Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  An icy draft of air met him at the kitchenette and he glanced across the dim stretches of the main kitchen to the passageway that wound out to his spiderweb door.

  A forty-watt security light burned over the stairs off to his left and something dark lay crumpled at the bottom. Half whimpering with terror, Pascal edged closer. “Rick?”

  A moment later, with the bat clutched in his hand, Rick emerged from the dark hallway into the main kitchen and found Pascal shivering over a twisted bundle at the foot of the stairs.

  “Dr. Shambley,” Pascal whispered.

  Rick drew near. The ugly little man lay face up on the tiles, his eyes stared unblinkingly at the light, his lips were drawn back almost in a snarl.

  “Is he dead?” asked Pascal.

  It reminded Rick of finding a dead snake in the road. Neither wanted to touch him. Rick nudged Shambley’s head with the bat. It flopped to one side and they saw that his shaggy brown hair was matted with blood. Rick knelt down then. There was no pulse in the man’s lifeless wrist.

  “Did you hit him?” asked Pascal. “I heard the bat.” “No,” Rick said sharply. “Someone else was here, too— in the hallway. I ran after them but the bat banged into the wall and I dropped it. Whoever it was must have pushed him down the stairs and then run away.”

  “Why?” “I don’t know,” Rick said grimly, “but we can’t leave him here.”

  “Why, Rick?” “Because they might think you pushed him. Or me.” “But we’ll just tell them we didn’t. I’ll call Mrs. Beardsley. Or Dr. Peake. They’ll know what to do.”

  “No!” Rick looked at Pascal’s beautiful innocent face despairingly. “Look, if you call them, you’ll have to tell them I was spending the night with you and they wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’re my friend.”

  “I know, but most people would think that was wrong.”

  “Wrong to have a friend?”

  “Wrong to let him sleep over with you. They’d make something dirty out of it. They think everything is sex.”

  “Oh,” said Pascal. He caught his lower lip between his teeth and nodded.

  “We’ll take him up to the third floor and leave him at the bottom of the attic stairs. Those steps are steeper. They’ll think he tripped and fell up there.”

  Still shivering, Pascal reluctantly agreed to Rick’s plan. Even though Shambley’s body was small, neither youth was strong enough to carry him very far. Instead, they rolled him onto one of the blue rag scatter rugs, loaded him inside the dumbwaiter, and hoisted him aloft.

  Up on the third floor, they carried him across the wide hall to the foot of the uncarpeted steps and Rick tried to arrange those limbs into a natural-looking sprawl.

  When they were finished, they lowered the dumbwaiter and, as a precaution, Rick stopped it at the butler’s pantry beside the dining room.

  Back in the basement, they were left with a patch of sticky blood on the tiles where Shambley’s head had lain. They swabbed up the worst with the blue rag rug since it already had blood smears on it. While Pascal got a mop and scrubbed away the rest of the blood, Rick bundled up the rug, stashed it in one of the storage rooms, then returned to Pascal’s room to finish dressing.

  “Aren’t you going to stay?” asked Pascal. His large blue eyes were frightened.

  “Listen, Pasc,” Rick said seriously. “If you want to stay friends, you have to do exactly what I tell you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  It took almost a half-hour before Rick was certain the janitor had their story straight: they had gone to a movie, come back and listened to jazz for a while, then Rick had gone home at nine and Pascal had fallen asleep without remembering to set the burglar alarm.

  “I could set it now,” Pascal said. “Better not,” Rick said. “Otherwise they’ll ask you if you checked to make sure Dr. Shambley was gone.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “You didn’t see Dr. Shambley.”

  “I didn’t,” Pascal agreed. “Not till—”

  “Not at all,” Rick reminded him. “You didn’t see him since before the party, okay?”

  “Okay.” Pascal looked up at his friend trustingly. “I wish you could sleep over, Rick.”

  “Another time,” he said and clasped Pascal’s shoulder as he stood. “I promise.”

  At the spiderweb door beneath the main stoop, he drew on his gloves, pulled his collar snugly around his neck, and stepped out into the freezing night as Pascal locked the door behind him.

