Corpus Christmas (14 page)

“This place opens at ten A.M. and a Mrs. Eloise Beardsley—I think she’s a volunteer—came upstairs at approximately ten forty-five
and discovered the body lying face down just as you see it. She said she tried to find a pulse, then realized the individual
was dead.”

Officer Monte had arrived at 10:57, observed certain inconsistencies, and immediately requested investigators.

“What inconsistencies?” asked Jim Lowry. “Not enough blood,” the patrol officer replied succinctly. “You can see from here—the
back of his head’s pretty messed up and blood’s clotted in his hair, but it didn’t run down his face and there’s none on the
floor beside his head. The stairs are bare wood and I guess he could have hit his head on one of the sharp edges coming down,
but again, no blood.”

Sigrid watched as Guidry indicated she’d taken enough pictures of the body and its immediate surroundings. While the photographer
waited for someone from the medical examiner’s office to turn it over, the crime scene unit began processing the area around
the body.

“Who was in the house when you arrived?” Sigrid asked. “Just the secretary, the Beardsley woman, the live-in janitor, and
the director,” answered Monte. “They’re all downstairs. The ambulance crew got here at eleven oh-two and confirmed death.”

For a moment, Sigrid almost forgot and looked around for Tillie, the officer on whom she most relied, the one who usually
acted as her recorder and could be trusted to note every minute detail.

Unfortunately, Detective Tildon was still recovering from the bomb blast that had nearly killed him in October. He was home
from the hospital now and healing nicely, but was not expected back at work till next month. Mick Cluett was certainly no
substitute and Albee was already catching her share on other cases. Sigrid told Lowry he’d won recorder’s job and the younger
man gave a mock groan as he continued to measure distances for sketching the scene.

Bernie Peters, directing the application of fingerprint powder on the stair rail, grinned in sympathy.

Cohen arrived from the medical examiner’s office and greeted her sardonically. “We gotta quit meeting like this, Lieutenant.”

A few minutes later, he’d agreed with Officer Monte’s suspicions. “Lividity’s not much help if he was moved within a half-hour
of death, but that wound bled like hell and there ought to be a puddle under his head. He didn’t die face down though. And
see this?”

Cohen pulled back the collar of Shambley’s shirt and Sigrid saw that a thin trickle of blood had run down inside to his back.

She nodded thoughtfully. “So he was upright when he received the wound?”

Cohen shrugged. “He did most of his bleeding while lying supine; but yeah, I’d guess the blow came while he was sitting or
standing.”

“He didn’t hurt himself in a fall?”

“Maybe. But I can’t see him standing up again after getting this wound, so how’d blood run straight down his neck?”

They would keep it in mind, Sigrid told him as Guidry photographed the stain.

The dumbwaiter shaft had been discovered and a good set of prints were found on the enamelled wood molding that framed the
hinged doors. Officer Monte had managed to keep everyone off the back stairs, so Albee started down to determine the dumbwaiter’s
current location, being careful to keep to the center of the treads and on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

Cohen finished his preliminary examination and stripped off thin latex gloves as he stood. “Funny-looking guy, isn’t he? Little
Ed with the big head. Something odd about that head.”

“Besides its size?” asked Lowry, who had chalked an outline of the body’s position before Cohen began.

“Not our old friend the blunt instrument?” queried Bernie Peters.

“I’ll let you know after I’ve taken a look at that wound in the lab,” Cohen told them.

Guidry stepped back in for more pictures now that Cohen had turned the body face up.

“Want to estimate a time of death?” Sigrid asked. Cohen shrugged. “Rigor’s complete, but there’s still a little body warmth,
so we’re talking maybe twelve to fifteen hours, no more than sixteen hours max.”

They looked at their watches. Between 7:15 and 11:15, always taking into account that the temperature in this hallway may
have been measurably higher or lower than it was now, or that the dead man had some physical quirk that would quicken or retard
rigor mortis.

“I saw him alive between eight and eight-thirty last night,” Sigrid said.

Bernie Peters shot Lowry a telling glance. The lieutenant had a reputation for coldness, but she hadn’t turned a hair upon
seeing the body. Even Cohen looked at her curiously. “Friend of yours?”

