The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian Read online

  “That’s right.”

  “And then walked out?”

  “Not right away, because you were still there when I came back. The door was bolted when I came back and I’d left it on the springlock, and if it was bolted that meant you were still inside. I guess you must have hidden in the stacks or in the back room, and after I opened up you slipped out. That had me confused for a while, because I had a visitor shortly after I opened up”—I glanced significantly at Elspeth Petrosian—“and I never even noticed her come in. At first I suspected she’d been the one hiding in the back room and that she had murdered Turnquist, but I couldn’t make sense out of that. You probably left just as she was walking in, or else you slipped out during my conversation with her. It was a lengthy and intense conversation, and I’m sure you could have departed without either of us having noticed.”

  He got to his feet, and Ray Kirschmann stood up immediately. Francis Rockland was already standing; he’d moved to within arm’s reach of Jacobi.

  “You can’t prove any of this,” Jacobi said.

  “Your room was searched,” Ray told him pleasantly. “You got enough city-owned books in there to start a branch library.”

  “So? That’s petty theft.”

  “It’s about eight hundred counts of petty theft. Tack all those short sentences together, you got yourself a pretty good-sized paragraph.”

  “Kleptomania,” Jacobi said. “I have a compulsion to steal library books. It’s harmless, and I eventually return them. It hardly qualifies me as a murderer.”

  “There were some pictures in there too,” Ray said. “Fakes, I suppose, but you couldn’t prove it by me. Mr. Lewes here’s the expert, but all I can tell is they’re paintin’s without frames, and what do you bet they turn out to be the work of your buddy Turnquist?”

  “He gave them to me. They were a gift of friendship, and I’d like to see you prove otherwise.”

  “We got a guy goin’ door-to-door at your roomin’ house, and what do you bet we turn up somebody who saw you carryin’ those canvases from his room to yours? And that woulda been after he was killed an’ before the body was discovered, and let’s hear you explain that one away. Plus we got a note in his room, Turnquist’s room, with Bernie’s name and address, same as the note we found on the body. You want to bet they turn out to be your handwritin’ and not his?”

  “What does that prove? So I wrote down a name and address for him.”

  “You also phoned in a tip. You said if we wanted to know who killed Turnquist we should ask Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

  “Maybe somebody called you. It wasn’t me.”

  “Suppose I told you that all incomin’ calls are recorded? And suppose I told you that voiceprint identification is as good as fingerprints?”

  Jacobi was silent.

  “We found somethin’ else in your room,” Ray said. “Show him, Francis.”

  Rockland reached into a pocket and produced an icepick. Richard Jacobi stared at it—hell, so did everybody else in the room—and I thought he was going to fall over in a faint. “You planted that,” he said.

  “Suppose I told you there were blood traces on it? And suppose I told you the blood type’s the same as Turnquist’s?”

  “I must have left it in the bookshop,” Jacobi blurted. “But that’s impossible. I threw it in a Dempsey dumpster. Unless I’m wrong and I dropped it in the store, but no, no, I remember I had it in my hand on the way out.”

  “So you could stab me if I challenged you,” I put in.

  “You never even knew I was there. And you didn’t follow me. Nobody followed me. Nobody even knew I left, and I went around the corner with the icepick hidden under my jacket and I went up Broadway and dumped it in the first dumpster I came to, and you couldn’t possibly have gotten it out of there.” He drew himself triumphantly to his full height. “So it’s a bluff,” he told Ray. “If there’s any blood on that thing it’s not Eddie’s. Somebody planted that icepick and it wasn’t the murder weapon in the first place.”

  “I guess it was just another icepick that happened to be in your room,” Ray said. “But now that you’ve told us where to look for the other one, I don’t think we’ll have a whole lot of trouble finding it. Should be easier than a needle in a haystack, anyway. What else do you want to tell us?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Jacobi said.

  “Now you’re absolutely right about that,” Ray said. “As a matter of fact, you have the right to remain silent, and you have the right to—”

  Di dah di dah di dah.

