Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  The story itself sounded like a nightmare. Had I been wrong earlier, was this merely another crank? I said, “Where was this place?” half expecting her to answer with Atlantis or Ur or Mars or something like that.

  But she said, “Guatemala. Back in the jungle, we were supposed to be building a school and teaching them things, but—It was just impossible, I couldn’t do it any more. I even went back after the first time, I thought I should, I thought I was just a coward, but I couldn’t do it any more. I broke down.”

  From the sound of her voice, faint and trembling, she was on the verge of breaking down again. I said, “Was this with the Peace Corps, you mean?”

  “Yes. I was—”

  I waited, but the sentence had apparently stopped, so I took a somewhat dangerous leap, saying, “Was George in the Peace Corps, too?”

  “What? Why do you—?” She sounded now like a terrified sparrow thrashing around in a small room, trying to find the window.

  “I thought maybe that’s where you knew him,” I said, trying to calm her simply with the calmness of my own voice. “You said you thought the dead man was somebody you knew named George, and I thought he might have been somebody you met in the Peace Corps. Or in Guatemala.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”

  “Were you in Canada with him?”

  Another dangerous thrust, that one, and it produced total silence. I said, “Miss?”

  A voice so faint I could barely hear it said, “Are you playing with me? Do you already know everything?”

  “Only that his clothes were from Canada,” I said. “Your friend George, was he in Canada at one time?”

  Faint, faraway: “Yes.”

  “So it may be him.”

  No stronger: “Yes.”

  “Could you tell me George’s last name?”

  “I don’t want to—I don’t think I should—I wouldn’t want to make trouble.”

  “It can’t make trouble for George. Not if he’s dead.”

  “I have to find out what Dan thinks. I could be making an awful mistake, it could be something else entirely, I wouldn’t want to—Well, I just wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

  I said, “Dan?”

  “What?”

  “You said Dan. Do you mean Dan Tynebourne?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, God.”

  “Miss, I don’t want to push you into anything you don’t want to do. If you want to talk to anybody else first, that’s all—Miss? Miss?”

  But she’d hung up.

  15

  I COULD HAVE CALLED Dan Tynebourne. I could have called Dunworthy, the night man at Allied, and had myself relieved from duty the rest of the night, and gone over to Tynebourne’s apartment. But I was afraid of losing the sparrow entirely, of pushing the girl so much that she would either disappear or just simply refuse to talk any more, so I did nothing. It seemed to me best to let that situation stew along on its own for a while, and see what developed.

  And there was also the call from Willie Vigevano. I thought it likely he’d respond, that he would understand the threat in my call to his mother. Not that I intended to do anything to Marie Vigevano, but I did intend to make menacing noises in that direction, and to convince Vigevano that the conflict was strictly between the two of us, that all families were out of bounds, his and mine both. It seemed to me he would probably be the type who would believe that everybody else was capable of behavior as scummy as his own, and that I could therefore make my threat credible to him. At least I intended to try.

  By four o’clock, however, I was beginning to wonder if I’d miscalculated. Surely Vigevano was home by now, and had received my message; if he were going to call, surely he would have called by now. Making my slow rounds through the museum, following my flashlight beam through the darkened rooms, I began to make up alternate scenarios for Vigevano’s movements and reactions, ranging from his going out to my home and hiding himself there to attack me when I got back in the morning, to his getting together with Fred Carver and the others to make a frontal attack on this museum.

  And what if the girl decided to come here after all, and her arrival coincided with Vigevano’s? I was trying to juggle too many balls in the air at once; the complications were beyond keeping track of.

  When the phone rang at twenty past four, in fact, I had given up completely on hearing from Vigevano tonight and assumed this time that it was the girl calling; which gave me a perfect score, making me wrong in guessing the identity of every caller. It was Vigevano.

  “What’s the idea calling my home?” That was the first thing he said, after my hello.

  I said, “Vigevano?”

  “You know who this is, never mind the crap. Who the hell do you think you are, bothering my old lady?”

  “You called my wife. I called your mother. If you want to make a next move, it’s up to you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You understand me, Vigevano,” I said.

  “What, you’re gonna hurt an old lady? A Captain Nice like you? You think I’m a dumbbell?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  God, he wanted to sound tough. I said, “If you think I won’t pay you back in kind for anything you do to me, you are a dumbbell, yes.”

  “You lousy bastard, we don’t need any of that crap. It’s between you and me. Nobody else, just you and me.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “You want to know where I am right now? Right this minute?”

  “Not in particular,” I said.

  “Yeah, you yellow fink, I guess you don’t. I’m a block from your stinking museum, how about that?”

  Would he come over? I felt a sudden excitement at the thought, an eagerness to have him come here, combined with a deep regret that I wasn’t armed. I said, “That’s closer than I thought you’d get.”

  “Come out,” he said. “Come on out, turn right, come down to the corner. Just you and me.”

