Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  I recognized that I was at that state of exhaustion where almost any concession will be made for the sake of being left alone. In my earlier days on the force, back when a confession was worth bringing into court, it had been an ordinary technique to try to reduce a suspect to this condition, when he would be willing to trade a detailed confession for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  I had to stay aware of that, had to guard against it. Already it was seeming as though the simple truth would be the best way to handle things, and I had to remind myself again that in fact it was the worst way, it was the last resort.

  Earlier, during my final few hours on duty last night, I had tried to work out a simple truth that would cover the necessary territory without spreading, and it just wasn’t possible. I had considered telling the whole story while leaving out only the one fact that my meeting with Linda had taken place in the museum, and I had come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work. They would want to know—Hargerson, for instance, would want to know—who I’d talked to on the force about pressuring Fred Carver and the others, and when I’d talked to him. And the answer would be Marty Kengelberg, on the same night I’d found the body. It wouldn’t take much for Hargerson or anybody else to realize the unknown woman seen leaving the museum that night had to have been Linda Campbell.

  And at that point my own original lie would be exposed, and Linda would be driven directly into the middle of the murder-and-forgery case. She would be a witness, having been in the building the night of the murder. More than that, she would be a public spectacle. The killing had originally gotten a pretty splashy play in the newspapers and on television because of the strangeness of its details—Newsweek had even done a small piece on it, with a photo of the room where I’d found the body—but it had pretty much faded from the media when nothing further happened. The discovery of the thefts had made the newspapers, but not television. Only the Mystery Woman, as the papers inevitably called her, kept the thing newsworthy at all. Once the Mystery Woman was found, and the rest of the story came out, the sexual implications would drive the case right back into prominence; and surely they would rehash all the old stuff about Linda and me, open those old wounds all over again.

  Three years ago, when Jock’s death and my removal from the force had been a brief but noisy public scandal, I had seen the phrase LOVE NEST more than once in headlines referring to Linda and me. Those headlines and those stories would still be on file in the newspaper morgues; a fast rewrite man could make titillating current reading out of them today, combining them with the understood suggestion—it would never quite be said out loud—that Linda and I were apparently still at it, despite everything that had happened the first time, despite even her husband now being out of jail. And here we’d be, sensationalized again, combined once more with sudden death; Jock Sheehan the first time, and now the John Doe. TRAGEDY STALKS EX-COP AND FORMER MISTRESS. Or would they bother to dilute their story with the word “former”?

  I didn’t want to go through all that again if I didn’t have to. No, and I didn’t want Linda run through it again, either. Or Kate, for that matter; especially Kate. I’d do it if it was the only way to get the guy who’d blinded Grinella, because I accepted the precedence of Grinella’s claim to redress over my own claim to peace and quiet. But I would try it the other way first; I would try it the other way as long as I could.

  Which meant withstanding Hargerson. He had obviously also come to the realization that the acid had been meant for me, and when I hadn’t volunteered anything, he’d decided to meet me for a private talk. So he’d waited near my home, and now he had me.

  But at first he didn’t do anything about it. We drove for several blocks together in silence, me keeping my eyes closed most of the time, opening them on occasion to see where we were. Inside, I was trying to build my strength and my resolve.

  It turned out we were heading for a construction site about a mile from my house. In a four-square-block area all of the perfectly sound middle-class private homes were being torn down. There was no indication yet which particular manifestation of Ant City would replace them. The crews were still in the process of ripping down the comfortable walls and gouging yellow holes in the earth. I tended to avoid this area when I could, because it made me think about their doing the same to my own home; I liked to think my wall would slow them down, though I knew it wouldn’t stop them.

  The whole area was enclosed by wire fencing, and Hargerson parked near one of the gates, where yellow-helmeted workmen were arriving to start the day. He switched off the engine and looked at me and said, “Who threw it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He looked at me for a few seconds, his heavy head thrust forward toward me, his expression watchful and brooding. He was waiting for me to say something else, and when I didn’t, he shrugged and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We got out of the car. He used his badge to get us through the gate, and we walked down a long board ramp and across the hollowed-out portion. All around us yellow machinery was starting up, roaring, beginning to move this way and that on metal treads. The air was dry with dust and oil.

  Another ramp on the opposite side of the excavation led up to where houses were still in the process of being torn down. Hargerson stopped at the foot of it and looked at me. He had to shout because of the machinery behind us: “Who threw it?”

  “I truly don’t know.”

  He shrugged again, and we started up the ramp.

  Hargerson had a technique I understood and admired. Most interrogators in his position would have argued details with me, proved to me that I had to have been the target of the acid-thrower, and so on. Hargerson had no small talk of that type; he took the provable things for granted, he let the other person do the dialogue himself inside his head, and all he asked was the last question. It was an extremely effective technique, but only if done with total conviction; not many men can resist the temptation to argue with the suspect. Hargerson was one of them.

