A small crowd had gathered in that section of the corridor and as Sigrid’s eyes fell upon Mr. Hogarty, the plump little man looked embarrassed and scuttled away.
“Hey, wait a minute!” called Guillory. “We didn’t finish.”
“Yes, you did,” said Sigrid. “Come on, Guillory. Give it a rest.”
“Then give me a statement,” he countered. “What’d she tell you?”
“She’s confused and unhappy,” Sigrid told him. “She’s had several strokes, her speech is badly slurred and her mind’s not very clear.”
“But you got something out of her. I know you, Lieutenant.”
Sigrid looked at the circle of avid faces that ringed them. Resigned, she said, “Put your coat on and let’s go. You want to make your deadline, don’t you?”
They walked through the now-buzzing corridor. “It’s not much of a story and we’ll probably never know what really happened,” she warned.
“That’s okay,” Guillory said cynically. “Feel free to speculate. I’m going to.”
“She and her husband lived there with her unmarried sister Angelika and their bachelor brother Gregor. She says the babies were Angelika’s and that they all died at birth. That’s all I could get out of her.”
“Was it incest, adultery, or good old-fashioned fornication?” Guillory went right to the tabloid heart of things.
“She says her brother would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was bringing shame on the family name,” Sigrid said. “I believe her.”
“What about the husband?” he persisted.
“I can’t go on record about that. She wasn’t clear enough.”
“So who killed the babies?”
“Fifty years ago, no prenatal care, unattended birth, they could have just died,” said Sigrid. “Why does it always have to be murder?”
“Murder sells more papers. You know that, Lieutenant. Besides, didn’t the M.E.’s office say the mummified one was born alive?”
“But there’s still nothing to say it wasn’t a natural death.” She pushed open an outer door and walked toward the parking lot. Despite the noontime sun, the wind was biting.
“So who put them in the attic?” asked Guillory, looking at his watch. “Santa Claus?”
Sigrid shrugged. “Sorry, Guillory. I’m all out of speculations.”
Rusty Guillory slung his camera case inside the car. “If I make the next ferry, I’ll just squeeze in under the next deadline. Need a lift?”
“No, thanks, I have a car.”
She waited until Guillory’s car was out of the lot before walking back to the dark-clad man who lingered indecisively near an evergreen tree beside the gate. “Father Francis, isn’t it?”
“Yes. They say you’re a police officer.”
“Lieutenant Harald,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag for her gold shield.
“They say you’re here because of those poor baby skeletons found over in New York. That it was Barbara Zajdowicz’s old house?”
“Yes.”
The priest was perhaps half an inch shorter than she and his troubled eyes were nearly level with hers.
“Father Francis, did she ever discuss this with you? About her sister? Or the infants?”
He drew back. “I can’t answer that.”
“I’m not asking you to break the sanctity of confession,” Sigrid assured him. “I meant outside confession.”
He hesitated. “I really never talked with her until after her first stroke. You have to understand, Lieutenant. Strokes, Alzheimer’s, hardening of the arteries-sometimes it’s hard for them to keep in touch with reality. Or for me to know where fantasy begins. Everything’s so different today. People have babies out of wedlock all the time- actresses, singers, career women-no one hides it anymore. Sometimes we forget what it was like fifty years ago.”
“Some things haven’t changed though, have they, Father Francis?” Sigrid said. “Things like jealousy and spite?”
“No,” he sighed.
“She killed them, didn’t she? They weren’t born dead, no matter what she told Angelika.”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” He moved away. “I can’t talk to you about this.”
Back at the office, Sigrid gave Bernie Peters the card she’d used to take Barbara Zajdowicz’s fingerprints. Peters stopped talking about his daughter’s newly reimplanted front tooth and developed the latents with special emphasis on the old woman’s right fingers, which he then compared to the prints found on the old newspapers.
At a little after two, he brought them into Sigrid’s office, where she was going over the case with Lowry’s records.
“We wouldn’t go to court without finding more characteristics,” he said, “but see the double bifurcation at one o’clock on both of these latents and the delta at high noon?”
Sigrid looked through the magnifying glass and agreed they seemed identical. “So what do we have? Evidence that in 1938, Barbara Zajdowicz put one of the bodies in that attic trunk. A woman who’s now eighty-seven, mentally confused, and confined to a wheelchair.” She sighed. “Write it up as soon as you can, Peters, and we’ll send it along to the DA’s office. Let them decide what to do about it.”
Elaine Albee and Matt Eberstadt breezed in at two-thirty from their interview with Soren Thorvaldsen, flushed and excited by a brief taste of life aboard a Caribbean cruise ship.
“It was getting ready to sail when we caught up with him-the
“They’d just installed a new generator,” said Eberstadt.
“So he gave us a pass and we got to stand on deck and throw confetti and streamers and listen to the band play ‘Anchors Aweigh’ with a reggae beat.”
“They had a buffet already set out like you wouldn’t believe,” Eberstadt told Peters, who was listening enviously. “ Frances would put me on lettuce and water till Christmas if she ever heard about the salmon and-”
“Oh, and those luscious chocolate-dipped strawberries and pineapple slices!” Albee interrupted him.
“Then we went up to the bridge-what a view!-and Thorvaldsen gave us a tour of the owner’s suite, one flight down with its own private deck. Talk about luxury!”
“We saw one of Oscar Nauman’s paintings,” said Elaine Albee, with a wary glance at Sigrid. She wondered how the lieutenant would react if they told her that Thorvaldsen had tried to pump them about her. “It was very colorful.”
“Did you happen to remember why you were there?” Sigrid asked coldly.
Eberstadt virtuously produced Thorvaldsen’s typed and signed statement. “He had a stenographer come up to his suite and went through the whole evening again, but it doesn’t add doodly to what he told you Thursday night.”
He read from Thorvaldsen’s statement, “ ‘Dr. Shambley implied that it could be to my benefit if I met with him again that night at the Erich Breul House. I assumed he meant to offer me the private opportunity to add something choice to my art collection. As I have occasionally bought works of art under similar circumstances, this did not strike me as an unusual request. I cannot say positively that this is what he meant. I saw no such piece of art that night, nor did I see Dr. Shambley. I went in through the unlocked front door, waited in the library for approximately one hour, and left at midnight without seeing or speaking to anyone.
Sigrid had listened silently with her elbows and forearms folded flatly on the desk.
“When we first got there,” said Albee, “we talked with Thorvaldsen’s secretary, a Miss Kristensen. She gave us the name of a security guard who was on outside duty Wednesday night, Leon Washington. She says Washington saw Thorvaldsen enter his office building around ten-thirty and then leave again about fifteen minutes later.”
“Convenient,” Sigrid said.
