The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  “What time was this?”

  “I would estimate about four-forty-five. I remembered having only fifteen minutes to get to the Club lockers and change for the five o’clock match.”

  Lieutenant Tracy asked if I would show him the elevator.

  I said of course and with alacrity took him along the corridor to the ratterly old thing, if only to escape the phone calls. We rode it down to the third floor and paced the distance to Scrabbe’s office, where a team of forensic experts from the SPD were going over the place for clues. They looked at me as though I was already handcuffed, and as a suspect once again, I could not help feeling a certain hideous kind of importance. In silence we continued to the basement, where there are storage areas for the various collections, and then down to the subbasement, which is just above the Skull Collection and which has more of the same and passageways connecting all three parts of the museum. As we were standing there, a technician from the Genetics Lab passed by on his way to the Primate Pavilion. I expressed some surprise to Lieutenant Tracy that the police had not looked at the elevator before and did not know that the subbasement passages were used to communicate between the two wings of the museum.

  The observation chastened him a bit, and we returned to my office, where he continued to question me, but in a less aggressive manner. He told me that it was not good that I did not have a “watertight” alibi.

  “One cannot live one’s life as an alibi,” I replied, but I wondered, in one of those daunting mental asides, if that wasn’t what I had been doing for the past thirty-odd years.

  The lieutenant’s demeanor softened. It was as though he wanted to help me — or trip me up — when he asked, “Was there anything that happened at the play that was out of the ordinary? Something that you might have noticed and that could prove that you were there, at least for some of the time unaccounted for?”

  The phone rang, and while I exchanged abuse with one of the worried people in Grope Tower, I racked my head about the play. At first I could recall nothing very unusual. There was the usual Sunday summer crowd, everyone casually dressed, the students more interested in each other than in what was happening on the stage. Then I remembered. “In Act II,” I said, “the actor playing Brutus anagrammatically flubbed one of his lines. In that scene when the conspirators are talking about assassinating Caesar, Brutus said: ‘Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the dogs.’ I almost missed it, but Cassius, a bit rotund and well fed for the part, snickered, because the rest of the sentence is ‘Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.’ ”

  Lieutenant Tracy nodded, then asked at what point it occurs in the play. I admitted it came quite early and racked my head for another gaffe as egregious as this one. Then I remembered. “In Act Five, Scene One, Antonius says to the assassins: ‘You showed your teeth like apes, and frowned like hounds.’ It should have been ‘fawned like hounds.’ ”

  “Is there any way you can prove this?” the lieutenant asked.

  I made a gesture of helplessness. “You could question the actors. Perhaps they made a tape of it.” I gave him my playbill.

  “You know the play well,” he said.

  I quoted him: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ the Capitol. Brutus killed me.”

  It appeared to impress him, but for only a minute. “That still leaves between four-thirty and five,” he said.

  “No,” I replied, “between four-thirty and about four-fifty, which is the time I got to the Club. Really, Lieutenant, would I have been able, in twenty minutes, to murder and dispose of the body of a full-grown man?” I felt as though I had disappointed him somehow, as though he depended on me to be a good suspect.

  Then he turned noticeably hostile. In rapid-fire succession he asked, “Isn’t it true, Mr. de Ratour, that you had the same conflict with Scrabbe that you had had with Fessing about the future of the museum? Isn’t the position of Recording Secretary obsolete, and wouldn’t you lose your job if the university took over? Wasn’t the animosity you felt towards Scrabbe aggravated by his offensive manner?” And before I could deny any of these charges, he informed me that I might want to have a lawyer present before answering any more questions.

  I returned his hostility in kind. “I do not need a lawyer, Lieutenant Tracy, as I have nothing whatsoever to hide. You should realize as well that I cannot be bullied. I have had to stand up to bullying all my life, and I have become quite good at it.”

  A moment later he appeared to become conciliatory, then started in again as though that would be enough to mollify me. In that he was mistaken. When he began, as though thinking aloud, to go over suspects, Chard and Pilty again, the diorama, flipping back through his notebook, I stopped him. I said, “Lieutenant, I am perfectly willing to help you, but you are going to have to trust me. In fact, I would suggest you cultivate a flair for trust to go along with what I know is a necessary capacity for suspicion.”

