The Murder in the Museum of Man (6 page)

A gorgeous cardinal and a flock of neatly bibbed chickadees, which looked in contrast like clergy of a lesser rank, curates, perhaps, graced my bird feeder this morning. One of those quirky late-season storms had mantled the scene — porch railing, feeder, rosebushes, and hedge of hemlock — with an inch or so of snow. And as I sipped tea and contemplated it from the kitchen table, a wonderful tranquillity descended on me. My back garden is one of the things that keeps me in this old place that Mother bought after Father died. It’s really too large for my personal needs — I could easily do most of my entertaining at the Club. But there’s my collection, and I feel I’ve grown into the place, a modest enough Federalist structure at heart that came out of the Greek Revival of the mid-nineteenth century with a
colonnaded entrance, pediments galore, and half-moon windows set into the tympanums at either end of the house.

My Neoclassical tranquillity didn’t last very long. By the time I started for work, the sun had turned the snow to slush, and I arrived to find Lieutenant Tracy standing in my office perusing on the wall opposite the bookcase some of the awards and citations I have received over the years. (In 1977 I was named Recording Secretary of the Year by the American Association of Recording Secretaries, and in 1982 I received the much-coveted Order of Merit for Undocumented Excellence, just to name a few.)

The door was open, he said to my rather frosty good morning. As a professional lawman he remained apparently impervious to any sense of trespass. I had scarcely hung my overcoat on the coatrack that stands sentinel near the door when he had his little spiral notebook out and had started in. It all seemed quite routine, the blandness and repetition of the questions, I mean. I nearly yawned when he flipped back through pages of his notebook, paused, then said, “You told me, Mr. de Ratour, that you don’t cook except for a boiled egg and tea in the morning.”

Although not a shrugger, I shrugged. “I can make a tuna fish salad sandwich, and I know how to heat a store-bought chicken pot pie in the oven,” I replied. I glanced at my watch to indicate the
soupçon
of irritation I was beginning to feel.

The lieutenant remained nonplussed. “I’ve been told you give very good dinner parties.”

“Oh,” I said, getting the drift of his questions and controlling with an effort a welling sense of dread, “but I don’t do any of the cooking, any of the real cooking.” I explained how Marge Littlefield sometimes drops by beforehand to help out, or, if I’m having more than a few people in, how I get Yvette and her husband, Gideon, to come over. They’re excellent cooks, especially of this blackened Cajun stuff, although they do leave quite a
dent in the sherry. I said I have used caterers, but I find the food, despite all the froufrou, a bit insipid.

The lieutenant, tweedily enough dressed to suggest he was trying to go undercover in academia, took this down and flipped again through his notebook. “I’ve been told you make a very good pesto sauce.”

For a moment I didn’t know quite how to respond. I was both gratified to hear my pesto praised and appalled that someone, presumably a friend, would tell the police about it. The dread grew to a kind of nausea. I became acutely aware that I was being “grilled” as a suspect, that this other person — however much it was his duty — thought it possible that I was a murderous cannibal. And as I hadn’t told the lieutenant earlier about my pesto sauce, I began to feel perversely guilty, not of murder or cannibalism but of withholding evidence. I tried to frown but laughed guiltily instead. “Lieutenant,” I said, attempting to sound nonchalant, “making pesto is more like mixing a drink than cooking.” I explained to him how I use nothing but a few handfuls of fresh basil, which I render with olive oil in the blender to a kind of green slurry. To this I add grated pecorino, crushed walnuts, a touch of pressed garlic, salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon, and — my secret ingredient — some finely chopped dried tomatoes.

He took this down, nodding as though with approval, as though he were going to try it himself. “What kind of a food processor do you use?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, trying to be helpful, “just the old Waring blender my mother had.” Only then did it occur me what he was doing. Extraordinary, I thought, the way a detective’s mind must work, the way suspicion gets raised nearly to an art form.

