Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  The door of Barbara Zajdowicz’s room opened and a middle-aged priest came out.

  “How’s she doing today, Father?” asked Mr. Hogarty as he and Sigrid walked toward him.

  “Much as usual, Harry,” said the priest. He smiled and nodded at others across the corridor, but did not break his progress to the next room.

  As Sigrid started to follow Mr. Hogarty into his friend’s room, she saw an unwanted sight. At the far end of the corridor, a tall redheaded man in sheepskin jacket and cowboy boots with a camera case slung over his shoulder paused to compare a room number on the nearest door with something scribbled on his notepad. He saw her at almost the same instant and his homely face took on the look of an excited terrier spotting its prey.

  “Yo! Lieutenant Harald,” he cried and loped around a passing wheelchair. William “Rusty” Guillory of the Post.

  “Two minds with but a single thought.” His free hand fumbled with the zipper on his camera case. “Didja talk to her, yet? Does she know anything about the babies? What’ve you got for me?”

  “What’re you doing here, Guillory?” she stalled. “Same as you.” He took two quick pictures of her before she could protest. “Got her name off the deed and ran it by a snitch in Social Security.”

  Mr. Hogarty’s curious face appeared in the doorway behind her and the reporter craned for a view of the interior. “Who’re you?” Guillory asked.

  “Hold it, Guillory,” Sigrid said firmly. “You’ll have to wait out here. I was just going in to interview Mrs. Zajdowicz now.”

  “Talk fast huh, Lieutenant? If she’s got anything good, I can still make the second edition.”

  Without promising, Sigrid stepped inside the room and closed the door on Rusty Guillory.

  “Here she is now, Barb.” Mr. Hogarty’s gossipy nature was clearly piqued by the appearance of yet a second visitor for his old acquaintance.

  Sigrid stretched out her hand to the woman in the wheel-chair. “Mrs. Zajdowicz? I’m Lieutenant Harald of the New York City Police Department.”

  “Police?” breathed Mr. Hogarty.

  Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz bore the ravages of her age and her illness. Her short straight hair was completely white, her blue eyes were faded, and the years had cut deep grooves in her gray face, but time could not efface the basic structure of her rangy frame and there was a residual impression of strength in her prominent jaw and broad brow. She wore a maroon skirt and cardigan, a white blouse that was pinned at the collar with a lovely cameo, and sturdy black lace-up oxfords. The footrests of her chair were folded up so that her feet touched the floor as she walked herself forward to give Sigrid her left hand.

  Her hand was considerably larger than Sigrid’s and bare of rings, except for a wide gold band that hung loosely on her fourth finger, trapped forever by the enlarged knuckle. Her right hand held a rosary and lay curled in her lap in what Sigrid recognized as stroke-induced weakness; and when she spoke, her words were so slurred that it was difficult to understand.

  “She says did Angelika send you?” interpreted Mr. Hogarty, who’d had more practice. “That’s her sister.”

  “I know,” said Sigrid. “No, Mrs. Zajdowicz. I came because a trunk was found in the attic of your old house a few days ago. Can you remember? Do you know anything about it?”

  The old woman looked at Sigrid for a long moment, then made a gesture with her left hand. “Go ’way, Harry,” she said thickly.

  “But, Barb—” be protested, his face dropping.

  Again came that dismissive shooing wave of her hand. “Out.”

  Sigrid detained him for a moment as he neared the door. “There’s a reporter out there, Mr. Hogarty. He’ll probably ask you questions, try to make you speculate about certain things which he may later twist for his own purposes. I’d caution you to choose your words carefully.”

  Mr. Hogarty brightened immediately and bounded through the door with such eagerness that Sigrid realized she should have saved her breath.

  She sat down beside Mrs. Zajdowicz. “Angelika?” asked the woman. “Your sister’s dead, Mrs. Zajdowicz. Like the babies.”

  “Ah.” She closed her eyes and her rawboned fingers began to tell the beads of the rosary. A moment later, Sigrid saw tears seep from beneath those wrinkled lids.

  “Mrs. Zajdowicz. Barbara,” she said gently. “Were they your sister’s babies?”

