The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

by Lawrence Block

  Widener ignored her, which I thought showed character. “To whose good?” he said, translating the Latin himself. “In other words, who benefits? The policy’s payable to Onderdonk, and in the event of his death it becomes part of his estate, and his estate goes to somebody in western Canada.” His eyes narrowed, then turned toward Richard Jacobi. “Or is that Canadian relative actually among those present?”

  “He’s in Canada,” Wally Hemphill said, “because I spoke to him at an hour that was equally uncivilized in either time zone. He’s empowered me to look out for his interests in this matter.”

  “Indeed,” said Widener.

  It was my turn. “The cousin never left Calgary,” I said. “The painting was stolen not for the insurance, considerable though it may be. The painting was stolen for the same reason its owner was murdered. Both acts were committed to conceal a crime.”

  “And what crime was that?”

  “Well, it’s a long story,” I said, “and I think we should make ourselves comfortable and have a cup of coffee. Now how many of you want cream and sugar? And how many just cream? And how many just sugar? And the rest of you want it all the way black? Fine.”

  I don’t think they really wanted coffee, but what I wanted was a breathing spell. When Carolyn and Alison had served the nasty stuff all around the room, I sipped some of mine, made a face, and started in.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “a man named Haig Petrosian had a painting in his dining room. It would later be called Composition with Color, but Petrosian probably didn’t call it anything but ‘My friend Piet’s picture,’ or words to that effect. Whatever he called it, it disappeared around the time of his death. Maybe a family member spirited it away. Maybe a servant made off with it, perhaps acting on the belief that the old man wanted her to have it.”

  “Perhaps Haig Petrosian’s son William stole it,” Elspeth Petrosian said, with a sharp glance to her right and another sharp glance at me.

  “Perhaps,” I said agreeably. “Whoever took it, it wound up in the possession of a man who found a wonderful way to make money. He bought paintings and gave them away.”

  Carolyn said, “That’s a way to make money?”

  “It is the way this fellow did it. He would buy a painting by an important artist, a genuine painting, and he would lend it to a show or two in order to establish its provenance and his history as its owner. Then a talented if eccentric artist would be engaged to produce a copy of the painting. The owner would let himself be persuaded to donate the painting to a museum, but in the course of things it would be the copy that wound up getting donated. Farther on down the line, he’d donate the painting to another institution in another part of the country, and once again it would be a copy that changed hands. Occasionally he might vary the pitch by selling the painting to a collector, picking someone who wouldn’t be likely to show it. In the course of a decade, he could sell or donate the same painting five or six times, and if he stuck to abstract artists like Mondrian and had his wacky painter vary the precise design a bit from one canvas to the next, he could get away with it forever.

  “And the richer you are to start with, the more profitable it is. Donate a painting appraised at a quarter of a million dollars and you can save yourself over a hundred thousand dollars in taxes. Do that a couple of times and you’ve more than paid for the painting, and you’ve still got the original painting yourself. There’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Alison asked.

  “Getting caught. Our killer found out that Mr. Danforth was putting together a retrospective exhibit of Piet Mondrian’s works, which in and of itself was no cause for alarm. After all, his fake paintings had survived such exposure in the past. But it seemed that Mr. Danforth was aware that there were far more Mondrians in circulation than Mondrian ever painted. What is it they used to say about Rembrandt? He painted two hundred portraits, of which three hundred are in Europe and five hundred in America.”

  “Mondrian’s not been counterfeited on that grand a scale,” Danforth said, “but in the past few years there have been some disconcerting rumors. I decided to combine the retrospective with an exhaustive move to authenticate or denounce every Mondrian I could root out.”

  “And toward that end you enlisted the aid of Mr. Lewes.”

  “That’s right,” Danforth said, and Lewes nodded.