  After Rockland had led him away, Ray Kirschmann said, “Now we come to the best part.” He went into the kitchen and returned with my five-foot cylindrical tube, uncapped it and drew out a rolled canvas. He unrolled it, and damned if it didn’t look familiar.

  Barnett Reeves asked what it was.

  “A paintin’,” Ray told him. “Another of the Moondrains, except it’s a fake. Turnquist painted it for Barlow and Barlow sold it to Onderdonk and stole it back after he killed him. It’s a perfect match for the broken frame and bits of canvas we found with Onderdonk’s body in the bedroom closet.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Do you mean to say my husband carried that thing off and didn’t have the brains to destroy it?”

  “He probably didn’t have the opportunity, ma’am. What was he gonna do, drop it down the incinerator? Suppose it was recovered? He put it where he thought it would be safe and intended to destroy it at leisure. But acting on my own initiative I discovered it through the use of established police investigative techniques.”

  Oh, God.

  “Anyway,” he went on, presenting it to Orville Widener, “here it is.”

  Widener looked as though his dog had just brought home carrion. “What’s this?” he said. “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “I just told you what it is,” Ray said, “and I’m givin’ it to you on account of the reward.”

  “What reward?”

  “The thirty-five grand reward your company’s gonna shell out for the paintin’ they insured. I’m handin’ you the paintin’ in front of witnesses and I’m claimin’ the reward.”

  “You must be out of your mind,” Widener snapped. “You think we’re going to pay that kind of money for a worthless fraud?”

  “It’s a fraud, okay, but it’s a long ways from worthless. You can pay me the thirty-five grand and say thank you while you do it, because otherwise you’d be ponyin’ up ten times as much to the cousin in Calgary.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Widener said. “We don’t have to pay anything to anybody. The painting’s a fake.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Wally Hemphill said, one hand on his wounded knee. “Onderdonk paid the premiums and you people took them. The fact that it was a fake and was overinsured doesn’t alter your responsibility. The insured acted in good faith—he certainly believed it to be authentic and he had paid a price for it commensurate with the coverage he took out on it. You have to restore the insured painting to my client in Calgary or else reimburse him for a loss in the amount of $350,000.”

  “I’ll see what our own legal people have to say about that.”

  “They’ll say just what I just got through telling you,” Wally said, “and I don’t know what you’re in a huff about. You’re getting off cheap. If it weren’t for Detective Kirschmann here, you’d pay the full insured value.”

  “Then Detective Kirschmann’s costing your client money, isn’t he, counselor?”

  “I don’t think so,” Wally said, “because we need the fake in order to substantiate our suit against Barlow. Barlow’s got money, and he got some of it from my client’s deceased uncle, and I intend to bring suit to recover the price paid for the spurious Mondrian. And I’m also representing Detective Kirschmann, so don’t think you can weasel out of paying him his reward.”

  “We’re a reputable company. I resent your use of the word ‘weasel.’”

  “Oh, please
,” Wally said. “You people invented the word.”

  Barnett Reeves cleared his throat. “I have a question,” he said. “What about the real painting?”

  “Huh?” somebody said. Probably several people, actually.

  “The real painting,” Reeves said, pointing to the canvas that Lloyd Lewes had authenticated several revelations ago. “If there’s no objection, I should like to take that back to the Hewlett Gallery, where it belongs.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Widener said. “If my people are coming up with $35,000—”

  “That’s for that thing,” Reeves said. “I want my painting.”

  “And you’ll get yours,” I said, gesturing toward the acrylic hanging over the fireplace. “That’s the painting that was on display in your gallery, Mr. Reeves, and that’s the painting you’ll take back with you.”

