The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  Not long afterwards, Riley came back from his expedition with the gold-toothed skull and stories about the blue-eyed natives. This began, from what I have been able to gather, a royal family row. Sarah, widow of Othniel, getting on in years and the “reigning matriarch,” as one account puts it, would not hear of having this “heathen relic” interred in the family vault in Hope Cemetery. In a letter to her daughter Eudoxia that I chanced across, Sarah castigates Riley, saying he was not really a Remick but a Riley and “who are these Rileys, anyway?” Eben, however, was convinced the skull was that of his brother, a fact he noted several times in his diary and in letters to other family members, notably his eldest son, Thomas, to whom he wrote, “I know it to be Nathaniel and I cannot in good conscience, after these kindly, untutored savages have made him an object of veneration, simply stick him in the ground.”

  He decided not long afterwards to establish an institution “dedicated to the study of man and his artifacts, among the treasured objects of which will be my late brother’s noble skull with the sole condition that it never be put on public display.” From that unexpected grit, the pearl of this institution began. In making subscriptions among the first families of Seaboard to support and supply the museum, Eben dissembled its original purpose, i.e., as a place of honor for what remained of his brother’s remains.

  In this matter, I think my duty is clear. I must not quail in making a full account of the incident, if only because, without it, the museum might not have come into being. I have filled out a requisition for the skull and sent it to Alger Wherry, who is in charge of the Skull Collection. (The MOM has several thousand skulls, one of the largest cataloged skull collections in North America, if I’m not mistaken.) I will need to have it examined by Professor Duggerson, who, though retired now, was an eminent anthropometrist in his day. Surely he would be able to tell if the skull is that of a native of Polynesia or Seaboard. And surely a forensic dentist should be able to determine whether the gold tooth was fitted to the jaw where it is now or torn from the original owner by some warrior chieftain and stuck in his own mouth. I will have to deploy the most careful language if I am to be both honest and edifying in telling this part of the story. Why is it, I wonder, that there’s always a fly in what we think is the purest of ointments?

  Speaking of flies in ointments, I returned to find a most curious transmission from Pan House, ostensibly keyed by one of the beasts I can hear shrieking below in their exercise yard. Here, for the record:

  CODE X443SRG CHIMPRITE ROYD WW64

  aond amdnand

  3333333333

  vonnegutclapclapclapclapclap traptrap amdieuayb and the an c akdahda paths of ZDA Eanda dkanaoqund alks glory wuqyqbayak yak ayk lead anappppamamfuiclk but toanandatoqna;pslamajd the waman ajmamuck amucka gravy oaoian anaya ayesor no

  I found time today to send a memorandum of my own — to Mr. Morin, who continues his strange ways, dragging his feet about hiring Ms. Pringle as press assistant. I put it in language as strong as I dared, given the man’s curious vulnerability. Things are quiet now with the slow hum of summer looming; there’s no telling what might blow up in our faces.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 19

  This Fessing case has me in its coils again. I smell a rat, or, rather, a whole nest of rats. The skull, or the Skull, as I think of it, is missing, and I think Alger Wherry … But let me explain. This morning, after I had taken the minutes of a general staff meeting, I went down to the Skull Collection, which is housed in a veritable warren of dim, low-ceilinged rooms in the sub-subbasement of the museum. I went down to pick up the Skull. (Being an officer of the MOM, I am privileged to request most any item from the collections for temporary study.) I found Alger, who is Curator of Skulls, ensconced in his office, a windowless room decorated with some of the more interesting specimens from the collection. He greeted me courteously enough, but with a tentativeness I had not noticed before. Alger, getting long in the tooth like all of us, is one of those perpetual graduate students who, with an air of defeat, haunt the libraries, laboratories, and collections of the world as though looking for something they know they will never find.

  “Skull Number One,” he said after we had exchanged civilities, “appears to have been temporarily misplaced.”

  “Strange,” I said. “I would have thought there would have been … a place of honor.” Something other than the surroundings sent a shiver down my vertebrae.