A forlorn art form. When the lieutenant finally left, going in the direction of Malachy Morin’s office, I fell into a state of what I can only call nervous depression out of which nothing — my
Buddha, my collection, the museum, thoughts of friends, the work on the history — nothing could rouse me. The very air seemed blighted. Not only my own life but all life seemed a beastly, futile attempt to rise above itself. That another person, even though it was his duty, could consider me capable of such depravity left me crushed beyond words. I answered the telephone — a routine call about scheduling a meeting — and spoke like an automaton. I shriveled inwardly until there seemed nothing left of my spirit but a dying ember of anger.

It didn’t die. I wouldn’t let it. I nursed it to a flame of real anger, a kind of unfocused rage against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. I quite worked myself into an elated anger, or perhaps an angry elation, during which I resolved, with a solemn inner vow, to find the murderer myself. I got quite carried away with the idea. In classic style I saw myself assembling the likely suspects in, say, Neanderthal Hall, or, better, the Twitchell Room, where, with my clues and evidence marshaled and with ineluctable deduction, I would expose the foul miscreant. And then, having allowed myself the sour pleasure of this fancy, I felt committed to undertake what at first glance I am not in the least suited for. I doubt, for instance, that I have the lieutenant’s knack for suspicion. Nor do I have what’s appropriately called “the killer instinct.” I have neither a badge nor a gun, which is to say authority. On the other hand, am I not a trained archaeologist, that is, an investigator, one given to literally digging for evidence, sifting for clues, even though it probably was, in my case, a sublimated search for beauty?

With an agitation now invigorating, I stood and began to pace the diagonal of my office, which is exactly ten of my indoor strides. I moved as though to keep up with my mind as it pondered more deeply the murder and mutilation (which is what cooking is, after all) of Dean Cranston Fessing. Why the good dean? Why the elaborate disposal of his remains? Why no
attempt to effectively hide the remains of his remains? Was he simply the chance victim of some demonic cult? Or was it done to make it look that way? Or — and this is when I started to feel truly excited —
both!
I began, like Inspector Morse, to see the outlines of a design, a kind of fearful symmetry, a perverse beauty wherein not merely the dean’s demise but the manner of it was precisely what his mission to the Museum of Man had, perhaps inadvertently, threatened. In murdering and disposing of the dean the way they did, the perpetrators had, so to speak, their cake in the very eating of it.

I sat down and began to compile a list of suspects, if only because suspicion is my weak suit. To suspect someone of such depravity, after all, takes a kind of imagination, a kind of creative paranoia. I began with Corny Chard because he is, conventionally, the most obvious suspect and therefore the least likely to be guilty. Moreover, he lacks, as far as I know, a motive in the specific case of Dean Fessing. I certainly put Damon Drex down, but without a whole lot of conviction. He’s too obsessed with his apes.… Although any consolidation with the university could have adversely affected his operation. And the culinary aspects. Unless he’s some kind of closet gourmet. Then Thad Pilty. Again, my powers of suspicion failed me. And yet, of all of them, Thad has the most to lose from merger with Wainscott. The late dean had put all major projects on hold, including Thad’s plans to turn Neanderthal Hall into a dioramic monument to his own research. I listed Malachy Morin as well, but more out of spite than conviction. I can, if I really try, imagine Morin and his pals sitting around like savages with cans of beer and feasting on the dean — had he been, say, roasted whole on a spit. Otherwise the cuisine is all wrong.

I concluded the morning in a state of rare self-satisfaction. I determined not to let my “investigation” interfere either with my regular duties or with my plans to write a history of the museum.
I determined to become, in the tradition of all amateur sleuths, a deal more sensitive to seemingly irrelevant details, to keep, in short, my eyes and ears open.

