The Murder in the Museum of Man (12 page)

Short of consolidation, I happen to know there has been talk at Mr. Morin’s “executive committee” meetings of “renovations” that would, for instance, include taking the fifth-floor atrium space for offices, i.e., boarding over the skylight and mangling in one blow the whole exquisite design of the exhibition space.

The thought of the MOM being vandalized in this manner depresses me beyond words. You see, I can scarcely describe the subdued, delicious shiver of revelation I experience when I linger alone among the collections. I love the orderliness of the objects in their cases of glass and polished mahogany and the manifest reassurance they provide of our slow and painful rise from brutishness to civilization. I stand enchanted when, say, the light pools in a certain way on the ebony smoothness of the great Haida raven. I very nearly start each time, which is daily, I confront among the African Collections the reliquary guardian figures carved from blackened wood. I perfectly understand that what’s represented here, of course, is a construction, in most cases a reconstruction, of our artfulness. (I have often thought the public would appreciate all this more if they could go into the various workshops to watch, as I have, conservators piecing back together the fragments of a black steatite rhyton more than three millennia old. It is like seeing the shattered past lovingly restored to something whole.) But reconstruction or not, everywhere I look in this sacred place I see a beauty that brims. And in this art I see and sense something deeper: that the spontaneous, gratuitous, and infinitely delighting human impulse to create beauty is nothing less than proof of our divinity. We are creators as well as creatures.

I know, of course, that such sentiments would not go over very well with the administrators at an administrative hearing, replete with architects and their blueprints, gathered to consider a “reorganization
plan to meet staffing requirements.” These are, with a few exceptions, people who cannot see the forest for the trees, who cannot even see the trees. Which reminds me, I must get to work on the history of the MOM before, like so much else, it is gone.

Speaking of which (in a roundabout way), I spent a good deal of the afternoon in the company of Malachy Morin interviewing another group of candidates for the press assistant post. What sublime, wonderful ignorance! It is clearly the age of Dionysus. One applicant, accoutred in cartoon clothes, dense sunglasses, long ponytail, and pointy beard, wanted to know if he could use the museum in the evenings to practice with his band. Even Mr. Morin had doubts about that, and neither of them got the joke when I suggested to the young man that he try the Primate Pavilion for such purposes.

The women, I have to admit, seemed much better qualified than the men. Still, it got embarrassing when Mr. Morin turned on all his blustery charm, especially with the better-looking ones. I think he shook hands three times with Elsa Pringle, a slight, comely young woman who has worked on suburban papers and spent a summer as an intern reporting for the
Bugle
. She certainly knows how to write a sentence and even a paragraph, to judge from the folder of clippings she brought with her. She’s without doubt the best candidate for the job, except, perhaps, for her self-confidence, which didn’t measure up to her competence as a writer. Malachy “Stormin’ ” Morin was quite smitten with her. She was scarcely out the door of his office (all cheap-looking paneling and a huge framed blowup of himself blocking that field goal attempt by Middlebrough) when he turned to me with that helpless laugh of his and boomed, “You know, Norm, outside of every thin woman there’s a fat man trying to get in.”

I admit I was attracted to her myself, to the fetching way she tilted her head and the nearly comic seriousness with which she
listened to what we were saying. She reminded me, in fact, despite some differences, of Elsbeth. But then, it is one of those fog-rolling-in, sea-racked days when Elsbeth haunts me, even though I used to think that I had, years ago, exorcised her ghost. I never did. Sometimes, like right now, when time seems a mere illusion, I think it is myself who is the ghost, one haunted by the living.

Late this morning I underwent a most distressing experience. Armed with a search warrant, the Seaboard Police did a thorough search of my unprepossessing if commodious home on Bridge Street. Lieutenant Tracy did have the courtesy to call me at the office, and I arrived at my front door in time to open it for a forensic team from the police department. Lieutenant Tracy also told me it was routine; they had already searched the homes of Professors Chard and Pilty, those of several members of the Eating Club, and Malachy Morin’s. Still, it’s a shock to arrive at one’s house and find two police cruisers and an unmarked car parked in front, as though some kind of disaster had happened. I could practically hear Mrs. Norris, a busybody of venomous smile who lives across the street, calling around to make sure no one missed the spectacle. How to explain to them that it was only “routine.” Not that I socialize much with the neighbors, although I am unfailingly polite and friendly enough. One likes to think one doesn’t care what they think, but one does.

At least I keep a tidy house (Yvette comes in once a week to give it a thorough cleaning), and the officers were most careful with my quite valuable collection. Indeed, I was gratified to hear a
couple of them exclaim over my little arrangement of bonsai and Buddha. But really, to see drawers and files opened and inspected, the contents of the kitchen cabinets minutely observed, and samples taken from the ice in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. Did they really think I might have kept pieces of Cranston in there? And then to have the clothing in my wardrobes gone through was as much an invasion of privacy as I could stand. I tried not to act guilty, which, I’m sure, only made me seem more guilty. I wanted to protest my innocence, to tell them they would find only evidence of a blameless, perhaps too blameless, life. They did turn up a pair of kidskin gloves I thought I had lost years ago and a catalog from a New York art dealer I had misplaced. They even went over the venerable Renault I keep parked in the side driveway for occasional weekend excursions, although I have never liked driving and am not very adept at it to judge from the reactions of other motorists. I can’t imagine what they expected to find in it. I was tempted to scoff, but I didn’t deem it wise to confront the police, especially in front of the whole neighborhood.