  “It’s been moved around a bit. Oh, it’s here all right.” A shortish man growing rather comfortable around the middle, Alger rose from his seat, came around his desk, and took me out into the collections as though he were going to take another look for the missing skull. But it turned into a kind of tour, complete with as much charm as the man could muster, as though to distract me. It wasn’t difficult. What a strange and ungodly place! Like a library of death with narrow, dim passages between the stacks. The shelves seemed to go on forever. As I gazed on row upon row of lipless grins and hollow-eyed sockets, I saw each as a bulb that had once been incandescent with a million lights. All that consciousness!

  The curator told me that the collection continues to grow and that much of it remains uncataloged. In a workroom lit with garish fluorescence he showed me some of the more recent acquisitions. I was more than a bit surprised to find the museum was still taking skulls, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Wherever do you get them? I asked. He shrugged. “People donate them. Some come from the Medical School, some from the coroner’s office. We used to take almost anyone, but now, with space restricted, we’ve had to be more selective.” He showed me a specimen with a large, neat hole in the forehead. “Husband caught this guy with his wife.” He spoke with a soft chuckle. “Wife’s in here, too, somewhere. Shot her in the heart.” Then, reaching for a specimen that looked unnervingly fresh, he said, “This one’s Rick Royick’s,” and handed it to me.

  “Rick Royick, the food critic?” I held the skull gingerly in both hands and felt guilty of a kind of trespass. “I knew him, Alger,” I said and recalled how he had been known as “a fellow of infinite digestion.”

  “Not quite infinite,” Alger said. “He died of uric acid poisoning, complications arising from gout.”

  “Yes, I’d heard he’d been ill. How do you get them so clean?” I asked, noticing the copious amount of gold in Rick’s dental work and thinking of all the fine food those teeth had chewed, all the vintage wines that had graced this now unsensing palate.

  “We use dermestids for the hard-to-get stuff and then hydrogen peroxide for the final degreasing.”

  We continued our tour. At the end of a poorly lighted passage we came to a door covered with green baize, an anomalous touch of formality in those stark surroundings. “What’s in there?” I asked and tried the brass doorknob, finding it locked.

  “Oh … storage,” Alger said. Something in the tone of his voice, in the quick glance he shot with his usually averted eyes, made me experience a sudden, preternatural alertness slivered with dread.

  And something else, something distracting me to near discourtesy as he showed me out, reassuring me that the Skull was there and would be located. I thanked him and in a state of fine-honed agitation took the uncertain elevator up to the fifth floor half-thinking how ironic it was to have established a museum as a place to keep an object only to have that object get lost. In midthought — a rumination on museums as the embodiment and practice of the science of ordering the things of the world — a realization crystallized that made me walk rapidly to my office, my hands unsteady, my heart palpably thumping as I unlocked the door and then the drawer in my desk where I keep my file on the Fessing case. There, in one of pictures in the National Geographic article, I swear, was a young Alger Wherry. The caption didn’t list his name, and it was a wide-angle shot of a group erecting a thatch-covered native house. Had he also been one of Raul Brauer’s students? Was he in the same group, the same cult, as Pilty and Chard? For a moment I contemplated ringing Lieutenant Tracy and telling him my sus
picions. But, really, they’re still … what? Far-fetched? I mean like a theory without data. Had Fessing turned up something, some documentation? I need to locate the file of that expedition to find out for certain. I need proof. And exactly what, I wonder, is behind the green door?

  If only I had more time. I am driven to distraction answering phone calls. The Fessing case is back in the news. The clothes he was wearing at the time of his murder have been found in a Goodwill collection depot. (A charitable cannibal, it would seem.)

  And it is an exercise in futility to appeal to Malachy Morin for help. The man never did do much real work, and now (according to Doreen, who told Sue, who works in Marge’s office and told Marge, who told me) he stays in his office all day with the door closed and insists on taking calls himself. When I telephoned him, he didn’t recognize my voice and kept saying, “Who is this? Who is this?” When I told him, he said, as though immensely relieved, “Oh, Norm, you sound so official. Please call me Mal.” I asked him what had happened to Elsa Pringle, a question that set him off into such incoherent burbling that I thought the man had taken total leave of his senses. Indeed, I hung up the receiver nearly feeling pity for the poor wretch.

