Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  “Yes.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  “I know he’s your friend,” Sigrid said. “And he seemed like a nice old man Wednesday night, but he wasn’t very cooperative today.”

  “You might be uncooperative, too, if you were eighty-two years old and just found out that your only grandson’s gay and your business partner’s a partner in murder.”

  “What?”

  In short terse sentences, Nauman repeated the things Munson had said at lunch.

  “He doesn’t have trouble hearing, does he?” Sigrid asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I just wonder if he misheard what Shambley actually said. Hester Kohn didn’t pass forged paintings; she forged Munson’s name on an inflated appraisal so someone could get a big tax write-off for a charitable donation.”

  Sigrid swirled the red wine in her glass thoughtfully. “Or at least that’s what she told me this afternoon.”

  As the waiter brought their check, she glanced at him in sudden mischief “By the way, Nauman, what are fungible formulations?”

  “Oh, God!” he groaned. “Buntrock’s been at you, hasn’t he?”

  She smiled. “Elliott’s all right as far as this new breed of heldencurators goes,” Nauman warned, “but aesthetic sensibility is only a meager compensation for the loss of innocence.”

  In his office at the Erich Breul House, Benjamin Peake sat in the deepest concentration he’d attained since assuming the directorship. Shambley’s Léger poster had touched off such an unlikely train of speculation. All the same…

  He found one of the house’s brochures and scanned it, but the information he sought wasn’t there; so he swivelled in his chair and took down a copy of Erich Breul—The Man and His Dream, that fulsome confection whipped up by the first director sixty years ago. He’d skimmed through it when he took over the house, but it seemed like so much puffery that he’d never bothered to read it carefully. He thought he recalled, though, that the book held a chronology.

  Yes, there it was. Erich Breul’s life laid out from birth to death. And there was Erich Jr.’s birth in 1890, his graduation from Harvard in 1911, his departure for Europe in the fall, and his fatal accident in 1912.

  Peake turned to the section on Erich Jr., but it was sketchy and, except when describing the youth’s Christmas visit with his Fürst relatives in Zurich, lacked necessary details. He had arrived in Paris in September of 1912 and died in mid-November.

  1912, thought Peake. Just before the Armory Show of 1913 blasted the American art world into modernism. Picasso was in Paris then. Picasso, Braque, Derain, Matisse, Juan Gris and, yes, Léger, too. All the iconographers of modern art poised on the brink of greatness. Nothing in the book suggested that the dutiful young Erich Jr. harbored bohemian leanings, but he was his father’s son so surely it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d seen an avant-garde exhibit in that brief two and a half months before he’d died.

  Could that be why Shambley had ransacked the house? wondered Peake. Was that why he wanted the inventory sheets and why he accused me of being too lazy to see what was under my nose?

  Peake replaced the book and turned back to the inventory file. Not the attic, he thought, the basement. He ran his finger down the itemized list and there it was: “B.8.4. Steamer trunk. EB Jr.”

  It was really too absurd, he told himself as he got up and walked through the inner door to the butler’s pantry. On the other hand, Shambley had been on his way down to the basement Wednesday night, right?

  Twenty minutes later, he closed Erich Jr.’s trunk in disappointment and brushed the dust of the storage room from his trousers knees. Well, you knew it was a million-to-one chance, he thought wryly.

  Nauman drove Sigrid home and when they carried in her packages, they found Roman Tramegra positively radiant.

  “Come and have some champagne!” he boomed. “I ordered a case for the holidays, but we must celebrate tonight! I did it, I did it, I DID IT!”

  “Did what?” asked Sigrid, disentangling herself from his effusive bear hug.

  “Sold my very first mystery story!” He waved a long blue check at them. “Mostly Male magazine bought it—five hundred dollars for fifteen hundred words. What a glorious, glorious Christmas present!”

  He shepherded them into the living room and filled two more crystal champagne flutes from a bottle that was by now nearly empty. On the table beside the ice bucket was an ornate and expensive-looking arrangement of blue spruce and white poinsettias.

  “You are celebrating,” said Sigrid, clinking glasses with Roman and Nauman.

