Corpus Christmas (24 page)

“You’re a lucky man, Oscar Nauman. When
you
go, you will leave behind you good work that will honor your name.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Oscar demanded.

Munson sank back in his chair. “Roger Shambley was killed Wednesday night.” He twirled the stem of his empty martini glass
back and forth between his wrinkled fingers.

The silence stretched between them. “So?” Oscar finally asked.

“So your lady policeman thinks my grandson Richard did it.”

“
What?
”

“She’s wrong, though. You will tell her this?”

“Jacob—”

“It was Benjamin or Hester or maybe both together,” he said heavily. “I don’t know.”

As the waiter brought their food and another martini, a paroxysm of coughing shook his small frame and Oscar told the waiter
to take away the drink and bring his friend club soda with a twist of lemon.

When Jacob was breathing normally again, Oscar said, “Talk to me, Jacob. What’s happening at the gallery?”

“You know what Horace Kohn and I tried to build.” Jacob stared at the savory chicken stew before him. “We never said
caveat emptor
. Never! What we sold we backed with our reputation and for better than a half century, Kohn and Munson Gallery has been trusted.
Never a stain on its name.”

“Yes.”

“You remember Paul?” he asked abruptly.

Oscar remembered Paul Munson as a handsome, sweet-natured kid. Bright enough, but not the flaming meteor he’d become to his
father since his plane had crashed sixteen years ago. Odd to think Paul would be nearing forty if he’d lived. “Rick reminds
me of Paul,” he said as he buttered a piece of crusty bread. “Same eyes.”

“They are nothing alike,” said Jacob, anger in every syllable. “Paul had an eye for art.”

“I meant in looks,” Oscar said mildly. “Same shade of brown. Besides, aren’t you being a little hard on the boy? He’s only
been here three months.”

“Three months, three years, it wouldn’t matter. It’s his mother’s fault. Suzanne turned her back on the gallery.”

Oscar occasionally had trouble remembering that there were two older daughters, Suzanne and Marta. He vaguely recalled that
both had earned doctorates in other fields, but Jacob almost never spoke of them. All his pride had been bound up in Paul
and when Paul died, Paul’s friend, Benjamin Peake, had become his surrogate.

“She made him a photographer. She made him a”—his voice dropped lower—“a
Schwulen.
”

“A what?” asked Oscar.

The old man’s face twisted with shame. “A faggot.” Oscar ate silently. There were so many different sexual proclivities in
the art world that he was surprised that Jacob could still be homophobic. Or did tolerance stop when it touched him personally?

“He was with the janitor that night. In his bedroom.”

“So what’s the big deal, Jacob? It’s not the end of the world.”

“Only the end of my line,” Munson said bleakly, drawing his fork through the sauce on his plate. “The end of the gallery.”

“Oh, come on, Jacob. If the boy doesn’t work out, Hester will keep things going. And it’s crazy to think she had anything
to do with Shambley’s death. When Sigrid and I left Wednesday night, you and Hester were planning to share a cab back uptown.”

“She got out at East Forty-ninth. Said she was meeting someone at the Waldorf. Yesterday when she came back from the police
station, I made her tell me who. It was Benjamin.”

Oscar stopped cutting his lamb and started to wonder if Jacob were experiencing the beginnings of senility. His voice was
gentle as he asked if Jacob had forgotten that Hester and Ben—?

The art dealer interrupted with an impatient wave of his hand. “It wasn’t about sex, Oscar. Wednesday night, Roger Shambley
accused Hester and Ben of passing a piece of forged art through the gallery. Yesterday I asked Hester of this. First she said
no; then she said there was no way Shambley could have proved it.”

He pushed his plate aside with most of the food still un-tasted. “She may be a woman, but she isn’t that stupid, Oscar. Shambley
wouldn’t have had to prove anything. A gallery’s word is its bond and if that word becomes a lie—”

He gave a palms-up gesture of hopelessness.

Sigrid arrived at the gallery with Jim Lowry shortly before three. The soft-voiced receptionist informed them that Mr. Munson
had not returned from lunch and that Miss Kohn, as they could see, was busy at the moment but if they wished to wait?

“Yes,” Sigrid said and Lowry took a guide sheet from a nearby stand.

“Notebook pages?” he asked sotto voce. “Twenty-three hundred a sheet? Who’s Ardù Screnii? Never heard of him.”

