"Corpus Christmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maron Margaret)

IX

Saturday, December 19

The day dawned gray and freezing and Sigrid’s mood wasn’t helped when she reached work and found that Mick Cluett had called in sick again and that Bernie Peters was taking a half day of personal leave.

“One of his daughters fell off her bike this morning and knocked out a tooth,” said Matt Eberstadt.

“I thought kids watched cartoons on Saturday morning,” Sigrid said, diverted by the thought that the Peters children might be part of a healthier national trend.

“Their TV’s in the shop,” said Eberstadt.

He described to her what they had learned of Shambley at the New York Center for the Fine Arts and how they’d found the posters he’d purchased at the Guggenheim.

“Matt thinks Shambley might have been bisexual,” Elaine Albee chimed in. “And you remember what Mrs. Beardsley said about Pascal Grant feeling uneasy around him?”

Sigrid nodded.

“Well, I decided to have another talk with him. He’s got all these reproductions of modern art up in his room-says they remind him of jazz. He’s really a nice kid and so good-looking, I wondered if maybe Shambley was trying to lay him.”

“And instead of flowers and candy,” jeered Lowry, “he brought art posters?”

“It could fit,” Eberstadt contended. “Shambley told the girl at the museum shop that he could hang one of the posters upside down and it wouldn’t matter. Sounds like he was talking about somebody two cards shy of a full deck, doesn’t it?”

“A love triangle?” Sigrid said. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Rick Evans said he and Grant were together when Shambley was killed,” Lowry nodded judiciously. “And we know what that means, but what if Evans knew Shambley was going to try to cut him out and-”

“No way,” said Elaine Albee. “Oh, there might be some latent adolescent stirrings, but Pascal Grant says he and Evans were listening to jazz and I don’t think he was lying. I don’t think he knows how to lie. He’s such an innocent. Look how quickly he fell apart when we questioned him Thursday.”

“You may be right about Grant,” Sigrid said, “but Jacob Munson is convinced that his grandson’s gay and he’s not happy about it.”

She repeated the pertinent things Nauman had told her about his lunch conversation with Munson.

“Oh,” said Lowry. “So that’s what he meant when he said we knew where his grandson was when Shambley was killed. And what he was doing there. I thought he was talking about them moving the body.”

“I did, too,” Sigrid admitted.

“I asked Grant about that again,” said Elaine. “He said Rick didn’t want anyone to know he’d been spending the night there because, and I quote, ‘People would say it was sex.’ ”

“And you’re sure that it wasn’t?” asked Sigrid.

“Not on Pascal Grant’s part,” Elaine said sturdily.

They moved on to the possibility that Shambley might have tried to blackmail Hester Kohn and Benjamin Peake over Munson’s forged signature on an inflated tax appraisal, and considered that relatively minor crime in the light of Munson’s assertion that they had instead authenticated and sold forged paintings through the gallery.

It was hard to know which was true, they decided, when everyone who’d known Dr. Roger Shambley agreed that he insinuated, suggested, and implied but very seldom said precisely what was on his mind.

“Look at Thorvaldsen,” said Lowry. “A self-made millionaire like him, he has to be sharp, right? Yet, according to him, he went sneaking back to the Breul House Wednesday night and cooled his heels for an hour, all because Shambley offered him a deal. At least he thinks Shambley offered him a deal. But he doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know why.”

“Or so he says,” Sigrid cautioned. “Don’t forget he also hinted to me that Shambley might have caused him a problem if he stirred up trouble right now. He might have gone there expecting to pay blackmail for all we know.”

“We checked out Lady Francesca Leeds’ story,” Matt Eberstadt reported. “And Hope Ruffton’s. Both were where they said they were unless a lot of people are lying.”

“That takes care of all the checkable stories,” said Lowry in his capacity as recorder for this case. He read from his notes, “Of the people there that night, the ones in the clear are Leeds, Ruffton, the Hymans, the Herzogs, Buntrock, that pianist and the caterer’s people. Munson, Hester Kohn, Thorvaldsen, Mrs. Beardsley, Peake and Mr. Reinicke can’t prove their movements.”

