Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  Miss Ruffton shrugged imperturbably as the electronic typewriter continued to hum beneath her capable brown fingers. “You asked me why he was acting so smug Wednesday night. I’ve told you what I thought. Now do you want me to finish with these dimensions or don’t you?”

  “I do, I do!” he assured her. With a stilt-legged gait, he picked his way across the marbled hall and through the gallery arch to glare at a picture of dead swans and market vegetables which had caught his eye high on the far wall. A passionate proponent of the latest in art, he considered “preart” anything exhibited in America before the Armory Show of 1913.

  Kitsch, kitsch, and more kitsch, he thought, contemptuously dismissing the Babbages and Vedders. And all this recent fuss over Sargent. One of the few silver linings to the gloom of curating a show in this place would be the sheer pleasure of dismantling these stiff rows of gilt-framed horrors and seeing them stacked somewhere else for the duration. And he wouldn’t limit himself to stripping the walls either. Much of the furniture and all of the tacky gewgaws would have to go as well.

  Dressed today in black jeans and a fuzzy black turtleneck, he stood in the exact center of the long gallery with his arms akimbo, the tip of his right boot en pointe while the heel lay flat against his inner left ankle, and his bony chin angled forward and up as he considered the size and shape of the long room. This was his favorite contemplative pose and one that a clever photographer had once captured in black and white for a whimsical New York Today article entitled “City Birds.” To Buntrock’s secret gratification, she’d captioned his portrait Curatoris Hotissimus (Genus Arbiter Artem).

  As he mentally cleared the gallery and the long drawing room beyond of their resident pictures and superfluous adornments, Elliott Buntrock had to admit that it was actually a rather lovely space, nicely proportioned, architecturally interesting. Maybe wrong for Nauman’s work—the restrained sensuality of his middle period, in particular, would be killed by these ornate moldings and marble pilasters. But a Blinky Palermo or a Joseph Beuys, one of those early late-postmoderns—what a curatorial coup it would be to show them here!

  It was hard, though, to keep his mind firmly fixed on an exhibition some twelve to fourteen months in the future when murder had occurred less than forty-eight hours in the past. He had barely known Shambley. Rumor tagged him a ravenous careerist, all the more dangerous for the depth of his expertise and the thoroughness of his scholarship.

  Zig-zags of fashion being what they were these days, Dr. Roger Shambley would probably have had his fifteen minutes of fame, would have found a way to titillate the gliterati’s gadfly interest in turn-of-the-century American art, perhaps even, Buntrock thought with a twist of the self-deprecation that made him so attractive to his friends, have been featured in a whimsical New York Today photograph of his own.

  The telephone out on the secretary’s desk trilled softly. He was too far away to hear her words, but Buntrock saw her answer, listen briefly, then hang up.

  Hope Ruffton thought Shambley had spent the last couple of weeks looking for something specific and that his cocky arrogance Wednesday night meant that he’d found it. “He wanted the inventory sheets and he was rude about Dr. Peake’s ability to recognize authentic work,” Miss Ruffton had said.

  Buntrock had cocked his bony head at that statement, wondering how much Peake’s present secretary knew about the Friedinger brouhaha when Peake wrongly deaccessioned some pieces that later turned out to be authentic after all. And not only authentic, but valuable. No malfeasance had been charged, merely simple stupidity, which, in the art world, could be almost as damaging as a suspended jail sentence.

  Innocent though Miss Ruffton’s interpretation of Shambley’s insinuations might be, Peake and several volunteer docents were even now up in the attic with the same set of inventory sheets that Shambley had used, trying to duplicate the dead man’s discovery, if discovery it had been. They were aided by the strong back of that simple-minded janitor as they shifted trunks and furniture around the big attic.

  “Taking that list and checking it twice,” Buntrock whistled half under his breath as he ambled from the gallery into the drawing room, and from the drawing room back out into the great hall with its opulent Christmas tree. “Gonna find out if naughty Shambley took something nice.”

  Fully indulging his momentary mood of postmodern grand funk, he ignored the disapproving glance of an elderly docent who guarded the entrance against casual visitors. The Breul House was unofficially closed today except for a group of art students, who had booked a tour for this date several weeks ago and were due in this afternoon from a woman’s college in Raleigh. Buntrock looked around for Hope Ruffton and found her desk unexpectedly vacant.

