The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,80
illustrated books out of libraries.”
“Hell, I’m not a real book thief,” Jacobi protested. “That was just to get your interest.”
I let that pass for the time being. “Once inside,” I said, “you turned the bolt so no one else would walk in and interrupt you. You led your good friend Turnquist to the back of the store where nobody could see you, and you stuck an icepick in his heart and left him sitting on the toilet.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because there was money to be made and he was screwing it up. He had a batch of forged canvases he’d painted in his spare time and he was planning to destroy them. You figured they were worth money, and you were probably right. For another, he had the goods on Barlow. Once I was safely behind bars, you could put the screws on Barlow and bleed him forever. If Turnquist talked, to me or to anybody else, he was taking away your meal ticket. You made up your mind to kill him, and you knew that if you killed him in my store I’d very likely get tagged with his murder, and that would get me out of the picture. Which would make it that much easier for you to turn up the heat under Barlow.”
“So I killed him right there in your store.”
“That’s right.”
“And then walked out?”
“Not right away, because you were still there when I came back. The door was bolted when I came back and I’d left it on the springlock, and if it was bolted that meant you were still inside. I guess you must have hidden in the stacks or in the back room, and after I opened up you slipped out. That had me confused for a while, because I had a visitor shortly after I opened up”—I glanced significantly at Elspeth Petrosian—“and I never even noticed her come in. At first I suspected she’d been the one hiding in the back room and that she had murdered Turnquist, but I couldn’t make sense out of that. You probably left just as she was walking in, or else you slipped out during my conversation with her. It was a lengthy and intense conversation, and I’m sure you could have departed without either of us having noticed.”
He got to his feet, and Ray Kirschmann stood up immediately. Francis Rockland was already standing; he’d moved to within arm’s reach of Jacobi.
“You can’t prove any of this,” Jacobi said.
“Your room was searched,” Ray told him pleasantly. “You got enough city-owned books in there to start a branch library.”
“So? That’s petty theft.”
“It’s about eight hundred counts of petty theft. Tack all those short sentences together, you got yourself a pretty good-sized paragraph.”
“Kleptomania,” Jacobi said. “I have a compulsion to steal library books. It’s harmless, and I eventually return them. It hardly qualifies me as a murderer.”
“There were some pictures in there too,” Ray said. “Fakes, I suppose, but you couldn’t prove it by me. Mr. Lewes here’s the expert, but all I can tell is they’re paintin’s without frames, and what do you bet they turn out to be the work of your buddy Turnquist?”
“He gave them to me. They were a gift of friendship, and I’d like to see you prove otherwise.”
“We got a guy goin’ door-to-door at your roomin’ house, and what do you bet we turn up somebody who saw you carryin’ those canvases from his room to yours? And that woulda been after he was killed an’ before the body was discovered, and let’s hear you explain that one away. Plus we got a note in his room, Turnquist’s room, with Bernie’s name and address, same as the note we found on the body. You want to bet they turn out to be your handwritin’ and not his?”
“What does that prove? So I wrote down a name and address for him.”
“You also phoned in a tip. You said if we wanted to know who killed Turnquist we should ask Bernie Rhodenbarr.”
“Maybe somebody called you. It wasn’t me.”
“Suppose I told you that all incomin’ calls are recorded? And suppose I told you that voiceprint identification is as good as fingerprints?”
Jacobi was silent.
“We found somethin’ else in your room,” Ray said. “Show him, Francis.”
Rockland reached into a pocket and produced an icepick. Richard Jacobi stared at it—hell, so did everybody else in the room—and I thought he was going to fall over in a faint. “You planted that,” he said.