The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Twenty-four

After a few urgent words to his wife, something about which lawyer to call and where to reach him, two of the uniformed police officers led J. McLendon Barlow off in handcuffs. Francis Rockland stayed behind, and so did Ray Kirschmann.

There was a respectful silence, broken at length by Carolyn Kaiser. “Barlow must have killed Turnquist,” she said, “because Turnquist was the artist he used, and Turnquist could expose him. Right?”

I shook my head. “Turnquist was the artist, all right, and Barlow might have killed him sooner or later if he felt he had to. But he certainly wouldn’t have come down to my bookstore to do it. Remember, I’d met Barlow as Onderdonk, and all I had to do was catch sight of him walking around hale and hearty and the whole scheme would collapse. It’s my guess that Barlow never even left his apartment after the murder. He wanted to stay out of sight until I was behind bars where I couldn’t get a look at him. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Barlow?”

All eyes turned to the woman who now sat alone on the couch. She cocked her head, started to say something, then simply nodded.

“Edwin P. Turnquist was an artist,” I said, “and a fervent admirer of Mondrian’s. He never considered himself a forger. God knows how Barlow got hold of him. Turnquist talked to total strangers in museums and galleries, and perhaps that’s how they first made one another’s acquaintance. At any rate, Barlow latched on to Turnquist because he could use him. He got the man to copy paintings, and Turnquist derived great satisfaction from looking at his own work in respected museums. He was a frequent visitor to the Hewlett, Mr. Reeves. All the attendants knew him.”

“Ah,” said Reeves.

“He only paid a dime.”

“And quite proper,” Reeves said. “We don’t care what you pay, but you must pay something. That’s our policy.”

“That and exclusion of the young. But no matter. When Barlow began to panic about your forthcoming retrospective exhibition, Mr. Danforth, he paid a call on Edwin Turnquist. I suppose he urged him to keep out of sight. The substance of their conversation is immaterial. More to the point, Turnquist realized that all along Barlow had not merely been playing a joke on the art world. He’d been making great sums of money at it, and Turnquist’s idealism was outraged. He’d been satisfied with the subsistence wages he made as Barlow’s forger. Art for art’s sake was fine with him, but that Barlow should profit from the game was not.”

I looked at the bearded man with the lank brown hair. “That’s where you came into it, isn’t it, Mr. Jacobi?”

“I never really came into it.”

“You were Turnquist’s friend.”

“Well, I knew him.”

“You had rooms on the same floor in the same Chelsea rooming house.”

“Yeah. I knew him to talk to.”

“You teamed up with Turnquist. One or the other of you followed Barlow to my shop. After that, and just hours before I came up here to appraise the books, you came to my shop alone and tried to sell me a book you’d stolen from the public library. You wanted me to buy it knowing it was a stolen book, and you figured I would because you thought I was an outlet for faked or stolen art. You thought that would give you some kind of an opening, some kind of hold on me, but when I wouldn’t bite you didn’t know what to do next.”

“You make it sound pretty sinister,” Jacobi said. “Eddie and I didn’t know how you fit into the whole thing and I wanted to dope it out. I thought if I sold you the butterfly book you’d let something slip. But you didn’t.”

“And you didn’t pursue it.”

“I figured you were too honest. Any book dealer who’d turn down a deal like that wouldn’t be into receiving stolen works of art.”

“But Friday morning you evidently changed your mind. You and Edwin Turnquist came to my shop together. By then I’d been arrested for Onderdonk’s murder and released on bail, and you figured I was tied in somehow. Turnquist, meanwhile, wanted to let me know what Barlow was up to. He probably guessed I’d been framed and wanted to help me clear myself.”

I took a sip of coffee. “I opened the store and then went two doors down the street to visit a friend of mine. Maybe you two got there after I’d left. Maybe you were the bums I saw lurking in a doorway, and maybe you purposely dawdled across the street until you saw me leave. In either event, the two of you let yourselves in. I just left the door on the springlock, and that wouldn’t present any great problem for a man who can spirit large 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.

“Suppose I told you there were blood traces on it? And suppose I told you the blood type’s the same as Turnquist’s?”

“I must have left it in the bookshop,” Jacobi blurted. “But that’s impossible. I threw it in a Dempsey dumpster. Unless I’m wrong and I dropped it in the store, but no, no, I remember I had it in my hand on the way out.”

“So you could stab me if I challenged you,” I put in.

“You never even knew I was there. And you didn’t follow me. Nobody followed me. Nobody even knew I left, and I went around the corner with the icepick hidden under my jacket and I went up Broadway and dumped it in the first dumpster I came to, and you couldn’t possibly have gotten it out of there.” He drew himself triumphantly to his full height. “So it’s a bluff,” he told Ray. “If there’s any blood on that thing it’s not Eddie’s. Somebody planted that icepick and it wasn’t the murder weapon in the first place.”

“I guess it was just another icepick that happened to be in your room,” Ray said. “But now that you’ve told us where to look for the other one, I don’t think we’ll have a whole lot of trouble finding it. Should be easier than a needle in a haystack, anyway. What else do you want to tell us?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Jacobi said.

“Now you’re absolutely right about that,” Ray said. “As a matter of fact, you have the right to remain silent, and you have the right to-”

Di dah di dah di dah.

After Rockland had led him away, Ray Kirschmann said, “Now we come to the best part.” He went into the kitchen and returned with my five-foot cylindrical tube, uncapped it and drew out a rolled canvas. He unrolled it, and damned if it didn’t look familiar.

