The Murder in the Museum of Man (40 page)

His brows knit in thought as I went on. “And they might have
succeeded had we not had in our employ a canny young attorney named Felix Skinnerman who has been handling our affairs with Wainscott for nearly two years now. He has learned, for instance, that the university’s charter was amended during the heady days of the nineteen sixties to the effect that no faculty member can benefit directly from research, patents, royalties, and the like taking place under university auspices or on university grounds.”

The lieutenant shrugged. “Why doesn’t Wainscott simply amend its charter?”

I related in some detail how they could not change the clause without the unanimous consent of the Board of Regents — which, by charter, has to include three faculty members, one of whom reliably objects.

“How does all this connect with Ossmann?”

“It doesn’t really,” I continued, “except to provide the context for Ossmann’s activities in the lab.”

“Activities?”

“He was something of a troublemaker. He liked to object, to talk a lot about issues. He liked to speak to the press.”

“But enough so that someone would want him out of the way?”

“Perhaps. I mean, if he was about to blow the whistle on some shady dealings or some off-the-books research. Of course I may be mistaken. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but I feel like I’m offering you little more than wretched stalks.”

The lieutenant smiled and rose to go. We shook hands. “That’s all any of us are doing right now, Norman, clutching at straws. But if you hear anything …”

“Of course,” I said. “We will stay in touch.”

I finished my coffee alone. The lieutenant’s visit reminded me anew that the unfortunate deaths of these two people, both
estimable in his and her own way, have cast another shadow over the Museum of Man. While both were on the faculty of Wainscott University, they were, as biochemists, under contract to the institute directly and to the Genetics Lab indirectly. The shadow is real, darkened by the press, which has hounded me daily, all but accusing the museum of perpetrating a cover-up.

Indeed, the university’s Oversight Committee, a claque of inquisitorial busybodies, has requested “in the strongest terms” that I attend a meeting to discuss “its concern with the unseemly recent events in the Genetics Lab.” I have responded to Constance Brattle, who still presides over the committee, reminding her that I have myself (for my own good reasons) remained an
ex officio
member. I said I would acquiesce to her request but only if it was clearly understood that where the museum was concerned, the committee’s involvement must remain purely advisory. I also stipulated that the press was to be excluded and all statements kept privileged. I reminded her that, as Director of the Museum of Man, I was as concerned as she in maintaining the high repute of both the university and the museum.

Strange how, when you start to worry about one thing, it leads you to worry about something else. For instance, no one has heard for some time from Cornelius Chard. Corny, the Packer Professor of Primitive Ethnology in the Wainscott Anthropology Department, inveigled the museum into underwriting some portion of his expedition to the Yomamas. It’s a venture I tried to talk him out of. There’s been considerable unrest in the area, apparently because of logging operations.

The Yomamas are a small tribe who inhabit an all-but-inaccessible plateau astride the Rio Sangre, one of the more remote tributaries of the Amazon. The tribe, according to Corny, are the last “untouched” group of hunter-gatherers left on earth. He also contends that they are the last people in the
world actively practicing cannibalism. He has gone virtually alone to witness, as he puts it, the actual thing. He says he wants to refute once and for all what he calls, in questionable taste, “the cannibalism deniers.”

Where he raised the majority of his funding, I don’t know. It’s one of those mysteries. He claims it’s a perfectly legitimate source that will in no way taint the objectivity of his research. His very protest makes me wonder. I do know he associates with some strange people.

Through Elsbeth, who goes way back with Jocelyn, Corny’s wife, I have gotten to know the man better, perhaps, than I might have wanted to. He’s an advocate of anthropophagy and author of
The Cannibal Within
, among other works. I never go to dinner at their home without wondering what, exactly, it is we’re eating.

I believe Corny organized his Rio Sangre expedition because, though he won’t admit it, he’s envious of all the publicity Raul Brauer has been getting for his book
A Taste of the Real
. Brauer, some people may remember, was involved in the cannibalism of a young volunteer on the Polynesian island of Loa Hoa back in the late sixties. His account was something of
succès de scandale
and is, I’ve been told, being made into a movie.

