The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (15 page)

I
t was somewhere around eleven when I left the Narrowback Gallery. Denise had offered me the hospitality of the couch but I was afraid to accept it. The police were looking for me and I didn’t want to be anyplace they might think of looking. Carolyn was the only person who knew I’d gone to Denise’s, and she wouldn’t talk unless they lit matches underneath her fingernails, but suppose they did? And she might let it slip to a friend—Alison, for instance—and the friend might prove less closemouthed.

For that matter, the police might not need a tip. Ray knew Denise and I had kept company in the past, and if they went through the routine of checking all known associates of the suspect, the fat would be in the fire.

Meanwhile it was in the frying pan and I was on the street. In an hour or so the bulldog edition of the
Daily News
would also be on the street, and it would very likely have my picture in it. For the time being I was my usual anonymous self, but I didn’t feel anonymous; walking through SoHo, I found myself seeking shadows and shrinking from the imagined stares of passersby. Or perhaps the stares weren’t imagined. Spend enough time shrinking in shadows and people are apt to stare at you.

On Wooster Street I found a telephone booth. A real one, for a change, with a door that drew shut, not one of those new improved numbers that leaves you exposed to the elements. Such booths have become rare to the point that some citizen had failed to recognize this particular one for what it was, mistaking it instead for a public lavatory. I chose privacy over comfort and closed myself within.

When I did this, a little light went on—literally, not figuratively. I loosened a couple of screws in the overhead fixture, took down a sheet of translucent plastic, and unscrewed the bulb a few turns, then put the plastic back and tightened the screws. Now I was not in the spotlight, which was fine for me. I called Information, then dialed the number the operator gave me.

I got the precinct where Ray Kirschmann hangs his hat, except that he doesn’t, given as he is to wearing it indoors. He wasn’t there. I called Information again and reached him at his house in Sunnyside. His wife answered and put him on without asking my name. He said “Hello?” and I said, “Ray?” and he said, “Jesus. The man of the hour. You gotta stop killin’ people, Bernie. It’s a bad habit and who knows what it could lead to, you know what I mean?”

“I didn’t kill Turnquist.”

“Right, you never heard of him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good, because he had a slip of paper with your name and the address of your store in his pocket.”

Could it be? Had I overlooked something that incriminating in my search of the dead man’s pockets? I wondered about it, and then I remembered something and closed my eyes.

“Bernie? You there?”

I hadn’t searched his pockets. I’d been so busy getting rid of him I hadn’t taken five minutes to go through his clothes.

“Anyway,” he went on, “we found one of your business cards in his room. And on top of that we got a phone tip shortly after the body was discovered. What we got, we got two phone tips, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the same person. First one told us where the body was, second said that if we wanted to know who killed Turnquist we should ask a fellow named Rhodenbarr. So what the hell, I’m askin’. Who killed him, Bern?”

“Not me.”

“Uh-huh. We let guys like you out on bail and what do you do but commit more crimes? I can see gettin’ carried away with a big hulk like Onderdonk, havin’ to hit him and hittin’ too hard. But shovin’ an icepick in a shrimp like Turnquist, that’s a pretty low thing to do.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“I suppose you didn’t search his room, either.”

“I don’t even know where it is, Ray. One of the reasons I called you was to get his address.”

“He had ID in his pocket. You coulda got it off that.”

Shit, I thought. Everything had been in Turnquist’s pockets but my two hands.

“Anyway,” he said, “why’d you want his address?”

“I thought I might—”

“Go search his room.”

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “To find the real killer.”

“Somebody already turned his room inside out, Bernie. If it wasn’t you, then it was somebody else.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t me. You found my card there, didn’t you? When I search dead men’s rooms I don’t make a point of leaving a calling card.”

“You don’t make a point of killin’ people, either. Maybe the shock left you careless.”

“You don’t believe that yourself, Ray.”

“No, I don’t guess I do. But they got an APB out on you, Bernie, and your bail’s revoked, and you better turn yourself in or you’re in deep shit. Where are you now? I’ll come get you, make sure you can surrender yourself with no hassles.”

“You’re forgetting the reward. How can I come up with the painting if I’m in a cell?”

“You think you got a shot at it?”

“I think so, yes.”

There was a lengthy pause, as pride warred with greed while he weighed an impressive arrest against a highly hypothetical $17,500. “I don’t like telephones,” he said. “Maybe we should talk it over face to face.”

I started to say something but a recording cut in to tell me my three minutes were up. It was still babbling when I broke the connection.

