to me by the police, and if I just survived the trek around the park I might live forever.
“It’s funny,” Wally said now, leading our charge up a hill as if he thought he was Teddy Roosevelt. “We’d see each other in Riverside Park, we’d do a few easy miles together, and I always thought of you as a runner.”
“Well, I rarely go more than three miles, see, and I’m not used to hills.”
“No, you didn’t let me finish. I’m not knocking your running, Bernie. I thought of you as a runner and it never occurred to me that you might be a burglar. I mean you don’t think of burglars as regular-type guys who talk about Morton’s Foot and shin splints. You know what I mean?”
“Try to think of me as a guy who runs a secondhand book store.”
“And that’s why you were at Onderdonk’s apartment.”
“That’s right.”
“At his invitation. You went over the night before last, that was Tuesday night, and you appraised his library.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he was alive when you left.”
“Of course he was alive when I left. I never killed anybody in my life.”
“You left him tied up?”
“No, I didn’t leave him tied up. I left him hale and hearty and saying goodbye to me at the elevator. No, come to think of it, he ducked back into his apartment to answer the phone.”
“So the elevator operator didn’t actually see him there when he took you out of the building.”
“No.”
“What time was that? If he was talking to somebody on the phone, and if we can find out who—”
“It was probably around eleven. Something like that.”
“But the elevator operator who took you down went on after midnight, didn’t he? And the doorman and the whatchamacallit—”
“The concierge.”
“Right. They changed shifts at midnight, and they identified you, said they let you out of the building around one. So if you left Onderdonk at eleven—”
“It could have been eleven-thirty.”
“I guess you had a long wait for the elevator.”
“They’re like the subways, you miss one at that hour and you can wait forever for the next one.”
“You had another engagement in the building.”
I don’t think Norb Klein would have figured it out any faster. “Something like that,” I agreed.
“But then you went back again last night. Without using Onderdonk to get you into the building. The after-midnight staff said you left the building late two nights running, and both times the elevator operator swears he picked you up at Onderdonk’s floor. Did he?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the other staff people say you managed to get in delivering sandwiches from the deli.”
“It was flowers from the florist, which shows how reliable eyewitnesses are.”
“I think they said flowers, as a matter of fact.”
“From the deli?”
“I think they said flowers from the florist, and I think my memory changed it to sandwiches from the deli, and I think you’re fooling yourself if you think those witnesses aren’t going to be good ones. And the medical evidence isn’t good.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to what I managed to learn, Onderdonk was killed by a blow to the head. He was hit twice with something hard and heavy, and the second shot did it. Fractured skull, cerebral hematoma, and I forget the exact language but what it amounts to is he got hit and he died of it.”
“Did they fix the time?”
“Roughly.”
“And?”
“According to their figures, he died sometime between when you arrived at the Charlemagne and when you left.”
“When I left the second time,” I said.
“No.”
“No?”
“You went up to Onderdonk’s apartment Tuesday night, right? And left a little before one Wednesday morning, something like that.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, that’s when he died. Now that’s give or take a couple of hours, that’s for sure, because they’re just not that accurate when another twenty-four hours has gone by before the body’s discovered. But he definitely got it that night. Bernie? Where are you going?”
Where I was going was over the 102nd Street cutoff, which trims a full mile off the six-mile circuit and avoids the worst hill. Wally wanted the extra mile and the hill training that went with it, but I just kept trotting doggedly west on the cutoff road and all he could do was run alongside arguing.
“Listen,” he said, “in a couple of years you’ll be begging for some hill training. Those prison yards, you get plenty of time to run but it’s all around a flat tenth-of-a-mile track. Even so, I got a client up at Green Haven who’s doing upwards of a hundred miles a week. He just