Still, it’s a relief to get these things down on paper if not off my mind. Now I must brace myself for another meal out with Elsbeth and her friend, the food critic Korky Kummerbund.

For the life of me I cannot see what Elsbeth sees in “the restaurant scene,” as she calls it. What is this cult of the gustatory that seems to have afflicted half the good people of Seaboard? What has happened to the days when one simply went to a restaurant of good reputation, ordered a recognizable dish and a decent wine, enjoyed it, paid for it, and left?

I have nothing against Korky; he is an engaging young man,
and he is devoted to Elsbeth. But the food! I scarcely recognize any of it anymore. And the menus. They read like parodies of pornography. Then we have to sample one another’s portions and, worse, talk about them. I have small relish in “savoring the complexity” or “thinking with my taste buds,” as Elsbeth and Korky urge. For me, the life of the digestive tract and the life of the mind do not mix. Of late I have hankered simply for a plate of old-fashioned beef stew served with mashed potatoes and peas.

But I really don’t want to complain, certainly not about Elsbeth. My world, after all those years of barren bachelorhood, has been utterly enriched by her presence, by her vitality, by her love. Our happiness is very nearly a public scandal. We have become the toast of Seaboard’s better tables. Last year we won the waltz contest at the Curatorial Ball. Ah yes, and those little
billets doux
we leave for each other! No, I do not complain. A meal out from time to time in some new bistro is small sacrifice on my part for the woman I love.

This evening we’re to go with Korky to the Green Sherpa, a restaurant that specializes, they tell me, in a fusion of Himalayan and Irish cuisines. I can’t imagine what they’ll be serving, no doubt some kind of braised yak with boiled cabbage gotten up to look like something exotic.

It is another beautiful day, despite the rain and the wind, which began this morning and has been blustering about most of the afternoon and rattling the windows here on the fifth floor of the museum. Though now Director, I have kept my old corner office, with its view of the hills to the west and that stern and rockbound coast to the north of Shag Bay. Ah, yes, the beauty of the world, even in — especially in — an autumn rain.

I am surrounded by beauty within as well. Which is to say I have redecorated my office, jettisoning the mournful array of plaques and citations I accumulated over more than three decades as Recording Secretary, a position, I’m afraid, I have allowed to lapse somewhat. To replace them, I have truffled through the storage bins and closets deep within the bowels of this magnificent old pile and come up with some rare treasures.

Just over the door, I suppose to remind myself of my executive responsibilities, I have mounted an elegantly shaped nineteenth-century executioner’s sword from the Ngala of the Congo. It has a wide short blade, crooked in the middle into a sickle shape just wide enough for a human neck. In a glass case I have a marvelous Chinese robe of silk satin embroidered with a swirl of peacocks, butterflies, and flowers, all in brilliant hues. And on the mantel over the fireplace (which I have kept in working order), there’s a figurine of Eros with a dog, a piece that by rights should be on display in the permanent exhibits.

In my more Machiavellian moments, I have considered resurrecting a pair of shrunken heads, a missionary and his wife, if I’m not mistaken, that I came across in the Papuan storage area. I have thought of putting them in a glass-fronted case near my desk with a curtain I could draw aside when meeting with people I want to disconcert. But for the nonce I have made do with a montage of fantastic funereal masks from Melanesia.

Speaking of which, I cannot, in the wake of Lieutenant Tracy’s visit yesterday, get out of my mind the unseemly deaths of Humberto Ossmann and Clematis Woodley. I have a feeling my good friend knows something about that bizarre tragedy that he’s not telling me. Elsbeth and I were away at the time of the deaths, staying with a friend of hers in Boston and visiting museums. As a result, I didn’t get back until well after the crime scene, if that’s what it was, had been restored to some semblance of normality.

I also missed, according to Doreen, a veritable plague of grief counselors who descended on the museum telling people not to hold back their feelings. Doreen, who has the sturdy good looks of a backcountry girl, said one of the group, a student from the Divinity School, came by several times and left his card. When she finally told the young man that she had never met either of the victims and hadn’t really given them much thought, his disappointment was such that she had to spend time consoling him. And, apparently, one thing led to another.

