The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“My, that doesn’t sound bad at all. If we had world enough and time, but we really don’t. I don’t, anyway. I have to get out of here.”

  “It would be nice,” I said, “if there were a way I could get in touch with you.”

  “The thing is I’m married.”

  “But occasionally indiscreet.”

  “Occasionally. But discreetly indiscreet, if you get my drift. Now if you were to tell me how to get in touch with you—”

  “Uh.”

  “You see? You’re a burglar and you don’t want to run the risk that I’ll get an attack of conscience or catch a bad case of the crazies and go to the police. And I don’t want to run a similar sort of risk. Maybe we should just leave it as is, ships that pass in the night, all that romantic stuff. That way we’re both safe.”

  “You could be right. But sometime down the line we might decide the risk’s worth running, and then where would we be? You know what the saddest words of tongue or pen are.”

  “‘It might have been.’ You’re witty, but John Greenleaf was Whittier.”

  “My God, you read poetry and you’re a smartass and you can verb like a mink. I can’t let you get away altogether. I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “Buy the Village Voice every week and read the personals in the ‘Village Bulletin Board’ section. Okay?”

  “Okay. You do the same.”

  “Faithfully. Can a burglar and an adulteress find happiness in today’s world? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Go ahead, you ring for the elevator.”

  “You don’t want to ride down with me?”

  “I want to tidy up here a little. And I’ll hang around so that we leave the building a few minutes apart. If I get in any trouble, you don’t want to get hooked into it.”

  “Will you get in trouble?”

  “Probably not, because I’m not stealing anything.”

  “That’s what I was asking, really. I mean, I shouldn’t care if you steal anything, including the carpet we verbed on, but evidently I do. Bernie, would you hold me?”

  “Are you scared again?”

  “Nope. I just like the way you hold me.”

  I put my gloves on and waited with the door a few inches ajar until I saw her ring for the elevator. Then I drew the door shut, turned the bolt, and gave the apartment a very quick look-see, just to make sure there was nothing I should know about in any of the other rooms. I didn’t open a drawer or a closet, just ducked into each room and flicked the lights on long enough to establish that there were no signs of Andrea’s presence. No drawers pulled out and dumped, no tables overturned, no signs that the apartment had been visited by a burglar or a cyclone or any comparable unwelcome phenomenon.

  And no dead bodies in the bed or on the floor. Not that one goes around expecting that sort of thing, but I was once caught in the act of burgling the apartment of a man named Flaxford, and Mr. F. himself was dead in another room at the time, a fact which became known to the police before it joined my storehouse of information. So I gave a quick look-see here and there, and if I’d come across the Mondrian, leaning against the wall or perhaps wrapped in brown paper and waiting for the framer, I’d have been roundly delighted.

  No such luck, nor did I spend much time looking. I did all of this reconnaissance rather more quickly than it takes to tell about it, as a matter of fact, and when I was out in the hallway the elevator was on its way up.

  Was it swarming with boys in blue? Had I, like Samson and Lord Randall and the Bold Deceiver before me, been done in by a woman’s treachery? No point, surely, in sticking around to find out. I ducked through the fire door and waited for the elevator to stop on Sixteen.

  But it didn’t. I peeked through the open fire door, and I listened carefully, and the cage went on past Sixteen, stopped, waited, and went on down, passing Sixteen in its descent. I returned to the hallway, picked the tumblers to lock Onderdonk’s door, recalled that Andrea’d said he never double-locked it, picked it again to leave it on the springlock as he was said to have done, sighed heavily at all of this wasted time and effort, stripped off my silly rubber gloves, put them in a pocket, and rang for the elevator.

  No cops in the elevator. No cops in the lobby or out on the street. No hassle from the elevator operator, the concierge or the doorman, even when I refused the last-named chap’s offer to hail me a taxi. I said I felt like walking, and I walked three blocks before hailing a cab myself. That way I didn’t have to switch to some other cab a few blocks away. I could just ride straight home, and that’s what I did.