“No,” she answered distantly. “There was a party here last night and he came, too. We met briefly and he left early. Or rather
he went upstairs early. I believe he was doing research on some papers in the attic.”

Elaine Albee reappeared on the back stairs. “The dumbwaiter’s on the first floor,” she reported, slightly out of breath. “And
there looks like a smear of blood inside.”

“Probably turn out to be roast beef,” Cohen grinned. “You guys ready for me to take him?”

Sigrid queried her people. Guidry was satisfied with the number of photographs she’d taken and Lowry and Peters had just finished
with their inventory of Roger Shambley’s pockets, so everyone stood back as Cohen’s assistants lifted the body onto a collapsible
gurney, covered it, and strapped it down. Rigor mortis made for a bulky shape and Sigrid was not the only one reminded of
a grotesque and badly wrapped Christmas package.

“By the way, Lieutenant—” Cohen paused before following the body downstairs. “You’ll get my official report late this afternoon,
but I can put it in an eyedropper right now: On the bones last week, you can forget about actual age, sex, race—hell! I couldn’t
even swear they aren’t monkey bones. All I can say is that they’re consistent with what you’d find if a newborn baby was wrapped
in newspapers and stuck in a trunk for thirty years, give or take a week.”

“What about the mummified one?” Sigrid asked. “Caucasian girl,” he replied promptly. “And before you ask, yeah, she was born
alive. I found lint in her breathing passages. Looks like she no sooner got herself born than she got herself smothered.”

With a laconic “Ciao for now,
amici,
” he trailed after the gurney, never realizing that he’d allowed Roger Shambley one final exit in Italian.

With the body removed from the landing, Sigrid went up the steep attic stairs to examine the makeshift office Roger Shambley
had created amid file cabinets and storage boxes. Later, someone would go through the papers and folders so neatly stacked
upon his work tables, but for now she simply wished to sit in the art historian’s chair and try to get a better feel for the
man she’d met so briefly last night, some sense of why he’d died.

The tabletop directly in front of his chair was bare, so she assumed he’d probably finished work for the night and cleared
away his papers. Into one of those folders, perhaps. Or into his briefcase, which still sat beside the chair. A methodical
man?

She rather thought there had been method in Shambley’s calculated insults last night—to that trustee, Mr. Reinicke, to Søren
Thorvaldsen and, by extension, to Nauman and Francesca Leeds—but she’d observed him too briefly to understand the motive for
his rudeness. There had been a certain electricity in his manner, though; as if he were so wired about something that he hardly
knew or cared what he was saying.

Or to whom.

Power
, Sigrid thought. Shambley had acted like someone who’d just won a lottery or inherited a throne and suddenly felt free to
ride roughshod over everyone else.

“Lieutenant?” Jim Lowry’s voice at the attic door drew her back to the present. “We think we’ve found where he died.”

They went down the narrow back stairs, past the butler’s pantry on the first floor where Officer Guidry had photographed the
dumbwaiter before the crime scene technicians took a sample of its stains for the lab, and from the butler’s pantry, on down
the broader, more commodious stairway to the basement.

As they descended, Sigrid noted and carefully sidestepped three chalk-circled spots.

At the foot of the steps, a portable floodlamp lit up the area and made it quite apparent that the floor there had been recently—and
inexpertly—mopped. They could clearly see a circular spot where dried streaks of water left dull swirls upon the shiny dark
tiles.

“Bonded commercial cleaners come in every Monday,” said Elaine Albee as they watched a technician fill small glass vials with
samples of a brown sticky substance he’d scraped from the joints between the tiles. “According to the woman who found the
body, the cleaners bring their own equipment and part of their routine is to wax and buff the floors down here.”

A mop, still damp, had been found in the scullery, she told Sigrid. It, too, would be taken to the lab for analysis.

“And the blood on the stairs themselves?” Sigrid asked, referring to those chalk circles.

“Couple of small splashes up on the tenth and eleventh treads; a bigger one down here on the third,” said Bernie Peters. “Nothing
on the upper landing and, from the shape of the drops, he was moving down at the time.”

