The Memorial Hall Murder (25 page)

“But it wasn't?” Mary jumped out of bed and threw her arms around Homer. “Oh, Homer, then Ham Dow is still alive. Vick's right. He's not dead after all.”

“Well, if he's not dead, where is he?” Homer rubbed his face in his wife's thick hair. “You know, I feel nothing but foreboding about that. I'm afraid nothing good can have happened to the man. He wasn't the kind of guy to just up and disappear. I must say, I'm not really very hopeful.”

Mary picked up her bathrobe and stuck one arm in a sleeve. “Homer, I don't see why he came back to Memorial Hall at all. I mean, the man from Philadelphia. You'd think he'd know enough to stay away. Especially when he didn't have a watch and didn't know what time it was. Wasn't that an awfully foolish thing for him to do?”

Homer put his hands on the window sash and stared at the snow piling up on the railing of the back porch. Then he slammed the window down with a crash. “But he did know what time it was. He knew! Only he was wrong! The clocks, the new tower clocks, they were wrong! They had just been set into motion the day before. There was a little ceremony the day before in Sanders Theatre, and Cheever made a speech and pushed the button, and then the clock works began whirring for the first time, only they were sluggish, and the whirligigs were still in the clutch of inertia, and the two spiral coils that wind back into the past and forward into the future weren't working right yet, and the little gears weren't really loosened up and twirling around fast enough and notching their little notches into the little slots on the other little gears, and the sprockets and spindles and thingamabobs were all delayed just a whisker, so the whole damned mechanism was slow by ten whole minutes the next day, and all four clock faces, looking east, west, north, and south over the city of Cambridge, were wrong, and everybody in the whole city was late to class or to work or they missed their trains and planes and opportunities for advancement and who knows what all. So the man from Philadelphia thought he had another ten minutes before the thing would go off, only he was wrong. Dead wrong. The deadest wrong of all.”

“I see,” said Mary. “He had just come up from Philadelphia, is that it? So it didn't occur to him that the clocks weren't accurate, since he didn't know how new they were, and he'd be bound to think that any clocks as big and important-looking as they, were would certainly be exactly right, so he trusted them, only he shouldn't have.”

Homer shook his head and laughed. “Too much respect for Harvard. These outsiders, they really think this ancient institution is dedicated to
veritas
, the way it pretends to be. They think it's dishing out
veritas
by the bushel. Only of course Harvard is just another bunch of fallible fools working on lucky hunches or wild guesses or august mistaken theories inherited from the past. Just a miscellaneous batch of mortal souls scattered all up and down the great chain of being from the bottom to the top.”

“Oh, Homer, look at it snow. Doesn't it make you think of Christmas. Homer, darling, what do you want for Christmas?”

Homer looked balefully at the snow blowing in small whirlpools between their own back porch and the porch of the house next door. “I'll tell you what I want for Christmas. Hamilton Dow. I'd like to find a big slob of a man named Ham Dow stuffed into my Christmas stocking. The trouble is, I may meet him altogether sooner than I'd like to. I'm going over to the Cambridge City Hospital first thing this morning and talk to that pathologist. The exhumation order finally got handed down by the judge and they've dug up the poor wretch from Mount Auburn Cemetery and taken him over to the hospital.”

“Oh, Homer, let's hope it's the man from Philadelphia.”

“I hope to God it's the man from Philadelphia. But if there are any calluses on those decomposing fingers, I'll get my Christmas present a whole lot sooner than I want.”

When Homer left the house on Huron Avenue, snow was still falling in flurries, collecting in the branches of the spindly trees, blowing eastward in gusts from the flat roofs of the three-deckers. But when he came back from his mission to the Cambridge City Hospital and stepped shakily off the bus at Harvard Square, the low winter sun was beginning to glare through the thinning clouds. The tinsel bells hanging over Boylston Street and Brattle swung sparkling in the sunlight. The bells and the tawdry Christmas decorations entwined around the light poles were the contribution of the city of Cambridge, and therefore they were Town, whereas the square itself was really a province of the university, and therefore it was Gown, so the tinsel bells didn't fit in at all. But in a vulgar way they added something to the particolored daftness of Harvard Square at this season of the year. The place throbbed and palpitated with its own skewed version of the Christmas spirit.