  Once there, I would have liked to go straight to bed. But I had J. C. Appling’s stamps to worry about and I was worried. I’d have taken a chance and left the job unfinished, but not after all I’d gone through at the Charlemagne in the past ten hours. I’d had far too many human contacts, enough so that I stood a chance of attracting police attention. I hadn’t done anything in Onderdonk’s apartment, hadn’t stolen anything at all but Appling’s stamps (and those earrings, mustn’t forget those earrings) but I certainly didn’t want those stamps sitting around if someone with a tin shield and a warrant came knocking on my door.

  I was up all night with the damned stamps. I swear you never have that problem with cash; you just spend it at leisure. I got all the stamps into glassine envelopes and all of Appling’s album pages into the incinerator, and then I fitted the envelopes into a hidey-hole I probably shouldn’t tell you about, but what the hell. There’s a baseboard electrical outlet that’s a phony, with no BX cable feeding into an aluminum box at its rear. It’s just a plate and a couple of receptacles, mounted to the baseboard with a pair of screws, and if you undo the screws and remove the plate you can reach your hand into an opening about the size of a loaf of bread. (Not the puffy stuff but a nice dense loaf from the health food store.) I keep contraband there until I can unload it, and I also stow burglar tools there. (Not all of them because some of them are innocent enough out of context. You can keep a roll of adhesive tape in the medicine chest and a penlight in the hardware drawer and feel secure about it. Picks and probes and prybars, however, are another story, incriminating in or out of context.)

  There’s another hidey-hole, similar in nature, where I keep my mad money. I even have a radio plugged into one of its receptacles, and the radio even works, running on batteries since its dummy cord is plugged into thin air. I’ve got a few thousand dollars there in untraceable fifties and hundreds, and it’ll do to bribe a cop or post a bond or, if things ever get that desperate, pay my way to Costa Rica. And I hope to God it never comes to that because I’d go nuts there. I mean who do I know in Costa Rica? What would I do if I got a craving for a bagel or a slice of pizza?

  I never did get to sleep. I showered and shaved and put on clean clothes. I went out and had a bagel (but not a slice of pizza) and a plate of eggs and bacon and a lot of coffee at the Greek place a block from my door. I sipped the coffee and my mind, exhausted and overamped from too many hours awake and too much concentration on itty bitty squares of colored paper, slipped a few hours into the past. I remembered eager hands and smooth skin and a warm mouth, and I wondered if there was any truth mixed in with the lies she’d told me.

  There was that sweet magic between us, the physical magic and the mental magic, and I was tired enough to drop my guard and let her in. It would be easy, I thought, to let go a little bit more and fall in love with her.

  And it wouldn’t be that dangerous, I decided. Not much worse than hang-gliding blindfolded. Safer on balance than swimming with an open wound in shark-infested waters, or playing catch with a bottle of nitroglycerine, or singing “Rule, Britannia” at Carney’s Emerald Lounge in Woodside.

  I paid the check and overtipped, as lovers are wont to do. Then I walked over to Broadway and caught a train heading downtown.

  Chapter Ten

  I unlocked the steel gates, opened the door, scooped up the mail and tossed it on the counter, shlepped the bargain table outside and turned the sign in the w
indow from Sorry…We’re CLOSED to OPEN…Come in! By the time I was perched on my stool behind the counter I had my first browser of the day. He was a round-shouldered gentleman in a Norfolk jacket and he was taking a mild interest in the shelves of General Fiction while I was taking about as much interest in the mail. There were a couple of bills, quite a few book catalogs, a postcard asking if I had the Derek Hudson biography of Lewis Carroll—I didn’t—and a government-franked message from some clown who hoped he could continue representing me in Congress. An understandable desire. Otherwise he’d have to start paying his own postage.

  While the chap in the Norfolk jacket was paging through something by Charles Reade, a sallow young woman with teeth like a beaver bought a couple of things from the bargain table. The phone rang and it was someone wanting to know if I had anything by Jeffery Farnol. Now I’ve had thousands of phone calls and I swear no one ever asked me that before. I checked the shelves and was able to report that I had clean copies of Peregrine’s Progress and The Amateur Gentleman. My caller wondered about Beltane the Smith.

