The Memorial Hall Murder (3 page)

Homer Kelly beamed and shook everybody's hand. He stepped over the broken door in the north entry and started down the steps outside.

A hearse was turning into the circular driveway from Kirkland Street. The driver pulled quickly to a stop and leaned out and shouted at Homer.

“What did you say?” said Homer, bending down politely to the car window.

“I said, is there anything left of the guy? My name's Ratchit. North Cambridge Funeral Parlor. I mean, sometimes, when you get a bomb, there's nothing left but pieces all over. You've got to mop them up in a bucket.”

“Oh, well,” said Homer mournfully. “It was pretty bad.” He shook his head and stood back as Ratchit bounced out of the hearse and ran around the front of the car.

John Campbell was there to meet him. “Hello, Ratchit,” he said. “You're early. They're not through taking pictures yet. You want to come back this afternoon?”

“No, it's all right. I'll wait.” Ratchit had a small sharp face. He bounded ahead of John Campbell up the stairs, snapping under his feet glass fragments bearing the names of the virtues, fallen from the rose window high above:
Fortitudo, Disciplina, Prudentia, Patientia.

Chapter Five

He was back in New Jersey. Although he didn't know how he knew it was New Jersey, because all the lights were out. But it must be New Jersey, because his great-aunts were lined up in a row beside him, singing. Oh, they were terrible. Oh, why didn't they stop? Oh, Christ, it hurt his head to listen. He had thought at first they were angels, only angels wouldn't sing like that, and when he had got a look at them by the light of the candles in their hands, he could see immediately that they were his old great-aunts, the ones in the picture on the bureau, back home in New Jersey. He had never met them in real life, because they had all died before he was born, but now they were all lined up just like in the picture, with their fuzzy hair and their shirtwaists and high collars and their staring faces, singing
ROCK OF AGES, CLEFT! FOR MEEEEEEEE! LET ME HIIIIIIIDE MYSELF IN THEEEEEEEEE!
Oh, God, why didn't they stop?

Chapter Six

From the sidewalk on the other side of Kirkland Street, Homer Kelly looked up solemnly at the sunless north façade of Memorial Hall. The building rose above him like a cliff face, mass piled upon mass, ten thousand of brick laid upon ten thousand. It was ugly. Majestically ugly. Augustly, monumentally ugly. It was a red-brick Notre Dame, a bastard Chartres, punctured with stained-glass windows, ribboned around with lofty sentiments in Latin, finialed with metallic crests and pennants, knobbed with the heads of orators, crowned with a bell tower and four giant clocks. Homer knew that the colossal edifice contained a theatre and a great hall and a memorial transept and a lecture room and a radio station and a lot of small offices and classrooms, but now in its gloomy grandeur it was a gigantic mausoleum as well. When it had been erected in the 1870s it had been intended as a half-secular, half-sacred memorial to young graduates who had died in the Union cause in the Civil War. Now it was an actual coffin.

Some of the people on the sidewalk had stopped to stare across the street because they were merely curious, glad of some excitement between a class in Nat Sci 4 and another in Soc Sci 2. But most of the people pressed up against the rope barrier were mourners. Homer listened while Ham Dow's students and choristers and friends murmured bitterly among themselves. A large woman in a red dress was weeping, clutching two fat boys in her arms. Mr. Crawley, the custodian of the building, was repeating his impressions of the morning over and over again. “Jeez, you should of seen him. His head was blowed right off. Blood running out of him down the hole. You should of been there.”

A short girl standing in front of Homer gave Crawley a savage look. “Oh, shut up, Crawley.”

But he gabbled on. “Hey, lookit. See that big car? That's Cheever, President Cheever. He was here yesterday. Jeez, if they'd of blown up the place yesterday they'd of blown up Cheever. You see that other guy with him? That's whooseywhatsis. Tinker. Sloan Tinker. Vice President or something. Excuse me, I think they're going to need me over there. It's all right, officer, I'm the super. I got all the keys. They can't unlock nothing without the keys.”

“Oh, Homer, there you are.” Homer's wife was reaching around shoulders and over heads, touching his arm. He took her hand and squeezed it. Someone was trailing after Mary, hanging on to her. Homer recognized the girl who had arrived on the scene of the disaster just as he was rushing upon it himself. And he had talked to her, he remembered now, before his class had even begun. Earlier this morning she had been a thin, handsome girl with long hair pouring over her shoulders in a violent mass of red. Now she was tear-stained, rumpled and pale, her hair hanging in lank dripping strands over her shirt.

“Homer, this is Vick Van Horn,” said Mary. “She was Ham Dow's assistant. She's really pretty shaken up.”

“Well, hello again,” said Homer. “I know Vick. She found my classroom for me this morning. Here, just let me speak to Officer Corcoran, so he'll know where I am. Come on, we'll find someplace to sit down.”

