The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,75

why he was out of sight, so I wouldn’t step on him if I took a wrong turn on my way to the bathroom. The murderer didn’t want to risk killing Onderdonk until he had the frame perfectly fitted around me. That way, too, he could make sure the time of death coincided nicely with my departure from the building. Medical examiners can’t time things to the minute—it’s never that precise—but he couldn’t go wrong timing things as perfectly as possible.”

“You’re just supposing all this, aren’t you?” Lloyd Lewes piped up. His voice was reedy and tentative, a good match for his pale face and his narrow tie. “You’re just creating a theory to embrace some inconsistencies. Or do you have additional facts?”

“I have two fairly substantial facts,” I said, “but they don’t prove much to anyone but me. Fact number one is that I’ve been to the morgue, and the body in Drawer 328-B”—now how on earth did I remember that number?—“isn’t the man who wandered into my bookstore one otherwise fine day. Fact number two is that the man who called himself Gordon Onderdonk is here right now, in this room.”

I’ll tell you, when everybody in a room draws a breath at the same moment, you get one hell of a hush.

Orville Widener broke the silence. “You have no proof for that,” he said. “We have just your word.”

“That’s right, that’s what I just told you. For my part, I suppose I should have guessed early on that the man I met wasn’t Gordon Onderdonk. There were clues almost from the beginning. The man who let me into this apartment—I can’t call him Onderdonk anymore so let’s call him the murderer—he just opened the door an inch or two before he let me in. He kept the chainlock on until the elevator operator had been told it was okay. He called me by name, no doubt for the operator’s benefit, but he fumbled with the lock until the elevator had left the floor.”

“Is true,” Eduardo Melendez said. “Mr. Onderdonk, he alla time comes into the hall to meet a guest. This time I doan see him. I think notheen of it at the time, but is true.”

“I thought nothing of it myself,” I said, “except that I wondered why a man security-conscious enough to keep a door on a chainlock when an announced and invited guest was coming up wouldn’t have more than one Segal dropbolt lock on his door. I should have done some wondering later on, when the murderer left me to wait for the elevator alone, dashing back into his apartment to answer a phone that I never heard ringing.” I hadn’t questioned that action, of course, because it had been a response to a fervent prayer, allowing me to dash down the stairs instead of getting shunted back onto the elevator. But I didn’t have to tell them that.

“There was another thing I kept overlooking,” I went on quickly. “Ray, you kept referring to Onderdonk as a big hulk of a man, and you made it sound as though clouting him over the head was on a par with felling an ox with a single blow. But the man who called himself Onderdonk wasn’t anybody’s idea of a hulk. If anything he was on the slight side. That should have registered, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Remember, the first time I ever even heard the name Onderdonk was when the killer came into my bookshop and introduced himself to me. I assumed he was telling the truth, and I took a long time to start questioning that assumption.”

Richard Jacobi scratched his bearded chin. “Don’t keep us in suspense,” he demanded. “If one of us killed Onderdonk, why don’t you tell us who it is?”

“Because there’s a more interesting question to answer first.”

“What’s that?”

“Why did the killer cut Composition with Color out of its frame?”

“Ah, the painting,” said Mordecai Danforth. “I like the idea of discussing the painting, especially in view of the fact that it seems to have been miraculously restored. There it reposes on the wall, a perfect example of Mondrian’s mature style. You’d never know some foul fiend cut it from its stretcher.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Tell us,” said Danforth. “Why did the killer cut the painting?”

“So everyone would know it had been stolen.”

“I don’t follow you.”

Neither, from the looks on their faces, did most of his fellows. “The killer didn’t just want to steal the painting,” I explained. “He wanted