  “Oh, those aren’t my flowers,” Roman told her. He fumbled through the greenery and located a small white envelope. “They came for you.”

  Puzzled, Sigrid opened the envelope and found one of Søren Thorvaldsen’s personal cards. On the reverse, he’d written, Please accept my apology.

  “Thorvaldsen?” Nauman growled, shamelessly reading the card over her shoulder. “What’d he do? Why’s he apologizing?”

  In creating from his own home “A Museum for the edification and pleasure of the public so long as its stones shall endure,” it was Mr. Breul’s sincerest wish that he might refute those cynics who hold that life has become squalid and ignoble in this new century of ours. Instead of the weariness and boredom induced by more formal museums, visitors to the Erich Breul House are charmed and refreshed by the air of peace and dignity and beauty throughout. Every room invites, every room welcomes the visitor as if he were a cherished guest in the private home of a gentleman of taste and discrimination.

  And so he is!

  ERICH BREUL—THE MAN AND HIS DREAM,

  PRIVATELY PUBLISHED 1924 BY THE FRIENDS AND

  TRUSTEES OF THE ERICH BREUL HOUSE

  IX

  Saturday, December 19

  THE DAY DAWNED GRAY AND FREEZING AND Sigrid’s mood wasn’t helped when she reached work and found that Mick Cluett had called in sick again and that Bernie Peters was taking a half day of personal leave.

  “One of his daughters fell off her bike this morning and knocked out a tooth,” said Matt Eberstadt.

  “I thought kids watched cartoons on Saturday morning,” Sigrid said, diverted by the thought that the Peters children might be part of a healthier national trend.

  “Their TV’s in the shop,” said Eberstadt.

  He described to her what they had learned of Shambley at the New York Center for the Fine Arts and how they’d found the posters he’d purchased at the Guggenheim.

  “Matt thinks Shambley might have been bisexual,” Elaine Albee chimed in. “And you remember what Mrs. Beardsley said about Pascal Grant feeling uneasy around him?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “Well, I decided to have another talk with him. He’s got all these reproductions of modern art up in his room—says they remind him of jazz. He’s really a nice kid and so good-looking, I wondered if maybe Shambley was trying to lay him.”

  “And instead of flowers and candy,” jeered Lowry, “he brought art posters?”

  “It could fit,” Eberstadt contended. “Shambley told the girl at the museum shop that he could hang one of the posters upside down and it wouldn’t matter. Sounds like he was talking about somebody two cards shy of a full deck, doesn’t it?”

  “A love triangle?” Sigrid said. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “Rick Evans said he and Grant were together when Shambley was killed,” Lowry nodded judiciously. “And we know what that means, but what if Evans knew Shambley was going to try to cut him out and—”

  “No way,” said Elaine Albee. “Oh, there might be some latent adolescent stirrings, but Pascal Grant says he and Evans were listening to jazz and I don’t think he was lying. I don’t think he knows how to lie. He’s such an innocent. Look how quickly he fell apart when we questioned him Thursday.”

  “You may be right about Grant,” Sigrid said, “but Jacob Munson is convinced that his grandson’s gay and he’s not h
appy about it.”

  She repeated the pertinent things Nauman had told her about his lunch conversation with Munson.

  “Oh,” said Lowry. “So that’s what he meant when he said we knew where his grandson was when Shambley was killed. And what he was doing there. I thought he was talking about them moving the body.”

  “I did, too,” Sigrid admitted. “I asked Grant about that again,” said Elaine. “He said Rick didn’t want anyone to know he’d been spending the night there because, and I quote, ‘People would say it was sex.’”

  “And you’re sure that it wasn’t?” asked Sigrid.

  “Not on Pascal Grant’s part,” Elaine said sturdily.

  They moved on to the possibility that Shambley might have tried to blackmail Hester Kohn and Benjamin Peake over Munson’s forged signature on an inflated tax appraisal, and considered that relatively minor crime in the light of Munson’s assertion that they had instead authenticated and sold forged paintings through the gallery.