It was consistent with what Cohen had told them. Until they uncovered data to disprove it, their working theory would be that
Shambley had started down the basement steps when he was struck a tremendous blow on the head from behind. He had fallen here,
bled copiously, then his body had been hauled up to the third floor soon afterwards.

“Why not leave him here in the basement where he fell?” Sigrid wondered aloud.

“The perpetrator wanted him found quickly?” speculated Lowry, “Maybe he
didn’t
want him found quickly,” Albee countered. “There’s a live-in janitor who has a room down here. Maybe the perp wanted time
to get away and set up an alibi before the janitor stumbled over him.”

“Or maybe it was an individual that just didn’t want us taking too close a look at the basement,” suggested Peters.

“In which case,” said Sigrid.

The others tried not to groan as they looked across the crowded Victorian kitchen to the warren of storage rooms beyond.

“There’s still a bunch of uniforms wandering around upstairs,” Mick Cluett reminded her.

“Might as well put them to use,” Sigrid agreed. “And start a canvass of the square, anyone seen entering or leaving these
premises last night. In the meantime, Lowry, you and I will begin with the staff.”

They commandeered the stately, book-lined library for questioning their witnesses and lunchtime came and went before the two
police detectives had heard all that the Breul House staff were prepared to tell them.

With commendable initiative, the secretary, Hope Ruffton, had typed up a guest list from the previous evening, complete with
addresses, which helped them track departures. Sigrid knew that the three trustees and their respective spouses had left shortly
after eight, and that she and Nauman left at 8:20. After that, as best the others could reconstruct, the curator, Elliott
Buntrock, said good-night at 8:30, followed soon by Søren Thorvaldsen and Lady Francesca Leeds, Hope Ruffton, Hester Kohn,
and Jacob Munson, in that order.

Hope Ruffton had been collected by three friends for a musical comedy playing up in Harlem and she supplied the detectives
with a separate list of her friends’ names and addresses.

Benjamin Peake declared that he’d planned to wait until the caterer’s men had gone, but Mrs. Beardsley, the senior docent,
had volunteered to stay in the director’s place since she had only to walk across the square after she’d locked up.

“Mr. Peake left about eight-forty,” Mrs. Beardsley told them. “The caterers were finished shortly before nine; then I double-checked
to make sure no candles were still burning, turned out the lights, and went home shortly after nine.”

“All the lights?” Sigrid asked. “What about Dr. Shambley?”

“I refer, of course, to the main lights,” Mrs. Beardsley replied, sitting so erectly in the maroon leather wing chair that
Sigrid was reminded of one of Grandmother Lattimore’s favorite dicta: a lady’s spine never touches the back of her chair.
“The security lights are on an automatic timer and they provide enough illumination for finding one’s way through the house.”

“And you didn’t see Dr. Shambley after the party last night?”

“No. Dr. Shambley often worked late,” said the docent with a slight air of disapproval.

“What about the janitor?”

“Pascal Grant had permission to attend a movie. I assume he hadn’t yet returned by the time I left.”

“Permission?”

“When you speak to Pascal, Lieutenant Harald, I think it will be evident why we give him more guidance and direction than
an ordinary worker. This is his first job since he left the shelter and I do hope you’ll be patient with him. He’s really
quite
capable
within clearly defined limits. You’ll see.”

“So as far as you know, Dr. Shambley was alone in the house when you left?”

“Y-es,” she said, but something unspoken lingered indecisively on her face.

Pressed, Mrs. Beardsley described how she’d awakened at midnight and seen Mr. Thorvaldsen descending the front steps of the
Breul House.

Sigrid went to the library window and asked Mrs. Beardsley to point out her house across the square. It was a windy gray day
and the reporters who crowded around below to question the police guard outside had bright pink cheeks and blown hair. “You’re
positive it was Thorvaldsen?”

“Absolutely,” the lady said firmly. “He’s quite tall and when he passed under a streetlight at the corner, I saw his fair
hair.”

On his identity, Mrs. Beardsley could not be budged, although she was quick to admit that she hadn’t actually seen the Dane
exit from the house. “I thought perhaps he might have returned for something he lost or else forgot and left behind.”

“Who has keys to this place?” asked Lowry from his place at the end of a polished wooden library table.