Corpus Christmas (25 page)

“Jacob used to think that Paul and I would marry and Paul would run the business. Then when Paul died, and it was too late
to rope in Suzanne or Marta, he half adopted Ben Peake and tried to make
him
marry me. Thank God,
my
father had a different attitude about daughters.”

Bright spots of angry red flamed in her cheeks. “Every time I really think about it, I feel like screaming. Men made the tax
laws, Ben Peake and his friend came up with the figures, and all I did was sign the appraisal, but who does Jacob blame the
most? Three guesses.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Kohn,” said Jim Lowry, “but I don’t understand. Tax laws? Appraisal?”

“It’s absolutely routine,” she said defensively. “Anyhow, half the galleries in the country are doing it, too.”

Abruptly, it dawned on her that neither detective knew what she was talking about. “I thought you said Ben told you.”

“I said he gave us his version,” Sigrid reminded her. “And we still have to hear Mr. Munson’s.”

With an angry sigh, Hester Kohn sank back into the cushions of the plum love seat. “This happened a couple of years ago while
Ben was still at the Friedinger. One of the patrons there was in serious need of a large tax write-off. Basically, the way
it works is that a donor gives a nonprofit institution a work of art. An independent appraiser estimates how much the work
is worth and the donor then lists that figure in his tax returns as a charitable donation.”

“The appraiser—you, in fact—inflates the figure?” Sigrid asked.

Hester Kohn nodded. “But why would the institution that’s getting the artwork go along with that?” asked Lowry.

“What do they care?” Her voice was cynical. “They’re getting a donation they otherwise wouldn’t and next time, it might be
a really important gift. Besides, if they decide to deaccess, it’s usually worth at least half the appraised price.”

Sigrid looked at her inquiringly. “Only in this particular case—”

“In this particular case, it was worth about a quarter of what Jacob Munson said it was worth.”

“You signed his name to an appraisal statement?” asked Lowry.

“He’s the judge of artistic merit in this firm,” Hester Kohn said with bitterness. “I’m just the business and financial side.
My signature wouldn’t have sufficed. See, Jacob isn’t asked to appraise things very often because everyone in the business
knows he’s so goddamned straight-arrow. He might come down on the high side, but his figures are usually within two or three
thousand of the true value. The tax people know this, too, and they haven’t bothered to question him in years.”

“So how much kickback did you and Peake get?” Sigrid asked.

“I had a pool put in at my house in Riverhead,” she said candidly. “I believe Ben bought a car.”

“And Shambley threatened to blow the whistle on you?” asked Jim Lowry.

Hester Kohn shrugged and plucked a piece of lint from the dark purple upholstery. “Ben thought so, but I wasn’t that sure.
Roger Shambley was so effing devious. He never came straight out and said what he meant. It was all hypothetical and insinuating.
Frankly, I thought he was sounding us out to see if we’d go along with some scheme he was hatching.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “Sort of as if he were saying he knew we’d bent the rules once before and got away with it and maybe we could
do something for him. Or with him. It wasn’t clear.”

“So you and Dr. Peake didn’t feel threatened by him?”

“Not really.
I
certainly didn’t.” She crossed her shapely legs and adjusted the hem of her short pink skirt. “Neither of us wanted Jacob
to find out about that tax scam, of course, but it’s not like we were going to go to jail or anything if it came out. Appraisals
are subjective judgments, right?”

“You forged your partner’s name,” Lowry pointed out. “Ye-s,” she admitted, “but if it came right down to it, Jacob would claim
it was his signature. He’d rather hush it up and say he’d made an honest mistake than let the gallery’s name be dragged through
the mud with one of its owners up for forgery.”

She stood up and walked over to stare through the window at the buildings of midtown Manhattan. A wave of gardenia reached
the two police officers as she turned back to face them. “Look, I know I’ve been rather flip about it and Jacob really does
make me furious at times, but go easy on him about what Ben and I did, okay? He’s an old man and the gallery’s all he has
now.”

