Corpus Christmas (27 page)

He shook his head. “Bad when the mind goes. The wife, she was sharp as a tack right up to the day she passed away. Beat me
in cribbage that very morning, but Barb—Well, you’ll see. Although she’s usually pretty good after Father Francis has been
here. You a friend of the family or something?”

“I didn’t think she had any family,” Sigrid parried. “Well, she didn’t, far as I ever heard. Me and the wife, we both come
from big families but we only had the two boys. Dick, he’s the oldest, he lives right here on Staten Island. Got grandchildren
of his own, even. But not Barb. She just had a sister and brother and none of ’em ever had kids. None that lived anyhow.”

Sigrid’s mental antennae quivered. “She had children that died?”

“Not her. She told the wife her and her husband couldn’t have babies. But seems like the sister had a couple of miscarriages
or the baby died getting born or some female trouble like that. She never talked about it till after her first stroke. Least
that’s when the wife first mentioned it to me, see, ’cause Barb’d get on these crying jags about those poor innocent babies
and how the sister oughtn’t to have done it.” He lowered his voice. “See, the sister wasn’t married.”

The door of Barbara Zajdowicz’s room opened and a middle-aged priest came out.

“How’s she doing today, Father?” asked Mr. Hogarty as he and Sigrid walked toward him.

“Much as usual, Harry,” said the priest. He smiled and nodded at others across the corridor, but did not break his progress
to the next room.

As Sigrid started to follow Mr. Hogarty into his friend’s room, she saw an unwanted sight. At the far end of the corridor,
a tall redheaded man in sheepskin jacket and cowboy boots with a camera case slung over his shoulder paused to compare a room
number on the nearest door with something scribbled on his notepad. He saw her at almost the same instant and his homely face
took on the look of an excited terrier spotting its prey.

“Yo! Lieutenant Harald,” he cried and loped around a passing wheelchair. William “Rusty” Guillory of the
Post.

“Two minds with but a single thought.” His free hand fumbled with the zipper on his camera case. “Didja talk to her, yet?
Does she know anything about the babies? What’ve you got for me?”

“What’re you doing here, Guillory?” she stalled. “Same as you.” He took two quick pictures of her before she could protest.
“Got her name off the deed and ran it by a snitch in Social Security.”

Mr. Hogarty’s curious face appeared in the doorway behind her and the reporter craned for a view of the interior. “Who’re
you?” Guillory asked.

“Hold it, Guillory,” Sigrid said firmly. “You’ll have to wait out here. I was just going in to interview Mrs. Zajdowicz now.”

“Talk fast huh, Lieutenant? If she’s got anything good, I can still make the second edition.”

Without promising, Sigrid stepped inside the room and closed the door on Rusty Guillory.

“Here she is now, Barb.” Mr. Hogarty’s gossipy nature was clearly piqued by the appearance of yet a second visitor for his
old acquaintance.

Sigrid stretched out her hand to the woman in the wheel-chair. “Mrs. Zajdowicz? I’m Lieutenant Harald of the New York City
Police Department.”

“Police?” breathed Mr. Hogarty.

Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz bore the ravages of her age and her illness. Her short straight hair was completely white, her blue
eyes were faded, and the years had cut deep grooves in her gray face, but time could not efface the basic structure of her
rangy frame and there was a residual impression of strength in her prominent jaw and broad brow. She wore a maroon skirt and
cardigan, a white blouse that was pinned at the collar with a lovely cameo, and sturdy black lace-up oxfords. The footrests
of her chair were folded up so that her feet touched the floor as she walked herself forward to give Sigrid her left hand.

Her hand was considerably larger than Sigrid’s and bare of rings, except for a wide gold band that hung loosely on her fourth
finger, trapped forever by the enlarged knuckle. Her right hand held a rosary and lay curled in her lap in what Sigrid recognized
as stroke-induced weakness; and when she spoke, her words were so slurred that it was difficult to understand.

