“Tell us again, please, what you did after the others left?” she was saying.
Mrs. Beardsley sighed and went through it all again: how all the guests had gone by eight-thirty, how she’d sent Dr. Peake on his way, how she’d overseen the caterers’ departure. She did not try to describe how she loved being alone in this house, how she could almost imagine herself a member of the Breul family, or how alive they often seemed to her. Never mind if Pascal were in the basement or Dr. Shambley in the attic. As long as one didn’t see or hear either man, one’s imagination was free to see and hear the Breuls.
“No,” she said again. “I didn’t go down to the basement because I thought Pascal was still out; and Dr. Shambley had made it quite clear more than once that he did not wish to be disturbed when he was working. I ascertained that all the candles were snuffed, then I unplugged the Christmas tree and went home without seeing either of them.”
Mrs. Beardsley braced herself for more questions on that point. Instead, the Harald woman sat back in her chair with a trousered knee propped against the edge of the gleaming table top and asked, “Why did Pascal Grant dislike Dr. Shambley? Some of the other docents have told us that he avoided the man whenever he could.”
“Dr. Shambley made him feel uncomfortable,” she hedged.
“How?”
Protective maternalism surged in Mrs. Beardsley’s breast. “Pascal Grant couldn’t hurt a fly,” she told them. “Surely you see what a sweet gentle boy he is.”
“That’s why we don’t understand what he had against Dr. Shambley,” said the younger detective, smiling at her across the table.
Mrs. Beardsley approved of the blonde’s tailored femininity, her coral lipstick and modest eye shadow, her Cuban-heeled boots and brown tweed jacket worn over beige-and-peach plaid slacks. So much easier to talk to, she decided. And really, weren’t policewomen rather like nurses? One could discuss anything with nurses.
“It was painful for Pascal to speak of it,” she said, bravely ignoring her own embarrassment, “but it seems there was a man at the shelter workshop where Pascal trained when he was twelve or thirteen.” Her voice lowered. “A sexual deviant, if you please! And he took advantage of his position to force himself on some of the boys.”
“And Shambley—?” asked Detective Albee. “Oh, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Beardsley. “When I realized how uneasy Pascal was, I cross-questioned him quite thoroughly, for I would have denounced Dr. Shambley had that been the case. No, no, I’m quite certain he did not approach the boy; but evidently, there was some physical resemblance between Dr. Shambley and the man who had once abused him. Something about their eyes, I believe. Poor Pascal. His reactions are emotional rather than reasoned. But you must surely see from this that his instinct is to retreat, not attack. He simply avoided the man whenever he could.”
The other two women were silent for a moment, then, absently tapping her pen against her knee, Lieutenant Harald said, “Getting back to your own movements, Mrs. Beardsley: you saw no one after the caterers left?”
“Not even,” added the other officer, “Mr. Thorvaldsen when you crossed the square?”
“I’m sorry, Detective Albee, but when it’s that cold, one doesn’t linger outside to pass the time of night with casual pedestrians whom one may or may not know. I simply didn’t notice.”
“So when you say that you went home shortly after nine and didn’t return,” said Lieutenant Harald, “there’s no one who can confirm your statement?”
Mrs. Beardsley inclined her head. “No one.”
Once more they asked her about seeing Thorvaldsen leave the house at midnight and then they thanked her for her cooperation.
One with a completely clear conscience did not register relief at having done one’s civic duty, Mrs. Beardsley reminded herself, and walked with quiet dignity from the library.
Sigrid glanced at Albee. “Well?”
“Oh yes,” said Elaine. “I could see her deciding that he was a bug that needed to be squashed and just doing it. But only if he was hurting her precious house. And he wasn’t.”
“That we’re aware of,” Sigrid told her. “We still don’t know where he found that glove case or what he took from it.”
