Corpus Christmas

“She and her husband lived there with her unmarried sister Angelika and their bachelor brother Gregor. She says the babies were Angelika’s and that they all died at birth. That’s all I could get out of her.”

“Was it incest, adultery, or good old-fashioned fornication?” Guillory went right to the tabloid heart of things.

“She says her brother would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was bringing shame on the family name,” Sigrid said. “I believe her.”

“What about the husband?” he persisted.

“I can’t go on record about that. She wasn’t clear enough.”

“So who killed the babies?”

“Fifty years ago, no prenatal care, unattended birth, they could have just died,” said Sigrid. “Why does it always have to be murder?”

“Murder sells more papers. You know that, Lieutenant. Besides, didn’t the M.E.’s office say the mummified one was born alive?”

“But there’s still nothing to say it wasn’t a natural death.” She pushed open an outer door and walked toward the parking lot. Despite the noontime sun, the wind was biting.

“So who put them in the attic?” asked Guillory, looking at his watch. “Santa Claus?”

Sigrid shrugged. “Sorry, Guillory. I’m all out of speculations.”

Rusty Guillory slung his camera case inside the car. “If I make the next ferry, I’ll just squeeze in under the next deadline. Need a lift?”

“No, thanks, I have a car.”

She waited until Guillory’s car was out of the lot before walking back to the dark-clad man who lingered indecisively near an evergreen tree beside the gate. “Father Francis, isn’t it?”

“Yes. They say you’re a police officer.”

“Lieutenant Harald,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag for her gold shield.

“They say you’re here because of those poor baby skeletons found over in New York. That it was Barbara Zajdowicz’s old house?”

“Yes.”

The priest was perhaps half an inch shorter than she and his troubled eyes were nearly level with hers.

“Father Francis, did she ever discuss this with you? About her sister? Or the infants?”

He drew back. “I can’t answer that.”

“I’m not asking you to break the sanctity of confession,” Sigrid assured him. “I meant outside confession.”

He hesitated. “I really never talked with her until after her first stroke. You have to understand, Lieutenant. Strokes, Alzheimer’s, hardening of the arteries-sometimes it’s hard for them to keep in touch with reality. Or for me to know where fantasy begins. Everything’s so different today. People have babies out of wedlock all the time-actresses, singers, career women-no one hides it anymore. Sometimes we forget what it was like fifty years ago.”

“Some things haven’t changed though, have they, Father Francis?” Sigrid said. “Things like jealousy and spite?”

“No,” he sighed.

“She killed them, didn’t she? They weren’t born dead, no matter what she told Angelika.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” He moved away. “I can’t talk to you about this.”

Back at the office, Sigrid gave Bernie Peters the card she’d used to take Barbara Zajdowicz’s fingerprints. Peters stopped talking about his daughter’s newly reimplanted front tooth and developed the latents with special emphasis on the old woman’s right fingers, which he then compared to the prints found on the old newspapers.

At a little after two, he brought them into Sigrid’s office, where she was going over the case with Lowry’s records.

“We wouldn’t go to court without finding more characteristics,” he said, “but see the double bifurcation at one o’clock on both of these latents and the delta at high noon?”

Sigrid looked through the magnifying glass and agreed they seemed identical. “So what do we have? Evidence that in 1938, Barbara Zajdowicz put one of the bodies in that attic trunk. A woman who’s now eighty-seven, mentally confused, and confined to a wheelchair.” She sighed. “Write it up as soon as you can, Peters, and we’ll send it along to the DA’s office. Let them decide what to do about it.”

Elaine Albee and Matt Eberstadt breezed in at two-thirty from their interview with Søren Thorvaldsen, flushed and excited by a brief taste of life aboard a Caribbean cruise ship.

“It was getting ready to sail when we caught up with him-the Sea Dancer,” Albee reported. “And he invited us to ride out into the bay and take his launch back with him. He wanted to hear how the engines ran or something.”

“They’d just installed a new generator,” said Eberstadt.

“So he gave us a pass and we got to stand on deck and throw confetti and streamers and listen to the band play ‘Anchors Aweigh’ with a reggae beat.”

“They had a buffet already set out like you wouldn’t believe,” Eberstadt told Peters, who was listening enviously. “ Frances would put me on lettuce and water till Christmas if she ever heard about the salmon and-”

“Oh, and those luscious chocolate-dipped strawberries and pineapple slices!” Albee interrupted him.

“Then we went up to the bridge-what a view!-and Thorvaldsen gave us a tour of the owner’s suite, one flight down with its own private deck. Talk about luxury!”

“We saw one of Oscar Nauman’s paintings,” said Elaine Albee, with a wary glance at Sigrid. She wondered how the lieutenant would react if they told her that Thorvaldsen had tried to pump them about her. “It was very colorful.”

“Did you happen to remember why you were there?” Sigrid asked coldly.

Eberstadt virtuously produced Thorvaldsen’s typed and signed statement. “He had a stenographer come up to his suite and went through the whole evening again, but it doesn’t add doodly to what he told you Thursday night.”

He read from Thorvaldsen’s statement, “ ‘Dr. Shambley implied that it could be to my benefit if I met with him again that night at the Erich Breul House. I assumed he meant to offer me the private opportunity to add something choice to my art collection. As I have occasionally bought works of art under similar circumstances, this did not strike me as an unusual request. I ca

Sigrid had listened silently with her elbows and forearms folded flatly on the desk.

“When we first got there,” said Albee, “we talked with Thorvaldsen’s secretary, a Miss Kristensen. She gave us the name of a security guard who was on outside duty Wednesday night, Leon Washington. She says Washington saw Thorvaldsen enter his office building around ten-thirty and then leave again about fifteen minutes later.”

“Convenient,” Sigrid said.

Elaine Albee shrugged. “Who knows? We stopped by his place on our way back here and woke him up. He wasn’t happy about telling us, but he says he’d stashed a coffee thermos in an empty warehouse across the street and was taking an unauthorized coffee break-”

“Coffee, my ass,” Eberstadt interjected.

“-so he saw Thorvaldsen but Thorvaldsen didn’t see him. And yeah, he may be lying, but he seemed too worried about the possibility of losing his job to be acting.”

Matt Eberstadt nodded. “He said Miss Kristensen promised she wouldn’t let it get back to Thorvaldsen and that’s all he really seemed to care about.”

Bernie Peters sighed. “If the guard’s telling the truth, that definitely puts Thorvaldsen out.”

“Whether or not he’s lying, it’s still hard to put Thorvaldsen there.” Sigrid leaned back in her chair with her left knee braced against the edge of the desk. “Francesca Leeds said she left him between ten and ten-fifteen; Evans and Grant said they found Shambley’s body between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. Even if he had the full half hour to get back there from the restaurant four blocks away, get inside, kill Shambley and then leave by the basement door, it’d be awfully tight.”