Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“I almost left myself. He’s not the only one you grossed out.”

“Oh, right. You didn’t know I was faking it.”

“Of course not. I didn’t know there was a dead man in there.”

“Maybe I went into too much detail.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and the phone rang.

I picked it up and Wally Hemphill said, “You’re a hard man to get hold of, Bernie. I was thinking you’d jumped bail.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I don’t know anybody in Costa Rica.”

“Oh, a guy like you would make friends anywhere. Listen, what do you know about this Mondrian?”

“I know he was Dutch,” I said. “Born in 1872 in Amberfoot or something like that. He began, you may recall, as a painter of naturalistic landscapes. As he found his own style he grew artistically and his work became increasingly abstract. By 1917-”

“What’s this, a museum lecture? There’s a painting missing from Onderdonk’s apartment worth close to half a million dollars.”

“I know.”

“You get it?”

“No.”

“It might be useful if you could come up with it. Give us a bargaining chip.”

“Suppose I gave them Judge Crater,” I said, “or a cure for cancer.”

“You really haven’t got the painting?”

“No.”

“Who got it?”

“Probably the person who killed him.”

“You didn’t kill anybody and you didn’t take anything.”

“Right.”

“You were just there to leave fingerprints.”

“Evidently.”

“Nuts. Where do you go from here, Bernie?”

“Around in circles,” I said.

I got off the phone and went in back, with Carolyn trailing after me. There’s a sort of cupboard next to the desk, filled with things I haven’t gotten around to throwing out, and I keep a sweat shirt and some other running gear there. I opened it, took inventory, and removed my shirt.

“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Getting undressed,” I said, unbelting my pants. “What’s it look like?”

“Jesus,” she said, turning her back on me. “If this is a subtle pass, I pass on it. In the first place I’m gay and in the second place we’re best friends and in the third place-”

“I’m going for a run, Carolyn.”

“Oh. With Wally?”

“Without Wally. A nice lope around Washington Square until my mind clears up. There’s nothing in it now but false starts and loose ends. People keep coming out of the woodwork asking me for a painting I never even had my hands on. They all want me to have it. Kirschmann smells a reward and Wally smells a fat fee and I don’t know what all the other people smell. Oil paint, probably. I’ll run and work the kinks out of my mind and maybe all of this will start to make sense to me.”

“And what about me? What’ll I do while you’re doing your Alberto Salazar impression?”

“You could take the wheelchair back.”

“Yeah, I have to do that sooner or later, don’t I? Bern? I wonder if any of the people who saw you in the wheelchair will recognize you jogging around Washington Square.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“Listen,” she said, “anybody says anything, just tell ’em you’ve been to Lourdes.”

Washington Square Park is a rectangle, and the sidewalk around it measures just about five-eighths of a mile, which in turn is just about a kilometer. It’s flat if you’re walking, but when you run there’s a slight slope evident, and if you run counterclockwise, as almost everybody does, you feel the incline as you run east along the southern border of the park. I felt it a lot on the first lap, with my legs still a little achy from the previous day’s ordeal in Central Park, but after that it didn’t bother me.

I was wearing blue nylon shorts and a ribbed yellow tank top and burgundy running shoes, and there was a moment when I found myself wondering whether Mondrian would have liked my outfit. Scarlet shoes would have suited him better, I decided. Or vermillion, like the galleries.

I took it very slow and easy. A lot of people passed me, but I didn’t care if old ladies with aluminum walkers whizzed by me. I just put one wine-colored foot after the other, and somewhere around the fourth lap my mind started to float, and I suppose I ran three more laps after that but I wasn’t keeping score.

I didn’t think about Mondrian or his paintings or all the crazy people who wanted them. I didn’t really think about anything, and after my close to four miles I picked up the plastic bag of stuff I’d left with one of the chessplayers at the park’s southwest corner. I thanked him and trotted west to Arbor Court.

Carolyn wasn’t home, so I used the tools I’d brought along to let myself into her building and then her apartment. The vestibule lock was candy but the others were not, and I wondered what curious villain had picked those locks without leaving a hint of his presence, and why he couldn’t use the same talents to hook the Mondrian out of the Hewlett Collection all by his own self.

I got in, locked up, stripped and showered, the last-named act being the reason I’d come to Arbor Court. I dried off and put on the clothes I’d been wearing earlier and hung my sopping shorts and tank top over the shower curtain rod. Then I looked in the fridge for a beer, made a face when I failed to find one, and fixed some iced tea from a mix. It tasted like what you would expect.

I made a sandwich and ate it and made another sandwich and started eating it, and some clown outside slammed on his brakes and hit his horn, and Ubi hopped onto the window ledge to investigate. I watched him stick his head through the bars, the tips of his whiskers just brushing the bars on either side, and I thought of Archie’s whiskers and found myself feeling uncommonly sorry for the poor cat. There were two people dead already and I was charged with one murder and might very well be charged with the other, and all I could think of was how forlorn Carolyn’s cat must be.

I looked up a number, picked up the phone and dialed it. Denise Raphaelson answered on the third ring and I said, “This is Bernie, and we never had this conversation.”

“Funny, I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

“What do you know about an artist named Turnquist?”

“That’s why you called? To find out what I know about an artist named Turnquist?”

“That’s why. He’s probably crowding sixty, reddish hair and goatee, bad teeth, gets all his clothes from the Goodwill. Sort of a surly manner.”

“Where is he? I think I’ll marry him.”

Denise was a girlfriend of mine for a while, and then she rather abruptly became a girlfriend of Carolyn’s, and that didn’t last very long. She’s a painter, with a loft on West Broadway called the Narrowback Gallery where she lives and works. I said, “Actually, it’s a little late for that.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“You don’t want to know. Ever hear of him?”

“I don’t think so. Turnquist. He got a first name?”

“Probably. Most people do, except for Trevanian. Maybe Turnquist’s his first name and he doesn’t have a last name. There are a lot of people like that. Hildegarde. Twiggy.”

“Liberace.”

“That’s his last name.”

“Oh, right.”

“Does Turnquist ring a bell?”

“Doesn’t even knock softly. What kind of painter is he?”

“A dead one.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, he’s in good company. Rembrandt, El Greco, Giotto, Bosch-all those guys are dead.”

“We never had this conversation.”

“What conversation?”

I hung up and looked up Turnquist in the Manhattan book, and there was only one listing, a Michael Turnquist in the East Sixties. Things are never that easy, and he certainly hadn’t dressed to fit that address, but what the hell. I dialed the number and a man answered almost immediately.