  It was hard to know which was true, they decided, when everyone who’d known Dr. Roger Shambley agreed that he insinuated, suggested, and implied but very seldom said precisely what was on his mind.

  “Look at Thorvaldsen,” said Lowry. “A self-made millionaire like him, he has to be sharp, right? Yet, according to him, he went sneaking back to the Breul House Wednesday night and cooled his heels for an hour, all because Shambley offered him a deal. At least he thinks Shambley offered him a deal. But he doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know why.”

  “Or so he says,” Sigrid cautioned. “Don’t forget he also hinted to me that Shambley might have caused him a problem if he stirred up trouble right now. He might have gone there expecting to pay blackmail for all we know.”

  “We checked out Lady Francesca Leeds’ story,” Matt Eberstadt reported. “And Hope Ruffton’s. Both were where they said they were unless a lot of people are lying.”

  “That takes care of all the checkable stories,” said Lowry in his capacity as recorder for this case. He read from his notes, “Of the people there that night, the ones in the clear are Leeds, Ruffton, the Hymans, the Herzogs, Buntrock, that pianist and the caterer’s people. Munson, Hester Kohn, Thorvaldsen, Mrs. Beardsley, Peake, and Mr. Reinicke can’t prove their movements.”

  Lowry paused and Sigrid said dryly, “You’ve omitted two people: Oscar Nauman and me.”

  There was an interested silence. “For the record, Professor Nauman and I were together during the pertinent time period. If it becomes necessary, I can supply corroboration. Question?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Lowry. “Moving on then.” Sigrid laid out the blowups Paula Guidry had made of the great hall on Thursday morning. “As you see, the mannequin’s cane is missing. Until we have reason to think otherwise, I think it’s safe to say that’s our weapon. So whose place is worth a search warrant?” she asked them.

  They went down Lowry’s list, from Jacob Munson— “That old guy?” said Elaine. “He may be old, but he’s feisty,” Jim told her—to Winston Reinicke. “Lainey has a theory about him,” Jim grinned.

  Lieutenant Harald was not amused by their byplay. This was where she missed Tillie the most. By this time, he would have provided a timetable with each suspect’s movements and motives carefully logged.

  “Has anyone heard when Tildon’s expected back?” she asked abruptly.

  “They keep saying sometime after New Year’s,” said Matt. “I talked to him two days ago. He was supposed to go to Chuckie’s Christmas play last night, his first time out except to see the doctor.”

  Elaine Albee gave Sigrid a sympathetic glance. “You miss him, too, right?”

  “I miss his thoroughness,” she answered, with a pointed look at Eberstadt. “I don’t suppose Peters remembered that he was supposed to interview the Zajdowicz woman this morning.”

  Eberstadt patted his pockets. “Yeah, he gave me the name of the place and the time. I wrote it down.”

  He found the scrap of paper. “Haven Rock on Staten Island. They told him to come after eleven o’clock. That’s when the priest finishes confession. Want me to go?”

  “No,” Sigrid decided. “I’ll do it.”

  The rest home was in West New Brighton on the north side of Staten Island, so she took the ferry instead of driving to Brooklyn and crossing the Verrazano Bridge.

  The sun had burned through the earlier clouds and even on this cold December day, the open rear deck of the boat held many camera-snapping tourists. The ferry still offered one of the most spectacular views of lower Manhattan; and although city lights made it much more breathtaking after dark, daytime wasn’t bad either, thought Sigrid. She stood close to a bulkhead out of the wind and watched the stretch of choppy gray water widen between boat and shore.

  As the ferry moved out into upper New York Bay, away from the shelter of land, several passengers who had burbled about the smell of clean salty air abruptly fled inside to search for hot coffee.

  Most cameras were pointed back toward the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but a few telephoto lenses were already focussing on the Statue of Liberty off to starboard. No one was paying attention to Brooklyn on the port side of the boat and Sigrid was stirred by a sudden memory of her Great-uncle Lars. He had often treated her and cousin Hilda to rides on the ferry that once ran between Brooklyn and Staten Island before the Verrazano Bridge was built.

