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.