  “We never should have had it in the first place. Mr. Barlow donated a genuine Mondrian—”

  “Nope,” I said. “He donated a fake, and he didn’t even cheat you by doing it. Because it never cost you people a penny. He defrauded the Internal Revenue Service, and they’ll probably have words with him on the subject, but he didn’t defraud you beyond making a horse’s ass out of you, and what’s the big deal about that? A bunch of school kids made a horse’s ass out of you just yesterday afternoon. You’ve got no claim on the painting.”

  “Then who does?”

  “I do,” Mrs. Barlow said. “The police officers took it from my apartment, but that doesn’t mean my husband and I relinquish title to it.”

  “You don’t have title,” Reeves said. “You gave title to the museum.”

  “Not true,” Wally said. “My client in Calgary should get the painting. It should have passed to Onderdonk, and so it now passes in fact to Onderdonk’s heirs.”

  “That’s all nonsense,” Elspeth Petrosian cried. “That thief Barlow never had clear title to it in the first place. The painting belongs to me. It was promised to me by my grandfather, Haig Petrosian, and someone stole it before his wishes could be carried out. I don’t care what Barlow paid for it or who he did or didn’t sell it to. He never dealt with a rightful owner in the first place. That’s my painting.”

  “I’d love to include it in the retrospective,” Mordecai Danforth said, “while all of this is being sorted out, but I suppose that’s out of the question.”

  Ray Kirschmann went over and put a hand on the painting. “Right now this paintin’s evidence,” he said, “and I’m impoundin’ it. The rest of you got your claims and notions and you can fight it out, but the paintin’ goes downtown while you drag each other through the courts, and once the lawyers get started it could go on for a good long while.” To Reeves he said, “If I was you, I’d take that other one downtown and hang it back where it was. By the time the papers write this up, half the city’s gonna want to look at it, fake or no. You can waste time worryin’ about lookin’ like a horse’s ass, but that’d just make you more of a horse’s ass, because whatever you look like they’re gonna be lined up around the block to look at this thing, and what’s so bad about that?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “This is a nice place,” Carolyn said, “and they make a hell of a drink, even if they do charge twice as much as they should for it. Big Charlie’s, huh? I like it.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “I like the girl playing piano, too. I wonder if she’s gay.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “What’s wrong with wondering?” She took a sip, set down her glass. “You left some things out,” she said. “Explaining everything and making all the bits and pieces fit together, you left a few things out.”

  “Well, it was confusing enough as it was. I didn’t want to make it impossible for people to follow.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re a considerate guy. You left out the bit about the cat.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Two men had been murdered and a couple of paintings had been stolen. I couldn’t waste people’s time talking about a kidnapped cat. Anyway, he’d been ransomed and returned, so what was the point?”

  “Uh-huh. Alison was Haig Petrosian’s other granddaughter, wasn’t she? The other one at the dining room table on Riverside Drive. She’s Elspeth’s cousin, and her father was Elspeth’s Uncle Billy.”

  “Well, the resemblance was striking. Remember how you stared at Elspeth in my shop? The funny thing is at first I thought Andrea was the missing cousin, because she and Elspeth both have this habit of cocking their heads to the side, but that was just coincidence. The minute I saw Alison I knew she was the cousin and not Andrea.”

  “Andrea Barlow.”

  “Right.”

  “You left her out, too, didn’t you? You didn’t mention running into her in Onderdonk’s apartment, let alone rolling around on the rug with her.”

  “Well, certain things ought to stay private,” I said. “One thing she told me was true enough. She had been having an affair with Onderdonk, and as it happens her husband knew about it, which probably added to the zest with which he killed the man. Then he must have gloated over the man’s death, and Andrea had visions of a police search of the premises uncovering some pictures Onderdonk had taken of the two of them with a time-release Polaroid. She went back for them, found them or didn’t find them, who the hell knows, and then I walked in on her. No wonder she was terrified. She must have already found Onderdonk’s body in the closet, so she knew it wasn’t him, but who could it be? Either the police, in which case she had some fancy explaining to do, or her murderous husband coming to kill her and leave her there with her dead lover. Either way she was in deep trouble.”

  “And she was so relieved it was you that she was overcome with passion.”

