It was hard, though, to keep his mind firmly fixed on an exhibition some twelve to fourteen months in the future when murder had occurred less than forty-eight hours in the past. He had barely known Shambley. Rumor tagged him a ravenous careerist, all the more dangerous for the depth of his expertise and the thoroughness of his scholarship.
Zig-zags of fashion being what they were these days, Dr. Roger Shambley would probably have had his fifteen minutes of fame, would have found a way to titillate the gliterati’s gadfly interest in turn-of-the-century American art, perhaps even, Buntrock thought with a twist of the self-deprecation that made him so attractive to his friends, have been featured in a whimsical New York Today photograph of his own.
The telephone out on the secretary’s desk trilled softly. He was too far away to hear her words, but Buntrock saw her answer, listen briefly, then hang up.
Hope Ruffton thought Shambley had spent the last couple of weeks looking for something specific and that his cocky arrogance Wednesday night meant that he’d found it. “He wanted the inventory sheets and he was rude about Dr. Peake’s ability to recognize authentic work,” Miss Ruffton had said.
Buntrock had cocked his bony head at that statement, wondering how much Peake’s present secretary knew about the Friedinger brouhaha when Peake wrongly deaccessioned some pieces that later turned out to be authentic after all. And not only authentic, but valuable. No malfeasance had been charged, merely simple stupidity, which, in the art world, could be almost as damaging as a suspended jail sentence.
Innocent though Miss Ruffton’s interpretation of Shambley’s insinuations might be, Peake and several volunteer docents were even now up in the attic with the same set of inventory sheets that Shambley had used, trying to duplicate the dead man’s discovery, if discovery it had been. They were aided by the strong back of that simple-minded janitor as they shifted trunks and furniture around the big attic.
“Taking that list and checking it twice,” Buntrock whistled half under his breath as he ambled from the gallery into the drawing room, and from the drawing room back out into the great hall with its opulent Christmas tree. “Gonna find out if naughty Shambley took something nice.”
Fully indulging his momentary mood of postmodern grand funk, he ignored the disapproving glance of an elderly docent who guarded the entrance against casual visitors. The Breul House was unofficially closed today except for a group of art students, who had booked a tour for this date several weeks ago and were due in this afternoon from a woman’s college in Raleigh. Buntrock looked around for Hope Ruffton and found her desk unexpectedly vacant.
“Miss Ruffton went up to tell Dr. Peake that the police are coming back this morning,” said the guardian of the gate.
“Very good,” said Buntrock. “I’ll just carry on.”
Continuing his casual whistling, he circled the mannequin that stood below the curve of the marble balustrade. That masculine figure was still dressed in heavy winter garments suitable for a brisk morning constitutional and his blank face still tilted up toward the female figure on the landing as if he were being instructed to pick up a quart of milk and a pound of lard on his way home. Smiling at his own drollery, Buntrock ducked through the doorway under the main stairs.
Let Peake explore the high pikes, he thought; surely there was a reason Shambley had died down in the basement. He remembered that when he and Francesca Leeds discussed logistics Wednesday night, she’d murmured something about storage racks in the basement and Peake had said more would have to be built because old Kimmelshue, the previous director, had filled most of them with earlier culls from the collection.
The mind boggled. If Kimmelshue had kept in William Carver Ewing and Everett Winstanley, what in God’s name had he weeded out?
At the foot of the stairs, Buntrock paused to get his bearings. Abruptly remembering that this was also presumably where Roger Shambley had got his, he moved away from the landing.
To his left stretched caverns measureless to man in the form of a large Victorian kitchen; to his right, beyond a sort of minikitchen adjunct, was a closed door. Buntrock automatically tried the closed door first.
The lights were on inside and as soon as he stuck his bony head around the door frame, all the colors and patterns of Victorian excessiveness beat upon his optic nerves and clamored for simultaneous attention. The rooms upstairs were models of harmonic taste and order compared to the chaotic anarchy of texture and design down here, with its clash of different cultures. Clinging to the door for support, Buntrock’s disbelieving eyes traveled from the syrupy farmyard scene over the fireplace, to the modern art posters thumbtacked to turkey red walls, down to the layered scraps of patterned carpet on the floor.
When he spotted the twentieth-century tape deck and portable television beside the nineteenth-century pasha’s mattress heaped high with silken cushions, the bizarre incongruities were explained. The janitor’s room, he realized.
Of course. Lo, the wonder of innocence!
With a shudder that lent his fuzzy sweater a fleeting resemblance to ruffled egret feathers, he pulled the door closed again and moved stilt-leggedly through the kitchen in search of old Kimmelshue’s storage racks.
Upon entering the Breul House, Elaine Albee immediately headed for the attic to see if that art expert on loan from another police division had learned anything pertinent from Shambley’s papers, while Sigrid and Jim Lowry invited Benjamin Peake into his own office for yet a further discussion of his relationship to Dr. Shambley.
“Relations were quite minimal,” said Peake. The dark suit he wore was impeccably tailored and a turquoise tie made his blue eyes seem even bluer as he leaned back in his chair with careless grace. “Jacob Munson put him up for trustee back in the fall. I think it was his first trusteeship and, just between us, it went to his head. Got it in mind that he was actually supposed to do something.”
He laughed deprecatingly. “Well, of course, he was supposed to be using some of Erich Breul’s papers to document the price of original art works in the 1880’s, here and abroad, for his new book.”
“Yesterday, Miss Ruffton implied that Dr. Shambley’s research had taken a different course,” Sigrid said, “and, if you recall,”-she paused to consult her notes-“you referred to him as a ‘busybody and a snoop with delusions of mental superiority.’ Would you explain that, please?”
Peake smiled. “I thought I just did. Roger Shambley seemed to think he ought to be a new broom, clean sweep, stir up the old cobwebs.”
“And did he?” asked Sigrid. “Stir up old cobwebs?”
“He tried, but he was going about it all wrong. Now I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the Breul House’s financial difficulties but I assume Nauman’s told you-”
“I prefer to hear your version,” Sigrid interrupted coldly.
“Certainly.” Peake glanced at Detective Lowry, but that young man had his eyes firmly fixed on the notebook on his knee and his face was a careful blank.
“Well, then, perhaps we should start with the terms of Erich Breul’s will,” Peake said and pedantically described shrinking endowments, capital outlays, and dwindling grants. “It’s simply a matter of attracting more money, but Shambley had begun to act as if the fault lay with the staff. As if we weren’t already doing everything humanly possible.”
“Why did he ask for a set of your inventory sheets?” Sigrid asked.
Peake shrugged petulantly.
“We’ve heard that he made certain insinuations.”
“Look,” said Peake defensively. “I don’t give a damn what you’ve heard. That was an honest mistake. There was nothing unethical or illegal about what happened when I was at the Friedinger. I was caught in the middle up there. And you can go through our inventory sheets with a fine-tooth comb. There hasn’t been a straight pin deaccessioned from the Breul House since I took over. If anything’s missing, it didn’t happen on my watch.”