“What about his grandson?” asked Lowry.

She shook her dark head. “He’s a sweet kid, but Richard Evans doesn’t know art from artichokes. Wouldn’t surprise me if he
went home for Christmas and never came back.”

“One moment,
acushla,
” said Francesca Leeds from her suite high in the Hotel Maintenon. She removed a heavy gold-and-amber earring and then returned
the receiver to her ear. When she spoke, her voice was like warm melted syrup, so pleased was she to hear Oscar’s voice on
her private line again.

“It’s been almost two years. How many people did you have to call to find my number?”

“None,” Nauman replied, making her pulse quicken before he added, “It was on the gallery’s Rolodex.”

“Beast! You’re supposed to say it’s engraved on your heart.”

He laughed. “Elliott Buntrock just called. He wants to have a short meeting here at the gallery tomorrow afternoon. ‘Talk
turkey’ was how he put it. Think you and Thorvaldsen can make it?”

Francesca looked at the calendar on her desk. “What time?”

“Three-thirty?”

“Four would probably be better for Søren.”

“Four it is. See you.”

“Ta.”

She replaced the receiver and tilted her head so that the thick coppery hair fell away from her face as she slipped the stud
of her earring through the lobe again.

The nice thing about parting amicably with someone, she thought, was the free and easy friendship that often continued afterwards.
The rotten thing was when the parting was more amicable on
his
part than yours. And the rottenest thing of all was feeling jealous of your replacement when you knew that if you both walked
into a room together, nine men out of ten wouldn’t notice her.

Except that the tenth man would be Oscar.

The interview with Jacob Munson was as difficult as Hester Kohn had predicted.

It began awkwardly when Sigrid, trailed by Jim Lowry, walked down the hall to Munson’s open door and found Nauman there, too,
just hanging up the phone on Munson’s desk. At least Nauman hadn’t said anything flippant when she introduced Lowry, and Lowry
gave no sign that the artist’s name had special curiosity value for him. But when Nauman heaved his tall frame up from the
chair, Munson had underlined the personal aspects of the case by insisting that Oscar should stay.

“You
und
Miss Harald, you have no secrets.”

“Just the same, I’ll wait outside,” Nauman said and took himself off.

Munson sat behind his cluttered desk looking like an elderly elf who’d just learned that Santa’s workshop was jobbing out
its toy production to Korea. He went through the motions of hospitality halfheartedly, offering them drinks, which they refused,
and peppermints, which Lowry accepted.

“Wow!” he breathed as the pungent minty oils peppered his tastebuds.

Normally, Jacob Munson would have beamed and offered to share the name of the candy company who imported these particular
mints, but not today.

His answers to their questions were monosyllabic. Yes, he and Hester had left the party together. Yes, Hester had gotten out
near the Waldorf and he’d gone on home alone. No, there was no one to say what time he’d arrived at his upper West Side apartment,
nor could he say when his grandson had come home, as he’d already gone to sleep.

“Besides,” he added, twisting the thin strands of his gray beard, “you know where my grandson was and what he was doing.”

“Yes,” Sigrid said wryly, thinking bow busy Rick Evans and Pascal Grant must have been hauling Shambley’s body all over the
Breul House.

Munson adamantly refused to discuss what he’d heard Shambley say to Benjamin Peake or Hester Kohn. “You must ask them,” he
said, drawing his small frame up with Prussian militancy.

“Miss Kohn has told us about the forgery,” Sigrid said. She had thought it was impossible for his stiff shoulders to become
more rigid. She was wrong.

“Then you know all there is to know,” he said. “I will not discuss this further without my lawyer.”

And from that position, he would not budge.

Nauman was still waiting out in the main part of the gallery when they emerged from Munson’s office, and he looked up expectantly.

Sigrid glanced at her watch, saw it was almost five-thirty, and sent Lowry to the phone to check in.

“Ready to call it a day?” Nauman asked. “Unless something’s come up,” she said.

They watched while Lowry spoke to headquarters on the receptionist’s telephone.

