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for something it’s like an order. Charlene who’s the secretary at the specimen lab says a lot of the older guys take a long time and don’t come up with much. But she tellsthem not to worry because she can get some of the maintenance guys to fill in for them. I don’t know if any of this has anything to do with Professor [
sic
] Fessing’s murder but someone ought to know about it. I have got to go now but I will let you know if I find anything else.
    Worried
    There have been rumors for some time now, somewhat better punctuated and spelled, I hope, than this one (which I cleaned up for the record), that Stoddard Gottling has been bending if not breaking the formal and informal restraints normally placed on genetics research and applications. But I don’t see what that would have to do with the murder of Cranston Fessing. Unless … Unless the consolidation would mean the termination of some project … No, it’s too fantastical. Or is it? In crime as in art and science and life, one must consider all the possibilities.
    I suppose I should send a copy of this communication over to Lieutenant Tracy. But, frankly, I doubt very much that it has anything to do with the Fessing case, about which I can report no breaks. Amazing, isn’t it, how quickly interest in the most hideous of crimes fades away. I haven’t heard from the lieutenant in a week, and life around here has resumed its unpunctuated equilibrium.
    Speaking of the late dean, there have been some rather tasteless jokes circulating about his fate. I hear someone has come up with a “Decanal Cookbook” and is soliciting recipes over the e-mail network. Even my friend Izzy Landes has not been impervious to this ghoulish ribaldry. Last Friday I ran into him in the Club library. Over coffee we got to talking about the dean, and about what had happened and what was happening, when he asked me, with that mischievous sidelong glance of his, what I thought “they served Fessing with.”
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “The wine, Norman, the wine. Was it a red or a white? Red I would think, a Bordeaux, but not a
premier cru.”
    I tutted at him, but his face was a moon of mirth. “Really,” he went on, “what are we, after all, red meat or white meat?”
    I tutted again and told him he had been spending too much time with Corny Chard.
    Well, I must say it’s good to get back to this unofficial Log after nearly a week. I feel as though I could go on writing for another hour. Perhaps, though, I am simply reluctant go out into that good night, which will, I know, remind me of Elsbeth, and I will arrive at the Club in a maudlin state and perhaps drink more wine than is good for me.

THURSDAY, APRIL 1 6

    Despite a contretemps today with the egregious Mr. Morin and the worthies of the Wainscott Public Relations Office, I have been in an absolute dither of aesthetic bliss since yesterday afternoon. Perhaps I should describe the unpleasantness first.
    Upon arrival this morning I learned that the university has appointed someone named Oliver Scrabbe to succeed Cranston Fessing as Visiting Dean to the Museum of Man. All well and good. (Although I had hoped that the university might desist in its plans after what happened to Fessing, not that good should come from evil, although it often does.) At any rate, a Mr. Bells or Balls in the Wainscott Public Relations Office called to tell me that he was faxing over Dean Scrabbe’s CV and that I was to draft a press release announcing the appointment and send it over to them for approval. I refused on the simple grounds that I do notreport to anyone at Wainscott and that the appointment is being made by the university and not by the museum.
    As I should have expected, they went over my head to Malachy Morin, who came lumbering into my office with a “what’s this about our not writing the press release for the new dean?” I told him quite simply that I don’t see why we should do their work for them, especially since