Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  Back in the warm security of his nest-like room, Pascal Grant rubbed his chin where Roger Shambley had touched him. “I don’t like him, Rick.”

  “I don’t either,” Rick Evans said and his soft Louisiana voice was grim.

  * * *

  On any clear winter night, Søren Thorvaldsen could look upriver from his desk and see the distant George Washington Bridge strung across the Hudson like a Victorian dowager’s diamond necklace, but it was not half so beautiful to him as the cruise ship docked almost directly below his office window. The Sea Dancer was lit from stem to stern by her own glittering lights and she would sail on Saturday with eighteen hundred winter-weary customers.

  A soft trill drew him from the window back to his desk where a winking button on his telephone console signaled a call on his private line.

  “Thorvaldsen here.” “Velkommen hjem, Thorvaldsen.” A gurgle of Irish laughter warmed her golden voice as Lady Francesca Leeds stumbled over the word for home.

  Her attempts at Danish amused him. “I tried to call you from the airport,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied. “I’m sorry. I was tied up with a client tonight.”

  He looked at his watch. Nearly ten. “Is it too late for a nightcap?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she murmured regretfully. “But I have good news for you.”

  “Oscar Nauman’s agreed?” “Not exactly. But he hasn’t said no, either, and this is the closest anyone’s come yet. I’ve arranged a small cocktail party tomorrow evening at the Erich Breul House. Jacob Munson’s going to bring Nauman to look at the space. You’ll come?”

  “Helt sikkert!” he assured her happily.

  Her voice turned teasingly miffed. “I think you’d rather see Oscar Nauman than me.”

  He laughed as she said godnat and hung up, but her teasing held a shadow of truth. Francesca Leeds excited him more than any woman in years. It wasn’t solely because she so outranked him in birth, although bedding a woman out of his class had always been an aphrodisiac. It was her special blend of sophistication and earthiness that was so irresistible to the self-made Dane, who had learned to hold his own in the drawing room without ever quite forgetting what went on out in the kitchen. She was capricious enough to keep him off balance, uncertain of victory.

  Yet past successes, spiced with a tinge of cynicism, let him savor the chase. For the first time, he enjoyed prolonging the preliminaries. Inevitably, she must surely come to his bed.

  In the meantime, Oscar Nauman was even less predictable and Thorvaldsen looked forward to meeting the artist whose pictures had given him so much pleasure, pictures that were as much a reward for his years of hard work as sex with a beautiful woman.

  “A party?” Sigrid asked, dismayed. “I’m no good at parties, Nauman. You should know that by now.”

  “I want you to meet Munson. You don’t have to dress up. Besides,” he reminded her, “you’re the one who thinks I ought to have this retrospective, so you might as well come along and see the place. Meet me there at seven and we’ll have dinner afterwards.”

  Remembering that her housemate had mentioned something about a pickled boar’s head in honor of the season, Sigrid decided that a party was probably the lesser of tomorrow’s two evils.

  “… so there we were—my machine smashed at the bottom of the tree, Chou-Chew hurling simian curses from the top, while I lay trampled beneath the paws of a monstrous dog who determined that my battered body should provide a footstool to raise himself closer to my hysterical pet.

  Fortunately, help was immediately at hand. The brute’s master pulled him from me with apologies that owed as much to the Spanish language as to the French.”

  LETTER FROM ERICH BREUL JR., DATED 8.30.1912

  (From the Erich Breul House Collection)

  V

  Wednesday, December 16

  THE CATERERS ARRIVED AT THE ERICH BREUL House shortly after six, and Mrs. Beardsley, delegated by Lady Francesca Leeds, was there to direct them through the door under the main stairs and into the butler’s pantry.

  In the dining room, the formal table was relieved of its extra leaves and draped in dark red linen with green plaid runners. The caterers had brought their own silver-plated canapé trays and their own chafing dish for the hot hors d’oeuvres, but the dozen or so sterling candelabra that would soon light the long room with tall white tapers belonged to the house.

