The Murder in the Museum of Man (3 page)

I did arrange to have four of us take questions at a hastily convened press conference. We were obliged to cram into Margaret Mead Auditorium on the second floor of the museum after the university refused permission to use one of their larger lecture halls. Someone in President Twill’s office told me he didn’t think a press conference an “appropriate use of university property.” I am going to write a very strong letter about this matter to President Twill for Dr. Commer to sign, with a copy to each member of the Wainscott Board of Regents. Cranston Fessing was, after all, a Wainscott dean, and while I would normally be among the first to keep the press at a distance from any university business, I thought in this case that anything smacking of a cover-up would only make matters worse. And matters are bad enough as it is.

The press conference turned out, despite my best efforts, to be something of a travesty. Before I knew it, there were coils of cable lying all about the place and glaring lights and glaring ignorance. Perhaps it’s just the arrogant, knowing way in which reporters ask the most banal of questions. I took their questions along with Chief Francis Murphy of the Seaboard Police Department, Dr.
Cutler, and Professor Cornelius Chard. Corny Chard, as most people know, is the Packer Professor of Primitive Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology and a public advocate of anthropophagy. A compact, cocky, red-faced man with a short, grizzled beard and a head both balding and closely shorn, Chard is best known for two popular (in the sense of nontechnical) works,
The Cannibal Within
and
An Anthropophagic Credo: Let Us Eat What We Are
. I had not realized when I invited him to answer questions at the press conference that he was (and remains) a principal suspect. With unusual acuity, one of the wire service reporters pounced on that possibility with an insinuating question. Chief Murphy parried it adroitly, saying that no one was above suspicion. (To me afterwards Professor Chard remarked that he would never eat an old dean like Fessing, what with all that vitriol building up in him over the years.)

What possible motive could someone have for killing and eating the dean? The coroner shrugged and said, “Hunger?” He explained that one couldn’t determine from the evidence that the dean had been either murdered or eaten, only that he had died and been cooked. In other words, he went on, it was possible, but not very probable, that the dean had died of natural causes and been subsequently “scavenged.” After a thoughtful pause he added that most of the meat we eat — after processing, hanging, canning, et cetera — is the equivalent of carrion.

When someone asked if the dean had enemies, I responded, paraphrasing Winston Churchill I think, to the effect that any good man has enemies, but none, I hoped, to this degree. Matters were not helped much by the presence of Amanda Feeney, who fancies herself literary and covers the university as part of her cultural beat. She all but accused me of being “locked in conflict” with the dean over the “university’s efforts to buy the MOM.” I explained as well as I could that the museum was not for sale to anyone; that I differed with the dean about the terms and extent
of future relations between the university and the museum; and that having differences with someone did not necessarily make that person an enemy. My response did not mollify Ms. Feeney in the least. In what might be called the journalistic voice — accusative interrogatory — she said, “Isn’t it true that Dean Fessing was delving into some very sensitive issues at the museum and may have come across something that could have proved embarrassing had it become public?” I replied as civilly as I could that the dean, with the consent of the Director of the museum, was evaluating the possibility of incorporating the MOM as an integral part of the university. I pointed out that Dean Fessing, in his Interim Status Report to the Select Committee on Consolidation, had not alluded to any matters that might be construed as embarrassing to the museum.

The question of how the dean had been cooked was brought up by a young woman from National Public Radio deploying a curiously toneless accent in vogue in that organization. Chief Murphy took that one, saying that, for investigative purposes, certain details were not being divulged. Dr. Cutler did answer an inquiry as to how the remains had been found. It seems a retired doctor had been out walking his dog, and when the animal came back to him carrying one of the dean’s humeri, he recognized it as human.

A reporter from the local television station asked if the Adventurers’ Eating Club, which has a loose affiliation with Wainscott, was being investigated. Chief Murphy said that all parties would be investigated impartially and that, for the moment, members of the eating club were under no particular suspicion. I added that while it’s rumored that certain members of the club had enjoyed the dubious pleasure of consuming human flesh while abroad (a very private club in Hong Kong, I’m told), the bylaws expressly forbid the preparation and consumption of human remains on the club premises.

When asked what in fact was left of the dean, Dr. Cutler replied, “Scraps,” and on that rather irreverent note I declared the conference over. I suppose it was arbitrary on my part, but I think they would still be there listening to themselves if I hadn’t cut it off. I’m sure the whole thing will be covered in all the papers tomorrow and on the television news this evening. I find it difficult to imagine that I will be on television. I have an old black-and-white set that my dear mother was watching when she died. I should probably dig it out and try to keep myself
au courant
. It is all too tedious.

It’s been a sad day for the museum and for the university. And of all nights, I suppose this is one when an appearance at the Club is most necessary for the sake of appearances. I can only hope they haven’t run out of the vegetarian special.

As a matter of routine, I supposed at first, I had a visit this morning from a Lieutenant Tracy of the Seaboard Police Department. It turned into a most disturbing encounter. Dark haired, square jawed, ruddy faced, the young man evinced a demeanor both respectful and skeptical as he said he wanted to ask me a few questions in the privacy of my office. I tried to be as straightforward as possible with the plainclothesman (actually he was wearing a well-cut tweed jacket and a silk tie hand-painted with linked triangles) when he asked me about my relations with the late dean. I readily admitted that I had disagreed from the very start with the objectives of Dean Fessing’s mission to the MOM. I explained that the assignment of a “Visiting Administrative Dean” to an institution already associated
with Wainscott has come to signal the start of a more formal consolidation.

