The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (18 page)

Phone calls, phone calls, phone calls. By the time I was done my ears ached from taking their turns pressed against the receiver. If Gordon Onderdonk knew what I was doing with his message units, he’d turn over in his drawer.

When I was finished I made another cup of coffee and found a Milky Way bar in the freezer and a package of Ry-Krisp in a cupboard. It made a curious meal.

I ate it anyway, went back to the living room and killed a little time. It was late but not late enough. Finally it
was
late enough, and I let myself out of Onderdonk’s apartment, leaving the door unlocked. I walked all the way down to the fifth floor, smiling as I passed the sleeping Ms. DeGrasse on Fifteen, sighing as I passed the Applings on Eleven, shaking my head as I passed Leona Tremaine on Nine. I had a bad moment getting through the fire door lock on Five. I don’t know why. It was the same simple proposition as all the other fire door locks, but perhaps my fingers were stiff from dialing the telephone. I unlocked the door, and I crossed the hallway to another door, and after a careful look and listen I opened the door.

I was as quiet as a mouse. There were people asleep within and I didn’t want to wake them. And I had a great many things to do.

And, finally, they were all done. I slipped ever so quietly out of that fifth-floor apartment, locked the locks after me, and went up the stairs again to Sixteen.

You know, I think that was the worst part of it. Climbing stairs is hard work, and climbing ten flights of stairs (there was still, thank God, no thirteenth floor) was very hard work. The New York Road Runners Club has a race each year up eighty-six flights of stairs to the top of the Empire State Building, and some lean-limbed showoff wins it every time, and he’s welcome to it. Ten flights of stairs was bad enough.

I let myself into Onderdonk’s apartment once again, closed the door, locked it, and took a little time to catch my breath.

“O
h, great,” I said. “Everybody’s here.

“And indeed everybody was. Ray Kirschmann had shown up first, flanked by a trio of fresh-faced young lads in blue. He talked to someone downstairs, and a couple of building employees came up to the Onderdonk apartment and set up folding chairs to supplement the Louis Quinze pieces that were already on hand. Then the three uniformed cops stuck around, one upstairs, the others waiting in the lobby to escort people up as they arrived, while Ray went out to pick up some of the other folks on the list.

While all this was going on, I stayed in the back bedroom with a book and a thermos of coffee. I was reading Defoe’s
The History of Colonel Jack,
and the man lived seventy years without ever writing a dull sentence, but I had a little trouble keeping my mind on his narrative. Still, I bided my time. A man likes to make an entrance.

Which I ultimately did, saying,
Oh, great. Everybody’s here.
It was comforting the way every head turned at my words and every eye followed me as I skirted the semicircular grouping of chairs and dropped into the leather wing chair facing them. I scanned the little sea of faces—well, call it a lake of faces. They looked back at me, or at least most of them did. A few turned their eyes to gaze over the fireplace, and after a moment so did I.

And why not? There was Mondrian’s
Composition with Color,
placed precisely where it had been on my first visit to the Charlemagne, and positively glowing with its vivid primary colors and sturdy horizontal and vertical lines.

“Makes a powerful statement, doesn’t it?” I leaned back, crossed my legs, made myself comfortable. “And of course it’s why we’re all here. A common interest in Mondrian’s painting is what binds us all together.”

I looked at them again, not as a group but as individuals. Ray Kirschmann was there, of course, sitting in the most comfortable chair and keeping one eye on me and another on the rest of the crowd. That sort of thing can leave a man walleyed, but he was doing a good job of it.

Not far from him, in a pair of folding chairs, were my partner in crime and her partner in lust. Carolyn was wearing her green blazer and a pair of gray flannel slacks, while Alison wore chinos and a striped Brooks Brothers shirt with the collar buttoned down and the sleeves rolled up. They made an attractive couple.

Not far from them, seated side by side on a six-foot sofa, were Mr. and Mrs. J. McLendon Barlow. He was a slender, dapper, almost elegant man with neatly combed iron-gray hair and a military bearing; with his posture he could have been just as comfortable on one of the folding chairs and left the sofa for somebody who needed it. His wife, who could have passed for his daughter, was medium height and slender, a large-eyed creature who wore her long dark hair pinned up in what I think they call a chignon. I know they call something a chignon, and I think that’s what it is. Was. Whatever.

Behind and to the right of the Barlows was a chunkily built man with the sort of face Mondrian might have painted if he’d ever gotten into portrait work. It was all right angles. He was jowly and droopy-eyed, and he had a moustache that was graying and tightly curled hair as black as India ink, and his name was Mordecai Danforth. The man sitting next to him looked about eighteen at first glance, but if you looked closer you could double the figure. He was very pale, wore rimless spectacles and a dark suit with an inch-wide black silk tie, and his name was Lloyd Lewes.

