Corpus Christmas

“Taking that list and checking it twice,” Buntrock whistled half under his breath as he ambled from the gallery into the drawing room, and from the drawing room back out into the great hall with its opulent Christmas tree. “Go

Fully indulging his momentary mood of postmodern grand funk, he ignored the disapproving glance of an elderly docent who guarded the entrance against casual visitors. The Breul House was unofficially closed today except for a group of art students, who had booked a tour for this date several weeks ago and were due in this afternoon from a woman’s college in Raleigh. Buntrock looked around for Hope Ruffton and found her desk unexpectedly vacant.

“Miss Ruffton went up to tell Dr. Peake that the police are coming back this morning,” said the guardian of the gate.

“Very good,” said Buntrock. “I’ll just carry on.”

Continuing his casual whistling, he circled the ma

Let Peake explore the high pikes, he thought; surely there was a reason Shambley had died down in the basement. He remembered that when he and Francesca Leeds discussed logistics Wednesday night, she’d murmured something about storage racks in the basement and Peake had said more would have to be built because old Kimmelshue, the previous director, had filled most of them with earlier culls from the collection.

The mind boggled. If Kimmelshue had kept in William Carver Ewing and Everett Winstanley, what in God’s name had he weeded out?

At the foot of the stairs, Buntrock paused to get his bearings. Abruptly remembering that this was also presumably where Roger Shambley had got his, he moved away from the landing.

To his left stretched caverns measureless to man in the form of a large Victorian kitchen; to his right, beyond a sort of minikitchen adjunct, was a closed door. Buntrock automatically tried the closed door first.

The lights were on inside and as soon as he stuck his bony head around the door frame, all the colors and patterns of Victorian excessiveness beat upon his optic nerves and clamored for simultaneous attention. The rooms upstairs were models of harmonic taste and order compared to the chaotic anarchy of texture and design down here, with its clash of different cultures. Clinging to the door for support, Buntrock’s disbelieving eyes traveled from the syrupy farmyard scene over the fireplace, to the modern art posters thumbtacked to turkey red walls, down to the layered scraps of patterned carpet on the floor.

When he spotted the twentieth-century tape deck and portable television beside the nineteenth-century pasha’s mattress heaped high with silken cushions, the bizarre incongruities were explained. The janitor’s room, he realized.

Of course. Lo, the wonder of i

With a shudder that lent his fuzzy sweater a fleeting resemblance to ruffled egret feathers, he pulled the door closed again and moved stilt-leggedly through the kitchen in search of old Kimmelshue’s storage racks.

Upon entering the Breul House, Elaine Albee immediately headed for the attic to see if that art expert on loan from another police division had learned anything pertinent from Shambley’s papers, while Sigrid and Jim Lowry invited Benjamin Peake into his own office for yet a further discussion of his relationship to Dr. Shambley.

“Relations were quite minimal,” said Peake. The dark suit he wore was impeccably tailored and a turquoise tie made his blue eyes seem even bluer as he leaned back in his chair with careless grace. “Jacob Munson put him up for trustee back in the fall. I think it was his first trusteeship and, just between us, it went to his head. Got it in mind that he was actually supposed to do something.”

He laughed deprecatingly. “Well, of course, he was supposed to be using some of Erich Breul’s papers to document the price of original art works in the 1880’s, here and abroad, for his new book.”

“Yesterday, Miss Ruffton implied that Dr. Shambley’s research had taken a different course,” Sigrid said, “and, if you recall,”-she paused to consult her notes-“you referred to him as a ‘busybody and a snoop with delusions of mental superiority.’ Would you explain that, please?”

Peake smiled. “I thought I just did. Roger Shambley seemed to think he ought to be a new broom, clean sweep, stir up the old cobwebs.”

“And did he?” asked Sigrid. “Stir up old cobwebs?”

“He tried, but he was going about it all wrong. Now I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the Breul House’s financial difficulties but I assume Nauman’s told you-”

“I prefer to hear your version,” Sigrid interrupted coldly.

“Certainly.” Peake glanced at Detective Lowry, but that young man had his eyes firmly fixed on the notebook on his knee and his face was a careful blank.

“Well, then, perhaps we should start with the terms of Erich Breul’s will,” Peake said and pedantically described shrinking endowments, capital outlays, and dwindling grants. “It’s simply a matter of attracting more money, but Shambley had begun to act as if the fault lay with the staff. As if we weren’t already doing everything humanly possible.”

“Why did he ask for a set of your inventory sheets?” Sigrid asked.

Peake shrugged petulantly.

“We’ve heard that he made certain insinuations.”

“Look,” said Peake defensively. “I don’t give a damn what you’ve heard. That was an honest mistake. There was nothing unethical or illegal about what happened when I was at the Friedinger. I was caught in the middle up there. And you can go through our inventory sheets with a fine-tooth comb. There hasn’t been a straight pin deaccessioned from the Breul House since I took over. If anything’s missing, it didn’t happen on my watch.”

Cautiously, because this was the first mention she’d heard of the skeleton in Peake’s closet, Sigrid said, “It would help us clarify things if we had your side of what actually did happen at the Friedinger.”

Giving his side took Benjamin Peake almost fifteen minutes, an intense quarter hour in which he used nearly every technical and aesthetic art term Sigrid had ever heard in order to rationalize his actions. When he ran out of breath, she mentally translated his account into layman’s terms for her own benefit.

According to Peake, the Friedinger had been presented with an opportunity to acquire an important Ingres. In order to finance the purchase, it was decided to sell (in museum talk “deaccession”) some of the lesser pictures, including two cataloged “ School of Zurbarán.” Consequently, the pictures were sent to auction and sold, and a month or so later, the new owner jubilantly a

In view of the soaring values for that artist’s work after the Met’s splashy Zurbarán show, the two pictures were now worth more than the Ingres they were sold to help purchase.

Peake’s immediate superior was technically responsible for approving the deaccessioning of any of the Friedinger’s holdings, so public ridicule fell heaviest on him; but since the action had been based on Dr. Benjamin Peake’s supposedly expert recommendation, Peake’s resignation was also accepted. Very unfair, Peake claimed, since he was pressured from above to find things to sell and had relied on the advice of subordinates who claimed to know more about the Spanish master than he had.