I took a seat off to one side and just sat there looking at the screen. There wasn’t much dialogue, just sound effects when people got their chests kicked in or fell through plate glass windows, and the audience was generally quiet except for murmurs of approval when someone came to a dramatically bad end, which happened rather often.

I sat there and watched for a while. At some point I dozed off and at another I woke up. The same movie may have been playing, or it might have been the other one. I let the on-screen violence hypnotize me, and before I knew it I was thinking about everything that had happened and how it had all started with a refined gentleman turning up at my shop and inviting me to appraise his library. What a civilized incident, I thought, with such a brutal aftermath.

Wait a minute.

I sat up straighter in my seat and blinked as a wild-eyed Oriental chap on the screen smashed a woman’s face with his elbow. I scarcely noticed. Instead, in my mind I saw Gordon Onderdonk greeting me at the door of his apartment, unfastening the chain lock, drawing the door wide to admit me. And other images played one after another across the retina of the mind, while snatches of a dozen different conversations echoed in accompaniment.

For a few minutes there my mind raced along as though I’d just brewed up a whole potful of espresso and injected it straight into a vein. All of the events of the past few days suddenly fell into place. And, on the screen in front of me, agile young men made remarkable leaps and stunning pirouettes and kicked and slashed and chopped the living crap out of each other.

I dozed off again, and in due course I awoke again, and after sitting up and blinking a bit I remembered the mental connections I’d made. I thought them through and they still made as much sense as ever, and I marveled at the way everything had come to me.

It struck me, on my way up the aisle to the exit, that I might have dreamed the whole solution. But I couldn’t really see that it made very much difference. Either way it fit. And either way I had a lot to do.

CHAPTER Nineteen

I stood in a doorway on West End Avenue and watched a couple of runners on their way to the park. When they’d cantered on by I leaned out a ways and fixed an eye on the entrance to my building. I kept it in view, and after a few minutes a familiar shape emerged. She walked to the curb, the ever-present cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth. At first she started to turn north, and I started to wince, and then she turned south and walked half a block and crossed the street and made her way to me.

She was Mrs. Hesch, my across-the-hall neighbor, an ever-available source of coffee and solace. “Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said now. “It’s good you called me. I was worried. You wouldn’t believe the things those momsers are saying about you.”

“Just so you don’t believe them, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Me? God forbid. I know you, Mr. Rhodenbarr. What you do is your business-a man has to make a living. And when it comes to neighbors you can’t be beat. You’re a nice young man. You wouldn’t kill anybody.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“So what can I do for you?”

I gave her my keys, explained which one went in which lock, and told her what I needed. She was back fifteen minutes later with a shopping bag and a word of caution. “There’s a man in the lobby,” she said. “Regular clothes, no uniform, but I think he’s an Irisher and he looks like a cop.”

“He’s probably both of those things.”

“And there’s two men, also looking like cops, in that dark green car over there.”

“I already spotted them.”

“I got the suit you told me and a clean shirt, and I picked you out a nice tie to go with it. Also socks and underwear which you didn’t mention but I figure what does it hurt? Also the other things which I don’t have to know what they are, and how you use them to open locks I don’t want to know, but it’s clever where you keep them, behind the fake electric outlet. You could fix me a place like that to keep things in?”

“First thing next week, if I can just stay out of jail.”

“Because the burglaries lately have been something awful. You put on that good lock for me, but even so.”

“I’ll fix you up with a hidey hole first chance I get, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Not that I got the Hope Diamond upstairs, but why take chances? You’re all right now, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I think so,” I said.

I changed clothes in a coffee shop lavatory, tucked my burglar’s tools into various pockets, and left my dirty clothes in the wastebasket. The British would have called it a dustbin, and who had told me so recently? Turnquist, and Turnquist was dead now, with an icepick in his heart.

I bought a disposable razor in a drugstore, made quick use of it in another coffee shop restroom, and promptly disposed of it. The same drugstore sold me a pair of sunglasses rather like the ones Turnquist had worn when we wheeled him across town. I’d worn them myself on the way back to the store, and they were there now on a shelf in my back room, and it struck me as curious that I’d bought two pairs of drugstore sunglasses in as many days. In the ordinary course of things, years would go by before I bought a pair of sunglasses.

The day was overcast and I wasn’t sure the sunglasses helped; they might hide my eyes, but at the same time they drew a certain amount of attention. I wore them for the time being and rode the subway downtown to Fourteenth Street. Between Fifth and Seventh Avenues there are schlock stores of every description, selling junk at cut-rate prices, their wares spilling out onto the sidewalk. One had a table piled high with clear-lensed eyeglasses. People who wanted to save an optician’s fee could try on pair after pair until they found something that seemed to help.

I tried on pair after pair until I found a heavy horn-rimmed pair that didn’t seem to distort things at all. Nonprescription glasses always look like stage props because of the way the light glints off them, but these glasses would disguise my appearance reasonably well without looking like a disguise. I bought them, and a few doors down the street I tried on hats until I found a dark gray fedora that looked and felt right.

I bought a knish and a Coke from a Sabrett vendor, tried to tell myself I was eating breakfast, made a couple of phone calls, and was at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street when a rather battered Chevy pulled up. The way the man steals, you’d think he could afford a flashier automobile.

“I looked right at you an’ didn’t recognize you,” he said as I got into the front seat next to him. “You oughta put on a suit more often. It looks nice. Of course you ruin the whole effect wearin’ runnin’ shoes with it.”

“Lots of people wear running shoes with a suit these days, Ray.”

“Lotsa guys eat peas with a knife but that don’t make it right. The hat an’ the glasses, you look like a tout at Aqueduct. What I oughta do, Bern, I oughta take you in. You’ll be outta trouble and I’ll wind up with a citation.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wind up with a reward?”

“You call it a reward and I call it two in the bush.” He sighed the sigh of the long-suffering. “This is crazy, what you’re askin’.”

“I know.”

“But I played along with you in the past, and I gotta admit it paid off more’n it didn’t.” He looked at the hat, the glasses, the running shoes, and he shook his head. “I wish you looked a little more like a cop,” he said.

“This way I look like a cop wearing a disguise.”

“Well, it’s some disguise,” he said. “It’d fool anybody.”

He left the car in a no-parking zone and we walked up a flight of stairs and down a corridor. Periodically Ray pulled out his shield and showed it to somebody who passed us on through. Then we took an elevator down to the basement.