  The old woman nodded. Her eyes opened. “Sister. Sorry. So sorry, Sister. Father… bless me, Father, for she has sinned—” She crossed herself with her left hand and her words became unintelligible.

  “Who sinned, Barbara?” Sigrid asked urgently. “Angelika? What happened to Angelika’s babies?”

  “Died,” Barbara Zajdowicz said, enunciating as clearly as she could. “Wrong… but we… couldn’t let… anyone know. Gregor. He kill her.”

  “Your brother Gregor killed the babies?”

  Mrs. Zajdowicz twitched her rosary beads impatiently. “No. Gregor. Such shame…on family. We said… woman troubles. Gregor… stayed downstairs.”

  “You’re saying Gregor would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was pregnant? So you kept it from him? How?”

  “She… fat like me.”

  Too much newsprint had been devoted to stories of large women suddenly surprised to find themselves giving birth for Sigrid to doubt that a sister built like Mrs. Zajdowicz could have gotten away with illicit pregnancy.

  “Who was the father?” Sigrid asked. “Was it your husband? Karol?”

  “Karol…he cried… babies for you, he said. But every time… died.”

  Her words were still badly slurred, but Sigrid was becoming used to her speech patterns.

  “How did the babies die, Barbara?”

  “Sin… she sinned… Karol…”

  “Did Angelika kill her own babies?” Sigrid asked. “They should been… mine! Not… Angelika’s.” Her rheumy blue eyes glared out at Sigrid, then they filled with tears. “Poor… little babies. So little. The shame… Sister—”

  She held out her rosary to Sigrid. “Pray me, Sister,” she pleaded and Sigrid wasn’t sure if Mrs. Zajdowicz had confused her with Angelika or a nun, since she was dressed today in navy slacks and a boxy black jacket.

  “Who put those babies in the attic?” Sigrid asked. “You or Angelika?”

  “Pray me, Sister,” Mrs. Zajdowicz wept. “Pray me.” Sigrid looked around helplessly, then saw the call bell on the wall beside the woman’s bed. She went over and pushed it. While she waited, she took a shiny white card from her purse and gently pressed it against Barbara’s fingers; first the left hand, then her curled right hand. After the card was carefully tucked into her notebook, she sat holding the sobbing woman’s hands until the nurse came.

  “What’s going on?” said Rusty Guillory, when Sigrid emerged. He had managed a couple of hasty pictures of the distrait Barbara Zajdowicz before the nurse closed the door again. “Didja give her a heart attack or something?”

  A small crowd had gathered in that section of the corridor and as Sigrid’s eyes fell upon Mr. Hogarty, the plump little man looked embarrassed and scuttled away.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” called Guillory. “We didn’t finish.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Sigrid. “Come on, Guillory. Give it a rest.”

  “Then give me a statement,” he countered. “What’d she tell you?”

  “She’s confused and unhappy,” Sigrid told him. “She’s had several strokes, her speech is badly slurred, and her mind’s not very clear.”

  “But you got something out of her. I know you, Lieutenant.”

  Sigrid looked at the circle of avid faces that ringed them. Resigned, she said, “Put your coat on and let’s go. You want to make your deadline, don’t you?”

  They walked through the now-buzzing corridor. “It’s not much of a story and we’ll probably never know what really happened,” she warned.

  “That’s okay,” Guillory said cynically. “Feel free to speculate. I’
m going to.”

  “She and her husband lived there with her unmarried sister Angelika and their bachelor brother Gregor. She says the babies were Angelika’s and that they all died at birth. That’s all I could get out of her.”

  “Was it incest, adultery, or good old-fashioned fornication?” Guillory went right to the tabloid heart of things.

  “She says her brother would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was bringing shame on the family name,” Sigrid said. “I believe her.”

  “What about the husband?” he persisted. “I can’t go on record about that. She wasn’t clear enough.”

  “So who killed the babies?”

  “Fifty years ago, no prenatal care, unattended birth, they could have just died,” said Sigrid. “Why does it always have to be murder?”

  “Murder sells more papers. You know that, Lieutenant. Besides, didn’t the M.E.’s office say the mummified one was born alive?”

  “But there’s still nothing to say it wasn’t a natural death.” She pushed open an outer door and walked toward the parking lot. Despite the noontime sun, the wind was biting.

