Corpus Christmas (15 page)

“All the trustees have keys.” Mrs. Beardsley patted her purse with a proprietary air. “I, too, of course, as senior docent.”

Seated across the table from her, Sigrid looked at the growing list of names on her notepad. “Thorvaldsen, as well?”

“Oh, no, he’s not a trustee. But Lady Francesca might since she’s going to be in and out a lot if Mr. Nauman’s retrospective
takes place.” She gave Sigrid a friendly social smile and began to describe how surprised everyone was to discover that last
night’s Miss Harald was today’s Lieutenant Harald.

Jim Lowry was diverted by these clues to the lieutenant’s off-duty life. Odd to be taking down her testimony as background
for a case. Oscar Nauman’s name rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t quite recall why. Besides, wasn’t she supposed to be living
with an oddball writer named Roman Tramegra? Maybe Lainey would know.

The lieutenant’s cold gaze fell on him and he started guiltily. “Um—
keys
,” he croaked. “Who else has them? The janitor?”

“Oh yes. Not to the main door, but to an outside door in the basement.” The gray-haired woman hesitated. “And Miss Ruffton
and Dr. Peake, of course.”

“Of course.”

* * *

Miss Ruffton shared with them her impression that Dr. Shambley had been up to something besides pure disinterested research,
but did not suggest what that something might be.

Dr. Peake grew defensive, mistook their questions for innuendoes, and wound up revealing more animosity toward Dr. Shambley
than he’d intended.

“A busybody and a snoop,” declared Peake. “With delusions of mental superiority and the reverse snobbism of the proletariat.”

“Really?” Sigrid asked, not having heard that epithet since her college days.

“Proletarian roots compounded by his shortness,” Peake theorized. “He always insulted his superiors.”

Sigrid thought of last night. “At the party, he was rude to Mr. Reinicke, Mr. Thorvaldsen, and Professor Nauman.

“Well, there you are.” Peake nodded. “They’re all much taller.”

When it was his turn to be questioned, Pascal Grant sat in one of the heavy library chairs with his ankles crossed like a
schoolboy and kept his head down when spoken to. The janitor was so uncommunicative that Sigrid at first wondered if the young
man fully understood what had happened to Shambley, and she and Lowry found themselves phrasing their questions in words of
one syllable.

“I didn’t see Dr. Shambley at all last night,” he said, looking up through thick golden lashes as he answered. “Rick and me,
we went to the movie.”

“Rick?”

“Rick’s my friend,” Grant said softly. “What time did you get back here?” asked Lowry.

“I don’t know. We listened to tapes, Rick and me. Then Rick went home and I went to bed. I didn’t hear anything.”

Sigrid looked up from her notes. “Your friend Rick was here?”

“He went home,” said Grant, darting quick glances a both of them. “He didn’t hear anything either.”

“Does your friend Rick have a last name?”

Pascal Grant concentrated a moment and then his face lit up with a beautiful smile. “Evans. His name is Rick Evans. He’s Mr.
Munson’s grandson.”

They could extract no further information. The young handyman continued to insist he and Evans had neither seen, heard, nor
spoken to Roger Shambley the previous evening.

Unfortunately for him, Bernie Peters came up just then to announce that their search had turned up a bloody scatter rug hidden
behind some boxes in one of the storerooms, and that a softball bat found beside Pascal Grant’s bed seemed to have a suspicious
stain at the business end.

“Is that how you killed him?” Sigrid asked gently. Young Grant shook his head and tears pooled in his blue eyes. “No, I didn’t.
We didn’t see him. We didn’t do it.”

Feeling rather like the schoolyard bully, Sigrid sighed. “Take him back to headquarters for further questioning,” she told
Peters. “And have Rick Evans picked up, too.”

Mrs. Beardsley was so outraged by Pascal Grant’s removal to headquarters that Sigrid was not overly surprised to reach her
office and find the woman had gotten there before her. Nor to see that she had brought along her own lawyer, a thin dry man
with tonsured hair and an ascetic manner. Harvey Pruitt might be more at home dealing with wills and deeds and other civil
matters, but for Mrs. Gawthrop Wallace Beardsley’s sake, he seemed prepared to represent Pascal Grant, should the young janitor
be detained on criminal charges.

