"Corpus Christmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maron Margaret)VIII Sigrid 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 “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 all 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 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 “pre-art” 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 turtle-neck, he stood in the exact center of the long gallery with his arms akimbo, the tip of his right boot 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 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 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 garments 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. Let Peake explore the high pikes, he thought; surely there was a reason Shambley had died down in the basement. He remembered that when he and Francesca Leeds discussed logistics Wednesday night, she’d murmured something about storage racks in the basement and Peake had said more would have to be built because old Kimmelshue, the previous director, had filled most of them with earlier culls from the collection. The mind boggled. If Kimmelshue had kept in William Carver Ewing and Everett Winstanley, what in God’s name had he weeded out? At the foot of the stairs, Buntrock paused to get his bearings. Abruptly remembering that this was also presumably where Roger Shambley had got his, he moved away from the landing. To his left stretched caverns measureless to man in the form of a large Victorian kitchen; to his right, beyond a sort of minikitchen adjunct, was a closed door. Buntrock automatically tried the closed door first. The lights were on inside and as soon as he stuck his bony head around the door frame, all the colors and patterns of Victorian excessiveness beat upon his optic nerves and clamored for simultaneous attention. The rooms upstairs were models of harmonic taste and order compared to the chaotic anarchy of texture and design down here, with its clash of different cultures. Clinging to the door for support, Buntrock’s disbelieving eyes traveled from the syrupy farmyard scene over the fireplace, to the modern art posters thumbtacked to turkey red walls, down to the layered scraps of patterned carpet on the floor. When he spotted the twentieth-century tape deck and portable television beside the nineteenth-century pasha’s mattress heaped high with silken cushions, the bizarre incongruities were explained. The janitor’s room, he realized. Of course. Lo, the wonder of innocence! With a shudder that lent his fuzzy sweater a fleeting resemblance to ruffled egret feathers, he pulled the door closed again and moved stilt-leggedly through the kitchen in search of old Kimmelshue’s storage racks. Upon entering the Breul House, Elaine Albee immediately headed for the attic to see if that art expert on loan from another police division had learned anything pertinent from Shambley’s papers, while Sigrid and Jim Lowry invited Benjamin Peake into his own office for yet a further discussion of his relationship to Dr. Shambley. “Relations were quite minimal,” said Peake. The dark suit he wore was impeccably tailored and a turquoise tie made his blue eyes seem even bluer as he leaned back in his chair with careless grace. “Jacob Munson put him up for trustee back in the fall. I think it was his first trusteeship and, just between us, it went to his head. Got it in mind that he was actually supposed to He laughed deprecatingly. “Well, of course, he was supposed to be using some of Erich Breul’s papers to document the price of original art works in the 1880’s, here and abroad, for his new book.” “Yesterday, Miss Ruffton implied that Dr. Shambley’s research had taken a different course,” Sigrid said, “and, if you recall,”-she paused to consult her notes-“you referred to him as a ‘busybody and a snoop with delusions of mental superiority.’ Would you explain that, please?” Peake smiled. “I thought I just did. Roger Shambley seemed to think he ought to be a new broom, clean sweep, stir up the old cobwebs.” “And did he?” asked Sigrid. “Stir up old cobwebs?” “He tried, but he was going about it all wrong. Now I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the Breul House’s financial difficulties but I assume Nauman’s told you-” “I prefer to hear your version,” Sigrid interrupted coldly. “Certainly.” Peake glanced at Detective Lowry, but that young man had his eyes firmly fixed on the notebook on his knee and his face was a careful blank. “Well, then, perhaps we should start with the terms of Erich Breul’s will,” Peake said and pedantically described shrinking endowments, capital outlays, and dwindling grants. “It’s simply a matter of attracting more money, but Shambley had begun to act as if the fault lay with the staff. As if we weren’t already doing everything humanly possible.” “Why did he ask for a set of your inventory sheets?” Sigrid asked. Peake shrugged petulantly. “We’ve heard that he made certain insinuations.” “Look,” said Peake defensively. “I don’t give a damn what you’ve heard. That was an honest mistake. There was nothing unethical or illegal about what happened when I was at the Friedinger. I was caught in the middle up there. And you can go through our inventory sheets with a fine-tooth comb. There hasn’t been a straight pin deaccessioned from the Breul House since I took over. If anything’s missing, it didn’t happen on my watch.” Cautiously, because this was the first mention she’d heard of the skeleton in Peake’s closet, Sigrid said, “It would help us clarify things if we had your side of what actually did happen at the Friedinger.” Giving his side took Benjamin Peake almost fifteen minutes, an intense quarter hour in which he used nearly every technical and aesthetic art term Sigrid had ever heard in order to rationalize his actions. When he ran out of breath, she mentally translated his account into layman’s terms for her own benefit. According to Peake, the Friedinger had been presented with an opportunity to acquire an important Ingres. In order to finance the purchase, it was decided to sell (in museum talk “deaccession”) some of the lesser pictures, including two cataloged “ School of Zurbarán.” Consequently, the pictures were sent to auction and sold, and a month or so later, the new owner jubilantly announced that his hunch had paid off: exhaustive scientific and aesthetic analysis conclusively proved that the pictures were not merely “ School of Zurbarán ” but authentic works by Zurbarán himself. In view of the soaring values for that artist’s work after the Met’s splashy Zurbarán show, the two pictures were now worth more than the Ingres they were sold to help purchase. Peake’s immediate superior was technically responsible for approving the deaccessioning of any of the Friedinger’s holdings, so public ridicule fell heaviest on him; but since the action had been based on Dr. Benjamin Peake’s supposedly expert recommendation, Peake’s resignation was also accepted. Very unfair, Peake claimed, since he was pressured from above to find things to sell and had relied on the advice of subordinates who claimed to know more about the Spanish master than he had. From the way Peake glossed over certain details, Sigrid gathered that there had also been allegations of impropriety concerning other, lesser pictures which had been deaccessioned and sold through private galleries, but nothing quite as spectacular as the Zurbaráns. Once more Sigrid remembered Shambley’s cock-of-the-walk attitude Wednesday night, the electricity in his big homely face, the pointed look he had given Peake when he learned that she was a police officer. “Robbery, may one hope?” he’d asked. “How appropriate.” He had also informed her that publicity came in many forms. Publicity, Sigrid wondered, or