Barnett Reeves asked what it was.

“A paintin’,” Ray told him. “Another of the Moondrains, except it’s a fake. Turnquist painted it for Barlow and Barlow sold it to Onderdonk and stole it back after he killed him. It’s a perfect match for the broken frame and bits of canvas we found with Onderdonk’s body in the bedroom closet.”

“I can’t believe it,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Do you mean to say my husband carried that thing off and didn’t have the brains to destroy it?”

“He probably didn’t have the opportunity, ma’am. What was he gonna do, drop it down the incinerator? Suppose it was recovered? He put it where he thought it would be safe and intended to destroy it at leisure. But acting on my own initiative I discovered it through the use of established police investigative techniques.”

Oh, God.

“Anyway,” he went on, presenting it to Orville Widener, “here it is.”

Widener looked as though his dog had just brought home carrion. “What’s this?” he said. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“I just told you what it is,” Ray said, “and I’m givin’ it to you on account of the reward.”

“What reward?”

“The thirty-five grand reward your company’s gonna shell out for the paintin’ they insured. I’m handin’ you the paintin’ in front of witnesses and I’m claimin’ the reward.”

“You must be out of your mind,” Widener snapped. “You think we’re going to pay that kind of money for a worthless fraud?”

“It’s a fraud, okay, but it’s a long ways from worthless. You can pay me the thirty-five grand and say thank you while you do it, because otherwise you’d be ponyin’ up ten times as much to the cousin in Calgary.”

“That’s nonsense,” Widener said. “We don’t have to pay anything to anybody. The painting’s a fake.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Wally Hemphill said, one hand on his wounded knee. “Onderdonk paid the premiums and you people took them. The fact that it was a fake and was overinsured doesn’t alter your responsibility. The insured acted in good faith-he certainly believed it to be authentic and he had paid a price for it commensurate with the coverage he took out on it. You have to restore the insured painting to my client in Calgary or else reimburse him for a loss in the amount of $350,000.”

“I’ll see what our own legal people have to say about that.”

“They’ll say just what I just got through telling you,” Wally said, “and I don’t know what you’re in a huff about. You’re getting off cheap. If it weren’t for Detective Kirschmann here, you’d pay the full insured value.”

“Then Detective Kirschmann’s costing your client money, isn’t he, counselor?”

“I don’t think so,” Wally said, “because we need the fake in order to substantiate our suit against Barlow. Barlow’s got money, and he got some of it from my client’s deceased uncle, and I intend to bring suit to recover the price paid for the spurious Mondrian. And I’m also representing Detective Kirschmann, so don’t think you can weasel out of paying him his reward.”

“We’re a reputable company. I resent your use of the word ‘weasel.’”

“Oh, please,” Wally said. “You people invented the word.”

Barnett Reeves cleared his throat. “I have a question,” he said. “What about the real painting?”

“Huh?” somebody said. Probably several people, actually.

“The real painting,” Reeves said, pointing to the canvas that Lloyd Lewes had authenticated several revelations ago. “If there’s no objection, I should like to take that back to the Hewlett Gallery, where it belongs.”

“Now wait a minute,” Widener said. “If my people are coming up with $35,000-”

“That’s for that thing,” Reeves said. “I want my painting.”

“And you’ll get yours,” I said, gesturing toward the acrylic hanging over the fireplace. “That’s the painting that was on display in your gallery, Mr. Reeves, and that’s the painting you’ll take back with you.”

“We never should have had it in the first place. Mr. Barlow donated a genuine Mondrian-”

“Nope,” I said. “He donated a fake, and he didn’t even cheat you by doing it. Because it never cost you people a penny. He defrauded the Internal Revenue Service, and they’ll probably have words with him on the subject, but he didn’t defraud you beyond making a horse’s ass out of you, and what’s the big deal about that? A bunch of school kids made a horse’s ass out of you just yesterday afternoon. You’ve got no claim on the painting.”

“Then who does?”

“I do,” Mrs. Barlow said. “The police officers took it from my apartment, but that doesn’t mean my husband and I relinquish title to it.”

“You don’t have title,” Reeves said. “You gave title to the museum.”

“Not true,” Wally said. “My client in Calgary should get the painting. It should have passed to Onderdonk, and so it now passes in fact to Onderdonk’s heirs.”

“That’s all nonsense,” Elspeth Petrosian cried. “That thief Barlow never had clear title to it in the first place. The painting belongs to me. It was promised to me by my grandfather, Haig Petrosian, and someone stole it before his wishes could be carried out. I don’t care what Barlow paid for it or who he did or didn’t sell it to. He never dealt with a rightful owner in the first place. That’s my painting.”

“I’d love to include it in the retrospective,” Mordecai Danforth said, “while all of this is being sorted out, but I suppose that’s out of the question.”

Ray Kirschmann went over and put a hand on the painting. “Right now this paintin’s evidence,” he said, “and I’m impoundin’ it. The rest of you got your claims and notions and you can fight it out, but the paintin’ goes downtown while you drag each other through the courts, and once the lawyers get started it could go on for a good long while.” To Reeves he said, “If I was you, I’d take that other one downtown and hang it back where it was. By the time the papers write this up, half the city’s gonna want to look at it, fake or no. You can waste time worryin’ about lookin’ like a horse’s ass, but that’d just make you more of a horse’s ass, because whatever you look like they’re gonna be lined up around the block to look at this thing, and what’s so bad about that?”