“And we may never know,” sighed Jim Lowry, returning from the attic at the end of her comments. “The docents say there’re more than a dozen trunks and wardrobe boxes full of Mrs. Breul’s stuff up there and the inventory sheets don’t go into much detail. Just ‘apparel’ or ‘accessories.’ And the case might have held a jeweler’s box, but they don’t think there was anything valuable still in it because all her good stuff was sold when the house became a museum.”
Out in the long marble hall, there was a sudden babble and chatter of excited female voices and through the open doorway, they saw a bearded professor with a harried air as he shepherded his charges past the ticket table.
The art students from that Raleigh women’s college, no doubt.
“This might be a good time to break for lunch,” Sigrid said judiciously.
At the gallery off Fifth Avenue, Rick Evans mechanically set another painting on the easel, readjusted the two floodlights on either side, took a reading with his light meter, then focused his camera and clicked the shutter.
When he first came up from Louisiana in September, it had surprised Rick how strongly the art world depended upon slides. The first cuts in competitions were made by judges who looked at slides; grants were awarded, exhibitions decided, magazine articles written—all very often on the basis of photographic slides alone.
His grandfather spoke of this trend with contempt, but Hester Kohn merely shrugged her shoulders and asked Jacob to consider the cost of shipping fees, not to mention wear and tear on the artwork itself.
Rick set another large oil painting upon the easel. It looked a little topheavy in composition, all those purple slashes at the top and empty unprimed canvas at the bottom, and he checked the label on the back of the stretcher to make sure it was right side up. He no longer tried to understand each picture. All he cared about now was making a technically perfect slide.
In the beginning, his grandfather had brought a chair into the workroom and sat beside him during these photography sessions and talked to him of each work’s artistic strengths and weaknesses. “See how the dynamic forces play against the static, Richard,” he would say, his words lightly accented with German and the smell of peppermint. Or, “Why do you think the artist placed the yellow so low? Why to buoy up the work and to relieve the dark weights above. Contraction and relaxation, ja?”
And if the picture touched a chord, he would go off and rummage through books in his office and come back with illustrations that showed how Vermeer, though a Dutch realist of the seventeenth century, used the same approach; or how Picasso or Matisse had dealt with the same matter differently.
“Do you see?” he would ask. “Do you see?”
“Yes, sir,” Rick would reply, wanting to please. And he did see when his grandfather pointed it out, but when asked to critique a fresh picture, he always muddled it.
“Mein Gott!” Jacob had exploded one day. “The simplest thing in art and you do not see it!”
That day, he had grabbed Rick by the shoulders and fiercely swung him around to glare into his face. As their eyes locked, the anger had drained from the old man’s face.
“Paul’s eyes you have,” he’d said sadly, “and in you they are blind.”
After that, his grandfather continued to sit in on some of the sessions and to instruct as before, but the intensity had gone out of his lectures and he had stopped asking Rick to describe what he saw.
He could stand that, Rick thought, as he snapped the last exposure on the roll of film. What he couldn’t stand was the look that had appeared on his grandfather’s face when he and Hester had returned from the police station yesterday.
“You were there last night?” Grandfather had asked in a dreadful voice. “In that Schwachsinnigen’s bedroom?”
“Ja, sure,” his grandfather muttered wearily, and suddenly he looked his full eighty-two years, old and frail and utterly defeated by what fate had given him. He had touched the picture of his dead son, then sighed and laid it face down among the papers on his desk, swivelled in his chair, and turned his back on Rick. “Tell Hester to come in,” he’d said stonily.
He would stay until after Christmas, Rick thought, sliding a fresh roll of film into his camera. After that, he would go home and let his mother pull strings for a job with one of the state bureaus in Baton Rouge. He would walk back-country lanes again and take pictures of pelicans and swamps for wildlife calendars or tourist brochures.
And he would stop trying to deny to himself that he was what he was.
Next to a rent-controlled apartment, Zeki’s, just west of Third Avenue, was that most precious urban find: an as-yet-undiscovered, good, midtown restaurant. Even Gael Greene was unaware of its existence. Although celebrities often lunched there, knowing they would not be bothered by gawkers, New Yorkers came for the Turco-Croatian cuisine of delicately spiced lamb and indescribable breads, not to see and be seen.