There was a bench in the garden of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The three of them sat down, with Vick stiffly erect in the middle. “Oh, it's so terrible,” she said, thumping one skinny fist into the other hand. “Oh, of all the people in the world. Ham was one of the few people in the
whole world
who were doing anything good for anybody else. He meant so much to so many people—with his music, I mean. He was the best. He really was. And now he's gone. Oh, I can't stand it. I just can't stand it.”

Homer didn't know what to say. “There now,” he said, “don't cry. There now.”

“Oh, Homer, don't be an idiot,” said Mary. “Of course she should cry. And she's right. She really is. Even I could see that. I'd only been singing with him twice, at my audition and then this morning, but I could tell he was just what Vick says. He was one of those people who are just born to teach. He was—well, he was just great. Well, I'm going to bawl a little myself.” Mary put her arms around Vick, and Homer sat helplessly while the two women leaned on each other and sobbed. But then Vick stopped crying and jumped up and began gesticulating with her thin, freckled arms. “I mean, it wasn't just the music. It was the way he was so, you know, kind to everybody. Once—you won't believe this—once I found him leaning down over a manhole in the street, and there was this man with his head sticking up out of the manhole, and they were singing this really corny old song, ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold,' only it was beautiful, it really was. Funny and beautiful. They were both throwing themselves into it. It was just the way he was. He couldn't even be mean enough to turn anybody down who wanted to sing. He was always getting himself in trouble by letting some really
strange
people into the chorus. He was just so
kind.
”

“That's right,” said Mary. “He let me in, and I was surprised. I mean, I'm just a visiting teacher, really old, compared to the rest of you. And I don't even sing all that well. I didn't think I'd pass the test. But he said it was all right. Of course, there are still the quartet trials to get through. I may not get in after all.”

“Well, everybody would get in, if we left it up to Ham. So the quartet trials have to be taken care of by other people. I do some and Jack Fox does the rest. He's the accompanist and the manager. Even so, Ham slips some really weird people in behind our backs. Oh, excuse me, I didn't mean you. Oh, damn. Oh, excuse me. Oh, God, I just can't believe it. To think we were working in there, all together, just an hour ago, in Sanders Theatre, and Ham was making a joke about my shirt.”

“Your shirt?” said Homer.

“It's got stripes, you see?” Vick threw out her arms to display her shirt. “And he said, ‘What a nice shirt,' and then he sang the first line of that chorus from
Messiah
, you know—”

“And with his stripes”—Mary laughed—“we are healed.”

“Right. That's right. I mean, he was just so … Who would want to hurt him? A man like that?”

“Oh, my dear Vick,” said Homer, “it probably didn't have anything to do with Ham Dow himself. It was just some crazy fool, some terrorist. It was probably that Nepalese Freedom Movement. Ham just happened to be standing at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Homer stood up and took Vick by the shoulders and gently shoved her down on the bench. “Now look here, girl, tell me what happened this morning. Everything you saw. I mean, the police are going to want to talk to you anyway. And I used to be in the District Attorney's office for Middlesex County, so I'd kind of like to understand the whole thing myself. Just begin at the beginning.”

Vick hunched her shoulders and plunged her hands between her knees. Her face was a narrow white cleaver between the fiery masses of her hair, which was beginning to spring away from her head as it dried in the sun. “Well, I came early. I had a schedule. Chorus rehearsal was to be at ten o'clock from now on, every Monday and Wednesday, only I was coming an hour early to make sure everything was all set up and ready. I mean, Mr. Crawley's supposed to do it, but he's kind of—well, you know, he's not very sharp. He's really different from Michael Lane, who was there before. Only they promoted Michael, so now we're stuck with Crawley. So I have to check up on him, you see. But the real reason I came a whole hour early was to practice. Oh, God.” Vick put her hand on her mouth. “I forgot my cello. I left it there, where it fell on its face. Oh, the heck with my cello. Where was I? I came an hour early to practice. You see, I just store my cello there in the instrument storage closet under the stairs. I've got my own key now.” Vick jerked a string from under her shirt and showed them the key hanging around her neck. “I take these lessons from Ham. Oh, I mean, I
was
taking lessons from Ham. He was a cellist himself, you see. That was his instrument. And he's good, really good. Oh, I mean he
was
good. Oh, what a waste, what a waste.” Vick's eyes filled again, but she shook herself and glared at Homer. “It must have been about nine o'clock when I got to Memorial Hall, walking over from Winthrop House, where I live, over there by the river. The bell was ringing, the new bell in the tower of Memorial Hall. I had the new posters about the concert under my arm. I tacked one of them up on the south door as I went in.…”

Chapter Seven