Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  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.

  “Jacob used to think that Paul and I would marry and Paul would run the business. Then when Paul died, and it was too late to rope in Suzanne or Marta, he half adopted Ben Peake and tried to make him marry me. Thank God, my father had a different attitude about daughters.”

  Bright spots of angry red flamed in her cheeks. “Every time I really think about it, I feel like screaming. Men made the tax laws, Ben Peake and his friend came up with the figures, and all I did was sign the appraisal, but who does Jacob blame the most? Three guesses.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Kohn,” said Jim Lowry, “but I don’t understand. Tax laws? Appraisal?”

  “It’s absolutely routine,” she said defensively. “Anyhow, half the galleries in the country are doing it, too.”

  Abruptly, it dawned on her that neither detective knew what she
was talking about. “I thought you said Ben told you.”

  “I said he gave us his version,” Sigrid reminded her. “And we still have to hear Mr. Munson’s.”

  With an angry sigh, Hester Kohn sank back into the cushions of the plum love seat. “This happened a couple of years ago while Ben was still at the Friedinger. One of the patrons there was in serious need of a large tax write-off. Basically, the way it works is that a donor gives a nonprofit institution a work of art. An independent appraiser estimates how much the work is worth and the donor then lists that figure in his tax returns as a charitable donation.”

  “The appraiser—you, in fact—inflates the figure?” Sigrid asked.

  Hester Kohn nodded. “But why would the institution that’s getting the artwork go along with that?” asked Lowry.

  “What do they care?” Her voice was cynical. “They’re getting a donation they otherwise wouldn’t and next time, it might be a really important gift. Besides, if they decide to deaccess, it’s usually worth at least half the appraised price.”

  Sigrid looked at her inquiringly. “Only in this particular case—”

  “In this particular case, it was worth about a quarter of what Jacob Munson said it was worth.”

  “You signed his name to an appraisal statement?” asked Lowry.

  “He’s the judge of artistic merit in this firm,” Hester Kohn said with bitterness. “I’m just the business and financial side. My signature wouldn’t have sufficed. See, Jacob isn’t asked to appraise things very often because everyone in the business knows he’s so goddamned straight-arrow. He might come down on the high side, but his figures are usually within two or three thousand of the true value. The tax people know this, too, and they haven’t bothered to question him in years.”

  “So how much kickback did you and Peake get?” Sigrid asked.

  “I had a pool put in at my house in Riverhead,” she said candidly. “I believe Ben bought a car.”

  “And Shambley threatened to blow the whistle on you?” asked Jim Lowry.

  Hester Kohn shrugged and plucked a piece of lint from the dark purple upholstery. “Ben thought so, but I wasn’t that sure. Roger Shambley was so effing devious. He never came straight out and said what he meant. It was all hypothetical and insinuating. Frankly, I thought he was sounding us out to see if we’d go along with some scheme he was hatching.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “Sort of as if he were saying he knew we’d bent the rules once before and got away with it and maybe we could do something for him. Or with him. It wasn’t clear.”

  “So you and Dr. Peake didn’t feel threatened by him?”

  “Not really. I certainly didn’t.” She crossed her shapely legs and adjusted the hem of her short pink skirt. “Neither of us wanted Jacob to find out about that tax scam, of course, but it’s not like we were going to go to jail or anything if it came out. Appraisals are subjective judgments, right?”

  “You forged your partner’s name,” Lowry pointed out. “Ye-s,” she admitted, “but if it came right down to it, Jacob would claim it was his signature. He’d rather hush it up and say he’d made an honest mistake than let the gallery’s name be dragged through the mud with one of its owners up for forgery.”

  She stood up and walked over to stare through the window at the buildings of midtown Manhattan. A wave of gardenia reached the two police officers as she turned back to face them. “Look, I know I’ve been rather flip about it and Jacob really does make me furious at times, but go easy on him about what Ben and I did, okay? He’s an old man and the gallery’s all he has now.”

  “What about his grandson?” asked Lowry.

  She shook her dark head. “He’s a sweet kid, but Richard Evans doesn’t know art from artichokes. Wouldn’t surprise me if he went home for Christmas and never came back.”

  “One moment, acushla,” said Francesca Leeds from her suite high in the Hotel Maintenon. She removed a heavy gold-and-amber earring and then returned the receiver to her ear. When she spoke, her voice was like warm melted syrup, so pleased was she to hear Oscar’s voice on her private line again.

  “It’s been almost two years. How many people did you have to call to find my number?”

  “None,” Nauman replied, making her pulse quicken before he added, “It was on the gallery’s Rolodex.”

  “Beast! You’re supposed to say it’s engraved on your heart.”

  He laughed. “Elliott Buntrock just called. He wants to have a short meeting here at the gallery tomorrow afternoon. ‘Talk turkey’ was how he put it. Think you and Thorvaldsen can make it?”

