The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  “I don’t know. This is pretty fast, isn’t it?”

  “I’d judge we’re doing a 9:20 mile.”

  “That’s funny. I could have sworn we were going faster than sound.”

  He laughed politely and picked up the pace and I sucked air and stayed with him. Gamely, you might say. It was still Thursday and I still hadn’t been to bed, and it was now around six-thirty in the evening and Wally Hemphill and I were making a counterclockwise circuit of Central Park. The circular park drive was closed to cars throughout its six-mile loop, and runners beyond number were out taking the air and turning its oxygen into carbon dioxide.

  “Call Klein,” I’d told Carolyn when I left the store in handcuffs. “Tell him to come collect me. And pick up some cash from my place and bail me out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Have a nice day.”

  As Ray and I walked in one direction and Carolyn walked in the other, I thought how Norb Klein had represented me several times over the years. He was a nice little guy who looked sort of like a fat weasel. He had an office on Queens Boulevard and a small-time criminal practice that never got him any headlines. He wasn’t very impressive in court but he handled himself nicely behind the scenes, knowing which judge would be sympathetic to the right approach. I was trying to remember when I’d seen Norb last when Ray said, conversationally, “You didn’t hear, Bern? Norb Klein’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “You know what a skirt chaser he was, and he never had a hooker for a client that he didn’t sample the merchandise, and how’d he wind up goin’ out? He was bangin’ his secretary on his office couch, same girl’s been with him eight, ten years, and his ticker blows out on him. Massive whatchacallit, coronary, an’ he’s dead in the saddle. Girl said she tried everythin’ to revive him, and I just bet she did.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Carolyn!”

  So we’d had a hurried conference on the street, and the only name I could think of was Wally Hemphill’s, who was ensuring himself against Norb Klein’s fate by training for the upcoming Marathon. His was a general legal practice, running to divorces and wills and partnership agreements and such, and I had no reason to believe he knew his way around what people persist in calling the criminal justice system. But he’d come when called, God love him, and I was out on bail, and I’d declined on the advice of my attorney to answer any and all questions put to me by the police, and if I just survived the trek around the park I might live forever.

  “It’s funny,” Wally said now, leading our charge up a hill as if he thought he was Teddy Roosevelt. “We’d see each other in Riverside Park, we’d do a few easy miles together, and I always thought of you as a runner.”

  “Well, I rarely go more than three miles, see, and I’m not used to hills.”

  “No, you didn’t let me finish. I’m not knocking your running, Bernie. I thought of you as a runner and it never occurred to me that you might be a burglar. I mean you don’t think of burglars as regular-type guys who talk about Morton’s Foot and shin splints. You know what I mean?”

  “Try to think of me as a guy who runs a secondhand book store.”

  “And that’s why you were at Onderdonk’s apartment.”

  “That’s right.”

  “At his invitation. You went over the night before last, that was Tuesday night, and you appraised his library.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And he was alive when you left.”

  “Of course he was alive when I left. I never killed anybody in my life.”

  “You left him tied up?”

  “No, I didn’t leave him tied up. I left him hale and hearty and saying goodbye to me at the elevator. No, come to think of it, he ducked back into his apartment to answer the phone.”

  “So the elevator operator didn’t actually see him there when he took you out of the building.”

  “No.”

  “What time was that? If he was talking to somebody on the phone, and if we can find out who—”

  “It was probably around eleven. Something like that.”

  “But the elevator operator who took you down went on after midnight, didn’t he? And the doorman and the whatchamacallit—”

  “The concierge.”

  “Right. They changed shifts at midnight, and they identified you, said they let you out of the building around one. So if you left Onderdonk at eleven—”

  “It could have been eleven-thirty.”

  “I guess you had a long wait for the elevator.”

  “They’re like the subways, you miss one at that hour and you can wait forever for the next one.”

  “You had another engagement in the building.”

  I don’t think Norb Klein would have figured it out any faster. “Something like that,” I agreed.

  “But then you went back again last night. Without using Onderdonk to get you into the building. The after-midnight staff said you left the building late two nights running, and both times the elevator operator swears he picked you up at Onderdonk’s floor. Did he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the other staff people say you managed to get in delivering sandwiches from the deli.”

  “It was flowers from the florist, which shows how reliable eyewitnesses are.”

  “I think they said flowers, as a matter of fact.”

  “From the deli?”

  “I think they said flowers from the florist, and I think my memory changed it to sandwiches from the deli, and I think you’re fooling yourself if you think those witnesses aren’t going to be good ones. And the medical evidence isn’t good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to what I managed to learn, Onderdonk was killed by a blow to the head. He was hit twice with something hard and heavy, and the second shot did it. Fractured skull, cerebral hematoma, and I forget the exact language but what it amounts to is he got hit and he died of it.”