Homer's own mood was sepulchral. He walked feebly across the street when the light said
WALK,
telling himself that of course he should really be rejoicing, because, after all, that pathologist had found no calluses on the hands of the corpse dug up from Mount Auburn Cemetery. He hadn't found any fingerprints either, but he had looked at Homer solemnly over the putrefying mess on the table and said that if there had ever been calluses on those hands he would have found evidence of them still. So that was good news. But, oh, God, the body of the man from Philadelphia had been unspeakable. Those damn kids and their idealism about embalming and their sanctimonious opinions about just letting nature take its course! Homer staggered up on the sidewalk on the other side of Mass Av and groaned aloud. It was his blood sugar, he told himself. He had thrown up his breakfast, and his blood sugar was down. It needed pumping up with something really solid and substantial, like a nice little second breakfast at Elsie's. And after that he would run right over to Memorial Hall and tell Vick the results of the exhumation. Vick would be conducting a final rehearsal of the orchestra and chorus, getting ready for tonight's performance. She would be overjoyed by Homer's news.

But no. There was something else he should do first. Before he went over to Mem Hall to talk to Vick. Just for the hell of it. Just a crazy notion. Just a nutty crazy thing he felt like doing.

Chapter Thirty-five

Homer had never seen Elmwood before. He had lived in Cambridge most of his life without ever finding himself on this short byway off Brattle Street. And yet he should have had a historical curiosity about the place, because James Russell Lowell had lived there. Lowell had been Longfellow's successor at Harvard. And he had been one of those truculent abolitionists who had made everybody so mad. Well, his house was a splendid residence for the President of Harvard. Homer pushed through the front gate and walked boldly up to the front door. It was still early. The President of Harvard would probably still be eating a leisurely Saturday-morning breakfast.

But James Cheever was just coming out. He paused in the open door and looked blankly at Homer.

“Oh, good morning, sir. I was just passing by. I thought I would drop in and make a brief report on a new development in the matter of the bombing at Memorial Hall.” Homer looked inquisitively over Cheever's head at the presidential front hall, and caught a glimpse of a table on which was displayed a small piece of alabaster sculpture, something picked up from the rubble of a ruined temple, a broken torso through which the lamplight shone. Homer wanted to exclaim in wonder, but Cheever was closing the door in his face, shutting off the view.

“A new development?” said President Cheever. “What new development?” He moved away from the door and started down the brick walk.

“Well, sir, I'm sure you'll be as amazed as I was to learn that the man who was killed in the explosion was not Hamilton Dow.”

James Cheever stopped in his tracks and looked sharply at Homer. “It was not …? Surely you are mistaken.”

“No, sir, it's a fact. It was a man from Philadelphia. The bomber himself. He planted the bomb the day before, and then blew himself up by mistake.”

Cheever began walking quickly forward again. He pushed through the gate and slammed it shut against Homer's knee. “But if that's true, then where is Hamilton Dow? Whatever happened to Dow?”

Doggedly Homer opened the gate. “Who knows? Beats me. Maybe he's still buried under all that brick.”

President Cheever slipped on the snowy sidewalk, then regained his balance and drove his legs forward once again. “But they searched the debris so thoroughly. I have been assured of that. Unless of course”—Cheever looked at Homer and uttered a dry laugh—”unless he was buried and rose again. Perhaps he rolled away the stone. Sloan Tinker is of the opinion that the man had a messiah complex, so of course that sort of thing would have come naturally. Perhaps he simply rolled away the stone.”

“Oh, yes, ha ha. He rolled away the stone.” Homer tripped on the sidewalk too, and nearly lost his balance. The old slate blocks along Brattle Street had been heaved up unevenly by generations of winter frosts and thaws, and Homer caught his big foot on a lifted corner, pitched forward, stumbled a few paces, and then caught up with Cheever again. “What did you say, sir? I'm sorry. I didn't hear.”

President Cheever had been mumbling to himself. Now he flung out one hand in a gesture of irritation. “But what about the plaque? I'm supposed to dedicate a plaque in Dow's memory during that concert in Memorial Hall this evening. What shall I do about the plaque? Nobody tells me anything. Nobody keeps me informed.”

“Well, you see, sir, this new piece of information isn't common knowledge. I don't know when it will be made known to the public at large. Perhaps it would be just as well to keep it under your hat. At least for the time being.”

And then Homer began rambling in a genial way about what an awful responsibility it must be to assume the presidency of so vast and various an institution as Harvard University. Surely it must be difficult enough to deal wisely with the ordinary intramural problems of the day, without random violence from the outside world throwing everything at the university into a tizzy. But how fortunate it was that through the wisdom of the forefathers, some of the heavy burden of responsibility could be carried on the shoulders of the Harvard Fellows and the Board of Overseen! So many loyal hands clasping the rod of authority! In union there was strength! How wonderful to think of the good will and self-sacrifice of the men and women who—it truly struck Homer as remarkable—would even gather from across the face of the land to meet at the very moment of the Harvard-Yale game. The fellows and the Overseers. Truly extraordinary devotion to duty.