Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“You left him tied up?”

“No, I didn’t leave him tied up. I left him hale and hearty and saying goodbye to me at the elevator. No, come to think of it, he ducked back into his apartment to answer the phone.”

“So the elevator operator didn’t actually see him there when he took you out of the building.”

“No.”

“What time was that? If he was talking to somebody on the phone, and if we can find out who-”

“It was probably around eleven. Something like that.”

“But the elevator operator who took you down went on after midnight, didn’t he? And the doorman and the whatchamacallit-”

“The concierge.”

“Right. They changed shifts at midnight, and they identified you, said they let you out of the building around one. So if you left Onderdonk at eleven-”

“It could have been eleven-thirty.”

“I guess you had a long wait for the elevator.”

“They’re like the subways, you miss one at that hour and you can wait forever for the next one.”

“You had another engagement in the building.”

I don’t think Norb Klein would have figured it out any faster. “Something like that,” I agreed.

“But then you went back again last night. Without using Onderdonk to get you into the building. The after-midnight staff said you left the building late two nights running, and both times the elevator operator swears he picked you up at Onderdonk’s floor. Did he?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the other staff people say you managed to get in delivering sandwiches from the deli.”

“It was flowers from the florist, which shows how reliable eyewitnesses are.”

“I think they said flowers, as a matter of fact.”

“From the deli?”

“I think they said flowers from the florist, and I think my memory changed it to sandwiches from the deli, and I think you’re fooling yourself if you think those witnesses aren’t going to be good ones. And the medical evidence isn’t good.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to what I managed to learn, Onderdonk was killed by a blow to the head. He was hit twice with something hard and heavy, and the second shot did it. Fractured skull, cerebral hematoma, and I forget the exact language but what it amounts to is he got hit and he died of it.”

“Did they fix the time?”

“Roughly.”

“And?”

“According to their figures, he died sometime between when you arrived at the Charlemagne and when you left.”

“When I left the second time,” I said.

“No.”

“No?”

“You went up to Onderdonk’s apartment Tuesday night, right? And left a little before one Wednesday morning, something like that.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, that’s when he died. Now that’s give or take a couple of hours, that’s for sure, because they’re just not that accurate when another twenty-four hours has gone by before the body’s discovered. But he definitely got it that night. Bernie? Where are you going?”

Where I was going was over the 102nd Street cutoff, which trims a full mile off the six-mile circuit and avoids the worst hill. Wally wanted the extra mile and the hill training that went with it, but I just kept trotting doggedly west on the cutoff road and all he could do was run alongside arguing.

“Listen,” he said, “in a couple of years you’ll be begging for some hill training. Those prison yards, you get plenty of time to run but it’s all around a flat tenth-of-a-mile track. Even so, I got a client up at Green Haven who’s doing upwards of a hundred miles a week. He just goes out there and runs for hours. It’s boring, but it has its advantages.”

“He probably doesn’t have too much trouble remembering the route.”

“There’s that, and he’s averaging something like fifteen miles a day. You can imagine the kind of shape he’ll be in when he gets out.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Oh, that’s hard to say. But he should be coming up for parole in a couple of years, and he’ll have a very good chance if he behaves himself between now and then.”

“What did he do?”

“Well, he had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend and he found out, and he sort of cut them a little.”

“Socially?”

“With a knife. They, uh, died.”

“Oh.”

“These things happen.”

“Like clockwork,” I said. “Wally, ease up. These uphills cut the legs out from under me.”

“You gotta charge the hills, Bernie. That’s how you develop your quads.”

“It’s how I develop angina. How could he have been dead before I left the building?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and we ran along in a companionable silence. Then he said, without looking my way, “Bernie, I could see how it could happen accidentally. He was a big, powerful guy and you had to knock him out and tie him up to rob him. You knocked him cold and tied him up and he was alive at that point, and then some leakage inside his head or something murky along those lines, it killed him and you didn’t even know it. Because obviously you wouldn’t go back to the building the next day if you knew he was dead. Except wait a minute. If you thought you left him tied up and alive, why would you go back to the building? You wouldn’t want to show your face within a mile of that building, would you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“Of course not.”

“Unless you killed him and you knew he was dead, and you went back-to what?”

“I didn’t hit him or steal from him, let alone kill him, Wally, so that makes the question a hard one to answer.”

“Forget Onderdonk for a minute. Why did you go back to the Charlemagne? You’d already committed a burglary there the night before. That’s what you did, right? Stole something from somebody after you left his apartment?”

“Right.”

“So why’d you go back? Don’t tell me the building was such a soft touch because I won’t believe it.”

“No, it’s worse than Fort Knox. Shit.”

“It’s easier if you level with me, Bernie. And anything you tell me is privileged. I can’t reveal it.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

“I went back to Onderdonk’s apartment.”

“To Onderdonk’s apartment.”

“Right.”

“You had another appointment with him? No, because you used the scam with the sandwiches to get in the door.”

“Flowers.”

“Did I say sandwiches again? I meant flowers. You went back there knowing he was dead?”

“I went back there knowing he was out because he didn’t answer his goddamn phone.”

“You called him? Why?”

“To establish that he was out so I could go back.”

“What for?”

“To steal something.”

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. “Something caught your eye when you were appraising his library.”

“That’s right.”

“So you thought you’d drop in and lift it.”

“It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the idea, yes.”

“It’s getting harder to think of you as a bookseller and easier to think of you as a burglar. What the papers call an unrepentant career criminal, but this bit makes you sound like a kleptomaniac with foresight. You went back to an apartment that you’d already left your fingerprints all over the night before? And where you’d already given your right name to get into the building?”

“I’m not saying it was the smartest move I ever made.”

“Good, because it wasn’t. I don’t know, Bernie. I’m not sure hiring me was the smartest move you ever made, either. I’m a pretty decent attorney but my criminal experience is limited, and I can’t say I did a hell of a lot for the client who cut those two people, but then I didn’t knock myself out because I figured we’d all sleep better with him running around the yard at Green Haven. But you need someone who can work a combination of bribery and plea bargaining, if you want my honest opinion, and I don’t have the moves for that.”