  “Either that or she figured it made sense to screw her way to safety,” I said, “but I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But why mention all of that to the police?”

  “Especially since you’d like to verb her again.”

  “Well—”

  “And why not? She’s got a nifty pair of nouns. I think I need another one of these, and don’t you just love the little getups the waitresses wear? Let’s order another round, and then you can tell me what really happened with the paintings.”

  “Oh, the paintings.”

  “Yeah, the paintings. This one’s from here and that one’s from there and this one’s cut out of the frame and that one isn’t and who can keep it all straight? I know some of what you said was true and I know some of it wasn’t, and I want the whole story. But first I want another of these.”

  Who could deny her anything? She got what she wanted, first the drink and then the explanation.

  “The painting Ray gave back to Orville Widener, the insurance guy, was one that Denise and I painted,” I said. “Naturally Barlow destroyed the canvas he took from the Onderdonk apartment. All he had to do was slash it to ribbons and put it down the incinerator, and I’m sure he did just that. The canvas I gave to Ray, which he in turn gave to Widener, was the portion I cut out of the frame that I left at the Hewlett. And it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match the piece of frame that was left in the closet with Onderdonk’s corpse, because that frame will get conveniently lost. Ray’ll see to that.”

  “What about the painting Reeves took back with him? Was that the one you took from the Hewlett? Did they have an acrylic fake on display all along?”

  “Of course not. Turnquist was an artist and he wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t use acrylics. He used oil paints, same as Mondrian, and the painting in the Hewlett was one of his.”

  “But what Reeves took back with him—”

  “Was a second fake that Denise and I did, tacked to the stretcher from the Hewlett. Remember, it was the incused mark on the stretcher that convinced him. I’d already unstapled the canvas and taken the frame apart to get the painting out of the museum. When I put it back together, I just tacked the acrylic fake to the Hewlett frame.”

  “And Reeves thinks tha
t’s what he had all along.”

  “So it would appear, and what’s the difference? A fake is a fake is a fake is a fake.”

  “I didn’t know Denise painted more than one fake.”

  “Actually she painted three of them. One got cut up, with the frame and some fragments left at the Hewlett and the rest of it returned to Orville Widener. The other went back to the Hewlett with Reeves.”

  “And the third?”

  “Is hanging on a wall in the Narrowback Gallery, and it’s a little different from the others in that the signature monogram is DR instead of PM. She’s pretty proud of it, although I had a hand in it myself, and so did Jared.”

  “She painted three fakes and Turnquist painted two. You said Barlow destroyed one of the Turnquist fakes. What happened to the other one? The one you lifted out of the Hewlett.”

  “Ah,” I said. “It’s been impounded.”

  “Jesus, Bern. That was the real real one that was impounded, the one Mondrian himself painted, remember? Everybody’s claiming it and there’ll be court cases for years and—oh.”

  I guess I must have smiled.

  “Bern, you didn’t.”

  “Well, why not? You heard what Lloyd Lewes said. He looked at the canvas the two cops brought in and said it was an oil painting and it looked right. Why shouldn’t it look right? After all, it sat in the Hewlett for years and nobody suspected a thing. Now it can sit in a locked closet at Number One Police Plaza for a few more years and nobody’ll suspect a thing there, either. I took it along with me when I let myself into the Barlow apartment last night, stapled it to a stretcher and left it where the cops would find it.”

  “And the real Mondrian?”

  “It was in the Barlow apartment when I got there, of course. I took it off its stretcher and stapled Turnquist’s fake in its place. I had to have a stretcher for the Turnquist canvas, remember.”

  “Because you used the stretcher it was on in the Hewlett for one of Denise’s fakes.”

  “Right.”

  “You know what the trouble is, Bern? There’s too many Mondrians. It sounds like a Nero Wolfe novel, doesn’t it? Too Many Cooks, Too Many Clients, Too Many Detectives, Too Many Women. And Too Many Mondrians.”