  An arrangement of cedar, red-berried holly, and shiny magnolia leaves had been delivered earlier, and as Mrs. Beardsley centered it between the candles, Pascal Grant paused with table leaves in his arms. “Do you want me to do anything else, Mrs. Beardsley? Bring up some more chairs?”

  She glanced about the room. Sophie Breul’s Sheraton dining table could be expanded to seat forty, but twenty chairs were its normal complement and Lady Francesca had said tonight’s party was to be quite small.

  “Just three or four of the trustees, Dr. Peake and his secretary, the art people, Mr. Thorvaldsen, and of course you, Mrs. Beardsley. When Oscar Nauman asks about the history of the Breul House, we must have someone who can tell him.”

  Mrs. Beardsley had known she was being buttered, but that didn’t diminish her pleasure. It was such smooth butter. Now she smiled at Pascal Grant. “I think we have enough chairs for anyone who might wish to sit. You go ahead to your movie, Pascal, and you needn’t worry about coming up later. We’ll put everything back as it was first thing tomorrow. Just don’t forget the alarm when you come back tonight.”

  “I won’t, Mrs. Beardsley. Good night, Mrs. Beardsley.” “Good night, dear,” she said absently, giving the room a final check.

  Everything seemed quite under control. Gas logs blazed upon the open hearth next to the glittering Christmas tree and together, they lent the great marble hall an almost Dickensian warmth and cheer. Paneled pocket doors between the drawing room and gallery to the left of the hall had been pushed back to form one long open room and a hired pianist was familiarizing himself with the baby grand at the street end of the drawing room. The caterers had set up their bar in the pantry, appetizing odors were coming from the oven, and Miss Ruffton had returned from the cloakroom wearing a red skirt shot through with gold threads, a gold ribbon in her hair, and a party smile on her face. Even Dr. Peake had changed his tie before drifting in to lift the domed lid of the largest silver chafing dish and sample a hot savory.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” he said, licking his fingers like a mischievous boy.

  Earlier in the afternoon, Mrs. Beardsley had slipped across the square and changed into her own holiday dress, a black wool sheath topped by a red Chanel jacket, her grandmother’s three-strand pearl choker and earrings, and an emerald-and-ruby pin that seemed appropriate for the season. Now she decided it was time to complete her own costume, to exchange her sensible low pumps for the patent leather T-straps waiting for her in the cloakroom.

  As she crossed the hall, the door swung open for Francesca Leeds, her windswept red hair swirling upon the collar of a dark mink coat, which she wore like a cloak over an evening suit of raw gold silk. “Show time!” she caroled.

  Uptown, along the broad avenues, Salvation Army Santas were jostled for sidewalk space by three-card monte dealers and free-lance Santas who hawked “genuine Rolex watches, jus’ twenny dollar—check it out” between nips from their hip flasks.

  Skaters twirled and circled before the blazing tree at Rockefeller Center; a string quartet sheltered in the street-level jog of a huge skyscraper to play German carols, while an artist chalked the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas’s Church with an ambitious choir of angels. Further up Fifth Avenue, wide-eyed toddlers, blissfully indifferent to the monetary worth of diamonds and rubies, were lifted up by their parents to watch Muppets romp among the gems in Tiffany’s windows.

  As customers streamed through the doorways of lavishly decorated stores, seasonal Muzak occasionally floated out to mingle with the Salvation Army bells. The vaguely religious
music fell equally upon the warmly dressed and upon the shabby bundles of rags who tried to hunker deeper into the few dark corners. For many, the street people added just the right tinge of guilt to the general thank-God-I’m-making-it aura of self-satisfaction, a sort of memento mori that made modern yuletide hedonism all the more pleasurable.

  In the art gallery just off Fifth Avenue, Oscar Nauman refilled his empty cup from the fat china pot on Jacob Munson’s desk, leaned back in the comfortable leather chair, and smiled at his friend. “I must be getting old, Jacob, when I prefer your hot chocolate to your cold whiskey.”

  “Ja, sure,” the old man jeered, unwrapping another of his perpetual peppermints. They were imported from France especially for him and were made with particularly pungent oils that bit the tongue and almost compensated for his forbidden cigarettes. “Wait till you are my age. At least you don’t have doctors telling you what you can drink. I look at you, Oscar, and I see still the boy who first came through this door with those charcoal drawings of Lila under his arm.”

