The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  “I think, Lieutenant, that you’ll find the third triplet has no alibi for the time Dean Scrabbe was abducted. I think a thorough search of the Snyderses’ place of domicile and the facilities of the Primate Pavilion will turn up sufficient material evidence for an indictment. I also think that Mr. Drex will prove a most cooperative witness.”

  Lieutenant Tracy officially arrested the triplets, read them their rights, and had them led off. They were followed by a quick-stepping Ariel Dearth, who was trying to give them his card. Amanda Feeney, after telling Malachy Morin to wait for her outside, asked me many questions, but in a respectful manner. Corny Chard tried to congratulate me, but I would not shake his hand. I watched Raul Brauer slip away quietly. I sat around for a while and chatted with my friends, remarking cryptically that I hoped “Worried” felt better. Then Izzy, saying he had just stocked some excellent champagne, suggested we retire to the Club for a well-earned tipple. So, surrounded by these good friends, so relieved as to be weak, I walked out into the brilliant October light.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9

  As I sit here making this quite personal entry into this unofficial log, I find myself a different, a transformed Norman Abbott de Ratour. Curiously enough, it has almost nothing to do with the resolution of the murders of Fessing and Scrabbe or with the ensuing and rather gratifying notoriety it has won for me. Suffice it to say that I am older, I am younger; I am sadder, I am happier; I am more serious, I am scoffing at myself; I am infinitely wiser and as obtuse as ever; I am much more confident, but of what I am not sure. I should start at the beginning, yesterday morning, to be exact, when I drove to our modest little airport to pick up Elsbeth. I had scarcely slept the night before. I nicked myself shaving and bled like a martyr. I could not find matching socks. I considered putting on a suit, then settled for a rugged corduroy shooting jacket with a leather patch on the right fore shoulder, an off-white shirt, and my club tie, which I rejected in favor of an indigo silk cravat with a paisley design. But it was all a front. I didn’t know what to do with the bouquet of yellow roses I had picked up. I put them in the car. I took them back into the house. I went and retrieved them. I nearly ran over Mrs. Norris backing out of my drive.

  At the airport I paced the waiting room like an expectant father. I wasn’t disappointed. When she came through the double doors, three decades disappeared. She was her old self, her smile radiant under short, neatly coiffed, still lustrous hair. She strode toward me in a pleated tartan, suede jacket, button-down oxford, and rakish cravat nearly matching mine, her short heels clicking decisively, her smile a picture of delight. We kissed chastely, a peck on the cheek. What a eruption of sensations swirled around and through me! Though hardly slender, she had become positively svelte and appeared, if anything, to have grown younger since that awful encounter in Philadelphia. She had one of those pull-along suitcases, so I had nothing to do with my big hands, which felt like encumbrances as I helped her through the door and out to the parking lot.

  I was altogether too light-headed with uncertain elation to do more than smile and nod rather idiotically as I drove her in my newly tuned and polished Renault to the Miranda Hotel, our talk along the way carefully small — the flight, the weather, how Seaboard had changed. She checked in. I waited like a swain of old in the lobby while she freshened up in her room. We had the whole day to ourselves, and as I paced the faux Iberian lobby, I wanted to escape into the faded murals of seascapes and whitewashed villages, a march of stylized olive trees, stick-legged donkeys, and azure skies. I wondered what on earth we would do. Lunch, of course, and a trip to the lake no doubt. But lunch where? And what would we do at the lake? What would we talk about?

  Above all, as she stepped from the elevator, having changed into slacks and turtleneck, I was determined not to reveal my heart. I knew I would not survive another rejection and felt supremely foolish even thinking in those terms. Somewhat stiffly, I think, I said, “I suppose you’ll want to go out to the lake first,” the “first” implying other activities of which I hadn’t a clue.

  “Oh, do let’s go and see what’s become of old Bramble.” She laughed, and the sun, playing hide-and-seek behind high, wistful clouds moving in a fresh, sea-scented breeze, came out for a glorious moment. We became tourists of our common past, and the day began to take care of itself.