Stunned, he began to circle the airy showroom, peering first at each matted and framed drawing and then at the price Kohn
and Munson was asking for it.

Sigrid pretended to study the drawings, but she chose those that would give her reflected views of Hester Kohn, presently
occupied with two customers. The dealer wore hot pink today and a chunky pearl-and-gold necklace.

From the conversation which floated through the nearly deserted gallery, Sigrid soon gathered that the man and woman were
a husband and wife from Chicago and that he was a commodities trader. She also gathered that they expected more from an Ardù
Screnii drawing than pure aesthetics.

“Of course,” she heard Hester Kohn say, “you have to realize that the bottom line is whether you
like
a work. I mean
I
can’t tell you something’s going to go up.”

“Yes,” the man nodded sagely. “Yes, I know that but—”

“I can tell you how some things
have
gone up, but if you’re buying one of these purely as an investment—”

“Oh, no, we
love
art,” said his wife, a dark, intense woman in her early thirties. “Of course, my decorator’s going to
kill
me. My taste is changing. Growing. I was always so—um—traditional, you know? And here I came home with this huge modern canvas
and my decorator wouldn’t let me hang it in the bedroom. Said it defeminized the room—it’s all traditional antiques, you know?
So I put it in storage. But if I get one of these Screniis, then it’s coming out of storage. I don’t care
what
the decorator says.”

She was struck by a sudden thought. “I forget. Screnii was Albanian, wasn’t he?”

“Bulgarian,” said Hester Kohn. “Oh, good!” said the woman. “I’ve always believed in the Bulgarians.”

By way of the reflective glass, Sigrid saw Hester Kohn smile politely.

The man chuckled, even though he wasn’t quite ready to give up the practical. “Still, a Screnii
is
an investment, isn’t it? And a lot more fun than soybean futures.”

There was a contemplative pause. “Not that I’d even know what a soybean looked like if I came face to face with one.”

“Aren’t they like guyva peas?” the woman asked brightly.

Hester Kohn shrugged.

“Ah well,” said the man, “what does it matter as long as I can buy low and sell them high? Now, I think my wife and I are
going to have to do a little commodities trading on which one of these Screniis we want.”

Ardù Screnii had died in the midsixties, Sigrid knew. He had eked out a living by teaching an occasional course at Vanderlyn,
and Nauman was a little bitter that Screnii had never been able to sell one of his major paintings for more than fifteen hundred
dollars during his lifetime.

As the two clients left, promising to come back the next day with their minds made up, Sigrid and Lowry approached Jacob Munson’s
partner. “Miss Kohn? We have a few more questions.”

Hester Kohn sighed. “Yes. I was afraid you might.”

When Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters returned to the Breul House, the docent on duty at the door informed them that Detective
Albee could be found in the attic.

“Where’s Lowry and the lieutenant?” they asked after they’d climbed to the top of the house and heard about Dr. Ridgway’s
discovery of the satin glove case in Shambley’s briefcase.

“Over at Kohn and Munson Gallery,” Elaine told them. “What’s up?”

The two women listened intently as the men described how Shambley had bought two posters at the Guggenheim on Wednesday morning,
posters Bernie Peters thought he remember seeing.

“I haven’t found any references to Léger in his papers,” said Dr. Ridgway, “but I’ll keep it in mind.”

The three detectives went down the back stairs, avoiding a group of twenty or so young women to whom Mrs. Beardsley was giving
a tour of the house.

In the basement, it took Peters a few minutes to regain his bearings, but he soon went to a box in one of the storage rooms
and plucked out the rolled posters, still in their plastic wrap. He slit the paper on one of them and backrolled it so that
it would hang straight.

It was just as the small illustration promised: a cubist depiction of two figures that, except for their vivid red and blue
colors, reminded Elaine of the Tin Woodman in
The Wizard of Oz.

They carried it upstairs and asked Dr. Peake if he or Miss Ruffton could speculate why Shambley should buy two identical Léger
posters and stash them in the basement.

“Beats me,” Peaks said, lounging indolently in a chair beside Hope Ruffton’s desk. “Léger’s too modern. Clean out of Shambley’s
period. Most of his work was done in the thirties, and forties. He died in the midfifties, if I’m not mistaken.”

His secretary was equally puzzled. “This looks familiar though. Now where have I seen—?”

