Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

On Eduardo’s left was another young man, also in a suit, but with a pair of New Balance 730s on his feet instead of the plain black oxfords Eduardo favored. I could see the top of one shoe and the sole of the other, because he was sitting on an upholstered chair with his right leg up on one of the folding chairs. He was Wally Hemphill, of course, and I guessed that his knee had finally made it from sensitivity to pain.

Denise Raphaelson was sitting a couple of yards from Wally. There were paint smears on her dungarees and her plaid shirt was starting to go in the elbow, but she looked all right to me. She evidently looked not bad to Wally, too, and the feeling seemed to be mutual, judging from the glances they kept stealing at one another. Well, why not?

Four more men filled out the audience. One had a round face and a high forehead and looked like a small-town banker in a television commercial, eager to lend you money so that you could fix up your home and make it an asset to the community you lived in. His name was Barnett Reeves. The second was bearded and booted and scruffy, and he looked like someone who’d approach the banker and ask for a college loan. And be turned down. His name was Richard Jacobi. The third was a bloodless man in a suit as gray as his own complexion. He had, as far as I could tell, no lips, no eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and he looked like the real-life banker, the one who approved mortgages in the hope of eventual foreclosure. His name was Orville Widener. The fourth man was a cop, and he wore a cop’s uniform, with a holstered pistol and a baton and a memo book and handcuffs and all that great butch gear cops get to carry. His name was Francis Rockland, and I happened to know that he was missing a toe, but offhand I couldn’t tell you which one.

I looked at them and they looked at me, and Ray Kirschmann, who I sometimes think exists just to take the edge off moments of high drama, said, “Quit stallin’, Bernie.”

So I quit stalling.

I said, “I’d say I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here, but you’re not. You know why I summoned you here. And, now that you’re here, I’ll-”

“Get to the point,” Ray suggested.

“I’ll get to the point,” I agreed. “The point is that a man named Piet Mondrian painted a picture, and four decades later a couple of men got killed. A man named Gordon Onderdonk was murdered in this very apartment, and another man named Edwin Turnquist was murdered in a bookstore in the Village. My bookstore in the Village, as it happens, and along with Mondrian I seem to be the common denominator in this story. I left this apartment minutes before Onderdonk was killed, and I walked into my own store minutes after Turnquist was killed, and the police suspected me of having committed both murders.”

“Perhaps they had good reason,” Elspeth Petrosian suggested.

“They had every reason in the world,” I said, “but I had an edge. I knew I hadn’t killed anybody. Beyond that, I knew I’d been framed. I’d been led to this apartment on the pretext that its owner wanted his library appraised. I spent a couple of hours examining his library, came up with a figure and accepted a fee for my work. I walked out with my fingerprints all over the place, and why not? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t care if I left my fingerprints on the coffee table or my name with the concierge. But it was crystal clear to me that I’d been invited here for the sole purpose of establishing my presence here, so that I could take the rap for burglary and homicide, the theft of a painting and the brutal slaying of its rightful owner.”

I took a breath. “I could see that much,” I went on, “but it didn’t make sense. Because I’d been framed not by the murderer but by the victim, and where’s the sense in that? Why would Onderdonk wander into my shop with a cock-and-bull story, lure me up here, get me to leave my prints on every flat surface that would take them, and then duck into the other room to get his head beaten in?”

“Maybe the murderer capitalized on an opportunity,” Denise said. “The way some quick-witted thief seized a chance to steal a painting yesterday afternoon.”

“I thought of that,” I said, “but I still couldn’t figure Onderdonk’s angle. He’d had me up here to frame me for something, and what could it be if it wasn’t his murder? The theft of the painting?

“Well, that seemed possible. Suppose he decided to fake a burglary in order to stick it to his insurance company. Why not add verisimilitude by having the fingerprints of a reformed burglar where investigators could readily find them? It didn’t really make sense, because I could justify my presence, so framing me would only amount to an unnecessary complication, but lots of people do dumb things, especially amateurs dabbling at crime. So he could have done that, and then his accomplice in the deal could have double-crossed him, murdered him, and left the reformed burglar to carry the can for both the burglary and the murder.”

“Reformed burglar,” Ray grunted. “I could let that go once, but that’s twice you said it. Reformed!”

I ignored him. “But I still couldn’t make sense out of it,” I said. “Why would the murderer tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in a closet? Why not just kill him and leave him where he fell? And why cut the Mondrian canvas from its stretcher? Thieves do that in museums when they have to make every second count, but this killer figured to have all the time in the world. He could remove the staples and take the painting from the stretcher without damaging it. For that matter, he could wrap it in brown paper and carry it out with the stretcher intact.”

“You said he was an amateur,” Mordecai Danforth said, “and that amateurs do illogical things.”

“I said dumb things, but that’s close enough. Still, how many dumb things can the same person do? I kept getting stuck on the same contradiction. Gordon Onderdonk went to a lot of trouble to frame me, and what he got for his troubles was killed. Well, I was missing something, but you know what they say-it’s hard to see the picture when you’re standing inside the frame. I was inside the frame and I couldn’t see the picture, but I began to get little flashes of it, and then it became obvious. The man who framed me and the murder victim were two different people.”

Carolyn said, “Slow down, Bern. The guy who got you over here and the guy who got his head bashed in-”

“Were not the same guy.”

“Don’t tell me that’s not Onderdonk down there in the morgue,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got a positive ID from three different people. That’s him, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk, that’s the guy.”

“Right. But somebody else came into my shop, introduced himself as Onderdonk, invited me up here, opened the door for me, paid me two hundred dollars for looking at some books, and then beat the real Onderdonk’s brains out as soon as I walked out the door.”

“Onderdonk himself was here all the time?” This from Barnett Reeves, the jolly banker.

“Right,” I said. “In the closet, all trussed up like a chicken and with enough chloral hydrate in his bloodstream to keep him quiet as an oiled hinge. That’s why he was out of sight, so I wouldn’t step on him if I took a wrong turn on my way to the bathroom. The murderer didn’t want to risk killing Onderdonk until he had the frame perfectly fitted around me. That way, too, he could make sure the time of death coincided nicely with my departure from the building. Medical examiners can’t time things to the minute-it’s never that precise-but he couldn’t go wrong timing things as perfectly as possible.”

“You’re just supposing all this, aren’t you?” Lloyd Lewes piped up. His voice was reedy and tentative, a good match for his pale face and his narrow tie. “You’re just creating a theory to embrace some inconsistencies. Or do you have additional facts?”