The Murder in the Museum of Man Read Online Free Page B

remarked, not entirely facetiously, that I thought he would make a good recording secretary. He didn’t seem to find it very complimentary. Indeed, at that point he turned noticeably officious and said he would like to have copies of all the correspondence between myself, Dean Fessing, and the Board of Governors. I said it would take some digging through my files but that I would send them over to him by tomorrow evening. I also said, deputizing myself, I suppose, that I would keep a sharp lookout for anything out of the ordinary.
    The lieutenant scarcely acknowledged my offer of assistance, and indeed the entire interview from that point on took a decidedly nasty turn. Did I know, he asked, what the late dean’s “sexual preferences” were? I replied that I believed CranstonFessing to have been gay, as they say, but that he was the soul of discretion regarding his proclivities save for an incident with a graduate student some years ago that the university handled rather badly. (The student was, after all, well beyond the age of consent.) Did I know anyone the dean might have been having a “relationship” with at the time of his death? I repeated that the dean was most discreet, and that in any event I was not privy to his social life. The lieutenant glanced up sharply and asked me: “Mr. de Ratour, have you had or were you having any kind of relationship with Dean Fessing other than what related to your work at the museum?”
    At first I didn’t realize what the officer was insinuating. I said I had seen the dean at social functions, of course, and we were members of the Club, but he didn’t play tennis or attend any of the Club’s special activities, such as the annual New Year’s party. With an almost admirable lack of embarrassment, the officer asked me, “What I mean, Mr. de Ratour, is have you ever had or were you having a sexual relationship with Dean Fessing?”
    I shouldn’t, I suppose, have been so surprised, but I was in fact utterly dismayed. When I had regained some composure, I told the lieutenant that I had had no dealings with the late dean that were not in every sense professional. I continued that while my own orientation in such matters was, strictly speaking, my own business, I led, in fact, a celibate life. I tried not to sound defensive, but I know I did. This whole issue is a real sore point with me. When a man in my situation decides to live alone and not socialize with the fair sex, it is taken these days as
prima facie
evidence that he is heteroclitic. (I happen to know that Malachy Morin has made slurs about me to this effect on more than one occasion.) The problem is compounded by the fact that I have more than one friend who is more or less than what’s taken for normal, and by the fact that, however instinctively normal one’s own predispositions, one learns, over time, to be tolerant wherethe inclinations of others are concerned. (In this matter I have come to subscribe to the dictum of my good friend Izzy Landes, who contends that the only perversion is the neglect or abuse of children.) There is something else: to pronounce oneself orthodox in a convincingly enough way, one has do so with an emphasis that can be inferred as a denigration of what is heterodox while at the same time inviting, in nearly direct proportion to one’s vehemence, skepticism as to one’s own real stance. I felt, in short, that my freedom of speech, or more pointedly, my freedom of silence, had been violated. I certainly was not going to go into my failed romance with Elsbeth Merriman, which occurred so many years ago, although I can admit in the privacy of this journal that that deep and tender wound feels as fresh as ever.
    I could not determine whether or not I had convinced the officer of my noninvolvement with the dean, and I had by that time ceased to care. If he wanted ours to be an adversarial relation, I was quite prepared to accommodate him. He closed his notebook, signaling the end of what I