  MONDAY, JUNE 22

  Oh horror, horror, such sweet horror! Malachy Morin has been arrested and charged with the murder of Elsa Pringle. Lieutenant Tracy called just moments ago to tell me that Morin was taken into custody late last night when officers, armed with a warrant, searched his home and found the poor girl’s naked body jammed into a freezer in his basement. The lieutenant said that the body has been there several weeks and that, under the circumstances, Mr. Morin was being investigated as well for the murder of Dean Fessing.

  I hardly expected this turn of events late last night when the lieutenant phoned me at home to ask when was the last time I had seen Elsa Pringle. I said that without my desk calendar I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint it exactly but told him Malachy Morin and I had interviewed her sometime in mid-May. I asked why he needed to know, and he replied that the young lady has been missing for some time. When I related the contents, tenor, and results of the interview, he asked me was it for a position I currently occupy. I said yes but quickly disabused him of any proprietary claim on my part for the post. I said that Morin was responsible for following up the interview and that I had been hectoring him lately to hire Ms. Pringle as I wanted to get on with writing the history of the museum.

  That, apparently, was the lead he needed. He told me Malachy Morin acted very suspiciously from the moment they arrived at his home just before midnight. When first questioned about Ms. Pringle, he pretended not to remember her name. Then he told the police, much more convincingly, that he was having trouble getting in touch with her. Finally, under repeated questioning, he led them down to the basement to the freezer. Lieutenant Tracy told me that Morin nearly fainted at the sight of the corpse and then tried, in a state of incoherence, to tell the police it was an accident. No one, of course, believes a word of his explanation. Lieutenant Tracy informed me in strictest confidence that they are sure they have found the murderer of Dean Fessing.

  Imagine! Malachy Morin! I am flabbergasted. Murder, perhaps, but I would never have suspected that the man was capable of haute cuisine. But then, as Lieutenant Tracy pointed out, it’s often surprising what we don’t know about people.

  The Seaboard Police Department is withholding public announcement of the arrest and charge on technical grounds until tomorrow or later. (The poor girl must be thawed, apparently, for an autopsy to be performed.) The press, of course, will have a field day with it, and I dread having to deal with the usual australopithecines of the media. I nearly feel sorry for Malachy Morin, the way I am going to have to cut him up in bits and pieces and feed him to the news hounds of this dog-eat-dog world.

  I know, of course, that all of this is of little consequence compared with the fate of that poor young woman. And I am mortified, naturally, about what this will mean to the good name of the Museum of Man. But I cannot, for the life of me, control a most unseemly delight. Malachy Morin is gone! Gone! Whatever else happens, he is gone and will not be coming back. I wish I could resist the awful elation that keeps sneaking up on me and making me smile and smile when to smile is villainous. But it is not me that is smiling, it is the ape in me, the ape that is in each of us. And, I wonder, does Malachy Morin’s exit really change anything? Thad Pilty will have his diorama. Damon Drex’s chimps will go on to write the great American novel. Dr. Gottling will carry on whatever mischief he’s up to in the Genetics Lab. And the Mr. Onoyokos of the world will own everything in the end. At least for a while.

  Well, I have calls in to Dr. Commer, President Twill, Dean Scrabbe, and several members of the Board of Governors, as well as to Professor Pilty. And I suppose I should get busy and write a press release for tomorrow. How do you phrase it when a colleague has been arrested and charged with murder and cannibalism? How do you make it sound … dignified? I think I’ll just have all inquiries directed to the Seaboard Police Department.

  On quite another subject, I received an invitation in my e-mail today that makes me realize how necessary it has become to make some real changes around here:

  Dear Mr. de Ratour:

  Dr. Drex and I would very much appreciate your company at a reception to meet the authors starting at 5:30 P.M., Thursday, June 25. An RSVP would be appreciated.