  She took my arm as we mounted the porticoed steps of what had been, in more genteel times, a ladies’ residence hall. The double French doors were locked, but a student with a key didn’t object when we entered in his wake. It was unrecognizable at first. They had vandalized the gracious old lobby, covering the flower-swirled plaster ceiling with sound-insulating stuff and installing what looked like stage lighting in place of the glassy chandeliers. Gone were the chintz-covered chairs and sofas, the drapery and dainty tables. They had been replaced by what looked like inflated life rafts and chunky wooden things, making it seem more like a room for children than adults. We did find the nook with the battered upright Vose almost intact. To the bemusement of some of the lounging students, all of whom looked not a little seedy, we bungled our way through a couple of lieder. Indeed, before we finished there had gathered something of an audience, which applauded us and asked for more.

  On that note we left and proceeded through the sadly neglected Marvell Gardens. In the little enclosure where we had embraced, we found an apologetic homeless man sheltering as best he could. Elsbeth reached into her purse and gave the man a five-dollar bill. At my raised eyebrows, she said, “Oh, I’ve got more than I’ll ever spend. Winslow was good in that way.”

  “Yes,” I said, distracted by her remark even as I explained how I felt something amiss both when I gave and when I didn’t give to beggars. Winslow was good in that way. But not in other ways? Was it a disparagement of her husband? Had I heard a subtle emphasis on the that? Or was it just a remark? And why on earth did she seem so happy to be with me? Pale, tremulous hope stirred in me like one of those fantastic desert plants that lie dormant for decades and then bloom into life at the first touch of rain. But if she were giving me an opening, I did not know how to take advantage of it, or lacked the courage to. She talked in a self-deprecating way about the work she was doing in a shelter for homeless families in Philadelphia, and I listened with the silence of one muted with love.

  It was Elsbeth’s suggestion to take a picnic out to the cottage. When we stopped at a delicatessen for sandwiches and fruit, and at a wine shop for a bottle of chilled white wine, how well she organized it! How I welcomed her brisk efficiencies! On the drive there, we remarked how, while suburbs had thickened around the periphery of Seaboard, much of the farmland had reverted to forest. We talked about what had happened at the museum. She said she had read and heard about it in the national media. She told me she had seen me on television and I was very telegenic. Then, placing her hand on my shoulder, she said she hoped fervently that I was now out of danger. What I can’t describe is how, as I talked to her about it and as she listened, watching my eyes, that whole absurd, grisly business fell from me like a great and cumbersome millstone. Or, more accurately, I think, she imperceptibly moved closer as though to take some of the weight. But I couldn’t see her eyes, which might have been pitying or admiring or wary. Was she throwing me some little sop of life but gingerly, the way you give a scrap to an abused dog?

  We turned off the state highway onto a single-lane road and wound our way up through a needle-carpeted evergreen forest, the past turning into the present, or vice versa, I’m not sure which. We came to a forking dirt road and a turnoff I always used to miss and almost did again. The drive, sloping down to the cottage, was blocked by a growth of hemlock saplings. It wasn’t much of a walk, the lake water all adazzle through a screen of leafless lilacs.

  She took my hand as we approached, as though for balance. We were both surprised to find the cottage looked largely intact, at least from the outside, surprising as well a porcupine sleeping under the side of the porch facing the lake. It awoke and rattled
off with slow dignity. The perspective from there — the bristle of pines on Barkley’s Point, the old railroad bridge and embankment on the distant shore, the sweep of blueberry shrubland to the right — seemed scarcely changed at all, an impression reinforced by the call of jays coming through the sharp air. The cottage itself listed decidedly to starboard, and we found, under the skirting of lattice, one of the sills and some of the uprights eaten away by ants. We went in, continuing our time walk. Elsbeth moved about, exclaiming, touching things, finally crying, so that I had to comfort her. “Why,” I asked, “did you never come back here?” I wanted to kiss away her tears.

  “Win never wanted to, and we always did what Win wanted. Right from the start.” Bitterness curdled the sadness in her voice.

