“Only the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
“Certainly not.”
CHAPTER
19
Built in the 1860s, the Erich Breul House was now a private museum that sat on an expensive piece of real estate in the East Twenties. According to its brochure, it contained “authentic late-Victorian furnishings and an interesting, if uneven, collection of late nineteenth-century American and European art.”
“Uneven” had been a kindness, thought Dr. Dorothy Reddish, who was beginning to wonder if she’d made a serious career mistake in accepting the position of director here.
With her shiny new Ph.D. in art history and a strong major in business administration, it had seemed like such a juicy plum, a first stepping-stone to running an important museum sometime in the not-too-far future.
Now she faced the board members gathered around the mahogany dining table where the Breuls had once hosted glittering dinner parties and touched the records that lay on the table before her. One card file held an inventory of the furnishings, another listed the art works. A ledger book was devoted to finances.
She took off the gold-rimmed reading glasses that gave her youthful face a touch of gravitas and laid them atop the ledger. “Since coming here, I’ve gone through all the current records and I’m afraid the results are quite bleak. I know you didn’t hire me to dismantle this wonderful house, but unless we sell some of the important pieces, there is simply no way it can continue. Victorian furniture isn’t highly valued these days, but the Whistler portrait, for instance, would probably bring enough to keep the house limping along for another two or three years.”
“Sell our Whistler?” exclaimed Mrs. Beardsley, a longtime docent and fairly recent member of the board. “But that’s one of the main works that people come to see.”
“Which brings me to another point,” said Dr. Reddish. “Except for school groups and the occasional tour groups, the house draws less than a hundred visitors a week. If not for you and some of our hardworking docents, we couldn’t afford to stay open at all. Right now, we’re open from Tuesday till noon on Saturday. I propose that we cut Tuesdays from the schedule and reduce our hours on some of the other days.”
“Would more advertising help?” asked one of the directors.
“It might,” she agreed, “but that takes money, too.”
Mrs. Beardsley heaved a great sigh. “If only we could have held that Oscar Nauman retrospective.”
“Attendance did pick up after Dr. Shambley’s death,” said one timorous lady.
Mrs. Beardsley gave her a withering glance. “Unfortunately, Marigold, we cannot rely on having someone murdered here every week.”
Not that she herself had been grief-stricken by the man’s death. He had been arrogant and condescending and openly contemptuous of dear Mr. Breul, as if this collection and this jewel of a house would barely merit a footnote in any catalog of the city’s cultural holdings. To tempt a scholar of his standing, though, he had been given a seat on the board that should have rightfully gone to her.
“Besides,” she said, “those people were sensation seekers. The Nauman retrospective would have introduced a whole new audience to the house.”
Dr. Reddish rather doubted that it would have made a permanent difference. Devotees of abstract twentieth-century art would hardly come back to examine the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century pictures that lined the walls of this mansion. Rather than be guided by knowledgeable connoisseurs, Erich Breul had followed his own taste. Happily, that taste had been eclectic enough to include several true gems like the Whistler portrait. Nevertheless, most of the art he had collected was second or third rate. From what she had read of his letters and diaries, Mr. Breul had probably been a decent man, a good husband and father, and certainly civic-minded, but he hadn’t held office or swashbuckled his way to obscene wealth, so there was nothing in his personal history to excite enough interest to bring visitors flocking to his house.
The meeting ended with permission to cut Tuesday openings and a “Do the best you can” from the kindly chairman of the board, who brightly proposed that everyone give it serious thought over the summer and be ready at the fall meeting to suggest new schemes to save the house.
After seeing them out, Dr. Reddish paused at the reception desk in the great entrance hall. “They just don’t get it,” she said pessimistically.
Hope Ruffton, her highly efficient assistant who was in place here when she arrived, gave a sympathetic smile. “One bit of good news, though.” She handed the director a letter from the morning mail. “The McAndrews Foundation is going to give us the grant you applied for.”
“Really? That’s grand!” But her face fell as she read the letter. “It’s only for one year, not two.”
“Contingent on results,” said Ruffton. She hesitated. She liked her new boss. It was refreshing to work for someone who didn’t automatically assume that she was basically stupid because she was female and black. The former director had barely listened when she had tried to bring something she’d noticed to his attention.
“The thing about Dr. Shambley…” she said.
“Yes?”
“You know that he was brought on board here to research and write a comprehensive history of the house and its contents?”
“Mrs. Beardsley told me that when I first came. I gather she disliked him.”
“Understatement of the year, I’m afraid. He acted as if he was slumming to come here and you know how crazy she is about this place. And how protective.”
Reddish nodded encouragingly.
“Well, a week or so before he was killed, something changed. He started plundering through all the records with an intensity I hadn’t seen before. Not just the papers, but opening drawers, looking in cabinets. It was almost as if he’d caught a hint about something important and wanted to chase it down.”
“Important?”
“I know that sounds vague, but he had set up a sort of office in the attic where all of the Breul business papers going back to the early eighteen-hundreds are stored. I think he might have read something that set him off, because the night that he was killed, there was a reception here. He insulted one of our major donors and almost came to blows with the man who planned to underwrite the Nauman exhibit. There was a recklessness about him—as if he no longer had to care what anyone thought because he was going to be above all that and out of anyone’s reach. Like he’d found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you know? Smug and cocky and bursting with a secret he was dying to tell.”