  “Not unless he’s under the spreading chestnut tree,” I said. “But I’ll have a look.”

  I agreed to put the other two titles aside, not that anyone else was likely to snatch them up meanwhile. I took them from the shelves, ducked into my back room, placed them on my desk where they could bask in the illumination of the portrait hanging over the desk (St. John of God, patron saint of booksellers), and came back to confront a tall and well-fed man in a dark suit that looked to have been very meticulously tailored for someone else.

  “Well, well, well,” said Ray Kirschmann. “If it ain’t Miz Rhodenbarr’s son Bernard.”

  “You sound surprised, Ray,” I said. “This is my store, this is where I work. I’m here all the time.”

  “Which is why I came here lookin’ for you, Bern, but you were in back and it gave me a turn. I figured somebody snuck in and burgled you.”

  I looked over his shoulder at the fellow in the Norfolk jacket. He’d gone on from Charles Reade to something else, but I couldn’t see what.

  “Business pretty good, Bern?”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “It’s holdin’ up, huh? Except you were never a one for holdups, were you? Makin’ ends meet?”

  “Well, there are good weeks and bad weeks.”

  “But you get by.”

  “I get by.”

  “And you got the satisfaction of treadin’ the straight an’ narrow path between right an’ wrong. That’s gotta be worth somethin’.”

  “Ray—”

  “Peace of mind, that’s what you got. It’s worth a lot, peace of mind is.”

  “Uh—”

  I nodded in the direction of the browser, who had assumed the unmistakable stance of a dropper of eaves. Ray turned, regarded my customer, and pinched his own abundant chin between thumb and forefinger.

  “Oh, I get your drift, Bern,” he said. “You’re worried this gentleman here’ll be taken aback to learn about your criminal past. Is that it?”

  “Jesus, Ray.”

  “Sir,” Ray announced, “you may not realize this, but you’re gonna have the privilege of buyin’ a book from a former notorious criminal. Bernie here was once the sort’d burgle you outta house an’ home, and now he’s a walking testimony to criminal rehabilitation. Yessir, I’ll tell you, all of us in the NYPD think the world of Bernie here. Say, mister, you’re welcome to hang around an’ browse. Last thing I want to do is chase you.”

  But my customer was on his way, with the door swinging shut behind him.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Aw, he was a stiff anyway, Bern. Never woulda bought that book. Guys like him, treat the place like a library. How you gonna make a dime on a bum like that?”

  “Ray—”

  “ ’Sides, he looked shifty. Probably woulda stole the book if he had half the chance. An honest guy like yourself, you don’t realize how many crooked people there are in the world.”

  I didn’t say anything. Why encourage him?

  “Say, Bern,” he said, leaning a heavy forearm on my glass counter. “You’re around books all the time, you’re all the time readin’. What I want to do is read somethin’ to you. You got a minute?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Sure you do,” he said, and reached into his inside jacket pocket, and just then the door burst open and Carolyn exploded through it. “There you are,” she cried. “I called and you didn’t answer, and then I called and the line was busy, and then I—Oh, hi, Ray.”

  “‘Oh, hi, Ray,’” he echoed. “Say it like you’re glad to see me, Carolyn. I’m not some dog that you gotta give me a bath.”

  “I’m going to leave that line alone,” she said.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “You called and he wasn’t here,” Ray said, “and then you called and the line was busy, and then you ran over here. So you got somethin’ to say to him.”

  “So?”

  “So say it.”

  “It’ll keep,” she said.

  “Then maybe you oughta run along, Carolyn. Go get your vacuum cleaner and suck the ticks off a bloodhound.”

  “I could make you the same suggestion,” she said sweetly, “but without the vacuum cleaner. Why don’t you go solicit a bribe, Ray? I got business with Bernie.”

  “So do I, sweetie. I was just lookin’ for a literary opinion from him. The hell, I don’t guess it’d hurt you to hear what I gotta read to him.”

