The Murder in the Museum of Man (13 page)

A strange transformation has come over Malachy Morin. Of a sudden he appears to be edgy and subdued at the same time. The boom of his voice issuing from his office on the third floor and echoing up through the exhibitions (a counterpoint of sorts to the hoots and hollers rising from the chimps in their exercise yard below) has all but ceased. His very presence seems to have shriveled: he slumps even while standing, and there’s something haunting and askance about his eyes when he looks at you. I don’t think it’s the heat. We’re in one of those greenhouse heat waves that has everyone around here panting. Personally, I rather like extremes of weather; at least they’re memorable, when so much of life isn’t. Perhaps the thickening atmosphere of fear and suspicion is getting to him. Perhaps the police have ransacked his life as well, and he is a more sensitive soul than I imagined. Perhaps he’s ill. Perhaps he has been to the clinic and been told that he has some anomaly, some lump, some shadow behind the heart, some indications that indicate … One forgets that the Malachy Morins of the world sometimes suffer.

The fact is I’ve never seen the man so considerate without wanting something. This morning he came into my office to ask me if I had gotten any more police inquiries. About what? I asked. Oh, he said, nothing in general. You know, the Fessing murder. I told him that I hadn’t heard much lately about our murdered dean other than what could be garnered from the newspaper. And that, judging from the way the
Bugle
played the search of my home, wasn’t especially enlightening. (“Museum Official Denies Complicity in Dean’s Murder.” I mean, really.) He asked me if I had heard from Elsa Pringle, and I told him I hadn’t. He lingered around, as though trying to make up his mind about something. He kept inventing questions. Had there been any
more calls about the press assistant position? I said no, and added with perceptible impatience that I thought he had decided to offer the position to Ms. Pringle. At that he appeared to turn pale. Yes, he said, he was working on that angle. If she didn’t pan out, he said, he would put another ad in the
Bugle
. All this time I had the uncanny feeling he wanted to ask me something specific or wanted me to do something. Just what, I cannot begin to imagine.

Finally he said that if the police ask any questions about any other missing persons to let him know. Was anyone else missing? I asked, and he quickly said no, not that he knew of, and added that perhaps we should have a policy about police inquiries should anyone else turn up missing because the person or persons who had done in Dean Fessing might strike again. What sort of policy? I asked. Mr. Morin said he meant to say that the policy should be to consider a policy. When I looked dubious at that response, he said he meant we should get a press assistant onboard as soon as possible, and was I sure that Elsa Pringle had not called or written, or had anyone else called or written on her behalf? He went on in this vein until I scarcely knew what the man was talking about, and I’m not sure he did either.

At the end of it, he stood up (he had been standing and sitting by turns during this entire exchange), shook my hand with something of an uncertain grip (he usually breaks your knuckles), and told me that I was doing a wonderful job, that I had an important role to play at the museum whatever the eventual status of the place in relation to Wainscott, and that he was someone I could count on when push came to shove.

It wasn’t until after he left that I realized I had not acted like the detective I need to be if I am going to solve this mystery. I ought to have questioned him about certain aspects of the Fessing case. For instance, what did he know of Raul Brauer’s whereabouts at the time of the dean’s disappearance? What did he know of
certain experiments going on in the Genetics Lab? Of course, the chances are he would know nothing. But I can’t help thinking that he knows
something
, that he’s hiding something that might have a direct bearing on the dean’s murder.

I mentioned my impressions of Mr. Morin to Marge Littlefield, and she said we weren’t the only ones to notice. Doreen, his secretary, told her that her boss had called in sick yesterday, saying he was to be called immediately should anything important arise. “I’ve never seen anyone change so quickly,” Marge told me. “I’ve never seen the man so subdued before.”

In this regard, I would like to think that my own example and some of the quiet but pointed remonstrances I have made to him, particularly in the recent past, have taken their effect. We sometimes underestimate the power of principle and the chastening effects of seriousness where important matters are concerned. Mr. Morin may finally be learning that you cannot bluff and bluster your way through the world.

However ineffectually, I have continued my own investigation. Today I phoned Mrs. Walsh again about the missing archives. It’s a painful experience. The woman is so apologetic and unhelpful at the same time that I feel both sorry for her and frustrated in my attempts to track down what should be so readily accessible. On the other hand, is not this very inaccessibility significant, as a clue, I mean?

I have suffered all day from a nagging melancholia that I can ascribe to nothing in particular. The morning began brightly enough. I left my house at my usual brisk pace, with happy
thoughts about Saturday’s dinner party. But then, as I was walking by the pond … I don’t know, it might have been the flat smell of the water, the midges in the sun, or the call of a red-winged blackbird, which seemed to come from long ago when I was young and easy under the apple boughs. I tried to cheer up, but even the bower of wisteria that graces the entrance to the Marvell Gardens seemed little more than limp lilacs. I remembered it was the anniversary of the first time I met and talked with Elsbeth.

It seemed like yesterday and yet so long ago. We were both on the ferry to Kirk’s Island. Elsbeth had braved the brisk chop to visit her grandmother, and I had joined a group from the Wax-wing Club, although it was a bit late for warblers. I noticed her immediately. She had tied her hair in pigtails in pink ribbons that didn’t quite go with the bright yellow slicker she wore. Imagine my surprise and delight to see her take from her rucksack a copy of Waugh’s
The Loved One
. It seemed little short of destiny that we should both be reading the same book, she for a course on the modern English novel and I for my own amusement. We smiled acknowledgment at each other. And, being close enough to talk, we began a spirited conversation as to the merits of the work. While agreeing with her that it was a good laugh, I maintained that its literary accoutrements didn’t save it from an essential nihilism.

