The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [49]
Reluctantly, shaking his hand, I left him in the good care of Doreen who, despite her new boyfriend, appeared quite taken with the young man.
All through the meeting with the committee my thoughts kept turning to the package, which I had brought along, determined to play the tape once the room was clear. I kept thinking of questions I should have asked. Where had he met this man Fernando? What else had the man said? I wondered why Corny himself hadn’t turned over the tape to Henderson. Why hadn’t he put my name and address on it? As I sat there listening to Alger Wherry detail his usual problems and some new ones that had developed over the past year, I was in the awful quandary of wanting to know what it was I really didn’t want to look at.
I did, however, manage to impersonate an attentive museum director deeply engrossed in the problems of acquiring, curating, and storing human skulls. It turns out there is something of a crisis in the collection. In his subdued but pithy way, Alger reported that, because of space limitations, you would have at present a better chance of winning a Nobel Prize than of getting your skull into the collection.
The members of the visiting committee listened attentively. The committee is little more than a holdover from the days when the university was tightening its grip on the museum. I added a few new members on my own, an action that prompted a rebuke from the university’s Committee on Visiting Committees, which I ignored.
Morgan Marsden, Professor of Divinity Emeritus, an expert on the afterlife and a longtime member of the committee, scratched the back of his own fine skull and said that surely, with the repatriation of skulls to various American Indian tribes, there must be a lot more room for new specimens.
Alger, his head bones prominent, his complexion unnaturally sallow from spending a life virtually underground, reported that in fact the repatriation program had bogged down because of intertribal squabbles as to what skulls belonged to whom.
Why not just move some of the less valuable skulls into a “deacquisition” program, asked Hermione Cabot, the doyenne of curators at the Frock, Wainscott’s small but well-endowed art museum.
Alger shrugged. “It’s not that easy. They are human remains, and we’d have to bury them in a cemetery with all that entails. Crematoriums won’t touch them without a death certificate. I mean you can’t just load them into a Dumpster and have them taken to a landfill. Although, I suppose you could.”
Alger also reported that the problem of bone mold, a pernicious form of which has afflicted our well-known Forensic Collection, is worse than initially estimated. He said they were running dehumidifiers around the clock, but it’s been a wet summer and part of the basement sits right on top of an old streambed.
We went down to the basement for our usual tour of the collection, row upon row of grinning death. We examined a few serious cases of bone mold and looked at some new acquisitions for the Curiosities Cabinet.
When we passed the room with the door of green baize behind which the Sociéte de Cochon Long used to hold its secret meetings, I tried the brass knob and found it locked. “What’s this used for?” I asked Alger.
“Oh, we’re thinking about it for storage,” he said in a way that made me wonder.
The meeting finally ended with resolutions to pursue funding for warehousing off-premises “marginal specimens” as well as those contested by Native American tribes. A subcommittee was formed to look into the bone mold problem and report back to both Alger and me.
When the meeting concluded, I remained in the Twitchell Room, thinking I would pop in the cassette and simply watch it. I have to confess I was relieved again to be told the room had been scheduled for a meeting of the museum’s Subcommittee on Signage.
Before returning to my office,