  Francesca looked at the calendar on her desk. “What time?”

  “Three-thirty?”

  “Four would probably be better for Søren.”

  “Four it is. See you.”

  “Ta.”

  She replaced the receiver and tilted her head so that the thick coppery hair fell away from her face as she slipped the stud of her earring through the lobe again.

  The nice thing about parting amicably with someone, she thought, was the free and easy friendship that often continued afterwards. The rotten thing was when the parting was more amicable on his part than yours. And the rottenest thing of all was feeling jealous of your replacement when you knew that if you both walked into a room together, nine men out of ten wouldn’t notice her.

  Except that the tenth man would be Oscar.

  The interview with Jacob Munson was as difficult as Hester Kohn had predicted.

  It began awkwardly when Sigrid, trailed by Jim Lowry, walked down the hall to Munson’s open door and found Nauman there, too, just hanging up the phone on Munson’s desk. At least Nauman hadn’t said anything flippant when she introduced Lowry, and Lowry gave no sign that the artist’s name had special curiosity value for him. But when Nauman heaved his tall frame up from the chair, Munson had underlined the personal aspects of the case by insisting that Oscar should stay.

  “You und Miss Harald, you have no secrets.”

  “Just the same, I’ll wait outside,” Nauman said and took himself off.

  Munson sat behind his cluttered desk looking like an elderly elf who’d just learned that Santa’s workshop was jobbing out its toy production to Korea. He went through the motions of hospitality halfheartedly, offering them drinks, which they refused, and peppermints, which Lowry accepted.

  “Wow!” he breathed as the pungent minty oils peppered his tastebuds.

  Normally, Jacob Munson would have beamed and offered to share the name of the candy company who imported these particular mints, but not today.

  His answers to their questions were monosyllabic. Yes, he and Hester had left the party together. Yes, Hester had gotten out near the Waldorf and he’d gone on home alone. No, there was no one to say what time he’d arrived at his upper West Side apartment, nor could he say when his grandson had come home, as he’d already gone to sleep.

  “Besides,” he added, twisting the thin strands of his gray beard, “you know where my grandson was and what he was doing.”

  “Yes,” Sigrid said wryly, thinking bow busy Rick Evans and Pascal Grant must have been hauling Shambley’s body all over the Breul House.

  Munson adamantly refused to discuss what he’d heard Shambley say to Benjamin Peake or Hester Kohn. “You must ask them,” he said, drawing his small frame up with Prussian militancy.

  “Miss Kohn has told us about the forgery,” Sigrid said. She had thought it was impossible for his stiff shoulders to become more rigid. She was wrong.

  “Then you know all there is to know,” he said. “I will not discuss this further without my lawyer.”

  And from that position, he would not budge.

  Nauman was still waiting out in the main part of the gallery when they emerged from Munson’s office, and he looked up expectantly.

  Sigrid glanced at her watch, saw it was almost five-thirty, and sent Lowry to the phone to check in.

  “Ready to call it a day?” Nauman a
sked. “Unless something’s come up,” she said.

  They watched while Lowry spoke to headquarters on the receptionist’s telephone.

  “Nothing that can’t wait till tomorrow,” he reported. As she dismissed him, she caught the look of hesitation on his face. “Something, Lowry?”

  “Just that—well, ma’am, Eberstadt and Peters have checked out all the stories we’ve been given.”

  “Yes”

  Her gray eyes were like granite and Jim Lowry lost his nerve. Let someone else ask her, he decided.

  “Nothing, ma’am. See you tomorrow?”

  “What was that about?” asked Nauman, watching the younger man step out into the cold night air and pull his collar up to his ears.

  “I think he wanted to ask if you had a proper alibi.” She smiled as she put on her heavy coat and gloves.

  “Me?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to go on record tomorrow and tell them that all your movements are accounted for.”

  “All my movements?” he laughed. “Well,” she emended. “Enough of them anyhow.”

  They browsed through a few stores along Fifth Avenue, not really intent on Christmas shopping, but open to felicitous suggestions. Sigrid bought a new camera case for her mother. Anne Harald was a photojournalist and her old case had banged around all over the world so much that it was ratty and frayed.

  A cutlery store reminded her that Roman Tramegra had recently grumbled about his need for proper boning knives. She found a set with wicked-looking thin blades.

  Nauman saw a delicate cloisonné pin enameled to look like a zebra swallowtail and immediately bought it for Jill Gill, an entomologist friend who raised butterflies.

  By seven their arms were laden with packages, so they walked to the garage west of Fifth Avenue, dumped everything into Nauman’s bright yellow sports car, and drove down to the Village for an early dinner.

  Over their wine, Nauman brought up Shambley’s death and Jacob Munson’s reaction. “He told me everything,” he said.

  Sigrid held up a warning hand. “Nauman, wait. You do understand that anything you tell me—”

  “—can and will be used against me?”