Corpus Christmas

Her own virginity had been lost so long ago that she had forgotten what terrors true sexual i

If I’d known, I would have made it more beautiful, she thought.

Too late. Already the sweet liquids of youth were spilling from his touchingly inept body.

With those first hot rushes of manhood, another boy might have become immediately cocky and boastful, a royal nuisance. Instead, Rick came to each subsequent session reluctantly and seemed miserable and guilty afterwards.

As he was now, in this overheated cab. It wasn’t only his involvement in Roger Shambley’s death that made him shrink into that corner, yet Hester knew that if she removed her glove and touched his bare, chapped hand with hers, he would be unable to resist. She considered testing her power, but they were now too close to the gallery.

Instead, she sank back into her own corner and wondered if young Rick had, after all, seen or done more last night than he was willing to admit.

Over in Queens, an artificial Christmas tree decorated the main lobby of the Lantana Walk Nursing Home and an electric menorah stood on the reception desk with two bulbs lit for this second day of Hanukkah. As Detective Bernie Peters soon discovered, he had arrived at the most restless hour of the day for ambulatory residents, and Mrs. Palka was not in her room.

“The di

They walked through halls wide enough for two wheelchairs to pass each other, into a lounge decorated with more symbols of Hanukkah and Christmas. There they found a querulous elderly woman with thick glasses and a hearing aid struggling to understand what she could expect for di

“Roast ham?” she sniffed. “We had ham for supper last night and dry, stringy fodder it was, too, with a smidgen of honey glaze or pineapple.”

“Lamb!” her friend enunciated loudly. “Roast lamb, Maureen. And you know perfectly well the doctor said you can’t have sweet things.”

“Wheat beans? What’re wheat beans? Do speak up, Dora.”

“There she is,” said the director, gesturing toward the cheerful little dumpling of a woman, who leaned heavily upon her aluminum walker and watched their approach with lively curiosity.

The director introduced Detective Peters to Mrs. Palka, pointed them to a quiet corner of the lounge, and expertly vectored Mrs. Palka’s hard-of-hearing friend toward another group of residents waiting for their di

“My daughter told me someone from the police might be up,” beamed Mrs. Palka. She lowered herself painfully into a chair, refusing Peters’s help. “I had a hip replacement two years ago,” she explained. “Eighty per cent who get it can go dancing in six months. I’m part of the twenty per cent who have to hang up their dancing shoes.”

“I’m sorry,” Bernie Peters said awkwardly. The infirmities of age made him uncomfortable. Even though he knew intellectually that everyone grows old, he was still young enough to believe he would somehow be exempted:

Mrs. Palka patted his hand. “Don’t be sorry. I danced plenty in my lifetime, believe me.” She sat erectly in her chair and cocked her small white head. “So! Dead babies in Gregor Jurczyk’s attic. Whose babies were they?”

“Well, that’s what we were hoping you could tell me, Mrs. Palka. Your daughter thought you were friendly with the Jurczyk family and might remember some of the people who lived in that house.”

“Pauline says between 1935 and 1947. That right?”

“Those were the dates on the newspapers we found them wrapped in,” Peters nodded.

“Now let me think. The Depression was going strong then and then came the war. They couldn’t have been Barbara’s. She was very good, very religious and would never. Besides, she and Karol-that was her husband, lovely man- they couldn’t have babies. And Angelika was a businesswoman, worked as a secretary in one of those big-shot investment places on Wall Street. She never married, so it couldn’t have been her. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Rospochowski, but they had a new baby almost every year. When did she have time to slip in four more? Now there was a pretty little red-headed thing. What was her name? A

“Ah, but what am I talking?” Mrs. Palka shook her head ruefully at what she considered a failing memory. “That one didn’t come till after the war started.”

“What about Mr. Jurczyk? Was he married?”

“Not that one. Too interested in the almighty dollar to spend a pe

The dining room opened and residents began a modest surge through the doors. The smell of roast meat and steamed broccoli spread through the lounge and stirred those still seated to action. Even Mrs. Palka began to move her walker into a ready position.

“But really, Barbara’s the one who could tell you better about the people who lived there,” she said. She took a slip of paper with a Staten Island address from the pocket of her pink cardigan and gave it to Peters. “If she’ll talk to you. We used to call each other up on the phone at least once a month, but she’s gone downhill so much this year. Last time I talked to her-back in August that must have been-I don’t believe she knew who I was. But then she is eighty-seven, four years older than me.”

Getting up from a chair seemed almost as painful to Mrs. Palka as sitting down, but as she regained her feet and had her walker pointed toward the dining room, her querulous friend impatiently called to her, “Hurry up, Dora! Loretta says we’re having colicky moose for dessert.”

A ridiculous mental image filled Peters’s head, and plump little Mrs. Palka, her wrinkled face aglow with laughter, winked at him with such insouciant charm that he found himself laughing, too.

“That Maureen! She knows perfectly well that Loretta said chocolate mousse.”

The Hymans lived on Central Park South, but the Herzogs and the Reinickes lived within three blocks of each other in the East Sixties, so Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry decided to interview them first.

Lydia Babcock Herzog was tall and gaunt in a high-necked tunic and slacks of ivory wool. The young policewoman admired her dramatic gold necklace, her diamond earrings, her beautifully furnished drawing room with its miniature gold Christmas tree set upon an intricately carved ebony stand, even her tall and dignified husband; but as far as Elaine was concerned, that old adage, “You can never be too rich or too thin,” was only half right. Mrs. Herzog would have to gain ten pounds just to qualify for anorectic, never mind too thin.

Mr. Herzog was quietly handsome, like a fair-haired English film star of the forties, refined and reserved. He offered Jim and Elaine drinks and, when they refused, continued with the one he’d begun before they arrived.

Mrs. Herzog’s drink remained untouched on the low table before her. She sat on a sofa of pale blue brocade, inclined her head graciously, and repeated how shocked they had been to learn of Dr. Shambley’s untimely death. How utterly shocked, in feet.

Jim Lowry rather doubted that. Mrs. Herzog seemed too detached to have ever been shocked by anything, but he nodded. “We understand that he hadn’t been there very long?”

“He was appointed at our semia