  “Our killer learned as much,” I said, “and he was scared. He knew Onderdonk intended to put his painting in the show, and he wasn’t able to talk him out of it. He couldn’t let on that the painting was a fake, not after he’d sold it to Onderdonk himself, and perhaps Onderdonk began to suspect him. That’s supposition. What was clear was that Onderdonk had to die and the painting had to disappear, and it had to be a matter of record that the damned thing disappeared. All he had to do was frame me for the theft and murder and he was home free. It didn’t matter if the charges stuck. If I went up for the job, fine. If not, that was fine, too. The cops wouldn’t look for someone with a private motive for Onderdonk’s death. They’d just decide I was guilty even if they couldn’t make the charges stick, and they’d let the case go by the boards.”

  “And we’d pay the cousin in Calgary $350,000 for a fake painting,” Orville Widener said.

  “Which wouldn’t affect the killer one way or the other. His interest was self-preservation, and that’s a pretty good Qui bono six days out of seven.”

  Ray said, “Who did it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who sold the fake paintings and killed Onderdonk? Who did it?”

  “Well, there’s really only one person it could be,” I said, and turned toward the little sofa. “It’s you, isn’t it, Mr. Barlow?”

  We had another one of those hushes. Then J. McLendon Barlow, who’d been sitting up very straight all along, seemed to sit up even straighter.

  “Of course that’s nonsense,” he said.

  “Somehow I thought you might deny it.”

  “Palpable nonsense. You and I have never met before today, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I never sold a painting to Gordon Onderdonk. He was a good friend and I deeply regret his tragic death, but I never sold him a painting. I defy you to prove that I did.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Nor did I ever visit your shop, or represent myself to you or to anyone else as Gordon Onderdonk. I can understand your confusion, since it is a matter of record that I did in fact donate a painting of Mondrian’s to the Hewlett Gallery. I’d hardly be inclined to deny it; there’s a plaque on the gallery wall attesting to the fact.”

  “Unfortunately,” I murmured, “the painting seems to have disappeared from the Hewlett.”

  “It’s clear that you arranged its disappearance in preparing this farce. I certainly had nothing to do with it, and can provide evidence of my whereabouts at all times yesterday. Furthermore, it’s to my disadvantage that the painting has disappeared, since it was unquestionably genuine.”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “One moment.” Barnett Reeves, my jolly banker, looked as though I’d offered a dead rat as collateral. “I’m the curator of the Hewlett, and I’m quite certain our painting is genuine.”

  I nodded at the fireplace. “That’s your painting,” I said. “How positive are you?”

  “That’s not the Hewlett Mondrian.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Ours was cut from its stretcher by some damned vandal. That painting’s intact. It may well be a fake, but it certainly never hung on our walls.”

  “But it did,” I said. “The man who stole it yesterday, and I’d as soon let him remain anonymous, was by no means a vandal. He wouldn’t dream of slashing your painting, genuine or false. He went to the Hewlett carrying a bit of broken stretcher with the outside inch of canvas of a homemade fake Mondrian. He dismantled the stretcher on our specimen, opening the staples and hiding the canvas under his clothing. He hung the pieces of stretcher down his trouser legs. And he left evidence
behind to make you assume he’d cut the painting from its mounting.”

  “And that painting over the fireplace—”

  “Is your painting, Mr. Reeves. With the stretcher reassembled and the canvas reattached to it. Mr. Lewes, would you care to examine it?”

  Lewes was on his way before I’d finished my sentence. He whipped out a magnifying glass, took a look, and drew back his head almost at once.

  “Why, this is painted with acrylics!” he said, as if he’d found a mouse turd on his plate. “Mondrian never used acrylics. Mondrian used oils.”

  “Of course he did,” said Reeves. “I told you that wasn’t ours.”

  “Mr. Reeves? Examine the painting.”

  He walked over, looked at it. “Acrylics,” he agreed. “And not ours. What did I tell you? Now—”

  “Take it off the wall and look at it, Mr. Reeves.”

