Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  I fought down the desire to defend myself, to assure her I hadn’t been seeing Linda before tonight. I said, “She came to me for help for her husband. She’d come here first, but didn’t have the courage to get out of the car and come ring the bell.”

  Kate looked at me. I desperately wanted to read her face, but I could find no signs in it. She said, “When did she come here?”

  “Tonight. And last night. And tonight she followed me to work.”

  “Her husband’s out of jail?”

  “He wants to go straight, and he’s having some trouble with old friends.”

  “What could you do?”

  “Put pressure in the other direction.” I nodded toward the hall phone. “I will, when we’re done talking.”

  “Who was the dead man? One of the old friends?”

  That was the question that told me she was hurt. I don’t know why. I was afraid to move closer to her, put my arms around her, for fear she would flinch; that had happened in the past, but not for a long time. I said, “No. It was nothing to do with her. And I’m nothing to do with her, Kate.”

  She said, “It must have been very tough for you.”

  “Seeing her again? It brought a lot of old aches out.” I had to push forward; I said, “I didn’t mention her to the police. They think I was alone when I found the body.”

  She frowned. She truly didn’t know why I would have done that. She said, “What for?”

  “Because of the past. The man was murdered by somebody. They’ll start looking into the past. If a woman was there, they’ll look into her past. If I say she was with me, they’ll look into my past.”

  She said, “Then why tell me? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to forget it? Or do you have to see her again?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “When I lie about her to the police, it’s to simplify my life and their investigation. But if I lie to you, I’m creating something where there isn’t anything.”

  She looked at me with an expression that was a dim echo of the look she used to give Bill when he was small and she’d caught him in a not-particularly-terrible fib. She said, “Nothing at all?”

  I remembered the unwanted sense of desire I’d felt when Linda had first come into the museum, but I also knew what my conscious mind wanted and what course I would be following, and I said, “Nothing at all. Not a trace.”

  She didn’t exactly change expression, but her face softened somehow, and she nodded at the brown paper bag in my hand and said, “You didn’t even get a chance to eat your lunch.”

  I welcomed the change of topic. “We can put it in the refrigerator, I’ll take it tomorrow night.”

  “We could have a dinner together now,” she said, “if you’re hungry.”

  “We could go out somewhere.”

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “Bill must know someplace open. Is he home?” Bill was sixteen, the age when most of his life was spent away from the house.

  “He’s asleep. I’ll make something nice.”

  She came toward me, reaching for the paper bag, and when I gave it to her our fingers touched. We both smiled at the same time, and I said, “You know me now.”

  “Yes.”

  We kissed, and she went out to the kitchen, and I headed for the hall phone, where I called a friend of mine still on the force, Marty Kengelberg. I had no idea what his duty hours were, but just took a chance. He wasn’t in, so I left my name, and went upstairs to change out of the uniform into slacks and shirt.

  Kate made a production out of dinner. There was no real reason for it, since even with this all-night job of mine we still ate most of our meals together, but there’s always a kick in unexpected time off, an aura of playing hookey from the regular routine. Also, I think Kate had a feeling that some sort of milestone had been passed in the reconstruction of our life together, and wanted to mark it or to celebrate it. I myself was aware of greater complexities than that, but took pleasure in her pleasure.

  We ate in the dining room, by candlelight, and afterward went upstairs to bed together and made love. Kate fell asleep very quickly, but I was keyed up by the night’s happenings, and was in any case on a schedule that wouldn’t have normally found me in bed before eight in the morning, so I was still awake a little after three when the phone rang. We have a bedroom extension, which I answered on the first ring, and it was Marty Kengelberg. I said, “Hold on while I switch phones.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t want Kate to wake up. I put on a robe, went downstairs, took the hall phone off the hook, hurried back up to the bedroom, hung up the extension there, dashed back down again, and said, “Marty? You there?”

  “Listen, did I wake you up? The message said—”

  “No, I was awake.”

  “It said call any time tonight.”

  That wasn’t exactly the message I’d left, but I let it go. I said, “No, it’s all right, I’m awake.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Not with me,” I said. “With Dink Campbell.”

  There was a little silence, in which I could hear Marty remembering who Dink Campbell was, and then he said, “Uh-oh. Bothering you?”

  “Nothing like that, Marty. He’s out, and he wants to go straight, and some of his old friends are giving him a rough time.”

  “That happens,” he said. He didn’t sound very interested.

  “I was asked if I could help,” I said.

  Again the little silence. This time he sounded careful and a bit remote when he said, “You want to tell me who asked?”

  “Linda Campbell.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mitch—”

  “I’m not seeing her, Marty, I haven’t seen her for three years. She came to me because she didn’t know who else to go to, and because Dink won’t ask for help himself.”

  I heard him sigh. “How we get into these things,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “What do you want, Mitch?”

  “If some attention could be paid to these guys, it might help.”