Lowry paused and Sigrid said dryly, “You’ve omitted two people: Oscar Nauman and me.”

There was an interested silence.

“For the record, Professor Nauman and I were together during the pertinent time period. If it becomes necessary, I can supply corroboration. Question?”

“No, ma’am,” said Lowry.

“Moving on then.” Sigrid laid out the blowups Paula Guidry had made of the great hall on Thursday morning. “As you see, the mannequin’s cane is missing. Until we have reason to think otherwise, I think it’s safe to say that’s our weapon. So who’s place is worth a search warrant?” she asked them.

They went down Lowry’s list, from Jacob Munson-“That old guy?” said Elaine. “He may be old, but he’s feisty,” Jim told her-to Winston Reinicke. “Lainey has a theory about him,” Jim grinned.

Lieutenant Harald was not amused by their byplay. This was where she missed Tillie the most. By this time, he would have provided a timetable with each suspect’s movements and motives carefully logged.

“Has anyone heard when Tildon’s expected back?” she asked abruptly.

“They keep saying sometime after New Year’s,” said Matt. “I talked to him two days ago. He was supposed to go to Chuckie’s Christmas play last night, his first time out except to see the doctor.”

Elaine Albee gave Sigrid a sympathetic glance. “You miss him, too, right?”

“I miss his thoroughness,” she answered, with a pointed look at Eberstadt. “I don’t suppose Peters remembered that he was supposed to interview the Zajdowicz woman this morning.”

Eberstadt patted his pockets. “Yeah, he gave me the name of the place and the time. I wrote it down.”

He found the scrap of paper. “Haven Rock on Staten Island. They told him to come after eleven o’clock. That’s when the priest finishes confession. Want me to go?”

“No,” Sigrid decided. “I’ll do it.”

The rest home was in West New Brighton on the north side of Staten Island, so she took the ferry instead of driving to Brooklyn and crossing the Verrazano Bridge.

The sun had burned through the earlier clouds and even on this cold December day, the open rear deck of the boat held many camera-snapping tourists. The ferry still offered one of the most spectacular views of lower Manhattan; and although city lights made it much more breathtaking after dark, daytime wasn’t bad either, thought Sigrid. She stood close to a bulkhead out of the wind and watched the stretch of choppy gray water widen between boat and shore.

As the ferry moved out into upper New York Bay, away from the shelter of land, several passengers who had burbled about the smell of clean salty air abruptly fled inside to search for hot coffee.

Most cameras were pointed back toward the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but a few telephoto lenses were already focussing on the Statue of Liberty off to starboard. No one was paying attention to Brooklyn on the port side of the boat and Sigrid was stirred by a sudden memory of her Great-uncle Lars. He had often treated her and cousin Hilda to rides on the ferry that once ran between Brooklyn and Staten Island before the Verrazano Bridge was built.

If Albee or Lowry had been with her, she would have kept silent; but since she was alone, Sigrid turned to a nearby tourist and pointed toward what would still be the country’s fourth largest city if it hadn’t been annexed back in 1898.

“ Brooklyn,” she said.

The Japanese woman smiled and nodded and a couple of her friends looked up at the thin woman with inquiring faces.

“That tall building is the Williamsburgh Bank,” she said, imitating Great-uncle Lars’s clear didactic tone. “Five hundred and twelve feet high. The tallest four-sided clock in the world.”

“Ah!” said the women. They spoke to their men. A ripple went through the group, then fourteen cameras swung toward Brooklyn.

When Sigrid was escorted to the correct building, a priest was still working his way down Barbara Zajdowicz’s corridor, offering to hear those who wanted to confess and bestowing a quiet blessing on those who did not.

The guide with whom a receptionist at the main office had provided her was a white-haired resident, gossipy and plump and proud of his continued mobility into his ninth decade of life. As loquaciously proud of Haven Rock as if he were a majority stockholder and she a prospective customer, Mr. Hogarty described the various facilities: how residents usually began with an apartment, moved into a comfortable single room in this building when they needed medical monitoring and could no longer manage alone, and, if necessary, finished up in a medical ward for the totally bedridden.