And speaking of Mr. Morin, I must confess to indulging in a bit of backhandedness. Just before he left this morning, the lieutenant asked me if I could recall anything, any incident, any remark, that seemed suspicious to me. Well, after a moment’s thought — under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have done this — I told him that on the morning of the news conference Malachy Morin had left the office early and had not returned until the following day. I pointed out that considerable concern had been expressed by the late dean in his Interim Status Report to the Select Committee on the accounting procedures in Mr. Morin’s office, enough concern, in fact, to “warrant immediate attention.” Now I did say that I thought it unlikely, though not impossible, that Mr. Morin, while a man of large and low appetites, had anything to do with Dean Fessing’s fate. I said that the Administrative Director’s absence more likely stemmed from moral cowardice and habitual sloth — a good deal of work, after all, was involved in “managing” and disseminating the news on that day. I told the lieutenant that Mr. Morin, as Administrative Director of the MOM, knew, or should know, a good deal about the workings and finances of the museum and that it was possible that a certain amount of interrogatory pressure might be fruitful. The lieutenant thanked me cordially and set off in the direction of Mr. Morin’s office.

I learned today a piece of startling and what may be significant news: funding for “The Diorama of Paleolithic Life” was granted
final approval yesterday at a meeting of Malachy Morin’s “executive committee” convened in an “executive” session, which means I was excluded from taking its minutes. It’s clear as day to me that Professor Pilty is acting on his pet project before the new Visiting Dean can get established. Which means that in a quite tangible way he has benefited from the murder of the late dean. Now this is not to accuse Thad Pilty of complicity, but, as I noted in the black notebook I have begun to keep on my own investigation, it does give him a strong motive.

There is another consideration. I do not want to sound a captious note, but it happens that any “executive” sessions are in direct contravention of the museum’s Rules of Governance. The Rules explicitly state that “no meeting regarding significant expenditures of monies within and by the Museum shall be held without said proceedings being duly recorded and entered into the Log by the Recording Secretary.” The only “executive” meetings allowed are those by the Board itself and only for certain matters as are spelled out in the Rules of Governance as amended November 12, 1923, at the Board’s annual meeting.

I want the record to show that it is not simply the professional insult to me with which I am concerned. This is not the first “executive session” in which large expenditures have been approved. The Genetics Lab within the past year has hired new staff and expanded into the old Punnett Annex after considerable renovation and enlargement of that venerable building. And, from what I have heard, Damon Drex, besides destroying the old courtyard by turning it into an exercise area for his animals, has revamped the entire first floor of the Primate Pavilion and called it, believe it or not, Pan House. I am more convinced than ever that the increasing presence and influence of Edo Onoyoko and his minions throughout the MOM does not bode well for the future of the museum. As I pointed out last year in my Annual Report to the Board, we are witnessing the emergence of a
budgetary process that, whatever its temporary advantages, will prove less than salutary in the long run.

It’s common knowledge that I have been opposed to the Paleolithic diorama from the start. In several memoranda to Dr. Commer with copies to Professor Pilty, I pointed out that while the current exhibit (which Pilty dismisses as “Alley Oop under glass”) could use some updating, it did not warrant turning the entire ground floor of the atrium into a Paleolithic fun house. I didn’t use those words, of course, but I may as well have. I noted that if the entire space is usurped for the diorama, there will be little room left for temporary exhibitions, although we are not mounting as many of those as I think we should be. Finally, I pointed out that the ground floor has traditionally been used for the annual Curatorial Ball. I know this doesn’t sound of great consequence, but in fact the ball is the one event we have each year that brings the entire museum together, and the sense of morale and united purpose that it provides is not to be discounted.

I should explain, perhaps, that each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas we decorate the hall with ribbons and crepe streamers. We deck out Herman, the alpha Neanderthal, in a Santa suit. We chip in for a champagne bar and hire the Wainscott Warblers, who play all the old favorites as well as Christmas music. It is a most beautiful occasion, at which we all let down our hair, as they say. I get to dance with the ladies, especially Margery Littlefield, who on one very memorable occasion … But I won’t go into that. Suffice it to say that I have been driven home from more than one Curatorial Ball, but then everyone is a little abashed the following Monday. And while there are other possible venues, it simply would not be the same. Moving the ball elsewhere will, I fear, destroy the special meaning this event has for all of us just at a time when we need all the morale we can get.