  “So who put them in the attic?” asked Guillory, looking at his watch. “Santa Claus?”

  Sigrid shrugged. “Sorry, Guillory. I’m all out of speculations.”

  Rusty Guillory slung his camera case inside the car. “If I make the next ferry, I’ll just squeeze in under the next deadline. Need a lift?”

  “No, thanks, I have a car.”

  She waited until Guillory’s car was out of the lot before walking back to the dark-clad man who lingered indecisively near an evergreen tree beside the gate. “Father Francis, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. They say you’re a police officer.”

  “Lieutenant Harald,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag for her gold shield.

  “They say you’re here because of those poor baby skeletons found over in New York. That it was Barbara Zajdowicz’s old house?”

  “Yes.”

  The priest was perhaps half an inch shorter than she and his troubled eyes were nearly level with hers.

  “Father Francis, did she ever discuss this with you? About her sister? Or the infants?”

  He drew back. “I can’t answer that.”

  “I’m not asking you to break the sanctity of confession,” Sigrid assured him. “I meant outside confession.”

  He hesitated. “I really never talked with her until after her first stroke. You have to understand, Lieutenant. Strokes, Alzheimer’s, hardening of the arteries—sometimes it’s hard for them to keep in touch with reality. Or for me to know where fantasy begins. Everything’s so different today. People have babies out of wedlock all the time—actresses, singers, career women—no one hides it anymore. Sometimes we forget what it was like fifty years ago.”

  “Some things haven’t changed though, have they, Father Francis?” Sigrid said. “Things like jealousy and spite?”

  “No,” he sighed. “She killed them, didn’t she? They weren’t born dead, no matter what she told Angelika.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” He moved away. “I can’t talk to you about this.”

  Back at the office, Sigrid gave Bernie Peters the card she’d used to take Barbara Zajdowicz’s fingerprints. Peters stopped talking about his daughter’s newly reimplanted front tooth and developed the latents with special emphasis on the old woman’s right fingers, which he then compared to the prints found on the old newspapers.

  At a little after two, he brought them into Sigrid’s office, where she was going over the case with Lowry’s records.

  “We wouldn’t go to court without finding more characteristics,” he said, “but see the double bifurcation at one o’clock on both of these latents and the delta at high noon?”

  Sigrid looked through the magnifying glass and agreed they seemed identical. “So what do we have? Evidence that in 1938, Barbara Zajdowicz put one of the bodies in that attic trunk. A woman who’s now eighty-seven, mentally confused, and confined to a wheelchair.” She sighed. “Write it up as soon as you can, Peters, and we’ll send it along to the DA’s office. Let them decide what to do about it.”

  Elaine Albee and Matt Eberstadt breezed in at two-thirty from their interview with Søren Thorvaldsen, flushed and excited by a brief taste of life aboard a Caribbean cruise ship.

  “It was getting ready to sail when we caught up with him—the Sea Dancer,” Albee reported. “And he invited us to ride out into the bay and take his launch back with him. He wanted to hear how the engines ran or something.”

  “They’d just installed a new generator,” said Eberstadt. “So he gave us a pass and we got to stand on deck and throw confetti and streamers and listen to the band play ‘Anchors Aweigh’ with a reggae beat.”

  “They had a buffet already set out like you wouldn’t believe,” Eberstadt told Peters, who was listening enviously. “Frances would put me on lettuce and water till Christmas if she ever heard about the salmon and—”

  “Oh, and those luscious chocolate-dipped strawberries and pineapple slices!” Albee interrupted him.

  “Then we went up to the bridge—what a view!—and Thorvaldsen gave us a tour of the owner’s suite, one flight down with its own private deck. Talk about luxury!”

  “We saw one of Oscar Nauman’s paintings,” said Elaine Albee, with a wary glance at Sigrid. She wondered how the lieutenant would react if they told her that Thorvaldsen had tried to pump them about her. “It was very colorful.”

  “Did you happen to remember why you were there?” Sigrid asked coldly.

  Eberstadt virtuously produced Thorvaldsen’s typed and signed statement. “He had a stenographer come up to his suite and went through the whole evening again, but it doesn’t add doodly to what he told you Thursday night.”