  He gave me a most rueful glance. “Withholding evidence, Mr. de Ratour, could make you an accessory.”

  “Ideas are not evidence.”

  “But ideas come from knowledge.”

  “Or suspicions.”

  He sighed and smiled very faintly. “We checked Drex out. Around one-thirty yesterday he took a group of chimps in the pavilion van to the Middling County Zoo. He said that it was one of their regular Sunday afternoon outings and that they didn’t get back until after four-thirty. He had ticket stubs with the time on them. The attendants at the zoo confirm his story.”

  I concurred that it made sense. Drex, I told the lieutenant, “is too obsessed with his chimps to go to the lengths that someone has gone to with Dean Fessing’s remains. Besides, would he have eaten a whole dean by himself?”

  “What about the chimps?”

  “Chimps are frugivores and folivores for the most part, as far as I know.”

  “You mean vegetarians?”

  “Fruits and leaves. But I’m not an expert, Lieutenant.” After a moment of silence, I asked, “What about his assistant?”

  He flipped through his notebook. “Frank Snyders?”

  “Or is it Franz?”

  “He gave both names. He was at the zoo as well.”

  I shook my head slowly. “There’s something about that man …”

  The lieutenant nodded. “I know what you mean, but he has an airtight alibi.”

  The phone rang again. Amanda Feeney. All but asking me if I had killed the deans. I got rid of her unceremoniously and turned back to the detective.

  “What about this Professor Gottling?” he asked.

  I shook my head and tried to dissemble the hair-raising prickle of suspicion I experienced at the mention of the name. I had stood and was glancing west-northwest, where I could see the glint of the Newhumber as it wound down from the Hays Mountains. “Why would the director of the Genetics Lab want to kill the deans?” I asked. I admitted there had been rumors over there for months about a very sensitive and controversial project. I was tempted to go to the computer and bring up the missives I had received from Worried. But I decided against it, in part out of my respect for “hard” science, which I take the study of genetics to be, but also because it seemed inconceivable to me that anyone exploring the mysteries of the genes would kill and cannibalize not one but two deans, if indeed that had been Scrabbe’s fate. “Just a rumor. There are lots of rumors.”

  The lieutenant became instantly alert. “That’s where you can help me. Where you should help me.”

  I shrugged and took a deep breath. “For years there’s been a rumor about a cannibal cult centered on a retired professor … Raul Brauer.”

  “Chard’s guest at the Eating Club?”

  “Yes. He and some colleagues, it is said, while doing research in the Marquesas, killed and butchered a young volunteer as an exercise in ritual cannibalism.” Voicing the canard so baldly seemed to reduce it to the absurdity it probably was.

  “Who are his colleagues, the ones with him at the time?”

  “
Pilty, Chard, and someone named Alger Wherry. He’s Curator of the Skull Collection. But I don’t find it … credible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why two deans? Why not a plump undergraduate or a well-conditioned young athlete?”

  “Could Fessing and Scrabbe have found out about the cult?”

  “I suppose. If there is one.”

  “But you do think there’s a plot of some kind, don’t you?”

  For a moment, as I looked across my desk at the intent, handsome face of the policeman, I felt that we were once again more like colleagues than antagonists, even if he maintained, with less and less conviction, despite his words, that I was a real suspect. “A plot?” I said. “I’m sure there must be one.”

  The lieutenant could sense, I know, that I was holding something back. And I might have told him about the missing archives from the Loa Hoa expedition and about the apparent disappearance of Skull Number One had I not suffered again from a strange hubris: the missing files were something I had found out about. They were my missing evidence. And as the interview, or interrogation if you prefer, wound down, I was inspired again to get to the bottom of these awful crimes myself.

  Almost apologetically the lieutenant told me that, technically at least, I remained a suspect. “You have a motive, Mr. de Ratour. You don’t have much of an alibi. And you admit being at the scene at the time of the murder.”

  “Disappearance,” I corrected him.

