Corpus Christmas

1912, thought Peake. Just before the Armory Show of 1913 blasted the American art world into modernism. Picasso was in Paris then. Picasso, Braque, Derain, Matisse, Juan Gris and, yes, Léger, too. All the iconographers of modern art poised on the brink of greatness. Nothing in the book suggested that the dutiful young Erich Jr. harbored bohemian leanings, but he was his father’s son so surely it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d seen an avant-garde exhibit in that brief two and a half months before he’d died.

Could that be why Shambley had ransacked the house? wondered Peake. Was that why he wanted the inventory sheets and why he accused me of being too lazy to see what was under my nose?

Peake replaced the book and turned back to the inventory file. Not the attic, he thought, the basement. He ran his finger down the itemized list and there it was: “B.8.4. Steamer trunk. EB Jr.”

It was really too absurd, he told himself as he got up and walked through the i

Twenty minutes later, he closed Erich Jr.’s trunk in disappointment and brushed the dust of the storage room from his trousers knees. Well, you knew it was a million-to-one chance, he thought wryly.

Nauman drove Sigrid home and when they carried in her packages, they found Roman Tramegra positively radiant.

“Come and have some champagne!” he boomed. “I ordered a case for the holidays, but we must celebrate tonight! I did it, I did it, I DID IT!”

“Did what?” asked Sigrid, disentangling herself from his effusive bear hug.

“Sold my very first mystery story!” He waved a long blue check at them. “Mostly Male magazine bought it-five hundred dollars for fifteen hundred words. What a glorious, glorious Christmas present!”

He shepherded them into the living room and filled two more crystal champagne flutes from a bottle that was by now nearly empty. On the table beside the ice bucket was an ornate and expensive-looking arrangement of blue spruce and white poinsettias.

“You are celebrating,” said Sigrid, clinking glasses with Roman and Nauman.

“Oh, those aren’t my flowers,” Roman told her. He fumbled through the greenery and located a small white envelope. “They came for you.”

Puzzled, Sigrid opened the envelope and found one of Søren Thorvaldsen’s personal cards. On the reverse, he’d written, Please accept my apology.

“Thorvaldsen?” Nauman growled, shamelessly reading the card over her shoulder. “What’d he do? Why’s he apologizing?”

In creating from his own home “A Museum for the edification and pleasure of the public so long as its stones shall endure,” it was Mr. Breul’s sincerest wish that he might refute those cynics who hold that life has become squalid and ignoble in this new century of ours. Instead of the weariness and boredom induced by more formal museums, visitors to the Erich Breul House are charmed and refreshed by the air of peace and dignity and beauty throughout. Every room invites, every room welcomes the visitor as if he were a cherished guest in the private home of a gentleman of taste and discrimination.

And so he is!

Erich Breul-the Man and His Dream, privately published 1924 by The Friends and Trustees of the Erich Breul House

IX

Saturday, December 19

The day dawned gray and freezing and Sigrid’s mood wasn’t helped when she reached work and found that Mick Cluett had called in sick again and that Bernie Peters was taking a half day of personal leave.

“One of his daughters fell off her bike this morning and knocked out a tooth,” said Matt Eberstadt.

“I thought kids watched cartoons on Saturday morning,” Sigrid said, diverted by the thought that the Peters children might be part of a healthier national trend.

“Their TV’s in the shop,” said Eberstadt.

He described to her what they had learned of Shambley at the New York Center for the Fine Arts and how they’d found the posters he’d purchased at the Guggenheim.

“Matt thinks Shambley might have been bisexual,” Elaine Albee chimed in. “And you remember what Mrs. Beardsley said about Pascal Grant feeling uneasy around him?”

Sigrid nodded.

“Well, I decided to have another talk with him. He’s got all these reproductions of modern art up in his room-says they remind him of jazz. He’s really a nice kid and so good-looking, I wondered if maybe Shambley was trying to lay him.”

“And instead of flowers and candy,” jeered Lowry, “he brought art posters?”

“It could fit,” Eberstadt contended. “Shambley told the girl at the museum shop that he could hang one of the posters upside down and it wouldn’t matter. Sounds like he was talking about somebody two cards shy of a full deck, doesn’t it?”

“A love triangle?” Sigrid said. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Rick Evans said he and Grant were together when Shambley was killed,” Lowry nodded judiciously. “And we know what that means, but what if Evans knew Shambley was going to try to cut him out and-”

“No way,” said Elaine Albee. “Oh, there might be some latent adolescent stirrings, but Pascal Grant says he and Evans were listening to jazz and I don’t think he was lying. I don’t think he knows how to lie. He’s such an i

“You may be right about Grant,” Sigrid said, “but Jacob Munson is convinced that his grandson’s gay and he’s not happy about it.”

She repeated the pertinent things Nauman had told her about his lunch conversation with Munson.

“Oh,” said Lowry. “So that’s what he meant when he said we knew where his grandson was when Shambley was killed. And what he was doing there. I thought he was talking about them moving the body.”

“I did, too,” Sigrid admitted.

“I asked Grant about that again,” said Elaine. “He said Rick didn’t want anyone to know he’d been spending the night there because, and I quote, ‘People would say it was sex.’ ”

“And you’re sure that it wasn’t?” asked Sigrid.

“Not on Pascal Grant’s part,” Elaine said sturdily.

They moved on to the possibility that Shambley might have tried to blackmail Hester Kohn and Benjamin Peake over Munson’s forged signature on an inflated tax appraisal, and considered that relatively minor crime in the light of Munson’s assertion that they had instead authenticated and sold forged paintings through the gallery.

It was hard to know which was true, they decided, when everyone who’d known Dr. Roger Shambley agreed that he insinuated, suggested, and implied but very seldom said precisely what was on his mind.

“Look at Thorvaldsen,” said Lowry. “A self-made millionaire like him, he has to be sharp, right? Yet, according to him, he went sneaking back to the Breul House Wednesday night and cooled his heels for an hour, all because Shambley offered him a deal. At least he thinks Shambley offered him a deal. But he doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know why.”

“Or so he says,” Sigrid cautioned. “Don’t forget he also hinted to me that Shambley might have caused him a problem if he stirred up trouble right now. He might have gone there expecting to pay blackmail for all we know.”

“We checked out Lady Francesca Leeds’ story,” Matt Eberstadt reported. “And Hope Ruffton’s. Both were where they said they were unless a lot of people are lying.”

“That takes care of all the checkable stories,” said Lowry in his capacity as recorder for this case. He read from his notes, “Of the people there that night, the ones in the clear are Leeds, Ruffton, the Hymans, the Herzogs, Buntrock, that pianist and the caterer’s people. Munson, Hester Kohn, Thorvaldsen, Mrs. Beardsley, Peake and Mr. Reinicke can’t prove their movements.”