Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  I was used to Dan Tynebourne by now, and knew that his rudeness wasn’t really rudeness, but simply insensitivity. Most people would have closed out the conversation in some way, in a normal social ritual, but that kind of thing never even occurred to Tynebourne. It wasn’t that he deliberately chose to be offensive and antisocial to the people around him, and that lack of deliberate choice removed the sting from his behavior.

  I followed after him, and as I approached the rear of the building I actually could hear voices raised in anger. Or at least one voice; it sounded like Crane’s, though I couldn’t be sure.

  How could people get emotional over a question like this? But on the other hand, I could remember brawls and killings from my days on the force that had been inspired by arguments over even smaller matters. I remember one wife who’d been beaten into the hospital by her husband for having bought the wrong brand of beer.

  But whatever the subject of a fight, people have a consistency of style in waging it. That is, whether arguing over something important or something trivial, each person will fight in his usual way, and his way will be in line with his general personality.

  And so it was with Crane and Ramsey. Dan Tynebourne left the office door open when he went in to join them—it was part of his own consistency of style that he’d be too preoccupied with his own thoughts to shut the door in the middle of a fight—and I loitered just down the corridor out of their sight, blatantly eavesdropping.

  Crane was in a highly dramatic fury; he was shouting at Ramsey, his speeches an awkward amalgam of high-flown democratic tub-thumping and cutting paperback psychology descriptions of Ramsey. He reminded me most of arguments between the principals in dramatic programs on television, his line of patter being full of the same heavy cargo of exposition combined with undigested chunks of philosophy and psychoanalysis. This seemed at first to be a rather obsolete anger-form in a Now Person like Phil Crane—Kirk Douglas has been delivering diatribes like that in the movies for twenty years—but then I realized it was the drama rather than the era that counted. Crane dressed and spoke in a flamboyant and dramatic way under any circumstances, so it was only natural he would choose the most flamboyant and dramatic way to conduct an argument.

  Ernest Ramsey was a different matter. In boxing terms, he was a jabber: in and out, giving small stings, never undertaking a sustained-attack. His attack was personal, aimed entirely at Crane’s appearance and mannerisms and friends and assumptions and private life, and he spoke in a much lower tone of voice than Crane, dropping his brief cold little barbs into the open spaces in Crane’s dissertation. He picked at Crane’s grammar, at his understanding of democracy, at his sloppy use of psychological terminology, at anything and everything Crane offered to him as a target. Of the two, Ramsey was by far the coolest, and in terms of points scored and scars given, was clearly the winner of the fight, if any verbal onslaught like that could be said to have a winner.

  The interesting thing in all this was that the subject of the fight—whether or not to reopen the museum—had been all but forgotten by the principals. Crane referred to it obliquely from time to time in his democracy paragraphs, but the field of conflict had shifted entirely to their general animosity toward one another. It was an animosity that had been buried and under control for a long time, but apparently the tensions of the last week had been working on both of them, and all it had taken was one difference of opinion to bring the whole thing out into the open.

  Which meant that Dan Tynebourne had a great deal of difficulty at first in attracting their attention. He had walked into the office with the apparent belief that he had solved the problem, and that the fight would automatically therefore end. Once the situation had become resolved in his own head, he clearly could see no reason why anyone else should remain confused or at odds. So he walked in and said, “Professor Ramsey, I finally understand what it is we’re—”

  And that was as far as he got, the first try. Crane and Ramsey both simply ignored him and kept right on talking through everything he tried to say. He was almost comic in his baffled attempts to break into their closed circle of conflict, and standing outside in the hall, I found myself smiling as I listened. Because Tynebourne obviously thought they were still fighting about the museum, and not about one another.

  Eventually, however, Tynebourne did manage to get enough words of his own into the mix for his own changed position to be made clear, and Phil Crane leaped on it at once: “Ah-hah! Even Dan comes around!” Tynebourne, of course, was Crane’s protégé, and his earlier semi-defection to the Ramsey point of view must have rankled in Crane and helped to set the stage for the fight.

