The Murder in the Museum of Man (10 page)

This happens to be a more serious matter than he realizes. Mason Twitchell, a pioneering giant in the field of ethnopaleosiphonapterology, which is the study of fossil fleas, was a benign presence at the MOM for many years and a powerful advocate for its independence even as he occupied one of the university’s most venerable chairs. His portrait, a very good likeness in splendid academic plumage, showing his kindly but intense blue eyes, his persuasive jaw, and the backward sweep of his abundant white hair, dominates the round table in the room named for him. Of course when I knew him (we sometimes had coffee together in the wonderful old cafeteria on the second floor, which has since been turned into offices), he was getting on in years but still had that twinkle in his eyes and was quite
gracious to everyone. But I’m sure he is turning in his grave at the thought of the room being used for a hearing by an oversight committee from the university.

I am still trying to arrange a dinner party in honor of my little shrine. What immense, vicarious peace that tableau affords me! Strange, the little things that keep us going.

Unannounced, dapper as ever, Lieutenant Tracy appeared in my office just after eleven this morning, and, with a politeness that produced a small moment of melodrama, asked if he could shut the door. I acquiesced, and he sat before my desk and requested permission to smoke. I nodded, and he took out a cigarette, lit it with a flick and snap of his lighter, and, exhaling toward the ceiling, said, “Tell me, Mr. de Ratour, “what do you know of the relationship between Professor Pilty and Dean Fessing?”

“Pilty and Fessing?” I repeated. I shook my head most emphatically and told him that I had had on more than one occasion the pleasure of meeting Theresa Pilty and their two lovely children. But knowing how little appearances count for these days, I threw in some gossip I had heard about Pilty and a female graduate student with whom he apparently had a fling during one of those long, arduous forays in the field, when any kind of comfort is at a premium.

The lieutenant was in turn shaking his head before I finished. “I mean strictly professional. What do you know of their differences over some kind of exhibit Professor Pilty wants to build?”

I informed the lieutenant that the dean had attempted, upon his appointment, to forestall the initiation of any major projects
pending the completion of his one-year term and his final report to the Select Committee on Consolidation. I said that this stance had generated resistance from those departments — principally the Primate Pavilion and the Genetics Lab, but also the MOM proper in the person of Professor Pilty — that had begun or were about to begin major undertakings. I noted that I had played a small if complicated role in some of these tussles by sending Dean Fessing carbons of my memoranda to the Board and Dr. Commer.

“Complicated in what way?” The police officer was watching me closely and taking notes. I had to resist an impulse to produce my own notebook and do the same.

“I say ‘complicated,’ Lieutenant, because while opposed myself to the dean’s mission, I was also opposed to the installation of the diorama on Paleolithic life and did not particularly welcome support from what I consider inappropriate sources.”

Lieutenant Tracy finished a note he was making of my remarks before reaching into a trim attaché case and extracting a folder of correspondence between Pilty and Fessing that he had culled from the latter’s files. Well, I must say, the memoranda showed the fur really flying between those two. While the dean began politely enough regarding plans for the diorama, it wasn’t long before Thad Pilty sounded rather like I sound, saying that the dean’s mission at the MOM was “evaluative and as such should concern itself with neither museum policy or [
sic
] administration.” Mind your own business, in other words.

I told the lieutenant I felt curiously vindicated but hardly saw in these exchanges, notwithstanding the dean’s less than veiled threat “to take the matter to a level of authority in such a way as to make the diorama problematic even in the long run,” a cause for murder.

He made the tolerant nod of a professional listening to an amateur and asked me how valuable I estimated the diorama to be to Professor Pilty.

I hesitated to respond, all the time aware that hesitation signified the contrary of what I really thought rather than what I had to say. I took a deep breath. I said, “The diorama is very important to Thad Pilty. Through it, I believe, he wants to dramatize his discovery and interpretation of Lucille and her family, a Neanderthal group from the middle to late Paleolithic. But I can’t see …”

The lieutenant was still watching me closely, his cigarette smoking on the ashtray, his pen poised over his spiral notebook. I tried, not very successfully I’m afraid, to dissemble a rush of disquieting thoughts, not just about Pilty but about what I had, or rather hadn’t, found out about Raul Brauer. I’m not sure now why I told the officer nothing of my suspicions. Loyalty to the institution? A sense of the information being proprietary? The fact that I really had nothing to go on but rumors, conjectures, will-o’-the-wisps? He finally stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “What’s surprising, Mr. de Ratour,” he said, stopping at the door, “is how little we sometimes know about the people we think we know. Give me a call if anything occurs to you about Professor Pilty that might help us.”

His words had their desired effect. I sat in the wake of his singular scents — aftershave, cigarette smoke, gunmetal oil — having doubts about Thad Pilty. The man is extraordinarily ambitious. He may have perceived Fessing as a threat. He wouldn’t be squeamish about carving up a body as he is an expert on human anatomy and has been called in by the state police to lend his expertise to some very messy cases. And he did concede rather easily to the demands of the Oversight Committee to hold hearings. And the lieutenant is right, isn’t he, about how little we sometimes know about each other.

I can only report that if the first meeting of the Oversight Committee provides any indication of what’s to come, Thad Pilty is in for some very choppy times with his diorama of Paleolithic life. I do not wish to gloat, but I cannot deny a certain grim satisfaction at what happened today.

It has cleared since this morning, when a spring storm lashed us with a bright rain, producing in the corridor outside the Twitchell Room a flowering of taut umbrellas and a few small puddles under the coatrack. I arrived a bit late to find the attendees already inside and still animated with the exhilaration of weather as they settled in. Some were pouring coffee for themselves from the urn at the side table or saying cheery hellos to those they knew.

