approximately ten forty-five and discovered the body lying face down just as you see it. She said she tried to find a pulse, then realized the individual was dead.”
Officer Monte had arrived at 10:57, observed certain inconsistencies, and immediately requested investigators.
“What inconsistencies?” asked Jim Lowry.
“Not enough blood,” the patrol officer replied succinctly. “You can see from here-the back of his head’s pretty messed up and blood’s clotted in his hair, but it didn’t run down his face and there’s none on the floor beside his head. The stairs are bare wood and I guess he could have hit his head on one of the sharp edges coming down, but again, no blood.”
Sigrid watched as Guidry indicated she’d taken enough pictures of the body and its immediate surroundings. While the photographer waited for someone from the medical examiner’s office to turn it over, the crime scene unit began processing the area around the body.
“Who was in the house when you arrived?” Sigrid asked.
“Just the secretary, the Beardsley woman, the live-in janitor, and the director,” answered Monte. “They’re all downstairs. The ambulance crew got here at eleven oh-two and confirmed death.”
For a moment, Sigrid almost forgot and looked around for Tillie, the officer on whom she most relied, the one who usually acted as her recorder and could be trusted to note every minute detail.
Unfortunately, Detective Tildon was still recovering from the bomb blast that had nearly killed him in October. He was home from the hospital now and healing nicely, but was not expected back at work till next month. Mick Cluett was certainly no substitute and Albee was already catching her share on other cases. Sigrid told Lowry he’d won recorder’s job and the younger man gave a mock groan as he continued to measure distances for sketching the scene.
Bernie Peters, directing the application of fingerprint powder on the stair rail, grinned in sympathy.
Cohen arrived from the medical examiner’s office and greeted her sardonically. “We gotta quit meeting like this, Lieutenant.”
A few minutes later, he’d agreed with Officer Monte’s suspicions. “Lividity’s not much help if he was moved within a half-hour of death, but that wound bled like hell and there ought to be a puddle under his head. He didn’t die face down though. And see this?”
Cohen pulled back the collar of Shambley’s shirt and Sigrid saw that a thin trickle of blood had run down inside to his back.
She nodded thoughtfully. “So he was upright when he received the wound?”
Cohen shrugged. “He did most of his bleeding while lying supine; but yeah, I’d guess the blow came while he was sitting or standing.”
“He didn’t hurt himself in a fall?”
“Maybe. But I can’t see him standing up again after getting this wound, so how’d blood run straight down his neck?”
They would keep it in mind, Sigrid told him as Guidry photographed the stain.
The dumbwaiter shaft had been discovered and a good set of prints were found on the enamelled wood molding that framed the hinged doors. Officer Monte had managed to keep everyone off the back stairs, so Albee started down to determine the dumbwaiter’s current location, being careful to keep to the center of the treads and on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.
Cohen finished his preliminary examination and stripped off thin latex gloves as he stood. “Funny-looking guy, isn’t he? Little Ed with the big head. Something odd about that head.”
“Besides its size?” asked Lowry, who had chalked an outline of the body’s position before Cohen began.
“Not our old friend the blunt instrument?” queried Bernie Peters.
“I’ll let you know after I’ve taken a look at that wound in the lab,” Cohen told them.
Guidry stepped back in for more pictures now that Cohen had turned the body face up.
“Want to estimate a time of death?” Sigrid asked.
Cohen shrugged. “Rigor’s complete, but there’s still a little body warmth, so we’re talking maybe twelve to fifteen hours, no more than sixteen hours max.”
They looked at their watches. Between 7:15 and 11:15, always taking into account that the temperature in this hallway may have been measurably higher or lower than it was now, or that the dead man had some physical quirk that would quicken or retard rigor mortis.
“I saw him alive between eight and eight-thirty last night,” Sigrid said.
Bernie Peters shot Lowry a telling glance. The lieutenant had a reputation for coldness, but she hadn’t turned a hair upon seeing the body. Even Cohen looked at her curiously. “Friend of yours?”
“No,” she answered distantly. “There was a party here last night and he came, too. We met briefly and he left early. Or rather he went upstairs early. I believe he was doing research on some papers in the attic.”
Elaine Albee reappeared on the back stairs. “The dumbwaiter’s on the first floor,” she reported, slightly out of breath. “And there looks like a smear of blood inside.”
“Probably turn out to be roast beef,” Cohen grinned. “You guys ready for me to take him?”
Sigrid queried her people. Guidry was satisfied with the number of photographs she’d taken and Lowry and Peters had just finished with their inventory of Roger Shambley’s pockets, so everyone stood back as Cohen’s assistants lifted the body onto a collapsible gurney, covered it, and strapped it down. Rigor mortis made for a bulky shape and Sigrid was not the only one reminded of a grotesque and badly wrapped Christmas package.
“By the way, Lieutenant-” Cohen paused before following the body downstairs. “You’ll get my official report late this afternoon, but I can put it in an eyedropper right now: On the bones last week, you can forget about actual age, sex, race-hell! I couldn’t even swear they aren’t monkey bones. All I can say is that they’re consistent with what you’d find if a newborn baby was wrapped in newspapers and stuck in a trunk for thirty years, give or take a week.”
“What about the mummified one?” Sigrid asked.
“Caucasian girl,” he replied promptly. “And before you ask, yeah, she was born alive. I found lint in her breathing passages. Looks like she no sooner got herself born than she got herself smothered.”
With a laconic “Ciao for now,
With the body removed from the landing, Sigrid went up the steep attic stairs to examine the makeshift office Roger Shambley had created amid file cabinets and storage boxes. Later, someone would go through the papers and folders so neatly stacked upon his work tables, but for now she simply wished to sit in the art historian’s chair and try to get a better feel for the man she’d met so briefly last night, some sense of why he’d died.
The tabletop directly in front of his chair was bare, so she assumed he’d probably finished work for the night and cleared away his papers. Into one of those folders, perhaps. Or into his briefcase, which still sat beside the chair. A methodical man?
She rather thought there had been method in Shambley’s calculated insults last night-to that trustee, Mr. Reinicke, to Soren Thorvaldsen and, by extension, to Nauman and Francesca Leeds-but she’d observed him too briefly to understand the motive for his rudeness. There had been a certain electricity in his manner, though; as if he were so wired about something that he hardly knew or cared what he was saying.
Or to whom.
“Lieutenant?” Jim Lowry’s voice at the attic door drew her back to the present. “We think we’ve found where he died.”
They went down the narrow back stairs, past the butler’s pantry on the first floor where Officer Guidry had photographed the dumbwaiter before the crime scene technicians took a sample of its stains for the lab, and from the butler’s pantry, on down the broader, more commodious stairway to the basement.
As they descended, Sigrid noted and carefully sidestepped three chalk-circled spots.
At the foot of the steps, a portable floodlamp lit up the area and made it quite apparent that the floor there had been recently-and inexpertly-mopped. They could clearly see a circular spot where dried streaks of water left dull swirls upon the shiny dark tiles.
