The Murder in the Museum of Man (38 page)

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the geneticist said, rising from his chair.

“Perhaps, Professor Gottling. But as we speak a team from the state Attorney General’s Office is in your lab starting their investigation.”

Professor Gottling immediately left.

I waited for the room to quiet, looking down at my notes before glancing around at my audience. But I did not need any notes. It was all inside me, poised like a verbal dagger.

“As you can see, none of these parties is completely innocent. But neither are they guilty of the murders of Cranston Fessing and Oliver Scrabbe. No, ladies and gentlemen, that guilt lies” — I stopped and pointed — “directly with the Snyders brothers.”

They started, as though they might attempt to flee.

“It’s useless to try to escape. Every door of the museum is secured with heavy police guard.”

“We have alibis,” they said in unison. “You have no proof.” And they smiled their wicked smiles.

I smiled back. There was a hubbub of hushed voices. Amanda Feeney was scribbling furiously. I waited until order was restored.

“Yes, of course, I know both of you have airtight alibis for the time Dean Scrabbe was knocked on the head and taken from his office. Too airtight for my liking. That one of you was at the Northside police substation precisely at that time asking to use the phone was overdoing it just a bit much. I called the garage that towed your car, and they said they found nothing wrong with it. And I fault myself for not getting a better copy of the CV’s the Personnel Department faxed me. The reference to the restaurant you owned at 333 Backbay Street in Boston came over graphically garbled as
Dri Brat
or
Prat
and something
sten
, the best I could make it out.
Dri Brat Worsten?
It didn’t make sense. Even when I called for and received a clean copy and saw the name of the restaurant was Drei Bratwursten, I still didn’t catch on. Drei Bratwursten. The Three Franks. That’s right, not just two Frank Snyderses but three. Identical triplets.”

To another outbreak of exclamations and murmurs, Lieutenant Tracy opened the door, and the third Snyders brother came in, handcuffed to a large uniformed officer.

“The Three Franks,” I repeated when order once again had been restored. “Franz, Francis, and Frans, born in Baltimore thirty-four years ago. And practical jokers, right from the start. Am I not right?”

“We’re not saying anything until we talk to a lawyer,” they all said in unison. Then they laughed, identically, creating a creepy effect.

“You worked your way up the coast, playing games, a habit that started early, harmless enough at first, this ability to be a single, a double, and especially a triple. People gaped and gawked and couldn’t believe their eyes. You got thrown out of college for
cheating when you didn’t have to. You were arrested in Philadelphia for running a con game with old ladies in a retirement home. You won endurance bets, dance contests, even a marathon in New York. Not for money, just for a joke.

“And when you came here after the Health Department in Boston closed you down for having cats, raccoons, and a dog as well as ‘unidentified meat products’ in your restaurant freezer, you found a situation ripe for the hoax of your wildest dreams. You found Damon Drex allowing Professor Gottling to have chimps for experimentation for practically nothing. So you started the biggest practical joke of your careers. You launched the program, funded by the Onoyoko Institute, to teach chimps how to write. And just when the joke was coming to fruition, Cranston Fessing showed up and, being the shrewd old dean he was, smelled a rat, or three rats in this case. At that point you decided to take the joke one ghastly step further. You killed and cooked the dean and fed him to the chimps. And when your murder and mutilation of Fessing didn’t deter the university, you repeated your ghastly joke, using Scrabbe’s skull to point suspicion at the Skull Collection and the antics of the Long Piggers. All the while you could barely stop laughing. You were able to get away with your wretched pranks because you were one person in three, miraculously capable of being in three places at one time. Or, more to the point of your hubris, three persons in one, which made you think you were invincible, a veritable god. What you didn’t count on, what all murderers big and small don’t count on, is that a civilized society will only take so much. You carried your joke too far, and your pride went before your fall.