  Silence can create more pressure than words, if it’s done right. Hargerson knew how to do it right; even knowing what he was doing, I felt it working on me, felt the nervousness building.

  We went up the ramp, and down the shattered remnant of a street. A half-dozen houses were in the process of being demolished, and another three or four at the far end were waiting their turn. The growling of machinery in the pit was now the background noise, while the foreground was full of hammering and crashing and the occasional shriek of nails being wrenched out of wood. Bulldozers and other heavy equipment had passed through here, making rubble of the pavement, through which it was somewhat awkward to walk.

  The last house on the left was completely intact. Small, two-story, one-family, with a front porch and fairly new shingle siding. There was a television antenna on the roof. Hargerson led the way up the stoop of this house, and across the porch, and through the half-open doorway.

  The living room was empty, and had the too-small look of all empty rooms. An enamel pot was on the floor in one corner, and on one wall was a framed photograph of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reading comic strips over the radio; that had been during a newspaper strike in his administration.

  I had just enough time to notice these things, when Hargerson turned and hit me very hard in the stomach, just below the belt. I’d been bracing myself for some sort of physical threat, but it had come so abruptly that it caught me unawares. It knocked the breath out of me, and I went staggering back, trying desperately to keep my feet, terrified of what he would do to me once I hit the floor.

  But I did hit the floor, and he did nothing. He stood in the middle of the room, his hands at his sides, and watched me. I had landed painfully on my back and left side, and I rolled over slowly, trying to breathe. The pain was worse in my throat, trying to force the air in, than in my stomach where he’d hit me. The first inhalation was very noisy, and agony to my throat; after that, they grew progressively easier.

  He waited ti
ll I was breathing almost normally, still sitting on the floor, holding one hand to my throat. Then he took a step closer and said, “Who threw it, Tobin?”

  I shook my head.

  This time I knew what would happen. He wouldn’t aim for my head, because he wouldn’t want to mark me visibly if he could avoid it. His shoe came toward my ribs, on the left side, and instead of trying to duck away from it I lunged toward it, trying to engulf his foot with my body, throw him off-balance with my weight, and topple him to the floor. But it didn’t work; he kept his balance, and swung a hard rabbit punch to the back of my neck that flattened me face down on the dusty boards, leaving me stunned and dizzy and unable to move, while he stepped around and kicked me twice in the side.

  In an ordinary fight, I might have stood a chance with Hargerson. He had a year or two on me, he was somewhat stronger and probably in a bit better shape, but we weren’t totally mismatched, and I think I could have given him some trouble along the way. But not like this; he’d moved first, without warning, and I never had a chance after that to catch up.

  We spent a long time in there, and he never once let me get all the way to my feet. He used fists and knees and shoes, and from time to time paused to let me catch my breath or my wits, and each time he asked me the same question. I held him off with determination for a while, and then with anger; for a time I was screaming through my raw throat that I would kill him, that I would follow him, I would find my chance, I would kill him dead. But he just kept at his methodical work, and steadily beat anger too out of me, and at the last I was resisting with nothing at all. I don’t know why I didn’t finally tell him the truth; it just seemed as though this thing would go on until it was time for it to stop, as though there was nothing I could do to cut it short, so why even try. I guess what I was resisting with at the end was despair.

  And, finally, with unconsciousness. I was dazed and half-conscious most of the way through it in any case, and one time it simply became more, and I was gone.

  For three hours. I came up out of it very slowly, driven up mostly by pain, and when I was awake enough to remember what had happened, I looked at my watch and it was nearly twelve o’clock. I raised myself to a sitting position, and Hargerson had left. Or would he be coming back? Was he simply taking a break somewhere?

  From the neck down, I didn’t seem to have one muscle that wasn’t aching. My arms trembled when I leaned on them to stand, and when at last I did get to my feet, I found I was in a half-crouched position, with my arms wrapped around my ribs. I walked like a man who’s been bedridden for six months, and every breath I took burned in my throat and ached in my chest.

  Hargerson was nowhere around. I had left my uniform cap back there on the floor, but there was no way for me to bend over and pick it up. I hobbled out onto the porch, where the thin bright October sun shone straight down, and looking to my left, the opposite direction from the pit we’d crossed, I saw another gate in the fence, standing open.

  The worst part was getting down the stoop; I could walk fairly well on level ground. I made my way across the rubble and through the gate, and walked a block to a laundromat with a telephone. I called Kate to come get me, which she did about fifteen minutes later. Three or four women in the laundromat kept looking at me, sitting in a chair by the front window, breathing through my open mouth. I knew my uniform was filthy, and my face was probably streaked with dirt and sweat. My movements were stiff, and I couldn’t seem to breathe normally; no wonder they kept frowning toward me from where they sat together amid the washers.

  I hadn’t told Kate anything on the phone. When she saw me she started asking questions, touching me in her concern, and I said, “Later. I can’t talk yet.”

