The Memorial Hall Murder (5 page)

“Oh, hi, there, Mrs. Kelly,” said Vick, beaming at her. “The altos are over there on the left side. And, say, I just met your husband. He's really great. I sure wish I could take your course.”

Ham was on the podium, tapping his music stand. Instantly disorder became order. Betsy was in her place with the sopranos. Jack Fox struck a note on the harpsichord. A threadlike piercing A escaped from the oboe. The orchestra tuned up, and then Ham pulled something out of his pocket and waved it in the air. “Peanut brittle,” he said. “Did everybody get some of Mrs. Esterhazy's peanut brittle?” Mrs. Esterhazy's basket was passed around once more. Then Ham stepped aside and Jack Fox, the manager of the chorus, talked about the quartet trials that were still to come. Newcomers who had passed their preliminary auditions trembled. Jack talked about attendance. Ham stepped back on the podium and talked about the music, turning slowly to face the orchestra on the stage and the chorus on the benches.

“There are some things I'd like to say about Handel's
Messiah
before we begin. As usual we will be performing it at Christmastime. But it was never intended solely as a Christmas piece. The text is concerned not only with the birth of Christ, but with his suffering, death, and resurrection, and the resulting redemption of all mankind. It could just as well be a Good Friday or an Easter piece. Handel himself first performed it in Dublin on Good Friday. Now, the soloists will as usual be drawn from our own forces. Mrs. Esterhazy, of course, will sing the contralto arias.” (Cheers for Mrs. Esterhazy.) “Mr. Proctor will be our bass.” (Cheers for Mr. Proctor.) “The tenor part will be sung by our own Tim Swegle.” (Whistles of amazement for Tim, whose voice was still a little thin and shaky.) “And last but not least, our soprano soloist will be Betsy Pickett.” (Applause mingled with insane shrieks from Betsy.) “Now, before we begin, I have a poem I would like to read.” (Shouts: “Oh, no, spare us!”) Ham took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read aloud.

“There once was a young girl named Vick,
Whose favorite expression was ‘Ick.'
Whenever you kissed her,
She said, ‘Listen, mister,
Don't touch me, you make me feel sick.'”

Vick reached out past her cello with her foot and kicked Ham in the shin, and the chorus and the orchestra laughed loudly, even the newcomers who didn't know who Vick was. Ham said
“Ow”
and rubbed his leg, and then he made a joke about Vick's striped shirt, and lifted his stick at last.

The noise died down. The thick volumes of music were riffled open. “All right now, you good Rats,” said Ham, “let's begin from the beginning with the overture. The chorus can just sit there and enjoy it. We'll get to them in a minute. We'll do as much of Part One as we can get through this morning, but we've got to finish up right on time. I've got to meet somebody promptly at eleven-thirty.” He stroked a great upbeat, and the orchestra struck the E-minor chord and sailed serenely up, the violins trilling mournfully on D sharp and then landing on the G for three solemn dotted notes. “Upbow, Miss Plankton,” shouted Ham.

Vick's music was part of the bass-line carried by the harpsichord. Moving her bow across the D string, drawing from it steadily the half note on E from which the voices of the other instruments sprang, she smiled up at Ham. It was good to be starting again. He knew what she meant, and smiled back.

“He had to meet somebody at eleven-thirty,” said Vick. “Isn't that right, Mary? He said he had to meet somebody.”

“He did say ‘somebody'?” said Homer. “Not ‘I have to meet a man,' or ‘I have to meet a woman,' or ‘some people'?”

Vick and Mary shook their heads. “No,” said Mary. “He said, ‘We've got to finish on time, because I have to meet somebody at eleven-thirty.'”

“And the bomb went off at eleven thirty-five,” said Homer. “I know, because I'd just made a joke, and the students all laughed, and I began to relax for the first time, and I wasn't scared of all those kids any more, only I was horrified to discover that I had less than half an hour to cover nine-tenths of the lecture. And then there was this big noise and the whole room shook and everybody started yelling and I ordered everybody to go outside.”

“And then, you big dumbhead, instead of running outside with the rest of us, you disappeared completely,” said Mary. “You really gave me a turn.”

“Well, I was looking for a shortcut. I got lost in the basement for a while, and then I found a little secret stairway and it took me up into that enormous cavern of a room, and from there I could cut right through into that big memorial hallway where the bomb went off. What about you, Vick—where were you?”

“Still in Sanders. I did some more practicing, and then I had to put away all the chairs again. I mean, Mr. Crawley is supposed to do it, but, well, I told you, he's pretty hopeless. So I was hauling chairs to the back of the stage, one by one, when there was this big boom, and it sounded sort of dull but tremendous, and I was lifted a couple of feet in the air, and I fell into the chairs, and I didn't even feel anything, I was so astonished. And the first thing I thought of was my cello, because it had fallen on its face on the floor, but I just lay there in the middle of the chairs for a minute, trying to get myself together. I mean, I could hear all the glass crashing outside, and huge noises as if the whole place were falling down. And I got scared and thought maybe it might all fall down on top of me, so I picked myself up and stumbled out into the hall, and it was raining out there, and I saw the firemen, and I saw you, Mr. Kelly, and—”

“Homer. Call me Homer.”