A few feet to Lewes’s right, Elspeth Petrosian sat with her hands folded in her lap, her lips set in a thin line, her head cocked, her expression one of patient fury. She was neatly dressed in Faded Glory jeans and a matching blouse, and was wearing Earth Shoes, with the heel lower than the toe. Those were all the rage a few years back, with ads suggesting that if everybody wore them we could wipe out famine and pestilence, but you don’t see them much anymore. You still see a lot of famine and pestilence, though.

To the right and to the rear of Elspeth, in another of the folding chairs, was a young man whose dark suit looked as though he only wore it on Sundays. Which was fine, because that’s what day it was. He had moist brown eyes and a slightly cleft chin, and his name was Eduardo Melendez.

On Eduardo’s left was another young man, also in a suit, but with a pair of New Balance 730s on his feet instead of the plain black oxfords Eduardo favored. I could see the top of one shoe and the sole of the other, because he was sitting on an upholstered chair with his right leg up on one of the folding chairs. He was Wally Hemphill, of course, and I guessed that his knee had finally made it from sensitivity to pain.

Denise Raphaelson was sitting a couple of yards from Wally. There were paint smears on her dungarees and her plaid shirt was starting to go in the elbow, but she looked all right to me. She evidently looked not bad to Wally, too, and the feeling seemed to be mutual, judging from the glances they kept stealing at one another. Well, why not?

Four more men filled out the audience. One had a round face and a high forehead and looked like a small-town banker in a television commercial, eager to lend you money so that you could fix up your home and make it an asset to the community you lived in. His name was Barnett Reeves. The second was bearded and booted and scruffy, and he looked like someone who’d approach the banker and ask for a college loan. And be turned down. His name was Richard Jacobi. The third was a bloodless man in a suit as gray as his own complexion. He had, as far as I could tell, no lips, no eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and he looked like the real-life banker, the one who approved mortgages in the hope of eventual foreclosure. His name was Orville Widener. The fourth man was a cop, and he wore a cop’s uniform, with a holstered pistol and a baton and a memo book and handcuffs and all that great butch gear cops get to carry. His name was Francis Rockland, and I happened to know that he was missing a toe, but offhand I couldn’t tell you which one.

I looked at them and they looked at me, and Ray Kirschmann, who I sometimes think exists just to take the edge off moments of high drama, said, “Quit stallin’, Bernie.”

So I quit stalling.

I said, “I’d say I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here, but you’re not. You know why I summoned you here. And, now that you’re here, I’ll—”

“Get to the point,” Ray suggested.

“I’ll get to the point,” I agreed. “The point is that a man named Piet Mondrian painted a picture, and four decades later a couple of men got killed. A man named Gordon Onderdonk was murdered in this very apartment, and another man named Edwin Turnquist was murdered in a bookstore in the Village.
My
bookstore in the Village, as it happens, and along with Mondrian I seem to be the common denominator in this story. I left this apartment minutes before Onderdonk was killed, and I walked into my own store minutes after Turnquist was killed, and the police suspected me of having committed both murders.”

“Perhaps they had good reason,” Elspeth Petrosian suggested.

“They had every reason in the world,” I said, “but I had an edge. I knew I hadn’t killed anybody. Beyond that, I knew I’d been framed. I’d been led to this apartment on the pretext that its owner wanted his library appraised. I spent a couple of hours examining his library, came up with a figure and accepted a fee for my work. I walked out with my fingerprints all over the place, and why not? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t care if I left my fingerprints on the coffee table or my name with the concierge. But it was crystal clear to me that I’d been invited here for the sole purpose of establishing my presence here, so that I could take the rap for burglary and homicide, the theft of a painting and the brutal slaying of its rightful owner.”

I took a breath. “I could see that much,” I went on, “but it didn’t make sense. Because I’d been framed not by the murderer but by the victim, and where’s the sense in that? Why would Onderdonk wander into my shop with a cock-and-bull story, lure me up here, get me to leave my prints on every flat surface that would take them, and then duck into the other room to get his head beaten in?”

“Maybe the murderer capitalized on an opportunity,” Denise said. “The way some quick-witted thief seized a chance to steal a painting yesterday afternoon.”

“I thought of that,” I said, “but I still couldn’t figure Onderdonk’s angle. He’d had me up here to frame me for something, and what could it be if it wasn’t his murder? The theft of the painting?

“Well, that seemed possible. Suppose he decided to fake a burglary in order to stick it to his insurance company. Why not add verisimilitude by having the fingerprints of a reformed burglar where investigators could readily find them? It didn’t really make sense, because I could justify my presence, so framing me would only amount to an unnecessary complication, but lots of people do dumb things, especially amateurs dabbling at crime. So he could have done that, and then his accomplice in the deal could have double-crossed him, murdered him, and left the reformed burglar to carry the can for both the burglary and the murder.”

