The Murder in the Museum of Man (32 page)

“We had to act quickly. I told Freddy to keep the news absolutely secret. I immediately informed Chard and Wherry about what had happened and how we now had an opportunity to re-create one of the basic rituals of the Rangu culture. They agreed, and together we approached Thad Pilty, all the while keeping up the fiction that it had been an accident. Thad wanted nothing to do with it. He said as far as he was concerned he had heard nothing and he wanted to hear nothing more about it. We left him in charge of the camp and, taking some supplies, including the camera, went to the site where the body lay. Bud’s neck was broken, but he appeared otherwise unhurt by his fall. I didn’t question Freddy about it. What was done was done. With help from a few trusted locals, we tied the body to a makeshift litter and headed over a rough trail deep into a high valley where few if any whites had ever penetrated. It took us nearly a day. We arrived at a taboo site made of large stones forming a sizable platform. It wasn’t easy, being accepted, I mean, by the local chiefs. But I knew the language, and in native dress with my tattoos I could pass.

“It’s all in the notes that I took, the magic chants, how Bud’s heart tasted. But you should know it wasn’t an exercise in depravity. It was enormously exalting in a way, not just a symbolic sacrament but the real thing. It was only later, as the significance began to sink in, that the doubts started. We all dealt with it in our own ways. My misgivings have been minimal. I would do it all over again. Poor Alger shriveled into his little morbid job. Corny tried to joke and rationalize his way out of it. We would meet and talk about it. We couldn’t publish anything about it, of course. Without perishing. We began meeting in the little room in the Skull Collection. We called ourselves the
Société de Couchon Long
as a kind of joke. I think it was as much a shrine to Bud
as anything else. We never did find out who he was. The wooden box contains everything he had. Some books on Buddhist teaching and drug paraphernalia and a picture of a girl.”

“That’s why you didn’t destroy anything,” I said.

He nodded. “I have nearly finished a book that I planned to have published posthumously.”

The lieutenant glanced up from his notes. “Was anyone else involved with the group?”

“We tried to interest Thad Pilty at one time, but he wanted nothing to do with it.”

“Did either Dean Fessing or Dean Scrabbe know or learn anything about this incident?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did they know anything about your … society?”

“I don’t know. But someone knew about it.”

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“We keep a very fine thread fixed over the green door, which we replace every time we go in there. Some time ago we found that it had been broken.”

“Why did you keep the Skull in there?” I asked.

He sighed, looked weary. “As a kind of fetish, I suppose. A surrogate Bud. I don’t know.”

We got up to leave finally. I could tell the lieutenant was skeptical. “Thank you, Professor Brauer,” he said with stiff formality. “I would like to have a team come here this evening and do a thorough examination of these premises and those of your office at the museum. If you would grant permission, it would save our having to get a search warrant.”

Brauer bowed his affirmation of the request. “I have nothing to hide. But I would prefer you did it in the morning.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Do you mind if I use your phone?”

It was all very businesslike. The forensic team showed up.
Brauer signed some forms and gave the officer in charge the key to his office at the museum. I called Mort to tell him to let the police back in. As the lieutenant drove me home, I could tell that he was disturbed. “I don’t understand …” He shook his head. “People with the kind of education …” We parked for a moment outside my house. He said, “I think he’s lying about Fessing and Scrabbe not knowing. They knew something, and I think Brauer knew they knew.”

I demurred. It was a possibility. I said I thought Chard the most likely suspect if that group had anything to do with the murders.

As I got out he thanked me. “That was a real piece of work, Norman.”

I thanked him in return and asked a favor: could he do everything possible to keep this out of the press until there was more conclusive evidence that the suspects were involved?

He told me he would do all he could but added that word about such things leaked out pretty quickly.

Well, I’m heading over to the Club for dinner and, I hope, a postprandial with Izzy and Lotte. It’ll be all I can do not to tell them about the room behind the Green Door. I find I’m quite proud of what I’ve done. I wish Elsbeth was here already so that I could brag a little to her. Although, to tell the truth, I wish I could be as certain as Lieutenant Tracy that we have found the culprits.

There is a bit of wisdom, of rabbinic origin if I’m not mistaken, that states you must choose carefully what you think you want in life because there is a good chance you will get it. At the conclusion
of an impromptu teleconference on Friday, the Board of Governors announced that Dr. Commer would step down as Director to become Director Emeritus and that I was named, effective immediately, “Director, with extraordinary powers for the duration of the present crisis at the Museum of Man.” At the end of the meeting, Robert Remick called to tell me that he and the Board had complete confidence that I would “get to work and clean up the mess.”

The first job I assigned myself, of course, was firing Malachy Morin. How many times I have dreamed of doing just that I cannot tell you. There have been nights when merely the thought of seeing the last of that man has kept me going. But now, granted the power and the cause to fire him, I find I have little stomach for it. I suppose I should have done it right away, immediately after the meeting, when he was still in a state of stupefaction at what had been announced. The way he looked at me, with that awful smile, his jowls quivering, fear and surprise mingling in a kind of low-grade, grudging respect. The fawning way he grabbed my hand, and his pathetic words of congratulations. I should have smothered all his overtures with a quick and decisive meeting in my office. But it was after four-thirty, and I did have a five o’clock tennis match at the Club.