As I write this now, I cringe at the thought that, in learning about our present difficulties, Elsbeth may think me implicated. Why that should worry me I don’t know, but I find it spurring me on to find the culprit myself and thereby free my name from any possible taint.

Then there was the meeting with Dean Oliver Scrabbe. He called around midmorning, practically summoning me to his office on the third floor. I’m not sure what to make of the man, who seems in a constant state of bristling. He is in his early forties, I would guess, with sandy gray hair that recedes far back
over a wide, freckled pate and fringes, as a beard, a long hawkish face. During our interview, he appeared distracted and intense at the same time, pulling at his chin whiskers and glancing away with grimaces that revealed a pair of pronounced canines.

I thought at first he had asked to meet with me at the instigation of Malachy Morin, who I assumed had warned him that my interest in preserving the integrity of the museum requires at least minimal acknowledgment — a five-minute lecture and dismissal.

The dean quickly disabused me of that notion. Hardly had I sat down when he asked me in a tone that sounded like sarcasm born of exasperation, “What exactly does Malachy Morin do here at the museum?” I was tempted to shrug at the man and his unpleasantness, but it was one of those occasions when I couldn’t resist being candid. I said I didn’t know with any detail what Mr. Morin did at the museum, but I was under the impression that whatever it was it wasn’t much. Dean Scrabbe regarded me for a moment with a baleful stare, as though Mr. Morin’s shortcomings were my responsibility. He went on to vent the opinion that the Executive Director “appears to lack the most elementary understanding as to how this institution functions or how its finances operate.” I said I could not answer for Mr. Morin insofar as I had been increasingly and in direct contravention of the Rules of Governance excluded from meetings where financial matters were decided. That did little to mollify the Visiting Dean. I began to think that it was perhaps the arrival of Scrabbe that had reduced M. Morin to such a jittery mess.

Quite abruptly, the dean changed tack, dumping the wind out of his own sails, so to speak, in assuming a less accusatory tone. What, he asked, did I know about the Onoyoko Institute? Again I wasn’t much help. I said I had not been made privy to the institute’s workings, its disbursements, invoicing procedures, et cetera, as it was a private body with no formal connection to any
part of the MOM. I assumed, I said, that it had been established to fund what is called technology transfer. “But isn’t it in fact funding all sorts of things?” the dean asked. It would appear that way, I answered, in a tone meant to convey that I found his question stupid. Why don’t you ask them? I said. There must be records. “Oh, there are records and records and records.” He pointed to several cardboard file boxes stacked next to a filing cabinet. “We have a regular paper trail of invoices, disbursements, expenses, grants, refunds that appear, from initial glance anyway, to go in circles.”

I asked, “Is this something Dean Fessing was working on?”

The dean regarded me for a moment as though trying to decide whether or not to take me into his confidence. “Did Cranston talk to you about this aspect of his work at all?” Before I could shake my head in the negative, he had spun the video screen of the computer around in my direction. “Let me show you something,” he said, working the keys so that a list of files appeared on the screen. He pointed to one labeled
“ONOBILPRCDS/FST
.” Then he called it up. It was blank. He did the same with another one called “
GENDREX/INV
.” It too was blank. Then again with “
EXPNS/SCL
.” He kept a skeptical eye on me as he handed me a printout. “This is a hard copy of Cranston’s program file he printed out a week before he disappeared,” he said. Underlined were all of the programs brought up on the screen. The first showed it had used nearly thirty thousand bytes of the disk capacity, the second more than seventy-five thousand, and the third about forty thousand.

At that point I took out my small black notebook and jotted down some notes. Scrabbe’s eyebrows gave an inquiring lift. “A little investigation of my own,” I said. “No backup?” I asked, distracted by the screen and a file labeled, I think, “
RATOURISM.”
Of course, it could have been “
RE:TOURISM
.” My eyes are not what they used to be.

“Nothing I’ve been able to find,” he said and pivoted the screen back to where it was.

“Have you told the police about this?”

“I mentioned it to one of them, but he didn’t seem interested. He told me to keep him posted.”

We lapsed into the kind of silence that signals the end of a meeting. I was about to bring up the future of the museum when, as though remembering something incidental, he told me he had read my memoranda to Dr. Commer that had been copied to the late dean. In a rather dismissive way, he gave me some
pro forma
assurances that, whatever the future relations between Wainscott and the MOM, the museum would remain open to the public. But on what basis? I asked. Ten hours a week to let people wander through a couple of rooms festooned with a few bits from the collections? This, I told him, was not what the founders had in mind and would not meet the requirements of the charter; which, I reminded him, were subject to the law.

That got a Dracula grimace out of him and the observation that nothing lasts forever. Except bureaucracy, I countered, and told him it would be little more than cultural vandalism to turn the atrium into dull little offices for the creation of paperwork.

Well, he really showed me his fangs on that one. Did I have any idea, he asked me, what a financial mess the MOM was in right now? Did I realize that the museum was operating under at least five separate budget systems? He ticked them off for me, taking evident relish in describing the mess: there was the old MOM budget, dependent on income from a shrinking and badly managed endowment and declining admissions. There were the parts of the museum underwritten by contracts with Wainscott, an arrangement confused by separate accounting systems for archaeology/anthropology, primatology, and molecular biology. And that was all quite aside from the MOM’s tangled relationship with the Onoyoko Institute and other funding sources.
Despite what appear to be heroic efforts by Marge Littlefield and her staff, he went on, none of the accounting procedures conforms to federal regulations, which daily grow more byzantine, with the result that grants from NIH, NEH, NSF, and IMS are all in a paperwork limbo of extravagant complexity. “The danger, Mr. de Ratour,” he said, leaning toward me with his amazing fangs, “is that the MOM, unless Wainscott steps in, will simply go bankrupt and disappear.” And he added, “I can assure you that that is a distinct possibility.”