  Shortly after eleven, Rick let himself into the apartment on the upper West Side. His grandfather usually went to bed early, but he was a light sleeper. Tonight, a muffled snore was all Rick heard as he crept past Jacob Munson’s closed door and gained the sanctuary of his own room. He expected to lie awake reliving the horror of the evening; yet no sooner did his head touch the pillow than he was instantly and deeply asleep.

  Mrs. Beardsley awoke near midnight with a painful leg cramp. Groaning, she pushed aside the covers and made herself stand up and walk around the room until the spasms passed. Her bedroom faced Sussex Square and, though she told herself it was childish, she lingered at the window to watch the tall spruce tree turn off its lights. The automatic timer was set for midnight, and there was something magical about catching the precise moment.

  There! The tree’s blaze of colored lights vanished, leaving only the old-fashioned gaslights to illumine the square. Pleased, she started to turn from the window when a movement diagonally across the park caught her eye. Someone was coming down the front steps of the Breul House. She strained to see.

  Dr. Shambley?

  No, Dr. Shambley was shorter than she and this man—if it were a man—was taller.

  The figure came down the steps, head hunched into the turned-up collar of the topcoat, and hurried along the brick walk. At the corner, the figure became recognizable as he passed beneath the electric streetlight there, turned west at the corner, and disappeared from her view.

  Now why, wondered Mrs. Beardsley, had Mr. Thorvaldsen come back to the Breul House so late at night?

  Sigrid turned in the night and found her bed empty. “Nauman?”

  The room was quite dark but there was a movement by the door. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Not quite five. Go back to sleep,” he whispered.

  She raised herself on one elbow and looked at the luminous clock dial in disbelief “Five! Why are you up so early?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and there’re things I need to do.”

  He came and sat on the edge of the bed and gathered her into his arms. She smoothed back his hair and felt the rough stubble along his chin line. “Come back to bed.”

  He kissed her then, a yearning, tender kiss that transcended carnal desire, and tucked the blanket around her body. “I’ll call you tonight.”

  Too sleepy to argue, she snuggled deeper into the covers.

  Zurich

  My dearest husband

  Mama’s health is so much improved this week that I begin to think I may soon be released from sickroom duty and may truly begin to plan our return. You will be surprised at how our son has grown since you last saw him in April. He all but tops my shoulder now.

  In these three short months, his German has become quite fluent. He has made great friends with Papa’s friend, Herrn Witt, one of the directors of the new art museum, and a visit to that magnificent institution is his dearest treat. Herr Witt asked him how he came by such a fine eye for art at so early an age and young Erich replied, “Es kommt von meinem Papa!”

  I will always regret, mein Lieber, that God in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to bless us with a dozen children, yet I can never give thanks enough for the angel-child He did lend us…

  LETTER FROM SOPHIE FÜRST BREUL TO

  ERICH BREUL SR., DATED 6.20.1899.

  (From the Erich Breul House Collection)

  VII

  Thursday, December 17

 
; SIGRID HAD DROPPED ALBEE ’S SEQUIN TOP AT A dry cleaners near headquarters and waited to have the claim ticket stamped paid, so she was a few minutes late for work. Jim Lowry, Matt Eberstadt, and Elaine Albee were already in the staff room with coffee and doughnuts and the morning papers. Sigrid had tucked the costume jewelry into a small plastic bag and she handed it and the ticket to the young blonde with a quiet, “Thanks again, Albee. And thank Quaranto for me, too.”

  Any other woman in the department and Elaine Albee would have asked how the evening went. With the lieutenant, discretion was always the better part of valor, so she smiled and said, “Any time, Lieutenant,” and went back to reading aloud the Daily News follow-up story on the “Babies in the Attic Case,” as it called the discovery of the infant remains found in that East Village row house.

  They had reprinted earlier pictures, including one of Detectives Harald and Lowry as police officers who appealed to the public for any information about former occupants from forty years earlier.