  “Did they fix the time?”

  “Roughly.”

  “And?”

  “According to their figures, he died sometime between when you arrived at the Charlemagne and when you left.”

  “When I left the second time,” I said.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You went up to Onderdonk’s apartment Tuesday night, right? And left a little before one Wednesday morning, something like that.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, that’s when he died. Now that’s give or take a couple of hours, that’s for sure, because they’re just not that accurate when another twenty-four hours has gone by before the body’s discovered. But he definitely got it that night. Bernie? Where are you going?”

  Where I was going was over the 102nd Street cutoff, which trims a full mile off the six-mile circuit and avoids the worst hill. Wally wanted the extra mile and the hill training that went with it, but I just kept trotting doggedly west on the cutoff road and all he could do was run alongside arguing.

  “Listen,” he said, “in a couple of years you’ll be begging for some hill training. Those prison yards, you get plenty of time to run but it’s all around a flat tenth-of-a-mile track. Even so, I got a client up at Green Haven who’s doing upwards of a hundred miles a week. He just goes out there and runs for hours. It’s boring, but it has its advantages.”

  “He probably doesn’t have too much trouble remembering the route.”

  “There’s that, and he’s averaging something like fifteen miles a day. You can imagine the kind of shape he’ll be in when he gets out.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “Oh, that’s hard to say. But he should be coming up for parole in a couple of years, and he’ll have a very good chance if he behaves himself between now and then.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Well, he had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend and he found out, and he sort of cut them a little.”

  “Socially?”

  “With a knife. They, uh, died.”


  “Oh.”

  “These things happen.”

  “Like clockwork,” I said. “Wally, ease up. These uphills cut the legs out from under me.”

  “You gotta charge the hills, Bernie. That’s how you develop your quads.”

  “It’s how I develop angina. How could he have been dead before I left the building?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and we ran along in a companionable silence. Then he said, without looking my way, “Bernie, I could see how it could happen accidentally. He was a big, powerful guy and you had to knock him out and tie him up to rob him. You knocked him cold and tied him up and he was alive at that point, and then some leakage inside his head or something murky along those lines, it killed him and you didn’t even know it. Because obviously you wouldn’t go back to the building the next day if you knew he was dead. Except wait a minute. If you thought you left him tied up and alive, why would you go back to the building? You wouldn’t want to show your face within a mile of that building, would you?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Unless you killed him and you knew he was dead, and you went back—to what?”

  “I didn’t hit him or steal from him, let alone kill him, Wally, so that makes the question a hard one to answer.”

  “Forget Onderdonk for a minute. Why did you go back to the Charlemagne? You’d already committed a burglary there the night before. That’s what you did, right? Stole something from somebody after you left his apartment?”

  “Right.”

  “So why’d you go back? Don’t tell me the building was such a soft touch because I won’t believe it.”

  “No, it’s worse than Fort Knox. Shit.”

  “It’s easier if you level with me, Bernie. And anything you tell me is privileged. I can’t reveal it.”

  “I know that.”

  “So?”

  “I went back to Onderdonk’s apartment.”

  “To Onderdonk’s apartment.”

  “Right.”

  “You had another appointment with him? No, because you used the scam with the sandwiches to get in the door.”

  “Flowers.”

  “Did I say sandwiches again? I meant flowers. You went back there knowing he was dead?”

  “I went back there knowing he was out because he didn’t answer his goddamn phone.”

  “You called him? Why?”

  “To establish that he was out so I could go back.”

  “What for?”

  “To steal something.”

  Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. “Something caught your eye when you were appraising his library.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you thought you’d drop in and lift it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the idea, yes.”

  “It’s getting harder to think of you as a bookseller and easier to think of you as a burglar. What the papers call an unrepentant career criminal, but this bit makes you sound like a kleptomaniac with foresight. You went back to an apartment that you’d already left your fingerprints all over the night before? And where you’d already given your right name to get into the building?”

  “I’m not saying it was the smartest move I ever made.”

  “Good, because it wasn’t. I don’t know, Bernie. I’m not sure hiring me was the smartest move you ever made, either. I’m a pretty decent attorney but my criminal experience is limited, and I can’t say I did a hell of a lot for the client who cut those two people, but then I didn’t knock myself out because I figured we’d all sleep better with him running around the yard at Green Haven. But you need someone who can work a combination of bribery and plea bargaining, if you want my honest opinion, and I don’t have the moves for that.”

  “I’m innocent, Wally.”

  “I just can’t understand why you hit the building again yesterday.”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time, okay? Wally, I didn’t get any sleep last night and I never run more than four miles tops. I’ve got to stop.”

  “We can slow down a little.”