  “Miss Ruffton went up to tell Dr. Peake that the police are coming back this morning,” said the guardian of the gate.

  “Very good,” said Buntrock. “I’ll just carry on.” Continuing his casual whistling, he circled the mannequin that stood below the curve of the marble balustrade. That masculine figure was still dressed in heavy winter garment’s suitable for a brisk morning constitutional and his blank face still tilted up toward the female figure on the landing as if he were being instructed to pick up a quart of milk and a pound of lard on his way home. Smiling at his own drollery, Buntrock ducked through the doorway under the main stairs.

  Let Peake explore the high pikes, he thought; surely there was a reason Shambley had died down in the basement. He remembered that when he and Francesca Leeds discussed logistics Wednesday night, she’d murmured something about storage racks in the basement and Peake had said more would have to be built because old Kimmelshue, the previous director, had filled most of them with earlier culls from the collection.

  The mind boggled. If Kimmelshue had kept in William Carver Ewing and Everett Winstanley, what in God’s name had he weeded out?

  At the foot of the stairs, Buntrock paused to get his bearings. Abruptly remembering that this was also presumably where Roger Shambley had got his, he moved away from the landing.

  To his left stretched caverns measureless to man in the form of a large Victorian kitchen; to his right, beyond a sort of minikitchen adjunct, was a closed door. Buntrock automatically tried the closed door first.

  The lights were on inside and as soon as he stuck his bony head around the door frame, all the colors and patterns of Victorian excessiveness beat upon his optic nerves and clamored for simultaneous attention. The rooms upstairs were models of harmonic taste and order compared to the chaotic anarchy of texture and design down here, with its clash of different cultures. Clinging to the door for support, Buntrock’s disbelieving eyes traveled from the syrupy farm-yard scene over the fireplace, to the modern art posters thumbtacked to turkey red walls, down to the layered scraps of patterned carpet on the floor.

  When he spotted the twentieth-century tape deck and portable television beside the nineteenth-century pasha’s mattress heaped high with silken cushions, the bizarre incongruities were explained. The janitor’s room, he realized.

  Of course. Lo, the wonder of innocence!

  With a shudder that lent his fuzzy sweater a fleeting resemblance to ruffled egret feathers, he pulled the door closed again and moved stilt-leggedly through the kitchen in search of old Kimmelshue’s storage racks.

  Upon entering the Breul House, Elaine Albee immediately headed for the attic to see if that art expert on loan from another police division had learned anything pertinent from Shambley’s papers, while Sigrid and Jim Lowry invited Benjamin Peake into his own office for yet a further discussion of his relationship to Dr. Shambley.

  “Relations were quite minimal,” said Peake. The dark suit he wore was impeccably tailored and a turquoise tie made his blue eyes seem even bluer as he leaned back in his chair with careless grace. “Jacob Munson put him up for trustee back in the fall. I think it was his first trusteeship and, just between us, it went to his head. Got it in mind that he was actually supposed to do something.”


  He laughed deprecatingly. “Well, of course, he was supposed to be using some of Erich Breul’s papers to document the price of original art works in the 1880’s, here and abroad, for his new book.”

  “Yesterday, Miss Ruffton implied that Dr. Shambley’s research had taken a different course,” Sigrid said, “and, if you recall,”—she paused to consult her notes—“you referred to him as a ‘busybody and a snoop with delusions of mental superiority.’ Would you explain that, please?”

  Peake smiled. “I thought I just did. Roger Shambley seemed to think he ought to be a new broom, clean sweep, stir up the old cobwebs.”

  “And did he?” asked Sigrid. “Stir up old cobwebs?”

  “He tried, but he was going about it all wrong. Now I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the Breul House’s financial difficulties but I assume Nauman’s told you—”

  “I prefer to hear your version,” Sigrid interrupted coldly. “Certainly.” Peake glanced at Detective Lowry, but that young man had his eyes firmly fixed on the notebook on his knee and his face was a careful blank.