“Me, I’m still in my own apartment,” Mr. Hogarty bragged, “but a lot of my friends are over here.”

“Here” was a clean-lined series of interlocking squares. The residential rooms reminded Sigrid of a solid block set down inside a square greenhouse. Each room opened onto the wide window-lined corridor, a common area hung with flowering baskets and green plants and made homey with clusters of sofas and easy chairs all along its length. It was a pleasant area and one that invited residents and their guests to sit and converse and look out at the small courtyard garden. The clear glass windows were curved to catch every ray of winter sun, and several of the people basking in the bright sunlight exchanged greetings with Sigrid’s guide when they passed.

As they found two unoccupied easy chairs and sat down to wait for the priest to emerge from Mrs. Zajdowicz’s room, Sigrid asked Mr. Hogarty if he knew the woman personally.

“Barb? Oh sure. See, she used to be in me and the wife’s canasta club, but then she had that first little stroke a couple of years ago and got religion and-” He broke off and gave a humorous shrug. “I mean, we’re all religious here. Me and the wife, that’s why we picked Haven Rock. Because it’s run by the Catholics, see? But when Barb had her stroke, even though it wasn’t a big one-well, you probably know how that can turn things on in your head that weren’t there before?”

Sigrid murmured noncommittally.

“Well, that’s what happened with Barb, see? So she quit playing cards and started going to confession every week and to mass every time it was offered. The wife said to me it was like being on retreat with the nuns, the way she talked; but the wife and her’d been friends ever since the beginning-we moved into our place the same week Barb did, see, in the next apartment-and they stayed friends. The wife passed away last spring and Barb kept having more of these little strokes, see, so they moved her over here. I try to get over a couple of times a week even though she don’t know me half the time.”

He shook his head. “Bad when the mind goes. The wife, she was sharp as a tack right up to the day she passed away. Beat me in cribbage that very morning, but Barb- Well, you’ll see. Although she’s usually pretty good after Father Francis has been here. You a friend of the family or something?”

“I didn’t think she had any family,” Sigrid parried.

“Well, she didn’t, far as I ever heard. Me and the wife, we both come from big families but we only had the two boys. Dick, he’s the oldest, he lives right here on Staten Island. Got grandchildren of his own, even. But not Barb. She just had a sister and brother and none of ’em ever had kids. None that lived anyhow.”

Sigrid’s mental antennae quivered. “She had children that died?”

“Not her. She told the wife her and her husband couldn’t have babies. But seems like the sister had a couple of miscarriages or the baby died getting born or some female trouble like that. She never talked about it till after her first stroke. Least that’s when the wife first mentioned it to me, see, ’cause Barb’d get on these crying jags about those poor innocent babies and how the sister oughtn’t to have done it.” He lowered his voice. “See, the sister wasn’t married.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’re you doing here, Guillory?” she stalled.

“Same as you.” He took two quick pictures of her before she could protest. “Got her name off the deed and ran it by a snitch in Social Security.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Police?” breathed Mr. Hogarty.

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

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

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

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

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

“But, Barb-” he protested, his face dropping.

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

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

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

She sat down beside Mrs. Zajdowicz.

“Angelika?” asked the woman.

“Your sister’s dead, Mrs. Zajdowicz. Like the babies.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your brother Gregor killed the babies?”

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

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

“She… fat like me.”

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

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

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

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

“How did the babies die, Barbara?”

“Sin… she sinned… Karol…”

“Did Angelika kill her own babies?” Sigrid asked.

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

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

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

“Pray me, Sister,” Mrs. Zajdowicz wept. “Pray me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about the husband?” he persisted.

“I can’t go on record about that. She wasn’t clear enough.”

“So who killed the babies?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, thanks, I have a car.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

He drew back. “I can’t answer that.”

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

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

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

“No,” he sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’d just installed a new generator,” said Eberstadt.

“So he gave us a pass and we got to stand on deck and throw confetti and streamers and listen to the band play ‘Anchors Aweigh’ with a reggae beat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Convenient,” Sigrid said.