There wasn’t a single acceptable movie on Forty-second Street. There are eight or ten theaters on the stretch between Sixth and Eighth Avenues and the ones that weren’t showing porn featured epics like
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and
Eaten Alive by Lemmings.
Well, it figured. Get rid of sex and violence and how would you know Times Square was the Crossroads of the World?

I settled on a house near Eighth Avenue where a pair of kung fu movies were playing. I’d never seen one before, and all along I’d had the right idea. But it was dark inside, and half empty, and I couldn’t think of a safer place to pass a few hours. If the cops were really working at it, they’d have circulated my picture to the hotels. The papers would be on the street any minute. A person could sleep on the subway, but transit cops tend to look at you, and even if they didn’t I’d have felt safer curling up on the third rail.

I took a seat off to one side and just sat there looking at the screen. There wasn’t much dialogue, just sound effects when people got their chests kicked in or fell through plate glass windows, and the audience was generally quiet except for murmurs of approval when someone came to a dramatically bad end, which happened rather often.

I sat there and watched for a while. At some point I dozed off and at another I woke up. The same movie may have been playing, or it might have been the other one. I let the on-screen violence hypnotize me, and before I knew it I was thinking about everything that had happened and how it had all started with a refined gentleman turning up at my shop and inviting me to appraise his library. What a civilized incident, I thought, with such a brutal aftermath.

Wait a minute.

I sat up straighter in my seat and blinked as a wild-eyed Oriental chap on the screen smashed a woman’s face with his elbow. I scarcely noticed. Instead, in my mind I saw Gordon Onderdonk greeting me at the door of his apartment, unfastening the chain lock, drawing the door wide to admit me. And other images played one after another across the retina of the mind, while snatches of a dozen different conversations echoed in accompaniment.

For a few minutes there my mind raced along as though I’d just brewed up a whole potful of espresso and injected it straight into a vein. All of the events of the past few days suddenly fell into place. And, on the screen in front of me, agile young men made remarkable leaps and stunning pirouettes and kicked and slashed and chopped the living crap out of each other.

I dozed off again, and in due course I awoke again, and after sitting up and blinking a bit I remembered the mental connections I’d made. I thought them through and they still made as much sense as ever, and I marveled at the way everything had come to me.

It struck me, on my way up the aisle to the exit, that I might have dreamed the whole solution. But I couldn’t really see that it made very much difference. Either way it fit. And either way I had a lot to do.

I
stood in a doorway on West End Avenue and watched a couple of runners on their way to the park. When they’d cantered on by I leaned out a ways and fixed an eye on the entrance to my building. I kept it in view, and after a few minutes a familiar shape emerged. She walked to the curb, the ever-present cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth. At first she started to turn north, and I started to wince, and then she turned south and walked half a block and crossed the street and made her way to me.

She was Mrs. Hesch, my across-the-hall neighbor, an ever-available source of coffee and solace. “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said now. “It’s good you called me. I was worried. You wouldn’t believe the things those
momsers
are saying about you.”

“Just so you don’t believe them, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Me? God forbid. I know you, Mr. Rhodenbarr. What you do is your business—a man has to make a living. And when it comes to neighbors you can’t be beat. You’re a nice young man. You wouldn’t kill anybody.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“So what can I do for you?”

I gave her my keys, explained which one went in which lock, and told her what I needed. She was back fifteen minutes later with a shopping bag and a word of caution. “There’s a man in the lobby,” she said. “Regular clothes, no uniform, but I think he’s an Irisher and he looks like a cop.”

“He’s probably both of those things.”

“And there’s two men, also looking like cops, in that dark green car over there.”

“I already spotted them.”

“I got the suit you told me and a clean shirt, and I picked you out a nice tie to go with it. Also socks and underwear which you didn’t mention but I figure what does it hurt? Also the other things which I don’t have to know what they are, and how you use them to open locks I don’t want to know, but it’s clever where you keep them, behind the fake electric outlet. You could fix me a place like that to keep things in?”

“First thing next week, if I can just stay out of jail.”

“Because the burglaries lately have been something awful. You put on that good lock for me, but even so.”

“I’ll fix you up with a hidey hole first chance I get, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Not that I got the Hope Diamond upstairs, but why take chances? You’re all right now, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I think so,” I said.

I changed clothes in a coffee shop lavatory, tucked my burglar’s tools into various pockets, and left my dirty clothes in the wastebasket. The British would have called it a dustbin, and who had told me so recently? Turnquist, and Turnquist was dead now, with an icepick in his heart.

I bought a disposable razor in a drugstore, made quick use of it in another coffee shop restroom, and promptly disposed of it. The same drugstore sold me a pair of sunglasses rather like the ones Turnquist had worn when we wheeled him across town. I’d worn them myself on the way back to the store, and they were there now on a shelf in my back room, and it struck me as curious that I’d bought two pairs of drugstore sunglasses in as many days. In the ordinary course of things, years would go by before I bought a pair of sunglasses.

