Corpus Christmas (16 page)

She was almost grateful when a uniformed officer opened the door, peered in, and signaled that she had an important phone
call.

“Sorry to interrupt, Lieutenant,” he said when she came out into the hall and closed the door to the interrogation room, “but
Dr. Cohen said you’d probably want to know right away.”

The assistant medical examiner was as laid-back over the telephone as in person. “You know that softball bat you people just
sent over? Forget it. Too big. You’re looking for a rod, not a club.”

“A rod?” Sigrid was surprised. “With a wound that messy?”

“I told you there was something odd about that head,” Cohen reminded her. “He had a big skull, but it was paper thin. Want
the Latin for it?”

“Put it in your report,” she said. “What do you mean by a rod? Like a curtain rod?”

“One of those solid brass ones, maybe. Or a broom handle.”

“What about that mop handle?”

“Not thin enough. We’re talking something no thicker than my thumb. A cane, maybe, or a poker or the handle of an umbrella
even. Anyhow, as thin as his skull was, it wouldn’t have taken much force whatever they used.”

Back in the interrogation room, Sigrid told the two lawyers that as soon as a statement could be typed up and signed, their
clients would be free to leave.

Rick Evans gave an involuntary sigh of relief and smiled at Pascal Grant. His smile faded though when she added, “Of course,
there will probably be further questions in the next few days, so we expect you not to leave town.”

“I won’t,” Pascal Grant said earnestly.

“No easy solutions,” Sigrid told Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry when Grant and Evans had signed their statements and departed.
The younger officers were disappointed to learn that the blow that killed Shambley could have been delivered by either a man
or a woman, or possibly even a determined child.

“Did any of those people last night carry a walking stick?” asked Albee.

“Not that I noticed,” said Sigrid. “The wife of one of the trustees, Mrs. Reinicke, walked with a slight limp, but I didn’t
see her with a cane.” She described the animosity she’d witnessed between Shambley and Reinicke, then checked the time. “I’ll
take Thorvaldsen and Lady Francesca Leeds; you two can split the trustees—the Reinickes, the David Hymans, and Mr. and Mrs.
Herzog.”

Sigrid’s voice was cool and her face perfectly serious as she told Lowry, “Mrs. Herzog was a Babcock, you know.”

“Huh?” said Lowry.

Later, he and Albee stood on a chilly IRT platform, surrounded by Christmas shoppers with brightly wrapped packages, and debated
whether or not the lieutenant’s last remark was meant to be humorous.

As the Lexington Avenue train squealed to a stop, they decided it probably wasn’t.

In a cab headed uptown, Hester Kohn and Caryn DiFranco discussed the pros and cons of contact lenses while

Rick Evans sat sandwiched between them on the rear seat with his feet drawn up on the transmission hump.

The furry hood of Ms. DiFranco’s parka brushed Rick’s nose as the lawyer leaned over for a closer look at the lenses in Hester
Kohn’s eyes.

“I just can’t wear mine,” she sighed. “I looked absolutely gorgeous in them, but I can’t see a damn thing. Besides, I’ve decided
glasses are who I am. People expect me to look like this.
I
expect me to look like this.”

The round gold frames of her granny glasses had slipped down on her little button nose and she pushed them up in a delicate
gesture.

“I know what you mean,” said Hester Kohn. “I wore glasses for almost twenty-five years. They were such a part of me I felt
naked the first few times I went out without them.”

Caryn DiFranco peered into Rick’s brown eyes. “Do you wear contacts, Rick?”

“No, ma’am.”

“
Ma’am?
Omigod! That makes me sound like I’m eighty years old.”

Rick flushed. “Sorry. I keep forgetting people don’t say that up here.”

“It’s okay, kid. You’ll be as rude as the rest of us soon enough.” She caught a glimpse of passing street signs and tapped
the driver on the shoulder. “Let me out at Macy’s, okay?”

The driver grunted.

“I’ve got to buy and mail presents to half of Michigan,” she complained to Hester Kohn. “Be grateful you’re Jewish.”

“I frequently am,” Hester said dryly.

As the taxi double-parked in a no-parking zone and Caryn DiFranco opened her door, Hester added, “Thanks for coming down,
Caryn.”

“Don’t thank me. You’ll get the bill. Speaking of which, do we bill that MCP partner of yours or the gallery?”

“The gallery.”

