Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Control,” he said. “When you found the body, I bet you were very cool.”

  I smiled a little ruefully, remembering that moment. “I didn’t feel cool, believe me.”

  “No? I bet it didn’t show. You don’t let anything blow your mind, not grass, not anything. Not even finding a dead body in the middle of the floor.”

  “You give me too much credit,” I said.

  Suddenly he’d lost interest in the conversation. “I don’t think so,” he said, and turned back to the copier, saying, “All set here? Right.”

  I watched him gather up an armload of copies. He seemed self-absorbed while getting ready to leave, but then gave me another friendly smile and said, “Nice talking to you.”

  “The same.”

  “Keep your cool,” he said, and grinned, and left the office.

  A minute later I followed him. Down by the front door, I saw Crane and Ernest Ramsey in conversation, with several of Crane’s students nearby; then Crane and his people left, and Ramsey went off toward the display rooms. I went over to Muller and said, “You don’t have to wait for these people to leave.”

  “No problem,” he said. “They’ll be out in a minute or two.” Over the last few weeks I’d picked up an impression of Muller as a man who preferred being on the job to being at home. I knew nothing of his home life, and might have been mistaking extreme conscientiousness for reluctance to go home.

  Muller and I stood talking by the front door now as the Ramsey students trailed out, one or two at a time. Ramsey himself came along last, and paused to tell Muller that the inventory would continue for the next two or three days, that the museum would remain closed for that time, and that only Muller himself would be required for daytime duty until the reopening. Muller promised to pass it all on to Grazko, and Ramsey turned to me. Like Crane, I had seen Ramsey three or four times in the last few weeks, but we had never actually been introduced. Now Ramsey said, “You’re Tobin, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “The guard who found the body?” He was apparently a man who liked to nail down the details.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You seem to have handled things very well.”

  “I didn’t have to do anything but call the police.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “you seem to have remained remarkably calm under the circumstances.”

  Like Phil Crane, Ramsey was saying I was cool. It was meant as a compliment, and I realized his chilly manner was his natural style and not at all aimed at me, but I couldn’t seem to avoid bristling a bit in response. I made a conscious effort to remain calm under these circumstances, too, and said, “Thank you.”

  He looked around and said, “Astonishing how he could have gotten in here.”

  “Someone with a key,” I suggested. “In the front door or the side.”

  He shook his head, being brisk and positive. “We aren’t that careless with keys,” he said. “These students, for instance, none of them have keys.”

  “If it’s that tight,” I said, “the police should be able to come up with the answer very soon.”

  “But the man was a stranger to us,” he said. “A stranger to everybody. Are you sure this door was locked?”

  “All three locks,” I said. I was offended by the question, but since I assumed Ramsey had asked it out of ignorance rather than malice, I didn’t show my offense.

  “And you let no one in here?”

  I thought of Linda; that, combined with two offensive questions in a row, made me more openly angry. “If I had,” I said, “I would have told the police about it.”

  He looked at me with impatient doubt, not sure whether he should check off that answer on his clipboard or not. Finally he gave a fretful shrug and said, “Well, well.” He nodded. “We’ll let the police handle it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ramsey left, trailing the last of his students, and Muller grinned at me. “Civilians,” he said.

  The word struck me funny, which improved my mood. “He just doesn’t like things unanswered,” I said.

  “Then he’ll live a very nervous life,” Muller said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “So long.”

  I locked the door three times after Muller left, and made my first rounds, double-checking each door and window along the way. Everything was locked up tight.

  The room containing “Advertising in the Fifties” was as bare and anonymous now as it had been at this same hour last night. The body was gone, leaving no traces. There had been small bloodstains on the floor where the face had been lying, but they too were now gone.

  My pattern was to spend about half the time sitting in the office at the first floor rear, listening to the radio, and the other half walking my rounds through the displays. Tonight I felt more restless, and walked more than necessary, thinking about things.

  It was the murdered man who occupied my thoughts now; Linda had receded from existence the minute I had arrived here for work. But the museum itself was the strongest reminder of the dead man, and I found myself poking at the puzzles with which he had surrounded himself in death. The greatest of these, of course, were the traditional two: who had killed him and why had he been killed? But these were unanswerable, unguessable, given my role and the amount of information I possessed, so I tended instead to pick at the secondary puzzles around those main two.

  For instance, why was he naked? How did he happen to be a John Doe? Why was he moved from the place where he had actually been killed? Why had the body been cleaned up, presumably by the killer? Why had it been brought here, to this museum? And why had it been carried all the way up to the second floor—what was the significance of that room that made the killer carry his burden up the stairs to it rather than leave it just inside whichever door he had used as an entrance?

  Ah. The phrasing itself in that last question had suggested at least one possible answer. By carrying the body to the second floor, the killer had left a question as to just which entrance to the museum had been used. Making the killer, perhaps, someone with a key to only one door. If Ramsey were to be believed about the caution the museum took with keys, that just might be a significant detail.

