The Murder in the Museum of Man (21 page)

In fact, with Mr. Morin’s departure, I seem to have become the unofficial source of authority here at the museum, with all kinds of people seeking my advice and deferring to my judgment. It is not a role I have sought, but it is one I must fill to the best of my abilities as I assist in finding a suitable replacement for Morin or, better still, an energetic successor to Dr. Commer, which would obviate the need for the former position altogether.

But the man’s letter is so piteous. And I call myself a Christian. And if everyone else has forsaken him, is it not my duty to
recognize him as a fellow soul, however depraved his character and heinous his acts? Didn’t Christ tell us we have to love our enemies? Oh, my, my. I probably will have to drive over sometime and see him. But I can’t imagine what good that will do either him or me.

I returned this morning from a wonderful weekend with the Landeses at their cottage on Mercy Island, which is just north of Shag Bay. The Littlefields have a place there as well, and they joined us and Father O’Gould for Saturday night dinner. I’m starting to think that such gatherings may be all we have left of civilization, I mean as it was once thought of.

The Landeses were both, I must say, in excellent form. Lotte is a pale, freckled woman who wears her striking, coppery hair, which has just started to turn, swept up into a knot, which bobs back and forth when she laughs. Izzy is a smallish man with an elfish face, a white mustache, and a floccose ring of white hair that looks impishly like a fallen halo. They have been married now more than thirty years. Imagine that. When asked once to what he attributed the longevity of their “relationship,” Izzy replied, “Because I have never confused marriage with tenure.” But I think it’s because of Lotte. I’ve been half in love with her myself for nearly thirty years. But then Izzy is known for his bons mots.

They have always treated me as though I were one of the family, and it’s painful to admit at times that they are just about the only family I have. The Landeses and the others were most solicitous about what happened to me at that “reception” in the
Primate Pavilion. I assured them I was fine, when in fact I remain quite shaken by the incident.

But I must resist anything like self-pity. It was a gorgeous weekend. The cottage rambles along a headland that faces north to Hooker’s Point, where you can still see a submarine spotting tower left over from World War II. The cove just south of the cottage sweeps back to a stretch of muddy shallows teeming with seabirds and shorebirds. The whole magnificent view can be taken in from their deck, to which we repaired early Saturday evening with good cheese and better wine.

Despite protestations from Lotte (“I came up here to get away from all that”), and efforts by the rest of us to avoid the subject, the conversation did drift inevitably to what was happening at the museum. Once Lotte had excused herself to see to the dinner, we all took a low, keen pleasure in shaking our heads with incredulity that it was Malachy Morin who had turned out to be the culprit. Only Father O’Gould, I think, refrained from appending a disparaging opinion of the man, though he joined in the general surprise that Morin was the Wainscott cannibal. I mentioned that he had written me a note denying he had murdered Elsa Pringle or intended to do anything unseemly with her body and saying that he had had nothing to do with Dean Fessing. I confessed that I was in a quandary as to how to respond to the man’s pleas for me to come visit him. Father O’Gould reminded me that we don’t have to like our enemies, we only have to love them. It was a comment that left me both chastened and encouraged.

Margery, resplendent in a suede skirt and green plaid shirt, her shapely legs crossed enticingly, her chin tilted up to blow cigarette smoke, remarked that “Morin certainly had a motive for getting rid of Fessing.” She told us the man had so many crooked schemes going with suppliers and contractors, not to mention the fiddling he did on his expense accounts, that Fessing was sure
to have called him on it. She recounted how, on her own initiative, she had spent nearly an afternoon with Fessing going over the details of Morin’s fraudulent activities.

“Yes, but why cannibalize him?” asked Izzy, always the skeptic. Below us in the cove I noticed a raft of eider ducks bobbing in the swell.

“Corny Chard thinks it’s natural,” said the priest. “He claims human flesh is just another form of protein and the suppression of its consumption is another irrational human prejudice. I’ve heard him say that we think we’re too good to eat.”

“Au contraire
.” Izzy laughed. “I think I would taste awful.” He sipped from his wine. “On the other hand, I have been marinating myself in this stuff most of my adult life.”

We all chuckled at that and turned to watch an unfamiliar black-sailed ketch running south. Into this silence Bill Littlefield, who hadn’t spoken much during the conversation, remarked with effective portentousness that there weren’t many left in the DA’s Office “who thought that Malachy Morin killed Cranston Fessing.”

“Why is that?” I asked. I felt oddly vindicated and fearful at the same time.

“They say it doesn’t fit. The dean really was expertly cooked. And Morin’s apparently something of a slob. They may still try to hang it on him in the public mind to clear the books, but it won’t be one of the charges.”

“You mean the Fessing case will remain officially open?” My question overlapped with that of Father O’Gould, who spoke at the same time, “Then who did murder the dean?”

Bill Littlefield said yes to my question and shrugged at that of the good father.

Izzy said, “I still think they should turn that Raul Brauer operation upside down. The man’s been a charlatan from his first day at Wainscott.”

And just as we were about to take up that gambit, Lotte called us to come in for lobsters, French bread, and salad.

