Corpus Christmas (20 page)

He was tall and portly and there was just enough light in their tiny courtyard to make him look like a cross between a Halloween
ghost and Frosty the Snowman. The eye and mouth holes of his white ski mask were outlined in black and the dark toggles of
his bulky white cardigan marched down his rounded torso like buttons of coal on a tubby snowman as be positioned the last
light and held out to Sigrid the plug end of the tree lights and the receptacle end of an extension cord that he’d snaked
from the house.

“Everything’s ready,” he caroled. “Come along, my dear. No speeches, though I really should hum something appropriate. What
did the Marine Band play the other night when they lit the White House tree?”

In his deep basso profundo, he began to hum the national anthem.

Laughing, Sigrid stepped up to the tree and, in a Monty Python imitation of ribbon-cutting royalty, plugged the two electric
cords together and said, “I now declare this Christmas season officially opened.”

A blaze of colorful lights twinkled through the bare twigs of the dogwood.

“God bless us, every one!” said Roman.

Friday, December 18

S
IGRID MOVED THE MORNING SESSION BRISKLY
through the usual update on current cases. Matt Eberstadt brushed powdered sugar from his dark green shirt and maroon tie
and reported a conviction in the drug-related homicide trial that finally went to the jury yesterday. “They were only out
twenty minutes.”

The neighborhood canvass around the house that held those infant remains had turned up no one else who could remember the
Jurczyks or their tenants from the thirties, but Bernie Peters had already been on the phone to the nursing home in Staten
Island, where a staff doctor confirmed Mrs. Palka’s fears about her former East Village friend.

“Mrs. Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz has had a series of small strokes this past year,” Peters said as he tore open a packet of
dry creamer and added it to his coffee. “She’s in a wheelchair now and the doctor says some days she’s cogent, most days she’s
not. He suggests that we try her immediately after Saturday morning confession.”

“Who’s her next of kin?” asked Sigrid. “None listed.”

“Who pays the bills then?”

“I talked to an individual in their business office, and the way it works is that she paid into something like an annuity
when she first went there back in 1971. Probably what she got for the house. On top of that, she signed over her husband’s
pension and social security and they’re supposed to take care of her as long as she lives.”

Elaine Albee shivered and pushed aside her jelly doughnut. She hated the whole idea of growing old, especially here in New
York City, and tried not to think about it any more than she could help. It kept getting shoved in her face, though: bag ladies
homeless on every street corner; women who once ran but now hobbled down subway platforms, fearfully clutching their lumpy
shopping bags as they moved arthritically through doors that closed too fast; women like Barbara Zajdowicz, who’d outlived
brothers and sisters and husbands and were now warehoused in nursing homes with no one to watchdog their interests or—

Lieutenant Harald’s cool voice cut across her private nightmare. “Are you with us, Albee?”

“Ma’am?”

“Your interview with the Reinickes,” the lieutenant prodded.

Feeling like a third-grade schoolkid caught goofing off by a strict teacher, a likeness subliminally underlined by the lieutenant’s
no-nonsense gray pantsuit and severe white blouse, Albee sat up straight and summarized what she and Lowry had learned from
Winston and Marie Reinicke.

“So there’s no alibi for Reinicke but his wife doesn’t use a cane either,” she finished, wadding up the scrap of paper Jim
Lowry had slipped her under the table with
P—S??!!
scrawled on it in bold block letters.

“We did pick up something from the Hymans, though,” said Lowry.

After looking at kids who were looking at toys in F.A.O. Schwarz, he and Lainy’d swung west to the Hymans’ terraced apartment
on Central Park South. David and Linda Hyman appeared to be in their midsixties. Mr. Hyman still looked like the rabbinical
student he’d once been before he became an economist. His thick and curly beard was more pepper than salt and his dark eyes
flashed with intensity as he spoke. A faint rusty glow through her soft white hair hinted that Mrs. Hyman had been a strawberry
blonde in her youth. She was small and quiet, but her face had held an amused intelligence as her husband described the things
they’d noticed last night.

“They said they saw Shambley come out of the library with a cat-that-ate-the-canary look on his face last night,” Lowry reported.
“He’d been in there with the director, what’s his name? Peake? And the Kohn woman. The Hymans didn’t hear what was said between
them, but evidently old Jacob Munson came in on the tail end of the conversation and didn’t much care for what he heard because
he told Hyman that maybe he’d made a mistake when he recommended Shambley as a trustee last fall.”

“After the Hymans left the Breul House, they went on to a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights so it looks like they’re out of
it,” said Elaine Albee. “And Mrs. Herzog didn’t like the way Shambley was riding Reinicke Wednesday night, but she and her
husband alibi each other and their maid confirms it.”

Sigrid reported the salient points of her interview with Søren Thorvaldsen and Lady Francesca Leeds and there was a brief
discussion of how Thorvaldsen’s movements fit into the timetable they were beginning to assemble.

Gray-haired Mick Cluett shifted his bulk in a squeaky swivel chair and phlegmatically reported that the Sussex Square canvass
had drawn a blank. No convenient nosy neighbor with an insatiable curiosity about the comings and goings of the Breul House.

He had, however, found an address book in Roger Shambley’s upper West Side apartment, which had helped him locate a brother
in Michigan who would be flying in tonight. A cursory examination of the apartment revealed nothing unusual to Cluett’s experienced
eyes.

“Looked like standard stuff to me,” he said. “Small one-bedroom apartment, nothing too fancy, but good stuff, you know? Lots
of books and papers, nice pictures on the walls. The brother said he’d let us know if he finds anything odd when he goes through
the stuff.”

They batted it around some more, then Sigrid laid out the day’s assignments: in addition to ongoing cases, there were alibis
that needed checking, interviews still to come, a murder weapon yet to be discovered, and that interesting possibility that
Shambley might have brokered art works of questionable provenance.

