Corpus Christmas

As Dr. Ridgway returned to her work, Sigrid drew Albee and Lowry aside and asked Albee about yesterday’s search of the basement. Lowry had already told her about the missing cane and the policewoman shook her blond head. “We were specifically looking for anything that could have been used as a weapon so I’m sure it would have been noticed if it was there.”

Sigrid looked around the large attic and saw that Mrs. Beardsley had rejoined the docents who, with Pascal Grant’s help, were still laboriously checking the attic’s inventory. She carried the embroidered satin envelope over to the senior docent.

“Have you ever seen this?” she asked.

“It’s Sophie Breul’s glove case,” said Mrs. Beardsley. “How did it get up here?”

“Where’s it normally kept?”

“Why, down in her dressing room, of course.”

She led the three police detectives down to the second floor, to the dressing room that co

A whiff of lavender drifted toward them as a puzzled Mrs. Beardsley said, “But here’s her glove case!” and drew out an identical envelope of embroidered pink satin. “I didn’t realize there were two.”

Sigrid reached for the new one. Inside were several pairs of kid gloves, all imbued with the scent of lavender. She lifted the first satin case to her nose. It was musty and smelled like an old bookstore.

“This didn’t come from that drawer,” she told the others.

Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters finished up at the New York Center for the Fine Arts before noon, grabbed a sandwich in a nearby bar and grill on York Avenue, then headed over to the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.

Afternoon sunlight shone through the barebranched trees of Central Park and slanted on the luxurious apartment buildings on the other side of Fifth Avenue. There, uniformed and gloved doormen opened their doors for residents who emerged from double-parked limos with piles of beautifully gift-wrapped boxes. Santa’s little helpers.

“What’re you getting Frances for Christmas?” asked Bernie as they passed a nursemaid wheeling an enormous English pram, its tiny occupant buried in a nest of pale pink wool.

“I don’t know. Maybe a fancy new robe.”

“Didn’t you give her that last year?”

“Did I?” They paused for a light and the big detective sighed. “Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know. What’re you giving Pam?”

“Diamond earrings,” Bernie said happily. “Soon as she got pregnant this last time, I just knew it was going to be a boy, so I put them on lay-away and I’ve been paying on ’em all along. Next week, they’re mine.”

“Diamond earrings! God, I hope Frances doesn’t hear about them,” groaned Eberstadt as they neared the Guggenheim.

Their visit to the Fine Arts Center had added little to their knowledge of the dead man. Tuesday had been the last day of classes until after New Year’s, so the only colleagues to be found were some instructors who hadn’t turned in all their grade cards.

Dr. Aaron Prawn, head of nineteenth-century American studies, summed up Shambley’s career through tightly clenched, pipe-gripping teeth. “Ambitious. Perhaps a bit too. But definitely on his way. A bit of a barracuda? Yes. But one has to be to get anywhere in the nineteenth century these days. Junior colleagues loathed him, of course. Goes with the territory.”

Unfortunately, Shambley had been on leave this semester so no one had seen enough of him lately to report on his last movements. The divisional secretary remembered that he’d been in Wednesday morning to pick up his mail, but she’d been busy with a student and had merely exchanged season’s greetings with him.

They were luckier at the Guggenheim. Among the scraps of paper in Shambley’s pocket had been a receipt from the museum’s bookstore and one of the clerks there remembered Dr. Shambley.

“I was in one of his classes at the center last spring,” said the girl, a part-time student who worked full-time during the holiday break. “I knew who he was, but he didn’t remember me.”

Eberstadt found that hard to believe. His own hairline had receded to the very top of his head where wiry gray curls ran from ear to ear across his bald dome like some sort of steel-wool tiara. He was half bald by necessity; the girl must have paid a hair stylist good money to clip that same area of her platinum white hair to a flat half-inch stubble while the rest of her hair fell to her shoulders.

How many of Shambley’s students could have had hairstyles like that?

Bernie Peters was more interested in whether she was wearing a bra beneath that turquoise silk shirt. “Do you remember what he bought?”

She looked at the sales slip and nodded. “Two Léger posters at fourteen ninety-eight each, plus tax.”

“Léger?” asked Eberstadt, stumbling over the pronunciation. He pulled out his notebook and pen. “How do you spell that?”

“Fernand Léger,” she said, spelling it over her silky shoulder as she led them through aisles crowded with artsy souvenirs and art books-some of them heavy enough to give you a hernia, thought Peters-to the Guggenheim’s collection of posters. “French painter. I thought it was kinda strange that Dr. Shambley would want cubist posters when his field’s nineteenth-century American. Of course, he did want early Léger and not the mechanistic things from the twenties and thirties that he’s really famous for.”

She pulled a plastic-wrapped cylinder from one of the bins. “This is it. I’m not supposed to open it though unless you’re going to buy it.”

There was a small reproduction of the artwork on the outer wrap. To the detectives’ untutored eyes, it looked like a picture of two faceless ma

“He bought two of ’em, just alike?” asked Peters.

“Uh-huh. He got kinda pissed when we didn’t have two différent examples from that period. It was like maybe he was doing his Christmas shopping or something. But then he kinda laughed and said it didn’t matter; that he’d just hang one of them upside down. Weird, right?”

Her loose shirt fell forward as she bent to return the poster to its proper slot, but Bernie Peters noted with only half his attention that she wasn’t wearing a bra. The other half recalled the search he’d helped conduct yesterday.

“I think I saw those posters in the Breul House basement,” he told Matt Eberstadt.

Seated across the library table from the two female detectives, Mrs. Beardsley had grown weary of the way one had to say the same thing three different ways before the police moved on to a different question. Beyond the possibility of a trunk in the attic, she had no idea where Sophie Breul’s extra glove case had spent the last seventy years, nor what that satin case had held, and she had told them so. At length.

This was rapidly becoming, she decided, a delicate question of etiquette.

On the one hand, police officers were, by their very calling, of a lower socioeconomic order. One must, of course, treat everyone-even one’s inferiors-graciously although a certain distance was allowed.

On the other hand, Miss Harald-Lieutenant Harald, Mrs. Beardsley reminded herself sharply-had been met on a social level and she was, after all, a personal friend of the famous Oscar Nauman.

So one could hardly snub her with impunity. Not even when she made gross insinuations.

“Now really, Lieutenant Harald!” She stiffened in one of the leather library chairs. “I don’t know with whom you’ve been gossiping, nor do I wish to be told. Under the circumstances, I suppose everyone becomes suspect. Nevertheless, it’s simply ridiculous to suppose that one-that I-would resort to violence.”