Rick Evans had been located at the Kohn and Munson Gallery, and an equally protective Hester Kohn had accompanied him downtown.
Three minutes after their arrival, they were joined by the gallery’s attorney, a tall, brown-haired woman in what looked like
Eskimo mukluks, a deer-skin parka lined with fur, and gold-rimmed granny glasses. Ms. Caryn DiFranco.

The two lawyers immediately went into a huddle, then requested and were given a private room in which to confer with their
respective clients.

It was long past lunchtime, so Sigrid and her team took advantage of the lull to send down for sandwiches. Mick Cluett had
been sent off to check Shambley’s apartment and to notify his next of kin; but Eberstadt, back from court, joined them with
an enormous corned beef on rye.

“If Frances could see that,” said Bernie Peters, shaking his head.

“Salads are for summertime,” Eberstadt said defensively. “In December, a man needs something that’ll stick to his ribs.”

“Just what you need.” Elaine Albee grinned. “More meat on those puny ribs.”

Eberstadt laughed and as they ate, the others filled him in on Roger Shambley’s death amid such Victorian surroundings.

They had taken a set of elimination prints from staff members at the house. “Just eyeballing it, I’d say the Grant kid’s the
one who left prints on the dumbwaiter,” said Peters.

“You should see his bedroom down there in that basement,” Jim Lowry told Eberstadt. “Looks like a Chinese whorehouse—red velvet
and gold satin, snaky lights, and art posters or calendar pictures on every square inch of wall space.”

“Calendar pictures?” Eberstadt leered. “Art posters?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Albee told him. She reached across the table to commandeer his kosher dill pickle. “He’s
talking abstract art, not
Playboy
art.”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” said Peters. “You’d think a guy like him—not too swift on the uptake—would have pictures that looked like
real things.”

“Probably sees enough of those upstairs,” said Albee. Between crunches of Eberstadt’s pickle, she described for him the tiers
of gilt-framed pictures that lined the walls of the main galleries at the Erich Breul House.

Matt Eberstadt savored the last morsel of corned beef and licked his fingertips. “Frances keeps saying we ought to go tour
the place. She likes old things,” he said, wiping his hands on a less than clean handkerchief.

“Like you?” gibed Peters.

Sigrid ate her own tuna sandwich swiftly and quietly, with one eye on some paperwork and only half an ear for their give and
take. Casual camaraderie had never been easy for her, although now that Nauman had entered her life, she found these unofficial
sessions a little easier than before.

She skimmed through one report a second time, then passed it down the table to Bernie Peters. “The neighborhood canvass turned
up someone who remembers the Jurczyks.”

The others looked at her blankly, trying to place the name.

“Oh, yeah,” said Peters. “Those baby bones.”

He read the highlights of the report aloud. “Mrs. Pauline Jaworski remembers the Jurczyk sisters from her childhood in the
fifties. Thinks her mother may still be in touch with

Barbara Zajdowicz. Mother’s name, Mrs. Dorota Palka. Currently resides at Lantana Walk Nursing Home up in Queens.”

Elaine Albee’s head came up. She had briefly worked undercover there back in the spring. “Lantana Walk? Queens? I thought
they put that place out of business last spring.”

“The director testified against his partners and got off with a suspended sentence and a hefty fine,” said Sigrid, who had
followed the situation and been disappointed by its outcome.

As they wadded up foam cups and paper napkins from their impromptu lunch, word came that Pascal Grant and Richard Evans were
ready to make their statements. Sigrid checked her watch. “Lowry, I want you and Albee to sit in on this, too. Peters, see
if you can get a statement from that Palka woman.”

“Just how I wanted to spend the afternoon,” Bernie Peters grumbled to Eberstadt when the other three had gone. “Freezing my
ass off on the F train to Queens.”

“Better than surveillance,” replied his partner, who had done his share of sitting in cold cars on icy winter streets.

Flanked by their lawyers, Pascal Grant and Rick Evans each appeared very young and very intimidated when they entered the
interrogation room; but once all the legal formalities and stipulations were out of the way, their statements were quite straightforward.

They were questioned separately and then together. The second time around, Rick Evans did all the talking at first, in a soft
voice full of southern inflections. Sigrid listened without questions as he described again the noises they had heard the
night before, his impression that someone had left through the basement door, Pascal Grant’s discovery of the body, and his
own decision to move it to the third floor using the dumbwaiter.