“Only he died without telling?”
“I guess so. The police were all over the place and I thought maybe whatever it was would come to light, but then they arrested his killer and nothing more came of it.”
“So whatever excited Dr. Shambley might still be here?”
“It’s probably nothing,” Hope Ruffton said.
“Did he leave any notes?”
“Not that I’ve found. Just a briefcase that his brother took. I looked through it and through the desk he was using upstairs, but I didn’t find anything.”
Dr. Reddish sighed. “I saw three full file cabinets of business records from Erich Breul’s shipping company up there.”
She sighed again.
“Want me to go through them?” asked Ruffton.
“Thanks, but there’s no point in both of us wasting time. I’ll do it. Get it out of the way before I start a full hands-on, touch-everything inventory.”
As two matronly ladies approached the reception desk, wallets in hand, a docent who had been reading the morning newspaper on a nearby bench put it aside and stood ready to guide them through the house once Ruffton had taken their money. The docent would also make sure that they remained behind the velvet ropes and that nothing belonging to the house left in one of those capacious handbags.
Before heading upstairs to read through bills of lading and contracts to build more barges, Dr. Reddish impulsively call
ed the mentor who had pulled a few strings to get her this job. “I know it’s short notice, Elliott, but could we possibly meet for lunch?”
To her delight, he was practically in the neighborhood. “It’ll have to be a quick lunch, though. What about a picnic in your park?” he said. “I’ll pick up some sushi.”
“And I’ll find the key. One o’clock?”
“Works for me,” he said.
Denny Kapps pulled on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and took his place behind the steam table as the doors opened to let in the hungry and homeless who had been waiting on the concrete steps outside in the hot June sun. The server next to him took a second look.
“Denny? Denny Kapps? It’s me, Nate Patterson. You back again? Where you been?”
Kapps shrugged. “Where you think?”
“Yeah? Bummer. They making you do the rest of your community service?”
“Yeah.” He ladled soup into a bowl and passed it across the counter to a man with a thin gray beard.
“Bummer,” the other man said again. “I got one more week and then I’m outta here.”
“You ever see a guy named Matty something here these days?”
Patterson shrugged. “Who knows their names?”
“You mean Matty Mutone?” asked the server on the other side of Patterson. “Didn’t you hear? He’s the one died on that bench last week.”
“Oh yeah.” Patterson nodded. “The cops were here asking about him. I heard it was poison.”
“Oh, shit!” said Kapps.
Promptly at one o’clock, Elliott Buntrock ambled down the brick sidewalk and met Dorothy Reddish, who had a large iron key in one hand and two bottles of water in the other.
“I always feel so ridiculously privileged whenever I’m inside one of these private gardens,” he said, holding the gate open for her. “They really are urban oases, aren’t they?”
He stood in the shade of a huge sycamore tree and took a deep breath, looking more like a crane than ever as he stretched his arms wide, almost as if flexing wings. A summer breeze caught his light jacket and billowed it out from a T-shirt that advertised Browning tractors.
The small park was lovingly maintained by the residents of Sussex Square. They had lost the battle to preserve the original gas streetlights, but had been allowed to replace the gas fixtures inside the frosted globes with soft electric lights that mimicked gas flames. The wrought-iron fence and the benches inside were original, and graveled paths wound through ornamental plantings true to the period.
They were the only ones there and when they’d chosen a bench near the small fountain shaped like a trumpeter swan, Buntrock laid the sushi tray on the space between them and said, “So how’s my favorite student settling in at the Breul House?”
“Except that it’s probably going to close under my tenure, just fine,” she said gamely, dribbling a little soy sauce over her eel and avocado morsel before popping it into her mouth. “The house has never been self-supporting and our funds will run dry next year if we don’t find a new way to bring more people through the doors or something to turn on the grant fountains.” She cocked her head and, with a mischievous smile that was only half-joking, said, “Are you sure you don’t want to move your Nauman retrospective back to us?”
“Sorry, kid. It was never going to be here if I had anything to do with it. Besides, it would only be a temporary fix.”
“I know,” she sighed. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. You knew Roger Shambley, didn’t you?”
“Not well, but yes.”
“You say that as if you didn’t like him.”
Buntrock shrugged. “He was such a pompous little ass, I doubt if anyone really liked him. I doubt if he cared. Why?”
“What would he care about, Elliott? What would excite him?”
“Power,” he said promptly. “Or fame. Why?”
She repeated what Hope Ruffton had told her, how Shambley had started rummaging through the Breul House as if hunting for something that excited him. “But if he found it, he didn’t get a chance to tell anyone. Unless he got it out of the house first.”
Buntrock flicked a grain of rice from his T-shirt. “Knowing Shambley, he probably wouldn’t hesitate to steal something minor, but something that had him that excited? Sounds more like an important piece of art that he could write a book about and go down in history as its discoverer.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Shambley’s specialty was nineteenth-century art. Breul was in Europe in the eighteen-sixties, right? That’s when he did most of his collecting. Millet, Manet, and Whistler, of course. Is there a Manet hanging on the walls?”