The young janitor passed near by on his way down to the basement and he gave them a shy smile as he skirted the mannequin
dressed like Erich Breul.

“Just a minute, Grant,” Dr. Peake said. “These detectives found some posters Dr. Shambley left in the basement. Do you know
anything about them?”

Pascal Grant looked at the cubist poster and his face lit up. “I have pictures like that in my room.”

“What?” exclaimed Peake, coming erect in his chair. “
That’s
where I saw it,” said Hope Ruffton. “Those posters Dr. Kimmelshue had. The ones you told Pascal he could put up.”

“Oh,” said Peake. “Those.”

He sank back lazily into the chair again. “For a minute there—” He smiled to himself at the absurdity of what he’d almost
thought for a minute.

“Want to see them?” Pascal Grant asked the detectives. Golden curls spilled over his fair brow and he brushed them back as
he looked up at Eberstadt with a friendly air.

“Naw, that’s okay,” said Peters.

He and Eberstadt started toward the front door. “We’ve still got a couple of alibis to check. Drop you somewhere, Lainey?”

“No, thanks,” she said, remembering Mrs. Beardsley’s explanation of Grant’s unease with Shambley. “One thing though—when you
were checking out Shambley’s background, did anybody happen to mention if he was gay?”

“No,” Eberstadt said slowly, “but when we asked if he was living with anybody… remember, Bern?”

“Yeah. They said no. That Shambley couldn’t decide if he was AC or DC, so he wound up being no-C.”

“Interesting,” Albee said. “I’ll hang on to the poster and bring it back to the office later. The lieutenant’ll probably want
to see it.”

By the time Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters reached the sidewalk, Elaine Albee was already halfway down the basement steps
to talk with Pascal Grant again.

“I suppose I may as well tell you,” said Hester Kohn. “If I don’t, Jacob will.”

She led them to the small sitting room she’d created around the window corner of the large office that had once belonged to
her father, and Sigrid and Jim Lowry were invited to take the blue-and-turquoise chairs opposite her plum-colored love seat.
The upholstery seemed impregnated with her gardenia perfume, which, coupled with a pair of highly chromatic red and orange
abstract pictures on dark green walls, gave the office a sensual, subtropical atmosphere.

She loosened her pink jacket button by button and a languid smile touched her lips when she saw how Lowry’s eyes followed
her fingers.

As an interested spectator, Sigrid usually enjoyed watching other women operate, but it was almost three and she didn’t feel
like wasting more time. “What would Mr. Munson tell us?” she asked crisply.

“That he didn’t drop me at my apartment near Lincoln Center Wednesday night,” Hester replied. “I met Ben Peake after the party.
We talked about an hour, then I went home. Alone. And before you ask, no, I can’t prove it.”

“You’d just seen Dr. Peake,” said Sigrid. “Why did you meet again so quickly?”

“There were private things we needed to discuss.”

“Things Shambley had brought up in the library?” Sigrid asked.

“Ben told you about that?”

“He gave us his version—” Sigrid said carefully.

Hester Kohn interrupted with a ladylike snort and ran her fingers through her short black hair. “I’ll bet he did!”

“—and no doubt, Mr. Munson will have his own version of what he overheard Shambley say,” Sigrid finished smoothly.

The seductive languor disappeared from Hester Kohn’s body and she became wary and all business. “There’s no need to question
Jacob about this.”

“No?”

“No.” She cast a speculative woman-to-woman look at Sigrid. “Oscar and Jacob have been friends for as long as I can remember.
Even since I was a little girl. Oscar could tell you how much this gallery means to Jacob.”

Her words contained a not-too-subtle threat, which Sigrid coldly ignored. “And not to you, too?”

“Of course to me,” she answered impatiently. “But it’s different for Jacob. He’s old-world with a capital O and that means
things like honor and
mano
. It’s going to kill him to admit there’s ever been anything a little under-the-table with the gallery, but to admit it to
a
woman—
!”

Her hazel eyes slid over Jim Lowry’s muscular body. “He might talk to you,” she told him.

“He’s chauvinistic?” asked Sigrid. “He’s a gentleman,” Hester Kohn corrected with a grimace. “That means women are ladies.
You charm ladies, you marry them, you have sons with them, but you don’t take them too seriously or admit them to power. Look
around the gallery, Lieutenant Harald: We represent two female artists. And both of them are dead.