There were hurried footsteps out in the kitchen and Lowry’s voice called, “Lieutenant?”
“Down here,” she answered.
“Could you come up? They’ve found something interesting in Shambley’s briefcase.”
Sigrid turned to go. “If you find something interesting among these pictures, you will share it, won’t you?”
In a series of jerky movements, Buntrock threw up his hand and touched his thumb to his little finger. “Scout’s honor.”
A faint expression of surprise flitted across his bony face. “Oddly enough, I mean it,” he said and rearranged his long fingers to form a Vulcan peace sign.
Oddly enough, thought Sigrid as she joined Lowry and started up to the attic, she believed him.
In the attic, Elaine Albee introduced Sigrid to Dr. Ridgway of Special Services, who immediately described how she’d found Roger Shambley’s briefcase under the desk. “Inside were the usual papers, and this.”
“This” was a heavily-embroidered pink satin envelope lined in white satin and tied with red cords. It measured approximately twelve inches long by seven inches wide and although it was now empty, they could clearly see that it had once held something that had left an imprint upon the lining, a rectangular object that measured ten by four and a half inches.
“Any guesses?” asked Sigrid.
“Could be anything,” said Dr. Ridgway. “A diary, letters, maybe even a jeweler’s box. I haven’t come across anything here that fits though.”
In fact, she reported, she’d been through everything on Shambley’s makeshift desk and had found nothing untoward among the murdered man’s papers. “It seems to be the usual scholarly hodgepodge of raw data right now,” she said, running her fingers through her extravagantly curly hair. “He had cross-referenced Erich Breul’s bills of sale for various pictures with what similar pictures were fetching in the U.S. at the time. He wanted to check what a middleman like Bernard Berenson got for some of the pictures he represented as compared with dealing directly with the owners as Breul did, for instance.”
“You’ve matched those bills with the actual pictures?” asked Sigrid.
“Only on the inventory sheets,” said Dr. Ridgway. “Shambley seems to have already checked them off himself, but I’ll redo it, if you like.”
“I would.”
“Okey-doke,” she said.
As Dr. Ridgway returned to her work, Sigrid drew Albee and Lowry aside and asked Albee about yesterday’s search of the basement. Lowry had already told her about the missing cane and the policewoman shook her blond head. “We were specifically looking for anything that could have been used as a weapon so I’m sure it would have been noticed if it was there.”
Sigrid looked around the large attic and saw that Mrs. Beardsley had rejoined the docents who, with Pascal Grant’s help, were still laboriously checking the attic’s inventory. She carried the embroidered satin envelope over to the senior docent.
“Have you ever seen this?” she asked.
“It’s Sophie Breul’s glove case,” said Mrs. Beardsley. “How did it get up here?”
“Where’s it normally kept?”
“Why, down in her dressing room, of course.”
She led the three police detectives down to the second floor, to the dressing room that connected Sophie Breul’s bedroom to her bath. With barely a moment’s hesitation, Mrs. Beardsley went straight to a chest of drawers and opened the second one from the top.
A whiff of lavender drifted toward them as a puzzled Mrs. Beardsley said, “But here’s her glove case!” and drew out an identical envelope of embroidered pink satin. “I didn’t realize there were two.”
Sigrid reached for the new one. Inside were several pairs of kid gloves, all imbued with the scent of lavender. She lifted the first satin case to her nose. It was musty and smelled like an old bookstore.
“This didn’t come from that drawer,” she told the others.
Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters finished up at the New York Center for the Fine Arts before noon, grabbed a sandwich in a nearby bar and grill on York Avenue, then headed over to the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.
Afternoon sunlight shone through the barebranched trees of Central Park and slanted on the luxurious apartment buildings on the other side of Fifth Avenue. There, uniformed and gloved doormen opened their doors for residents who emerged from double-parked limos with piles of beautifully gift-wrapped boxes. Santa’s little helpers.
“What’re you getting Frances for Christmas?” asked Bernie as they passed a nursemaid wheeling an enormous English pram, its tiny occupant buried in a nest of pale pink wool.
“I don’t know. Maybe a fancy new robe.”
“Didn’t you give her that last year?”
“Did I?” They paused for a light and the big detective sighed. “Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know. What’re you giving Pam?”
“Diamond earrings,” Bernie said happily. “Soon as she got pregnant this last time, I just knew it was going to be a boy, so I put them on lay-away and I’ve been paying on ’em all along. Next week, they’re mine.”
“Diamond earrings! God, I hope Frances doesn’t hear about them,” groaned Eberstadt as they neared the Guggenheim.
Their visit to the Fine Arts Center had added little to their knowledge of the dead man. Tuesday had been the last day of classes until after New Year’s, so the only colleagues to be found were some instructors who hadn’t turned in all their grade cards.
Dr. Aaron Prawn, head of nineteenth-century American studies, summed up Shambley’s career through tightly clenched, pipe-gripping teeth. “Ambitious. Perhaps a bit too. But definitely on his way. A bit of a barracuda? Yes. But one has to be to get anywhere in the nineteenth century these days. Junior colleagues loathed him, of course. Goes with the territory.”
Unfortunately, Shambley had been on leave this semester so no one had seen enough of him lately to report on his last movements. The divisional secretary remembered that he’d been in Wednesday morning to pick up his mail, but she’d been busy with a student and had merely exchanged season’s greetings with him.
They were luckier at the Guggenheim. Among the scraps of paper in Shambley’s pocket had been a receipt from the museum’s bookstore and one of the clerks there remembered Dr. Shambley.
“I was in one of his classes at the center last spring,” said the girl, a part-time student who worked full-time during the holiday break. “I knew who he was, but he didn’t remember me.”
Eberstadt found that hard to believe. His own hairline had receded to the very top of his head where wiry gray curls ran from ear to ear across his bald dome like some sort of steel-wool tiara. He was half bald by necessity; the girl must have paid a hair stylist good money to clip that same area of her platinum white hair to a flat half-inch stubble while the rest of her hair fell to her shoulders.
How many of Shambley’s students could have had hairstyles like that?
Bernie Peters was more interested in whether she was wearing a bra beneath that turquoise silk shirt. “Do you remember what he bought?”
She looked at the sales slip and nodded. “Two Léger posters at fourteen ninety-eight each, plus tax.”
“Léger?” asked Eberstadt, stumbling over the pronunciation. He pulled out his notebook and pen. “How do you spell that?”
“Fernand Léger,” she said, spelling it over her silky shoulder as she led them through aisles crowded with artsy souvenirs and art books-some of them heavy enough to give you a hernia, thought Peters-to the Guggenheim’s collection of posters. “French painter. I thought it was kinda strange that Dr. Shambley would want cubist posters when his field’s nineteenth-century American. Of course, he did want early Léger and not the mechanistic things from the twenties and thirties that he’s really famous for.”