The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Twenty-three

“Oh, great,” I said. “Everybody’s here.

“And indeed everybody was. Ray Kirschmann had shown up first, flanked by a trio of fresh-faced young lads in blue. He talked to someone downstairs, and a couple of building employees came up to the Onderdonk apartment and set up folding chairs to supplement the Louis Quinze pieces that were already on hand. Then the three uniformed cops stuck around, one upstairs, the others waiting in the lobby to escort people up as they arrived, while Ray went out to pick up some of the other folks on the list.

While all this was going on, I stayed in the back bedroom with a book and a thermos of coffee. I was reading Defoe’s The History of Colonel Jack, and the man lived seventy years without ever writing a dull sentence, but I had a little trouble keeping my mind on his narrative. Still, I bided my time. A man likes to make an entrance.

Which I ultimately did, saying, Oh, great. Everybody’s here. It was comforting the way every head turned at my words and every eye followed me as I skirted the semicircular grouping of chairs and dropped into the leather wing chair facing them. I scanned the little sea of faces-well, call it a lake of faces. They looked back at me, or at least most of them did. A few turned their eyes to gaze over the fireplace, and after a moment so did I.

And why not? There was Mondrian’s Composition with Color, placed precisely where it had been on my first visit to the Charlemagne, and positively glowing with its vivid primary colors and sturdy horizontal and vertical lines.

“Makes a powerful statement, doesn’t it?” I leaned back, crossed my legs, made myself comfortable. “And of course it’s why we’re all here. A common interest in Mondrian’s painting is what binds us all together.”

I looked at them again, not as a group but as individuals. Ray Kirschmann was there, of course, sitting in the most comfortable chair and keeping one eye on me and another on the rest of the crowd. That sort of thing can leave a man walleyed, but he was doing a good job of it.

Not far from him, in a pair of folding chairs, were my partner in crime and her partner in lust. Carolyn was wearing her green blazer and a pair of gray flannel slacks, while Alison wore chinos and a striped Brooks Brothers shirt with the collar buttoned down and the sleeves rolled up. They made an attractive couple.

Not far from them, seated side by side on a six-foot sofa, were Mr. and Mrs. J. McLendon Barlow. He was a slender, dapper, almost elegant man with neatly combed iron-gray hair and a military bearing; with his posture he could have been just as comfortable on one of the folding chairs and left the sofa for somebody who needed it. His wife, who could have passed for his daughter, was medium height and slender, a large-eyed creature who wore her long dark hair pinned up in what I think they call a chignon. I know they call something a chignon, and I think that’s what it is. Was. Whatever.

Behind and to the right of the Barlows was a chunkily built man with the sort of face Mondrian might have painted if he’d ever gotten into portrait work. It was all right angles. He was jowly and droopy-eyed, and he had a moustache 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 knew I hadn’t killed anybody. Beyond that, I knew I’d been framed. I’d been led to this apartment on the pretext that its owner wanted his library appraised. I spent a couple of hours examining his library, came up with a figure and accepted a fee for my work. I walked out with my fingerprints all over the place, and why not? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t care if I left my fingerprints on the coffee table or my name with the concierge. But it was crystal clear to me that I’d been invited here for the sole purpose of establishing my presence here, so that I could take the rap for burglary and homicide, the theft of a painting and the brutal slaying of its rightful owner.”

I took a breath. “I could see that much,” I went on, “but it didn’t make sense. Because I’d been framed not by the murderer but by the victim, and where’s the sense in that? Why would Onderdonk wander into my shop with a cock-and-bull story, lure me up here, get me to leave my prints on every flat surface that would take them, and then duck into the other room to get his head beaten in?”

“Maybe the murderer capitalized on an opportunity,” Denise said. “The way some quick-witted thief seized a chance to steal a painting yesterday afternoon.”

“I thought of that,” I said, “but I still couldn’t figure Onderdonk’s angle. He’d had me up here to frame me for something, and what could it be if it wasn’t his murder? The theft of the painting?

“Well, that seemed possible. Suppose he decided to fake a burglary in order to stick it to his insurance company. Why not add verisimilitude by having the fingerprints of a reformed burglar where investigators could readily find them? It didn’t really make sense, because I could justify my presence, so framing me would only amount to an unnecessary complication, but lots of people do dumb things, especially amateurs dabbling at crime. So he could have done that, and then his accomplice in the deal could have double-crossed him, murdered him, and left the reformed burglar to carry the can for both the burglary and the murder.”

