“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 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 how 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.