Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“I was just leavin’,” Ray said, backing off. His face had a greenish tinge and he didn’t look happy. “ Bern, I’ll be in touch, right?”

“You don’t want to give us a hand?”

“Are you kiddin’?” he said. “Jesus!”

I was around the counter before he was out the door, and he wasn’t taking his time, either. I went through toward the back room and ducked into the john, and there was nothing on the floor but red and black vinyl tiles in a checkerboard pattern. They were quite dry, and about as clean as they generally are.

There was a man sitting on my toilet.

He didn’t look as though he belonged there. He was fully dressed, wearing gray sharkskin trousers with a gray glen-plaid suit jacket. His shirt was maroon and his shoes were a pair of scuffed old wingtips, somewhere between black and brown in hue. He had shaggy rust-brown hair and a red goatee, ill-trimmed and going to gray. His head was back and his jaw slack, showing tobacco-stained teeth that had never known an orthodontist’s care. His eyes, too, were open, and they were of the sort described as guileless blue.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

“You didn’t know he was in here?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s what I figured. You recognize him?”

“The artist,” I said. “The one who paid a dime at the Hewlett Collection. I forget his name.”

“Turner.”

“No, that’s another artist, but it’s close. The guard knew his name, called him by name. Turnquist.”

“That’s it. Bernie, where are you going?”

“I want to make sure there’s nobody in the store,” I said, “and I want to turn the bolt, and I want to change the sign from Open to Closed. ”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Oh,” she said. “Bernie?”

“What?”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Oh, no question,” I said. “They don’t get much deader.”

“That’s what I thought. I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Well, if you have to. But can’t you wait until I get him off the toilet?”

“You can rent ’em for only fifty bucks a month,” she said. “That’s a pretty good deal, isn’t it? Comes to less than two dollars a day. What else can you get for less than two dollars a day?”

“Breakfast,” I said, “if you’re a careful shopper.”

“And a lousy tipper. The only thing is they got a one-month minimum. Even if we bring the thing back in an hour and a half, it’s the same fifty bucks.”

“We might not bring it back at all. How much of a deposit did you have to leave?”

“A hundred. Plus the first month’s rental, so I’m out a hundred and a half. But the hundred comes back when we return the thing. If we return the thing.”

We paused at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street, waiting for the light to change. It changed and we headed across. At the opposite side Carolyn said, “Didn’t they pass a law? Aren’t there supposed to be access ramps at all corners?”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Well, do you call this a ramp? Look at this curb, will you? You could hang-glide off of it.”

“You push down on the handles,” I said, “and I’ll lift. Here we go.”

“Shit.”

“Easy does it.”

“Shit with chocolate sauce. I mean we can manage it, even a steep curb, but what’s a genuinely handicapped person out on his own supposed to do, will you tell me that?”

“You’ve been asking that question once a block.”

“Well, my consciousness is being raised every time we have to shlep this damned thing up another curb. It’s the kind of cause I could get worked up about. Show me a petition and I’ll sign it. Show me a parade and I’ll march. What’s so funny?”

“I was picturing the parade.”

“You’ve got a sick sense of humor, Bernie. Anyone ever tell you that? Help me push-I’m giving our friend here a bumpy ride.”

Not that our friend was apt to complain. He was the late Mr. Turnquist, of course, and the thing we were pushing, as you’ve probably figured out, was a wheelchair, leased from Pitterman Hospital and Surgical Supply on First Avenue between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets. Carolyn had gone there, rented the contraption, and brought it back in the trunk of a cab. I’d helped her get it into the bookstore, where we’d unfolded it and wrestled Turnquist into it.

By the time we left the store he looked natural enough sitting there, and a lot better than he’d looked on the throne in my john. There was a leather strap that fastened around his waist, and I’d added a couple of lengths of old lamp cord to secure his wrists to the chair’s arms and his ankles to an appropriately positioned rail. A lap robe-an old blanket, really, slightly mildewed-covered him from the neck down. A pair of Foster Grants hid his staring blue eyes. A peaked tweed cap that had been hanging on a nail in my back room since March, waiting for its owner to reclaim it, now sat on Turnquist’s head, doing its best to make him a shade less identifiable. And in that fashion we made our way westward, trying to figure out what the hell was happening, and getting distracted once a block when Carolyn started bitching about the curbs.

“What we’re doing,” she said. “Transporting a dead body. Is it a felony or a misdemeanor?”

“I don’t remember. It’s a no-no, that’s for sure. The law takes a dim view of it.”

“In the movies, you’re not supposed to touch anything.”

“I never touch anything in the movies. What you’re supposed to do is report dead bodies immediately to the police. You could have done that. You could have come right out of the john and told Ray there was a corpse sitting on the pot. You wouldn’t have even had to make a phone call.”

She shrugged. “I figured he’d want an explanation.”

“It’s likely.”

“I also figured we didn’t have one.”

“Right again.”

“How’d he get there, Bernie?”

“I don’t know. He felt fairly warm to the touch but I haven’t touched a whole lot of dead people in my time and I don’t know how long it takes them to cool off. He could have been in the store yesterday when I locked up. I closed the place in a hurry, remember, because I’d just been arrested and that kept me from concentrating fully upon my usual routine. He could have been browsing in the stacks, or he could have slipped into the back room and hidden out on purpose.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Beats me. Then he could have been there and sometime in the course of the night or morning he could have gone to the john, sat down on it without dropping his pants, and died.”

“Of a heart attack or something?”

“Or something,” I agreed, and the wheelchair hit a bump in the sidewalk. Our passenger’s head flopped forward, almost dislodging cap and sunglasses. Carolyn straightened things out.

“He’ll sue us,” she said. “Whiplash.”

“Carolyn, the man’s dead. Don’t make jokes.”

“I can’t help it. It’s a nervous reaction. You think he just died of natural causes?”

“This is New York. Murder’s a natural cause in this city.”

“You think he was murdered? Who could have murdered him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think somebody else was in the store with him? How did they get out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he committed suicide.”

“Why not? He was a Russian agent, he had a cyanide capsule in a hollow tooth, and he knew the jig was up, so he let himself into my store and bit down on the old bicuspid. It’s natural enough that he’d want to die in the presence of first editions and fine bindings.”