  Respectfully,

  F. Snyders

  And, if nothing else, the removal of Malachy Morin opens the way for some direction, some new management, and some close, critical scrutiny of what’s going on in the Primate Pavilion. On the other hand, can I be absolutely sure he’s gone? Can he be fired on the spot? Is he not innocent until proved guilty? Are having the body of a missing person in your freezer and being charged with murder and cannibalism sufficient grounds for dismissal? We live in uncertain times.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 23

  As you may well imagine, the representatives of the media were as egregious as I predicted they would be. They swarmed all over the museum, at one point invading my office, harassing me with klieg lights and cameras and pointless questions until I insisted they leave. That awful woman Amanda Feeney asked me if I had ever noticed what Mr. Morin brought with him to work for lunch. They pestered everyone. Even poor Doreen, blowing pink bubbles of gum and snapping them with her teeth, was corralled by a reporter with a microphone and asked, I’m sure, all sorts of loaded questions. I came across one camera crew set up in front of Herman in Neanderthal Hall. For a moment I thought the reporter was interviewing the encased model, but he was apparently using the exhibit as a “backdrop,” as he delivered a soliloquy to the listening camera. I heard something about “reverting to the days when our savage ancestors tore each other limb from limb …” Cornelius Chard, of course, was in his glory. “Cannibalism,” I heard him telling one admiring woman reporter, “is nothing less than dining out at the very tip-top of the food chain.” The Bugle got the story last night and ran a typically tasteless headline, something about an obese museum official arrested as the gourmet cannibal.

  I must also report that Dean Oliver Scrabbe did not help matters in the least the way he pandered to the media, agreeing to answer, and elaborating on, their most poisonous, insinuating questions. “This kind of behavior,” he said to one network reporter, “is precisely why it is imperative for the university to take immediate charge of all aspects of the museum.” He was playing politics, of course, and I’m afraid that my attempts to control the damage only made things worse.

  For all that, things seemed eerily normal once the news dogs left. There were a few summer visitors slowly circulating up and down through the exhibits. A docent from the Public Affairs Office was quietly explaining metapes (those marvelous Mesoamerican gristmills carved with zoomorphic ornamentation from solid pieces of volcanic rock) to a touring group from Japan. Marge was in her office dealing with the financial mess. And as I write I can hear the chimps yapping as usual in their exerc
ise yard below. Speaking of which, I was the recipient today of another of those communications from the Genetics Lab. To judge from it, there may be a new public relations fiasco in the making over there, something I shudder to think about. I am entering it into this log, if only to keep a record.

  Dear Mr. Detour [sic]:

  I haven’t sent you any messages in a while because I’ve been on vacation. Looks like they got the cannibal cook, but things are still happening over here. People were really ducking when I got back. Some joker substituted dog semen for one of the specimens in the sperm bank and messed up a whole bunch of experiments and the fur has really been flying. I’m more sure than ever that Project Alpha is still going on over here and has something to do with the pavilion but I don’t know what it is. This morning I was adjusting the rotary evaporator in Professor Gottling’s lab just outside his office and I heard him and Dr. Drex from the pavilion arguing about money. I couldn’t catch it all but Professor Gottling got really mad. He accused Dr. Drex of bleeding the institute dry for a bunch of monkey tricks and those are his exact words. Dr. Drex also got mad and his English isn’t that good but I think he said something like his monkey tricks were not only better than Professor Gottling’s monkey tricks but legal. I know you can’t do anything unless I get you some real proof but right now they are watching every scrap of paper and have just installed a new high-speed shredder and all kinds of codes when they enter data into the computer. They also tried to fire Charlene but she said she would sue if they did because of sexual harassment. I don’t think anyone believes that because when you look at the tape carefully like some of us did last night on a monitor that’s got a computer enhancement program it’s Charlene who makes the first move. She was the one who unzipped Dr. Hanker’s pants and started doing things to him with her hand. Everyone thinks that if Charlene gets fired Dr. Hanker ought to get fired too. Professor Gottling won’t do that because he’s afraid that Dr. Hanker who is one of the real insiders here might blow the whistle. I sometimes think I’m living right in the middle of one of those real-life thrillers you know the kind they have on television when they use the real characters from the crime and reenact the whole thing. But I can tell you’re a good guy and will do something when the time comes.