepalese Freedom Movement said they did it. It was on the news just now.”

“No kidding? Well, thank you, Judy. Mr. Kelly, I think they've turned their attention elsewhere. It's the banks that will be getting it next, I'll bet. They must be through with the universities. It's funny, though; they never took credit for our bombing. They usually call up some newspaper and give a speech over the phone.”

“What about supporters of the movement here in Cambridge? Do you know anything about them?” said Homer. “I understand there are plenty of sympathizers with the Nepalese Freedom Movement among the student body. But I don't suppose there are any mad bombers in that lot?”

“I doubt it very much. We've talked to a bunch of them. Some of our best students are members of leftist groups of one kind or another. And of course when you say the word ‘radical' around here, everybody thinks of Charley Flynn. He's an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department. But the trouble is, all these people were friends of Ham Dow. It's in conceivable any of them would have put his life in danger, let alone blow him up.”

“What about people on the scene at the time? Have you got any record on them?”

“Oh, my God, there were so many of them. There was such a jumble and confusion of near-witnesses and standers-by and rushers-to-the-scene. Well, you know. You were there. At the time of the explosion the basement was full of people. They poured out of the building from every door. You know: the radio station, WHRB, the copy center, the lecture hall where you were teaching, all those little rooms and offices down there. But when we tried to pin them down—who they were, where they had been at the time, where they lived, and so on—they melted away. And the people we did manage to identify didn't seem to have the vaguest notion who any of the others might be. Teli me, have you ever heard of Ham's Rats?”

“Ham's Rats?”

“It was what they called themselves. A whole bunch of people. Mostly kids, but not all. Some of them were middle-aged, even elderly. People that hung around Ham. A lot of them weren't even students. They were people he picked up or befriended in one way or another. The trouble is, no one seems to know who they were exactly. Wait a minute, listen to this. Wait till you hear our interview with Crawley, the building superintendent. I've got a tape recording right here. Listen to this.”

Homer sat back and looked at the ceiling and winced, as Mr. Crawley's whining voice began droning from the tape recorder.

“I don't know who was in the building. Damned if I know who the hell was downstairs.”

“But, Mr. Crawley, whoever put that bundle of dynamite and the clock mechanism under the floor of the memorial transept must have known the building very well.”

“Well, don't ask me. They were all over the place all the time, those kids. ‘What the hell you doing here?' I says. ‘It's a free country,' they says. So I says, ‘Get the hell out.' Only, next thing you know, they're back again, all over the place downstairs. And up in the balcony.”

“The balcony?”

“That balcony up there. You know. It's right up over the place where the guy got his head blown off.”

“Who? Who was up in the balcony?”

“Some weirdo. I don't know. He's new. Wasn't there before.”

“Well, what about the night before the bombing? Did you see anybody unusual hanging around the building the evening before? The clock mechanism would have been good for no more than twelve hours. So it was probably set the night before, around midnight.”

“Jeez, I don't know. You think I want to hang around this place at night? Come five o'clock, I get out of there. Cheever was there the day before. President Cheever. There was some ceremony going on in Sanders Theatre on Tuesday. Cheever was in there giving a speech. Only, that was in the middle of the day.”

“Mr. Crawley, do you know anything about Ham's Rats?”

“Well, there was this big lady—”

“Mrs. Esterhazy. Right. We know about Mrs. Esterhazy. She lived on Martin Street in Ham's house. Anybody else?”

“I don't know. I can't tell them apart. Bunch of weirdos, if you ask me.”

Chapter Fifteen