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“How realistic is that?”

“I don’t know. They want the lab and the revenue it brings in. The university itself would never sanction such means, but there’s a cabal doing everything it can to discredit me. But you’re right, Lieutenant, it’s a stretch. At the same time, you might want to question Malachy Morin …”

“The fat guy involved in the death of Elsa Pringle?’

“The very man.”

“We’ll bring him in.”

“Good. And have someone leak the timing of his arrival to the television newspeople.”

He gave one of his rare smiles. We spoke about what to do next. I called one of the mammalian specialists in the Biology Department and asked him to assist Dr. Cutler in a postmortem.

With the lieutenant’s assistance I dictated a news release to Doreen setting out the facts as tersely as possible. We checked it over and had her fax it to our priority list. The phone started ringing immediately. Amanda Feeney-Morin, in that peremptory tone of hers, demanded to know every last detail. I told her the matter was under investigation and that I would keep her and others up to date with any developments. She persisted, asking a lot of insinuating questions designed to make it seem we are covering things up.

The lieutenant agreed with me that, given the implications of what had happened and the intense media interest, it would be best to hold a press conference. Accordingly, I secured Margaret Mead Auditorium for one in the afternoon and had Doreen contact our list with that information. Lieutenant Tracy, after talking to Chief Murphy of the SPD, agreed to conduct the conference with me. As best we could, we went over probable questions and arrived at responses we deemed as candid as we could make them.

In the midst of these preparations, Malachy Morin called to ask me why I was conducting a press conference without his authorization. I’m afraid I lost my temper. I told the man that he was a poor deluded wretch to think that he had any authority over anything that happened at the Museum of Man. I told him he was perfectly welcome to call a press conference of his own and share his considerable ignorance with anyone so feebleminded as to take seriously anything he would have to say about anything. I then gently hung up the receiver.

Now, I want to go on record as saying that, in the course of my career in dealing with the press, I have met many thoughtful, diligent, intelligent, and responsible journalists. And it is clear that a democracy cannot function without an active Fourth Estate. But even in a community as small as Seaboard, there appear to be hordes of them. And so many of them are benighted beyond redemption, crude beyond credibility, and so openly hostile as to be comic. One young man, after making a dramatic entrance in a long, swirling overcoat that looked like a bathrobe, asked me in a challenging manner some long unintelligible question with the phrase “sex torture” thrown in. I simply shook my head and said I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another, wearing raked-back hair and those squinty little glasses you see in photographs of W.B. Yeats, asked me if Bert and Betti were a “breeding pair.”

I answered that we no longer had a breeding program at the Pavilion and that the two chimps had been placed together in a single cage by persons unknown and without any authorization.

“If the chimps are not allowed to breed, how do they take care of their sexual needs?”

When I responded facetiously that we did not disclose details about the sex lives of our chimpanzees out of respect for their privacy, I was taken entirely seriously.

“Was Bert still in a program for recovering alcoholics?” someone else asked.

“No. Bert completed that program and had been sober for more than three months at the time of his death.”

Amanda Feeney-Morin sat right up front, poised, I knew, to make slurs disguised as questions. Right on cue, she stood up. “Given what’s been happening at the Museum of Man over the past few months,