The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,3

September, with the New York City Marathon a little over a month away, and the park was thick with runners. Some of them were of my stripe, the casual sort who knocked off three or four sluggish miles three or four times a week. Others were in marathon training, grinding out fifty or sixty or seventy miles a week, and for them it was Serious Business.

It was thus for Wally Hemphill, but he was following a program of alternate short and long runs, and the night’s agenda called for four miles so we wound up keeping each other company. Wallace Riley Hemphill was a recently divorced lawyer in his early thirties who didn’t look old enough to have been married in the first place. He’d grown up somewhere in eastern Long Island and was now living on Columbus Avenue and dating models and actresses and (puff puff) training for the Marathon. He had his own one-man practice with an office in the West Thirties, and as we ran he talked about a woman who’d asked him to represent her in a divorce action.

“And I went ahead and drew up papers,” he told me, “and it developed that this dizzy bitch wasn’t married in the first place. She wasn’t even living with anybody, didn’t even have a boyfriend. But she has a history of this. Every once in a while something snaps inside her and she finds an attorney and institutes divorce proceedings.”

I told him about my book thief who specialized in libraries. He was shocked. “Stealing from libraries? You mean there are people who would do that?”

“There are people to steal anything,” I said. “From anyplace.”

“Some world,” he said.

I finished my run, stretched some, walked on home to my apartment building at the corner of Seventy-first and West End. I stripped and showered and did a little more stretching, and then I stretched out and closed my eyes for a while.

And got up and looked up two telephone numbers and dialed them in turn. No one answered my first call. My second was answered after two or three rings, and I chatted briefly with the person who answered it. Then I tried the first number again and let it ring an even dozen times. A dozen rings comes to one minute, but when you’re calling it seems longer than that, and when someone else is calling and you let the phone go unanswered, it seems like an hour and a half.

So far so good.

I had to decide between the brown suit and the blue suit, and I wound up choosing the blue. I almost always do, and at this rate the brown’ll still be in good shape when its lapels come back into style again. I wore a blue oxford button-down shirt and selected a striped tie which would probably have indicated to an Englishman that I’d been cashiered from a good regiment. To an American it would be no more than a mark of sincerity and fiscal integrity. I got the knot right on the first try and chose to regard that as a favorable omen.

Navy socks. Scotch-grained black loafers, less comfortable than running shoes but rather more conventional. And comfy enough once I’d slipped in my custom-made orthotic arch supports.

I took up my attaché case, a slimmer and more stylish affair than my book thief’s, covered with beige Ultrasuede and glowing with burnished brass fittings. I filled its several compartments with the tools of my trade—a pair of rubber gloves with their palms cut out, a ring of cunning steel implements, a roll of adhesive tape, a pencil-beam flashlight, a glass cutter, a flat strip of celluloid and another of spring steel, and, oh, a bit of this and a little of that. Were I to be lawfully seized and searched, the contents of that case would earn me an upstate vacation as a guest of the governor.

My stomach did a little buck-and-wing at the thought, and I was glad I’d skipped dinner. And yet, even as I was recoiling at the idea of stone walls and iron bars, there was a familiar tingle in my fingertips and a racy edge to the blood in my veins. Lord, let me outgrow such childish responses—but, uh, not yet, if you please.

I added a lined yellow legal pad to the attaché case and outfitted my inside breast pocket with a couple of pens and pencils and a slim leatherbound notebook. My outside breast pocket already held a hankie, which I