The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian by Lawrence Block Page B

running, and then where would we be? You know what the saddest words of tongue or pen are.”
    “‘It might have been.’ You’re witty, but John Greenleaf was Whittier.”
    “My God, you read poetry and you’re a smartass and you can verb like a mink. I can’t let you get away altogether. I know.”
    “You know what?”
    “Buy the Village Voice every week and read the personals in the ‘Village Bulletin Board’ section. Okay?”
    “Okay. You do the same.”
    “Faithfully. Can a burglar and an adulteress find happiness in today’s world? We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Go ahead, you ring for the elevator.”
    “You don’t want to ride down with me?”
    “I want to tidy up here a little. And I’ll hang around so that we leave the building a few minutes apart. If I get in any trouble, you don’t want to get hooked into it.”
    “Will you get in trouble?”
    “Probably not, because I’m not stealing anything.”
    “That’s what I was asking, really. I mean, I shouldn’t care if you steal anything, including the carpet we verbed on, but evidently I do. Bernie, would you hold me?”
    “Are you scared again?”
    “Nope. I just like the way you hold me.”
     
    I put my gloves on and waited with the door a few inches ajar until I saw her ring for the elevator. Then I drew the door shut, turned the bolt, and gave the apartment a very quick look-see, just to make sure there was nothing I should know about in any of the other rooms. I didn’t open a drawer or a closet, just ducked into each room and flicked the lights on long enough to establish that there were no signs of Andrea’s presence. No drawers pulled out and dumped, no tables overturned, no signs that the apartment had been visited by a burglar or a cyclone or any comparable unwelcome phenomenon.
    And no dead bodies in the bed or on the floor. Not that one goes around expecting that sort of thing, but I was once caught in the act of burgling the apartment of a man named Flaxford, and Mr. F. himself was dead in another room at the time, a fact which became known to the police before it joined my storehouse of information. So I gave a quick look-see here and there, and if I’d come across the Mondrian, leaning against the wall or perhaps wrapped in brown paper and waiting for the framer, I’d have been roundly delighted.
    No such luck, nor did I spend much time looking. I did all of this reconnaissance rather more quickly than it takes to tell about it, as a matter of fact, and when I was out in the hallway the elevator was on its way up.
    Was it swarming with boys in blue? Had I, like Samson and Lord Randall and the Bold Deceiver before me, been done in by a woman’s treachery? No point, surely, in sticking around to find out. I ducked through the fire door and waited for the elevator to stop on Sixteen.
    But it didn’t. I peeked through the open fire door, and I listened carefully, and the cage went on past Sixteen, stopped, waited, and went on down, passing Sixteen in its descent. I returned to the hallway, picked the tumblers to lock Onderdonk’s door, recalled that Andrea’d said he never double-locked it, picked it again to leave it on the springlock as he was said to have done, sighed heavily at all of this wasted time and effort, stripped off my silly rubber gloves, put them in a pocket, and rang for the elevator.
    No cops in the elevator. No cops in the lobby or out on the street. No hassle from the elevator operator, the concierge or the doorman, even when I refused the last-named chap’s offer to hail me a taxi. I said I felt like walking, and I walked three blocks before hailing a cab myself. That way I didn’t have to switch to some other cab a few blocks away. I could just ride straight home, and that’s what I did.
    Once there, I would have liked to go straight to bed. But I had J. C. Appling’s stamps to worry about and I was worried. I’d have taken a chance and left the job unfinished, but not after all I’d gone