The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian Read online

  “I thought we were going to leave it alone.”

  “It’s like a scab, it’s irresistible. I’m going to see if I can’t find a book with the painting reproduced. Composition with Color, 1942. God knows how many paintings he did with that title. There’s a minimalist I know on Harrison Street who calls everything he paints Composition #104. It’s his favorite number. If he ever amounts to anything, the art historians are going to go batshit trying to straighten it all out.”

  I was sanding the third coat of gesso when she returned with a large book entitled Mondrian and the Art of De Stijl. She flipped it open to a page near the end, and there was the painting we’d seen in the Hewlett. “That’s it,” I said.

  “How are the colors?”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t they in the right place? I thought you took my sketch along.”

  “Yes, and it’s a wonderful sketch. Burglary’s gain was the art world’s loss. Books of reproductions are never perfect, Bernie. The inks never duplicate the paint a hundred percent. How do these colors compare to what you saw in the painting?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t have that kind of an eye, Denise. Or that kind of a memory. I think this looks about right.” I held the book at arm’s length, tilted it to catch the light. “The background’s darker than I remember it. It was whiter in—I want to say real life, but that’s not what I mean. You know what I mean.”

  She nodded. “Mondrian used off-whites. He tinted his white with a little blue, a little red, a little yellow. I can probably make up something that looks sort of all right. I hope this isn’t going to have to fool an expert.”

  “So do I.”

  “Let me see how you did with the gesso. That’s not bad. I think what we want now is a coat or two of white, just to get that smooth canvas effect, and then a coat of tinted white, and then—I wish I could have like two weeks to work on this.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’m going to use acrylics, obviously. Liquid acrylics. He used oils but he didn’t have some lunatic at his elbow who wanted the finished painting in a matter of hours. Acrylics dry fast but they’re not oils and—”

  “Denise?”

  “What?”

  “There’s no point making ourselves crazy. We’ll just give it our best shot. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got a few things to do, but I can come back after I do them.”

  “I can handle this myself, Bernie. I don’t need help.”

  “Well, I was thinking while I was putting the gesso on the canvas. There are a few things I can be doing at the same time.”

  “Only one person can work on a canvas at a time.”

  “I know that. See how this sounds to you.”

  I told her what I had in mind. She listened and nodded, and when I finished she didn’t say anything but stopped to light a cigarette. She smoked it almost to the filter before she spoke.

  “Sounds elaborate,” she said.

  “I guess it is.”

  “Complicated. I think I see what you’re getting at, but I’ve got the feeling I’m better off not knowing too much. Is that possible?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I think I want music,” she said, and lit another cigarette and switched on her radio, which was tuned to one of the FM jazz stations. I recognized the record they were playing, a solo piano recording of Randy Weston’s.

  “Brings back memories,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it? Jared’s over at a friend’s house. He’ll be home within the hour. He can help.”

  “Great.”

  “I love the Hewlett Collection. Of course Jared has a fierce resentment against the place.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a kid. Kids aren’t allowed, remember?”

  “Oh, right. Not even accompanied by an adult?”

  “Not even accompanied by the front four of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Nobody under sixteen, no exceptions, nohow.”

  “That does seem a little high-handed,” I said. “How’s a kid supposed to develop an appreciation for art in this town?”

  “Oh, it’s real tough, Bernie. Outside of the Met and the Modern and the Guggenheim and the Whitney and the Museum of Natural History and a couple of hundred private galleries, a young person in New York is completely bereft of cultural resources. It’s really hell.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were being sarcastic.”

  “Me? Not in a million years.” She sucked on her cigarette. “I’ll tell you, it’s a pleasure to go in there and not have eight million kids bouncing off the walls. Or class groups, with some brain-damaged teacher explaining at eighty decibels what Matisse had in mind while thirty kids fidget around, bored out of their basketball sneakers. The Hewlett’s a museum for grownups and I love it.”

  “But Jared doesn’t.”

  “He will the day he turns sixteen. Meanwhile it has the lure of forbidden fruit. I think he must be convinced it’s the world’s storehouse of erotic art and that’s why he’s not allowed in it. What I like about the place, aside from the childless aspect and the quality of the collection, is the way the paintings are hung. Hanged? Hung?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Hung,” she said decisively. “Murderers are hanged, or they used to be. Paintings and male models are hung. There’s plenty of space between the paintings at the Hewlett. You can look at them one at a time.” She looked meaningfully at me. “What I’m trying to say,” she said, “is I have a special feeling for the place.”

  “I understand.”

  “Assure me once more that this is in a good cause.”

  “You’ll be helping to ransom a cat and keep an antiquarian bookman out of jail.”

  “Screw the bookman. Which cat is it? The Siamese?”

  “You mean Burmese. Archie.”

  “Right. The friendly one.”

  “They’re both friendly. Archie’s just more outgoing.”

  “Same difference.”

  Randy Weston had given way to Chick Corea, and now that record had also ended and a young man with an untrained voice was bringing us the news. The first item had to do with progress in some arms-limitations talks, which may have had global importance but which I must admit I didn’t pay heed to, and then the little big mouth was telling us that an anonymous tip had led police to the body of a man identified as Edwin P. Turnquist in a West Village warehouse. Turnquist had been stabbed in the heart, probably with an icepick. He was an artist and a latter-day bohemian who’d hung out with the early Abstract Expressionists at the old Cedar Tavern, and who’d been living at the time of his death in an SRO rooming house in Chelsea.

  That would have been plenty, but he wasn’t finished. Prime suspect in the case, he added, was one Bernard Rhodenbarr, a Manhattan bookseller with several arrests for burglary. Rhodenbarr was out on bail after having been charged with homicide in the death of Gordon Kyle Onderdonk just days ago at the fashionable and exclusive Charlemagne Apartments. Onderdonk was presumed to have been murdered in the course of a burglary, but Rhodenbarr’s motive for the murder of Turnquist had not yet been disclosed by police sources. “Perhaps,” the little twerp suggested, “Mr. Turnquist was a man who knew too much.”

  I went over and turned off the radio, and the ensuing silence stretched out like the sands of the Sahara. It was broken at length by the flick of a Bic as Denise kindled yet another cigarette. Through a cloud of smoke she said, “The name Turnquist rings a muted bell.”

  “I thought it might.”

  “What was his first name—Edwin? I still never heard of him. Except in that conversation we never had.”

  “Uh.”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you, Bernie?”

  “No.”

  “Or that other man? Onderdonk?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re in this up to your eyeballs, aren’t you?”

  “Up to my hairline.”


  “And the police are looking for you.”

  “So it would seem. It would be, uh, best if they didn’t find me. I used up all my cash posting a bond the other day. Not that any judge would let me out on bail this time around.”

  “And if you’re in a cell on Rikers Island, how can you right wrongs and catch killers and liberate pussycats?”

  “Right.”

  “What do they call what I am? Accessory after the fact?”

  I shook my head. “Unwitting accomplice. You never turned the radio on. If I get out of this, there won’t be any charges, Denise.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Er.”

  “Forget I asked. How’s Carolyn holding up?”

  “Carolyn? She’ll be okay.”

  “Funny the turns human lives take.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She tapped the canvas. “The one in the Hewlett’s not framed? Just a canvas on a stretcher?”

  “Right. The design continues around the edge.”

  “Well, he painted that way sometimes. Not always but sometimes. This whole business is crazy, Bernie. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All the same,” she said, “it just might work.”

  Eighteen

  It 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.

  Chapter Nineteen

  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.”