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

“Coffee, my ass,” Eberstadt interjected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ma’am?” said Eberstadt.

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

“Unpremeditated,” mused Albee.

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

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

“Bop!” Lowry grinned.

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

They didn’t see her point.

“Look,” she said. “Assume that Shambley says something that so enrages or scares the killer that he or she grabs up the cane and starts after him. At that point, Shambley’s already passed through the door under the main staircase and started down the basement stairs when the blow lands on his head. Why? His study was in the attic. Elliott Buntrock went through the paintings stored down there and he’s certain that none of them are worth much more than the canvas they’re painted on. So why was Shambley going to the basement?”

“Oh, crap!” said Albee. “You don’t think it’s simple B and E, do you? That he left the door open for Thorvaldsen and a burglar came in? In that case, he could have been trying to get help.”

“Great,” Peters groaned. “So instead of four suspects, you just widened the field to half a million.”

“I don’t know.” Eberstadt shook his head. “I’ve got a gut feeling about those two kids down there-Rick Evans and Pascal Grant. You sure that janitor’s not stringing you along with that innocent look, Lainey?”

“And what about that empty glove case in Shambley’s briefcase?” asked Lowry. “That’s got to mean something, doesn’t it?”

In a half-empty coffee shop on Fourth Avenue, Pascal Grant savored a forkful of fruitcake and drank from his glass of milk as he listened to Rick Evans talk about Louisiana.

“You’d love it out there in the country, Pasc. No subways or drug pushers every ten feet, no crowds of people hassling you all the time. We could go camping and fishing back in the swamps.”

“Yeah, but Rick-” He carefully speared two green cherries and a piece of citron with his fork and ate them one by one.

Christmas carols drifted down from a speaker high on the wall overhead.

“Is it money? You don’t need much in Louisiana,” Rick said earnestly.

“Yeah, but you’ll be taking pictures. What’ll I do?”

“You’ll help me. Or you can do what you do here. In my town, people are always griping because they can’t find anybody to do chores or odd jobs. You can be a gardener. Work outdoors all day long if that’s what you want.”

“I’d like that,” Pascal said, smiling at Rick across the scarred Formica table.

“Great!” said Rick. “Then you’ll come with me next Saturday? The day after Christmas?”

Pascal’s smile faded and his fork explored a raisin. “Mrs. Beardsley won’t like it.”

“Mrs. Beardsley doesn’t own you, Pasc. You own yourself. Just like I own myself.”

“But you’re not a dummy,” Pascal blurted, his blue eyes miserable. “People may not like me in your town. Your mother won’t like me.”

“Sure she will. And you’ll like her. I called her last night and told her all about you and she said I could bring anybody home I wanted to. And besides, as soon as we’re earning enough money, we could move into a place of our own. Maybe even out in the middle of nowhere where nobody’ll bother us and you can play your jazz tapes as loud as you want.”

The thought of open country was bewildering to someone who’d only known the city, but Pascal had never had a friend like this, someone who did not merely put up with him but actually seemed to like him unconditionally and as he was. The lure of that friendship and the fear of losing it were irresistible and outweighed any nebulous fears about Louisiana ’s alien landscape.

Pascal put out his hand and shyly touched Rick’s. “Okay,” he said.

When Sigrid got home at five-thirty, she was surprised to find Nauman and Elliott Buntrock wrestling with an eight-foot Christmas tree in her living room.

“I thought you had a summit meeting at the gallery,” she said.

“You didn’t hear what happened with Thorvaldsen?” asked Nauman, holding the tree perpendicular while Buntrock crawled around under the lower branches, tightening the screws of the stand.

“No,” said Sigrid.

“One of his ships sailed today.”

She nodded. “I know. Two of my detectives rode out into the bay and then came back with him in his launch.”

“They should have stayed on a little longer,” said Nauman. With his foot he nudged aside a large, much-taped cardboard box so that Buntrock would have more space for his flying elbows. “The Coast Guard was waiting for it just beyond the Verrazano Bridge.”

“What?”

“They took down some of the bulkheads in the engine room and found over six million dollars in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. A lot of them marked so they could be traced, according to the news bulletins we heard at the gallery. Drug money. On its way to buy a fresh shipment in the Caribbean.”

