“Who’s her next of kin?” asked Sigrid.
“None listed.”
“Who pays the bills then?”
“I talked to an individual in their business office, and the way it works is that she paid into something like an annuity when she first went there back in 1971. Probably what she got for the house. On top of that, she signed over her husband’s pension and social security and they’re supposed to take care of her as long as she lives.”
Elaine Albee shivered and pushed aside her jelly doughnut. She hated the whole idea of growing old, especially here in New York City, and tried not to think about it any more than she could help. It kept getting shoved in her face, though: bag ladies homeless on every street corner; women who once ran but now hobbled down subway platforms, fearfully clutching their lumpy shopping bags as they moved arthritically through doors that closed too fast; women like Barbara Zajdowicz, who’d outlived brothers and sisters and husbands and were now warehoused in nursing homes with no one to watchdog their interests or-
Lieutenant Harald’s cool voice cut across her private nightmare. “Are you with us, Albee?”
“Ma’am?”
“Your interview with the Reinickes,” the lieutenant prodded.
Feeling like a third-grade schoolkid caught goofing off by a strict teacher, a likeness subliminally underlined by the lieutenant’s no-nonsense gray pantsuit and severe white blouse, Albee sat up straight and summarized what she and Lowry had learned from Winston and Marie Reinicke.
“So there’s no alibi for Reinicke but his wife doesn’t use a cane either,” she finished, wadding up the scrap of paper Jim Lowry had slipped her under the table with P-S??!! scrawled on it in bold block letters.
“We did pick up something from the Hymans, though,” said Lowry.
After looking at kids who were looking at toys in F.A.O. Schwarz, he and Lainy’d swung west to the Hymans’ terraced apartment on Central Park South. David and Linda Hyman appeared to be in their midsixties. Mr. Hyman still looked like the rabbinical student he’d once been before he became an economist. His thick and curly beard was more pepper than salt and his dark eyes flashed with intensity as he spoke. A faint rusty glow through her soft white hair hinted that Mrs. Hyman had been a strawberry blonde in her youth. She was small and quiet, but her face had held an amused intelligence as her husband described the things they’d noticed last night.
“They said they saw Shambley come out of the library with a cat-that-ate-the-canary look on his face last night,” Lowry reported. “He’d been in there with the director, what’s his name? Peake? And the Kohn woman. The Hymans didn’t hear what was said between them, but evidently old Jacob Munson came in on the tail end of the conversation and didn’t much care for what he heard because he told Hyman that maybe he’d made a mistake when he recommended Shambley as a trustee last fall.”
“After the Hymans left the Breul House, they went on to a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights so it looks like they’re out of it,” said Elaine Albee. “And Mrs. Herzog didn’t like the way Shambley was riding Reinicke Wednesday night, but she and her husband alibi each other and their maid confirms it.”
Sigrid reported the salient points of her interview with Søren Thorvaldsen and Lady Francesca Leeds and there was a brief discussion of how Thorvaldsen’s movements fit into the timetable they were beginning to assemble.
Gray-haired Mick Cluett shifted his bulk in a squeaky swivel chair and phlegmatically reported that the Sussex Square canvass had drawn a blank. No convenient nosy neighbor with an insatiable curiosity about the comings and goings of the Breul House.
He had, however, found an address book in Roger Shambley’s upper West Side apartment, which had helped him locate a brother in Michigan who would be flying in tonight. A cursory examination of the apartment revealed nothing unusual to Cluett’s experienced eyes.
“Looked like standard stuff to me,” he said. “Small one-bedroom apartment, nothing too fancy, but all good stuff, you know? Lots of books and papers, nice pictures on the walls. The brother said he’d let us know if he finds anything odd when he goes through the stuff.”
They batted it around some more, then Sigrid laid out the day’s assignments: in addition to ongoing cases, there were alibis that needed checking, interviews still to come, a murder weapon yet to be discovered, and that interesting possibility that Shambley might have brokered art works of questionable provenance.
Someone with a knowledge of art had been specialed in from another division to go through the papers Shambley had left behind in the Breul House attic, and Eberstadt and Peters were given the task of backtracking on Shambley’s last few days as well as taking a quick poll of how his colleagues at the New York Center for the Fine Arts had felt about him.
Leaving Mick Cluett with a stack of paperwork, Sigrid left with Albee and Lowry to do another sweep through the Erich Breul House.
Elliott Buntrock leaned on a chair beside the desk like a great blue heron with a potential mullet in view and cocked his head at Miss Ruffton, who was a peppermint cane this morning in red wool suit and white sweater.
“Looking for something?” he asked. “Looking for what, for God’s sake? And how would he know if he’d found it, as much stuff as this house has crammed into it?”
Miss Ruffton shrugged imperturbably as the electronic typewriter continued to hum beneath her capable brown fingers. “You asked me why he was acting so smug Wednesday night. I’ve told you what I thought. Now do you want me to finish with these dimensions or don’t you?”
“I do, I do!” he assured her. With a stilt-legged gait, he picked his way across the marbled hall and through the gallery arch to glare at a picture of dead swans and market vegetables which had caught his eye high on the far wall. A passionate proponent of the latest in art, he considered “pre-art” anything exhibited in America before the Armory Show of 1913.
Kitsch, kitsch, and more kitsch, he thought, contemptuously dismissing the Babbages and Vedders. And all this recent fuss over Sargent. One of the few silver linings to the gloom of curating a show in this place would be the sheer pleasure of dismantling these stiff rows of gilt-framed horrors and seeing them stacked somewhere else for the duration. And he wouldn’t limit himself to stripping the walls either. Much of the furniture and all of the tacky gewgaws would have to go as well.
Dressed today in black jeans and a fuzzy black turtle-neck, he stood in the exact center of the long gallery with his arms akimbo, the tip of his right boot en pointe while the heel lay flat against his inner left ankle, and his bony chin angled forward and up as he considered the size and shape of the long room. This was his favorite contemplative pose and one that a clever photographer had once captured in black and white for a whimsical New York Today article entitled “City Birds.” To Buntrock’s secret gratification, she’d captioned his portrait Curatoris Hotissimus (Genus Arbiter Artem).
As he mentally cleared the gallery and the long drawing room beyond of their resident pictures and superfluous adornments, Elliott Buntrock had to admit that it was actually a rather lovely space, nicely proportioned, architecturally interesting. Maybe wrong for Nauman’s work-the restrained sensuality of his middle period, in particular, would be killed by these ornate moldings and marble pilasters. But a Blinky Palermo or a Joseph Beuys, one of those early late-postmoderns-what a curatorial coup it would be to show them here!