That night, sleeping to the sound of waves, I dreamed a most realistic dream in which all the principals in the case — Malachy Morin, Lieutenant Tracy, Chard, Pilty, Brauer, Wherry, Drex, myself of course, Dean Fessing and Elsa Pringle, neither looking the worse for wear — were assembled in the Twitchell Room under the chairmanship of Constance Brattle to sort the matter out once and for all.

Early the next morning, I walked out with my powerful field glasses toward the shallows to peep on nature. Izzy and Father O’Gould accompanied me, and while I dwelt visually in that tremulous, prismatic world of spangled water and reedy grasses, I was able to eavesdrop on their conversation, which I always find edifying. They were immersed in that ancient and durable conundrum: man’s place in nature. Izzy, who is the author of the award-winning
The Science of Science
and its equally brilliant sequel,
The Nature of Nature
, held forth on why it is both difficult and unwise for evolutionists to ascribe to organisms a qualitative order, saying that it is simply bad science or not science at all to assert that the frog is higher than the worm or that mankind is higher than the frog.

I had just spotted a greater yellow legs and would have let both of them have a look, only the bird is rather common on these shores even at this time of the year. Besides, Father O’Gould had begun his countering view, claiming that the scientific enterprise could not escape these kinds of value judgments. “The very people,” he said, as we moved off the road down a path lined with late-blooming blackberries, “who contend there is no inherent superiority of man over the frog are perfectly willing to subject the latter to all kinds of grotesque experiments and even to eat its legs in restaurants. By those standards, are not cannibals and those doctors in the death
camps the only ones who really see no difference between man and other forms of life?”

Izzy was shaking his head, and I nearly interrupted them, thinking I had found a
rara avis
, but it turned out to be only a common snipe. On this subject, Izzy said, there is much misunderstanding. “It is pernicious to both science and society to try to infer a moral order from the natural world or to examine the natural world through a lens distorted by social theory. The former leads to National Socialism and the latter to Lysenkoism and worse.”

“But what of the brilliant medical student who forgoes what will surely be a lucrative practice to pursue a career in cancer research in order to relieve mankind of this scourge?” Father O’Gould asked.

“That medical student,” Izzy responded, “may be propelled into the laboratory by his passionate humanity, but once he is there and in the process of comparing, say, the DNA of a frog’s eyelid with that of a human being, it is of no use and indeed detrimental to the methodology of research to call one ‘better’ than the other.”

We had reached the flats themselves, pungent at low tide with the smell of life, and we paused for a moment to watch a couple of egrets in courtship display. Our footgear squelching in the muddy sand, we moved on. Father O’Gould, I think, was leading Izzy on, waiting to spring his trap. We had left the flats and were ascending through a stand of wind-stunted oaks toward a brackish pond when he stopped walking and said, “If the scientist is willing to experiment on the frog in ways that he is not willing to experiment on human beings, then the scientist assumes absolute superiority right from the start, a condition that must color his research, whether he is conscious of it or not. The scientific method is anything but objective at its very basis, but in fact it assumes and depends on what might be called a ‘higher objectivity.’ ”

Izzy was only slightly fazed. He muttered something about “the Uncertainty Principle” writ large. “Of course,” he said, “to presume a value-free objectivity in science or any other field is in itself what I have called a ‘necessary fiction,’ objectivity being nothing more than another human contrivance, often colored by prevailing ideologies. But I would suggest very strongly that the effort to strive for such objectivity, however theoretical one may render it with philosophical discourse and ideological slumming and slamming, is an important one. Surely, the most skeptical deconstructionist and the most ardent feminist demonstrate absolute faith in the largely male science of aerodynamics when they board an aircraft to fly to one of their conferences. Such faith clearly transcends the rhetoric of rhetoric. And I would wager, S.J., that members of your own order would rather have that same airplane well maintained by an expert ground crew than prayed over by a thousand devout nuns.”

“Indeed, Izzy, indeed.” It was the good father’s turn to concede, which he did with his usual graciousness. “But I think we both agree that the admirable tradition of scientific objectivity relies, at least in part, on an ethical tradition in which truth is valued for itself alone.”

“Yes, yes,” Izzy agreed. “And I will concede that I have little patience for those who hold there is no hierarchy in the scale of evolution — those who present themselves as hard-nosed, no-nonsense scientific tough guys but who are among the first to protest when the insights of sociobiology are even tentatively applied to our own species.”

At that point, standing on the shore of the pond, I shushed them both. In my moist field of vision, perched on a low branch and doubled in the gleaming water, was a black-crowned night heron, looking almost jaunty with its long hindneck plume. “What we should never forget,” I whispered as I handed them my binoculars to take a look, “is that nature is above all, always and forever, the supreme artist.”

Poor Malachy Morin. I am most thoroughly chastened. Never again will I gloat over the fate of another human being. I finally went this afternoon to visit him in the Middling County Jail, where he is being held on a million dollars’ cash bail. What really has him frightened, though, was the announcement by the District Attorney that the prosecution would seek a first-degree murder indictment, conviction, and the death sentence in the state’s newly refurbished electric chair. Newton Flanner has announced plans to run for Governor, which in some ways makes the threat even more real.