“Reformed burglar,” Ray grunted. “I could let that go once, but that’s twice you said it. Reformed!”

I ignored him. “But I still couldn’t make sense out of it,” I said. “Why would the murderer tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in a closet? Why not just kill him and leave him where he fell? And why cut the Mondrian canvas from its stretcher? Thieves do that in museums when they have to make every second count, but this killer figured to have all the time in the world. He could remove the staples and take the painting from the stretcher without damaging it. For that matter, he could wrap it in brown paper and carry it out with the stretcher intact.”

“You said he was an amateur,” Mordecai Danforth said, “and that amateurs do illogical things.”

“I said dumb things, but that’s close enough. Still, how many dumb things can the same person do? I kept getting stuck on the same contradiction. Gordon Onderdonk went to a lot of trouble to frame me, and what he got for his troubles was killed. Well, I was missing something, but you know what they say—it’s hard to see the picture when you’re standing inside the frame. I was inside the frame and I couldn’t see the picture, but I began to get little flashes of it, and then it became obvious. The man who framed me and the murder victim were two different people.”

Carolyn said, “Slow down, Bern. The guy who got you over here and the guy who got his head bashed in—”

“Were not the same guy.”

“Don’t tell me that’s not Onderdonk down there in the morgue,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got a positive ID from three different people. That’s him, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk, that’s the guy.”

“Right. But somebody else came into my shop, introduced himself as Onderdonk, invited me up here, opened the door for me, paid me two hundred dollars for looking at some books, and then beat the real Onderdonk’s brains out as soon as I walked out the door.”

“Onderdonk himself was here all the time?” This from Barnett Reeves, the jolly banker.

“Right,” I said. “In the closet, all trussed up like a chicken and with enough chloral hydrate in his bloodstream to keep him quiet as an oiled hinge. That’s why he was out of sight, so I wouldn’t step on him if I took a wrong turn on my way to the bathroom. The murderer didn’t want to risk killing Onderdonk until he had the frame perfectly fitted around me. That way, too, he could make sure the time of death coincided nicely with my departure from the building. Medical examiners can’t time things to the minute—it’s never that precise—but he couldn’t go wrong timing things as perfectly as possible.”

“You’re just supposing all this, aren’t you?” Lloyd Lewes piped up. His voice was reedy and tentative, a good match for his pale face and his narrow tie. “You’re just creating a theory to embrace some inconsistencies. Or do you have additional facts?”

“I have two fairly substantial facts,” I said, “but they don’t prove much to anyone but me. Fact number one is that I’ve been to the morgue, and the body in Drawer 328-B”—now how on earth did I remember that number?—“isn’t the man who wandered into my bookstore one otherwise fine day. Fact number two is that the man who called himself Gordon Onderdonk is here right now, in this room.”

I’ll tell you, when everybody in a room draws a breath at the same moment, you get one hell of a hush.

Orville Widener broke the silence. “You have no proof for that,” he said. “We have just your word.”

“That’s right, that’s what I just told you. For my part, I suppose I should have guessed early on that the man I met wasn’t Gordon Onderdonk. There were clues almost from the beginning. The man who let me into this apartment—I can’t call him Onderdonk anymore so let’s call him the murderer—he just opened the door an inch or two before he let me in. He kept the chainlock on until the elevator operator had been told it was okay. He called me by name, no doubt for the operator’s benefit, but he fumbled with the lock until the elevator had left the floor.”

“Is true,” Eduardo Melendez said. “Mr. Onderdonk, he alla time comes into the hall to meet a guest. This time I doan see him. I think notheen of it at the time, but is true.”

“I thought nothing of it myself,” I said, “except that I wondered why a man security-conscious enough to keep a door on a chainlock when an announced and invited guest was coming up wouldn’t have more than one Segal dropbolt lock on his door. I should have done some wondering later on, when the murderer left me to wait for the elevator alone, dashing back into his apartment to answer a phone that I never heard ringing.” I hadn’t questioned that action, of course, because it had been a response to a fervent prayer, allowing me to dash down the stairs instead of getting shunted back onto the elevator. But I didn’t have to tell them that.

“There was another thing I kept overlooking,” I went on quickly. “Ray, you kept referring to Onderdonk as a big hulk of a man, and you made it sound as though clouting him over the head was on a par with felling an ox with a single blow. But the man who called himself Onderdonk wasn’t anybody’s idea of a hulk. If anything he was on the slight side. That should have registered, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Remember, the first time I ever even heard the name Onderdonk was when the killer came into my bookshop and introduced himself to me. I assumed he was telling the truth, and I took a long time to start questioning that assumption.”