“She says did Angelika send you?” interpreted Mr. Hogarty, who’d had more practice. “That’s her sister.”

“I know,” said Sigrid. “No, Mrs. Zajdowicz. I came because a trunk was found in the attic of your old house a few days ago.
Can you remember? Do you know anything about it?”

The old woman looked at Sigrid for a long moment, then made a gesture with her left hand. “Go ’way, Harry,” she said thickly.

“But, Barb—” be protested, his face dropping.

Again came that dismissive shooing wave of her hand. “Out.”

Sigrid detained him for a moment as he neared the door. “There’s a reporter out there, Mr. Hogarty. He’ll probably ask you
questions, try to make you speculate about certain things which he may later twist for his own purposes. I’d caution you to
choose your words carefully.”

Mr. Hogarty brightened immediately and bounded through the door with such eagerness that Sigrid realized she should have saved
her breath.

She sat down beside Mrs. Zajdowicz. “Angelika?” asked the woman. “Your sister’s dead, Mrs. Zajdowicz. Like the babies.”

“Ah.” She closed her eyes and her rawboned fingers began to tell the beads of the rosary. A moment later, Sigrid saw tears
seep from beneath those wrinkled lids.

“Mrs. Zajdowicz. Barbara,” she said gently. “Were they your sister’s babies?”

The old woman nodded. Her eyes opened. “Sister. Sorry. So sorry, Sister. Father… bless me, Father, for she has sinned—” She
crossed herself with her left hand and her words became unintelligible.

“Who sinned, Barbara?” Sigrid asked urgently. “Angelika? What happened to Angelika’s babies?”

“Died,” Barbara Zajdowicz said, enunciating as clearly as she could. “Wrong… but we… couldn’t let… anyone know. Gregor. He
kill her.”

“Your brother Gregor killed the babies?”

Mrs. Zajdowicz twitched her rosary beads impatiently. “No. Gregor. Such shame…on family. We said… woman troubles. Gregor…
stayed downstairs.”

“You’re saying Gregor would have killed Angelika if he’d known she was pregnant? So you kept it from him? How?”

“She… fat like me.”

Too much newsprint had been devoted to stories of large women suddenly surprised to find themselves giving birth for Sigrid
to doubt that a sister built like Mrs. Zajdowicz could have gotten away with illicit pregnancy.

“Who was the father?” Sigrid asked. “Was it your husband? Karol?”

“Karol…he cried… babies for you, he said. But every time… died.”

Her words were still badly slurred, but Sigrid was becoming used to her speech patterns.

“How did the babies die, Barbara?”

“Sin… she sinned… Karol…”

“Did Angelika kill her own babies?” Sigrid asked. “They should been…
mine!
Not… Angelika’s.” Her rheumy blue eyes glared out at Sigrid, then they filled with tears. “Poor… little babies. So little.
The shame… Sister—”

She held out her rosary to Sigrid. “Pray me, Sister,” she pleaded and Sigrid wasn’t sure if Mrs. Zajdowicz had confused her
with Angelika or a nun, since she was dressed today in navy slacks and a boxy black jacket.

“Who put those babies in the attic?” Sigrid asked. “You or Angelika?”

“Pray me, Sister,” Mrs. Zajdowicz wept. “Pray me.” Sigrid looked around helplessly, then saw the call bell on the wall beside
the woman’s bed. She went over and pushed it. While she waited, she took a shiny white card from her purse and gently pressed
it against Barbara’s fingers; first the left hand, then her curled right hand. After the card was carefully tucked into her
notebook, she sat holding the sobbing woman’s hands until the nurse came.

“What’s going on?” said Rusty Guillory, when Sigrid emerged. He had managed a couple of hasty pictures of the distrait Barbara
Zajdowicz before the nurse closed the door again. “Didja give her a heart attack or something?”

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 Søren 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
Sea Dancer,
” Albee reported. “And he invited us to ride out into the bay and take his launch back with him. He wanted to hear how the
engines ran or something.”

“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!”