  “The hair,” said Oscar.

  It was true. That thick mane of hair had turned completely white before he was thirty. His height helped, as did the probing intelligence in his intensely blue eyes, but it was the white hair that gave him such an aura of timelessness. Munson tried to look at him objectively, to catalog the fine wrinkles around his eyes, the lines beneath his firm chin, but it was hard to perceive the softening of age in that strong face. He did recognize that inward-turning melancholy however. Lila’s name still had that power.

  If only the woman would die, he thought. Die or be cured. God knows she’d tried to kill herself often enough in the past twenty-five years. Jacob sipped his cocoa and refrained from looking at Oscar’s left ear. He knew that the scars Lila’s knife had left there were almost invisible. And the scars on Oscar’s psyche should have faded as well, but how could they while the woman remained alive in that prison for the criminally insane?

  “I’m sorry,” be murmured. “I’m a stupid old man to mention her.”

  “It isn’t just Lila.” Nauman cradled the cup with the fingertips of both hands and gazed at it bleakly. “That’s the worst of this retrospective business, Jacob. I’ll have to look again at so many things I thought I was finished with. I don’t think I want to do that.”

  “For a real retrospective, perhaps not,” Munson agreed, stroking his wispy beard. “But the Breul House—this we will treat like a preview, ja?” he said coaxingly. “The space is small. Friendly. This you will do for your old friend?”

  “Preview?” Nauman growled. “Ja, sure. How much longer can I keep working, Oscar? I tell you alone: I am eighty-two. Most men my age are dead but I cannot retire before we do your retrospective.” He tried to sound frail and pathetic, but his small body was still too wiry and agile and there was a jaunty glint in his black eyes. “You are killing me.”

  “Ja, sure,” Oscar said sardonically.

  The office door was ajar and Hester Kohn, vivid in red and purple, stuck her head in. The lush scent of her gardenia perfume floated in ahead of her.

  “Car’s here,” she said, holding out Jacob’s coat and muffler.

  Munson beamed. “Good, good! Now we meet your lady fireman.”

  “Lady policeman,” Oscar grinned.

  Sigrid had intended to leave work early enough to allow herself plenty of time for a long hot shower and a leisurely hour to dress, but in the late afternoon, she’d been called to an unexpected meeting that ran past six-thirty.

  If she hoped to make Sussex Square before the party was over, Sigrid knew she could forget about that shower, much less changing into something more glamorous than the shapeless black wool suit and white turtleneck sweater she’d pulled from her closet this morning.

  She rummaged in her shoulder bag and found a tube of lipstick and some mascara. She’d been running late the day before yesterday and had planned to duck into the locker room here at work, then completely forgot about makeup as soon as she saw the papers that had accumulated on her desk over the weekend.

  Well, mascara and lipstick were better than nothing, she thought, and headed for the locker room where she washed her face and hands, pushed her hair into place and started on her eyes.

  It looked so simple when other women did it. And really, what was so difficult? A steady hand, a bit of bravura and voila!

  “Oh, damn!” “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  Sigrid whirled to see Detective Elaine Albee peering around the bank of lockers.

  “No.” She turned back to the mirror where she saw that the pretty blond officer was frankly staring at the smeared dark black rings around her eyes.

  Sigrid was torn with frustration and embarrassment. “I’m supposed to be at a cocktail party in Sussex Square in exactly thirteen minutes and I look like a goddamned panda!”

  “I was wondering if someone had given you a black eye,” the younger woman ventured. This was the first time she’d ever known the lieutenant to worry about her looks and Elaine wasn’t quite sure how to react. Lieutenant Harald could freeze a blast furnace with her tongue when annoyed.

  “It’s probably because the light’s so bad in here,” she said diplomatically.

  “This is ridiculous,” Sigrid said, grimly washing off the smeared mascara. “I’ll just call and say I can’t make it.”

  “Let me help,” Albee offered. “I keep a few things in my locker for emergencies.”