  Ramsey, however, was prepared to take on entire armies of Crane supporters. “The opinions of your Mortimer Snerd,” he said, “don’t interest me.”

  But Tynebourne’s presence did have to change things, and I was surprised at what that change turned out to be. The fact was, Tynebourne wasn’t angry, and therefore wasn’t fighting. Nothing that was said to him made him angry or altered him from his course of simply explaining the revelation that had come to him. He wanted to explain it, and the words that came at him from the other people in the room were simply interruptions that had to be waited out or waded through. And what finally happened was, Ramsey became embarrassed. His cold angry remarks had worked well with Phil Crane, but by having no effect at all on Dan Tynebourne, they seemed to make Ramsey himself more aware of the kind of thing he was saying. Like a happy drunk made awkward by being in the presence of someone unhumorously sober, Ramsey’s rage foundered on the earnestness of Dan Tynebourne, and he became flustered and embarrassed.

  But not defeated. “We’ll let the Board decide,” he said at last, and came abruptly out of the office, so quickly that I had no opportunity to pretend to be merely walking by. His face was red, his shirt and tie disheveled, and when he saw me his embarrassment and anger combined and focused on me and he said, more heatedly than anything he’d said to Crane, “What are you doing here?”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s after nine o’clock,” I said. “It’s my responsibility now to see that nothing gets broken.”

  “You people have done well so far, haven’t you?”

  Being Allied’s most recent employee, and not identifying myself with the company in any case, I saw no reason to respond to that. “I do my best,” I said. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked past him into the office.

  I’d expected Ramsey to say something more, but he marched away without a word. It was Phil Crane who gave me an angry smile and said, “Well, Mister Cool. You groove on other people’s bad scenes, huh?”

  Crane and Tynebourne were standing near one another in the middle of the room, Crane looking angry and hot and triumphant, Tynebourne earnest and pained and embarrassed. It was Tynebourne who answered for me, saying, “Mr. Tobin was the one who made me see things, Phil. He was the one who saw through the whole elitist put-on.”

  For some reason, this defense of me flattened Crane’s mood entirely; he went from angry triumph to deflated annoyance, his expression becoming petulant as he said, “What difference does it make? Open, shut, who cares? This place is a bad trip now, I’m sick of it.”

  Tynebourne said, “But it isn’t really different, that’s the point. They’re still copies on the walls, just like they always were. You used to say that yourself.”

  “I used to say a lot of shit,” Crane said. He gave Tynebourne a sullen look. “You coming?”

  “Sure,” Tynebourne said. He clearly didn’t know what had altered Crane’s mood—I didn’t know either, and maybe Crane didn’t know himself—but he seemed to feel responsible for it, and to want to make Crane feel better. “Anything you say, Phil,” he said, and came very near to patting the older man on the arm.

  Crane, like Ramsey before him, pushed past me without another word, and it was Tynebourne, oddly enough, who made the apologetic farewell for them both, saying, “Thanks for talking to me before.”

  “That’s al
l right.”

  “This last week has been a bummer for everybody,” he said.

  I felt that I knew that better than any of them, but I didn’t say so. I said, “I suppose it has,” and followed him down the corridor to say good night to Muller and lock up after I had been left alone in the building.

  13

  THE PHONE WOKE ME, shortly after eleven. It was Kate, and she said, “A little while after you left, someone called and made threats. He said he was the one who’d thrown the acid at the policeman.”

  I was having trouble waking up, understanding where I was, what was going on. All I recognized was Kate’s voice, not the room I was in or the desk I was sitting at. I said, “Kate? Kate?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Listen,” I said, trying to wake up, make order out of chaos. “Listen, what’s going on? Somebody threatened you?”