The matter might have remained “routine” had they not uncovered my father’s old Smith & Wesson tucked away in an attic chest filled with memorabilia. The gun was still in its case and looked not only well kept but as though I had used it lately and hidden it there. I told Lieutenant Tracy that I did not have a permit for the gun, as required by state law, because I had quite forgotten that my father had possessed the thing. I explained that my father, the late Alexander de Ratour, had been a mining engineer, an occupation that took him to remote and dangerous places and necessitated his carrying a weapon. I said my own interest in archaeology had been spurred on at an early age by the kinds of artifacts he brought back from his travels.

This account appeared to satisfy the lieutenant, but another officer in plainclothes, a rumpled suit in fact, a Sergeant Lemure,
interrogated me in a manner that bordered on the abusive. Standing in my kitchen, leaning against the sink counter as though he owned it, he had the impertinence to suggest that I “hid” the revolver in the attic and suggested I might want to have a lawyer present. I informed him I had hidden nothing in the attic or anywhere else. I answered him in a dignified manner as he repeated his questions. Where did the gun come from? Why was I hiding it? Why had I not applied for a permit? It took me a while to realize that he was subjecting me to nothing less than a crude travesty of the technique detectives use when they try to get someone to contradict his “story.”

I finally said to Sergeant Lemure, in a tone that suggested his questions were a trifle foolish, that I thought it should be a simple matter to have the weapon tested to see if it had been fired recently. I followed up with some questions of my own: What exactly did they expect to find that might implicate me in the presumed murder of Dean Fessing? Why had they waited so long? Surely if I had committed the crime I would have gotten rid of any evidence by now. When the sergeant tried to bully me again, I said in an even voice that I was not in the least intimidated by his manner and that if he could not conduct his investigation with intelligence he could at least conduct it with civility. When he mentioned something about “going downtown” (actually police headquarters have been relocated to a new building out near the bypass), I responded that to do that he would have to arrest me and that he had no grounds whatsoever for doing so. I said if he did arrest me I would embarrass both him and the department with a civil suit of exceedingly large dimensions.

At that point Lieutenant Tracy intervened, saying that Sergeant Lemure was only doing his job and that it would be a simple matter to have the gun examined. He took me aside and, in a tone as apologetic as police use, told me they were operating on an anonymous tip received on the 911 line.

“A tip?” I said. “Who made the tip?”

“We don’t really know. Someone calling himself ‘Panglosser.’ ”

“Panglosser?” The odd name, obviously a pseudonym, struck several faint bells, but I could make nothing of their distant, tantalizing chiming. “But you said it was routine,” I objected.

He explained that it was routine to follow up whatever leads they had. I was not reassured. My home, my castle, had been legally burglarized and rendered alien to me in a way I cannot describe. It’s as though it, as well as I, has been besmirched. And while I know, as much as anyone can know anything, that I had nothing to do with the dean’s demise, the thought that others suspect me, had even called the police department about me, has left me with a vague, nagging anxiety akin to guilt. I suppose I am naive, but I had begun to think that Lieutenant Tracy trusted me, even counted on me to help him with his investigation. It’s as though, however innocent we may be in one instance, we are all capable of the crime we are suspected of.

When they had finished, he gave me a receipt for the revolver and, by glance more than anything, apologized, I think, for what he had to do. We parted on amicable terms.

But I had hardly gotten back to the office and begun to regain some kind of inner composure when Amanda Feeney called from the
Bugle
. In that awful voice of hers, she demanded to know why the police had searched my home. When I tried to explain that it was routine, that others had had their homes and offices gone through, she brought up the gun. (Lemure, to get at me, probably told her about it.) When I again tried to explain, she twisted my answers around horribly, put words in my mouth, and made me sound defensive. I can just imagine the story she’s going to write. I’m sure she would have loved to have a photographer there to see me led away in handcuffs. And what I find most offensive is the undisguised relish she takes in maligning the museum through me.

This assault on my privacy and dignity has had one salutary effect: it has reinvigorated my own investigation of what happened to Dean Fessing. I have gone over my notebook several times. I called Mrs. Walsh to see if she had located the missing files, but she could report nothing. I pondered connections. While the Onoyoko money trail leads all over the place, might not the real connections here be between the Primate Pavilion and the Genetics Lab? I mean, if those communications have any substance at all … And the more I think about Raul Brauer … Those eyes, I mean. His is the home that should have been ransacked.

I have begun, in fact, to contemplate bold and perhaps dangerous steps. I am thinking of doing some hands-on work of my own. After hours, I mean. Mort and I go back decades, and more than once he has fished through his impressive array of keys to grant me access to restricted areas. And I have put in a call to a friend at the Medical School to see if, in fact, the pavilion is involved with AIDS research there. Or any real research for that matter. Still, I must confess to being quite at sea. It always seems so easy in those detective novels where the amateur sleuth picks up on seemingly inconsequential details and weaves out of them a dark and beautiful tapestry of crime. All I seem to have are random bits and pieces that I might sew into an abstract, not quite plausible quilt.

Well, I do have some good news. I am finally going to have that dinner party to introduce my shrine to my friends. The Landeses, the Littlefields, Esther and her husband Norbert, a professor of chemistry, and Alfie Lopes can all make it next Saturday. Esther, who is well-known for her Chinese cuisine, is going to cook, while I am going to do the peeling and chopping. What would we do without friends?