  If Albee or Lowry had been with her, she would have kept silent; but since she was alone, Sigrid turned to a nearby tourist and pointed toward what would still be the country’s fourth largest city if it hadn’t been annexed back in 1898.

  “Brooklyn,” she said.

  The Japanese woman smiled and nodded and a couple of her friends looked up at the thin woman with inquiring faces.

  “That tall building is the Williamsburgh Bank,” she said, imitating Great-uncle Lars’s clear didactic tone. “Five hundred and twelve feet high. The tallest four-sided clock in the world.”

  “Ah!” said the women. They spoke to their men. A ripple went through the group, then fourteen cameras swung toward Brooklyn.

  When Sigrid was escorted to the correct building, a priest was still working his way down Barbara Zajdowicz’s corridor, offering to hear those who wanted to confess and bestowing a quiet blessing on those who did not.

  The guide with whom a receptionist at the main office had provided her was a white-haired resident, gossipy and plump and proud of his continued mobility into his ninth decade of life. As loquaciously proud of Haven Rock as if he were a majority stockholder and she a prospective customer, Mr. Hogarty described the various facilities: how residents usually began with an apartment, moved into a comfortable single room in this building when they needed medical monitoring and could no longer manage alone, and, if necessary, finished up in a medical ward for the totally bedridden.

  “Me, I’m still in my own apartment,” Mr. Hogarty bragged, “but a lot of my friends are over here.”

  “Here” was a clean-lined series of interlocking squares. The residential rooms reminded Sigrid of a solid block set down inside a square greenhouse. Each room opened onto the wide window-lined corridor, a common area hung with flowering baskets and green plants and made homey with clusters of sofas and easy chairs all along its length. It was a pleasant area and one that invited residents and their guests to sit and converse and look out at the small courtyard garden. The clear glass windows were curved to catch every ray of winter sun, and several of the people basking in the bright sunlight exchanged greetings with Sigrid’s guide when they passed.

  As they found two unoccupied easy chairs and sat down to wait for the priest to emerge from Mrs. Zajdowicz’s room, Sigrid asked Mr. Hogarty if he knew the woman personally.

  “Barb? Oh sure. See, she used to be in me and the wife’s canasta club, but then she had that first little stroke a couple of years ago and got religion and—” He broke off and gave a humorous shrug. “I mean, we’re all religious here. Me and the wife, that�
�s why we picked Haven Rock. Because it’s run by the Catholics, see? But when Barb had her stroke, even though it wasn’t a big one—well, you probably know how that can turn things on in your head that weren’t there before?”

  Sigrid murmured noncommittally. “Well, that’s what happened with Barb, see? So she quit playing cards and started going to confession every week and to mass every time it was offered. The wife said to me it was like being on retreat with the nuns, the way she talked; but the wife and her’d been friends ever since the beginning—we moved into our place the same week Barb did, see, in the next apartment—and they stayed friends. The wife passed away last spring and Barb kept having more of these little strokes, see, so they moved her over here. I try to get over a couple of times a week even though she don’t know me half the time.”

  He shook his head. “Bad when the mind goes. The wife, she was sharp as a tack right up to the day she passed away. Beat me in cribbage that very morning, but Barb—Well, you’ll see. Although she’s usually pretty good after Father Francis has been here. You a friend of the family or something?”

  “I didn’t think she had any family,” Sigrid parried. “Well, she didn’t, far as I ever heard. Me and the wife, we both come from big families but we only had the two boys. Dick, he’s the oldest, he lives right here on Staten Island. Got grandchildren of his own, even. But not Barb. She just had a sister and brother and none of ’em ever had kids. None that lived anyhow.”

  Sigrid’s mental antennae quivered. “She had children that died?”

  “Not her. She told the wife her and her husband couldn’t have babies. But seems like the sister had a couple of miscarriages or the baby died getting born or some female trouble like that. She never talked about it till after her first stroke. Least that’s when the wife first mentioned it to me, see, ’cause Barb’d get on these crying jags about those poor innocent babies and how the sister oughtn’t to have done it.” He lowered his voice. “See, the sister wasn’t married.”