  “I’m at Grace’s,” she said. “Bill and I came right out as soon as we got the call. I thought I shouldn’t take time to phone you until we got here.”

  I was finally waking up; I remembered now where I was, and about the acid, and Willie Vigevano. I said, “He called you? Who did he threaten, you or me?”

  “He said he knew you weren’t home, and you were stupid to leave me there, because he still had more acid.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.” I kept rubbing my face with my free hand, trying to get my mind working.

  “I woke you,” she said. “I knew you shouldn’t try to go to work tonight.”

  “I was very stupid,” I said. “I should have known he’d hit at me through you. I’m sorry, I was very stupid.”

  “Well, we’re perfectly safe now,” she said. “We’re out here at Grace’s, and we’ll just stay here for the next few days.”

  I’d had too much to think about, and the result was that I hadn’t been thinking clearly enough about any part of it. There were too many unconnected complications. “I’ll take care of things,” I said. “This situation has just drifted, but I’ll take care of it now.”

  “Don’t put yourself in danger, Mitch,” she said. “There’s no need for it, Bill and I are perfectly all right where we are. I just wanted you to know what happened, but there’s nothing you have to do.”

  There was a lot I had to do, but I said, “I’ll take care of myself, don’t worry. I’ll take care of myself, and everything else.”

  She said, “How do you feel now?”

  I felt stiff again. I’d been sleeping with my head and arms down on the desk top, and my body was almost as stiff as when I’d regained consciousness on that empty house’s floor. I said, “Not bad. Just groggy from being asleep, that’s all.”

  “Be careful,” she said. “Please be careful.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  We both said goodbye, and I hung up, and got to my feet to move around a bit and work the stiffness out. And wake myself up. I’d fallen asleep almost immediately after finishing my first rounds, nearly two hours ago.

  The girl who’d called me; had she been here? Would I have heard her knock? I became angry at myself for falling asleep, for not thinking clearly enough about Willie Vigevano, for not having done something definite and useful to get myself out of this morass. One small lie about Linda, and the complications from it just kept getting more and more complicated.

  I left the office and went down the hall to the men’s room and scrubbed my face with cold water. I was angry and confused and irritated with myself, and I was frustrated because I was stuck in this building for another eight hours, there was nothing I could do anywhere about any of the things that needed to be done. And I had no idea if that girl had tried knocking on the door, if she’d already been here and given up and gone away again.

  I went back to the office for my flashlight, and made my rounds of the building, finding everything quiet and peaceful. And as I walked I thought about things, and I wondered what I was going to do. About Vigevano, first of all. He had to be dealt with, that was clear enough, because of Grinella and because of Kate and because of Hargerson, but what was I going to do about him? I’d been thinking that I could handle that situation somehow, rig up something that would bring him to book, but that was something else I hadn’t really thought through. If I did manage to get Vigevano and Mort Livingston arrested for the blinding of Grinella, they would talk, they would explain their motive, and it would be one small step from that to Hargerson’s realization that Linda Campbell must have been the woman seen leaving the museum, and that I had been lying all along. If I set Vigevano up for something else instead—as Hargerson had threatened to do to me—it wouldn’t solve my own problem with Hargerson, who would have no way of knowing that vengeance had been done.

  If only, I thought, Hargerson and the others would solve the John Doe murder and the forgeries, there would no longer be any problem. If that situation were solved and out of the way, I could tell the truth about Linda because the truth would no longer have any news value. It was only the connection with a murder case that made it something the newspapers would eat up, and only the connection with a murder case that made it something the police would start poking around in.

  Could I wait for them to find the killer? It had been six days already, and they seemed to have made no progress at all. The John Doe hadn’t been identified, the problems of the forgeries hadn’t been solved, and so far as I could tell, nothing new had been learned in three or four days.

  What was the alternative? I was very remote from the case to consider trying to solve it myself, so that was out. Simply waiting and hoping for the best was the method I’d been using so far, and it had only made things worse. So it looked as though I’d have to do something positive, try to thin out these complications myself as best I could.