  Except for two things. First, even if it was a significant detail, there was nothing for me to do with it; it was hardly weighty enough evidence to offer Detective Grinella, to say nothing of his partner. And second, there was the key rack behind the first-floor office door. The museum might want to be careful about keys, but anyone with a gob of wax hidden in his hand could make a quick impression of one of those keys and leave no one the wiser.

  Still, the fact of carrying the body upstairs did suggest a desire to conceal the direction of the killer’s movements as well as the origin. Also, it had been placed in the very middle of a square room with doors in all four walls, again tending to confuse, to obscure indications of the direction from which it had come. Not that I thought the killer had chosen the particular room and placement for that conscious reason, but that his conscious desire to cover his tracks had led him to these unconscious lengths.

  From where? I studied each door and window as I passed it, hoping to see some indication of the killer’s route, but of course there was nothing. I passed again the door leading to the basement, and paused to frown at it. There was no exit from the basement to the street, so this couldn’t have been his road, but nevertheless the door held my interest. I had never been below, had never felt any curiosity about it. But tonight my curiosity was high, in anything to do with this building. I went off to get that door’s key.

  This building had originally been a private home, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, having been built sometime before the turn of the century, when there were still fields and farmlands this far north of what was then considered the city. At that time the theater district had been on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, and Fourteenth Street itself was the uptown shopping center. Now the near
est farm was in Connecticut, the theater district was in the West Forties, and the uptown shopping area was just down the block from here, Madison Avenue in the Fifties and Sixties. Fifteen years ago this building had been sold to the semi-private semi-university group which had turned it into the Museum of American Graphic Art. Money had been spent to re-create the original era of the house, if not its original appearance, while at the same time the plumbing and electricity and so on had been modernized. There had also been structural work done, firming up ancient walls and things like that.

  The result was an attractive large house, three stories plus basement and attic, with a private garden on one side. The basement was used for workshops, the ground floor for both display area and office space, the upper floors for display, and the attic for storage. The financing of all this quietly expensive good taste was a bafflement to me; I knew only that “foundation money” had formed the lion’s share.

  In any event, it was a setting far removed from the atmospheres of violence and sudden death. But if violence and sudden death had not actually happened here they had nevertheless been brought to this place, and the effect was that the house itself seemed different. It now seemed secretive, unhealthily empty, ingrown and unreal.

  I was full of this changed sense of the house when I unlocked the basement door and went down the stairs, but the reality down below was certainly simple and straightforward and mundane. A narrow corridor ran straight ahead toward the front of the building from the foot of the stairs, with a gray concrete floor, a whitewashed stone wall on the right, and a white plasterboard wall on the left. Two small windows high in the stone wall, up next to the acoustical ceiling, were barred on the inside and couldn’t have been used as an entrance.

  There were three doors spaced along the plasterboard wall, all shut but none locked. The nearest led into a cluttered L-shaped storage area that took up the rear portion of the basement including the part under the stairs. Discarded office furniture, picture frames, stacks of newspapers and magazines, filing cabinets, old light fixtures, and in a corner a cracked toilet lid.

  The second door, midway along the corridor, led to the furnace and general utilities. Everything was neat and clean here, the walls had been finished with plasterboard, and there was an acoustical ceiling like that in the corridor.

  The final door led to a workroom, with high tables along the walls, each with its own long fluorescent light fixture hanging over it. Again the acoustical ceiling and plasterboard walls and concrete floor, except that two or three scatter rugs were spread around on the concrete in this room, apparently at random. In this room the ads and cartoons and comic strips were made ready for display, taken from their original sources, mounted on heavy cardboard, framed behind non-reflecting glass. Some of the older and more battered items had to be practically reconstructed from yellowed brittle newspaper sheets or magazine pages, and this room was equipped for all such rehabilitation.

  I was fascinated, without really understanding what was done here. I knew that the table covered with an old piece of rug tacked down around all the edges was used for cutting glass. I knew that the acrid smell of chemicals in the air must come from that row of brown glass bottles on a high shelf, used somehow in the restoration of old materials. But the small tools, thin and fragile-looking, were a complete mystery to me.

  Apparently the work was sometimes dirtying, because stained clothing hung from hooks on the wall near the door to a small lavatory. Three or four smocks, plus trousers and old shirts, and an old basketball jacket with vague color differences on the back where some design had once appeared—“Hell’s Angels,” maybe, or a high school letter, or the name of a company sponsoring a bowling team.

  The workroom was reassuring; it was as though the calm competence of it was convincing me that no dead man ever had been found in this building, nor ever could be. Not in a building like this.

  It might be that some sort of reassurance like that was all I’d been seeking after all; when I left the workroom and switched off the light and headed for the stairs, my mood was lighter and I felt no more curiosity or desire to pry into dark corners.