  “Keep them moving, huh? Distract them a little.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  I told him the names and background I knew, and then he said, “Mitch, can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “I may be out of line …”

  “Ask anyway.”

  “You aren’t expecting, are you, some kind of gratitude on this?”

  I knew at once what he meant. I said, “From Linda Campbell? Goddammit, Marty—”

  “It was a question in my head,” he said. “I just wanted to bring it out and look at it.”

  “Well, put it back again,” I said. “I didn’t seek her out, Marty, I didn’t go to her and I won’t. And believe me she won’t be coming back to me.”

  “It’s none of my business anyway,” he said. “You just take an interest in an old friend.”

  Marty had stood by me at a time when I wouldn’t stand by myself. He was primarily the one who had made it possible for me to get my ticket to operate as a private detective. He was my oldest and truest friend, and I’d only gotten irritated because he’d tapped a fantasy I’d been burying: the grateful Linda coming to see me once more. I knew she wouldn’t, I knew I wouldn’t in any case follow through, but the fantasy had been there, and he’d turned over the rock hiding it, and I’d gotten mad at him for it. I said, “Marty, I promise you I’m in control. If anything, I’m trying to pay off a debt to Dink.” Which was also true.

  He was mollified, and we talked a little more, and I went back upstairs to bed. Where I dreamed about hunting hyenas in a darkened movie theater.

  4

  I GOT UP AT eleven and called Allied. Grazko, the supervisor there, told me he didn’t know yet whether I would be working that night. “The museum’s shut down today,” he said. “If the cops are out by tonight, I suppose they’ll want you back. I’ll let you know.”

  “Have they f
ound out who did it?”

  “They don’t even know who it was done to,” Grazko said. “The body’s a John Doe.”

  That amazed me. With all of the record-keeping today, all of the dossiers, all of the sources of fingerprinting, there are hardly any John Does left in the world at all. Except children, of course. Trying to remember the body, if it had looked like a teenager—there had been no way to tell from the face—I said, “Was he an adolescent?”

  “They figure about twenty-five.”

  “That’s old to be a John Doe.”

  “Except Mex,” he said. Grazko had lived several years in Arizona, and all non-native Americans were Mexican to him.

  I pictured the body as Caucasian, average in height and build. The hair had been moderately long, in the current style, and there had somehow been the undefinable feeling that he was American by birth and residence. But that could have been simply unthinking assumption.

  Grazko said, “Anyway, that’s not our problem. We leave that to the bottles.” Meaning the Police Department. I smiled at the thought of Grazko in conversation with Detective Grinella’s unnamed partner, the tough one who called private detectives “keyholes”; the two were almost brothers in their personalities, but I couldn’t see any brotherly love developing between them.

  I said, “Shall I call you this afternoon?”

  “No, we’ll buzz you when we know the story. You’ll be home?”

  I said I would, and hung up, and spent most of the afternoon working on my wall. I’d started the wall half a year after being thrown off the force, and at first it had done nothing but fill my need for something to do with my hands and my mind. It had been my own home-remedy version of occupational therapy, my kind of basket-weaving.

  The idea of the wall was that it completely enclosed my back yard. When finished, it would mark the perimeter of the yard on three sides, with the house itself enclosing the fourth. There were no doors or windows in the wall, no breaks of any kind. I had made the footing of concrete block, and the wall itself was brick, two rows with dirt packed between. When finished—if I ever finish it—the wall would be ten feet high and two feet thick. It is now six feet high, just over my head, and the work has been slowed even more—six feet in nearly three years isn’t very fast—by the necessity to build and move scaffolding from which to work. I have never wanted the wall to be complete, and have always been aware that the process of working on it was its own goal, but in the last few months I’ve spent less and less time on its construction, as though the need for basket-weaving had begun to recede into the past.

  But today I felt the need to occupy myself again. And most of the time out there was spent in fantasies in which I was given the opportunity to demonstrate my determination not to start anything with Linda again. The demonstrations were made to Linda, to Kate, to Marty, and even just to myself.

  Grazko called back at four-thirty to say the museum wanted me to come to work as usual this evening. “The cops finished already,” he said. “You ask me, they’re going to Open it.”

  “Open” is a form of Newspeak; it means “close.” The Open File—in some police departments called the Pending File—contains unsolved cases which are not actively being investigated. They are cases which have been closed without resolution.

  “So everything’s back to normal,” I said.

  “Almost. The museum’s shut down. But they still want somebody there at night.”

  To find the bodies, I thought; but Grazko and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which I would say that kind of thing aloud. We said so long to one another, I told Kate I would be working tonight, and she adjusted dinner to suit.

  I got to the museum a few minutes early, and found it as brightly lighted as when it was open. The front door was unlocked, and Muller was at his usual place inside. Allied also furnished daytime guards to the museum, three of them, of whom Muller was the senior man. Stout and sixtyish, Muller had spent thirty years in the Army as an MP, and was now living comfortably on Army retirement pay. He worked for Allied mostly to occupy his mind and keep from going stale. Not from going fat, certainly.