  If I hadn’t already suspected that he had his friends with him, this repetition of “just you and me” would have tipped me off. As it was, I knew an unpleasant surprise had been prepared for me somewhere between here and the corner. “I’ll see you when I’m ready,” I said. “In daylight, and when I’m ready.”

  “You’re yellow,” he said. “You sneak behind people’s back, you bring the law down on them, but you don’t come out front like a man.”

  There was something very adolescent about this situation, being taunted to come out and fight, and the absurdity was doubled when I remembered that it was a cowardly acid-thrower who was doing the taunting. “You’ll meet me,” I said. “When I’m ready.” And I hung up.

  I’d expected him to call back, but he didn’t. I stayed in the office for a few minutes, brooding at the phone, waiting for the call and thinking about things. What if the girl did come over now, would Vigevano and his friends do something to her? It would probably be very easy to frighten her away forever, even if they didn’t actually harm her. I thought about calling Marty Kengelberg and asking him to cover the outside of the museum for me, but he too might frighten her away, if she saw him out there.

  It would be better after all if she didn’t come. I was very reluctant to acknowledge that, but finally I saw there was no other way to handle it, and I got out the Manhattan phone book again and looked up Dan Tynebourne. He turned out to live on West 24th Street, in Chelsea; I dialed the number, and let it ring twenty times before accepting the fact that Tynebourne was out rather than asleep.

  Were they already on their way over here? If the girl was coming, it made sense that she would bring Tynebourne with her, since she seemed like someone who felt too frail to do much on her own. But assuming they were coming, what could I do to keep Vigevano and the others from interfering?

  I left the office right after the unsuccessful attempt to call Tynebourne, and went up to the second floor, where three long narrow windows across the front overlo
oked the main entrance and the street. I’d used the flashlight in coming up, and used it again while dragging a bench over by one of the windows, but then I switched it off and sat in darkness, looking out at the empty street. It was heading toward five in the morning, the deadest hour of the day in New York, and barely one car in five minutes traveled down the block while I was sitting there. Nor did I see any pedestrians at all, not Vigevano or anyone else.

  Sitting there, looking out the window at the street, I gradually became aware of the dark museum behind me. There were no lights on at all, no lights anywhere in the building except the one I’d left on far away downstairs in the office, and none of that illumination reached anywhere near where I was. I would turn around every once in a while and look behind me, but the darkness was almost complete back there, the white display walls merely vague gray forms in the black.

  I couldn’t help thinking about the John Doe, and about the killer carrying him naked from room to room that night last week, following in my wake. I kept visualizing it, and imagining it happening again; I could almost hear the small sounds of his passage.

  But of course there was no one behind me, it was simply nerves and an overactive imagination. There were no noises, there was no one carrying a naked dead body from room to room of the museum. Still, my back was tensed and hunched most of the time I was sitting there, and it was sometimes difficult to keep looking out at the street when what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world was spin around and fan the flashlight beam over the full interior of the building.

  I never quite did that, though I did come close. But I waited it out, and shortly after six the sky began to lighten slightly, traffic picked up a little, and the first pedestrians began to walk by. Then I could without embarrassment turn around, switch on the flashlight, see the empty room, and make a great deal of noise in dragging the bench back to its original position.

  I tried Tynebourne again at six-thirty, this time letting the phone ring thirty times, and once more there was no answer. I called the operator and asked her to check the number and be sure it was functioning, and she said it was.

  I was beginning to be afraid that the girl had decided not to talk to me again after all. Whatever connection she and Tynebourne had together, whatever they had discussed, it now seemed they had decided to keep their own counsel. Tynebourne had probably taken her away somewhere for safety from me and anyone else who might want to question her. She did, after all, know that she had slipped and mentioned Tynebourne’s name, and that I had picked it up. So it could be that both of them now planned to stay out of sight for a while. In trying to push the girl to tell me more, I might have pushed her into total silence.

  I’d have to find them, that’s all. They were amateurs at hiding, and amateurs tend to hide with friends. I would find them.

  16

  WHEN I LEFT THE museum, shortly after seven, I looked around but saw no sign of Willie Vigevano or any of his friends. Of the four, I would remember and recognize Fred Carver and Mort Livingston, but it seemed to me I’d also be able to spot Vigevano. The fourth man, Knox, was the only one I’d be unsure about, but I wouldn’t expect him or any of the others to travel alone. Punks like that move in packs.

  They also prefer the dark, and we were now into full daylight. After one quick look around to satisfy myself that they’d crawled back into their holes for the day, I put Vigevano and the others from my mind and turned my attention back to Dan Tynebourne and the unnamed girl.

  My body was still stiff, but I didn’t ache so much any more, and for some reason I wasn’t sleepy. The two-hour nap in the office must have helped somewhat, but I think more than that I was refreshed by being free of the museum, able to go out and move, and with definite objects in view.

  The first being Tynebourne and the girl. It had occurred to me they might be holed up in his place after all, just refusing to answer the phone, so I hailed a cab and headed for Chelsea.