“I think, Lieutenant, that you’ll find the third triplet has no alibi for the time Dean Scrabbe was abducted. I think a thorough search of the Snyderses’ place of domicile and the facilities of the Primate Pavilion will turn up sufficient material evidence for an indictment. I also think that Mr. Drex will prove a most cooperative witness.”

Lieutenant Tracy officially arrested the triplets, read them their rights, and had them led off. They were followed by a quick-stepping Ariel Dearth, who was trying to give them his card. Amanda Feeney, after telling Malachy Morin to wait for her outside, asked me many questions, but in a respectful manner. Corny Chard tried to congratulate me, but I would not shake his hand. I watched Raul Brauer slip away quietly. I sat around for a while and chatted with my friends, remarking cryptically that I hoped “Worried” felt better. Then Izzy, saying he had just stocked some excellent champagne, suggested we retire to the Club for a well-earned tipple. So, surrounded by these good friends, so relieved as to be weak, I walked out into the brilliant October light.

As I sit here making this quite personal entry into this unofficial log, I find myself a different, a transformed Norman Abbott de Ratour. Curiously enough, it has almost nothing to do with the resolution of the murders of Fessing and Scrabbe or with the ensuing and rather gratifying notoriety it has won for me. Suffice it to say that I am older, I am younger; I am sadder, I am happier; I am more serious, I am scoffing at myself; I am infinitely wiser and as obtuse as ever; I am much more confident, but of what I am not sure. I should start at the beginning, yesterday morning, to be exact, when I drove to our modest little airport to pick up Elsbeth. I had scarcely slept the night before. I nicked myself shaving and bled like a martyr. I could not find matching socks. I considered putting on a suit, then settled for a rugged corduroy shooting jacket with a leather patch on the right fore shoulder, an off-white shirt, and my club tie, which I rejected in favor of an
indigo silk cravat with a paisley design. But it was all a front. I didn’t know what to do with the bouquet of yellow roses I had picked up. I put them in the car. I took them back into the house. I went and retrieved them. I nearly ran over Mrs. Norris backing out of my drive.

At the airport I paced the waiting room like an expectant father. I wasn’t disappointed. When she came through the double doors, three decades disappeared. She was her old self, her smile radiant under short, neatly coiffed, still lustrous hair. She strode toward me in a pleated tartan, suede jacket, button-down oxford, and rakish cravat nearly matching mine, her short heels clicking decisively, her smile a picture of delight. We kissed chastely, a peck on the cheek. What a eruption of sensations swirled around and through me! Though hardly slender, she had become positively svelte and appeared, if anything, to have grown younger since that awful encounter in Philadelphia. She had one of those pull-along suitcases, so I had nothing to do with my big hands, which felt like encumbrances as I helped her through the door and out to the parking lot.

I was altogether too light-headed with uncertain elation to do more than smile and nod rather idiotically as I drove her in my newly tuned and polished Renault to the Miranda Hotel, our talk along the way carefully small — the flight, the weather, how Seaboard had changed. She checked in. I waited like a swain of old in the lobby while she freshened up in her room. We had the whole day to ourselves, and as I paced the faux Iberian lobby, I wanted to escape into the faded murals of seascapes and whitewashed villages, a march of stylized olive trees, stick-legged donkeys, and azure skies. I wondered what on earth we would do. Lunch, of course, and a trip to the lake no doubt. But lunch where? And what would we do at the lake? What would we talk about?

Above all, as she stepped from the elevator, having changed
into slacks and turtleneck, I was determined not to reveal my heart. I knew I would not survive another rejection and felt supremely foolish even thinking in those terms. Somewhat stiffly, I think, I said, “I suppose you’ll want to go out to the lake first,” the “first” implying other activities of which I hadn’t a clue.

“Oh, do let’s go and see what’s become of old Bramble.” She laughed, and the sun, playing hide-and-seek behind high, wistful clouds moving in a fresh, sea-scented breeze, came out for a glorious moment. We became tourists of our common past, and the day began to take care of itself.

