cut her off in midsentence and brought her up to date. The visit to the Charlemagne, the bit with the flowers, the incident in Onderdonk’s apartment, the conversation with Wally Hemphill. Everything.
Now she said, “How bad is it, Bernie? Are you in deep shit or what?”
“Let’s call it chest high and rising.”
“It’s my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s my cat, isn’t it?”
“They kidnapped Archie to get at me, Carolyn. If you hadn’t had a cat they’d have found some other way to put pressure on me. All to get a picture off a museum wall, and that’s as impossible as it ever was. You asked if Andrea killed him. That was my first thought, but the times are all wrong. Unless the Medical Examiner’s crazy, Onderdonk was killed while I was stealing Appling’s stamps.”
“He was alone when you left him.”
“As far as I know.”
“And someone else dropped in on him, beat his head in, tied him up, and stuffed him in the closet. And stole the painting?”
“I suppose so.”
“Isn’t it interesting that someone just happens to kill a guy and steal a painting from him, and we’re supposed to steal a painting by the same artist in order to get my cat back?”
“The coincidence struck me, too.”
“Uh-huh. You get this coffee at the felafel joint?”
“Yeah. Not very good, is it?”
“It’s not a question of good or bad. It’s a matter of trying to figure out what they put in it.”
“Chickpeas.”
“Really?”
“Just a guess. They put chickpeas in everything. I must have lived the first twenty-five years of my life without knowing what a chickpea was, and all of a sudden they’re inescapable.”
“What do you figure caused it?”
“Probably nuclear testing.”
“Makes sense. Bern, why tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in the closet? Let’s say they killed him in order to get away with the painting.”
“Which is crazy, because it didn’t look as though anything else was taken. The other art was worth a fortune but the place didn’t even look as though it had been searched, let alone stripped.”
“Maybe somebody just needed the Mondrian for a specific purpose.”
“Like what?”
“Like ransoming a cat.”
“Didn’t think of that.”
“The point is—next time get the coffee at the coffee shop, okay?”
“Sure.”
“The point is, why tie him up and why put him in the closet? To keep the body from being discovered? Makes no sense, does it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did whatsername, Andrea, did she know he was in the closet?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“She was pretty cool, wasn’t she? She’s in an apartment with a dead guy in the closet and a burglar walks in on her and what does she do? Rolls around on the oriental rug with him.”
“It was an Aubusson.”
“My mistake. What do we do now, Bern? Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t tell the police about Andrea.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t tell them anything. It’s not as if she could give me an alibi. I could try telling them that I was in the Appling apartment while somebody was killing Onderdonk, but where would that get me? Just charged with another burglary, and even if I showed them the stamps I couldn’t prove I hadn’t killed Onderdonk before or after I performed philately on Appling’s collection. Anyway, I don’t know her name or where she lives.”
“You don’t think her name’s Andrea?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You could run an ad in the Voice.”
“I could.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I, oh, I sort of liked her, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s good. You wouldn’t want to caper on the carpet with someone you hated.”
“Yeah. The thing is, I sort of thought I might get together with her again. Of course she’s a married woman and there’s no future in that sort of thing, but I thought—”
“You had romantic feelings.”
“Well, yeah, Carolyn, I guess I did.”
“That’s not a bad thing.”
“It isn’t?”
“Of course not. I have them myself. Alison came over last night. We met for a drink, and then I explained I didn’t want to miss an important phone call so we went back to my place. The phone call I was talking about was about the cat, but it never came, and we just sat around and listened to music and talked.”
“Did you get lucky?”
“Bern, I didn’t even try. It was just sort of peaceful and cozy, you know what I mean? You know how standoffish Ubi can be, and he’s especially whacko with Archie gone, but he came over and curled up in her lap. I told her about Archie.”
“That he was missing?”
“That he’d