The bartender strolled down the bar toward the spot where I was heading, and we came to rest at the same instant, he saying, “What can I do for you?”
I asked for Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, feeling I needed something that would be both a pick-me-up and an anesthetic. When he brought it, I shoved him a five-dollar bill and asked for change for the pay phone. I then took two or three quick sips of my drink, slipped a dime from the change he put on the bar in front of me, and walked across the floor to the booth at the rear. I was grateful for the dim lighting in the bar; it not only obscured my beat-up appearance, it also hid the stiff awkwardness of my movements. The dimness, and the general lack of interest in me; the bartender had kept one eye on the television set while serving me, and was now back to watching full time.
I sat in the phone booth, inserted my dime, and laboriously dialed the number of Hargerson’s precinct. He wasn’t there, of course, but I said it was important I get in touch with him, and left my name and the number of this phone. The detective I was talking to promised to pass the message on, and I went back outside to attract the bartender’s attention again and say, “If that phone rings, it’ll be for me.”
“Sure,” he said, and looked at the screen again.
There were a couple of tables near the phone booth. I got my drink from the bar and went over to sit at one of the tables, letting my body sag into relaxation until I realized I was on the verge of passing out again; after which I forced myself to sit up straighten
A siren went by, an ambulance this time. The customers glanced toward the street, but were more interested in television. I sipped at my drink and waited.
Sirens continued to go by intermittently in the half-hour before Hargerson called me back. A second ambulance went through, and several more police cars, and then each ambulance separately returned again. There would be chaos and confusion at my house, with no one there capable of answering questions; except Vigevano, who would be unlikely to want to answer any.
The thought of the explanations that would have to be made was staggering. The time was coming—tomorrow, the day after—when I would have to talk and talk and talk. But not yet, not until this was all finished and I’d had my chance to rest.
Except, of course, for talking to Hargerson. He called at last, half an hour after I’d left the message, and I said, “If you’ll trust me and do what I say, I’ll give you the whole thing tonight, everything you want.”
“What do you mean, the whole thing? All I want is who threw the acid.”
“And who killed the John Doe,” I said. “And who did the forgeries at the museum, and why.”
He was silent for a second, and then said, “You have all of that? All of a sudden you’ve got it?”
“All of a sudden,” I said.
“You didn’t have it before, but now you do.”
“I’ll explain the whole thing,” I promised. “But there isn’t enough to arrest the killer yet. I need you for that.”
“Tobin, what the hell are you up to?”
“Getting this mess over and done with,” I said. “So I can have a peaceful life again. I promise I’ll give you everything you want. Will you let me run it my own way?”
A longer pause this time; then he said, “All right, Tobin. Everybody thinks you’re hot shit. So far I don’t see it, but I’ll go along. Up to a point.”
“That’s all I could ask for. Now, there was some trouble at my house tonight, so I’m not there. A pickup may be out on me, but I don’t want to talk to anybody officially until we clean up the museum mess. I’d like you to come meet with me, but just you. All right?”
“I’ll come alone,” he said. “What we do after that depends on you.”
“Of course.”
“If you’re full of crap, I turn you over to whoever wants you.”
“Naturally,” I said. “I take that for granted.”
“Good.”
I told him the name and address of the tavern, and he said he would be there in less than an hour. I left the booth, went to the bar, and got myself another Jack Daniel’s. Then I sat down at the table again to wait.
22
A HAND WAS GRIPPING my shoulder, shaking me without gentleness. A voice said, “Okay, come on, come on.”
I sat upright, terrified without knowing why. As I stared around at the dark barroom, I slowly came to remember where I was and what was happening and why I was here.
The bartender was the one holding my shoulder. He was giving me a look of disapproval tinged with disgust; I wasn’t the kind of customer he wanted. “You don’t sleep it off in here, fella,” he said. “You go home, or you go wherever you want.”
I’d fallen asleep, without even realizing it. I stared past his arm at the television set; a talk show had been starting when Hargerson had called, and it was still going on. I said, “What time—?” But my mouth was too dry. I cleared my throat, licked my lips, tried again: “What time is it?”
He looked at his watch. “Ten to one.”
The customers were dividing their attention between the talk show and me. I said, “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“You go on home,” he said, and tugged a bit at my shoulder.
I realized he had taken a closer look at me now and seen the condition of my face and clothing and had decided I was a bum. There was no choice any more; he didn’t want my kind in his bar. So I struggled to my feet, with some not very gentle assistance from him, and made my way stiffly to the door and the street.
There were no more sirens. The mess at my house had been cleaned up by now, but there would probably still be a man on duty there, waiting for Kate or me to come home.
I looked around, and a car was parked in darkness to my left, under a tree and some distance from the nearest lightpost. I went over to the car and sat on the fender and waited, shivering a bit, feeling very cold after my unexpected nap.