  He did so, and it was painful to watch the play of expression across the man’s face. He looked like a banker who’d foreclosed on what turned out to be swampland. “My God,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Our stretcher,” he said. “Our stamp incused in the wood. That painting was hanging in the Hewlett where thousands of eyes looked at it every day and nobody ever noticed it was a fucking acrylic copy.” He turned, glared furiously at Barlow. “You damned cad,” he said. “You filthy murdering bounder. You fucking counterfeit.”

  “It’s a trick,” Barlow protested. “This burglar pulls fake rabbits out of fake hats and you fools are impressed. What’s the matter with you, Reeves? Can’t you see you’re being flimflammed?”

  “I was flimflammed by you,” Reeves said, glowering. “You son of a bitch.”

  Reeves took a step toward Barlow, and Ray Kirschmann was suddenly on his feet, with a hand on the curator’s forearm. “Easy,” he said.

  “When this is all over,” Barlow said, “I’ll bring charges against you, Rhodenbarr. I think any court would call this criminal libel.”

  “That’s really a frightening prospect,” I said, “to someone who’s currently wanted for two murders. But I’ll keep it in mind. You won’t be pressing any charges, though, Mr. Barlow. You’ll be upstate pressing license plates.”

  “You’ve got no evidence of anything.”

  “You had easy access to this apartment. You and your wife live on the fifth floor. You didn’t have the problem of getting in and out of a high-security building.”

  “A lot of people live here. That doesn’t make any of us murderers.”

  “It doesn’t,” I agreed, “but it makes it easy to search your apartment.” I nodded at Ray, and he in turn nodded at Officer Rockland, who went to the door and opened it. In marched a pair of uniformed officers carrying yet another Mondrian. It looked for all the world just like the one Lloyd Lewes had just damned as an acrylic fake.

  “The genuine article,” I said. “It almost glows when it’s in the same room with a copy, doesn’t it? You might have carved up the painting you palmed off on Onderdonk, but you took good care of this one, didn’t you? It’s the real thing, the painting Piet Mondrian gave to his friend Haig Petrosian.”

  “And we had a warrant,” Ray said, “in case you were wondering. Where’d you boys find this?”

  “In a closet,” one said, “in the apartment you said on the fifth floor.”

  Lloyd Lewes was already holding his glass to the canvas. “Well, this is more like it,” he said. “It’s not acrylic. It’s oil paint. And it certainly looks to be genuine. Quite a different thing from that, that specimen over there.”

  “Now there’s been some mistake,” Barlow said. “Listen to me. There’s been some mistake.”

  “We also found this,” the cop said. “In the medicine cabinet. No label, but I tasted it, and if it ain’t chloral hydrate it’s a better fake than the painting.”

  “Now that’s impossible,” Barlow said. “That’s impossible.” And I thought he was going to explain why it was impossible, that he’d flushed all the extra chloral hydrate down the john, but he caught himself in time. Listen, you can’t have everything.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Ray Kirschmann told him, but I’m not going to go through all that again. Miranda-Escobedo’s a good or a bad thing, depending on whether or not you’re a cop, but who wants to put it down word for word all the time?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After a few urgent words to his wife, something about which lawyer to call and where to reach him, two of the uniformed police officers led J. McLendon Barlow off in handcuffs. Francis Rockland stayed behind, and so did Ray Kirschmann.

  There was a respectful silence, broken at length by Carolyn Kaiser. “Barlow must have killed Turnquist,” she said, “because Turnquist was the artist he used, and Turnquist could expose him. Right?”

  I shook my head. “Turnquist was the artist, all right, and Barlow might have killed him sooner or later if he felt he had to. But he certainly wouldn’t have come down to my bookstore to do it. Remember, I’d met Barlow as Onderdonk, and all I had to do was catch sight of him walking around hale and hearty and the whole scheme would collapse. It’s my guess that Barlow never even left his apartment after the murder. He wanted to stay out of sight until I was behind bars where I couldn’t get a look at him. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Barlow?”

  All eyes turned to the woman who now sat alone on the couch. She cocked her head, started to say something, then simply nodded.