It was nearly two and the outer room was still crowded as Oscar Nauman passed through. He spoke to a couple of friends, nodded when the barman said, “The usual?” and found Jacob Munson at his corner table in the back.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite his dealer. “The garage down the block was full. You order yet?”
“Nein.”
Oscar looked across the snowy white tablecloth and frowned. “You feeling all right, Jacob?”
The old man shrugged. He looked shrunken today. His face was nearly as gray as his thin beard and his brown eyes had lost their elfin luster.
“Not coming down with something, are you?”
“It’s nothing. A little cough. What are you? Nurse Nightingale?” Jacob asked irritably.
“That’s better,” Oscar grinned.
But as his glass of ale arrived accompanied by a martini, the grin faded; and when the waiter had taken their orders, he said, “What’s with the drink? I thought your doctors said—”
“They did. Lean closer, my friend, and I’ll tell you a secret: Jacob Munson is not going to live forever. Tomorrow he could drop dead; so why not a martini today?”
He lifted the glass and sipped long. “Then who’ll take care of my show?” Oscar asked lightly, determined to shake Jacob out of this puzzling mood.
“Elliott Buntrock will.” He caught the waiter’s eye across the room and signaled for another martini. “There’s a Buntrock under every rock,” he said bitterly.
“Jacob?”
“You’re a lucky man, Oscar Nauman. When you go, you will leave behind you good work that will honor your name.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Oscar demanded.
Munson sank back in his chair. “Roger Shambley was killed Wednesday night.” He twirled the stem of his empty martini glass back and forth between his wrinkled fingers.
The silence stretched between them. “So?” Oscar finally asked.
“So your lady policeman thinks my grandson Richard did it.”
“What?”
“She’s wrong, though. You will tell her this?”
“Jacob—”
“It was Benjamin or Hester or maybe both together,” he said heavily. “I don’t know.”
As the waiter brought their food and another martini, a paroxysm of coughing shook his small frame and Oscar told the waiter to take away the drink and bring his friend club soda with a twist of lemon.
When Jacob was breathing normally again, Oscar said, “Talk to me, Jacob. What’s happening at the gallery?”
“You know what Horace Kohn and I tried to build.” Jacob stared at the savory chicken stew before him. “We never said caveat emptor. Never! What we sold we backed with our reputation and for better than a half century, Kohn and Munson Gallery has been trusted. Never a stain on its name.”
“Yes.”
“You remember Paul?” he asked abruptly.
Oscar remembered Paul Munson as a handsome, sweet-natured kid. Bright enough, but not the flaming meteor he’d become to his father since his plane had crashed sixteen years ago. Odd to think Paul would be nearing forty if he’d lived. “Rick reminds me of Paul,” he said as he buttered a piece of crusty bread. “Same eyes.”
“They are nothing alike,” said Jacob, anger in every syllable. “Paul had an eye for art.”
“I meant in looks,” Oscar said mildly. “Same shade of brown. Besides, aren’t you being a little hard on the boy? He’s only been here three months.”
“Three months, three years, it wouldn’t matter. It’s his mother’s fault. Suzanne turned her back on the gallery.”
Oscar occasionally had trouble remembering that there were two older daughters, Suzanne and Marta. He vaguely recalled that both had earned doctorates in other fields, but Jacob almost never spoke of them. All his pride had been bound up in Paul and when Paul died, Paul’s friend, Benjamin Peake, had become his surrogate.
“She made him a photographer. She made him a”—his voice dropped lower—“a Schwulen.”
“A what?” asked Oscar.
The old man’s face twisted with shame. “A faggot.” Oscar ate silently. There were so many different sexual proclivities in the art world that he was surprised that Jacob could still be homophobic. Or did tolerance stop when it touched him personally?
“He was with the janitor that night. In his bedroom.”