  I was upstairs, locking the basement door behind me, when I became aware of the reflected glow of a flashlight. I immediately switched off my own, and moved as silently as I could in the direction of the light.

  Two flashlights. They were both in the display room nearest the office. I was unarmed, and regretted it for the first time.

  A voice said, “Where the hell is he?”

  “Beats me,” said a second voice, and shouted, “Hey!”

  I said, “Here I am,” and as they came out the doorway I flicked my light on them, and saw that they were Detective Grinella and his partner. I said, “What’s going on?”

  I had been careful not to aim the light directly in their faces. They were less careful, particularly the one whose name I didn’t know; blinding me, he said, “Where the hell were you?”

  “Get that light out of my eyes,” I said, turning away from it. “Come on into the office, there’s a light on in there.”

  They followed me in, and I saw they both had the same personalities as last night; Grinella easygoing but quick, his partner irritable and heavy. The partner said again, “Where were you?”

  “Downstairs,” I said. “Did you knock?”

  “We pretty well kicked the door in,” Grinella said, but just as a comment, not as an accusation.

  “I didn’t hear it. I was looking over the workroom downstairs.”

  “We let ourselves in,” Grinella said.

  His partner said, “That part of your rounds, Tobin?”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “I know your partner’s name, but I don’t know yours.”

  He seemed startled by the question, and more disgruntled than ever. He hesitated, and then said, “I’m Detective Hargerson.” He gave me the impression that by having asked the question I had scored a very tough victory over him, one which earned me a small token of grudging respect.

  I said, “How do you do?”

  “I asked you,” he said, “is the downstairs workroom part of your rounds?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “I’d never seen it before, I was curious to take a look at it.”

  “Because of the killing?”

  “I suppose that’s what gave me the idea,” I said.

  “Gonna be a private dick like in the movies? Snoop around, find something we missed, catch the killer all by yourself?”

  “Hardly,” I said. “That’s not my job.”

  “You’re goddamn right,” Hargerson said.

  “A funny kind of curiosity,” Grinella said casually. “To send you downstairs like that.”

  “Not so funny,” I said. “A man was found dead in here last night. By me. It gave the building a different feeling to it tonight.”

  Grinella said, “You found him upstairs. Tonight you went looking downstairs.”

  I said, “Is there any point to all this? I was curious about the basement, so I went down and looked. I’m not trying to take your jobs away from you, I’ve got a job of my own and I’m happy with it.”

  Hargerson frowned at me. “You just come on too strong,” he said.

  I looked at him. I thought, I come on too strong? But I didn’t say that; I didn’t say anything.

  Grinella took the opportunity of the silence to change the subject. He said, “We came here for a reason. We had a report a woman was seen leaving here last night, around eleven.”

  What would an innocent man say? How would he behave? I frowned slightly and said, “Leaving here?”

  “That would be just before or just after you reported the body,” Grinella said.

  I said, “You think she was the one left the body here?” This was just the kind of false scent I’d been trying not to give them. I said, “She’d have to be pretty strong, wouldn’t she? To carry a dead body up a flight of stairs like that
. If she was on her own, I mean.”

  “That’s the question,” Hargerson said. He leaned on the phrase.

  Grinella said, “You didn’t see her, did you?”

  “If I’d seen anybody,” I said, “I would have told you last night.”

  “That’s right, sure.” He nodded. “I just like to double-check.”

  “I didn’t see her,” I said.

  Grinella glanced at Hargerson, then looked back at me. His expression was pleasant, casual. He said, “Of course, it could go the other way, too. I mean, we’d understand if that’s the way it was.”

  I said, “What other way?”

  “Well, take it like this. It’s a long night, you’re alone, you might get lonely. You might have a friend stop in to keep you company. Maybe it’s a friend you don’t want your wife to know about.”

  I was shaking my head.

  He grinned and said, “Wait, now, hear me out. Let’s say you do have this friend. You’re with her, and that’s why you don’t hear or see somebody come along and deposit the body. You find the body, you tell your friend to take off, you don’t want her name connected in this because it’ll get back to your wife. Or maybe your wife doesn’t care, but the company you work for, they’d get a little bugged. So you send her away, and you say you were all alone here.”

  “It could certainly work that way,” I said. “But it didn’t.”

  “A woman left here,” Hargerson said.

  I looked at him. “Is that a definite report? Or just a maybe?”

  Grinella answered me. “Let’s just say,” he said, “that for now we think we ought to take the report and believe what it says. Which means we’re either going to take off after a woman who turns out to be the killer, or we’re going to waste our time looking for somebody who turns out to be just a friend of yours that you wanted to keep quiet. See what I mean?”

  “I see.”

  “We’re all men of the world,” Grinella suggested. “If the friend theory is the truth, why not tell us about it? We can keep it quiet, it won’t go any further than the three of us in this room. And it’ll save us a lot of trouble and waste of time.”