  “Well, then, perhaps we should start with the terms of Erich Breul’s will,” Peake said and pedantically described shrinking endowments, capital outlays, and dwindling grants. “It’s simply a matter of attracting more money, but Shambley had begun to act as if the fault lay with the staff. As if we weren’t already doing everything humanly possible.”

  “Why did he ask for a set of your inventory sheets?” Sigrid asked.

  Peake shrugged petulantly. “We’ve heard that he made certain insinuations.”

  “Look,” said Peake defensively. “I don’t give a damn what you’ve heard. That was an honest mistake. There was nothing unethical or illegal about what happened when I was at the Friedinger. I was caught in the middle up there. And you can go through our inventory sheets with a fine-tooth comb. There hasn’t been a straight pin deaccessioned from the Breul House since I took over. If anything’s missing, it didn’t happen on my watch.”

  Cautiously, because this was the first mention she’d heard of the skeleton in Peake’s closet, Sigrid said, “It would help us clarify things if we had your side of what actually did happen at the Friedinger.”

  Giving his side took Benjamin Peake almost fifteen minutes, an intense quarter hour in which he used nearly every technical and aesthetic art term Sigrid had ever heard in order to rationalize his actions. When he ran out of breath, she mentally translated his account into layman’s terms for her own benefit.

  According to Peake, the Friedinger had been presented with an opportunity to acquire an important Ingres. In order to finance the purchase, it was decided to sell (in museum talk “deaccession”) some of the lesser pictures, including two cataloged “School of Zurbarán.” Consequently, the pictures were sent to auction and sold, and a month or so later, the new owner jubilantly announced that his hunch had paid off: exhaustive scientific and aesthetic analysis conclusively proved that the pictures were not merely “School of Zurbarán” but authentic works by Zurbarán himself.

  In view of the soaring values for that artist’s work after the Met’s splashy Zurbarán show, the two pictures were now worth more than the Ingres they were sold to help purchase.

  Peake’s immediate superior was technically responsible for approving the deaccessioning of any of the Friedinger’s holdings, so public ridicule fell heaviest on him; but since the action had been based on Dr. Benjamin Peake’s supposedly expert recommendation, Peake’s resignation was also accepted. Very unfair, Peake claimed, since he was pressured from above to find things to sell and had relied on the advice of subordinates who claimed to know more about the Spanish master than he had.

  From the way Peake glossed over certain details, Sigrid gathered that there had also been allegations of impropriety concerning other, lesser pictures that had been deaccessioned and sold through private galleries, but nothing quite as spectacular as the Zurbaráns.

  Once more Sigrid remembered Shambley’s cock-of-the-walk attitude Wednesday night, the electricity in his big homely face, the pointed look he had given Peake when he learned that she was a police officer.

  “Robbery, may one hope?” he’d asked. “How appropriate.” He had also informed her that publicity came in many forms.

  Publicity, Sigrid wondered, or notoriety?

  Her flint gray eyes rested on Benjamin Peake as she considered what he’d just told them about the Friedinger in the light of Shambley’s insinuations.

  Peake stirred uneasily behind his gleaming desk, unable to meet her gaze, and Lowry, who’d endured that unblinking basilisk stare more than once himself, felt a small twinge of sympathy for the man.

  At last Sigrid dropped her eyes and turned through her notebook for yesterday’s interviews. “We’ve been told that you and Miss Kohn had a later confrontation with Dr. Shambley in the library, a confrontation overheard by Mr. Munson.”

  “Our conversation was hardly a confrontation,” Peake protested with a nervous laugh. “It was only artsy hypothetical cocktail-party nonsense.”

  “What was his hypothesis?” asked Sigrid. “I’m afraid I really don’t remember.”

  Sigrid let it pass for the moment. “You stated that you left here Wednesday night around eight-forty?”

  “That’s correct,” Peake said, relaxing a little. “Mrs. B— that is, Mrs. Beardsley—volunteered to stay and lock up after the caterers had gone. There was no need for both of us to stay.”

  “Where was Dr. Shambley when you left?”

  The director shrugged. “So far as I knew, in the attic.”

  “Alive and unharmed?”