  “‘Baby killer still stalking East Village?’” read Albee. “‘Area residents mum.’”

  “Are area residents mum?” Sigrid asked, taking the last glazed doughnut in the box.

  Matt Eberstadt regarded the empty box with mild sorrow. Now in his late forties with a wiry, iron gray hairline that had receded to the top of his head, he’d been put on a strict diet by his wife Frances—“You’ll lose six more pounds before Christmas or no strudel for you this year,” she’d threatened—but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “The problem may be finding any longtime residents, talky or mum,” Lowry said pessimistically. “So far, the canvass hasn’t turned up anybody earlier than 1954. I think Bernie’s over checking records this morning.”

  Eberstadt shifted his girth in the chair and slipped his thumb into his waistband. Not as snug as last month, but not nearly loose enough to satisfy Frances. He met Lieutenant Harald’s gaze and hastily reported, “Those fingerprints we found on the newspaper have been on the wire almost a week. Nothing so far.”

  “And I don’t suppose Cohen has anything more for us yet?” Sigrid asked. “No? Okay, on to other matters.”

  The next twenty minutes were devoted to cases still pending, then Albee and Lowry settled into paperwork while Eberstadt went off to review his testimony for a court hearing.

  Bernie Peters returned with some names he’d dug out of public records. Now that his infant son was finally sleeping through the nights, he seemed to have more energy for work again.

  “That block was mostly Polish and Ukrainian in the thirties,” he said. “Still is, to some extent.”

  By cross-referencing real estate and tax records, he’d learned that the house was sold in 1934 to a Gregor Jurczyk, who’d converted it to an eight-unit tenement. Old telephone directories turned up a single telephone listed in Jurczyk’s name, at that address, until he died in 1963 and left the house to his sisters, Angelika Jurczyk and Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz. Even after his death, the telephone continued to be listed in his name until 1971, which would lead one to believe at least one of his sisters was still in residence there until the property was sold to a developer who went bankrupt in 1972, at which time the house was taken over by a bank.

  “And after that I didn’t bother,” said Peters. “I called a friend of mine in Vital Records. Angelika Jurczyk died in 1970, age sixty-seven. No death record for Barbara Zajdowicz.”

  Sigrid jotted the figures down on her pad. “That would have made her forty-four in 1947 when the last infant was put in that trunk. Any idea of the age of her sister?”

  Before Peters could answer, they were abruptly interrupted. A patrol officer in Sussex Square had requested the assistance of investigators at the Erich Breul House where a dead male had been discovered.

  “Where?” Sigrid asked, startled. “Sussex Square,” Elaine Albee repeated. “Wasn’t that where you were last night?”

  Patrol cars had driven up onto the bricked walk around Sussex Square and eight or ten uniformed officers clogged the doorway when Sigrid arrived with her team.

  “Too many unnecessary personnel,” Sigrid said crisply, as they entered the vaulted marble hall. “Clear them out, Cluett.”

  Detective Third Grade Michael Cluett was an old-timer from Brooklyn who’d been wished on her by Captain McKinnon. He didn’t seem to resent taking orders from a woman, but he was too close to retirement to worry about impressing anyone. His only ambition seemed to be finishing out his forty years on the force without screwing up. He hitched his belt up around a belly that sagged worse than Eberstadt’s and moved off to carry out the lieutenant’s instructions.

  Dr. Benjamin Peake was speaking to a uniformed officer at the rear of the hall and his handsome face grew bewildered at the sight of Sigrid.

  “Miss Harald!” he exclaimed. “I’m afraid we’re closed—”

  “Lieutenant Harald,” she said, pointing to her badge. She was almost as surprised to see him. They’d been told only that a man had been found dead under suspicious circumstances at the Breul House, not who the man was, and for no good reason she’d halfway expected it to be Peake. “Who—?” she asked him.

  “Dr. Shambley. A dreadful accident. Dreadful. Fell down the stairs. I’ll show you,” Peake said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Sigrid told him.

