The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  “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?”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was lunch hour when I hit the downtown financial district. The narrow streets were full of people. Stock clerks and office girls, those vital cogs in the wheel of free enterprise, passed skinny cigarettes from hand to hand and smoked their little capitalist brains out. Older men in three-piece suits shook their heads at all of this and dove into bars for sanctuary and solace.

  I made a phone call. When no one answered I joined the take-out line at a luncheonette and emerged with two sandwiches and a container of coffee in a brown paper bag. I carried it into the lobby of a ten-story office building on Maiden Lane. I was still wearing the hat and the horn-rimmed glasses and carrying the pet carryall that Jared had found so disappointingly empty. I stopped on my way to the elevator to sign Donald Brown on the log sheet, entering my destination (Rm. #702) and my time of arrival (12:18). I took the elevator to the seventh floor and then walked up a flight, having prevaricated about everything but the time. I found the office I was looking for. The lock on the door was rather less challenging than Rubik’s Cube. I set down the pet carrier but held the lunch bag in one hand while I opened the door with the other.

  Inside the office I sat down at one of those metal desks with a fake wood-grain top and unpacked my lunch. I opened up one sandwich, removed the slices of pastrami and turkey, tore them into small pieces, and arranged them in a pile on the desk top. I ate the other sandwich and drank the coffee, looked up something in the Manhattan phone book, and dialed a number. A woman answered. The voice was familiar but I wanted to be absolutely certain, so I asked to speak to Nathaniel. The voice told me that I had the wrong number.

  I made a couple of other calls and talked to some people, and then I dialed 0 and said, “This is Police Officer Donald Brown, my shield number’s 23094, and I need you to get an unlisted number for me.” I told her the name and read off the number I was calling from. She called back less than a minute later and I wrote down the
number she gave me. I said, “Thanks. Oh, and what’s the address on that?” and she told me the address. I didn’t have to write it down.

  I dialed the number. A woman answered. I said, “This is Bernie. You wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Ah, darling,” I said. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep—”

  The phone clicked in my ear.

  I sighed and dialed another number. I went through channels and then a familiar voice came on the line. “Okay, give,” it said. “How’d you know?”

  “They found Seconal?”

  “Chloral hydrate, the ever-popular Mickey Finn. How’d you take one look at a dead man with his head beaten in and figure drugs? Even on Quincy they gotta run tests and stick things in microscopes.”

  “I’m working up a new series. Bernie Rhodenbarr, Psychic Pathologist.”

  We said a few more reasonably pleasant things to one another. I hung up and made a couple more calls, rummaged in some desk drawers and pawed through a filing cabinet. I left the contents of drawers and cabinet as I’d found them. Then I dropped the lunch bag and wrappings in the wastebasket, along with the bread from the pastrami-and-turkey sandwich and the empty coffee container. I opened the case I’d brought along, and a few minutes later I closed it and fastened its clasps.

  “Off we go,” I said.

  On the way out I checked my watch and entered 12:51 under time of departure.

  The sun was out so I switched to sunglasses and caught a cab at the corner of Broadway and John Street. I gave the driver a West Village address. He was a recent arrival from Iran with uncertain English and a very vague sense of the geography of Manhattan, so I guided him and we both got lost. But we wound up on a familiar street and I paid him off and sent him on his way.

  I entered a building I’d never been in before, carding my way past the locked vestibule door. I walked through the building to another locked door which led to a rear courtyard. The lock wasn’t a problem, and I left part of a toothpick jammed up against the springbolt so it would be even less of a problem on the way back.