“Reformed burglar,” Ray grunted. “I could let that go once, but that’s twice you said it. Reformed!”

I ignored him. “But I still couldn’t make sense out of it,” I said. “Why would the murderer tie Onderdonk up and stuff him in a closet? Why not just kill him and leave him where he fell? And why cut the Mondrian canvas from its stretcher? Thieves do that in museums when they have to make every second count, but this killer figured to have all the time in the world. He could remove the staples and take the painting from the stretcher without damaging it. For that matter, he could wrap it in brown paper and carry it out with the stretcher intact.”

“You said he was an amateur,” Mordecai Danforth said, “and that amateurs do illogical things.”

“I said dumb things, but that’s close enough. Still, how many dumb things can the same person do? I kept getting stuck on the same contradiction. Gordon Onderdonk went to a lot of trouble to frame me, and what he got for his troubles was killed. Well, I was missing something, but you know what they say-it’s hard to see the picture when you’re standing inside the frame. I was inside the frame and I couldn’t see the picture, but I began to get little flashes of it, and then it became obvious. The man who framed me and the murder victim were two different people.”

Carolyn said, “Slow down, Bern. The guy who got you over here and the guy who got his head bashed in-”

“Were not the same guy.”

“Don’t tell me that’s not Onderdonk down there in the morgue,” Ray Kirschmann said. “We got a positive ID from three different people. That’s him, Gordon Kyle Onderdonk, that’s the guy.”

“Right. But somebody else came into my shop, introduced himself as Onderdonk, invited me up here, opened the door for me, paid me two hundred dollars for looking at some books, and then beat the real Onderdonk’s brains out as soon as I walked out the door.”

“Onderdonk himself was here all the time?” This from Barnett Reeves, the jolly banker.

“Right,” I said. “In the closet, all trussed up like a chicken and with enough chloral hydrate in his bloodstream to keep him quiet as an oiled hinge. That’s 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 the world to know it was gone. If he just took it, well, who would realize it was missing? Onderdonk lived alone. I suppose he must have had a will, and his worldly goods must go to somebody, but-”

“His heir’s a second cousin in Calgary, Alberta,” Orville Widener cut in. “And now we’re coming to my part of the field. My company underwrote Onderdonk’s insurance and we’re on the hook for $350,000. I gather the painting was stolen so that we’d have to pay, but what we ask in a situation like that is Qui bono? I’m sure you know what that means.”

“Cooey Bono,” Carolyn said. “That was Sonny’s first wife, before he was married to Cher. Right?”

Widener ignored her, which I thought showed character. “To whose good?” he said, translating the Latin himself. “In other words, who benefits? The policy’s payable to Onderdonk, and in the event of his death it becomes part of his estate, and his estate goes to somebody in western Canada.” His eyes narrowed, then turned toward Richard Jacobi. “Or is that Canadian relative actually among those present?”

“He’s in Canada,” Wally Hemphill said, “because I spoke to him at an hour that was equally uncivilized in either time zone. He’s empowered me to look out for his interests in this matter.”

“Indeed,” said Widener.

It was my turn. “The cousin never left Calgary,” I said. “The painting was stolen not for the insurance, considerable though it may be. The painting was stolen for the same reason its owner was murdered. Both acts were committed to conceal a crime.”

“And what crime was that?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” I said, “and I think we should make ourselves comfortable and have a cup of coffee. Now how many of you want cream and sugar? And how many just cream? And how many just sugar? And the rest of you want it all the way black? Fine.”

I don’t think they really wanted coffee, but what I wanted was a breathing spell. When Carolyn and Alison had served the nasty stuff all around the room, I sipped some of mine, made a face, and started in.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “a man named Haig Petrosian had a painting in his dining room. It would later be called Composition with Color, but Petrosian probably didn’t call it anything but ‘My friend Piet’s picture,’ or words to that effect. Whatever he called it, it disappeared around the time of his death. Maybe a family member spirited it away. Maybe a servant made off with it, perhaps acting on the belief that the old man wanted her to have it.”

“Perhaps Haig Petrosian’s son William stole it,” Elspeth Petrosian said, with a sharp glance to her right and another sharp glance at me.

“Perhaps,” I said agreeably. “Whoever took it, it wound up in the possession of a man who found a wonderful way to make money. He bought paintings and gave them away.”

Carolyn said, “That’s a way to make money?”

