The Murder in the Museum of Man (23 page)

The meeting did give me a chance to buttonhole Ariel Dearth and tell him that Malachy Morin was having difficulty finding any kind of competent legal counsel. I must say he seemed quite surprised and intrigued, even when I told him that the museum would in no manner support any kind of defense fund. While I have my reservations about Ariel Dearth and his motives, he certainly would be better than the counsel Morin has now. Everyone else seems to have utterly deserted the man, although I have heard Amanda Feeney has dropped by to see him. But I suspect she’s probably just looking for a story.

The nightmare continues.

Dean Scrabbe is missing, foul play is involved, from all appearances, and I am once again a suspect. Lieutenant Tracy came to my office this morning to inform me that the dean, after having spent part of the afternoon working at the museum, had not returned home yesterday. Very much a professional in his rugged trench coat, the lieutenant did not ask my permission to smoke but took out a cigarette, lit it, and began puffing. In a manner meant to intimate that I perhaps already knew what he was relating, he told me that the dean, after watching the first few innings of a baseball game on television, left his home to go to his office, the same one on the third floor that had been occupied by Dean Fessing. Scrabbe told his wife just before he left that he had come across some revealing anomalies in the finances of the museum and wanted to follow up on a hunch. When dinnertime came and went
and he still hadn’t come home, Mrs. Scrabbe called the dean’s office and got a busy signal. At first she thought he was simply on the phone with a colleague, but finally she asked the phone company to check and found that the phone was off the hook. Alarmed, she called Wainscott security, who called the police.

The lieutenant paused as though to give me time to think it over. Then, his tone hard but not overtly hostile, he said, “The preliminary examination of his office indicates that a scuffle took place. His phone was knocked off the desk, and his computer looks damaged.”

I was horrified, naturally, and still am, but I tried to remain ostensibly calm. “Well,” I said, “this surely removes Malachy Morin as a suspect in Dean Fessing’s murder.”

The lieutenant remained noncommittal, and the ensuing silence was interrupted by the phone — reporters wanting to know if the Wainscott Cannibal had struck again. I informed the callers, with as much civility as I could muster under the circumstances, that I knew nothing about the dean’s disappearance, that the dean was employed by Wainscott University, and that they should therefore call the Wainscott News Office. Of course, the calls were immediately referred back to me, and I parried by giving callers the office and home telephone numbers of President Twill.

It was during this flurry of calls and countercalls that I became aware that I was again, as they say, a prime suspect. What, Lieutenant Tracy wanted to know, had I been doing between the hours of three and seven Sunday afternoon? The notebook was out, and his tone bordered on the officious.

I told the officer that I had gone to de Vere Amphitheatre, which abuts the Marvell Gardens, to see a somewhat uneven production of
Julius Caesar
mounted by the Seaboard Summer Players.

“Was there anyone there who could vouch for your presence at the play?”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t remember speaking to anyone there, although I saw, from a distance, several people that I know.” I explained to him that this is not unusual, as many people connected with the university or the museum are away during the summer while a whole new crowd of summer students, tourists, and the like occupy much of Wainscott during July and August.

“When did the play finish?”

“About four-thirty.”

“What did you do then?”

“I dropped by my office to pick up my newly restrung racquet before heading to the Club for a game of doubles.”

“Who were the other players?”

“Let’s see.… There was Bill Littlefield, Professor Punn of the Slavic Department, and Joe Dzhugashvili. He’s Curator of the Armand Hammer Collection in the Frock.”

“Is that like the baking soda brand?” He was taking down everything.

I said no and spelled it out for him.

“Mr. de Ratour, did you noticed anything out of the ordinary when you came into the museum … after the play?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was in a hurry, but I couldn’t take the elevator, because someone had propped it open on a floor above, a practice expressly forbidden by the fire ordinances in force in the building. As a result I had to go up through the exhibits and a thin scattering of Sunday visitors that were drifting down to the exit since it was near closing time.”

“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.”