notoriety? Her flint gray eyes rested on Benjamin Peake as she considered what he’d just told them about the Friedinger in the light of Shambley’s insinuations. Peake stirred uneasily behind his gleaming desk, unable to meet her gaze, and Lowry, who’d endured that unblinking basilisk stare more than once himself, felt a small twinge of sympathy for the man. At last Sigrid dropped her eyes and turned through her notebook for yesterday’s interviews. “We’ve been told that you and Miss Kohn had a later confrontation with Dr. Shambley in the library, a confrontation overheard by Mr. Munson.” “Our conversation was hardly a confrontation,” Peake protested with a nervous laugh. “It was only artsy hypothetical cocktail-party nonsense.” “What was his hypothesis?” asked Sigrid. “I’m afraid I really don’t remember.” Sigrid let it pass for the moment. “You stated that you left here Wednesday night around eight-forty?” “That’s correct,” Peake said, relaxing a little. “Mrs. B- that is, Mrs. Beardsley-volunteered to stay and lock up after the caterers had gone. There was no need for both of us to stay.” “Where was Dr. Shambley when you left?” The director shrugged. “So far as I knew, in the attic.” “Alive and unharmed?” Peake looked at her sharply. “Certainly! That’s right, isn’t it? I mean, he died much later in the evening, didn’t he?” He appealed to Jim Lowry for confirmation. “The medical examiner’s office says sometime between eight and eleven-fifteen,” Lowry told him. “Well, there you are,” Peake told Sigrid. “You saw him go upstairs around eight, didn’t you?” “He could have come down again before you left,” she said mildly. “Ask Mrs. Beardsley. She’ll tell you.” Sigrid nodded. “What did you do after you left here?” “Went home,” he said promptly. “It’d been a long day.” “Can anyone verify that?” Peake hesitated. “No.” He started to amplify and then stopped himself. “No,” he repeated. Before Sigrid or Jim Lowry could push him further on that point, there was a brisk knock on the office door and Mrs. Beardsley opened it without waiting for a reply. “Dr. Peake!‘ she exclaimed, her long face full of self-important concern.”Lieutenant Harald! Someone’s stolen Mr. Breul’s gold-handled walking stick!” Oblivious to the stares and speculations of curious docents, the tall mannequin stood as serenely as ever in the well of the curving marble balustrade, his face turned toward the female figure on the landing above his head. He still wore a gray pearl stickpin in his tie, but there was no longer a cane in his gloved hand. “Who saw it last?” Sigrid asked. Four other docents had gathered and they murmured together uncertainly, but Mrs. Beardsley said firmly, “I definitely remember that I brushed a piece of lint from the collar of his overcoat on Wednesday night and straightened his stick at the same time.” “When Wednesday night?” “Shortly before the party began. You know how one will look around one’s house to make certain everything’s in proper order before one’s guests arrive?” Her unconscious choice of words revealed her deep involvement in the place, thought Sigrid. She recalled glancing at the two mannequins during the party and again yesterday, but she couldn’t have sworn to the presence of a walking stick. She glanced at Jim Lowry, who shook his head. “Call Guidry and see if the mannequin’s in any of the pictures she took of the hall yesterday,” Sigrid directed. Then, turning back to Mrs. Beardsley and Dr. Peake, she said, “Describe the cane, please.” Peake looked blank. “It was black, I believe, and had a solid gold knob.” “And was about so long,” said Mrs. Beardsley, stretching out her plump hand a few feet from the floor. “Would you like to read how it’s listed on the inventory?” asked Miss Ruffton, efficient as ever. She handed Sigrid a stapled sheaf of papers labeled As Sigrid read the description aloud, Mrs. Beardsley said, “So “Gold Sigrid was silent, thinking of ebony’s strength and hardness. And when weighted with a solid brass knob at one end? Until they learned otherwise, Erich Breul’s missing walking stick sounded like a perfect candidate for the rod that had smashed Roger Shambley’s thin skull. Lowry hung up the telephone on Hope Ruffton’s desk and reported, “Guidry says she’ll have to make a blowup to be sure, but she doesn’t think the cane’s in any of the pictures and she’s got a long shot of this hall and doorway.” After telling the staff members that they were free to continue with their normal routine for the moment, Sigrid walked with Lowry over to the Christmas tree where they could confer unheard. The gas logs wouldn’t be lit until just before the students from Raleigh were due to arrive, so the hearth was dark and cheerless. Someone had already plugged in the tree, however, and a hundred or more tiny electric candles sparkled in the vaulted marble hall. “I suppose it would be too much to hope that the search team found a blood-smeared walking stick yesterday?” Sigrid asked, bending for a closer look at one of Sophie Breul’s glass angels. “ ’Fraid so,” Lowry said glumly. “They noticed smears on that softball bat in Grant’s room, but I didn’t hear anything about a cane.” Sigrid turned to cast a speculative glance at the mannequin. It stood so near the concealed door beneath the stairs. Say Shambley had gone through the door on his way to the basement, she thought. And say further that he was accompanied by someone suddenly so moved to violence that he (or she?) had grabbed for the first implement that came to hand: the mannequin’s walking stick. The scene was so vivid in her mind that she could almost see it. The only thing she couldn’t see was who had actually wielded the stick. “Albee helped search,” Sigrid remembered. She glanced at her watch. “What’s keeping her upstairs? Go check, Lowry. I’m going to take another look at that basement.” As Sigrid crossed the large basement kitchen, she heard noises floating down the passageway beyond. She had thought that Pascal Grant was still up in the attic, so who-? She paused to listen and the odd sound defined itself as a whistle that rose and soared above muffled thumps even as she listened, a bouncy and rather familiar tune. As she turned a corner and saw light spilling from a doorway, she recognized Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” With catlike tread, she stole to the door and there was Elliott Buntrock, his lips pursed in music as he slid one picture after another from a large wooden storage rack, removed its brown paper covering for a quick examination, then carelessly recovered it. Sigrid leaned against the doorjamb, one hand in the pocket of her loose gray slacks. “Found anything interesting?” Buntrock jumped like a startled bird, but made a quick recovery. “Nothing worth keeping,” he said cheerfully. “Biggest pile of junk you ever saw.” “I thought nineteenth-century art was outside your area of expertise.” “Good art is timeless. You don’t have to be an expert to recognize it. All you have to do is trust your eye.” “As Peake trusted his at the Friedinger?” she asked sardonically. “Ben Peake couldn’t tell his armpit from his-” He broke off with a laugh and undid another picture. “What about Roger Shambley? Could he tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoflanies?” Buntrock leaned the picture against the others, put his hands on his hips, and straightened up to give her his full attention. “Well, well, well!” he said, cocking his head to look down at her from his full six foot two. “And here I thought Oscar was merely becoming eccentric in his old age. A policewoman who actually knows her Gilbert and Sullivan.” Sigrid shrugged. “Tarantara, tarantara,” she said modestly. “Now don’t show off,” he admonished. She laughed and came over to look at the last picture he’d uncovered. It was a bathetic