She took my arm as we mounted the porticoed steps of what had been, in more genteel times, a ladies’ residence hall. The double French doors were locked, but a student with a key didn’t object when we entered in his wake. It was unrecognizable at first. They had vandalized the gracious old lobby, covering the flower-swirled plaster ceiling with sound-insulating stuff and installing what looked like stage lighting in place of the glassy chandeliers. Gone were the chintz-covered chairs and sofas, the drapery and dainty tables. They had been replaced by what looked like inflated life rafts and chunky wooden things, making it seem more like a room for children than adults. We did find the nook with the battered upright Vose almost intact. To the bemusement of some of the lounging students, all of whom looked not a little seedy, we bungled our way through a couple of
lieder
. Indeed, before we finished there had gathered something of an audience, which applauded us and asked for more.

On that note we left and proceeded through the sadly neglected Marvell Gardens. In the little enclosure where we had embraced, we found an apologetic homeless man sheltering as best he could. Elsbeth reached into her purse and gave the man a five-dollar bill. At my raised eyebrows, she said, “Oh, I’ve got more than I’ll ever spend. Winslow was good in that way.”

“Yes,” I said, distracted by her remark even as I explained how I
felt something amiss both when I gave and when I didn’t give to beggars.
Winslow was good in that way
. But not in other ways? Was it a disparagement of her husband? Had I heard a subtle emphasis on the
that?
Or was it just a remark? And why on earth did she seem so happy to be with me? Pale, tremulous hope stirred in me like one of those fantastic desert plants that lie dormant for decades and then bloom into life at the first touch of rain. But if she were giving me an opening, I did not know how to take advantage of it, or lacked the courage to. She talked in a self-deprecating way about the work she was doing in a shelter for homeless families in Philadelphia, and I listened with the silence of one muted with love.

It was Elsbeth’s suggestion to take a picnic out to the cottage. When we stopped at a delicatessen for sandwiches and fruit, and at a wine shop for a bottle of chilled white wine, how well she organized it! How I welcomed her brisk efficiencies! On the drive there, we remarked how, while suburbs had thickened around the periphery of Seaboard, much of the farmland had reverted to forest. We talked about what had happened at the museum. She said she had read and heard about it in the national media. She told me she had seen me on television and I was very telegenic. Then, placing her hand on my shoulder, she said she hoped fervently that I was now out of danger. What I can’t describe is how, as I talked to her about it and as she listened, watching my eyes, that whole absurd, grisly business fell from me like a great and cumbersome millstone. Or, more accurately, I think, she imperceptibly moved closer as though to take some of the weight. But I couldn’t see her eyes, which might have been pitying or admiring or wary. Was she throwing me some little sop of life but gingerly, the way you give a scrap to an abused dog?

We turned off the state highway onto a single-lane road and wound our way up through a needle-carpeted evergreen forest, the past turning into the present, or vice versa, I’m not sure
which. We came to a forking dirt road and a turnoff I always used to miss and almost did again. The drive, sloping down to the cottage, was blocked by a growth of hemlock saplings. It wasn’t much of a walk, the lake water all adazzle through a screen of leafless lilacs.

She took my hand as we approached, as though for balance. We were both surprised to find the cottage looked largely intact, at least from the outside, surprising as well a porcupine sleeping under the side of the porch facing the lake. It awoke and rattled off with slow dignity. The perspective from there — the bristle of pines on Barkley’s Point, the old railroad bridge and embankment on the distant shore, the sweep of blueberry shrubland to the right — seemed scarcely changed at all, an impression reinforced by the call of jays coming through the sharp air. The cottage itself listed decidedly to starboard, and we found, under the skirting of lattice, one of the sills and some of the uprights eaten away by ants. We went in, continuing our time walk. Elsbeth moved about, exclaiming, touching things, finally crying, so that I had to comfort her. “Why,” I asked, “did you never come back here?” I wanted to kiss away her tears.