  I didn’t encourage an elaboration. I didn’t feel particularly vindicated. It was too late for that. And, anyway, revenge is a dish that grows cold. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Although I suspected as much … when I came out to visit you.”

  We were in the kitchen, the cobwebs straining the cold light on the steel sink, the four-burner gas stove, the oilcloth on the table where a few dead flies lay, when she put her arms around me, collapsing against my chest. She was sobbing again, whispering, “Norman, Norman, please don’t hate me …”

  I held her in my arms and let her sob, patting her back, saying twice or three times, “Of course I don’t hate you, of course …” while wondering with a poignancy too exquisite for words whether forgiveness was all she wanted from me.

  Indeed, she recovered her composure so quickly I was just a little put out. She suggested we have lunch on the porch, now bright with sunshine. She found a corkscrew and some glasses while I arranged a card table and a couple of chairs. We toasted with our glasses of wine, exactly what I still wasn’t sure. She ate and spoke avidly, waiting to swallow, then talking, one hand moving just a little bit, as though conducting herself, the way she always had. She elaborated, seemed positively anxious and relieved to talk about her life with Winslow. She knew she had made a terrible, terrible mistake, she said, after they had been married only a few months. But by then, through carelessness, she was pregnant with their first child, and in those days you didn’t automatically get a divorce. She elaborated on her late husband’s smallness, his need to control everything, his growing preoccupation with money, his golf. I listened, nodding, wondering what all this had to do with me, when she said something so extraordinary I had to put down the ham and Swiss on rye I had been toying with. “During all those years, Norman, I thought about you every day. I thought about you every night, especially those nights when …”

  “When what?” I asked, obtuse to the end.

  “When Win wanted to make love.”

  “Oh, dear” was all I could manage and sipped my wine. I held her hand. It was as though, through all those years, we had been making love after all. But I couldn’t tell her that, not yet.

  A cold wind came off the lake. We went inside and started a fire in the fieldstone fireplace to take the chill off the air. We sat on the wicker sofa in front of the fire and watched it roar and dance. We kissed.

  I won’t, gentle reader, even in the privacy of this journal, go into details after she whispered that we should go upstairs. Suffice it to say that what ensued on her cleanly sheeted and only mildly mildewed bed was touching, passionate, and in its own way hilarious. Elsbeth simply couldn’t believe I had waited.

  She has made a complete man of me, and I am so happy that I scarcely resent all those lost years. Because I think all of us, in a way, carry around ghost lives, lives we could have lived with others, in other places, doing other things. But we can’t regret not having lived them, even when they rise up and come back to claim us.

  1

  It is with reluctance and foreboding that I trouble these pages with an account of a tragic, unseemly, and suspicious incident here at the Museum of Man. I say “reluctance” as I do not wish to serve as amanuensis to a nightmare. Nor do I wish to prompt iniquity with words. I would rather, on this lovely evening, sit back and gaze out of my high windows at the Hays Mountains, where I can see the first flares of autumn touching with scarlet and gold those rolling, mist-tendriled hills. But write I must. Because yet again I have a presentiment of evil uncoiling itself within the womb of this ancient institution.

  Let me start with this morning. Just as Doreen was heading down to the cafeteria for our coffees, Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department appeared in the doorway of my fifth-floor domain. Dapper as ever in charcoal suit, buttondown off-white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, the officer reminded me that he took his coffee black. The amenities of small talk attended to, the door closed, we got down to business.

  “I’m here to see you, Norman, about the Ossmann-Woodley case.” His tone indicated that he spoke off the record.

  “Ossmann-Woodley,” I repeated with a sigh, not entirely surprised. “I was under the impression, Lieutenant, that the case was too riddled with imponderables to begin an investigation. It’s most unusual, I know, and not a little embarrassing for the museum, given Professor Ossmann’s affiliation.”

  Thanks to the tabloids and those television programs devoted to the tawdry and the sensational (for which my dear wife, Elsbeth, has a decided weakness), much of the world knows that, just a week ago, Professor Humberto Ossmann and Dr. Clematis Woodley, a postdoctoral student, were found dead quite literally in each other’s arms; indeed, in an unequivocally amorous embrace.