The meeting itself began equably enough. I took my seat, as customary, facing Mason Twitchell’s portrait. Someone suggested that we introduce ourselves, and so we did, going around the table clockwise for self-descriptions the length of which varied according to status (the more important the personage, the shorter, I’ve noticed). Constance Brattle, the rather hard-bottomed chair of the committee, began by describing herself as Director of Gender Studies at Wainscott. (Professor Brattle, who serves on many committees, is the coeditor of
Blame: Source and Resource
, a compendium of scholarly articles about a subject on which she is a nationally recognized figure.) Next to her was Randall Athol, a specialist on ethics at our sad little Divinity School. Dr. Commer, at his turn, simply sat in the vacant silence that attends the declining old until Athol tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “Who are you?” Dr. Commer, ever the gentleman, shook the educator’s hand and whispered back, “Dr. Commer.” But we all heard it. Next was Dr. Gertrude Gordon, an oncologist
at Wainscott’s small but excellent medical school. An impressive woman of middle years, she wore the impatient expression of someone who has better things to do. I then introduced myself and explained what I was doing. Thad Pilty sat to my left, followed by Cornelius Chard, whom everyone seemed to know, then Professor John Murdleston, a shaggy-haired little man who is Curator of the Ethnocoprolite Collections in the MOM. These latter two, like Dr. Commer, were in attendance as representatives of the museum. (I had expected Malachy Morin there in that capacity, but he has a knack for avoiding these kinds of meetings.) Marlene Parkers, a black woman of considerable presence, represented the university’s Office of Outreach. I was surprised to see, sitting next to Ms. Parkers, Mr. Edo Onoyoko, who was introduced by his translator, Ms. Kushiro, a winsome young woman of his nation, who then introduced herself. Bertha Schanke, quite preoccupied with the plate of donuts in front of her, simply stated her name followed by the word
bitch
, standing, I think, for BITCH, a coalition of local victims’ groups. Next to her was the ubiquitous Ariel Dearth, the Leona Von Beaut Professor of Situational Ethics and Litigation Development in the Law School. Then my friend Israel Landes, Smythe Professor of the History of Science, who was sitting next to his good friend Father S. J. O’Gould, S. J. Father O’Gould holds a joint appointment in paleontology and philosophy and is well-known for his revival of the ideas and ideals of Teilhard de Chardin, a fellow Jesuit. Last year Father O’Gould came out with his long-awaited
Wonderful Strife: Natural Selection and the Inevitability of Intelligence
. One reviewer, I remember, castigated him as “an out-and-out unreconstructed neo-optimist,” but the book was, surprisingly, well received.

Professor Brattle, following a perfunctory note of gratitude for the use of the room, went on to make it clear that the hearing would be anything but salubrious for Professor Pilty’s project.
The committee, she said, reported directly to President Twill, who, she added, dropping her chained glasses for effect, took the committee’s findings and recommendations “very seriously.” Prim and proper in brooched blouse and no-nonsense business suit (the shoulder pads did make her look a bit like a bespectacled football player), Professor Brattle stated that, as chair of the committee, she had been distressed to learn about the plans for the diorama at such a late date. She said the form and content of the diorama represented “an area of profound sensitivities” and that the Museum of Man, “the very name of which makes it suspect from a genderist’s perspective,” had acted without regard for “significant and increasingly powerful marginalized constituencies within the university community.” She even dragged in poor Cranston Fessing, insinuating that the “climate” at the museum had had something to do with the dean’s fate and intimating that the committee might be compelled to extend its purview into areas beyond the project under discussion.

Attention to her remarks was somewhat blunted, I think, by the distraction provided by Bertha Schanke. As the chair spoke, Ms. Schanke consumed a good number of the two dozen or so Dunkin’ Donuts heaped on a platter which, while centrally located on the circular table that takes up much of the Twitchell Room, appeared locked in the force field of Ms. Schanke’s scowl. I don’t think I was the only one who tried not to stare as the woman broke into pieces and ate, in rapid succession and with a cup of coffee, first the Old Fashioned, then the Frosted, and finally the Boston Kreme. (I admit a fondness myself for those vile concoctions as often, on Sunday mornings after church, I stop by the Dunkin’ Donuts on Linnaeus Avenue to indulge.)

She was working on the Toasted Coconut when some of the other committee members ruffled up their feathers and made opening statements as well. Professor Athol said he wanted to make sure that the diorama did not become one more “white
male fantasy.” (I have placed it in quotes in the official Log as well.) He then reached for the high ground with pronouncements such as “When we look at early humankind we look at ourselves …” and “We are not dealing just with models but with role models …”

Ariel Dearth, who last year published his autobiography,
Ariel Dearth by Ariel Dearth
(by Ariel Dearth), had, surprisingly, little to say. Perhaps it was because he was sitting next to Ms. Schanke. She seemed to agitate him, especially when she picked up the Sugar Cruller and began, in a rather disturbing manner, to lick the end of it before biting it off and aggressively masticating it. Professor Dearth usually goes around with the pinched expression of someone who is smelling something foul. He seems to like the sound of his own voice and to be continually casting about, as though looking for the cameras. There was a considerable flap not long ago when Spike Manacle, a columnist who emotes regularly in the
Bugle
, referred to Dearth as the Von Beaut Professor of Situational Ethnics. Professor Dearth accused Manacle, who claimed it was a typo, of committing an ethnic slur.