Lawrence Block Omnibus by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2018-03-04T22:39:36.300000+00:00

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.

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