sickroom scene: an expiring young matron, a doctor who held her limp wrist with a hopeless air, the grief-stricken young husband being comforted by his innocent curly-haired toddler and a couple of weeping older women. There was a bronze title plate at the bottom of the picture frame but it was written in old-fashioned German script and Sigrid didn’t recognize any of the words. Nor the artist’s name. “Probably part of Mrs. Breul’s dowry,” Buntrock hazarded. “Godawful, isn’t it? Picasso painted scenes like this when he was about fifteen.” “Are all the pictures like that?” “This is one of the better ones. Most of them are ladies, either at their spinets or spinning, or landscapes oozing with moral uplift, like the one hanging over the hearth in the janitor’s room. Have you been in there?” A mock shudder shook his bony frame. “Not yet. I keep hearing that it’s an interesting experience.” “Don’t bother,” he advised her. “You’d find it a visual nightmare.” Buntrock watched as Sigrid pulled another picture from the rack. “So how long’ve you known Oscar?” he asked. “Since April. Do you think Shambley examined these pictures?” He ignored her question and pounced on her answer. “April? That’s when Riley Quinn was poisoned, wasn’t it?” “Yes.” “And in the process of catching his killer, you also caught one of the greats of American art?” “Is he?” “He must be. After all, I once called him the master of effortless complexity in an article I wrote for Sigrid pulled a picture of a snow-covered mountain from the rack. It depicted a late afternoon when the snow was cream and rose. Long purplish shadows stretched across the slopes, and the needles on a scrub pine in the foreground looked almost real. “Why? What makes a Nauman abstract a better picture than, say, this snow scene? It looks effortless enough.” Buntrock started to laugh, but something in her steady gaze stopped him. Instead, he found himself answering seriously. “Effortlessness is one thing, a breezy want of substance is quite another. True art’s always been made for an elite, Lieutenant. The elite of the eye. It places visual “Nauman goes to the core of experience and makes visible the invisible. His pictures are more than the merely fungible formulations of generic abstraction, and they’re never Caught up in the heat of his rhetoric, Buntrock flung out a hand and thumped the offending canvas scornfully. “Nauman’s pictures deal with critical masses and elemental tensions. His best are like the moment before the big bang!” Buntrock’s arms fluttered erratically as he searched for the precise phrases, as if he expected to pluck them from the walls of this cramped storage room. “It’s as simple as that, Lieutenant: Oscar Nauman makes the invisible visible. Either you see it or you don’t.” He flexed his bony shoulders and assumed his contemplative pose. “Nauman was the quintessential risk-taker in his time,” he said with a valedictory air. “He may no longer be on the cutting edge. The parade does move on. Modernism gives way to postmodernism as day yields to night. But his place within the matrix of aesthetic discourse is secure. And do you know what triggers his genius?” A bit dazed, Sigrid shook her head. “He knows what to leave out!” Buntrock said triumphantly. “He is the master of elision.” She had listened without comment and when he finished, she formally inclined her head-rather an interesting head now that he looked at it closely-and said, “Thank you.” Buntrock was intrigued. She was almost like a Nauman painting herself: a seemingly simple surface that concealed unexpected complexities. “Don’t you like his work?” he asked. “It’s not that. There are things that I can like that I don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the things I don’t like that I “Ah,” he smiled. “I think we’re not talking about art anymore.” There were hurried footsteps out in the kitchen and Lowry’s voice called, “Lieutenant?” “Down here,” she answered. “Could you come up? They’ve found something interesting in Shambley’s briefcase.” Sigrid turned to go. “If In a series of jerky movements, Buntrock threw up his hand and touched his thumb to his little finger. “Scout’s honor.” A faint expression of surprise flitted across his bony face. “Oddly enough, I mean it,” he said and rearranged his long fingers to form a Vulcan peace sign. Oddly enough, thought Sigrid as she joined Lowry and started up to the attic, she believed him. In the attic, Elaine Albee introduced Sigrid to Dr. Ridgway of Special Services, who immediately described how she’d found Roger Shambley’s briefcase under the desk. “Inside were the usual papers, and this.” “This” was a heavily-embroidered pink satin envelope lined in white satin and tied with red cords. It measured approximately twelve inches long by seven inches wide and although it was now empty, they could clearly see that it had once held something that had left an imprint upon the lining, a rectangular object that measured ten by four and a half inches. “Any guesses?” asked Sigrid. “Could be anything,” said Dr. Ridgway. “A diary, letters, maybe even a jeweler’s box. I haven’t come across anything here that fits though.” In fact, she reported, she’d been through everything on Shambley’s makeshift desk and had found nothing untoward among the murdered man’s papers. “It seems to be the usual scholarly hodgepodge of raw data right now,” she said, running her fingers through her extravagantly curly hair. “He had cross-referenced Erich Breul’s bills of sale for various pictures with what similar pictures were fetching in the U.S. at the time. He wanted to check what a middleman like Bernard Berenson got for some of the pictures he represented as compared with dealing directly with the owners as Breul did, for instance.” “You’ve matched those bills with the actual pictures?” asked Sigrid. “Only on the inventory sheets,” said Dr. Ridgway. “Shambley seems to have already checked them off himself, but I’ll redo it, if you like.” “I would.” “Okey-doke,” she said. As Dr. Ridgway returned to her work, Sigrid drew Albee and Lowry aside and asked Albee about yesterday’s search of the basement. Lowry had already told her about the missing cane and the policewoman shook her blond head. “We were specifically looking for anything that could have been used as a weapon so I’m sure it would have been noticed if it was there.” Sigrid looked around the large attic and saw that Mrs. Beardsley had rejoined the docents who, with Pascal Grant’s help, were still laboriously checking the attic’s inventory. She carried the embroidered satin envelope over to the senior docent. “Have you ever seen this?” she asked. “It’s Sophie Breul’s glove case,” said Mrs. Beardsley. “How did it get up here?” “Where’s it normally kept?” “Why, down in her dressing room, of course.” She led the three police detectives down to the second floor, to the dressing room that connected Sophie Breul’s bedroom to her bath. With barely a moment’s hesitation, Mrs. Beardsley went straight to a chest of drawers and opened the second one from the top. A whiff of lavender drifted toward them as a puzzled Mrs. Beardsley said, “But Sigrid reached for the new one. Inside were several pairs of kid gloves, all imbued with the scent of lavender. She lifted the first satin case to her nose. It was musty and smelled like an old bookstore. “This didn’t come from that drawer,” she told the others. Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters finished up at the New York Center for the Fine Arts before noon, grabbed a sandwich in a nearby bar and grill on York Avenue, then headed over to the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. Afternoon sunlight shone through the barebranched trees of Central Park and slanted on the luxurious apartment buildings on the other side of Fifth Avenue. There, uniformed and gloved doormen opened their doors for residents who emerged from double-parked limos with piles of beautifully gift-wrapped boxes. Santa’s little helpers. “What’re you getting Frances for Christmas?” asked Bernie as they passed a nursemaid wheeling an enormous English pram, its tiny occupant buried in a nest of pale pink wool. “I don’t know. Maybe a fancy new robe.” “Didn’t you give her that last year?” “Did I?” They paused for a light and the big detective sighed. “Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know. What’re you giving Pam?” “Diamond earrings,” Bernie said happily. “Soon as she got pregnant this last time, I just knew it was going to be a boy, so I put them on lay-away and I’ve been paying on ’em all along. Next week, they’re mine.” “Diamond earrings! God, I hope Frances doesn’t hear about them,” groaned Eberstadt as they neared the Guggenheim. Their visit to the Fine Arts Center had added little to their knowledge of the dead man. Tuesday had been the last day of classes until after New Year’s, so the only colleagues to be found were some instructors who hadn’t turned in all their grade cards. Dr. Aaron Prawn, head of nineteenth-century American studies, summed up Shambley’s career through tightly clenched, pipe-gripping teeth. “Ambitious. Perhaps a bit too. But definitely on his way. A bit of a barracuda? Yes. But one has to be to get anywhere in the nineteenth century these days. Junior colleagues loathed him, of course. Goes with the territory.” Unfortunately, Shambley had been on leave this semester so no one had seen enough of him lately to report on his last movements. The divisional secretary remembered that he’d been in Wednesday morning to pick up his mail, but she’d been busy with a student and had merely exchanged season’s greetings with him. They were luckier at the Guggenheim. Among the scraps of paper in Shambley’s pocket had been a receipt from the museum’s bookstore and one of the clerks there remembered Dr. Shambley. “I was in one of his classes at the center last spring,” said the girl, a part-time student who worked full-time during the holiday break. “I knew who he was, but he didn’t remember me.” Eberstadt found that hard to believe. His own hairline had receded to the very top of his head where wiry gray curls ran from ear to ear across his bald dome like some sort of steel-wool tiara. He was half bald by necessity; the girl must have paid a hair stylist good money to clip that same area of her platinum white hair to a flat half-inch stubble while the rest of her hair fell to her shoulders. How many of Shambley’s students could have had hairstyles like that? Bernie Peters was more interested in whether she was wearing a bra beneath that turquoise silk shirt. “Do you remember what he bought?” She looked at the sales slip and nodded. “Two Léger posters at fourteen ninety-eight each, plus tax.” “Léger?” asked Eberstadt, stumbling over the pronunciation. He pulled out his notebook and pen. “How do you spell that?” “Fernand Léger,” she said, spelling it over her silky shoulder as she led them through aisles crowded with artsy souvenirs and art books-some of them heavy enough to give you a hernia, thought Peters-to the Guggenheim’s collection of posters. “French painter. I thought it was kinda strange that Dr. Shambley would want cubist posters when his field’s nineteenth-century American. Of course, he She pulled a plastic-wrapped cylinder from one of the bins. “This is it. I’m not supposed to open it though unless you’re going to buy it.” There was a small reproduction of the artwork on the outer wrap. To the detectives’ untutored eyes, it looked like a picture of two faceless mannequins constructed of Dixie cups and paper chains. They were drawn in heavy black lines. One figure was red, the other bright blue. “He bought “Uh-huh. He got kinda pissed when we didn’t have two différent examples from that period. It was like maybe he was doing his Christmas shopping or something. But then he kinda laughed and said it didn’t matter; that he’d just hang one of them upside down. Weird, right?” Her loose shirt fell forward as she bent to return the poster to its proper slot, but Bernie Peters noted with only half his attention that she wasn’t wearing a bra. The other half recalled the search he’d helped conduct yesterday. “I think I saw those posters in the Breul House basement,” he told Matt Eberstadt. Seated across the library table from the two female detectives, Mrs. Beardsley had grown weary of the way one had to say the same thing three different ways before the police moved on to a different question. Beyond the possibility of a trunk in the attic, she had no idea where Sophie Breul’s extra glove case had spent the last seventy years, nor what that satin case had held, and she had told them so. At length. This was rapidly becoming, she decided, a delicate question of etiquette. On the one hand, police officers were, by their very calling, of a lower socioeconomic order. One must, of course, treat everyone-even one’s inferiors-graciously although a certain distance was allowed. On the other hand, Miss Harald- So one could hardly snub her with impunity. Not even when she made gross insinuations. “Now “But Dr. Shambley did fill a vacancy on the board of trustees which you had hoped for, didn’t he?” asked the lieutenant. “I let it be known that my name could be considered,” Mrs. Beardsley admitted. “One is seldom chosen immediately. It is quite usual to be passed over the first time or two.” “Will you ask to be considered now that the seat is vacant again?” “Certainly,” said Mrs. Beardsley firmly. “Why not? Everyone knows my devotion to the Erich Breul House is unchanged.” “Yes,” agreed the police officer. “We’ve heard that you’re often the first to arrive in the mornings and the last to leave at night.” Her tone sounded more conciliatory and Mrs. Beardsley unbent slightly. “One can’t claim too much credit for that when it’s merely a matter of walking across the square.” “And you do have a key,” mused Lieutenant Harald. Mrs. Beardsley looked at her sharply. Such a drab-looking person today in that dark gray suit and no makeup. On Wednesday night she’d been rather striking in an odd way. Or was that only because one linked her with Oscar Nauman? “Tell us again, please, what you did after the others left?” she was saying. Mrs. Beardsley sighed and went through it all again: how all the guests had gone by eight-thirty, how she’d sent Dr. Peake on his way, how she’d overseen the caterers’ departure. She did not try to describe how she loved being alone in this house, how she could almost imagine herself a member of the Breul family, or how alive they often seemed to her. Never mind if Pascal were in the basement or Dr. Shambley in the attic. As long as one didn’t see or hear either man, one’s imagination was free to see and hear the Breuls. “No,” she said again. “I didn’t go down to the basement because I thought Pascal was still out; and Dr. Shambley had made it quite clear more than once that he did not wish to be disturbed when he was working. I ascertained that all the candles were snuffed, then I unplugged the Christmas tree and went home without seeing either of them.” Mrs. Beardsley braced herself for more questions on that point. Instead, the Harald woman sat back in her chair with a trousered knee propped against the edge of the gleaming table top and asked, “Why did Pascal Grant dislike Dr. Shambley? Some of the other docents have told us that he avoided the man whenever he could.” “Dr. Shambley made him feel uncomfortable,” she hedged. “How?” Protective maternalism surged in Mrs. Beardsley’s breast. “Pascal Grant couldn’t hurt a fly,” she told them. “Surely you see what a sweet gentle boy he is.” “That’s