The day was overcast and I wasn’t sure the sunglasses helped; they might hide my eyes, but at the same time they drew a certain amount of attention. I wore them for the time being and rode the subway downtown to Fourteenth Street. Between Fifth and Seventh Avenues there are schlock stores of every description, selling junk at cut-rate prices, their wares spilling out onto the sidewalk. One had a table piled high with clear-lensed eyeglasses. People who wanted to save an optician’s fee could try on pair after pair until they found something that seemed to help.

I tried on pair after pair until I found a heavy horn-rimmed pair that didn’t seem to distort things at all. Nonprescription glasses always look like stage props because of the way the light glints off them, but these glasses would disguise my appearance reasonably well without looking like a disguise. I bought them, and a few doors down the street I tried on hats until I found a dark gray fedora that looked and felt right.

I bought a knish and a Coke from a Sabrett vendor, tried to tell myself I was eating breakfast, made a couple of phone calls, and was at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street when a rather battered Chevy pulled up. The way the man steals, you’d think he could afford a flashier automobile.

“I looked right at you an’ didn’t recognize you,” he said as I got into the front seat next to him. “You oughta put on a suit more often. It looks nice. Of course you ruin the whole effect wearin’ runnin’ shoes with it.”

“Lots of people wear running shoes with a suit these days, Ray.”

“Lotsa guys eat peas with a knife but that don’t make it right. The hat an’ the glasses, you look like a tout at Aqueduct. What I oughta do, Bern, I oughta take you in. You’ll be outta trouble and I’ll wind up with a citation.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wind up with a reward?”

“You call it a reward and I call it two in the bush.” He sighed the sigh of the long-suffering. “This is crazy, what you’re askin’.”

“I know.”

“But I played along with you in the past, and I gotta admit it paid off more’n it didn’t.” He looked at the hat, the glasses, the running shoes, and he shook his head. “I wish you looked a little more like a cop,” he said.

“This way I look like a cop wearing a disguise.”

“Well, it’s some disguise,” he said. “It’d fool anybody.”

He left the car in a no-parking zone and we walked up a flight of stairs and down a corridor. Periodically Ray pulled out his shield and showed it to somebody who passed us on through. Then we took an elevator down to the basement.

When you’re a civilian and you show up to identify a body, you wait on the first floor and they bring up the late lamented on an elevator. When you’re a cop they save time and let you go down to the basement, where they pull out a drawer and give you a peek. The attendant, a whey-faced little man who hadn’t seen the sun since he posed for Charles Addams, pulled a card from a file, led us across a large and silent room, and opened a drawer for us.

I took one look and said, “This isn’t the right one.”

“Gotta be,” the attendant said.

“Then why does the toe tag say
Velez, Concepción
?”

The attendant examined it himself and scratched his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This is 228-B and right here on the card it says”—he looked at us accusingly—“it says 328-B.”

“So?”

“So,” he said.

He led the way and pulled out another drawer, and this time the toe tag said
Onderdonk, Gordon K.
Ray and I stood looking in companionable silence. Then he asked me if I’d seen enough, and I said I had, and he spoke to the attendant and told him to close the drawer.

On the way upstairs I said, “Can you find out if he was drugged?”

“Drugged?”

“Seconal or something. Wouldn’t it show in an autopsy?”

“Only if somebody went looking for it. You come across a guy with his head beaten in, you examine him and determine that’s what killed him, hell, you don’t go an’ check to see if he also had diabetes.”

“Have them check for drugs.”

“Why?”

“A hunch.”

“A hunch. I’d feel better about your hunches if you didn’t look like a racetrack tout. Seconal, huh?”

“Any kind of sedative.”

“I’ll have ’em check. Where do we go from here, Bernie?”

“Separate ways,” I said.

I called Carolyn and let her carry on for a few minutes until her panic played itself out. “I’m going to need your help,” I said. “You’re going to have to create a diversion.”

“That’s my specialty,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

I told her and went over it a couple of times, and she said it sounded like something she could handle. “It would be better if you had help,” I said. “Would Alison help you?”

“She might. How much would I have to tell her?”

“As little as possible. If you have to, tell her I’m going to be trying to steal a painting from the museum.”

“I can tell her that?”

“If you have to. In the meantime—I wonder. Maybe you should close the Poodle Factory and go over to her house. Where does she live, anyway?”

“Brooklyn Heights. Why should I go there, Bern?”

