Corpus Christmas

The art dealer interrupted with an impatient wave of his hand. “It wasn’t about sex, Oscar. Wednesday night, Roger Shambley accused Hester and Ben of passing a piece of forged art through the gallery. Yesterday I asked Hester of this. First she said no; then she said there was no way Shambley could have proved it.”

He pushed his plate aside with most of the food still untasted. “She may be a woman, but she isn’t that stupid, Oscar. Shambley wouldn’t have had to prove anything. A gallery’s word is its bond and if that word becomes a lie-”

He gave a palms-up gesture of hopelessness.

Sigrid arrived at the gallery with Jim Lowry shortly before three. The soft-voiced receptionist informed them that Mr. Munson had not returned from lunch and that Miss Kohn, as they could see, was busy at the moment but if they wished to wait?

“Yes,” Sigrid said and Lowry took a guide sheet from a nearby stand.

“Notebook pages?” he asked sotto voce. “Twenty-three hundred a sheet? Who’s Ardù Screnii? Never heard of him.”

Stu

Sigrid pretended to study the drawings, but she chose those that would give her reflected views of Hester Kohn, presently occupied with two customers. The dealer wore hot pink today and a chunky pearl-and-gold necklace.

From the conversation which floated through the nearly deserted gallery, Sigrid soon gathered that the man and woman were a husband and wife from Chicago and that he was a commodities trader. She also gathered that they expected more from an Ardù Screnii drawing than pure aesthetics.

“Of course,” she heard Hester Kohn say, “you have to realize that the bottom line is whether you like a work. I mean I can’t tell you something’s going to go up.”

“Yes,” the man nodded sagely. “Yes, I know that but-”

“I can tell you how some things have gone up, but if you’re buying one of these purely as an investment-”

“Oh, no, we love art,” said his wife, a dark, intense woman in her early thirties. “Of course, my decorator’s going to kill me. My taste is changing. Growing. I was always so-um-traditional, you know? And here I came home with this huge modern canvas and my decorator wouldn’t let me hang it in the bedroom. Said it defeminized the room-it’s all traditional antiques, you know? So I put it in storage. But if I get one of these Screniis, then it’s coming out of storage. I don’t care what the decorator says.”

She was struck by a sudden thought. “I forget. Screnii was Albanian, wasn’t he?”

“Bulgarian,” said Hester Kohn.

“Oh, good!” said the woman. “I’ve always believed in the Bulgarians.”

By way of the reflective glass, Sigrid saw Hester Kohn smile politely.

The man chuckled, even though he wasn’t quite ready to give up the practical. “Still, a Screnii is an investment, isn’t it? And a lot more fun than soybean futures.”

There was a contemplative pause.

“Not that I’d even know what a soybean looked like if I came face to face with one.”

“Aren’t they like guyva peas?” the woman asked brightly.

Hester Kohn shrugged.

“Ah well,” said the man, “what does it matter as long as I can buy low and sell them high? Now, I think my wife and I are going to have to do a little commodities trading on which one of these Screniis we want.”

Ardù Screnii had died in the midsixties, Sigrid knew. He had eked out a living by teaching an occasional course at Vanderlyn, and Nauman was a little bitter that Screnii had never been able to sell one of his major paintings for more than fifteen hundred dollars during his lifetime.

As the two clients left, promising to come back the next day with their minds made up, Sigrid and Lowry approached Jacob Munson’s partner. “Miss Kohn? We have a few more questions.”

Hester Kohn sighed. “Yes. I was afraid you might.”

When Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters returned to the Breul House, the docent on duty at the door informed them that Detective Albee could be found in the attic.

“Where’s Lowry and the lieutenant?” they asked after they’d climbed to the top of the house and heard about Dr. Ridgway’s discovery of the satin glove case in Shambley’s briefcase.

“Over at Kohn and Munson Gallery,” Elaine told them. “What’s up?”

The two women listened intently as the men described how Shambley had bought two posters at the Guggenheim on Wednesday morning, posters Bernie Peters thought he remembered seeing.

“I haven’t found any references to Léger in his papers,” said Dr. Ridgway, “but I’ll keep it in mind.”

The three detectives went down the back stairs, avoiding a group of twenty or so young women to whom Mrs. Beardsley was giving a tour of the house.

In the basement, it took Peters a few minutes to regain his bearings, but he soon went to a box in one of the storage rooms and plucked out the rolled posters, still in their plastic wrap. He slit the paper on one of them and backrolled it so that it would hang straight.

It was just as the small illustration promised: a cubist depiction of two figures that, except for their vivid red and blue colors, reminded Elaine of the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz.

They carried it upstairs and asked Dr. Peake if he or Miss Ruffton could speculate why Shambley should buy two identical Léger posters and stash them in the basement.

“Beats me,” Peaks said, lounging indolently in a chair beside Hope Ruffton’s desk. “Léger’s too modern. Clean out of Shambley’s period. Most of his work was done in the thirties and forties. He died in the midfifties, if I’m not mistaken.”

His secretary was equally puzzled. “This looks familiar though. Now where have I seen-?”

The young janitor passed near by on his way down to the basement and he gave them a shy smile as he skirted the ma

“Just a minute, Grant,” Dr. Peake said. “These detectives found some posters Dr. Shambley left in the basement. Do you know anything about them?”

Pascal Grant looked at the cubist poster and his face lit up. “I have pictures like that in my room.”

“What?” exclaimed Peake, coming erect in his chair.

“That’s where I saw it,” said Hope Ruffton. “Those posters Dr. Kimmelshue had. The ones you told Pascal he could put up.”

“Oh,” said Peake. “Those.”

He sank back lazily into the chair again. “For a minute there-” He smiled to himself at the absurdity of what he’d almost thought for a minute.

“Want to see them?” Pascal Grant asked the detectives. Golden curls spilled over his fair brow and he brushed them back as he looked up at Eberstadt with a friendly air.

“Naw, that’s okay,” said Peters.

He and Eberstadt started toward the front door. “We’ve still got a couple of alibis to check. Drop you somewhere, Lainey?”

“No, thanks,” she said, remembering Mrs. Beardsley’s explanation of Grant’s unease with Shambley. “One thing though-when you were checking out Shambley’s background, did anybody happen to mention if he was gay?”

“No,” Eberstadt said slowly, “but when we asked if he was living with anybody… remember, Bern?”

“Yeah. They said no. That Shambley couldn’t decide if he was AC or DC, so he wound up being no-C.”

“Interesting,” Albee said. “I’ll hang on to the poster and bring it back to the office later. The lieutenant’ll probably want to see it.”

By the time Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters reached the sidewalk, Elaine Albee was already halfway down the basement steps to talk with Pascal Grant again.

“I suppose I may as well tell you,” said Hester Kohn. “If I don’t, Jacob will.”

She led them to the small sitting room she’d created around the window corner of the large office that had once belonged to her father, and Sigrid and Jim Lowry were invited to take the blue-and-turquoise chairs opposite her plum-colored love seat. The upholstery seemed impregnated with her gardenia perfume, which, coupled with a pair of highly chromatic red and orange abstract pictures on dark green walls, gave the office a sensual, subtropical atmosphere.