“So what’s the big deal, Jacob? It’s not the end of the world.”
“Only the end of my line,” Munson said bleakly, drawing his fork through the sauce on his plate. “The end of the gallery.”
“Oh, come on, Jacob. If the boy doesn’t work out, Hester will keep things going. And it’s crazy to think she had anything to do with Shambley’s death. When Sigrid and I left Wednesday night, you and Hester were planning to share a cab back uptown.”
“She got out at East Forty-ninth. Said she was meeting someone at the Waldorf. Yesterday when she came back from the police station, I made her tell me who. It was Benjamin.”
Oscar stopped cutting his lamb and started to wonder if Jacob were experiencing the beginnings of senility. His voice was gentle as he asked if Jacob had forgotten that Hester and Ben—?
The art dealer interrupted with an impatient wave of his hand. “It wasn’t about sex, Oscar. Wednesday night, Roger Shambley accused Hester and Ben of passing a piece of forged art through the gallery. Yesterday I asked Hester of this. First she said no; then she said there was no way Shambley could have proved it.”
He pushed his plate aside with most of the food still un-tasted. “She may be a woman, but she isn’t that stupid, Oscar. Shambley wouldn’t have had to prove anything. A gallery’s word is its bond and if that word becomes a lie—”
He gave a palms-up gesture of hopelessness.
Sigrid arrived at the gallery with Jim Lowry shortly before three. The soft-voiced receptionist informed them that Mr. Munson had not returned from lunch and that Miss Kohn, as they could see, was busy at the moment but if they wished to wait?
“Yes,” Sigrid said and Lowry took a guide sheet from a nearby stand.
“Notebook pages?” he asked sotto voce. “Twenty-three hundred a sheet? Who’s Ardù Screnii? Never heard of him.”
Stunned, he began to circle the airy showroom, peering first at each matted and framed drawing and then at the price Kohn and Munson was asking for it.
Sigrid pretended to study the drawings, but she chose those that would give her reflected views of Hester Kohn, presently occupied with two customers. The dealer wore hot pink today and a chunky pearl-and-gold necklace.
From the conversation which floated through the nearly deserted gallery, Sigrid soon
gathered that the man and woman were a husband and wife from Chicago and that he was a commodities trader. She also gathered that they expected more from an Ardù Screnii drawing than pure aesthetics.
“Of course,” she heard Hester Kohn say, “you have to realize that the bottom line is whether you like a work. I mean I can’t tell you something’s going to go up.”
“Yes,” the man nodded sagely. “Yes, I know that but—”
“I can tell you how some things have gone up, but if you’re buying one of these purely as an investment—”
“Oh, no, we love art,” said his wife, a dark, intense woman in her early thirties. “Of course, my decorator’s going to kill me. My taste is changing. Growing. I was always so—um—traditional, you know? And here I came home with this huge modern canvas and my decorator wouldn’t let me hang it in the bedroom. Said it defeminized the room—it’s all traditional antiques, you know? So I put it in storage. But if I get one of these Screniis, then it’s coming out of storage. I don’t care what the decorator says.”
She was struck by a sudden thought. “I forget. Screnii was Albanian, wasn’t he?”
“Bulgarian,” said Hester Kohn. “Oh, good!” said the woman. “I’ve always believed in the Bulgarians.”
By way of the reflective glass, Sigrid saw Hester Kohn smile politely.
The man chuckled, even though he wasn’t quite ready to give up the practical. “Still, a Screnii is an investment, isn’t it? And a lot more fun than soybean futures.”
There was a contemplative pause. “Not that I’d even know what a soybean looked like if I came face to face with one.”
“Aren’t they like guyva peas?” the woman asked brightly.
Hester Kohn shrugged.
“Ah well,” said the man, “what does it matter as long as I can buy low and sell them high? Now, I think my wife and I are going to have to do a little commodities trading on which one of these Screniis we want.”
Corpus Christmas Page 18