  Peake looked at her sharply. “Certainly! That’s right, isn’t it? I mean, he died much later in the evening, didn’t he?” He appealed to Jim Lowry for confirmation.

  “The medical examiner’s office says sometime between eight and eleven-fifteen,” Lowry told him.

  “Well, there you are,” Peake told Sigrid. “You saw him go upstairs around eight, didn’t you?”

  “He could have come down again before you left,” she said mildly.

  “Ask Mrs. Beardsley. She’ll tell you.”

  Sigrid nodded. “What did you do after you left here?”

  “Went home,” he said promptly. “It’d been a long day.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  Peake hesitated. “No.” He started to amplify and then stopped himself. “No,” he repeated.

  Before Sigrid or Jim Lowry could push him further on that point, there was a brisk knock on the office door and Mrs. Beardsley opened it without waiting for a reply.

  “Dr. Peake!” she exclaimed, her long face full of self-important concern. “Lieutenant Harald! Someone’s stolen Mr. Breul’s gold-handled walking stick!”

  Oblivious to the stares and speculations of curious docents, the tall mannequin stood as serenely as ever in the well of the curving marble balustrade, his face turned toward the female figure on the landing above his head. He still wore a gray pearl stickpin in his tie, but there was no longer a cane in his gloved hand.

  “Who saw it last?” Sigrid asked.

  Four other docents had gathered and they murmured together uncertainly, but Mrs. Beardsley said firmly, “I definitely remember that I brushed a piece of lint from the collar of his overcoat on Wednesday night and straightened his stick at the same time.”

  “When Wednesday night?”

  “Shortly before the party began. You know how one will look around one’s house to make certain everything’s in proper order before one’s guests arrive?”

  Her unconscious choice of words revealed her deep involvement in the place, thought Sigrid. She recalled glancing at the two mannequins during the party and again yesterday, but she couldn’t have sworn to the presence of a walking stick. She glanced at Jim Lowry, who shook his head.

  “Call Guidry and see if the mannequin’s in any of the pictures she took of the hall yesterday,” Sigrid directed. Then, turning back to Mrs. Bea
rdsley and Dr. Peake, she said, “Describe the cane, please.”

  Peake looked blank. “It was black, I believe, and had a solid gold knob.”

  “And was about so long,” said Mrs. Beardsley, stretching out her plump hand a few feet from the floor.

  “Would you like to read how it’s listed on the inventory?” asked Miss Ruffton, efficient as ever.

  She handed Sigrid a stapled sheaf of papers labeled Second Floor. A subdivision under Bedroom & Dressing Room—Erich Breul, Sr. was Wardrobe—Accessories, and Miss Ruffton pointed to a numbered entry: “2.3.126. Man’s ebony stick. 95 cm., two threaded knobs: (a) gold plate over solid brass, acanthus design; (b) carved ivory ball.”

  As Sigrid read the description aloud, Mrs. Beardsley said, “So that’s what that ivory thing is! I didn’t realize one could change the knobs. How clever.”

  “Gold plated?” Peake sounded personally affronted. Sigrid was silent, thinking of ebony’s strength and hardness. And when weighted with a solid brass knob at one end? Until they learned otherwise, Erich Breul’s missing walking stick sounded like a perfect candidate for the rod that had smashed Roger Shambley’s thin skull.

  Lowry hung up the telephone on Hope Ruffton’s desk and reported, “Guidry says she’ll have to make a blowup to be sure, but she doesn’t think the cane’s in any of the pictures and she’s got a long shot of this hall and doorway.”

  After telling the staff members that they were free to continue with their normal routine for the moment, Sigrid walked with Lowry over to the Christmas tree where they could confer unheard. The gas logs wouldn’t be lit until just before the students from Raleigh were due to arrive, so the hearth was dark and cheerless. Someone had already plugged in the tree, however, and a hundred or more tiny electric candles sparkled in the vaulted marble hall.

  “I suppose it would be too much to hope that the search team found a blood-smeared walking stick yesterday?” Sigrid asked, bending for a closer look at one of Sophie Breul’s glass angels.

  “’Fraid so,” Lowry said glumly. “They noticed smears on that softball bat in Grant’s room, but I didn’t hear anything about a cane.”