telling us that an anonymous tip had led police to the body of a man identified as Edwin P. Turnquist in a West Village warehouse. Turnquist had been stabbed in the heart, probably with an icepick. He was an artist and a latter-day bohemian who’d hung out with the early Abstract Expressionists at the old Cedar Tavern, and who’d been living at the time of his death in an SRO rooming house in Chelsea.
That would have been plenty, but he wasn’t finished. Prime suspect in the case, he added, was one Bernard Rhodenbarr, a Manhattan bookseller with several arrests for burglary. Rhodenbarr was out on bail after having been charged with homicide in the death of Gordon Kyle Onderdonk just days ago at the fashionable and exclusive Charlemagne Apartments. Onderdonk was presumed to have been murdered in the course of a burglary, but Rhodenbarr’s motive for the murder of Turnquist had not yet been disclosed by police sources. “Perhaps,” the little twerp suggested, “Mr. Turnquist was a man who knew too much.”
I went over and turned off the radio, and the ensuing silence stretched out like the sands of the Sahara. It was broken at length by the flick of a Bic as Denise kindled yet another cigarette. Through a cloud of smoke she said, “The name Turnquist rings a muted bell.”
“I thought it might.”
“What was his first name—Edwin? I still never heard of him. Except in that conversation we never had.”
“Uh.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you, Bernie?”
“No.”
“Or that other man? Onderdonk?”
“No.”
“But you’re in this up to your eyeballs, aren’t you?”
“Up to my hairline.”
“And the police are looking for you.”
“So it would seem. It would be, uh, best if they didn’t find me. I used up all my cash posting a bond the other day. Not that any judge would let me out on bail this time around.”
“And if you’re in a cell on Rikers Island, how can you right wrongs and catch killers and liberate pussycats?”
“Right.”
“What do they call what I am? Accessory after the fact?”
I shook my head. “Unwitting accomplice. You never turned the radio on. If I get out of this, there won’t be any charges, Denise.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Er.”
“Forget I asked. How’s Carolyn holding up?”
“Carolyn? She’ll be okay.”
“Funny the turns human lives take.”
“Uh-huh.”
She tapped the canvas. “The one in the Hewlett’s not framed? Just a canvas on a stretcher?”
“Right. The design continues around the edge.”
“Well, he painted that way sometimes. Not always but sometimes. This whole business is crazy, Bernie. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“All the same,” she said, “it just might work.”
Eighteen
It was somewhere around eleven when I left the Narrowback Gallery. Denise had offered me the hospitality of the couch but I was afraid to accept it. The police were looking for me and I didn’t want to be anyplace they might think of looking. Carolyn was the only person who knew I’d gone to Denise’s, and she wouldn’t talk unless they lit matches underneath her fingernails, but suppose they did? And she might let it slip to a friend—Alison, for instance—and the friend might prove less closemouthed.
For that matter, the police might not need a tip. Ray knew Denise and I had kept company in the past, and if they went through the routine of checking all known associates of the suspect, the fat would be in the fire.
Meanwhile it was in the frying pan and I was on the street. In an hour or so the bulldog edition of the Daily News would also be on the street, and it would very likely have my picture in it. For the time being I was my usual anonymous self, but I didn’t feel anonymous; walking through SoHo, I found myself seeking shadows and shrinking from the imagined stares of passersby. Or perhaps the stares weren’t imagined. Spend enough time shrinking in shadows and people are apt to stare at you.
On Wooster Street I found a telephone booth. A real one, for a change, with a door that drew shut, not one of those new improved numbers that leaves you exposed to the elements. Such booths have become rare to the point that some citizen had failed to recognize this particular one for what it was, mistaking it instead for a public lavatory. I chose privacy over comfort and closed myself within.
When I did this, a little light went on—literally, not figuratively. I loosened a couple of screws in the overhead fixture, took down a sheet of translucent plastic, and unscrewed the bulb a