Someone with a knowledge of art had been specialed in from another division to go through the papers Shambley had left behind
in the Breul House attic, and Eberstadt and Peters were given the task of backtracking on Shambley’s last few days as well
as taking a quick poll of how his colleagues at the New York Center for the Fine Arts had felt about him.

Leaving Mick Cluett with a stack of paperwork, Sigrid left with Albee and Lowry to do another sweep through the Erich Breul
House.

Elliott Buntrock leaned on a chair beside the desk like a great blue heron with a potential mullet in view and cocked his
head at Miss Ruffton, who was a peppermint cane this morning in red wool suit and white sweater.

“Looking for something?” he asked. “Looking for what, for God’s sake? And how would he know if he’d found it, as much
stuff
as this house has crammed into it?”

Miss Ruffton shrugged imperturbably as the electronic typewriter continued to hum beneath her capable brown fingers. “You
asked me why he was acting so smug Wednesday night. I’ve told you what I thought. Now do you want me to finish with these
dimensions or don’t you?”

“I do, I do!” he assured her. With a stilt-legged gait, he picked his way across the marbled hall and through the gallery
arch to glare at a picture of dead swans and market vegetables which had caught his eye high on the far wall. A passionate
proponent of the latest in art, he considered “preart” anything exhibited in America before the Armory Show of 1913.

Kitsch, kitsch, and more kitsch, he thought, contemptuously dismissing the Babbages and Vedders. And all this recent fuss
over Sargent. One of the few silver linings to the gloom of curating a show in this place would be the sheer pleasure of dismantling
these stiff rows of gilt-framed horrors and seeing them stacked somewhere else for the duration. And he wouldn’t limit himself
to stripping the walls either. Much of the furniture and all of the tacky gewgaws would have to go as well.

Dressed today in black jeans and a fuzzy black turtleneck, he stood in the exact center of the long gallery with his arms
akimbo, the tip of his right boot
en pointe
while the heel lay flat against his inner left ankle, and his bony chin angled forward and up as he considered the size and
shape of the long room. This was his favorite contemplative pose and one that a clever photographer had once captured in black
and white for a whimsical
New York Today
article entitled “City Birds.” To Buntrock’s secret gratification, she’d captioned his portrait
Curatoris Hotissimus
(
Genus Arbiter Artem
).

As he mentally cleared the gallery and the long drawing room beyond of their resident pictures and superfluous adornments,
Elliott Buntrock had to admit that it was actually a rather lovely space, nicely proportioned, architecturally interesting.
Maybe wrong for Nauman’s work—the restrained sensuality of his middle period, in particular, would be killed by these ornate
moldings and marble pilasters. But a Blinky Palermo or a Joseph Beuys, one of those early late-postmoderns—what a curatorial
coup it would be to show
them
here!

It was hard, though, to keep his mind firmly fixed on an exhibition some twelve to fourteen months in the future when murder
had occurred less than forty-eight hours in the past. He had barely known Shambley. Rumor tagged him a ravenous careerist,
all the more dangerous for the depth of his expertise and the thoroughness of his scholarship.

Zig-zags of fashion being what they were these days, Dr. Roger Shambley would probably have had his fifteen minutes of fame,
would have found a way to titillate the gliterati’s gadfly interest in turn-of-the-century American art, perhaps even, Buntrock
thought with a twist of the self-deprecation that made him so attractive to his friends, have been featured in a whimsical
New York Today
photograph of his own.

The telephone out on the secretary’s desk trilled softly. He was too far away to hear her words, but Buntrock saw her answer,
listen briefly, then hang up.

Hope Ruffton thought Shambley had spent the last couple of weeks looking for something specific and that his cocky arrogance
Wednesday night meant that he’d found it. “He wanted the inventory sheets and he was rude about Dr. Peake’s ability to recognize
authentic work,” Miss Ruffton had said.

Buntrock had cocked his bony head at that statement, wondering how much Peake’s present secretary knew about the Friedinger
brouhaha when Peake wrongly deaccessioned some pieces that later turned out to be authentic after all. And not only authentic,
but valuable. No malfeasance had been charged, merely simple stupidity, which, in the art world, could be almost as damaging
as a suspended jail sentence.

Innocent though Miss Ruffton’s interpretation of Shambley’s insinuations might be, Peake and several volunteer docents were
even now up in the attic with the same set of inventory sheets that Shambley had used, trying to duplicate the dead man’s
discovery, if discovery it had been. They were aided by the strong back of that simple-minded janitor as they shifted trunks
and furniture around the big attic.

“Taking that list and checking it twice,” Buntrock whistled half under his breath as he ambled from the gallery into the drawing
room, and from the drawing room back out into the great hall with its opulent Christmas tree. “Gonna find out if naughty Shambley
took something nice.”

Fully indulging his momentary mood of postmodern grand funk, he ignored the disapproving glance of an elderly docent who guarded
the entrance against casual visitors. The Breul House was unofficially closed today except for a group of art students, who
had booked a tour for this date several weeks ago and were due in this afternoon from a woman’s college in Raleigh. Buntrock
looked around for Hope Ruffton and found her desk unexpectedly vacant.

“Miss Ruffton went up to tell Dr. Peake that the police are coming back this morning,” said the guardian of the gate.

“Very good,” said Buntrock. “I’ll just carry on.” Continuing his casual whistling, he circled the mannequin that stood below
the curve of the marble balustrade. That masculine figure was still dressed in heavy winter garment’s suitable for a brisk
morning constitutional and his blank face still tilted up toward the female figure on the landing as if he were being instructed
to pick up a quart of milk and a pound of lard on his way home. Smiling at his own drollery, Buntrock ducked through the doorway
under the main stairs.