“It is the way this fellow did it. He would buy a painting by an important artist, a genuine painting, and he would lend it to a show or two in order to establish its provenance and his history as its owner. Then a talented if eccentric artist would be engaged to produce a copy of the painting. The owner would let himself be persuaded to donate the painting to a museum, but in the course of things it would be the copy that wound up getting donated. Farther on down the line, he’d donate the painting to another institution in another part of the country, and once again it would be a copy that changed hands. Occasionally he might vary the pitch by selling the painting to a collector, picking someone who wouldn’t be likely to show it. In the course of a decade, he could sell or donate the same painting five or six times, and if he stuck to abstract artists like Mondrian and had his wacky painter vary the precise design a bit from one canvas to the next, he could get away with it forever.

“And the richer you are to start with, the more profitable it is. Donate a painting appraised at a quarter of a million dollars and you can save yourself over a hundred thousand dollars in taxes. Do that a couple of times and you’ve more than paid for the painting, and you’ve still got the original painting yourself. There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?” Alison asked.

“Getting caught. Our killer found out that Mr. Danforth was putting together a retrospective exhibit of Piet Mondrian’s works, which in and of itself was no cause for alarm. After all, his fake paintings had survived such exposure in the past. But it seemed that Mr. Danforth was aware that there were far more Mondrians in circulation than Mondrian ever painted. What is it they used to say about Rembrandt? He painted two hundred portraits, of which three hundred are in Europe and five hundred in America.”

“Mondrian’s not been counterfeited on that grand a scale,” Danforth said, “but in the past few years there have been some disconcerting rumors. I decided to combine the retrospective with an exhaustive move to authenticate or denounce every Mondrian I could root out.”

“And toward that end you enlisted the aid of Mr. Lewes.”

“That’s right,” Danforth said, and Lewes nodded.

“Our killer learned as much,” I said, “and he was scared. He knew Onderdonk intended to put his painting in the show, and he wasn’t able to talk him out of it. He couldn’t let on that the painting was a fake, not after he’d sold it to Onderdonk himself, and perhaps Onderdonk began to suspect him. That’s supposition. What was clear was that Onderdonk had to die and the painting had to disappear, and it had to be a matter of record that the damned thing disappeared. All he had to do was frame me for the theft and murder and he was home free. It didn’t matter if the charges stuck. If I went up for the job, fine. If not, that was fine, too. The cops wouldn’t look for someone with a private motive for Onderdonk’s death. They’d just decide I was guilty even if they couldn’t make the charges stick, and they’d let the case go by the boards.”

“And we’d pay the cousin in Calgary $350,000 for a fake painting,” Orville Widener said.

“Which wouldn’t affect the killer one way or the other. His interest was self-preservation, and that’s a pretty good Qui bono six days out of seven.”

Ray said, “Who did it?”

“Huh?”

“Who sold the fake paintings and killed Onderdonk? Who did it?”

“Well, there’s really only one person it could be,” I said, and turned toward the little sofa. “It’s you, isn’t it, Mr. Barlow?”

We had another one of those hushes. Then J. McLendon Barlow, who’d been sitting up very straight all along, seemed to sit up even straighter.

“Of course that’s nonsense,” he said.

“Somehow I thought you might deny it.”

“Palpable nonsense. You and I have never met before today, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I never sold a painting to Gordon Onderdonk. He was a good friend and I deeply regret his tragic death, but I never sold him a painting. I defy you to prove that I did.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Nor did I ever visit your shop, or represent myself to you or to anyone else as Gordon Onderdonk. I can understand your confusion, since it is a matter of record that I did in fact donate a painting of Mondrian’s to the Hewlett Gallery. I’d hardly be inclined to deny it; there’s a plaque on the gallery wall attesting to the fact.”

“Unfortunately,” I murmured, “the painting seems to have disappeared from the Hewlett.”

“It’s clear that you arranged its disappearance in preparing this farce. I certainly had nothing to do with it, and can provide evidence of my whereabouts at all times yesterday. Furthermore, it’s to my disadvantage that the painting has disappeared, since it was unquestionably genuine.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not,” I said.

“One moment.” Barnett Reeves, my jolly banker, looked as though I’d offered a dead rat as collateral. “I’m the curator of the Hewlett, and I’m quite certain our painting is genuine.”

I nodded at the fireplace. “That’s your painting,” I said. “How positive are you?”

“That’s not the Hewlett Mondrian.”

“Yes it is.”