“Right. Stay out of mischief, Rick, and don’t talk to any strange cops.”

“Thanks, Miss DiFranco,” he said.

She rolled her eyes, slammed the door, and disappeared among the crowds of Christmas shoppers.

The cold air that rushed in when Caryn DiFranco got out had briefly dispersed Hester Kohn’s gardenia perfume, but as the cab
swerved back into the flow of traffic, the sweet scent again filled the space between them even though Rick had moved to the
far side of the seat. For him, it was a disorienting smell, one connected with hot drowsy summer days, swinging on the porch
of his mother’s house, a porch surrounded by those glossy bushes heavy with waxy white blossoms. Somehow it seemed all wrong
to be smelling his mother’s gardenias here in this New York City taxicab on a cold December afternoon. Especially with the
new associations the heavy scent of gardenias now held.

Dusk was falling and rush hour had begun in earnest. All lanes were clogged at Forty-second Street.

Forty-sixth, Forty-seventh, another snarl in front of Radio City Music Hall.

Hester Kohn smoothed her dark hair and loosened the top button of her red wool coat. “Want to tell me what’s really bothering
you?”

“Nothing.” Without a camera to shield himself from her face, he unconsciously sank deeper into his corner and kept his eyes
on the neon-lit stores and buildings they were now creeping past.

A complex blend of affection and irritation and a few stray tendrils of pity as well swept over Hester as she remembered Rick’s
first few weeks at the gallery.

Her own virginity had been lost so long ago that she had forgotten what terrors true sexual innocence could hold. Despite
their age difference, she had dazzled him, made him want her, made him helpless to resist; yet, until they were well into
the act, she hadn’t even considered the possibility that it might be his first time. In that moment she had become tender
and sentimental and had almost broken it off because she suddenly found herself panged by a conscience she didn’t know she
still possessed.

If I’d known, I would have made it more beautiful,
she thought.

Too late. Already the sweet liquids of youth were spilling from his touchingly inept body.

With those first hot rushes of manhood, another boy might have become immediately cocky and boastful, a royal nuisance. Instead,
Rick came to each subsequent session reluctantly and seemed miserable and guilty afterwards.

As he was now, in this overheated cab. It wasn’t only his involvement in Roger Shambley’s death that made him shrink into
that corner, yet Hester knew that if she removed her glove and touched his bare, chapped hand with hers, he would be unable
to resist. She considered testing her power, but they were now too close to the gallery.

Instead, she sank back into her own corner and wondered if young Rick had, after all, seen or done more last night than he
was willing to admit.

Over in Queens, an artificial Christmas tree decorated the main lobby of the Lantana Walk Nursing Home and an electric menorah
stood on the reception desk with two bulbs lit for this second day of Hanukkah. As Detective Bernie Peters soon discovered,
he had arrived at the most restless hour of the day for ambulatory residents, and Mrs. Palka was not in her room.

“The dinner shift is promptly at five,” explained the new resident-director, “but they begin gathering outside the door by
four o’clock. No doubt that’s where we’ll find Mrs. Palka.”

They walked through halls wide enough for two wheel-chairs to pass each other, into a lounge decorated with more symbols of
Hanukkah and Christmas. There they found a querulous elderly woman with thick glasses and a hearing aid struggling to understand
what she could expect for dinner as her incurably cheerful friend read the menu aloud.

“Roast ham?” she sniffed. “We had ham for supper last night and dry, stringy fodder it was, too, with a smidgen of honey glaze
or pineapple.”

“Lamb!” her friend enunciated loudly. “Roast
lamb,
Maureen. And you know perfectly well the doctor said you can have sweet things.”

“Wheat beans? What’re wheat beans? Do speak up, Dora.”

“There she is,” said the director, gesturing toward the cheerful little dumpling of a woman, who leaned heavily upon her aluminum
walker and watched their approach with lively curiosity.

The director introduced Detective Peters to Mrs. Palka, pointed them to a quiet corner of the lounge, and expertly vectored
Mrs. Palka’s hard-of-hearing friend toward another group of residents waiting for their dinner.

“My daughter told me someone from the police might be up,” beamed Mrs. Palka. She lowered herself painfully into a chair,
refusing Peters’s help. “I had a hip replacement two years ago,” she explained. “Eighty per cent who get it can go dancing
in six months. I’m part of the twenty per cent who have to hang up their dancing shoes.”