  “Good.” I kept moving my feet. “What difference did the second visit make?” I asked him. “I’d be in the same trouble anyway, with my prints all over the apartment and the staff remembering me, and if they really figure the time of death the way you said, the second visit is redundant.”

  “Uh-huh. Except it makes it much harder in court to argue that you were never there in the first place.”

  “Oh.”

  “You were there for over eight hours yesterday, Bernie. That’s another thing I don’t understand. You spent eight hours in an apartment with a dead man and you say you didn’t even know he was dead. Didn’t he strike you as a little unresponsive?”

  “I never saw him, Wally.” Puff, puff. “Ray Kirschmann said the body was discovered in the bedroom closet. I checked all the rooms but I didn’t go into the closets.”

  “What did you take from his apartment?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bernie, I’m your lawyer.”

  “And here I thought you were my coach. It doesn’t matter. Even if you were my spiritual adviser the answer would be the same. I didn’t take anything from Onderdonk’s apartment.”

  “You went there to steal something.”

  “Right.”

  “And you left there without it.”

  “Right again.”

  “Why?”

  “It was gone when I got there. Somebody’d already hooked it.”

  “So you turned around and went home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But not for eight hours or so. Something on television you didn’t want to miss? Or were you reading your way through his library?”

  “I didn’t want to leave the building until the shift changed. And I didn’t spend eight hours in Onderdonk’s apartment. I stayed in another apartment, an empty one, until after midnight.”

  “There’s things you’re not telling me.”

  “Maybe a couple.”

  “Well, that’s okay, I guess. But you haven’t done much direct lying to me, have you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Positive.”

  “And you didn’t kill him.”

  “God, no.”

  “And you don’t know who did. Bernie? Do you know who killed him?”

  “No.”

  “Got an idea?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Once more around? We’ll take the Seventy-second Street cutoff, do a nice easy four-mile loop. Okay?”

  “No way, Wally.”

  “C’mon, take a shot at it.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Well,” he said, chest heaving, arms pumping, “I’ll catch you later, then. I’m gonna go for it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “She must have killed him,” Carolyn said. “Right?”

  “You mean Andrea?”

  “Who else? That’d be one reason why she was scared shitless when you walked in on her. She was afraid you’d discover the skeleton in her closet. Of course it wasn’t her closet and he wasn’t a skeleton yet, but—”

  “You figure she overpowered him and tied him up and killed him? She’s just a girl, Carolyn.”

  “That’s a real pig remark, you know that?”

  “I mean in terms of physical strength. Maybe she could hit him hard enough to knock him out, maybe even hard enough to kill him, and maybe she could even drag him into the closet when she was done, but somehow I can’t believe she did any of those things. Maybe she went there to look for her letters, just as she said.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Somehow I don’t. But I’m willing to believe she went there looking for something.”

  “The Mondrian.”

  “And then what did she do, smuggle it past me secreted in her bodily cavities?”<
br />
  “Not likely. You’d have found it.”

  I gave her a look. It was morning, Friday morning, and if I didn’t feel like a new man, I at least felt like a secondhand one in excellent shape. I’d left Wally Hemphill in the park and went straight home to a shower and a hot toddy and a full ten hours of sleep with the door double-bolted and the blinds shut and the phone unplugged. I’d come downtown early and tried Carolyn at the Poodle Factory every ten minutes or so, and when she answered I hung the BACK IN TEN MINUTES sign in the window and went outside and pulled the door shut.

  Across the street, a couple of shaggy guys lurking in a doorway shrank into the shadows when I glanced their way. They looked like a bottle gang without a bottle, and I had second thoughts about leaving my bargain table on the street, but what could they steal? My books on home winemaking were all safe inside the store. I left the table where it was and picked up two cups of coffee around the corner, then took them to Carolyn’s canine beauty parlor.

  She was clipping a Bichon Frise when I got there. I mistook it at first for a snow-white poodle, and Carolyn was quick to point out why it didn’t look at all like a poodle, and after a couple of paragraphs of American Kennel Club lore I cut her off in midsentence and brought her up to date. The visit to the Charlemagne, the bit with the flowers, the incident in Onderdonk’s apartment, the conversation with Wally Hemphill. Everything.

  Now she said, “How bad is it, Bernie? Are you in deep shit or what?”

  “Let’s call it chest high and rising.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s my cat, isn’t it?”

  “They kidnapped Archie to get at me, Carolyn. If you hadn’t had a cat they’d have found some other way to put pressure on me. All to get a picture off a museum wall, and that’s as impossible as it ever was. You asked if Andrea killed him. That was my first thought, but the times are all wrong. Unless the Medical Examiner’s crazy, Onderdonk was killed while I was stealing Appling’s stamps.”

  “He was alone when you left him.”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And someone else dropped in on him, beat his head in, tied him up, and stuffed him in the closet. And stole the painting?”