“They confiscate speedboats and fishing boats when they’re involved in drug deals,” said Buntrock from somewhere beneath the tree. “Do you suppose they’ll confiscate the Sea Dancer?”

The telephone rang out in the kitchen and Roman Tramegra stuck his head around the corner a moment later. “Ah, Sigrid, my dear. I thought I heard you come in. Telephone.”

“Lieutenant!” came Albee’s breathless voice. “Did you hear about Thorvaldsen? The feds have arrested him.”

“So I just heard,” said Sigrid.

“This must be what he meant when he said he went back to the Breul House because he didn’t want Shambley to cause any controversy right now. Wow!”

Sigrid waited until Albee ran out of steam, then observed, “It’s certainly interesting, but I don’t see that it affects Shambley’s murder. Do you?”

There was a moment of silence, then Albee admitted that she was probably right and rang off.

As Sigrid hung up the kitchen phone, it finally registered on her that Roman was surrounded by take-out cartons, plastic containers, and green-and-white grocery bags from Balducci’s. He seemed to be arranging a long snakelike creature on his largest platter.

“What in God’s name is that?” she asked.

“Smoked eel. Neapolitans always have eel at Christmas, but I wasn’t sure what to do with a fresh one, so I got smoked. Isn’t it sumptuous? I know it should be skinned and cut it into perfect little ovals, but then we’d lose the effect.” He straightened the tail. “I thought a bed of red lettuce with strands of alfalfa sprouts for seaweed? What do you think?”

“Roman, are we having a party tonight?” she asked.

“A tree-trimming party. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No,” she said mildly.

“Oh, my dear!” he rumbled. “I’m so sorry. I was certain-” He curved the eel around a mound of tortellini salad and paused to consider the result. “It’s such a little party-hardly worth calling it a party at all-but we do want to celebrate our first Christmas tree, don’t we? I’m such a child about Christmas! See what you think of my wassail.”

He filled a glass from a nearby bowl and passed it to her across the cluttered counter. Sigrid sipped cautiously. Roman might be a child about Christmas but this was no child’s drink. She tasted tart lemon juice tamed by sugar, rum, and some sort of fruity flavor. “Peach brandy?”

“Do you like it?”

Sigrid nodded, beginning to feel slightly more festive. “Who’s coming?”

“Just family, so to speak. Oscar, of course. And, as you see, he brought along his friend. Amusing chap. A bit too fey though.”

Sigrid almost choked on her drink at this pot calling the kettle black.

“And Jill Gill and-”

“What about ornaments?” Sigrid interrupted. “I don’t have any. Do you?”

“I bought new lights and fresh tinsel.” He smeared two crackers with pate and handed one to her. “Goose liver.”

“Umm.”

“And your mother sent down that enormous box out by the tree. She said it hadn’t been unpacked in her last eight moves, but she’s sure it’s tree ornaments.”

Since Anne Harald averaged three moves per every two years, no amount of unopened boxes would surprise Sigrid. She refilled her glass and wandered back out to the living room, where Elliott Buntrock had emerged from the shubbery. He wore black jeans and a black shirt topped by a white sweatshirt that bore the picture of a large yellow bulldozer and the words “Heavy Equipment Is My Life.”

“My glass is empty,” he complained and headed for the kitchen.

Roman had decked their halls with bayberry candles but he hadn’t yet lit them, so the woodsy smell of the fresh pine tree filled the room as Nauman turned to her and, with a flat, deadpan Brooklyn accent, said, “Hey, lady, where’s yer mistletoe?”

She smiled and went into his arms.

Even without mistletoe, it was a very satisfactory kiss.

“What happens to your show now that Thorvaldsen won’t be underwriting it?” she asked.

“Elliott had already decided I’m not postmodern enough for the Breul House. He’s talking about using Blinky Palermo or someone like that to put the place back on New York ’s cultural map.”

“Blinky who?”

“Don’t ask.”

“But what about you?”