  “Yes,” he echoed, “disappearance,” and got up to go. He paused at the door to tell me, with a trace of facetiousness, not to leave town without informing him. Then the phone began ringing again. I ignored it. I opened my desk and took out the Fessing file, which I had presumed closed. I leafed through my black book. I couldn’t get Thad Pilty out of my mind. I kept seeing and feeling the extraordinary anger he had shown at last week’s meeting of the Oversight Committee. Then, on a strange impulse, I took out my father’s revolver. I unloaded it, held it in both hands, aimed at the wall, and pulled the trigger several times, feeling the oiled mechanism click smoothly. Then, feeling the nugget weight of each deadly cartridge, I reloaded it.

  Well, I think I have earned a good vintage with my dinner at the Club tonight. I don’t imagine there will be much joking this time about how good or bad deans do or don’t taste. I can already feel the fear rising around the whole place. We are all looking at one another with more and more suspicion. I must say I would feel more secure if I could carry the gun tucked snugly somewhere on my person.

  THURSDAY, JULY 30

  It has been only a few days since Dean Scrabbe’s disappearance, and already it seems like an eternity. Everyone is on tenterhooks wondering what grisliness is about to be served up. The news media have been unmerciful, utterly unmerciful. They are assiduous in reporting every silly and grotesque rumor, including one about UFOs and cannibal aliens from outer space. Malachy Morin has been linked to a rumored “cannibal cult” among the faculty, that association with the professoriat conferring on the poor wretch a dubious kind of status. I cannot open my front door without finding some journalist or other waiting there with some imbecilic or gratuitously insulting question. Just last night I thought I heard one of them rooting around out in my trash bins. It turned out to be a large, bold raccoon, and I nearly expected it to start hectoring me. At the same time I confess to being relieved to see them, the journalists, I mean. The pall of fear that has settled on our little community is positively palpable. Each pair of averted eyes asks the same question: Am I next? To be murdered is bad enough; to be murdered, cooked, and eaten is simply hors concours. And if a full-grown man in all the vigor of his middle years can be plucked in broad daylight from his office in a public institution, are any of us safe?

  Indeed, I have finally taken matters into my own hands and written to each member of the Board of Governors a detailed letter regarding the situation around here. I pointed out to them the clause in the Rules of Governance that not merely enables me to take such a step but in fact requires that, with or without the consent of the Director, I bring to their attention matters of paramount importance. I reiterated, of course, my respect for Dr. Commer, while pointing out that, if anything, that aging scholar’s infirmities have grown more pronounced with time. I wrote that I was prompted to this act in part by the situation created by the (presumed) murders of Fessing and Scrabbe and by Malachy Morin’s arrest and pending indictment, which has created more of a managerial vacuum than had existed heretofore. I stated that trends were developing which, if allowed to continue, could prove disastrous to the museum.

  Another matter regarding the governance of the museum concerns me as well. I was the recipient this week of another communication through the e-mail from the Genetics Lab. I am glad now that I have entered all of these into this unofficial log, as they show a definite trend. Again, I will let the document speak for itself:

  Dear Mr. Detour [sic]:

  I can’t tell you how crazy things are getting over here. I’m even thinking of leaving but I’ve been here a long time and I would lose a lot of benefits if I tried to switch jobs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the stuff here had something to do with those deans getting killed. Someone around here is going to get killed the way things are going. Professor Gottling and Dr. Kaplan are barely talking to each other and when they do it’s usually an argument. Dr. Kaplan kept telling Professor Gottling that he Professor Gottling I mean was trying to make a whole new Gino type, which sounds like some kind of Italian to me but then I don’t understand all the complicated stuff they do here. Then Professor Gottling said it was only chimpanzees and why did Dr. Kaplan care. Dr. Kaplan kept saying it wasn’t just chimpanzees because why did they need a human sperm bank in that case. Then they went around and around like that before someone saw me there and closed the door. I also heard from one of the secretaries that Charlene is pregnant and won’t get an abortion because she’s Catholic. It may just be gossip but Dr. Hanker sure does walk about with a worried look on his face. I don’t know how it’s all going to end but it’s getting really tense around here.