  Tynebourne lived in an apartment building converted from three red-brick townhouses. Two of the entrances had been sealed off, leaving only the one in the middle building. A foyer worthy of a much larger structure had been inserted into this entrance, with the mailboxes and doorbells along the right-hand wall.

  Tynebourne, Daniel, was in apartment 3-C. I rang the bell a few times and waited and nothing happened. It wasn’t yet seven-thirty in the morning, and I was hesitating over ringing the superintendent’s bell when a middle-aged woman came out of the building, apparently on her way to work. I caught the door before it closed behind her; she gave me a quick suspicious look, but I suppose the uniform reassured her, because she didn’t say anything.

  There was no elevator. I went up the stairs to the third floor, and found the door to 3-C. I rang the bell, and waited some more, and tried the knob, but the door was locked.

  I was alone in the hall. I listened and heard no one coming down the stairs, and took out my wallet to get my gasoline credit card, the only credit card I own. It’s a thin rectangle of plastic, and in recent years these credit cards have become the burglar’s most valuable tool.

  And, at the moment, mine. The plastic is strong, but it bends. I inserted it between the door and the jamb and fiddled with it until I’d slipped the door lock open. If there’d been a second lock with a straight bolt, I couldn’t have opened the door that way, but a singly locked door can almost always be opened with patience and a credit card.

  There were no lights on inside. I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by finding people in bed, so after I’d entered the apartment and closed the door behind me, I called, “Tynebourne? Dan Tynebourne?”

  No answer. I moved forward, slowly, inspecting the place.

  It was empty. Tynebourne had a small place—living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen and bath—and there was no one in it. The second time through I switched on the lights, since little daylight came in through windows facing onto a narrow airshaft, and spent some time looking the place over. I was hoping to find some indication of where Tynebourne and the girl might have gone, or perhaps some indication of the girl’s name or the full name of the George who she thought might be our John Doe.

  I found neither, but I did see plenty of further evidence of the split in Dan Tynebourne’s personality. In his books, Jerry Rubin nestled with Henry James. On his walls, a print of the Unicorn tapestry was hung next to a poster of Che Guevara. His records were an amalgam of Jefferson Airplane and Mozart, and beside his bed I found a heavily annotated paperback copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Looking at his marginal remarks, I saw him torn between the nihilism of the terrorists in that book and his own apparently natural love of tradition and heritage and history. He was trying to be in love with both Now and Then, even though the currently accepted way to love Now is by rejecting Then.

  On one side of the living room was a desk made of a door on wrought-iron legs. Half-corrected students’ papers from his courses at City College were here, plus some tortured writing he had apparently been doing himself in an attempt to resolve the Now versus Then conflict in his head. There was also a telephone, and beside it a personal address book. I looked through it, and found no one named George, nor anyone with an address in Canada.

  There weren’t, in fact, very many names in the book at all. Phil Crane was there, with both home and office numbers. The museum was there. Perhaps a dozen individuals were listed, not including Ernest Ramsey.

  Well, I might as well begin. I sat at Tynebourne’s desk, opened his address book, and started calling his friends.

  The first was someone named Edward Barber, and I woke him up. He was angry about it, and irritated at my calling him in search of Dan Tynebourne. “What the hell would he be doing here?”

  “I think he might be with a friend,” I said.

  “Well, he isn’t with me. Christ on a crutch.”

  “Do you know any friend of his named George? Someone who’s been living in Canada?”

  “Who the hell are you, fellow?”
<
br />   “My name is Tobin,” I said. “I’m a friend of Dan’s, I work at the Museum of American Graphic Art.”

  “That piece of crap,” he said. “I would much rather be asleep.” And he hung up.

  Phil Crane was next. I tried him at home, and he was there. “This is Mitch Tobin,” I said. “You know, the night guard at the museum.”

  “Yes, sure,” he said. “Captain Cool. How’s it shaking?”

  “I’m looking for Dan Tynebourne.”

  “Dan? What for?”

  “I wanted to talk with him. He isn’t home, I thought he might be visiting a friend.”

  “He’s probably gone to work.”

  “No, he hasn’t been home for several hours.”

  “Listen,” he said, “what’s going down? You suddenly sound very heavy. What’s happening?”

  “I’m just looking for him, that’s all. It’s nothing serious. There was a girl who wanted to talk with me, and she was going to see Tynebourne first, that’s all.”

  “A girl? Talk to you? What girl?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I didn’t feel like going through a whole explanation every time. “The point is, I want to talk to him, and I want him to know I don’t mean to cause any trouble for him, and I thought he might have decided to stay with a friend for a while. So I’m calling his friends.”

  “Well, if I see him, I’ll tell him to get in touch with you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You want to give me your phone number?”

  “All right.” I gave him my home number, and he said, “Where’s that? In Queens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the address, too, why don’t you? In case he doesn’t want to talk on the phone.”