The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,59

could sleep on the subway, but transit cops tend to look at you, and even if they didn’t I’d have felt safer curling up on the third rail.

I took a seat off to one side and just sat there looking at the screen. There wasn’t much dialogue, just sound effects when people got their chests kicked in or fell through plate glass windows, and the audience was generally quiet except for murmurs of approval when someone came to a dramatically bad end, which happened rather often.

I sat there and watched for a while. At some point I dozed off and at another I woke up. The same movie may have been playing, or it might have been the other one. I let the on-screen violence hypnotize me, and before I knew it I was thinking about everything that had happened and how it had all started with a refined gentleman turning up at my shop and inviting me to appraise his library. What a civilized incident, I thought, with such a brutal aftermath.

Wait a minute.

I sat up straighter in my seat and blinked as a wild-eyed Oriental chap on the screen smashed a woman’s face with his elbow. I scarcely noticed. Instead, in my mind I saw Gordon Onderdonk greeting me at the door of his apartment, unfastening the chain lock, drawing the door wide to admit me. And other images played one after another across the retina of the mind, while snatches of a dozen different conversations echoed in accompaniment.

For a few minutes there my mind raced along as though I’d just brewed up a whole potful of espresso and injected it straight into a vein. All of the events of the past few days suddenly fell into place. And, on the screen in front of me, agile young men made remarkable leaps and stunning pirouettes and kicked and slashed and chopped the living crap out of each other.

I dozed off again, and in due course I awoke again, and after sitting up and blinking a bit I remembered the mental connections I’d made. I thought them through and they still made as much sense as ever, and I marveled at the way everything had come to me.

It struck me, on my way up the aisle to the exit, that I might have dreamed the whole solution. But I couldn’t really see that it made very much difference. Either way it fit. And either way I had a lot to do.

Chapter Nineteen

I stood in a doorway on West End Avenue and watched a couple of runners on their way to the park. When they’d cantered on by I leaned out a ways and fixed an eye on the entrance to my building. I kept it in view, and after a few minutes a familiar shape emerged. She walked to the curb, the ever-present cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth. At first she started to turn north, and I started to wince, and then she turned south and walked half a block and crossed the street and made her way to me.

She was Mrs. Hesch, my across-the-hall neighbor, an ever-available source of coffee and solace. “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said now. “It’s good you called me. I was worried. You wouldn’t believe the things those momsers are saying about you.”

“Just so you don’t believe them, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Me? God forbid. I know you, Mr. Rhodenbarr. What you do is your business—a man has to make a living. And when it comes to neighbors you can’t be beat. You’re a nice young man. You wouldn’t kill anybody.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“So what can I do for you?”

I gave her my keys, explained which one went in which lock, and told her what I needed. She was back fifteen minutes later with a shopping bag and a word of caution. “There’s a man in the lobby,” she said. “Regular clothes, no uniform, but I think he’s an Irisher and he looks like a cop.”

“He’s probably both of those things.”

“And there’s two men, also looking like cops, in that dark green car over there.”

“I already spotted them.”

“I got the suit you told me and a clean shirt, and I picked you out a nice tie to go with it. Also socks and underwear which you didn’t mention but I figure what does it hurt? Also the other things which I don’t have to know what they are, and how you use them to open locks I don’t want to know, but it’s clever where