Corpus Christmas

They would keep it in mind, Sigrid told him as Guidry photographed the stain.

The dumbwaiter shaft had been discovered and a good set of prints were found on the enamelled wood molding that framed the hinged doors. Officer Monte had managed to keep everyone off the back stairs, so Albee started down to determine the dumbwaiter’s current location, being careful to keep to the center of the treads and on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

Cohen finished his preliminary examination and stripped off thin latex gloves as he stood. “Fu

“Besides its size?” asked Lowry, who had chalked an outline of the body’s position before Cohen began.

“Not our old friend the blunt instrument?” queried Bernie Peters.

“I’ll let you know after I’ve taken a look at that wound in the lab,” Cohen told them.

Guidry stepped back in for more pictures now that Cohen had turned the body face up.

“Want to estimate a time of death?” Sigrid asked.

Cohen shrugged. “Rigor’s complete, but there’s still a little body warmth, so we’re talking maybe twelve to fifteen hours, no more than sixteen hours max.”

They looked at their watches. Between 7:15 and 11:15, always taking into account that the temperature in this hallway may have been measurably higher or lower than it was now, or that the dead man had some physical quirk that would quicken or retard rigor mortis.

“I saw him alive between eight and eight-thirty last night,” Sigrid said.

Bernie Peters shot Lowry a telling glance. The lieutenant had a reputation for coldness, but she hadn’t turned a hair upon seeing the body. Even Cohen looked at her curiously. “Friend of yours?”

“No,” she answered distantly. “There was a party here last night and he came, too. We met briefly and he left early. Or rather he went upstairs early. I believe he was doing research on some papers in the attic.”

Elaine Albee reappeared on the back stairs. “The dumbwaiter’s on the first floor,” she reported, slightly out of breath. “And there looks like a smear of blood inside.”

“Probably turn out to be roast beef,” Cohen gri

Sigrid queried her people. Guidry was satisfied with the number of photographs she’d taken and Lowry and Peters had just finished with their inventory of Roger Shambley’s pockets, so everyone stood back as Cohen’s assistants lifted the body onto a collapsible gurney, covered it, and strapped it down. Rigor mortis made for a bulky shape and Sigrid was not the only one reminded of a grotesque and badly wrapped Christmas package.

“By the way, Lieutenant-” Cohen paused before following the body downstairs. “You’ll get my official report late this afternoon, but I can put it in an eyedropper right now: On the bones last week, you can forget about actual age, sex, race-hell! I couldn’t even swear they aren’t monkey bones. All I can say is that they’re consistent with what you’d find if a newborn baby was wrapped in newspapers and stuck in a trunk for thirty years, give or take a week.”

“What about the mummified one?” Sigrid asked.

“Caucasian girl,” he replied promptly. “And before you ask, yeah, she was born alive. I found lint in her breathing passages. Looks like she no sooner got herself born than she got herself smothered.”

With a laconic “Ciao for now, amici,” he trailed after the gurney, never realizing that he’d allowed Roger Shambley one final exit in Italian.

With the body removed from the landing, Sigrid went up the steep attic stairs to examine the makeshift office Roger Shambley had created amid file cabinets and storage boxes. Later, someone would go through the papers and folders so neatly stacked upon his work tables, but for now she simply wished to sit in the art historian’s chair and try to get a better feel for the man she’d met so briefly last night, some sense of why he’d died.

The tabletop directly in front of his chair was bare, so she assumed he’d probably finished work for the night and cleared away his papers. Into one of those folders, perhaps. Or into his briefcase, which still sat beside the chair. A methodical man?

She rather thought there had been method in Shambley’s calculated insults last night-to that trustee, Mr. Reinicke, to Søren Thorvaldsen and, by extension, to Nauman and Francesca Leeds-but she’d observed him too briefly to understand the motive for his rudeness. There had been a certain electricity in his ma

Or to whom.

Power, Sigrid thought. Shambley had acted like someone who’d just won a lottery or inherited a throne and suddenly felt free to ride roughshod over everyone else.

“Lieutenant?” Jim Lowry’s voice at the attic door drew her back to the present. “We think we’ve found where he died.”

They went down the narrow back stairs, past the butler’s pantry on the first floor where Officer Guidry had photographed the dumbwaiter before the crime scene technicians took a sample of its stains for the lab, and from the butler’s pantry, on down the broader, more commodious stairway to the basement.

As they descended, Sigrid noted and carefully sidestepped three chalk-circled spots.

At the foot of the steps, a portable floodlamp lit up the area and made it quite apparent that the floor there had been recently-and inexpertly-mopped. They could clearly see a circular spot where dried streaks of water left dull swirls upon the shiny dark tiles.

“Bonded commercial cleaners come in every Monday,” said Elaine Albee as they watched a technician fill small glass vials with samples of a brown sticky substance he’d scraped from the joints between the tiles. “According to the woman who found the body, the cleaners bring their own equipment and part of their routine is to wax and buff the floors down here.”

A mop, still damp, had been found in the scullery, she told Sigrid. It, too, would be taken to the lab for analysis.

“And the blood on the stairs themselves?” Sigrid asked, referring to those chalk circles.

“Couple of small splashes up on the tenth and eleventh treads; a bigger one down here on the third,” said Bernie Peters. “Nothing on the upper landing and, from the shape of the drops, he was moving down at the time.”

It was consistent with what Cohen had told them. Until they uncovered data to disprove it, their working theory would be that Shambley had started down the basement steps when he was struck a tremendous blow on the head from behind. He had fallen here, bled copiously, then his body had been hauled up to the third floor soon afterwards.

“Why not leave him here in the basement where he fell?” Sigrid wondered aloud.

“The perpetrator wanted him found quickly?” speculated Lowry.

“Maybe he didn’t want him found quickly,” Albee countered. “There’s a live-in janitor who has a room down here. Maybe the perp wanted time to get away and set up an alibi before the janitor stumbled over him.”

“Or maybe it was an individual that just didn’t want us taking too close a look at the basement,” suggested Peters.

“In which case,” said Sigrid.

The others tried not to groan as they looked across the crowded Victorian kitchen to the warren of storage rooms beyond.

“There’s still a bunch of uniforms wandering around upstairs,” Mick Cluett reminded her.

“Might as well put them to use,” Sigrid agreed. “And start a canvass of the square, anyone seen entering or leaving these premises last night. In the meantime, Lowry, you and I will begin with the staff.”

They commandeered the stately, book-lined library for questioning their witnesses and lunchtime came and went before the two police detectives had heard all that the Breul House staff were prepared to tell them.