“And I saw the sole of somebody's shoe and this big shape on the floor with just black shreds of clothes, and I went to look, and it was—” Vick's face began to come apart again.

“Now, look here,” said Mary Kelly, taking her firmly by the hand. “I'm absolutely starved. I'll bet you are too. You're going to come home with me right now and have lunch. I made some soup with the last of the vegetables we grew back home in Concord last summer. You just come on home with me. We've got a nice apartment on Huron Avenue. It's the top deck of one of those big comfortable three-deckers, all lace curtains and overstuffed upholstery and a nice view of the back yard and the laundry hanging out on the back porches next door. You'll like it.”

“Mr. Kelly?” An officer wearing the insignia of the Harvard Police was beckoning at Homer. “They're going to search the tower now.”

“Oh, good,” said Homer. “Listen, you two, save me some soup.”

Chapter Eight

Homer walked into the memorial corridor by way of the north entry and stopped beside the hole in the floor. It didn't seem possible that a gap in the flooring only fifteen or twenty feet wide could have dropped that much debris into the basement. But of course the explosion had blown out all those walls downstairs too. That would account for some of the mountains of plaster dust and shattered marble and broken timbers, and all the rubble of brick and concrete block. Jerry Crawley, the building superintendent, was blundering around in the hole, wearing a hard hat, getting in the way of Captain McCurdy and one of McCurdy's men from the Bomb Squad.

“I see you're hard at work with that fine-tooth comb of yours, Captain McCurdy,” said Homer.

McCurdy looked up, his face gray with plaster dust. “That's right. Tom and I just have to make sure there isn't anybody else buried down here in all this mess. And then Frank Harvey will take over. He'll sift through everything, see if he can find pieces of the explosive device. So far we think it's just dynamite. Tom found a piece of the cap. Fulminate of mercury. Just a bundle of dynamite, that's all it was, with a fulminate of mercury cap.”

“Sort of run-of-the-mill, eh? No imagination? No creative spark? Ha ha, no joke intended.”

“You should of seen President Cheever,” said Crawley, looking up at Homer, his rheumy eyes alight. “He was sick to his stomach. Honest, I thought he was going to throw up. They didn't clean up the blood yet, you know? It was laying all over the place, and he slipped in the blood. Had to hang on to that other guy. Tinker. You know.”

“Tinker?”

“Some big guy way high up. Sloan Tinker. I don't know who the hell he is. Cheever had to go in my office and lay down. I got this sofa in there. President Cheever almost threw up on my sofa.”

“Well, congratulations. That would have been an honor indeed for your sofa.” Homer moved rapidly away from Crawley and climbed over the remnants of the shattered door to the great hall.

“Whatsamatter with him?” said Crawley. “Queasy, I guess. Some people got no stomach. Can't stand the sight of blood. Me, it never bothered me none.” He picked up a brick from one pile of rubbish and moved it slowly to another. “Like once I saw this accident. There was four, five people laying all over the road. I pulled my car over to the side—”

“Hey, Crawley,” said Captain McCurdy, “have you got the key to that room there? Room 196? It's the only one down here that didn't get its door blown off. We've got to get in there and look inside. You've got the master key?”

“Right, you bet I do,” said Crawley. He felt around his neck for the key on the string. It wasn't there. He patted his shirt pocket. “I got it right here someplace.”

A head appeared at the edge of the hole and said hello to Captain McCurdy. “Oh, Bert, there you are,” said McCurdy. “Good. You can take over now. Tom hasn't had any lunch and I've got to go up in the tower with Maderna from Buildings and Grounds. Now look here, Bert. Take it slow and easy. And that room there, with the locked door—take a good look in there. Crawley, here, he's got the key.” McCurdy climbed up the ladder, followed by Tom, and Bert climbed down.

Mr. Crawley was feeling cheated out of his story about the bodies on the highway. “I was just telling those guys about this terrible accident I saw on Route 128. There were these people all over the road, dead bodies.”

Bert looked at the door of Room 196. “You've got the key to this room here?” he said to Crawley.

“Jeez, it's on me someplace,” said Crawley. “I know I got it here someplace.” He felt feebly in his pants pockets. Then he looked at the locked door of Room 196. “Oh, 196,” he said. “That's right; 196 is okay anyways. I already looked in 196. Now, as I was saying, there was all these corpses—”

“You already looked in there?” said Bert. “You mean, it's all cleared out in there? What's that sign mean on the door:
Ethiopian Literacy?
What the heck is that?”

“Damned if I know. They got all these organizations here downcellar. Yeah, I already looked in there. See, that room isn't even under the hole. The ceiling didn't even get blowed off.”

Bert shrugged his shoulders and began shoveling plaster dust and brick rubble out of Room 197, which had once housed the Harvard Sci-Fi Comics Library.

“Hey, look at that, will you,” said Mr. Crawley. He reached over and picked a dusty comic book out of Bert's shovel. “An old Flash Gordon comic. What do you know?”

Bert dumped his shovelful of plaster dust against the door of 196. “You swear you looked in here?” said Bert.

Jerry Crawley leaned against the ladder and turned the pages of his comic book. “Oh, sure, I swear,” he said. He sealed his oath with a mighty belch.

Chapter Nine