“So you won’t be where the cops can hassle you. Is Alison with you now?”

“No.”

“Where is she, at home?”

“She’s at her office. Why?”

“No reason. You don’t happen to know her address in Brooklyn Heights, do you?”

“I don’t remember it, but I know the building. It’s on Pineapple Street.”

“But you don’t know the number.”

“What’s the difference? Oh, I bet you’re looking for a place to hole up, aren’t you?”

“Good thinking.”

“Well, her place is nice. I was there last night.”

“So that’s where you were. I tried you early this morning and I couldn’t reach you. Wait a minute. You were at Alison’s last night?”

“What’s the matter with that? What are you, the Mother Superior, Bern?”

“No, I’m just surprised, that’s all. You’d never been there before, had you?”

“No.”

“And it’s nice?”

“It’s very nice. What’s so surprising about that? Tax planners make a decent living. Their clients tend to have money or else they wouldn’t have to worry about taxes.”

“It seems to me everybody has to worry about taxes. You saw the whole apartment? The, uh, bedroom and everything?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? There’s no bedroom, what she’s got is a giant studio. It’s about eight hundred square feet but it’s all one room. Why?”

“No reason.”

“Is this a roundabout way of asking me if we slept together? Because that’s none of your business.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“Well, you’re right about it being none of my business,” I said, “but you’re my best friend and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I’m not in love with her, Bern.”

“Good.”

“And yes, we slept together. I figured she was used to men hassling her and conning her and trying to exploit her, so I picked my strategy accordingly.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her I’d only put the tip in.”

“And now you’re at the Poodle Factory.”

“Right.”

“And she’s at her office.”

“Right.”

“And I’m wasting my time worrying about you.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’m touched. I really am.”

I cabbed down to the Narrowback Gallery, wearing the sunglasses so that the driver wouldn’t see anything recognizable in his rear-view mirror. When I got out I switched to my other glasses so I’d be less conspicuous. I was still wearing the hat.

Jared opened the door, took in the glasses and the hat, then looked down at what I was carrying. “That’s pretty neat,” he said. “You can carry anything in there and people figure it’s an animal. What have you got in there, burglar tools?”

“Nope.”

“I bet it’s swag, then.”

“Huh?”

“Swag. Loot. Plunder. Can I see?”

“Sure,” I said, and opened the clasps and lifted the hinged top.

“It’s empty,” he said.

“Disappointing, huh?”

“Very.” We moved on into the loft, where Denise was touching up a canvas. I examined what she’d done in my absence and told her I was impressed.

“You ought to be,” she said. “We worked all night, both of us. I don’t think we got an hour’s sleep between us. What have you been doing in the meantime?”

“Staying out of jail.”

“Well, keep on doing it. Because when all of this is history I expect a substantial reward. I won’t settle for a good dinner and a night on the town.”

“You won’t have to.”

“You can throw in dinner and a night out as a bonus, but if there’s a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, I want a share.”

“You’ll get it,” I assured her. “When will all this stuff be ready?”

“Couple hours.”

“Two hours, say?”

“Should be.”

“Good,” I said. And I called Jared over and explained what I had in mind for him. A variety of expressions played over his face.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You could organize it, couldn’t you? Get some of your friends together.”

“Lionel would go for it,” Denise suggested. “And what about Pegeen?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. What would I get?”

“What do you want? Your pick of every science fiction book that comes through my store for the next—how long? The next year?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded about as enthusiastic as if I’d offered him a lifetime supply of cauliflower.

“Make sure you get a good deal,” his mother told him. “Because you’ll have a lot to handle. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a TV news crew. If you’re the leader you’ll be the one they interview.”

“Really?”

“Stands to reason,” she said.

He thought about it for a moment. I started to say something but Denise silenced me with a hand. “If somebody made a couple of phone calls,” Jared said, “then they’d know to have camera crews there.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll get Lionel,” he said. “And Jason Stone and Shaheen and Sean Glick and Adam. Pegeen’s at her father’s for the weekend, but I’ll get—I know who I’ll get.”

“All right.”

“And we’ll need signs,” he said. “Bernie? What time?”

“Four-thirty.”

“We’ll never make the six o’clock news.”

“You’ll make the eleven o’clock.”

“You’re right. And not that many people watch the six o’clock on Saturday anyway.”

He tore off down the stairs. “That was terrific,” I told Denise.

“It was wonderful. Look, if you can’t manipulate your own kid, what kind of a parent are you?” She moved in front of one of the canvases, frowned at it. “What do you think?”

“I think it looks perfect.”

“Well, it doesn’t look perfect,” she said, “but it doesn’t look bad, does it?”