Wainscott, he might remember from news accounts, had been publicly criticized for its so-called anomalous relationships with affiliated institutions, and this had become a matter of some concern in light of the auditing that attends federal funding, not to mention the sensitivity to adverse publicity given the plans for a major capital campaign. I recalled for him that a visiting dean had been at the Thornton Arboretum just before that fine institution was trimmed back to a mere sprig of Wainscott’s Department of Botany. I told Lieutenant Tracy, who was all the time taking meticulous notes, that I was not opposed in every case to this practice. Wainscott’s acquisition of the old City Observatory made sense as the place had become decrepit, and the university does have an established and well-respected Department of Astrophysics. But, I said to him, did anyone really think it was in the public interest for Newhumber Conservatory, a financially sound, well-administered school of music (I was on the board of trustees), to be reduced to a mere appendage of the Wainscott Music Department? I admitted to him that I am no great admirer of the present director, Arnie Beaumont, whose little confections I find scarcely transcend the category of random noise.

Lieutenant Tracy took all this down, and I went on to explain to him that the MOM is still not technically part of Wainscott, however complex and intertwined the affiliation has become over the years, particularly between the university and the Genetics Lab. For complete union to occur, the Board of Governors would have to dissolve itself by unanimous vote, and even then it would be possible to challenge the matter in court. I said I had spelled out my objections to the consolidation in several memoranda to Dr. Commer and to the Board itself, pointing out the clause in the Rules of Governance enabling the Recording
Secretary “from time to time and in an appropriate manner [to] inform and advise the Board relative to matters he [the Recording Secretary] deems important to the sound operation of the museum.” I told Lieutenant Tracy that I had been very frank, in a cordial way, of course, with the late Dean Fessing regarding my views. And I believe I had more than a little influence on his. I showed Lieutenant Tracy the dean’s Interim Status Report to the Select Committee on Consolidation, which, while citing continuing concern for the financial situation at the MOM, especially its growing reliance on the institute founded by Onoyoko Pharmaceuticals, also indicated that a way should be considered to maintain, and I quote, “the unique character of the museum, which makes it a place attractive to scholars and public alike.” Those are, in fact, my own words.

The officer appeared to contemplate all this for a moment before asking who, besides myself, in what he called “the museum complex” might not want the university to take over.

To answer that I had to explain how the Genetics Lab and the Primate Pavilion were really only affiliated institutions of the MOM, that is, theoretically under the Board of Governors but in reality constituting a kind of academic free zone between the university and the museum.

The lieutenant lifted his chin just a fraction, and I thought I could detect a glint of significance in the steely, noncommittal blue of his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘academic free zone’?”

“Well, for instance,” I replied, “many of the researchers in both the lab and the pavilion are Wainscott faculty. But when it comes to fund-raising, say, or benefits, bonuses, patent rights, they use their extramural affiliation to do pretty much what they want to. Quite aside from that, the resulting budgetary process is skewed, I’m told, beyond the reach of chaos theory. It’s the real reason, I think, the university wants to take us over. And frankly, sir, they are more than welcome to both of the other institutions, but the
museum,
qua
museum, cannot be absorbed without a unanimous vote by the Board, as I’ve said.”

Lieutenant Tracy took a moment to record all this before asking me several probing questions about Cornelius Chard and just how “active” he was in promoting cannibalism.

I began my response by trying to disabuse the officer of any correlation between what an academic advocates and what an academic practices. Wainscott, I said, abounds with the usual gaggle of tenured radicals for whom rhetoric of one sort or another constitutes a reality all its own. As perhaps it does. But I’m not sure I entirely convinced him that while Professor Chard might think it wise for some hypothetical population to eat its dead, he would probably never really consider the consumption of human flesh himself. I don’t know what it was, perhaps the lieutenant’s silence and the way he lifted one eyebrow, but I felt a shiver of suspicion myself about Corny Chard. The man has never seemed entirely stable. He’s certainly been known to test the limits of what might be called acceptable eccentricity.

As the lieutenant scribbled diligently, I remarked, not entirely facetiously, that I thought he would make a good recording secretary. He didn’t seem to find it very complimentary. Indeed, at that point he turned noticeably officious and said he would like to have copies of all the correspondence between myself, Dean Fessing, and the Board of Governors. I said it would take some digging through my files but that I would send them over to him by tomorrow evening. I also said, deputizing myself, I suppose, that I would keep a sharp lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

The lieutenant scarcely acknowledged my offer of assistance, and indeed the entire interview from that point on took a decidedly nasty turn. Did I know, he asked, what the late dean’s “sexual preferences” were? I replied that I believed Cranston
Fessing to have been gay, as they say, but that he was the soul of discretion regarding his proclivities save for an incident with a graduate student some years ago that the university handled rather badly. (The student was, after all, well beyond the age of consent.) Did I know anyone the dean might have been having a “relationship” with at the time of his death? I repeated that the dean was most discreet, and that in any event I was not privy to his social life. The lieutenant glanced up sharply and asked me: “Mr. de Ratour, have you had or were you having any kind of relationship with Dean Fessing other than what related to your work at the museum?”

At first I didn’t realize what the officer was insinuating. I said I had seen the dean at social functions, of course, and we were members of the Club, but he didn’t play tennis or attend any of the Club’s special activities, such as the annual New Year’s party. With an almost admirable lack of embarrassment, the officer asked me, “What I mean, Mr. de Ratour, is have you ever had or were you having a sexual relationship with Dean Fessing?”