“Not that I’ve seen. No Millet either.”
“Too early for Cezanne…Greek sculpture was getting quite a play then, but I doubt a big piece of marble would go unnoticed. Pompeii would have been on the Grand Tour, though. Perhaps a particularly nice little Roman bronze? Or maybe there’s a piece of Etruscan gold mixed in with his wife’s jewelry?”
“No. All of her good pieces were sold to endow the house and the costume things aren’t worth more than a few hundred dollars.”
Buntrock shook his head impatiently. “Even Etruscan gold wouldn’t have made a big enough splash for Shambley. Sorry, Dot, I’m out of ideas. Hope you find whatever it is, though. If you’re right about Shambley’s excitement, maybe you’ll get to write your own book.”
CHAPTER
20
In midafternoon, Tillie turned from his computer screen with an air of accomplishment. “Listen to this, Lieutenant! The deed to Number 403 was registered to Charlotte Randolph forty-three years ago, which puts it about eighteen months after Marta Constanza’s accident. Before that, the house was owned by a Matthew Littlejohn, who sold it to Benito DelVecchio.”
“Who then gave it to Randolph?” Sigrid asked.
Dinah Urbanska made a face. “Poor Mrs. DelVecchio. Do you think she knew he’d moved his mistress practically next door? That was cruel.”
“But convenient,” said Lowry.
Hentz had been following his own trail of breadcrumbs. “I went back and pulled up some old references to Franklin McCall.”
“Who?”
“The critic who just happened to be at that performance of La Bohème. I cross-referenced Benito DelVecchio and got nothing, but with Benny Olds…”
He turned his computer screen around so that Sigrid saw black-and-white photographs from an old magazine.
“This is a historical website dedicated to the mobs of New York.” He read the picture’s cutline aloud. “Man about town and music critic Franklin McCall relaxing with friends at Sardi’s after a performance of the New York Philharmonic.” Several men in black tie and dinner jackets were seated around a table thick with cocktail glasses. “That’s McCall, that’s Walter Winchell, and there across the table from McCall is Benny Olds.”
“Are you sure?” asked Sigrid. “The picture’s not labeled.”
“No, but he’s mentioned in the text as hanging out with show business types. Like the way Frank Sinatra liked to hang out with mobsters in Vegas. Wait a minute and I’ll show you.”
A few clicks later and a mug shot of DelVecchio flashed on the screen. Hentz reduced it in size, then dropped it in next to the magazine photo.
Sigrid looked closer at the man who had employed her father’s killer. Dark curly hair, hooded eyes, and a sardonic smile that probably looked sexy to any woman he aimed it at.
“Wow!” said Urbanska, looking at the first picture. “He was hot.”
Albee was more dismissive. “All men look hot in a dinner jacket.”
“If we’re looking for motives,” said Hentz, “I think we just found one. Benny not only caused the accident, I’m willing to bet he’s the ‘friend’ who invited McCall back to another performance of La Bohème, saying it was to give the tenor another hearing.”
“And Bloss was blackmailing her?” asked Albee.
“Why else would she give him five hun
dred dollars? For old times’ sake?” Lowry gave a cynical snort. “Out of the kindness of her heart?”
“If the poison was meant for Jack Bloss, that makes Matty Mutone collateral damage,” Sigrid said.
“About that twenty dollars Matty had,” said Dinah Urbanska, who was beginning to feel she could hold her own with the others. “Jack Bloss’s sister said he wasn’t crazy about tomato sauce, so what if he offered Matty that money and some of his lasagna in exchange for some of Matty’s fettuccine?”
“Twenty bucks for a serving of pasta?” asked Hentz.
“Why not? He was hungry and he was probably feeling flush and if this was a first payment to keep quiet, he’d be expecting that there would be more where that came from, right?”
It made a certain amount of sense, thought Sigrid. But poor sad Matty. Yes, he’d been on a path to self-destruction, but remembering the words of the woman who had comforted him after his cousin’s death, she regretted that he’d found no closure.
“Tillie, take another look at that report on the hit-and-run that killed Aria Edwards. See if the driver was ever found.”
The day had started with blue skies and sunshine, but by the time Sigrid and Hentz got down to Vanderbock Street in the late afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind some heavy dark clouds that were rolling in from the west. After driving around the block, Hentz gave up on finding a legal space and pulled in next to a fire hydrant. A light wind carried the smell of rain as they rang the bell at Number 403.
No response.
Hentz rang again, with the same result.
“Do we have Randolph’s phone number?” Sigrid asked.
Before he could check, she tilted her head to the left. “Never mind.”
He looked in the direction of her gesture and saw Charlotte Randolph walking toward them from farther down the street, swinging an ivory cane.
She hesitated when she saw them and for a moment, looked as if she might cross the street to avoid them; then, with a visible shrug, she continued as she’d begun. She looked cool in a long gray-and-white print skirt and a loose white shirt belted at the waist. The skirt was made of a light material that brushed around her ankles as the wind picked up.
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