  Beginning with Willie Vigevano and his threat to Kate. That couldn’t be tolerated, but had to be dealt with at once. Finishing my rounds, I went back to the office and got out the Manhattan phone book. Dink had said Vigevano lived in Manhattan with his mother, Marie, and there she was in the phone book, Mrs. Marie Vigevano on Bedford Street, down in Greenwich Village. It was nearly midnight, so I thought the odds were good that I would get the son rather than the mother when I called, but it was a woman’s voice that answered, with a slight but noticeable Italian accent. I said, “Is this Marie Vigevano?”

  “Yes? Who’s calling?”

  “Is your son Willie there, please?”

  “No, he’s out.”

  “Would you give him a message?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell him Mitch Tobin called, and—”

  “Just a minute, I’ll get a pencil.”

  I waited, and when she came back I repeated my name, spelled it for her, and gave her my phone number here at the museum. “Would you tell Willie,” I said, “that I’d like him to call me tonight. Any time tonight. But if he can’t call me tonight, I’ll come over and talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Talk to me?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What you want to talk to me for?”

  “I’d rather talk to Willie,” I said, “but if he’s unavailable I’ll talk to you. Will you tell him that?”

  “You selling something?”

  “No. Willie knows who I am.”

  “I’ll tell him when he comes in,” she said. “He should be home pretty soon.”

  “Fine. I’ll be at this number all night.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. She sounded curious, but not worried.

  I hung up, and turned on the radio low, and listened to music, and waited.

  14

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG at ten past two, I expected it to be Vigevano, so I suppose my voice was a little harsh when I answered. But it wasn’t Vigevano, it was the girl who had called me at home and arranged to meet me here; I recognized the frail voice when she said, doubtfully, “Is this Mr. Tobin? Excuse me, I wanted to talk to Mr. Tobin.”

  I consciously made my manner less gruff, saying, “Thi
s is Mr. Tobin. You’re the girl I talked to before, aren’t you?”

  “I wanted you to know why I wasn’t there,” she said.

  “You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  It seemed to me important to meet this girl, talk with her, find out what her story was. I said, “I’d very much like to talk to you, Miss—”

  She didn’t respond with her name. She said, “I want to talk to somebody else first. I’m going over to see him now, and then we’ll decide what to do. But I have to see him first.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.” She sounded terrified of her own capacity to make trouble; from the sound of her voice, she was perpetually on the verge of tears. “We have to decide first,” she said. “That’s why I’m not there yet. I just wanted to call and explain, so you wouldn’t think … I didn’t want you to think I just didn’t show up.”

  I said, “Will you at least call me again, after you talk to this other person?”

  “Oh, I hate to make promises. I don’t know what’s going to happen, we’ll just have to work it out. Don’t make me promise, I’m just not sure yet.”

  I said, “Miss, I know you don’t want to tell me your name or anything like that, at least not yet. But may I ask you one question?”

  “Well, I guess so. I mean, you can ask it. I don’t know if I can answer or not.”

  “I understand that. When we talked before, you said something about dead bodies, not wanting to see any more dead bodies. Would you mind telling me what you meant?”

  “Oh.” The word was so small and distant I was suddenly afraid she was about to faint.

  I said, “If you don’t want to, if it’s too painful for you—”

  “I was in a place,” she said, speaking suddenly very quickly, as though wanting to get it all over with. “I was in a place, and they put the bodies in the trees. They didn’t bury anybody, they put them all, everybody that died, they just put them in the trees. That was their religion. They just wouldn’t change, they thought it was awful to put dead people in the ground. So you’d go out of the village, and in the trees there’d be the bodies, and you never knew when you’d see one. And I used to be terrified that I’d die, and nobody would find out about it in time, and they’d put my body in a tree, and nobody would ever know where I was or what happened. I used to have nightmares all the time about it.”