  He drew a little card from his pocket. “‘You have the right to remain silent,’” he intoned. “‘You have the right to consult an attorney. If you do not have legal counsel, you have the right to have counsel provided for you.’” There was more, and the wording wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it, but I’m not going to look it up and reproduce the whole thing here. If you’re interested, go throw a rock through a precinct house window. Somebody’ll come out and read it to you word for word.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you reading me that?”

  “Aw, Bernie. Lemme ask you a question, okay? You know an apartment building called the Charlemagne?”

  “Sure. On Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. Why?”

  “Ever been there?”

  “As a matter of fact I was there the night before last.”

  “No kiddin’. Next you’re gonna tell me you’ve heard of a man named Gordon Onderdonk.”

  I nodded. “We’ve met,” I said. “Once here, in the store, and again two nights ago.”

  “At his apartment at the Charlemagne.”

  “That’s right.” Where was he going with all this? I hadn’t stolen anything from Onderdonk, and the man would hardly have reported me to the police for lifting his letters from Andrea. Unless Ray was taking an elaborate windup before delivering the pitch, and all this Onderdonk stuff was prelude to some more incisive questions about J.C. Appling’s stamp collection. But the Applings hadn’t even returned to the city as of midnight, so how could they have discovered the loss and reported it, and how could Ray have already tied it to me?

  “I went there at his invitation,” I said. “He wanted an appraisal of his personal library, although he’s not likely to be selling it. I spent some time going through his books and came up with a figure.”

  “Decent of you.”

  “I got paid for my time.”

  “Oh, yeah? Wrote you out a check, did he?”

  “Paid me in cash. Two hundred dollars.”

  “Is that a fact? I suppose you’ll report the income on your tax return, a good law-abidin’ reformed citizen like yourself.”

  “What’s all this sarcasm about?” Carolyn demanded. “Bernie didn’t do anything.”

  “Nobody ever did. The prisons are full of innocent guys who got railroaded by corrupt police.”

  “God knows there are enough corrupt police to go around,” Carolyn said, “and if they’re not railroading innocent people, what are they doing?”

&n
bsp; “Anyway, Bern—”

  “Besides eating in restaurants and not paying for their meals,” she went on. “Besides swapping jokes on street corners while old ladies get mugged and raped. Besides—”

  “Besides puttin’ up with insults from some little dyke who needs a rabies shot an’ a muzzle.”

  I said, “Get to the point, Ray. You just read me my rights and it says I don’t have to answer questions, so you can stop asking them. I’ll ask you one. What’s this circus about?”

  “What’s it about? What the hell do you think it’s about? You’re under arrest, Bernie. Why else’d I read you your Miranda?”

  “Under arrest for what?”

  “Aw, Jesus, Bern.” He sighed and shook his head, as if his pessimistic view of human nature had once again been confirmed. “This guy Onderdonk,” he said. “They found him in his bedroom closet, bound and gagged with his head bashed in.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Why, was he breathin’ when you left him like that? Inconsiderate of the bastard to die, but that’s what he did. He’s dead, all right, and what I gotta bring you in for is murder.” He showed me a pair of handcuffs. “I gotta use these,” he said. “Regulations which they’re enforcin’ again these days. But take your time first and close up, huh? And do a good job. Place might wind up stayin’ closed for a while.”

  I don’t think I said anything. I think I just stood there.

  “Carolyn, whyntcha hold the door and me’n Bern’ll bring in the table. You don’t want to leave it out there. They’ll steal it empty in an hour and then somebody’ll walk off with the table. Aw shit, Bern, what’s the matter with you, anyway? You were always a gentle guy. Stealin’s stealin’, but what’d you go an’ kill him for?”

  Chapter Eleven

  “What gives me the most trouble,” Wally Hemphill said, “is finding the time to fit in the miles. Of course what really helps is if I got a client who’s a runner himself. You know how some people’ll do their business over nine holes of golf? ‘Suit up,’ I’ll say, ‘and we’ll lope around the reservoir and see where we stand on this.’ You think we could pick up the pace a little, Bernie?”