It was about fifteen minutes later that the black Ford pulled up in front of the bar and Hargerson got out, looking bigger and tougher than ever under the red neon. I slid off the fender and moved forward, but Hargerson was already heading for the tavern, and I had to call his name, surprising myself by how hoarse and cracked my voice was when I tried to raise it.
I guess he didn’t recognize it as a voice he knew. He stopped with his hand out toward the tavern door, about to push it open, and turned his head to frown in my direction. I shuffled toward him, making the best time I could, and he said, doubtfully, “Tobin?”
“Let’s get in the car,” I said.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story,” I said. I was still walking, angling now across the sidewalk toward the black Ford.
He held the passenger door open for me, which was the first I’d realized just how bad I must actually look. I crawled into the car and he shut the door and trotted around to get behind the wheel and say, “All right, give.”
“Drive,” I said. “We’re going to the museum. I’ll tell you the story along the way.”
Hargerson had his moments; happily this was one of them. He didn’t argue, he just started the car and pulled away from the curb.
It took a long time to tell him the whole thing, though he very rarely interrupted with questions. But a kind of dark iris kept trying to close in from the periphery of my vision, narrowing the circle through which I could still see, and I knew if that iris ever closed completely, I would be out for several hours; so I had to keep pausing to catch my breath, shift position, force the iris a bit further open once more.
He only needed to ask two questions before he understood and accepted my reasons for telling the initial lie about Linda. And then he had one comment: “You shouldn’t have called your friend the same night. You should have waited a few days for the killing to blow over.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “But it was a very upsetting thing, an emotional thing, seeing Linda after three years, and I ju
st went ahead and did it. To get it over with, I think.”
“So it was Carver and his friends that threw the acid?”
“Willie Vigevano threw it. Mort Livingston drove the car. Fred Carver gave the orders.”
“How’d they get to you? How’d they find out about you?”
So I told him about Dink, and the sequence of events, and my meeting with Dink which had produced the names. And then the call to me from Vigevano, and then the four of them being in my house tonight, and what had happened. He gave me a startled look when I told him about Knox being shot from outside the house: “I don’t follow that.”
“Once again,” I said, “somebody else took something that was meant for me. That’s happened twice in the last week, first with Grinella and then with Knox.”
“You’re not a good man to be around,” he said. “But if all four of them are in there, who’s shooting at you?”
“The guy who killed the John Doe,” I said.
“Why? What’s he got against you?”
“The dead girl talked to me. He doesn’t know how much she said, he doesn’t know what connections I might make. Particularly once the girl has been identified, since she probably has a direct relationship with the killer.”
“She’s been identified,” he said. “Her name’s Carol Beck. She graduated from NYU five years ago and spent four years in the Peace Corps.”
“In Guatemala.”
Another frowning look at me. “That’s right,” he said. “She just got back a couple months ago. She had a nervous breakdown, that’s why she came back.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
“What they call culture shock,” he said. “People who can’t make it in a real primitive society, or a different society, and crack up.”
I remembered what she’d said about the bodies in the trees, and her fear of her own body ending in a tree after death. Not that what she’d been given in her own culture was that much better; but in water or in air, a dead body is still dead.
I said, “She must have graduated the same year as Dan Tynebourne.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “Around the same time.”
“When the John Doe is identified,” I said, “he’ll turn out to be a classmate of theirs, and his first name is George.”
“You told me that name when you first called me about the girl being missing. It hasn’t led us anywhere yet.”
“It will.”
He brooded for a few seconds, and then said, “You think you know who the killer is.”
“Yes.”
“Then why are we going to the museum? Why not go pick him up?”
“Because I don’t have anything you could get an indictment with. But maybe we can talk him into bringing some evidence with him.”
He continued to frown out the windshield as we drove along, still crossing Queens toward Manhattan. “Don’t give me a name,” he said. “Give me your reasons.”
I found myself grinning at Hargerson’s profile; his sense of competition led him to some strange behavior. I said, “All right. The first thing is the forgeries themselves. The profit in the robberies was very small, particularly considering the amount of work involved in doing the copies. You could spend the same amount of time washing dishes in some diner and still make almost as much.”
He nodded. “Very small potatoes. That’s been a problem, why anybody should do a thing like that.”
“Not for profit,” I said. “That’s the point. It wasn’t done for the usual profit motive. It was done to divert money from a place the thieves considered useless to places they considered useful. Dan Tynebourne talked to me about the forgeries once, and asked me if I thought the thieves were maybe humanitarians. He meant they might be people interested in social causes, who would prefer to see money used for those causes than to see it used to display old cartoons. He presented it as a theory, of course, but what he was doing was talking about himself.”
“He was the thief?”
“One of them. I think there were four originally. Tynebourne, the John Doe, the girl—”
“Carol Beck.”