why we don’t understand what he had against Dr. Shambley,” said the younger detective, smiling at her across the table. Mrs. Beardsley approved of the blonde’s tailored femininity, her coral lipstick and modest eye shadow, her Cuban-heeled boots and brown tweed jacket worn over beige-and-peach plaid slacks. So much easier to talk to, she decided. And really, weren’t policewomen rather like nurses? One could discuss anything with nurses. “It was painful for Pascal to speak of it,” she said, bravely ignoring her own embarrassment, “but it seems there was a man at the sheltered workshop where Pascal trained when he was twelve or thirteen.” Her voice lowered. “A “And Shambley-?” asked Detective Albee. “Oh, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Beardsley. “When I realized how uneasy Pascal was, I cross-questioned him quite thoroughly, for I would have denounced Dr. Shambley had that been the case. No, no, I’m quite certain he did not approach the boy; but evidently, there was some physical resemblance between Dr. Shambley and the man who had once abused him. Something about their eyes, I believe. Poor Pascal. His reactions are emotional rather than reasoned. But you must surely see from this that his instinct is to retreat, not attack. He simply avoided the man whenever he could.” The other two women were silent for a moment, then, absently tapping her pen against her knee, Lieutenant Harald said, “Getting back to your own movements, Mrs. Beardsley: you saw no one after the caterers left?” “Not even,” added the other officer, “Mr. Thorvaldsen when you crossed the square?” “I’m sorry, Detective Albee, but when it’s that cold, one doesn’t linger outside to pass the time of night with casual pedestrians whom one may or may not know. I simply didn’t notice.” “So when you say that you went home shortly after nine and didn’t return,” said Lieutenant Harald, “there’s no one who can confirm your statement?” Mrs. Beardsley inclined her head. “No one.” Once more they asked her about seeing Thorvaldsen leave the house at midnight and then they thanked her for her cooperation. One with a completely clear conscience did not register relief at having done one’s civic duty, Mrs. Beardsley reminded herself, and walked with quiet dignity from the library. Sigrid glanced at Albee. “Well?” “Oh yes,” said Elaine. “I could see her deciding that he was a bug that needed to be squashed and just doing it. But only if he was hurting her precious house. And he wasn’t.” “That we’re aware of,” Sigrid told her. “We still don’t know where he found that glove case or what he took from it.” “And we may never know,” sighed Jim Lowry, returning from the attic at the end of her comments. “The docents say there’re more than a dozen trunks and wardrobe boxes full of Mrs. Breul’s stuff up there and the inventory sheets don’t go into much detail. Just ‘apparel’ or ‘accessories.’ And the case might have held a jeweler’s box, but they don’t think there was anything valuable still in it because all her good stuff was sold when the house became a museum.” Out in the long marble hall, there was a sudden babble and chatter of excited female voices and through the open doorway, they saw a bearded professor with a harried air as he shepherded his charges past the ticket table. The art students from that Raleigh women’s college, no doubt. “This might be a good time to break for lunch,” Sigrid said judiciously. At the gallery off Fifth Avenue, Rick Evans mechanically set another painting on the easel, readjusted the two floodlights on either side, took a reading with his light meter, then focused his camera and clicked the shutter. When he first came up from Louisiana in September, it had surprised Rick how strongly the art world depended upon slides. The first cuts in competitions were made by judges who looked at slides; grants were awarded, exhibitions decided, magazine articles written-all very often on the basis of photographic slides alone. His grandfather spoke of this trend with contempt, but Hester Kohn merely shrugged her shoulders and asked Jacob to consider the cost of shipping fees, not to mention wear and tear on the artwork itself. Rick set another large oil painting upon the easel. It looked a little topheavy in composition, all those purple slashes at the top and empty unprimed canvas at the bottom, and he checked the label on the back of the stretcher to make sure it was right side up. He no longer tried to understand each picture. All he cared about now was making a technically perfect slide. In the beginning, his grandfather had brought a chair into the workroom and sat beside him during these photography sessions and talked to him of each work’s artistic strengths and weaknesses. “See how the dynamic forces play against the static, Richard,” he would say, his words lightly accented with German and the smell of peppermint. Or, “Why do you think the artist placed the yellow so low? Why to buoy up the work and to relieve the dark weights above. Contraction and relaxation, And if the picture touched a chord, he would go off and rummage through books in his office and come back with illustrations that showed how Vermeer, though a Dutch realist of the seventeenth century, used the same approach; or how Picasso or Matisse had dealt with the same matter differently. “Do you see?” he would ask. “Do you see?” “Yes, sir,” Rick would reply, wanting to please. And he “ That day, he had grabbed Rick by the shoulders and fiercely swung him around to glare into his face. As their eyes locked, the anger had drained from the old mans face. “Paul’s eyes you have,” he’d said sadly, “and in you they are blind.” After that, his grandfather continued to sit in on some of the sessions and to instruct as before, but the intensity had gone out of his lectures and he had stopped asking Rick to describe what he saw. He could stand that, Rick thought, as he snapped the last exposure on the roll of film. What he couldn’t stand was the look that had appeared on his grandfather’s face when he and Hester had returned from the police station yesterday. “You were there last night?” Grandfather had asked in a dreadful voice. “In that “In his “ He would stay until after Christmas, Rick thought, sliding a fresh roll of film into his camera. After that, he would go home and let his mother pull strings for a job with one of the state bureaus in Baton Rouge. He would walk back-country lanes again and take pictures of pelicans and swamps for wildlife calendars or tourist brochures. And he would stop trying to deny to himself that he was what he was. Next to a rent-controlled apartment, Zeki’s, just west of Third Avenue, was that most precious urban find: an as-yet-undiscovered, good, midtown restaurant. Even Gael Greene was unaware of its existence. Although celebrities often lunched there, knowing they would not be bothered by gawkers, New Yorkers came for the Turco-Croatian cuisine of delicately spiced lamb and indescribable breads, not to see and be seen. It was nearly two and the outer room was still crowded as Oscar Nauman passed through. He spoke to a couple of friends, nodded when the barman said, “The usual?” and found Jacob Munson at his corner table in the back. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite his dealer. “The garage down the block was full. You order yet?” “ Oscar looked across the snowy white tablecloth and frowned. “You feeling all right, Jacob?” The old man shrugged. He looked shrunken today. His face was nearly as gray as his thin beard and his brown eyes had lost their elfin luster. “Not coming down with something, are you?” “It’s nothing. A little cough. What are you? Nurse Nightingale?” Jacob asked irritably. “That’s better,” Oscar grinned. But as his glass of ale arrived accompanied by a martini, the grin faded; and when the waiter had taken their orders, he said, “What’s with the drink? I thought your doctors said-” “They did. Lean closer, my friend, and I’ll tell you a secret: Jacob Munson is not going to live forever. Tomorrow he could drop dead; so why not a martini today?” He lifted the glass and sipped long. “Then who’ll take care of my show?” Oscar asked lightly, determined to shake Jacob out of this puzzling mood. “Elliott Buntrock will.” He caught the waiter’s eye across the room and signaled for another martini. “There’s a Buntrock under every rock,” he said bitterly. “Jacob?” “You’re a lucky man, Oscar Nauman. When “What the hell’s going on?” Oscar demanded. Munson sank back in his chair. “Roger Shambley was killed Wednesday night.” He twirled the stem of his empty martini glass back and forth between his wrinkled fingers. The silence stretched between them. “So?” Oscar finally asked. “So your lady policeman thinks my grandson Richard did it.” “ “She’s wrong, though. You will tell her this?” “Jacob-” “It was Benjamin or Hester or maybe both together,” he said heavily. “I don’t know.” As the waiter brought their food and another martini, a paroxysm of coughing shook his small frame and Oscar told the waiter to take away the drink and bring his friend club soda with a twist of lemon. When Jacob was breathing normally again, Oscar said, “Talk to me, Jacob. What’s happening at the gallery?” “You know what Horace Kohn and I tried to build.” Jacob stared at the savory chicken stew before him. “We never said “Yes.” “You remember Paul?” he asked abruptly. Oscar remembered Paul Munson as a handsome, sweet-natured kid. Bright enough, but not the flaming meteor he’d become to his father since his plane had crashed sixteen years ago. Odd to think Paul would be nearing forty if he’d lived. “Rick reminds me of Paul,” he said as he buttered a piece of crusty bread. “Same eyes.” “They are nothing alike,” said Jacob, anger in every syllable. “Paul had an eye for art.” “I meant in looks,” Oscar said mildly. “Same shade of brown. Besides, aren’t you being a little hard on the boy? He’s only been here three months.” “Three months, three years, it wouldn’t matter. It’s his mother’s fault. Suzanne turned her back on the gallery.” Oscar occasionally had trouble remembering that there were two older daughters, Suzanne and Marta. He vaguely recalled that both had earned doctorates in other fields, but Jacob almost never spoke of them. All his pride had been bound up in Paul and when Paul died, Paul’s friend, Benjamin Peake, had become his surrogate. “She made him a photographer. She made him a-” His voice dropped lower-“a “A what?” asked Oscar. The old man’s face twisted with shame. “A faggot.” Oscar ate silently. There were so many different sexual proclivities in the art world that he was surprised that Jacob could still be homophobic. Or did tolerance stop when it touched him personally? “He was with the janitor that night. In his bedroom.” “So what’s the big deal, Jacob? It’s not the end of the world.” “Only the end of my line,” Munson said bleakly, drawing his fork through the sauce on his plate. “The end of the gallery.” “Oh, come on, Jacob. If the boy doesn’t work out, Hester will keep things going. And it’s crazy to think she had anything to do with Shambley’s death. When Sigrid and I left Wednesday night, you and Hester were planning to share a cab back uptown.” “She got out at East Forty-ninth. Said she was meeting someone at the Waldorf. Yesterday when she came back from the police station, I made her tell me who. It was Benjamin.” Oscar stopped cutting his lamb and started to wonder if Jacob were experiencing the beginnings of senility. His voice was gentle as he asked if Jacob had forgotten that Hester and Ben-? The art dealer interrupted with an impatient wave of his hand. “It wasn’t about sex, Oscar. Wednesday night, Roger Shambley accused Hester and Ben of passing a piece of forged art through the gallery. Yesterday I asked Hester of this. First she said no; then she said there was no way Shambley could have proved it.” He pushed his plate aside with most of the food still untasted. “She may be a woman, but she isn’t that stupid, Oscar. Shambley wouldn’t have had to prove anything. A gallery’s word is its bond and if that word becomes a lie-” He gave a palms-up gesture of hopelessness. Sigrid arrived at the gallery with Jim Lowry shortly before three. The soft-voiced receptionist informed them that Mr. Munson had not returned from lunch and that Miss Kohn, as they could see, was busy at the moment but if they wished to wait? “Yes,” Sigrid said and Lowry took a guide sheet from a nearby stand. “Notebook pages?” he asked sotto voce. “Twenty-three hundred a sheet? Who’s Ardù Screnii? Never heard of him.” Stunned, he began to circle the airy showroom, peering first at each matted and framed drawing and then at the price Kohn and Munson was asking for it. Sigrid pretended to study the drawings, but she chose those that would give her reflected views of Hester Kohn, presently occupied with two customers. The dealer wore hot pink today and a chunky pearl-and-gold necklace. From the conversation which floated through the nearly deserted gallery, Sigrid soon gathered that the man and woman were a husband and wife from Chicago and that he was a commodities trader. She also gathered that they expected more from an Ardù Screnii drawing than pure aesthetics. “Of course,” she heard Hester Kohn say, “you have to realize that the bottom line is whether you “Yes,” the man nodded sagely. “Yes, I know that but-” “I can tell you how some things “Oh, no, we She was struck by a sudden thought. “I forget. Screnii was Albanian, wasn’t he?” “Bulgarian,” said Hester Kohn. “Oh, good!” said the woman. “I’ve always believed in the Bulgarians.” By way of the reflective glass, Sigrid saw Hester Kohn smile politely. The man chuckled, even though he wasn’t quite ready to give up the practical. “Still, a Screnii There was a contemplative pause. “Not that I’d even know what a soybean looked like if I came face to face with one.” “Aren’t they like guyva peas?” the woman asked brightly. Hester Kohn shrugged. “Ah well,” said the man, “what does it matter as long as I can buy low and sell them high? Now, I think my wife and I are going to have to do a little commodities trading on which one of these Screniis we want.” Ardù Screnii had died in the midsixties, Sigrid knew. He had eked out a living by teaching an occasional course at Vanderlyn, and Nauman was a little bitter that Screnii had never been able to sell one of his major paintings for more than fifteen hundred dollars during his lifetime. As the two clients left, promising to come back the next day with their minds made up, Sigrid and Lowry approached Jacob Munson’s partner. “Miss Kohn? We have a few more questions.” Hester Kohn sighed. “Yes. I was afraid you might.” When Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters returned to the Breul House, the docent on duty at the door informed them that Detective Albee could be found in the attic. “Where’s Lowry and the lieutenant?” they asked after they’d climbed to the top of the house and heard about Dr. Ridgway’s discovery of the satin glove case in Shambley’s briefcase. “Over at Kohn and Munson Gallery,” Elaine told them. “What’s up?” The two women listened intently as the men described how Shambley had bought two posters at the Guggenheim on Wednesday morning, posters Bernie Peters thought he remembered seeing. “I haven’t found any references to Léger in his papers,” said Dr. Ridgway, “but I’ll keep it in mind.” The three detectives went down the back stairs, avoiding a group of twenty or so young women to whom Mrs. Beardsley was giving a tour of the house. In the basement, it took Peters a few