  “You have emergencies like this?” Sigrid asked curiously. “You always look so put together.”

  “Come with me,” Elaine grinned and Sigrid soon found herself seated on a bench in front of the other woman’s locker.

  Five minutes later, her eyes were expertly lined and shadowed, the planes of her cheeks subtly enhanced with blusher, her lips—

  “My lip gloss is wrong for you,” Elaine frowned. “I’m blond, you’re brunette. You need something richer than anything I have here.”

  Sigrid brought out her own lipstick. “Will this do?” Elaine uncapped it, examined it critically and handed it back with approval. “Perfect for you. How did you stumble—” She caught herself. “I mean—”

  “I know what you meant,” Sigrid said dryly as she leaned toward the mirror on the door of Albee’s locker and applied the lipstick. “It was the woman who cut my hair last month. She picked it out. I’ve just tried to follow her directions.”

  She capped the lipstick and looked at the finished result as impersonally as if her face belonged to someone else.

  “Uh, Lieutenant?” “Yes?”

  Elaine reached into her locker for a plastic bag with the name of a dress shop located on the next block. “I picked this up on my lunch hour today. It was on sale and looked like something that might come in handy during the holidays. You can borrow it, if you want.”

  It was a scoop-necked shell of gold sequins that glittered and sparkled like Christmas lights when Elaine lifted it from the bag.

  Sigrid made one weak protest, then shucked off her jacket and sweater, remembering just in time not to smear her lipstick. The sequinned top fit fine. Albee was curvier, but she was taller, so it balanced. With her jacket left unbuttoned, she looked almost glamorous.

  Elaine was getting into the sport of it now and pulled out some gold-colored costume jewelry: bracelets and a pair of earrings.

  Sigrid accepted the bracelets but regretfully confessed, “My ears aren’t pierced.”

  “You have to have earrings.”

  Another woman entered, greeted Albee by name, then gave Sigrid a formal nod and a curious glance.

  “I’m late,” Sigrid said, looking at the clock on the end wall, but Albee was lost in thought. “Quaranto!” she exclaimed suddenly. “In Records. She keeps a wad of costume jewelry in her desk.”

  “I have to go,” Sigrid objected. “Not without earrings,” Albee told her firmly and neither woman noticed that in this area it was now Albee who commanded. “I’ll meet you by the elevators on the fi
rst floor in two minutes.”

  She sprinted for the door. Sigrid folded her turtleneck and left it in her own locker, put on her heavy coat, then took an elevator downstairs.

  True to her word, it wasn’t much more than two minutes later that Elaine Albee raced down the stairs with a glittery dangling earring in each determined hand. Without a shred of self-consciousness, she stood on tiptoe to clip them on Sigrid’s ears, then fluffed her hair and stepped back to look at what she’d wrought.

  “Your coat!” she cried. “I think I know someone—” “No!” Sigrid protested, clutching her camel hair topcoat protectively.

  “Well—” said Elaine. “But take it off the minute you get there, okay?”

  “Okay.” Sigrid hesitated and awkwardly held out her hand. “Thanks, Albee.”

  “Any time, Lieutenant.” Feeling almost maternal, the younger woman watched as her boss hurried out into the winter night, earrings swinging with each long stride.

  “There you are,” said Jim Lowry when she returned to the squad room. “What’s funny, Lainey?”

  “Nothing,” she grinned. “Except that now I know how the fairy godmother felt when she sent Cinderella off to the ball.”

  “Huh?” “Skip it. Didn’t you want to make the early movie?”

  The cabbie had bent the speed limit, and Sigrid, who normally hated fast driving, gratefully added a little extra to her tip as he let her out in Sussex Square. It was only nineteen minutes past seven. Fashionably late, she told herself and hurried up the brick walk.

  Remembering her promise to Elaine Albee, she slipped her coat off as soon as she entered the Erich Breul House. There she was greeted by a dignified gray-haired woman in a red jacket and beautiful pearls.

  “Welcome to the Erich Breul House,” said the woman, directing her to the cloakroom. “I’m Eloise Beardsley, senior docent.”