“Carol Beck, right. And Phil Crane.”
Hargerson gave me a sharp look. “Crane? The professor?”
“He was probably the instigator,” I said. “Last night there was an argument at the museum between Crane and Ernest Ramsey about whether or not the place should be reopened with all those forgeries on the wall. Tynebourne was on the fence about it for a while, but then came down on Crane’s side. At one point he said to Crane something about the forgeries simply being copies of copies, not copies of originals, since what they have there is mostly prints from newspapers and magazines anyway. The idea being that the real things are copies and the forgeries are copies, so they’re all the same. And then he said to Crane, ‘You used to say that yourself.’ I didn’t pick it up then, but the sentence can only mean that Crane used to say it before the forgeries were generally known to be forgeries.”
“I follow it,” Hargerson said, “but I wouldn’t like to explain it to an assistant DA.”
“Neither would I. But it’s enough to convince me that Crane was a part of the forgeries, and that the idea was not to steal money but to liberate it. Take from the Establishment and give it to the people.”
He shook his head, with an expression of disgust. “A thief is a thief,” he said.
“People can convince themselves of things, if they want to. Anyway, Carol Beck left the scheme when she graduated, and went off to the Peace Corps, leaving the three men. The John Doe went to Canada to avoid the draft, and I suppose he was the one who sold the originals, coming back down to New York every once in a while to pick up some more. Tynebourne and Crane did the forgery work, and Crane distributed the money.”
He said, “You’re saying Crane did the killings.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?”
“I suppose he was diverting the cash to his own pockets instead of things like free lunch programs. The John Doe found out, and confronted him with it, and was going to expose him if Crane didn’t replace the money. That would be down in the workroom. Crane could get in the side door and down into the basement without the night guard knowing he was there; he’d probably been doing it for months, going down there with Tynebourne or the John Doe, working on the forgeries or turning originals over to the John Doe to take to Canada.”
Hargerson said, “So he killed the John Doe to keep from having the whistle blown.”
“He killed him out of panic, I think,” I said. “And then was afraid to leave the body in the workroom because it might lead to the discovery of the forgeries or in some other way connect directly with him. So he stripped it and cleaned it, and cleaned the room, and brought the body upstairs to try to suggest it had been brought in from outside.”
“Why didn’t Tynebourne identify the body?”
“Crane must have told him some stranger had evidently done the killing, and awkward questions would be raised if the body was identified, so they should both keep quiet. But once Carol Beck came in, with her fears and neuroses about dead bodies, wanting to give it identification so it could be treated right, Crane had to kill both Tynebourne and the girl. And then he had to try for me.”
Hargerson grunted. “I half wish he’d got you,” he said.
I looked at him, thinking, Only half? So I’d come up in Hargerson’s estimation. But I didn’t say anything.
23
CRANE ANSWERED THE PHONE on the third ring, and I said, “This is Mitch Tobin.”
There was a short pause, and then a sudden bark of laughter, and he said, “Oh, man, you’re a groove! What a head trip you put me through just then, you sounded so down and heavy there: This is Mitch Tobin. You are beautiful, man.”
He wasn’t bad himself. He had to have been sure I was already dead, but the pause after I’d given my name had been very short, and he was already adapted to the new situation. I said, “I hope you don’t mind me cal
ling you at this time of night, but I’ve got a problem, and I thought maybe you could help me out.”
“Well, sure, Mitch, I dig you fine, you know that.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “Somebody tried to shoot me tonight. Down at my house.”
“Shoot you! With a gun? You mean, to kill?”
“That’s right.”
“Man, you’re very lucky they missed.”
“I ducked,” I said. He didn’t know yet that he’d actually killed someone else by mistake, and there was no point telling him. If he believed his gun hadn’t killed anybody yet, he would be less likely to get rid of it. “It was very close,” I said.
“Well, you’re damn lucky,” he said.
“Well, I got to thinking about it, afterward, wondering why anybody would want to kill me, and I decided it probably had to have something to do with the killing here in the museum.”
“Sure,” he said. “That scans.”
“There were a couple of things I’d taken from Dan Tynebourne’s apartment,” I said, “that I thought might be useful if I ever had to defend myself with the police.”
“What? Wait a second, Mitch, start that one again.”
“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said. “You know the Mystery Woman who was supposed to have left here the night of the murder?”
Of course he knew about her. He must have seen her, while skipping out of here after leaving the John Doe upstairs. But he said, “Wasn’t there something in the papers about that?”
“Yes. I said there hadn’t been anybody here.”
“Oh, Mitch,” he said, and I could hear the roguish grin in his voice. “You mean you fibbed to the fuzz, man.”
“I knew she didn’t have anything to do with the killing,” I said. “And we’re both married, and it could have been misinterpreted.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, I know what you mean,” he said, with very heavy-handed humor.
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