When he finished, Sigrid said “Do you have anything to add to that, Mr. Grant?”

Looking like a frightened Raphael angel, Pascal Grant darted a quick glance at her through thick sandy-blond lashes, then
bit his lip and shook his head.

“You didn’t set the burglar alarm; therefore anyone who had a key could have walked in without your knowing. Is that right?”

He nodded without lifting his eyes. “What if that person
didn’t
have a key?”

Puzzled, Pascal Grant looked at her. “He couldn’t come in?” he guessed.

“No,” Sigrid said patiently. “I meant what would happen if someone rang the bell? Would you hear?”

“Oh. Yes,” he nodded vigorously. “It’s right over the door in my room. Makes a real loud noise. Even if my tapes are on.”
He hesitated. “Or did you mean the bell board in the kitchen? It’s nice. The bells jingle and a little flag comes up to show
which one it is. Mrs. Sophie had a bell and Mr. Erich and—”

“No, I meant the doorbells,” Sigrid said, interrupting his enthusiastic description of how Victorian employers had once summoned
their servants to particular rooms of the house.

“The doorbells ring in the office and they buzz in my room,” said Pascal Grant. “A big buzz means it’s the upstairs door and
a sort of littler one means it’s the spiderweb door.”

“And did you hear either buzzer last night?”

Pascal shook his head. “You’re sure of that?”

He nodded solemnly.

The two youths described how they had returned to the Breul House from an early showing of
Round Midnight
, entered through the basement door, and headed straight to Pascal Grant’s room without going upstairs and without seeing
anyone.

“So you were in your bedroom listening to jazz tapes,” Sigrid said, “and you heard someone outside. What time was this?”

Pascal’s smooth brow frowned in concentration. “Around ten-fifteen, I think. Maybe ten-thirty.”

“Yet you didn’t go out to investigate?”

“I thought it was Dr. Shambley,” Pascal said slowly. “Did Dr. Shambley often come down to the basement that late?”

“He was everywhere.”

“Did you like Dr. Shambley?”

“No,” said the golden-haired janitor before his lawyer could stop him.

“My client’s personal feelings toward the deceased had nothing to do with his death,” said Harvey Pruitt.

“Then you won’t mind if he tells us why he disliked Dr. Shambley?” Sigrid asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that at this time,” Mr. Pruitt said austerely.

“Very well. What about others at the house, Mr. Grant? Who else didn’t like Dr. Shambley?”

“Mrs. Beardsley didn’t like him.”

“Why not?”

Mr. Pruitt started to object, then sat back. “I don’t know,” said Grant. “She said he got her place or something.”

Sigrid looked at the lawyer, but Pruitt shook his head. “This is sheer hearsay, you realize?”

“Of course.”

She turned to Rick Evans. “You said you had an impression that someone else was there in the passageway when you came out
of the bedroom. Who did you think it was?”

Rick shook his head. “I didn’t think. I just heard—like footsteps or something. And then I felt a draft from the open door
and heard it close.”

“Did you go down and look through the door window?” asked Lowry.

“I didn’t see anyone,” Evans said.

They asked Pascal Grant to explain once more why there was blood on his softball bat if he hadn’t hit Shambley with it.

“I didn’t!” Pascal said.

“He’s telling the pure truth,” said Rick in his soft Southern voice. “I was the one carrying that bat. The whole
time. I didn’t want to touch Dr. Shambley at first. I thought he was dead. He
looked
dead and I just sort of poked him to make sure he really was.”

The weakest part of their story was the reason they gave for moving the body and not calling the police. No matter how many
times the police detectives returned to that point, the story remained that they were afraid to have Shambley’s body found
so close to Pascal Grant’s door. Period.

While Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee pressed the two youths for stronger reasons, Sigrid leaned back in her chair trying to decide
whether or not to charge one or the other or both with the murder. They’d had a weapon, an opportunity, and probably a motive
if that lawyer’s reluctance to let Grant discuss his distaste for Shambley meant anything.

On the other hand, Grant said he hadn’t heard a doorbell, yet that Beardsley woman claimed she’d seen Thorvaldsen there at
midnight.

And what was Rick Evans holding back? That he and Grant were sleeping together. Was that all?