Corpus Christmas

“Dr. Shambley was rude to you last night?” asked Mrs. Reinicke. “You didn’t tell me, Winston.”

“No need, my dear, no need at all,” he said gruffly. “He’d heard about our Van Gogh and it amused him.”

“Amused him?” Mrs. Reinicke began to grow indignant.

“And then he had the unmitigated gall to suggest I could upgrade my collection with a Norman Rockwell or a Pierson Sharpe.”

“My dear!”

“Sharpe?” asked Jim Lowry, who rather liked Norman Rockwell’s down-to-earth pictures and didn’t see where the insult lay in Shambley’s remarks.

“He’s the man who draws those kids with the big sad eyes,” Elaine told him. “The one my sister-in-law likes so much.”

Lowry knew what Lainey thought of her sister-in-law’s taste and began to understand the Reinickes’ a

“No wonder you and Cheevy were gone so long last night,” said Mrs. Reinicke sympathetically.

“You went out again last night?” asked Elaine.

“Needed a good long tramp,” Winston Reinicke nodded. “Walked around the edge of the park to Columbus Circle, then up to Lincoln Center and back down Broadway to Times Square. Don’t mind admitting the fellow got to me. Nobody likes to admit he’s failed.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Winston!” Mrs. Reinicke stood, plucked her husband’s empty glass from his hand and stumped over to their liquor cabinet to pour him a fresh drink. “You had a temporary setback. And you were hardly alone. I never liked that Van Gogh anyhow.”

“Well, I did!” he said testily, waving away the drink she offered him.

Mrs. Reinicke evidently knew her husband’s moods quite well, for she continued to hold out the glass until he sighed and took it.

“Suppose that lieutenant woman wants to know what it was all about,” he told Lowry and Albee. “Black Monday. Took a real bath on the Street. Overextended. More than I could raise to cover all my margin calls. Elliott Buntrock’d had his eye on my Van Gogh for years and he offered to help liquidate some of my collection in a hurry if I’d give him first shot at that drawing. Didn’t try to fudge the prices either. Damned decent of him. Might’ve gotten a bit more if I’d put them up for a proper auction; but if I could’ve waited for an auction, wouldn’t have had to sell out in the first place, eh?”

“And now you can have the fun of building a new collection,” Marie Reinicke observed indulgently.

“Not the same,” said her husband, taking another swallow of his drink. “Not as much fun having people to di

“It was a very gloomy drawing,” Mrs. Reinicke told the young officers. “But some people were impressed to learn they were dining in the same room with a Van Gogh and Winston loved to show it off. Personally, I miss the Cassatt pastel more and no one ever paid it a shred of attention.”

“After Dr. Shambley’s remarks, though, it’s certainly understandable that you’d want to walk off some steam,” said Elaine Albee.

It all sounded very much like a tempest in a teapot to Jim Lowry, but he knew that murders were committed every day for even sillier reasons. It was lucky that Mr. Reinicke had an alibi.

“Did your friend come home with you?” he asked.

Mr. Reinicke looked blank. “Friend?”

Elaine realized that Jim was trying to avoid raising Mr. Reinicke’s ire again. “You said that you and a Mr.-Cheever, was it?-took a long walk together,” she said helpfully. “If you could give us his full name and address-”

“Cheevy?”

Mrs. Reinicke lay back in her chair and whooped with laughter. “Mr. Cheevy!”

“Cheevy’s our dog,” chuckled Mr. Reinicke, his good spirits partially restored. “A King Charles spaniel out of Scorned Lady of Winterset, so we had to name him Cheevy. First name,”-he chuckled some more-“Miniver, of course.”

Mrs. Reinicke took pity on the detectives’ puzzled looks. “From the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem,” she smiled. “You know: ‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn’?”

Elaine looked at Jim, then sighed and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reinicke, but we have to ask you exactly what time you left this apartment, when you returned and if you met anyone you recognized during that time?”

Traffic was begi

Jim Lowry had not worn a hat or cap since he was twelve and still under parental control, but he turned up his own collar and wrapped his wool scarf tighter so that his ears were somewhat protected. His breath blew out in white clouds before him as he said gloomily, “I don’t think Lieutenant Harald’s going to accept the testimony of a King Charles spaniel.”

Elaine pulled him to a stop. “Look down there,” she said, gesturing with her head. “Cohen said a rod or a stick, right? Do you suppose Mr. Reinicke has one?”

On the sidewalk a few yards ahead of them, a man was cleaning up after his poodle with a device that looked something like a long-handled dustpan.

Jim began to laugh. “You gotta promise I can be there when you ask the lieutenant if Shambley could have bought it with a pooper-scooper.”

With a fuzzy hat pulled down over her ears and a long fur coat that swathed her tiny body like a djellaba, Søren Thorvaldsen’s middle-aged secretary tripped up the gangplank and across the wide deck as if the frigid gusts whipping off the Hudson River were nothing more than spring zephyrs.

Probably one of those dauntless Nordic types that went from steaming saunas to splashing among ice floes, thought Sigrid as she shivered along behind in a utilitarian coat and hood of heavy black wool that had weathered nine winters. The usual river traffic seemed to be out on the choppy water tonight, but the wind made her eyes so teary that she could only distinguish blurred lights in the darkness.

When she called earlier to set up this meeting, Sigrid hadn’t expected it would take a half-mile hike to find Thorvaldsen. But she’d arrived at his office overlooking the river to find a Danish pixie who, after a quick telephone conversation conducted in Danish, had immediately encased herself in an envelope of fur and led Sigrid through a maze of hallways and elevators and eventually across a bone-numbing expanse of windswept pier and up onto the deck of his cruise ship, the Sea Dancer.

“She’s supposed to sail Saturday at noon,” explained the pixie, a Miss Kristensen. Even in high-heeled leather boots, the woman barely came up to Sigrid’s shoulder and her words were almost blown away as she trotted along ahead of the tall police officer. “-partial loss of power in one of the main generators.”

She tugged open a heavy steel door and they were suddenly and mercifully out of the biting wind and into the silence of a glass-enclosed promenade. Through another door and this time they entered true warmth. Sigrid pushed back the hood of her coat and felt her face begin to thaw.

They were inside a spacious lobby decorated in tones of peach, melon and sunshine yellow, but Sigrid was given no time to play tourist. Already, Miss Kristensen was halfway across the wide expanse of floral carpeting, heading for a bank of elevators. Sigrid almost expected to see her pull out a large turnip watch and murmur something about being late. She lengthened her own stride and caught up with the other woman just as the elevator arrived.

Instead of descending to the depths of the ship, or wherever they kept generators»-Sigrid was weak on engineering details-the elevator rose. Soon she was once more following Miss Kristensen through a maze of confusing twists and turns, then down a wide, paneled hall carpeted in rich patterns of luscious tropical colors.