Corpus Christmas (21 page)

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 farm-yard 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
do
something.”

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 that 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
Second Floor.
A subdivision under
Bedroom & Dressing Room—Erich Breul, Sr.
was
Wardrobe—Accessories,
and Miss Ruffton pointed to a numbered entry: “2.3.126. Man’s ebony stick. 95 cm., two threaded knobs: (a) gold plate over
solid brass, acanthus design; (b) carved ivory ball.”

As Sigrid read the description aloud, Mrs. Beardsley said, “So
that’s
what that ivory thing is! I didn’t realize one could change the knobs. How clever.”

“Gold
plated?
” Peake sounded personally affronted. 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.”