  Foul play, other than double adultery — they were both married — has not been ruled out. In short, we have two corpses and enough circumstantial evidence to indicate corpus delicti. For instance, a security guard found them, not in some comfortable bed or even on the couch available in a nearby office, but on the floor of one the laboratories. There, judging from the disorder — an overturned chair, some smashed pipettes, and a terrified white rat running loose — their lovemaking had been spontaneous and energetic, if not violent. Rape does not appear to have been involved inasmuch as Professor Ossmann was a smallish man, a good two inches shorter and twenty-five pounds lighter than the formidable Dr. Woodley, who played rugby for Rutgers, albeit on the women’s team. Moreover, neither participant had disrobed in a manner suggesting premeditated lovemaking. Professor Ossmann’s trousers and boxer shorts were down around his ankles, and Dr. Woodley’s panties had been clawed off, but by herself, judging from the fragments of matching material found under her fingernails.

  Finally, both victims, if that is what they are, entertained a deep and abiding antipathy for the other. Professor Ossmann had blocked Dr. Woodley’s appointment to a tenure-track position a year or so back. Dr. Woodley for her part had taken to calling Professor Ossmann “Pip” to his face, “Pip-squeak” being the nickname colleagues used behind his back.

  I know the case in considerable detail, not only from the lurid and often inaccurate coverage in the Seaboard Bugle, but also from briefings I arranged between the SPD and important university officials in an attempt to keep the rumor mills from working overtime.

  The postmortems, done by the venerable Dr. P.M. Cutler, have provided only preliminary findings. The Medical Examiner reported gross inflammation of the genitals of both parties, who otherwise presented no signs of trauma or assault. Professor Ossmann succumbed to a coronary thrombosis while Dr. Woodley died of massive systemic failure when her blood pressure, for which she was taking medication, dropped below what is necessary for life. Curiously enough, according to Dr. Cutler, despite prolonged sexual activity, no evidence of ejaculate was found. Whether Dr. Woodley had experienced a physiological orgasm could not be determined with any certainty. Assays on blood chemistry, other bodily fluids, stomach contents, and organs are presently being conducted and should tell us a lot more as to what happened on that Friday night in early September when the lab was deserted except for those two.

  Sergeant Lemure, Lieutenant Tracy’s blunt-spoken deputy, put the matter in words of a characteri
stic crudity, which I will refrain from repeating here.

  The lieutenant regarded me closely. “Officially, Norman, it is a low-priority case because we cannot determine whether it’s a murder, an accident, or some kind of bizarre suicide pact. But something about this case reeks.”

  His remarks struck a chord, if nagging doubts can be said to resonate. Despite myself, I have acquired of late a knack for suspicion. It’s related, no doubt, to my work with the Seaboard police on what have come to be called the Cannibal Murders, which gained Wainscott University, the museum, myself, and others such notoriety a few years back. Indeed, the account of those grisly events that I kept in my journal at the time was subsequently entered as evidence in the case against the Snyders brothers. Published initially over my objections, it was well received in those circles devoted to the “true detective” genre.

  Moreover, I have found that working as a private sleuth — or a public sleuth, for that matter — sharpens one’s apprehension of those slight discordances that indicate the presence not so much of clues but of what might be termed “negative clues” — the dog that doesn’t bark. It makes one aware of anomalies within anomalies, life being full of the anomalous, after all. And this case, if a case it be, is loud with silent hounds.

  While I was thus cogitating, Doreen came in with the coffee. The dear girl had been offered a higher salary to go back to her old boss, Malachy Morin. But she told me she wouldn’t even consider it, calling the man “a serial groper.” She has a new beau and has finally ceased inflating out of her mouth those gaudy-hued, condom-like bubbles of gum.

  After Doreen had withdrawn and closed the door, I noted the obvious. “We have no real evidence of foul play. At least not until the lab tests come in.”

  The lieutenant lifted an eyebrow at the implied collaboration in the “we,” as though both realizing and acknowledging that we were once again, however unofficially, a team.