minutes to regain his bearings, but he soon went to a box in one of the storage rooms and plucked out the rolled posters, still in their plastic wrap. He slit the paper on one of them and backrolled it so that it would hang straight. It was just as the small illustration promised: a cubist depiction of two figures that, except for their vivid red and blue colors, reminded Elaine of the Tin Woodman in They carried it upstairs and asked Dr. Peake if he or Miss Ruffton could speculate why Shambley should buy two identical Léger posters and stash them in the basement. “Beats me,” Peaks said, lounging indolently in a chair beside Hope Ruffton’s desk. “Léger’s too modern. Clean out of Shambley’s period. Most of his work was done in the thirties and forties. He died in the midfifties, if I’m not mistaken.” His secretary was equally puzzled. “This looks familiar though. Now where have I seen-?” The young janitor passed near by on his way down to the basement and he gave them a shy smile as he skirted the mannequin dressed like Erich Breul. “Just a minute, Grant,” Dr. Peake said. “These detectives found some posters Dr. Shambley left in the basement. Do you know anything about them?” Pascal Grant looked at the cubist poster and his face lit up. “I have pictures like that in my room.” “What?” exclaimed Peake, coming erect in his chair. “ “Oh,” said Peake. “Those.” He sank back lazily into the chair again. “For a minute there-” He smiled to himself at the absurdity of what he’d almost thought for a minute. “Want to see them?” Pascal Grant asked the detectives. Golden curls spilled over his fair brow and he brushed them back as he looked up at Eberstadt with a friendly air. “Naw, that’s okay,” said Peters. He and Eberstadt started toward the front door. “We’ve still got a couple of alibis to check. Drop you somewhere, Lainey?” “No, thanks,” she said, remembering Mrs. Beardsley’s explanation of Grant’s unease with Shambley. “One thing though-when you were checking out Shambley’s background, did anybody happen to mention if he was gay?” “No,” Eberstadt said slowly, “but when we asked if he was living with anybody… remember, Bern?” “Yeah. They said no. That Shambley couldn’t decide if he was AC or DC, so he wound up being no-C.” “Interesting,” Albee said. “I’ll hang on to the poster and bring it back to the office later. The lieutenant’ll probably want to see it.” By the time Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters reached the sidewalk, Elaine Albee was already halfway down the basement steps to talk with Pascal Grant again. “I suppose I may as well tell you,” said Hester Kohn. “If I don’t, Jacob will.” She led them to the small sitting room she’d created around the window corner of the large office that had once belonged to her father, and Sigrid and Jim Lowry were invited to take the blue-and-turquoise chairs opposite her plum-colored love seat. The upholstery seemed impregnated with her gardenia perfume, which, coupled with a pair of highly chromatic red and orange abstract pictures on dark green walls, gave the office a sensual, subtropical atmosphere. She loosened her pink jacket button by button and a languid smile touched her lips when she saw how Lowry’s eyes followed her fingers. As an interested spectator, Sigrid usually enjoyed watching other women operate, but it was almost three and she didn’t feel like wasting more time. “What would Mr. Munson tell us?” she asked crisply. “That he didn’t drop me at my apartment near Lincoln Center Wednesday night,” Hester replied. “I met Ben Peake after the party. We talked about an hour, then I went home. Alone. And before you ask, no, I can’t prove it.” “You’d just seen Dr. Peake,” said Sigrid. “Why did you meet again so quickly?” “There were private things we needed to discuss.” “Things Shambley had brought up in the library?” Sigrid asked. “Ben told you about that?” “He gave us his version-” Sigrid said carefully. Hester Kohn interrupted with a ladylike snort and ran her fingers through her short black hair. “I’ll bet he did!” “-and no doubt, Mr. Munson will have his own version of what he overheard Shambley say,” Sigrid finished smoothly. The seductive languor disappeared from Hester Kohn’s body and she became wary and all business. “There’s no need to question Jacob about this.” “No?” “No.” She cast a speculative woman-to-woman look at Sigrid. “Oscar and Jacob have been friends for as long as I can remember. Even since I was a little girl. Oscar could tell you how much this gallery means to Jacob.” Her words contained a not-too-subtle threat, which Sigrid coldly ignored. “And not to you, too?” “Of course to me,” she answered impatiently. “But it’s different for Jacob. He’s old-world with a capital O and that means things like honor and Her hazel eyes slid over Jim Lowry’s muscular body. “He might talk to you,” she told him. “He’s chauvinistic?” asked Sigrid. “He’s a gentleman,” Hester Kohn corrected with a grimace. “That means women are ladies. You charm ladies, you marry them, you have sons with them, but you don’t take them too seriously or admit them to power. Look around the gallery, Lieutenant Harald: We represent two female artists. And both of them are dead. “Jacob used to think that Paul and I would marry and Paul would run the business. Then when Paul died, and it was too late to rope in Suzanne or Marta, he half adopted Ben Peake and tried to make Bright spots of angry red flamed in her cheeks. “Every time I really think about it, I feel like screaming. Men made the tax laws, Ben Peake and his friend came up with the figures, and all I did was sign the appraisal, but who does Jacob blame the most? Three guesses.” “I’m sorry, Miss Kohn,” said Jim Lowry, “but I don’t understand. Tax laws? Appraisal?” “It’s absolutely routine,” she said defensively. “Anyhow, half the galleries in the country are doing it, too.” Abruptly, it dawned on her that neither detective knew what she was talking about. “I thought you said Ben told you.” “I said he gave us his version,” Sigrid reminded her. “And we still have to hear Mr. Munson’s.” With an angry sigh, Hester Kohn sank back into the cushions of the plum love seat. “This happened a couple of years ago while Ben was still at the Friedinger. One of the patrons there was in serious need of a large tax write-off. Basically, the way it works is that a donor gives a nonprofit institution a work of art. An independent appraiser estimates how much the work is worth and the donor then lists that figure in his tax returns as a charitable donation.” “The appraiser-you, in fact-inflates the figure?” Sigrid asked. Hester Kohn nodded. “But why would the institution that’s getting the artwork go along with that?” asked Lowry. “What do they care?” Her voice was cynical. “They’re getting a donation they otherwise wouldn’t and next time, it might be a really important gift. Besides, if they decide to deaccess, it’s usually worth at least half the appraised price.” Sigrid looked at her inquiringly. “Only in this particular case-” “In this particular case, it was worth about a quarter of what Jacob Munson said it was worth.” “You signed his name to an appraisal statement?” asked Lowry. “He’s the judge of artistic merit in this firm,” Hester Kohn said with bitterness. “I’m just the business and financial side. My signature wouldn’t have sufficed. See, Jacob isn’t asked to appraise things very often because everyone in the business knows he’s so goddamned straight-arrow. He might come down on the high side, but his figures are usually within two or three thousand of the true value. The tax people know this, too, and they haven’t bothered to question him in years.” “So how much kickback did you and Peake get?” Sigrid asked. “I had a pool put in at my house in Riverhead,” she said candidly. “I believe Ben