  She brought me home, and ran a hot bath for me, and lying in it I told her what had happened. She wanted to do something about Hargerson, she got outraged and protective, she wanted to call Marty Kengelberg or Inspector Stanton, but I said, “Kate, I can’t prove it, and he’ll deny it. And they’ll just start asking me the same questions themselves.”

  “You just have to let him get away with it?”

  “I don’t have any choice.”

  “But he beat you!”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”

  She looked at me. “Is that really any consolation?”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “But there’s nothing to be done, so why even think about it?”

  “You have to pay him back,” she said. Kate is usually so stolid a woman; I’d never seen her so intense.

  I shook my head. Remembering my own screamed threats while Hargerson was beating me, I almost smiled. I said, “Some debts just don’t get paid, Kate. That’s one of them.”

  “What if he does it again?”

  “I’ll keep out of his way from now on.”

  “Will you be able to?”

  I closed my eyes. The water was so warm. “God knows,” I said.

  10

  THE EVENING WAS FULL of phone calls. I got out of bed at seven, still stiff and aching but at least capable of moving around, and Dink called at seven twenty-five, while I was finishing a meal midway between breakfast and dinner. He said, “You want the names over the phone?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Vigevano threw it,” he said.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “He’s bragging about it,” Dink said. “He’s the one. And Mort drove the car.”

  “That’s Mort Livingston?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fred Carver wasn’t there at all,” I said.

  “Nowhere near.”

  I said, “But he ordered it.”

  “Oh, sure. He does all the ordering, everything is up to him.”

  “What about the car? You get the model and license plate?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They stole it special for the job, and then ditched it.”

  I said, “Give me an address for Vigevano.”

  He was hesitant, very reluctant. “That’s pushing me kind of far,” he said.

  It seemed a strange place to draw the line, and I had little sympathy for it. I said, “Give it to me, Dink.”

  “Look,” he said. “He lives with his mother. Marie. They got a phone.”

  “Which borough?”

  “Manhattan.”

  “All right.”

  I was about to hang up, but he said, “Listen.”

  “What?”

  “They didn’t give up, you know.”

  “I didn’t think they had.”

  “Willie’s glad he got a cop instead,” Dink said. “But he still wants you.”

  “I know.”

  “I just thought I’d tell you.”

  It was a friendly act. It was from such an unexpected source, that’s the only reason I wasn’t giving it a proper reaction. I forced myself, saying, “I appreciate it, Dink. Thanks.”

  “Thought you’d like to know,” he said.

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  We both said so long, and I broke the connection and then called Allied. Grazko wasn’t there, but the night man was on: Dun-worthy. I said, “I had a kind of accident today, I’m sort of banged up. Can you replace me tonight?”

  “This is damn short notice.” Dunworthy was an irritable man who loved paperwork, hated people, and took all breaks in routine as a personal insult.

  “I was hoping I could go in,” I said, “but I just don’t think I can do it.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “I don’t think I ought to talk about it over the phone.”

  At least he had that much sense; he didn’t argue the point. “We’ll fill in,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and hung up, and went upstairs to dress. I expected Hargerson would be hanging around me, so when I left the house I would first have to find him, and then lose him. I didn’t want him around while I was dealing with Willie Vigevano.

  I was sorry to be in
such bad physical shape at the moment. That, and not having a gun, were my two main problems after Hargerson.

  I had dressed and was on my way downstairs when the phone rang again. Kate took it on the hall phone, and said to me as I reached the foot of the stairs, “It’s for you. A girl.”

  “A girl?” I took the phone and said, “Yes?”

  “Mr. Tobin?” The girl sounded both young and frail; one of those hesitant about-to-faint voices.

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Mitchell Tobin? The man who was the guard who found the body at the museum?”

  “That’s right. Who is this?”

  “I’m—somebody who might, uh, might know who, who it was. Who the body is.”

  “You should go to the police,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t want to do anything if it isn’t George,” she said. “I don’t want to—I wouldn’t want to make any trouble for anybody.”

  “Miss, I’m just not the person for you to talk to.”

  “Well, if you could answer one question,” she said, “it could help me. It could help me know if it was him or not.”

  “What question?”

  “Well—On his right leg, on the back, above the knee, was there a kind of birthmark? It was sort of—orange, and kind of small, and shaped like a, like a kind of a rectangle. Only small. Was there anything like that?”

  I tried to remember the body, but I honestly couldn’t recall whether the right leg had had a birthmark or not. I said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t say yes or no. It was a shock, seeing him, and I guess I just didn’t look that closely.”

  “Oh, dear. Don’t you remember anything about him?”

  “Miss, really, the police aren’t that terrible. Why not get in touch with them? They could show you the body, or at least photographs of it, and you could see for yourself if—”

  “Oh, no, no, no more dead bodies! No, I couldn’t stand any more dead bodies!”