Lawrence Block: The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

“Shit on toast,” she said, loud. “Will you just listen to me? Please? It’s Archie.”

“Archie?”

She nodded. “Archie,” she said. “They’ve kidnapped Archie Goodwin.”

“The cat,” I said.

“Right.”

“Archie the cat. Your Burmese cat. That Archie.”

“Of course, Bern. Who else?”

“You said Archie Goodwin, and the first thing I thought-”

“That’s his full name, Bern.”

“I know that.”

“I didn’t mean Archie Goodwin the person, Bern, because he’s a character in the Nero Wolfe stories, and the only way he could have been kidnapped would be in a book, and if that happened I wouldn’t run up here in the middle of the night and carry on about it. You want to know the truth, Bern, I think you need a drink more than I do, which is saying something.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

It was more like five. I walked down the hall past my friend Mrs. Hesch’s apartment to Mrs. Seidel’s. Mrs. Seidel was visiting family in Shaker Heights, according to Mrs. Hesch. I rang her bell for safety’s sake, then let myself into her apartment. (She’d gone off without double-locking her door, so all I had to do was loid the springlock with a strip of plastic. Someone, I thought, would have to talk to Mrs. Seidel about that.)

I came back from there with a mostly full bottle of Canadian Club. I poured drinks for both of us. Carolyn had hers swallowed before I had the cap back on the bottle.

“That’s better,” she said.

I took a drink myself, and as it hit bottom I remembered that I was pouring it into a very empty stomach. It would be a lot easier to get me drunk than to get Carolyn sober, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I opened the fridge and built a sandwich of thin-sliced Polish ham and Monterey jack cheese on one of those dark musky rye breads that comes in little square loaves. I took a big bite and chewed thoughtfully and could have killed for a bottle of Dos Equis.

“What about Archie?” I said.

“He doesn’t drink.”

“Carolyn-”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be drunk, Bern.” She tilted the bottle and helped herself to a few more cc’s of the CC, as it were. “I went home and fed the cats and had something to eat, and then I got restless and went out. I kept bopping around. I think I had a touch of moon madness. Did you happen to notice the moon?”

“No.”

“Neither did I, but I’ll bet it’s full or close to it. I kept feeling as though the problem was that I just wasn’t in the right place. So I’d go somewhere else and I’d feel the same way. I went to Paula’s and the Duchess and Kelly’s West and a couple of straight bars on Bleecker Street, and then I went back to Paula’s and played a little pool, and then I hit this pigpen on Nineteenth Street, I forget the name, and then I hit the Duchess again-”

“I get the picture.”

“I was bouncing is what I was doing, and of course you have to have a drink when you go to a place, and I went to a lot of places.”

“And had a lot of drinks.”

“What else? But I wasn’t looking to get drunk, see. I was looking to get lucky. Will true love ever come to Carolyn Kaiser? And, failing that, how about true lust?”

“Not tonight, I gather.”

“I’ll tell you, I couldn’t get arrested. I called Alison a couple of times, which I swore I wasn’t gonna do, but it’s all right because she didn’t answer. Then I went home. I figured I’d make it a reasonably early night, maybe have a brandy before I turned in, and I opened the door and the cat was missing. Archie, I mean. Ubi was fine.”

Archie, full name Archie Goodwin, was a sleek Burmese given to eloquent yowling. Ubi, full name Ubiquity or Ubiquitous, I forget which, was a plump Russian Blue, more affectionate and a good deal less assertive than his Burmese buddy. Both had started life as males, and each had received at a tender age the sort of surgical attention which leaves one purring in soprano.

“He was hiding somewhere,” I suggested.

“No way. I looked in all his hiding places. In things, under things, behind things. Besides, I ran the electric can opener. That’s like a fire alarm to a dalmatian.”

“Maybe he snuck out.”

“How? The window was shut and the door was locked. John Dickson Carr couldn’t have slipped him out of there.”

“The door was locked?”

“Locked up tight. I always double-lock my dead bolt locks when I go out. You made me a believer in that department. And I locked the Fox police lock. I know I locked all those locks because I had to unlock them to get in.”

“So he went out when you left. Or maybe he snuck out while you were letting yourself in.”

“I would have noticed.”

“Well, you said yourself that you’d had a few drinks more than usual to celebrate the full moon. Maybe-”

“I wasn’t that bad, Bern.”

“Okay.”

“And he never does that anyway. Neither of the cats ever tries to get out. Look, you could say this and I could say that and we’d be going around Robin Hood’s barn because I know for a fact the cat was snatched. I got a phone call.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what time I got home and I don’t know how much time I spent looking for the cat and running the electric can opener. There was a little brandy and I finally poured some for myself and sat down with it and the phone rang.”

“And?”

She poured another drink, a short one, and paused with the glass halfway to her lips. She said, “ Bern? It wasn’t you, was it?”

“Huh?”

“I mean I could see how it could be a joke that got out of hand, but if it was, tell me now, huh? If you tell me now there won’t be any hard feelings, but if you don’t tell me now all bets are off.”

“You think I took your cat.”

“No I don’t. I don’t think you’ve got that kind of an asshole sense of humor. But people do wacky things, and who else could unlock all those locks and lock ’em up again on the way out? So all I want you to do is say, ‘Yes, Carolyn, I took your cat,’ or ‘No, you little idiot, I didn’t take your cat,’ and then we can get on with it.”

“No, you little idiot, I didn’t take your cat.”

“Thank God. Except if you had I’d know the cat was safe.” She looked at the glass in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. “Did I just pour this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I must have known what I was doing,” she said, and drank it. “The phone call.”

“Right. Tell me about it.”

“I’m not sure if it was a man or a woman. It was either a man making his voice high or a woman making her voice husky, and I couldn’t tell you which. Whoever it was had an accent like Peter Lorre except really phony. ‘Ve haff ze poosycat.’ That kind of accent.”

“Is that what he said? ‘Ve haff ze poosycat’?”

“Or words to that effect. If I want to see him again, di dah di dah di dah di dah.”

“What are all the di dahs about?”

“You’re not gonna believe this, Bern.”

“He asked for money?”

“A quarter of a million dollars or I’ll never see my cat again.”

“A quarter of a-”

“Million dollars. Right.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Dollars. Right.”

“For-”

“A cat. Right.”

“I’ll be a-”

“Child of a dog. Right. So will I.”

“Well, it’s nuts,” I said. “In the first place the cat’s not worth any real money. Is he show quality?”

“Probably, but so what? You can’t breed him.”

“And he’s not a television star like Morris. He’s just a cat.”