  He read from Thorvaldsen’s statement, “‘Dr. Shambley implied that it could be to my benefit if I met with him again that night at the Erich Breul House. I assumed he meant to offer me the private opportunity to add something choice to my art collection. As I have occasionally bought works of art under similar circumstances, this did not strike me as an unusual request. I cannot say positively that this is what he meant. I saw no such piece of art that night, nor did I see Dr. Shambley. I went in through the unlocked front door, waited in the library for approximately one hour, and left at midnight without seeing or speaking to anyone.”

  Sigrid had listened silently with her elbows and forearms folded flatly on the desk.

  “When we first got there,” said Albee, “we talked with Thorvaldsen’s secretary, a Miss Kristensen. She gave us the name of a security guard who was on outside duty Wednesday night, Leon Washington. She says Washington saw Thorvaldsen enter his office building around ten-thirty and then leave again about fifteen minutes later.”

  “Convenient,” Sigrid said.

  Elaine Albee shrugged. “Who knows? We stopped by his place on our way back here and woke him up. He wasn’t happy about telling us, but he says he’d stashed a coffee thermos in an empty warehouse across the street and was taking an unauthorized coffee break—”

  “Coffee, my ass,” Eberstadt interjected. “—so he saw Thorvaldsen but Thorvaldsen didn’t see him. And yeah, he may be lying, but he seemed too worried about the possibility of losing his job to be acting.”

  Matt Eberstadt nodded. “He said Miss Kristensen promised she wouldn’t let it get back to Thorvaldsen and that’s all he really seemed to care about.”

  Bernie Peters sighed. “If the guard’s telling the truth, that definitely puts Thorvaldsen out.”

  “Whether or not he’s lying, it’s still hard to put Thorvaldsen there.” Sigrid leaned back in her chair with her left knee braced against the edge of the desk. “Francesca Leeds said she left him between ten and ten-fifteen; Evans and Grant said they found Shambley’s body between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. Even if he had the full half hour to get back there, from the restaurant four blocks away, get inside, kill Shambley and then leave by the
basement door, it’d be awfully tight.”

  “And why would he hang around there for another hour and a half?” asked Elaine Albee.

  “Looking for the picture Shambley promised him?” Lowry guessed.

  “With Grant and Evans running all over the place?”

  “Up and down the back stairs,” Lowry reminded her. “They never said they were in the main rooms.”

  Despite Lowry’s reservations, the others were willing to strike the Danish ship owner from their dwindling list.

  “Reinicke, Munson, Kohn, Beardsley, and Peake,” said Lowry. “I move to strike Reinicke, too. I can’t see him tying the dog up somewhere while he goes in and bops Shambley over the head just because the guy sneered at his taste in art. He didn’t seem to be that thin-skinned.”

  Sigrid listened with only half an ear as they bounced theories off each other. “That’s probably all it really was,” she told them.

  “Ma’am?” said Eberstadt. “What Lowry said about a bop over the head. A simple whack with a weighted cane that happened to be handy. One blow, not a shower of them. If Shambley’s skull had been half as thick as his skin, he might not have suffered anything other than a simple concussion.”

  “Unpremeditated,” mused Albee. “He was at the party for less than an hour,” Sigrid said “but in those few minutes, he insulted Reinicke and Thorvaldsen and half threatened Kohn and Peake with public disgrace. He didn’t seem to care what he said; but at a party, of course, he could get away with it. Although,” she added, “Thorvaldsen almost threw a punch at him.”

  “So,” Peters said, “if he mouthed off to the wrong person—”

  “Bop!” Lowry grinned. “If we eliminate Reinicke,” said Sigrid, “I could see Benjamin Peake or Hester Kohn flying off the handle. And even Mrs. Beardsley or Jacob Munson might be pushed. But why then and there?”

  They didn’t see her point. “Look,” she said. “Assume that Shambley says something that so enrages or scares the killer that he or she grabs up the cane and starts after him. At that point, Shambley’s already passed through the door under the main staircase and started down the basement stairs when the blow lands on his head. Why? His study was in the attic. Elliott Buntrock went through the paintings stored down there and he’s certain that none of them are worth much more than the canvas they’re painted on. So why was Shambley going to the basement?”