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“Edwin P. Turnquist was an artist,” I said, “and a fervent admirer of Mondrian’s. He never considered himself a forger. God knows how Barlow got hold of him. Turnquist talked to total strangers in museums and galleries, and perhaps that’s how they first made one another’s acquaintance. At any rate, Barlow latched on to Turnquist because he could use him. He got the man to copy paintings, and Turnquist derived great satisfaction from looking at his own work in respected museums. He was a frequent visitor to the Hewlett, Mr. Reeves. All the attendants knew him.”
“Ah,” said Reeves.
“He only paid a dime.”
“And quite proper,” Reeves said. “We don’t care what you pay, but you must pay something. That’s our policy.”
“That and exclusion of the young. But no matter. When Barlow began to panic about your forthcoming retrospective exhibition, Mr. Danforth, he paid a call on Edwin Turnquist. I suppose he urged him to keep out of sight. The substance of their conversation is immaterial. More to the point, Turnquist realized that all along Barlow had not merely been playing a joke on the art world. He’d been making great sums of money at it, and Turnquist’s idealism was outraged. He’d been satisfied with the subsistence wages he made as Barlow’s forger. Art for art’s sake was fine with him, but that Barlow should profit from the game was not.”
I looked at the bearded man with the lank brown hair. “That’s where you came into it, isn’t it, Mr. Jacobi?”
“I never really came into it.”
“You were Turnquist’s friend.”
“Well, I knew him.”
“You had rooms on the same floor in the same Chelsea rooming house.”
“Yeah. I knew him to talk to.”
“You teamed up with Turnquist. One or the other of you followed Barlow to my shop. After that, and just hours before I came up here to appraise the books, you came to my shop alone and tried to sell me a book you’d stolen from the public library. You wanted me to buy it knowing it was a stolen book, and you figured I would because you thought I was an outlet for faked or stolen art. You thought that would give you some kind of an opening, some kind of hold on me, but when I wouldn’t bite you didn’t know what to do next.”
“You make it sound pretty sinister,” Jacobi said. “Eddie and I didn’t know how you fit into the whole thing and I wanted to dope it out. I thought if I sold you the butterfly book you’d let something slip. But you didn’t.”
“And you didn’t pursue it.”
“I figured you were too honest. Any book dealer who’d turn down a deal like that wouldn’t be into receiving stolen works of art.”
“But Friday morning you evidently changed your mind. You and Edwin Turnquist came to my shop together. By then I’d been arrested for Onderdonk’s murder and released on bail, and you figured I was tied in somehow. Turnquist, meanwhile, wanted to let me know what Barlow was up to. He probably guessed I’d been framed and wanted to help me clear myself.”
I took a sip of coffee. “I opened the store and then went two doors down the street to visit a friend of mine. Maybe you two got there after I’d left. Maybe you were the bums I saw lurking in a doorway, and maybe you purposely dawdled across the street until you saw me leave. In either event, the two of you let yourselves in. I just left the door on the springlock, and that wouldn’t present any great problem for a man who can spirit large illustrated books out of libraries.”
“Hell, I’m not a real book thief,” Jacobi protested. “That was just to get your interest.”
I let that pass for the time being. “Once inside,” I said, “you turned the bolt so no one else would walk in and interrupt you. You led your good friend Turnquist to the back of the store where nobody could see you, and you stuck an icepick in his heart and left him sitting on the toilet.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because there was money to be made and he was screwing it up. He had a batch of forged canvases he’d painted in his spare time and he was pla
“So I killed him right there in your store.”
“That’s right.”
“And then walked out?”
“Not right away, because you were still there when I came back. The door was bolted when I came back and I’d left it on the springlock, and if it was bolted that meant you were still inside. I guess you must have hidden in the stacks or in the back room, and after I opened up you slipped out. That had me confused for a while, because I had a visitor shortly after I opened up”-I glanced significantly at Elspeth Petrosian-“and I never even noticed her come in. At first I suspected she’d been the one hiding in the back room and that she had murdered Turnquist, but I couldn’t make sense out of that. You probably left just as she was walking in, or else you slipped out during my conversation with her. It was a lengthy and intense conversation, and I’m sure you could have departed without either of us having noticed.”
He got to his feet, and Ray Kirschma
“You can’t prove any of this,” Jacobi said.
“Your room was searched,” Ray told him pleasantly. “You got enough city-owned books in there to start a branch library.”
“So? That’s petty theft.”
“It’s about eight hundred counts of petty theft. Tack all those short sentences together, you got yourself a pretty good-sized paragraph.”
“Kleptomania,” Jacobi said. “I have a compulsion to steal library books. It’s harmless, and I eventually return them. It hardly qualifies me as a murderer.”
“There were some pictures in there too,” Ray said. “Fakes, I suppose, but you couldn’t prove it by me. Mr. Lewes here’s the expert, but all I can tell is they’re paintin’s without frames, and what do you bet they turn out to be the work of your buddy Turnquist?”
“He gave them to me. They were a gift of friendship, and I’d like to see you prove otherwise.”
“We got a guy goin’ door-to-door at your roomin’ house, and what do you bet we turn up somebody who saw you carryin’ those canvases from his room to yours? And that woulda been after he was killed an’ before the body was discovered, and let’s hear you explain that one away. Plus we got a note in his room, Turnquist’s room, with Bernie’s name and address, same as the note we found on the body. You want to bet they turn out to be your handwritin’ and not his?”
“What does that prove? So I wrote down a name and address for him.”
“You also phoned in a tip. You said if we wanted to know who killed Turnquist we should ask Bernie Rhodenbarr.”
“Maybe somebody called you. It wasn’t me.”
“Suppose I told you that all incomin’ calls are recorded? And suppose I told you that voiceprint identification is as good as fingerprints?”
Jacobi was silent.
“We found somethin’ else in your room,” Ray said. “Show him, Francis.”
Rockland reached into a pocket and produced an icepick. Richard Jacobi stared at it-hell, so did everybody else in the room-and I thought he was going to fall over in a faint. “You planted that,” he said.
“Suppose I told you there were blood traces on it? And suppose I told you the blood type’s the same as Turnquist’s?”
“I must have left it in the bookshop,” Jacobi blurted. “But that’s impossible. I threw it in a Dempsey dumpster. Unless I’m wrong and I dropped it in the store, but no, no, I remember I had it in my hand on the way out.”