“I’m sorry,” Bernie Peters said awkwardly. The infirmities of age made him uncomfortable. Even though he knew intellectually
that everyone grows old, he was still young enough to believe he would somehow be exempted.

Mrs. Palka patted his hand. “Don’t be sorry. I danced plenty in my lifetime, believe me.” She sat erectly in her chair and
cocked her small white head. “So! Dead babies in Gregor Jurczyk’s attic. Whose babies were they?”

“Well, that’s what we were hoping you could tell me Mrs. Palka. Your daughter thought you were friendly with the Jurczyk family
and might remember some of the people who lived in that house.”

“Pauline says between 1935 and 1947. That right?”

“Those were the dates on the newspapers we found them wrapped in,” Peters nodded.

“Now let me think. The Depression was going strong then and then came the war. They couldn’t have been Barbara’s. She was
very good, very religious and would never. Besides, she and Karol—that was her husband, lovely man— they couldn’t have babies.
And Angelika was a business-woman, worked as a secretary in one of those big-shot investment places on Wall Street. She never
married, so it couldn’t have been her. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Rospochowski, but they had a new baby almost every year. When
did she have time to slip in four more? Now there
was
a pretty little redheaded thing. What was her name? Anna? Anya?

“Ah, but what am I talking?” Mrs. Palka shook her head ruefully at what she considered a failing memory. “That one didn’t
come till after the war started.”

“What about Mr. Jurczyk? Was he married?”

“Not that one. Too interested in the almighty dollar to spend a penny on a wife.”

The dining room opened and residents began a modest surge through the doors. The smell of roast meat and steamed broccoli
spread through the lounge and stirred those still seated to action. Even Mrs. Palka began to move her walker into a ready
position.

“But really, Barbara’s the one who could tell you better about the people who lived there,” she said. She took a slip of paper
with a Staten Island address from the pocket of her pink cardigan and gave it to Peters. “
If
she’ll talk to you. We used to call each other up on the phone at least once a month, but she’s gone downhill so much this
year. Last time I talked to her—back in August that must have been—I don’t believe she knew who I was. But then she
is
eighty-seven, four years older than me.”

Getting up from a chair seemed almost as painful to Mrs. Palka as sitting down, but as she regained her feet and had her walker
pointed toward the dining room, her querulous friend impatiently called to her, “Hurry up, Dora! Loretta says we’re having
colicky moose for dessert.”

A ridiculous mental image filled Peters’s head, and plump little Mrs. Palka, her wrinkled face aglow with laughter, winked
at him with such insouciant charm that he found himself laughing, too.

“That Maureen! She knows perfectly well that Loretta said chocolate mousse.”

The Hymans lived on Central Park South, but the Herzogs and the Reinickes lived within three blocks of each other in the East
Sixties, so Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry decided to interview them first.

Lydia Babcock Herzog was tall and gaunt in a high-necked tunic and slacks of ivory wool. The young police-woman admired her
dramatic gold necklace, her diamond earrings, her beautifully furnished drawing room with its miniature gold Christmas tree
set upon an intricately carved ebony stand, even her tall and dignified husband; but as far as Elaine was concerned, that
old adage, “You can never be too rich or too thin,” was only half right. Mrs. Herzog would have to gain ten pounds just to
qualify for anorectic, never mind too thin.

Mr. Herzog was quietly handsome, like a fair-haired English film star of the forties, refined and reserved. He offered Jim
and Elaine drinks and, when they refused, continued with the one he’d begun before they arrived.

Mrs. Herzog’s drink remained untouched on the low table before her. She sat on a sofa of pale blue brocade, inclined her head
graciously, and repeated how shocked they had been to learn of Dr. Shambley’s untimely death. How utterly shocked, in fact.

Jim Lowry rather doubted that. Mrs. Herzog seemed too detached to have ever been shocked by anything, but he nodded. “We understand
that he hadn’t been there very long?”

“He was appointed at our semiannual meeting in September,” said Mrs. Herzog. “Jacob Munson put his name forward. I wasn’t
quite sure he was right for the Breul House—he was on sabbatical from the New York Center for the Fine Arts, you see—but Jacob
assured us his academic credentials were impeccable and we did lack a scholar on the board.” She watched her husband refill
his martini glass from a silver shaker on the antique Chinese sideboard. “I suppose we shall have to find ourselves another
scholar.”