The Burglar in the Closet - By Lawrence Block Page 0,40

Are you a dentist?”

“Christ, no.”

“You sound like you’re the direct opposite of a dentist, whatever that could be. Maybe you knock people’s teeth out. I’m a little flaky this morning, or is it afternoon already? Jesus, it is, isn’t it?”

“Just barely.”

“Gag.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s how you can find your Grabow, though I don’t think you should bother, to tell you the truth. What I think you should do is buy something beautiful by the one and only Denise Raphaelson, but failing that you can try Gag. That’s initials, G-A-G, it’s Gotham Artists’ Guild. They’re a reference service, you go there and they have slides of everybody’s work in their files, plus they have everything indexed by artists’ names, and they can tell you what gallery handles an artist’s work or how to get in touch with him directly if he doesn’t have any gallery affiliation. They’re located somewhere in midtown, I think in the East Fifties. Gotham Artists’ Guild.”

“I think I love you.”

“Honest? This is so sudden, sir. All I know about you is you’re not a dentist, which is a point in your favor, truth to tell. I bet you’re married.”

“I bet you’re wrong.”

“Yeah? Living with somebody, huh?”

“Nope.”

“You weigh three hundred pounds, you’re four-foot-six, and you’ve got warts.”

“Well, you’re wrong about the warts.”

“That’s good, because they give me toads. What’s your name?”

Was there any way on earth the cops were going to interrogate this lady? There was not. “Bernie,” I said. “Bernie Rhodenbarr.”

“God, if I married you I’d still have the same initials. I could keep on wearing all my monogrammed blouses. And yet we’ll never meet. We’ll have shared this magic moment over the telephone and we’ll never encounter each other face to face. That’s sad but it’s okay. You told me you loved me and that’s better than anything that happened to me all day yesterday. Gotham Artists’ Guild. Got it?”

“Got it. ’Bye, Denise.”

“’Bye, Bernie. Keep in touch, lover.”

Gotham Artists’ Guild was located on East Fifty-fourth Street between Park and Madison. They told me over the phone to call in person, so I took a bus uptown and walked over to their office. It was two flights up over a Japanese restaurant.

I’d been winging it with Denise Raphaelson, inventing my story as I went along, but now I was prepared and I gave my spiel to an owlish young man without any hesitation. He brought me a half dozen Kodachrome slides and a viewer.

“This is the only Grabow we have,” he said. “See if it looks like the painting you remember.”

It didn’t look anything like the painting I’d described to Denise, and I almost said as much until I remembered that the painting I’d been talking about had never existed in the first place. Grabow’s work turned out to involve bold amorphous splashes of color applied according to some scheme which no doubt made considerable sense to the artist. It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually liked, but I was looking at it in miniature, and maybe it would blow my mind if I saw it life-size.

As if it mattered. “Grabow,” I said positively. “The painting I saw was like these, all right. It’s definitely the same artist.”

I couldn’t get an address or a phone number. When the artist is represented by a gallery that’s all they’ll tell you, and Walter Ignatius Grabow was represented by the Koltnow Gallery on Greene Street. That was also in SoHo, quite possibly no more than a stone’s throw from Denise Raphaelson. And possibly rather more than that; my grasp of geography south of the Village is limited.

I found a pay phone—the Hotel Wedgeworth, Fifty-fifth just east of Park. I called the Koltnow Gallery and nobody answered. I called Jillian’s apartment and nobody answered. I called Craig’s office and nobody answered. I called 411 and asked the Information operator if there was a listing in Manhattan for Walter Ignatius Grabow. She told me there wasn’t. I thanked her and she said I was welcome. I thought of calling Denise back and telling her I’d managed to get in touch with my Grabow, thanks to her good advice, but I restrained myself. I called Koltnow again, and Jillian, and Craig’s office, and nothing happened. Nobody was home. I dialed my own number and established that I wasn’t home either. The whole world was out to lunch.

Ray Kirschmann had staked his claim to half of Crystal’s jewels and I hadn’t even stolen them yet. He’d figured things wrong but he’d come scarily