  More Worried

  Despite everything, I have, with effort, been able of late to find much comfort in researching the history of this marvelous place. What a boon, what a balm it has been to delve into the past! How simple everything seemed in those days! Among the family archives I have found some absolute treasures, including a bundle of letters between Othniel Remick and Sarah Goodfellow during their courtship. Extraordinary how civilized people were then, at least in the sentiments they expressed to each other. In a letter dated June 14, 1823, Othniel writes in part:

  We are ashore on Isabela, which is a large island among the Galápagos. Here the wonders of the Creator never cease to amaze myself and my officers. Here might paradise have been, the wild creatures being so tame they light on one’s shoulder and take feed from one’s hand. Such is the bounty, we have provisioned ourselves with great land turtles that we secure on their backs for fresh meat many days from shore. God willing, I will arrive home before this poor correspondence that I am leaving in trust of Captain Bowdoin of the Mermaid out of Salem. You are never far from my thoughts, and I pray the Almighty will vouchsafe my return not for my life but for ours.

  Reading that put in me mind of my own dear Elsbeth. It wasn’t just Othniel’s letter. Around this time of year I am particularly vulnerable to what used to a bittersweet melancholy one might call the blues — especially when I think of her. Just standing near the north window of my office, with its partial view of Shag Bay and the sailboats tautly propped against an onshore breeze, reminds me of other summers and of one in particular when I wasn’t here. Elsbeth sailed her father’s boat up on Lake Longing. I never took much pleasure in jibbing and tacking, coming about, being close-hauled, although I did like going wing to wing before the wind. But moving for its own sake never moved me. The illusion, I suppose, is that we are going someplace, not merely making the rounds of the inevitable circles, however ingeniou
s, that we all revolve in. It was just about this time of the summer that I dropped out of her circles. It was the summer after she graduated from Wainscott. I should have proposed to her then, but I hesitated, not wanting, I told myself, to stand in the way of any career she might pursue.

  Of course, I can see in retrospect that I was at least as concerned about the impact an engagement and subsequent marriage would have on my own career. Just that February I had been accepted by Professor Calloway to join the Wainscott team excavating the Greco-Roman levels of a site at Infra, which is just inland on the coast of North Africa. I had come to archaeology late, having taken my undergraduate degree in fine arts. Following my own graduation three years earlier and during the year I was at Jesus College, Oxford, studying under Blecky, I had begun to reject the notion of “fine arts” per se, a rather radical departure at the time. I saw that all art was “fine” provided it was competently done within its own terms: the finely etched boomerang of a naked aborigine is superior tout court to a mediocre oil from the Quattrocento. Having said that, I must insist that, where art is concerned, aesthetic standards should concede nothing to ethical or ideological considerations. Aesthetics constitutes a moral system of its own, and simply because a member of some “marginalized” group (awful terms they use these days) has made something does not endow it with any intrinsic value as art. Eskimos and Berbers are as capable of kitsch as the middlebrow Americans who, in buying such stuff, participate in its propagation.

  But I have wandered from my subject. The fact is, I had at the time embraced archaeology with all the enthusiasm of youth, and I was full of passionate eagerness to join the team at Infra, having helped catalog some of the artifacts from earlier digs. It did not seem proper to propose to a woman and then leave immediately for nearly three months. Engagements, I have always thought, are a time of growing intimacy, when two people come to know each other by spending time together. Instead, I was spending less time with Elsbeth. As the mid-June departure date approached, I was in a veritable tizzy of preparation. I bought myself one of those Australian slouch hats that tie up at the side and the kind of shorts issued by the British Army in warm climates. I packed and repacked my kit. I suffered the necessary inoculations gladly. I read constantly. Elsbeth wasn’t absent from my mind; indeed, I think in some ways I was doing it for her. I imagined the snapshots of myself at the dig — begrimed and bewhiskered, in slouch hat and shorts — that I would send to her with long letters full of vivid details about what we were unearthing from the past. I imagined returning to her in September, sunburned and roughened, a man!