The good lieutenant called again this morning and wondered aloud if it would not be a good idea for me to try to contact Worried. He is the anonymous tipster who works in the Genetics Lab and proved instrumental in solving the Cannibal Murders. I told the lieutenant I would put out an e-mail to all in-house addresses, asking “Worried” to please contact me when he gets a chance. Worried may be able to tell me something relevant
about what that collection of wily eggheads are concocting over in the lab.

But Woodley and Ossmann. I am perfectly willing to consider the possibility that they were murdered or, in one way or another, murdered each other. But how? Murder requires an instrument. But what? Some
elisir d’amore?
Are they brewing up some magic love potion over there in the lab? It seems too cartoonishly Larsonesque to imagine them sipping some philter from a dripping retort and then transmogrifying into sexual monsters. But stranger things have happened.

As I am Director of the museum, of which the Genetics Lab remains an integral part, one might suppose that I could simply walk in there and demand to know what’s going on. Ah, the illusion of power. People tell you either what they want you to know or what they think you want to hear. The truth? Another of those illusions by which we live. I don’t know. But if murder has been done, the truth must out if justice is to prevail.

Which reminds me, I received a call today from Malachy “Stormin’ ” Morin, “the lead blocker of the consolidation team,” as he calls himself. He asked to schedule a meeting between me and “the big-money guys” in Wainscott’s development office. Mr. Morin and other worthies in the Wainscott bureaucracy persist in the fiction that “the consolidation process” is actually happening.

Mr. Morin, who ought to be languishing in jail for the grotesque way he caused the death of young Elsa Pringle, fancies himself my boss. He has somehow managed to insinuate his blustering persona and considerable bulk — he’s six feet, six inches and four-hundred-odd pounds — into the Wainscott hierarchy as Vice President for Affiliated Institutions. I have to keep reminding him that the MOM is affiliated with the university strictly on its own terms and that he has absolutely no authority concerning our
affairs. But for the sake of good relations, I did agree in principle to meet with “the big-money guys,” telling him I would get back to him.

On a more positive note, I have received word from Corny Chard. It came by way of a telegram, the diction of which made me think of the old days. (You might call it telegramese, a dying literary convention.)

On an even brighter note, I have been invited to attend the inaugural Cranston Fessing Memorial Lecture that my good friend Father S.J. O’Gould, S.J., is to give in November. It has a curious title: “Why Is There No Tuna-Safe Dolphin to Eat?” There’s to be a dinner afterward, a black-tie affair, to which Elsbeth and I have been invited.

Speaking of dinner, our evening at the Green Sherpa was not a success. The proprietor, a strange fellow named Bain, fawned all over us, especially when he noticed Korky Kummerbund tucking in his napkin. Korky took it all in good grace, politely refusing to let Mr. Bain, who managed to appear both obsequious and threatening, pick up the tab. Korky did allow one special dish “on the house” to be sent over. Still, it was disconcerting to have Bain, a big blond fellow in a tunic-like outfit who spoke British English with a foreign accent, hovering over us through half the meal.

I had some sort of pummeled goat while Elsbeth, always game, had what looked like the remains of a rodent. She hasn’t felt well ever since. Indeed, I’m beginning to worry about her. So it was with some relish that I read Korky’s review of the place in today’s
Bugle
. He concluded a quite thorough savaging of the food with, and I quote: “Despite its elevated ambitions, the Green Sherpa serves up little more than a pastiche of yak-whey chic and tortured potatoes in a mushy chinoiserie cuisine that induces the gastric equivalent of altitude sickness.”

But Elsbeth. I’m afraid my love is starting to show her age. Although still full-bodied with abundant dark hair (thanks to chemicals, of course), fresh coloring, and brilliant agate eyes, the ravages of time have not left her untouched. There’s a stoop to her now, a fine wrinkling about the eyes, the slightest tremor in her hands. I should talk. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth myself and a bit stringy, as tall ones are wont to do. But I’ve kept a good deal of my perpetually thinning hair and am at least not a candidate for a shaved head. So many men look like convicts these days. And I will not go into the unspeakable puncturing that young people do to their various bodily parts.