  “Edwin P. Turnquist was an artist,” I said, “and a fervent admirer of Mondrian’s. He never considered himself a forger. God knows how Barlow got hold of him. Turnquist talked to total strangers in museums and galleries, and perhaps that’s how they first made one another’s acquaintance. At any rate, Barlow latched on to Turnquist because he could use him. He got the man to copy paintings, and Turnquist derived great satisfaction from looking at his own work in respected museums. He was a frequent visitor to the Hewlett, Mr. Reeves. All the attendants knew him.”

  “Ah,” said Reeves.

  “He only paid a dime.”

  “And quite proper,” Reeves said. “We don’t care what you pay, but you must pay something. That’s our policy.”

  “That and exclusion of the young. But no matter. When Barlow began to panic about your forthcoming retrospective exhibition, Mr. Danforth, he paid a call on Edwin Turnquist. I suppose he urged him to keep out of sight. The substance of their conversation is immaterial. More to the point, Turnquist realized that all along Barlow had not merely been playing a joke on the art world. He’d been making great sums of money at it, and Turnquist’s idealism was outraged. He’d been satisfied with the subsistence wages he made as Barlow’s forger. Art for art’s sake was fine with him, but that Barlow should profit from the game was not.”

  I looked at the bearded man with the lank brown hair. “That’s where you came into it, isn’t it, Mr. Jacobi?”

  “I never really came into it.”

  “You were Turnquist’s friend.”

  “Well, I knew him.”

  “You had rooms on the same floor in the same Chelsea rooming house.”

  “Yeah. I knew him to talk to.”

  “You teamed up with Turnquist. One or the other of you followed Barlow to my shop. After that, and just hours before I came up here to appraise the books, you came to my shop alone and tried to sell me a book you’d stolen from the public library. You wanted me to buy it knowing it was a stolen book, and you figured I would because you thought I was an outlet for faked or stolen art. You thought that would give you some kind of an opening, some kind of hold on me, but when I wouldn’t bite you didn’t know what to do next.”

  “You make it sound pretty sinister,” Jacobi said. “Eddie and I didn’t know how you fit into the whole thing and I wanted to dope it out. I thought if I sold you the butterfly book you’d let something slip. But you didn’t.”

  “And you didn’t pursue it.”

  “I figured you were too honest. Any book dealer wh
o’d turn down a deal like that wouldn’t be into receiving stolen works of art.”

  “But Friday morning you evidently changed your mind. You and Edwin Turnquist came to my shop together. By then I’d been arrested for Onderdonk’s murder and released on bail, and you figured I was tied in somehow. Turnquist, meanwhile, wanted to let me know what Barlow was up to. He probably guessed I’d been framed and wanted to help me clear myself.”

  I took a sip of coffee. “I opened the store and then went two doors down the street to visit a friend of mine. Maybe you two got there after I’d left. Maybe you were the bums I saw lurking in a doorway, and maybe you purposely dawdled across the street until you saw me leave. In either event, the two of you let yourselves in. I just left the door on the springlock, and that wouldn’t present any great problem for a man who can spirit large illustrated books out of libraries.”

  “Hell, I’m not a real book thief,” Jacobi protested. “That was just to get your interest.”

  I let that pass for the time being. “Once inside,” I said, “you turned the bolt so no one else would walk in and interrupt you. You led your good friend Turnquist to the back of the store where nobody could see you, and you stuck an icepick in his heart and left him sitting on the toilet.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because there was money to be made and he was screwing it up. He had a batch of forged canvases he’d painted in his spare time and he was planning to destroy them. You figured they were worth money, and you were probably right. For another, he had the goods on Barlow. Once I was safely behind bars, you could put the screws on Barlow and bleed him forever. If Turnquist talked, to me or to anybody else, he was taking away your meal ticket. You made up your mind to kill him, and you knew that if you killed him in my store I’d very likely get tagged with his murder, and that would get me out of the picture. Which would make it that much easier for you to turn up the heat under Barlow.”

  “So I killed him right there in your store.”