The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Twelve

“She must have killed him,” Carolyn said. “Right?”

“You mean Andrea?”

“Who else? That’d be one reason why she was scared shitless when you walked in on her. She was afraid you’d discover the skeleton in her closet. Of course it wasn’t her closet and he wasn’t a skeleton yet, but-”

“You figure she overpowered him and tied him up and killed him? She’s just a girl, Carolyn.”

“That’s a real pig remark, you know that?”

“I mean in terms of physical strength. Maybe she could hit him hard enough to knock him out, maybe even hard enough to kill him, and maybe she could even drag him into the closet when she was done, but somehow I can’t believe she did any of those things. Maybe she went there to look for her letters, just as she said.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Somehow I don’t. But I’m willing to believe she went there looking for something.”

“The Mondrian.”

“And then what did she do, smuggle it past me secreted in her bodily cavities?”

“Not likely. You’d have found it.”

I gave her a look. It was morning, Friday morning, and if I didn’t feel like a new man, I at least felt like a secondhand one in excellent shape. I’d left Wally Hemphill in the park and went straight home to a shower and a hot toddy and a full ten hours of sleep with the door double-bolted and the blinds shut and the phone unplugged. I’d come downtown early and tried Carolyn at the Poodle Factory every ten minutes or so, and when she answered I hung the BACK IN TEN MINUTES sign in the window and went outside and pulled the door shut.

Across the street, a couple of shaggy guys lurking in a doorway shrank into the shadows when I glanced their way. They looked like a bottle gang without a bottle, and I had second thoughts about leaving my bargain table on the street, but what could they steal? My books on home winemaking were all safe inside the store. I left the table where it was and picked up two cups of coffee around the corner, then took them to Carolyn’s canine beauty parlor.

She was clipping a Bichon Frise when I got there. I mistook it at first for a snow-white poodle, and Carolyn was quick to point out why it didn’t look at all like a poodle, and after a couple of paragraphs of American Kennel Club lore I cut her off in midsentence and brought her up to date. The visit to the Charlemagne, the bit with the flowers, the incident in Onderdonk’s apartment, the conversation with Wally Hemphill. Everything.

Now she said, “How bad is it, Bernie? Are you in deep shit or what?”

“Let’s call it chest high and rising.”

“It’s my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s my cat, isn’t it?”

“They kidnapped Archie to get at me, Carolyn. If you hadn’t had a cat they’d have found some other way to put pressure on me. All to get a picture off a museum wall, and that’s as impossible as it ever was. You asked if Andrea killed him. That was my first thought, but the times are all wrong. Unless the Medical Examiner’s crazy, Onderdonk was killed while I was stealing Appling’s stamps.”

“He was alone when you left him.”

“As far as I know.”

“And someone else dropped in on him, beat his head in, tied him up, and stuffed him in the closet. And stole the painting?”

“I suppose so.”

“Isn’t it interesting that someone just happens to kill a guy and steal a painting from him, and we’re supposed to steal a painting by the same artist in order to get my cat back?”

“The coincidence struck me, too.”

“Uh-huh. You get this coffee at the felafel joint?”

“Yeah. Not very good, is it?”

“It’s not a question of good or bad. It’s a matter of trying to figure out what they put in it.”

“Chickpeas.”

“Really?”

“Just a guess. They put chickpeas in everything. I must have lived the first twenty-five years of my life without knowing what a chickpea was, and all of a sudden they’re inescapable.”

“What do you figure caused it?”

“Probably nuclear testing.”

“Makes sense. Bern, why tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in the closet? Let’s say they killed him in order to get away with the painting.”

“Which is crazy, because it didn’t look as though anything else was taken. The other art was worth a fortune but the place didn’t even look as though it had been searched, let alone stripped.”

“Maybe somebody just needed the Mondrian for a specific purpose.”

“Like what?”

“Like ransoming a cat.”

“Didn’t think of that.”

“The point is-next time get the coffee at the coffee shop, okay?”

“Sure.”

“The point is, why tie him up and why put him in the closet? To keep the body from being discovered? Makes no sense, does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did whatsername, Andrea, did she know he was in the closet?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“She was pretty cool, wasn’t she? She’s in an apartment with a dead guy in the closet and a burglar walks in on her and what does she do? Rolls around on the oriental rug with him.”

“It was an Aubusson.”

“My mistake. What do we do now, Bern? Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell the police about Andrea.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t tell them anything. It’s not as if she could give me an alibi. I could try telling them that I was in the Appling apartment while somebody was killing Onderdonk, but where would that get me? Just charged with another burglary, and even if I showed them the stamps I couldn’t prove I hadn’t killed Onderdonk before or after I performed philately on Appling’s collection. Anyway, I don’t know her name or where she lives.”

“You don’t think her name’s Andrea?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“You could run an ad in the Voice.”

“I could.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I, oh, I sort of liked her, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s good. You wouldn’t want to caper on the carpet with someone you hated.”

“Yeah. The thing is, I sort of thought I might get together with her again. Of course she’s a married woman and there’s no future in that sort of thing, but I thought-”

“You had romantic feelings.”

“Well, yeah, Carolyn, I guess I did.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“It isn’t?”

“Of course not. I have them myself. Alison came over last night. We met for a drink, and then I explained I didn’t want to miss an important phone call so we went back to my place. The phone call I was talking about was about the cat, but it never came, and we just sat around and listened to music and talked.”

“Did you get lucky?”

“ Bern, I didn’t even try. It was just sort of peaceful and cozy, you know what I mean? You know how standoffish Ubi can be, and he’s especially whacko with Archie gone, but he came over and curled up in her lap. I told her about Archie.”

“That he was missing?”

“That he’d been kidnapped. The whole thing. I couldn’t help it, Bernie. I had to talk about it.”

“It’s okay.”

“Romance,” she said. “It’s what makes the world go round, isn’t it, Bern?”

“So they say.”

“You and Andrea, me and Alison.”

“Andrea’s about five-foot-six,” I said. “Slender, narrow at the waist. Dark hair to her shoulders, and she was wearing it in pigtails when I saw her.”

“Alison’s slim, too, but she’s not that tall. I’d say five-four. And her hair’s light brown and short, and she doesn’t wear any lipstick or nail polish.”

“She wouldn’t, not if she’s a political and economic lesbian. Andrea wears nail polish. I can’t remember about the lipstick.”

“Why are we comparing descriptions of our obsessions, Bern?”

“I just had this dumb idea and I wanted to make sure it was a dumb idea.”

“You thought they were the same girl.”

“I said it was a dumb idea.”

“You’re just afraid to let yourself have romantic feelings, that’s all. You haven’t been involved with anybody that way in a long time.”

“I guess.”

“Years from now,” she said, “when you and Andrea are old and gray, nodding off together before the fire, you’ll look back on these days and laugh quietly together. And neither of you will have to ask the other why you’re laughing, because you’ll just know without a word’s being spoken.”

“Years from now,” I said, “you and I will be having coffee somewhere, and one of us will puke, and without a word’s being spoken the other’ll immediately think of this conversation.”

“And this lousy coffee,” said Carolyn.