  Elaine Albee was beside her as she started up the wide marble staircase. “This is one of the places I keep meaning to come see,” said the younger woman. She noticed the rich details of the dress worn by the female dummy on the landing. “How did Breul make his money? Railroads? Oil?”

  “Canal barges, I think,” Sigrid said, threading her way past the uniformed officers who loitered in the second-floor hallway frankly sight-seeing at the moment. She could only hope they’d had the sense to keep their feet out of the actual crime scene.

  “That’s nice stained glass,” Albee said, pausing beneath the oval Tiffany window where spring flowers blossomed on this December day.

  Tiffany glass seldom appealed to Sigrid and she didn’t break her stride as she continued up the last flight of steps to the third floor.

  “Through there, Lieutenant,” said a patrol officer, who was posted to limit access to the rear half of the third floor.

  They passed through the frosted glass doors that were blocked open and at the end of the hall found Officer Paula Guidry already photographing the body, which lay sprawled on the bare floor at the base of some steep wooden steps. A frosted glass window high in the rear wall flooded the area with cold north light.

  Across the wide landing, a mannequin dressed in the long bib apron and starched white cap of an old-fashioned maid smiled at them serenely.

  Sigrid was glad to see that the end of the hall was roped off and that everyone seemed to be respecting the integrity of the crime scene. “Who was responding officer?” she asked.

  A uniformed patrolman in his late twenties stepped forward. “Officer Dan Monte, ma’am.”

  Without being asked, he flipped open his notebook and described how he’d been dispatched to number 7 Sussex Square in response to a call placed by a Miss Hope Ruffton, the secretary here.

  “This place opens at ten A.M. and a Mrs. Eloise Beardsley—I think she’s a volunteer—came upstairs at approximately ten forty-five and discovered the body lying face down just as you see it. She said she tried to find a pulse, then realized the individual was dead.”

  Officer Monte had arrived at 10:57, observed certain inconsistencies, and immediately requested investigators.

  “What inconsistencies?” asked Jim Lowry. “Not enough blood,” the patrol officer replied succinctly. “You can see from here—the back of his head’s pretty messed up and blood’s clotted in his hair, but it didn’t run down his face and there’s none on the floor beside his head. The stairs are bare wood and I guess he could have hit his head on one of the sharp edges coming down, but again, no blood.”

  Sigrid watched as Guidry indicated she’d taken enough pictur
es of the body and its immediate surroundings. While the photographer waited for someone from the medical examiner’s office to turn it over, the crime scene unit began processing the area around the body.

  “Who was in the house when you arrived?” Sigrid asked. “Just the secretary, the Beardsley woman, the live-in janitor, and the director,” answered Monte. “They’re all downstairs. The ambulance crew got here at eleven oh-two and confirmed death.”

  For a moment, Sigrid almost forgot and looked around for Tillie, the officer on whom she most relied, the one who usually acted as her recorder and could be trusted to note every minute detail.

  Unfortunately, Detective Tildon was still recovering from the bomb blast that had nearly killed him in October. He was home from the hospital now and healing nicely, but was not expected back at work till next month. Mick Cluett was certainly no substitute and Albee was already catching her share on other cases. Sigrid told Lowry he’d won recorder’s job and the younger man gave a mock groan as he continued to measure distances for sketching the scene.

  Bernie Peters, directing the application of fingerprint powder on the stair rail, grinned in sympathy.

  Cohen arrived from the medical examiner’s office and greeted her sardonically. “We gotta quit meeting like this, Lieutenant.”

  A few minutes later, he’d agreed with Officer Monte’s suspicions. “Lividity’s not much help if he was moved within a half-hour of death, but that wound bled like hell and there ought to be a puddle under his head. He didn’t die face down though. And see this?”

  Cohen pulled back the collar of Shambley’s shirt and Sigrid saw that a thin trickle of blood had run down inside to his back.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “So he was upright when he received the wound?”

  Cohen shrugged. “He did most of his bleeding while lying supine; but yeah, I’d guess the blow came while he was sitting or standing.”

  “He didn’t hurt himself in a fall?”