The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,73

that was graying and tightly curled hair as black as India ink, and his name was Mordecai Danforth. The man sitting next to him looked about eighteen at first glance, but if you looked closer you could double the figure. He was very pale, wore rimless spectacles and a dark suit with an inch-wide black silk tie, and his name was Lloyd Lewes.

A few feet to Lewes’s right, Elspeth Petrosian sat with her hands folded in her lap, her lips set in a thin line, her head cocked, her expression one of patient fury. She was neatly dressed in Faded Glory jeans and a matching blouse, and was wearing Earth Shoes, with the heel lower than the toe. Those were all the rage a few years back, with ads suggesting that if everybody wore them we could wipe out famine and pestilence, but you don’t see them much anymore. You still see a lot of famine and pestilence, though.

To the right and to the rear of Elspeth, in another of the folding chairs, was a young man whose dark suit looked as though he only wore it on Sundays. Which was fine, because that’s what day it was. He had moist brown eyes and a slightly cleft chin, and his name was Eduardo Melendez.

On Eduardo’s left was another young man, also in a suit, but with a pair of New Balance 730s on his feet instead of the plain black oxfords Eduardo favored. I could see the top of one shoe and the sole of the other, because he was sitting on an upholstered chair with his right leg up on one of the folding chairs. He was Wally Hemphill, of course, and I guessed that his knee had finally made it from sensitivity to pain.

Denise Raphaelson was sitting a couple of yards from Wally. There were paint smears on her dungarees and her plaid shirt was starting to go in the elbow, but she looked all right to me. She evidently looked not bad to Wally, too, and the feeling seemed to be mutual, judging from the glances they kept stealing at one another. Well, why not?

Four more men filled out the audience. One had a round face and a high forehead and looked like a small-town banker in a television commercial, eager to lend you money so that you could fix up your home and make it an asset to the community you lived in. His name was Barnett Reeves. The second was bearded and booted and scruffy, and he looked like someone who’d approach the banker and ask for a college loan. And be turned down. His name was Richard Jacobi. The third was a bloodless man in a suit as gray as his own complexion. He had, as far as I could tell, no lips, no eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and he looked like the real-life banker, the one who approved mortgages in the hope of eventual foreclosure. His name was Orville Widener. The fourth man was a cop, and he wore a cop’s uniform, with a holstered pistol and a baton and a memo book and handcuffs and all that great butch gear cops get to carry. His name was Francis Rockland, and I happened to know that he was missing a toe, but offhand I couldn’t tell you which one.

I looked at them and they looked at me, and Ray Kirschmann, who I sometimes think exists just to take the edge off moments of high drama, said, “Quit stallin’, Bernie.”

So I quit stalling.

I said, “I’d say I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here, but you’re not. You know why I summoned you here. And, now that you’re here, I’ll—”

“Get to the point,” Ray suggested.

“I’ll get to the point,” I agreed. “The point is that a man named Piet Mondrian painted a picture, and four decades later a couple of men got killed. A man named Gordon Onderdonk was murdered in this very apartment, and another man named Edwin Turnquist was murdered in a bookstore in the Village. My bookstore in the Village, as it happens, and along with Mondrian I seem to be the common denominator in this story. I left this apartment minutes before Onderdonk was killed, and I walked into my own store minutes after Turnquist was killed, and the police suspected me of having committed both murders.”

“Perhaps they had good reason,” Elspeth Petrosian suggested.

“They had every reason in the world,” I said, “but I had an edge. I