  There seemed to be activity within the museum, a lot of it. I said, “I thought the place was closed.”

  “It is. They’re doing an inventory, want to see if anything’s gone.”

  It turned out Muller was the only daytime guard on duty. The museum had various unofficial threads of connection with New York University, and several graduate students were now in the process of checking the contents of the building against the catalogue. They were working under the direction of the two men who were the principal links between museum and university, they being both faculty members at NYU and directors of the museum. One of these was Ernest Ramsey, whose specialty was American history, a short, slender, neat, fussy man in his fifties, with a gray spade beard and the manner of running his life from lists; we had met four or five times in the three weeks of my employment here, and I had always had the feeling that each sentence he said to me was afterward checked off on a clipboard he maintained in his head. The other was named Phil Crane, from the Art Department at the university; an intense, long-haired man in his late thirties, he wore a heavily undisciplined beard to go with his love beads and bell-bottom slacks, and tended to pepper his language with the slang of the moment. Ramsey and Crane made a comic contrast with one another, though neither seemed aware of it; the one the traditional university professor, pedantic and edgy and impatient with people outside his specialty, the other the new breed of committed don, striving frantically to remain in touch with his students. Yet they found a kind of common meeting ground here, involved with a museum devoted to nostalgia.

  Still, their influences never truly mingled. Among the young people taking the inventory, the Ramsey students could clearly be separated from the Crane students. The Ramseyites were more traditional, more scholarly, more clean-cut and old-fashioned, while the Cranettes leaned toward beards and beads and bells.

  Leaving Muller, who promised to let me know when he was going to leave, I went down the hall to the office, and found Phil Crane himself there, running off copies of a page of the Village Voice on the copier there. “Hi,” he said, when I walked in. “You’re Tobin, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” I put my lunchbag down in its usual place, on the corner of a desk; I felt self-conscious about carrying a lunchbag, as though it were foolish or simple-minded, like wearing knickers.

  The copier could be programmed to do a maximum of ten copies at a time. Crane had apparently set it to its top output; he came away from it, and it kept on clicking and working away. “That must have been a real down for you last night,” he said.

  “It was.”

  “A hell of a thing,” he said. “You walk into a room and zap! A dead body, staring right at you.”

  “He wasn’t staring,” I said. “He was face down. It was just as well.”

  “Still. And you all alone.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “He was there.”

  Crane barked with laughter. “Mr. Tobin,” he said, “you exceed my expectations. You groove on crisis, I know you do. Isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “It cools you out,” he said. “You go along, you go along, everything’s quiet, then there’s a crash, and you’re cool. Am I right?”

  I grinned at him. “You mean I’m good under pressure.”

  “Man, I mean you live under pressure. It picks you up.”

  “No,” I said. “I like a quiet life.”

  He gave me a knowing look. “Not you,” he said. “You’re a fatality freak. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know it,” he said, “but I groove with you. I really and truly dig where you are. You let it come to you, and that’s good. I’m the same.”

  I wasn’t sure why, but he made me feel like laughing. Not derisive laughter, but happy laughter, agreeing with him. I said, “You think we’re tha
t much alike?”

  He shook his head, with a kind of mournful smile. “No, no,” he said, without emphasis. “We don’t pick up on the same kind of thing. But we react the same, you and me. You ever try grass?”

  “Yes.” I was referring to things from a long time ago, back when marijuana was a lot more esoteric than it is now.

  “Didn’t do you anything, did it?” He said it as a challenge.

  “As a matter of fact, no, it didn’t.”

  He nodded, grinning at me. “Try it more than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still a bummer?”

  “Still no reaction,” I said, assuming that was what he’d meant.

  “I knew it,” he said, nodding some more, grinning in satisfaction. “I’m the same way. The kids can’t stand me, they’re flying and I’m on the ground.”

  I had to smile back. I said, “Why is that?”

  “Control,” he said. “Mastery of self. You and me, we just won’t ever let go, put down the reins and relax. You ever been hypnotized?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody ever tried?”

  I shook my head.

  “Try it some time,” he told me. “It won’t work. You take any hypnotist you want, any professional. You try, you go into it and want to get hypnotized. Just to see what it is, say.” He shook his head, then glanced over at the copier and noticed it had stopped working. Walking over to it, he said, “You won’t go under. It’s the same as with the grass.”

  “Have you tried it?”

  Grinning again, reprogramming the copier for ten more, he said, “Five different times. I drive them right up the wall.” He struck a stern pose, and did a parody voice combining Viennese professor and Times Square homosexual: “Professor Crane, you are not cooperating.”

  “Are you cooperating?”

  He cocked his head to one side, looking past me, thinking it over. “I guess I’m not,” he said, sounding surprised. “I want to, but I just won’t let it happen. Like with the grass. You know what I mean?”