I remained nervous all night, thinking and dreaming about it. And it was worse when I arrived here this morning. How do you kick someone who is licking your boots? How do you shoot a cringing dog? I did at least tell him there would be a drastic reorganization and was about to intimate that his position was at best tenuous when he interrupted me, saying we had worked well together in the past and would make a great team in the future. It was not an auspicious start for my career as an administrator.

I found it nearly as difficult to be straightforward with Thad Pilty. I met with him just after lunch and told him that I planned to write a letter to Constance Brattle to let her know there would
be no further meetings of the Oversight Committee regarding the diorama of Paleolithic life. Well, you would have thought I was interfering with the affairs of the museum rather than the committee. I kept my course, however, and his tone grew more conciliatory. He implored me “for political reasons” to allow the upcoming meeting, set for next Tuesday, to go forward as planned.

In acquiescing to his plea, I mentioned that I personally had reservations about the diorama — not so much its form and content, which I said struck me as original and instructive, but its usurpation of space traditionally reserved for temporary exhibits. After a rather stiff silence, he said he would be willing to meet with Edwards, the likable and resourceful young man in charge of exhibits, to see how best to make the exhibition removable and storable. He added, however, that unless the diorama was established “on a semipermanent basis,” he would go to the Board himself and even hinted that he might offer it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I simply nodded, saying nothing about the Curatorial Ball. But I have in fact called around to arrange a meeting of the Ball Committee, so that we can get things rolling, as they say.

I scheduled a meeting of all MOM staffers in Margaret Mead Auditorium, with coffee and sweet rolls laid on. I am going to tell them what has happened and to apprise them, as far as is prudent, about what steps I will be taking to improve security and boost morale, which has hit an all-time low, at least in my tenure here. I also want to hear what they have to say.

Of course, to accomplish this there will be some toes, some well-protected toes and some quite precious toes, that I will have to step on. I may have to bring in an expert consultant to straighten out the financial mess. I have in mind a joint Wainscott-MOM committee to consider the status of the Genetics Lab. If the future of that establishment has had anything to
do with the murders of Fessing and Scrabbe, then a committee would be the best instrument to effect change. The murderer or murderers would have difficulty, one presumes, with dispatching a large and active committee. I have sent a note to Professor Gottling informing him of my appointment and requesting a meeting as soon as possible to discuss a range of issues, not least the relations between the lab and the pavilion. Closing down that latter entity will, by itself, save enormous amounts of money. (Speaking of which, I returned to Damon Drex his draft “press packet” with a note telling him that he ought to have a thorough check done on his computer and his programmers.)

Last, but by no means least, I must press ahead with my own investigation into the murders of the deans. I am naive, perhaps, but I still do not share the lieutenant’s belief that one or all of the cultists are implicated directly in the crimes. The cultists certainly fit into the larger puzzle that is slowly coming together in my mind. I may be wrong, of course, and I must say I find it troubling that Thad Pilty is the only other person with a motive who knew about what happened in Loa Hoa. A thorough search and examination of the Skull Collection and the residences of Wherry and Brauer has turned up no incriminating evidence, or none that Lieutenant Tracy has been willing to share with me.

I am also pursuing some hunches of my own. I do not want to reveal what they are even in this journal as it’s possible that the perpetrators, who appear to be omnipresent, may have access to material in the mainframe, even that protected by a password. Suffice it to say that I have retained at my own expense a reputable detective agency to do some research for me. It may or may not be a long shot. In the meanwhile I’m going to have to keep my wits about me if I’m not to end up, quite literally, in the same pot as Fessing and Scrabbe.

I have yet to receive a reply from Elsbeth, and it makes me think that I was perhaps overly warm in my response to her. In
my worst moments I think there might be a farcical replay of the awful little missive I got from her when I was at Infra. But I have no regrets. As it is said, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

What is it about our age that inverts so many expectations? Here I was, daily expecting another grotesque media circus when the news of the Brauer cult and those incidents in Loa Hoa so far and so long ago leaked out, as I knew they eventually would. The story “broke” the day before yesterday as the lead article in the
Bugle
under a byline by Amanda Feeney, who has her own sources in the Seaboard Police Department. Except for the headline, “Cannibal Cult Uncovered in the MOM,” it was a reasonably straightforward account of what Brauer had related to Lieutenant Tracy and me. So I braced for the usual spate of calls by reporters asking loaded, insinuating questions, for visitations by the television types, trailing through with their gear as though they owned the place. And there have been a few calls, tours of the Skull Collection and that sort of thing. But instead of pariahs, Brauer and company have been made into national celebrities.

A story in this morning’s news reports that Brauer is on the point of signing a three-point-two-million-dollar contract for a book and movie deal. Marge told me there’s already a lot of speculation about who will play Brauer. She mentioned some names that I didn’t recognize, but then I’ve never been much up on popular culture. Corny Chard has been utterly irresponsible. I tuned in Mother’s old black-and-white television set last night, and the man seemed to be on just about every channel, saying things about how human flesh tasted to him like lamb. I wonder sometimes if this is the way civilization unravels.