Lawrence Block: The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“And we had a warrant,” Ray said, “in case you were wondering. Where’d you boys find this?”

“In a closet,” one said, “in the apartment you said on the fifth floor.”

Lloyd Lewes was already holding his glass to the canvas. “Well, this is more like it,” he said. “It’s not acrylic. It’s oil paint. And it certainly looks to be genuine. Quite a different thing from that, that specimen over there.”

“Now there’s been some mistake,” Barlow said. “Listen to me. There’s been some mistake.”

“We also found this,” the cop said. “In the medicine cabinet. No label, but I tasted it, and if it ain’t chloral hydrate it’s a better fake than the painting.”

“Now that’s impossible,” Barlow said. “That’s impossible.” And I thought he was going to explain why it was impossible, that he’d flushed all the extra chloral hydrate down the john, but he caught himself in time. Listen, you can’t have everything.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Ray Kirschmann told him, but I’m not going to go through all that again. Miranda-Escobedo’s a good or a bad thing, depending on whether or not you’re a cop, but who wants to put it down word for word all the time?

After a few urgent words to his wife, something about which lawyer to call and where to reach him, two of the uniformed police officers led J. McLendon Barlow off in handcuffs. Francis Rockland stayed behind, and so did Ray Kirschmann.

There was a respectful silence, broken at length by Carolyn Kaiser. “Barlow must have killed Turnquist,” she said, “because Turnquist was the artist he used, and Turnquist could expose him. Right?”

I shook my head. “Turnquist was the artist, all right, and Barlow might have killed him sooner or later if he felt he had to. But he certainly wouldn’t have come down to my bookstore to do it. Remember, I’d met Barlow as Onderdonk, and all I had to do was catch sight of him walking around hale and hearty and the whole scheme would collapse. It’s my guess that Barlow never even left his apartment after the murder. He wanted to stay out of sight until I was behind bars where I couldn’t get a look at him. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Barlow?”

All eyes turned to the woman who now sat alone on the couch. She cocked her head, started to say something, then simply nodded.

“Edwin P. Turnquist was an artist,” I said, “and a fervent admirer of Mondrian’s. He never considered himself a forger. God knows how Barlow got hold of him. Turnquist talked to total strangers in museums and galleries, and perhaps that’s how they first made one another’s acquaintance. At any rate, Barlow latched on to Turnquist because he could use him. He got the man to copy paintings, and Turnquist derived great satisfaction from looking at his own work in respected museums. He was a frequent visitor to the Hewlett, Mr. Reeves. All the attendants knew him.”

“Ah,” said Reeves.

“He only paid a dime.”

“And quite proper,” Reeves said. “We don’t care what you pay, but you must pay something. That’s our policy.”

“That and exclusion of the young. But no matter. When Barlow began to panic about your forthcoming retrospective exhibition, Mr. Danforth, he paid a call on Edwin Turnquist. I suppose he urged him to keep out of sight. The substance of their conversation is immaterial. More to the point, Turnquist realized that all along Barlow had not merely been playing a joke on the art world. He’d been making great sums of money at it, and Turnquist’s idealism was outraged. He’d been satisfied with the subsistence wages he made as Barlow’s forger. Art for art’s sake was fine with him, but that Barlow should profit from the game was not.”

I looked at the bearded man with the lank brown hair. “That’s where you came into it, isn’t it, Mr. Jacobi?”

“I never really came into it.”

“You were Turnquist’s friend.”

“Well, I knew him.”

“You had rooms on the same floor in the same Chelsea rooming house.”

“Yeah. I knew him to talk to.”

“You teamed up with Turnquist. One or the other of you followed Barlow to my shop. After that, and just hours before I came up here to appraise the books, you came to my shop alone and tried to sell me a book you’d stolen from the public library. You wanted me to buy it knowing it was a stolen book, and you figured I would because you thought I was an outlet for faked or stolen art. You thought that would give you some kind of an opening, some kind of hold on me, but when I wouldn’t bite you didn’t know what to do next.”

“You make it sound pretty sinister,” Jacobi said. “Eddie and I didn’t know how you fit into the whole thing and I wanted to dope it out. I thought if I sold you the butterfly book you’d let something slip. But you didn’t.”

“And you didn’t pursue it.”

“I figured you were too honest. Any book dealer who’d turn down a deal like that wouldn’t be into receiving stolen works of art.”

“But Friday morning you evidently changed your mind. You and Edwin Turnquist came to my shop together. By then I’d been arrested for Onderdonk’s murder and released on bail, and you figured I was tied in somehow. Turnquist, meanwhile, wanted to let me know what Barlow was up to. He probably guessed I’d been framed and wanted to help me clear myself.”

I took a sip of coffee. “I opened the store and then went two doors down the street to visit a friend of mine. Maybe you two got there after I’d left. Maybe you were the bums I saw lurking in a doorway, and maybe you purposely dawdled across the street until you saw me leave. In either event, the two of you let yourselves in. I just left the door on the springlock, and that wouldn’t present any great problem for a man who can spirit large illustrated books out of libraries.”

“Hell, I’m not a real book thief,” Jacobi protested. “That was just to get your interest.”

I let that pass for the time being. “Once inside,” I said, “you turned the bolt so no one else would walk in and interrupt you. You led your good friend Turnquist to the back of the store where nobody could see you, and you stuck an icepick in his heart and left him sitting on the toilet.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because there was money to be made and he was screwing it up. He had a batch of forged canvases he’d painted in his spare time and he was planning to destroy them. You figured they were worth money, and you were probably right. For another, he had the goods on Barlow. Once I was safely behind bars, you could put the screws on Barlow and bleed him forever. If Turnquist talked, to me or to anybody else, he was taking away your meal ticket. You made up your mind to kill him, and you knew that if you killed him in my store I’d very likely get tagged with his murder, and that would get me out of the picture. Which would make it that much easier for you to turn up the heat under Barlow.”

“So I killed him right there in your store.”

“That’s right.”

“And then walked out?”

“Not right away, because you were still there when I came back. The door was bolted when I came back and I’d left it on the springlock, and if it was bolted that meant you were still inside. I guess you must have hidden in the stacks or in the back room, and after I opened up you slipped out. That had me confused for a while, because I had a visitor shortly after I opened up”-I glanced significantly at Elspeth Petrosian-“and I never even noticed her come in. At first I suspected she’d been the one hiding in the back room and that she had murdered Turnquist, but I couldn’t make sense out of that. You probably left just as she was walking in, or else you slipped out during my conversation with her. It was a lengthy and intense conversation, and I’m sure you could have departed without either of us having noticed.”