“I let Jacob and Elliott talk me into a three-gallery midtown extravaganza,” he admitted, “and Francesca’s going to line up a new set of sponsors. It’s starting to sound like a cross between Busby Berkeley and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I may go to Australia for the year. Want to come?”

She laughed as the buzzer went off in the entry hall announcing the arrival of Anne Harald and Jill Gill at her outer gate.

The next hour was a happy jumble of untangling light cords, testing bulbs, and running extension cords from badly placed outlets, helped along with generous servings of Roman’s wassail.

Jill Gill had brought with her a selection of Christmas records ranging from Alvin and the Chipmunks and the Norman Luboff Choir to Gregorian chants; and Sigrid took a bittersweet trip down memory lane when Anne opened the carton of ornaments and lifted out a crumpled tinsel star. All at once she was three years old again and her father was holding her up in his strong young arms to place that same star on the very top of their Christmas tree.

She had been so young when he was killed that her memories of him were fragmentary, and suddenly here was a new one that she hadn’t even known she possessed.

Anne leaned over and a faint mist of familiar jasmine followed as her lips brushed Sigrid’s cheek. “I know, honey,” she whispered.

Candles glowed from a dozen different clusters around the warm room. Nauman struggled to relight his pipe, Buntrock and Roman were debating the aesthetics of icicles slung on in clumps (Buntrock’s method) or carefully draped one by one (Roman’s), and Jill brought a fresh platter of canapés hot from the oven.

Elliott Buntrock beamed as he savored the ambience. “How utterly postmodern this is!”

“Late postmodern,” Nauman corrected.

Later, when everyone else had left and Roman had stumbled off to bed, Sigrid walked out to Oscar’s disreputable yellow sports car with him. It was midnight and the temperature was frigid, but for once the air was so clear that the brighter constellations shone through the city’s reflected glow.

At the car, Nauman unlocked the passenger door, but Sigrid touched his arm regretfully. “I can’t go home with you. I promised Roman I’d help him clean up before work in the morning.”

“I know,” he said. “But I have something for you and it’s too cold to stand out here on the sidewalk.”

As soon as they were inside, Oscar switched on the engine and started the powerful heater; then he turned and gently traced the contours of her chilled face with gentle fingers. In this dim light, for a fleeting moment, the memory of other faces flickered between his hands-women he had known, women he had slept with, women he had even loved for a little space of time.

And now this woman.

For the first time, he had admitted to himself that she had it within her to be the last. And for the first time he was both awed and apprehensive by what he felt for her.

Half angered by the powerful emotions she aroused in him, he reached into the space behind her seat and drew out a flat package wrapped in brown paper. “Here,” he rasped. “Merry Christmas.”

“Nauman?” She looked at him, puzzled by his sudden belligerence.

He shrugged and stared through the windshield.

Bewildered, Sigrid undid the paper and found a cardboard folder approximately ten inches wide by eighteen inches tall. Inside was a drawing.

Silently, Oscar turned on the interior light so that she could see, and he heard the sharp intake of her breath as she realized what she held.

It was a sheet of light gray paper with a textured surface that was exquisite to touch; and on it was her own portrait, drawn in delicate silver point and highlighted with touches of white.

A taxi lumbered past, an ambulance wailed in the distance, and from the river a block away came the lonesome hoot of a tugboat’s horn; but Nauman’s small car was a pool of silence.

At last Sigrid turned to him. “It’s like something Dürer would have done,” she whispered brokenly. “Is that how you see me?”

“Just like Dürer,” he said and leaned forward to touch the tear that glistened on her cheek.

Paris.

…add my condolences to the Ambassador’s and hope it may somehow comfort you to know that it was not a cold, indifferent stranger that personally supervised the packing of your son’s possessions, but a father like yourself; moreover, one who has also had to submit to the heaviest burden Providence may lay upon the shoulders of any father.

As a pen more gifted than mine has written, “What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”

I pray God may strengthen you in this hour of darkness.

Letter to Erich Breul Sr., dated 12.15.1912, from Mr. Leonard White, personal assistant to The Honorable Myron T. Herrick, Ambassador to France.

(From the Erich Breul House Collection)