Corpus Christmas (22 page)

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 Zoffanies?”

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,” be 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
The Loaded Brush.
”

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
demands
on the viewer and it rewards with visual delights. That snow scene demands nothing. It’s only meant to soothe and please
or, at worst,
edify
, for God’s sake.

“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
ever
tricked-up literary sentimentality like
that
thing!”

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 be 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
want
to like that give me trouble.”

“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
you
find something interesting among these pictures, you will share it, won’t you?”

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 bead. “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
here’s
her glove case!” and drew out an identical envelope of embroidered pink satin. “I didn’t realize there were two.”

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
did
want early

Léger and not the mechanistic things from the twenties and thirties that he’s really famous for.”

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.