“Nothing that can’t wait till tomorrow,” he reported. As she dismissed him, she caught the look of hesitation on his face.
“Something, Lowry?”

“Just that—well, ma’am, Eberstadt and Peters have checked out all the stories we’ve been given.”

“Yes”

Her gray eyes were like granite and Jim Lowry lost his nerve. Let someone else ask her, he decided.

“Nothing, ma’am. See you tomorrow?”

“What was that about?” asked Nauman, watching the younger man step out into the cold night air and pull his collar up to his
ears.

“I think he wanted to ask if you had a proper alibi.” She smiled as she put on her heavy coat and gloves.

“Me?”

“I suppose I’ll have to go on record tomorrow and tell them that all your movements are accounted for.”

“
All
my movements?” he laughed. “Well,” she emended. “Enough of them anyhow.”

They browsed through a few stores along Fifth Avenue, not really intent on Christmas shopping, but open to felicitous suggestions.
Sigrid bought a new camera case for her mother. Anne Harald was a photojournalist and her old case had banged around all over
the world so much that it was ratty and frayed.

A cutlery store reminded her that Roman Tramegra had recently grumbled about his need for proper boning knives. She found
a set with wicked-looking thin blades.

Nauman saw a delicate cloisonné pin enameled to look like a zebra swallowtail and immediately bought it for Jill Gill, an
entomologist friend who raised butterflies.

By seven their arms were laden with packages, so they walked to the garage west of Fifth Avenue, dumped everything into Nauman’s
bright yellow sports car, and drove down to the Village for an early dinner.

Over their wine, Nauman brought up Shambley’s death and Jacob Munson’s reaction. “He told me everything,” he said.

Sigrid held up a warning hand. “Nauman, wait. You do understand that anything you tell me—”

“—can and will be used against me?”

“Yes.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“I know he’s your friend,” Sigrid said. “And he seemed like a nice old man Wednesday night, but he wasn’t very cooperative
today.”

“You might be uncooperative, too, if you were eighty-two years old and just found out that your only grandson’s gay and your
business partner’s a partner in murder.”

“What?”

In short terse sentences, Nauman repeated the things Munson had said at lunch.

“He doesn’t have trouble hearing, does he?” Sigrid asked.

“No, why?”

“I just wonder if he misheard what Shambley actually said. Hester Kohn didn’t pass forged paintings; she forged Munson’s name
on an inflated appraisal so someone could get a big tax write-off for a charitable donation.”

Sigrid swirled the red wine in her glass thoughtfully. “Or at least that’s what she told me this afternoon.”

As the waiter brought their check, she glanced at him in sudden mischief “By the way, Nauman, what are fungible formulations?”

“Oh, God!” he groaned. “Buntrock’s been at you, hasn’t he?”

She smiled. “Elliott’s all right as far as this new breed of
helden
curators goes,” Nauman warned, “but aesthetic sensibility is only a meager compensation for the loss of innocence.”

In his office at the Erich Breul House, Benjamin Peake sat in the deepest concentration he’d attained since assuming the directorship.
Shambley’s Léger poster had touched off such an unlikely train of speculation. All the same…

He found one of the house’s brochures and scanned it, but the information he sought wasn’t there; so he swivelled in his chair
and took down a copy of
Erich Breul—The Man and His Dream,
that fulsome confection whipped up by the first director sixty years ago. He’d skimmed through it when he took over the house,
but it seemed like so much puffery that he’d never bothered to read it carefully. He thought he recalled, though, that the
book held a chronology.

Yes, there it was. Erich Breul’s life laid out from birth to death. And there was Erich Jr.’s birth in 1890, his graduation
from Harvard in 1911, his departure for Europe in the fall, and his fatal accident in 1912.

Peake turned to the section on Erich Jr., but it was sketchy and, except when describing the youth’s Christmas visit with
his Fürst relatives in Zurich, lacked necessary details. He had arrived in Paris in September of 1912 and died in mid-November.

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?