The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,39
my feet. “What difference did the second visit make?” I asked him. “I’d be in the same trouble anyway, with my prints all over the apartment and the staff remembering me, and if they really figure the time of death the way you said, the second visit is redundant.”
“Uh-huh. Except it makes it much harder in court to argue that you were never there in the first place.”
“Oh.”
“You were there for over eight hours yesterday, Bernie. That’s another thing I don’t understand. You spent eight hours in an apartment with a dead man and you say you didn’t even know he was dead. Didn’t he strike you as a little unresponsive?”
“I never saw him, Wally.” Puff, puff. “Ray Kirschmann said the body was discovered in the bedroom closet. I checked all the rooms but I didn’t go into the closets.”
“What did you take from his apartment?”
“Nothing.”
“Bernie, I’m your lawyer.”
“And here I thought you were my coach. It doesn’t matter. Even if you were my spiritual adviser the answer would be the same. I didn’t take anything from Onderdonk’s apartment.”
“You went there to steal something.”
“Right.”
“And you left there without it.”
“Right again.”
“Why?”
“It was gone when I got there. Somebody’d already hooked it.”
“So you turned around and went home.”
“That’s right.”
“But not for eight hours or so. Something on television you didn’t want to miss? Or were you reading your way through his library?”
“I didn’t want to leave the building until the shift changed. And I didn’t spend eight hours in Onderdonk’s apartment. I stayed in another apartment, an empty one, until after midnight.”
“There’s things you’re not telling me.”
“Maybe a couple.”
“Well, that’s okay, I guess. But you haven’t done much direct lying to me, have you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Positive.”
“And you didn’t kill him.”
“God, no.”
“And you don’t know who did. Bernie? Do you know who killed him?”
“No.”
“Got an idea?”
“Not a clue.”
“Once more around? We’ll take the Seventy-second Street cutoff, do a nice easy four-mile loop. Okay?”
“No way, Wally.”
“C’mon, take a shot at it.”
“Not a chance.”
“Well,” he said, chest heaving, arms pumping, “I’ll catch you later, then. I’m gonna go for it.”
Chapter Twelve
“She must have killed him,” Carolyn said. “Right?”
“You mean Andrea?”
“Who else? That’d be one reason why she was scared shitless when you walked in on her. She was afraid you’d discover the skeleton in her closet. Of course it wasn’t her closet and he wasn’t a skeleton yet, but—”
“You figure she overpowered him and tied him up and killed him? She’s just a girl, Carolyn.”
“That’s a real pig remark, you know that?”
“I mean in terms of physical strength. Maybe she could hit him hard enough to knock him out, maybe even hard enough to kill him, and maybe she could even drag him into the closet when she was done, but somehow I can’t believe she did any of those things. Maybe she went there to look for her letters, just as she said.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Somehow I don’t. But I’m willing to believe she went there looking for something.”
“The Mondrian.”
“And then what did she do, smuggle it past me secreted in her bodily cavities?”
“Not likely. You’d have found it.”
I gave her a look. It was morning, Friday morning, and if I didn’t feel like a new man, I at least felt like a secondhand one in excellent shape. I’d left Wally Hemphill in the park and went straight home to a shower and a hot toddy and a full ten hours of sleep with the door double-bolted and the blinds shut and the phone unplugged. I’d come downtown early and tried Carolyn at the Poodle Factory every ten minutes or so, and when she answered I hung the BACK IN TEN MINUTES sign in the window and went outside and pulled the door shut.
Across the street, a couple of shaggy guys lurking in a doorway shrank into the shadows when I glanced their way. They looked like a bottle gang without a bottle, and I had second thoughts about leaving my bargain table on the street, but what could they steal? My books on home winemaking were all safe inside the store. I left the table where it was and picked up two cups of coffee around the corner, then took them to Carolyn’s canine beauty parlor.
She was clipping a Bichon Frise when I got there. I mistook it at first for a snow-white poodle, and Carolyn was quick to point out why it didn’t look at all like a poodle, and after a couple of paragraphs of American Kennel Club lore I