bought a car.” “And Shambley threatened to blow the whistle on you?” asked Jim Lowry. Hester Kohn shrugged and plucked a piece of lint from the dark purple upholstery. “Ben thought so, but I wasn’t that sure. Roger Shambley was so effing devious. He never came straight out and said what he meant. It was all hypothetical and insinuating. Frankly, I thought he was sounding us out to see if we’d go along with some scheme he was hatching.” “Oh?” She nodded. “Sort of as if he were saying he knew we’d bent the rules once before and got away with it and maybe we could do something for him. Or with him. It wasn’t clear.” “So you and Dr. Peake didn’t feel threatened by him?” “Not really. “You forged your partner’s name,” Lowry pointed out. “Ye-s,” she admitted, “but if it came right down to it, Jacob would claim it was his signature. He’d rather hush it up and say he’d made an honest mistake than let the gallery’s name be dragged through the mud with one of its owners up for forgery.” She stood up and walked over to stare through the window at the buildings of midtown Manhattan. A wave of gardenia reached the two police officers as she turned back to face them. “Look, I know I’ve been rather flip about it and Jacob really does make me furious at times, but go easy on him about what Ben and I did, okay? He’s an old man and the gallery’s all he has now.” “What about his grandson?” asked Lowry. She shook her dark head. “He’s a sweet kid, but Richard Evans doesn’t know art from artichokes. Wouldn’t surprise me if he went home for Christmas and never came back.” “One moment, “It’s been almost two years. How many people did you have to call to find my number?” “None,” Nauman replied, making her pulse quicken before he added, “It was on the gallery’s Rolodex.” “Beast! You’re supposed to say it’s engraved on your heart.” He laughed. “Elliott Buntrock just called. He wants to have a short meeting here at the gallery tomorrow afternoon. ‘Talk turkey’ was how he put it. Think you and Thorvaldsen can make it?” Francesca looked at the calendar on her desk. “What time?” “Three-thirty?” “Four would probably be better for Søren.” “Four it is. See you.” “Ta.” She replaced the receiver and tilted her head so that the thick coppery hair fell away from her face as she slipped the stud of her earring through the lobe again. The nice thing about parting amicably with someone, she thought, was the free and easy friendship that often continued afterwards. The rotten thing was when the parting was more amicable on Except that the tenth man would be Oscar. The interview with Jacob Munson was as difficult as Hester Kohn had predicted. It began awkwardly when Sigrid, trailed by Jim Lowry, walked down the hall to Munson’s open door and found Nauman there, too, just hanging up the phone on Munson’s desk. At least Nauman hadn’t said anything flippant when she introduced Lowry, and Lowry gave no sign that the artist’s name had special curiosity value for him. But when Nauman heaved his tall frame up from the chair, Munson had underlined the personal aspects of the case by insisting that Oscar should stay. “You “Just the same, I’ll wait outside,” Nauman said and took himself off. Munson sat behind his cluttered desk looking like an elderly elf who’d just learned that Santa’s workshop was jobbing out its toy production to Korea. He went through the motions of hospitality halfheartedly, offering them drinks, which they refused, and peppermints, which Lowry accepted. “Wow!” he breathed as the pungent minty oils peppered his tastebuds. Normally, Jacob Munson would have beamed and offered to share the name of the candy company who imported these particular mints, but not today. His answers to their questions were monosyllabic. Yes, he and Hester had left the party together. Yes, Hester had gotten out near the Waldorf and he’d gone on home alone. No, there was no one to say what time he’d arrived at his upper West Side apartment, nor could he say when his grandson had come home, as he’d already gone to sleep. “Besides,” he added, twisting the thin strands of his gray beard, “you know where my grandson was and what he was doing.” “Yes,” Sigrid said wryly, thinking how busy Rick Evans and Pascal Grant must have been hauling Shambley’s body all over the Breul House. Munson adamantly refused to discuss what he’d heard Shambley say to Benjamin Peake or Hester Kohn. “You must ask them,” he said, drawing his small frame up with Prussian militancy. “Miss Kohn has told us about the forgery,” Sigrid said. She had thought it was impossible for his stiff shoulders to become more rigid. She was wrong. “Then you know all there is to know,” he said. “I will not discuss this further without my lawyer.” And from that position, he would not budge. Nauman was still waiting out in the main part of the gallery when they emerged from Munson’s office, and he looked up expectantly. Sigrid glanced at her watch, saw it was almost five-thirty, and sent Lowry to the phone to check in. “Ready to call it a day?” Nauman asked. “Unless something’s come up,” she said. They watched while Lowry spoke to headquarters on the receptionist’s telephone. “Nothing that can’t wait till tomorrow,” he reported. As she dismissed him, she caught the look of hesitation on his face. “Something, Lowry?” “Just that-well, ma’am, Eberstadt and Peters have checked out all the stories we’ve been given.” “Yes?” Her gray eyes were like granite and Jim Lowry lost his nerve. Let someone else ask her, he decided. “Nothing, ma’am. See you tomorrow?” “What was that about?” asked Nauman, watching the younger man step out into the cold night air and pull his collar up to his ears. “I think he wanted to ask if you had a proper alibi.” She smiled as she put on her heavy coat and gloves. “Me?” “I suppose I’ll have to go on record tomorrow and tell them that all your movements are accounted for.” “ “Well,” she emended. “Enough of them anyhow.” They browsed through a few stores along Fifth Avenue, not really intent on Christmas shopping, but open to felicitous suggestions. Sigrid bought a new camera case for her mother. Anne Harald was a photojournalist and her old case had banged around all over the world so much that it was ratty and frayed. A cutlery store reminded her that Roman Tramegra had recently grumbled about his need for proper boning knives. She found a set with wicked-looking thin blades. Nauman saw a delicate cloisonné pin enameled to look like a zebra swallowtail and immediately bought it for Jill Gill, an entomologist friend who raised butterflies. By seven their arms were laden with packages, so they walked to the garage west of Fifth Avenue, dumped everything into Nauman’s bright yellow sports car, and drove down to the Village for an early dinner. Over their wine, Nauman brought up Shambley’s death and Jacob Munson’s reaction. “He told me everything,” he said. Sigrid held up a warning hand. “Nauman, wait. You do understand that anything you tell me-” “-can and will be used against me?” “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 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 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: “ 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 Twenty minutes later, he closed Erich Jr.’s trunk in disappointment and brushed the dust of the storage room from his trousers knees. 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 “Did what?” asked Sigrid, disentangling herself from his effusive bear hug. “Sold my very first 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 “Oh, those aren’t Puzzled, Sigrid opened the envelope and found one of Søren Thorvaldsen’s personal cards. On the reverse, he’d written, “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! |
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