“Don’t be a fool. Ours was cut from its stretcher by some damned vandal. That painting’s intact. It may well be a fake, but it certainly never hung on our walls.”

“But it did,” I said. “The man who stole it yesterday, and I’d as soon let him remain anonymous, was by no means a vandal. He wouldn’t dream of slashing your painting, genuine or false. He went to the Hewlett carrying a bit of broken stretcher with the outside inch of canvas of a homemade fake Mondrian. He dismantled the stretcher on our specimen, opening the staples and hiding the canvas under his clothing. He hung the pieces of stretcher down his trouser legs. And he left evidence behind to make you assume he’d cut the painting from its mounting.”

“And that painting over the fireplace-”

“Is your painting, Mr. Reeves. With the stretcher reassembled and the canvas reattached to it. Mr. Lewes, would you care to examine it?”

Lewes was on his way before I’d finished my sentence. He whipped out a magnifying glass, took a look, and drew back his head almost at once.

“Why, this is painted with acrylics!” he said, as if he’d found a mouse turd on his plate. “Mondrian never used acrylics. Mondrian used oils.”

“Of course he did,” said Reeves. “I told you that wasn’t ours.”

“Mr. Reeves? Examine the painting.”

He walked over, looked at it. “Acrylics,” he agreed. “And not ours. What did I tell you? Now-”

“Take it off the wall and look at it, Mr. Reeves.”

He did so, and it was painful to watch the play of expression across the man’s face. He looked like a banker who’d foreclosed on what turned out to be swampland. “My God,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“Our stretcher,” he said. “Our stamp incused in the wood. That painting was hanging in the Hewlett where thousands of eyes looked at it every day and nobody ever noticed it was a fucking acrylic copy.” He turned, glared furiously at Barlow. “You damned cad,” he said. “You filthy murdering bounder. You fucking counterfeit.”

“It’s a trick,” Barlow protested. “This burglar pulls fake rabbits out of fake hats and you fools are impressed. What’s the matter with you, Reeves? Can’t you see you’re being flimflammed?”

“I was flimflammed by you,” Reeves said, glowering. “You son of a bitch.”

Reeves took a step toward Barlow, and Ray Kirschmann was suddenly on his feet, with a hand on the curator’s forearm. “Easy,” he said.

“When this is all over,” Barlow said, “I’ll bring charges against you, Rhodenbarr. I think any court would call this criminal libel.”

“That’s really a frightening prospect,” I said, “to someone who’s currently wanted for two murders. But I’ll keep it in mind. You won’t be pressing any charges, though, Mr. Barlow. You’ll be upstate pressing license plates.”

“You’ve got no evidence of anything.”

“You had easy access to this apartment. You and your wife live on the fifth floor. You didn’t have the problem of getting in and out of a high-security building.”

“A lot of people live here. That doesn’t make any of us murderers.”

“It doesn’t,” I agreed, “but it makes it easy to search your apartment.” I nodded at Ray, and he in turn nodded at Officer Rockland, who went to the door and opened it. In marched a pair of uniformed officers carrying yet another Mondrian. It looked for all the world just like the one Lloyd Lewes had just damned as an acrylic fake.

“The genuine article,” I said. “It almost glows when it’s in the same room with a copy, doesn’t it? You might have carved up the painting you palmed off on Onderdonk, but you took good care of this one, didn’t you? It’s the real thing, the painting Piet Mondrian gave to his friend Haig Petrosian.”

“And we had a warrant,” Ray said, “in case you were wondering. Where’d you boys find this?”

“In a closet,” one said, “in the apartment you said on the fifth floor.”

Lloyd Lewes was already holding his glass to the canvas. “Well, this is more like it,” he said. “It’s not acrylic. It’s oil paint. And it certainly looks to be genuine. Quite a different thing from that, that specimen over there.”

“Now there’s been some mistake,” Barlow said. “Listen to me. There’s been some mistake.”

“We also found this,” the cop said. “In the medicine cabinet. No label, but I tasted it, and if it ain’t chloral hydrate it’s a better fake than the painting.”

“Now that’s impossible,” Barlow said. “That’s impossible.” And I thought he was going to explain why it was impossible, that he’d flushed all the extra chloral hydrate down the john, but he caught himself in time. Listen, you can’t have everything.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Ray Kirschmann told him, but I’m not going to go through all that again. Miranda-Escobedo’s a good or a bad thing, depending on whether or not you’re a cop, but who wants to put it down word for word all the time?