Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  Until I was on my feet, my utter concentration on moving without sound had distracted me from the major question: who was he? Was it Vigevano? Was it the killer? Which hands were reaching into the boat to clutch at me now?

  It would be Vigevano, wouldn’t it? The killer had caused me a great deal of trouble, but only indirectly, and there was no reason for him to come after me now. Tynebourne and the girl had been a threat to him because they had known the identity of the John Doe and his connection with the killer, but I knew neither.

  So it would be Vigevano. And not alone, no, all four of them would be here, waiting for me.

  Of course; they were waiting for me. They had come to a darkened house, the car gone from in front of it, and had taken it for granted I wasn’t home. So they had settled in to wait, to take me by surprise whenever I should return.

  Except that now, if I remained very silent and very careful, the surprise would be in the other direction.

  But first I needed my clothing. A shirt and trousers are no physical protection against any weapon, of course, but they are a psychological protection of the most important kind—a naked man does not fight with any sense of confidence.

  I knew my own room, could move around it with some assurance, though very slowly. I dressed, pausing at every inadvertent rustle and scrape, and leaving off only my shoes.

  I needed a weapon. I had no gun in the house, but I remembered an old nightstick from my early days on the force, kept over the years first for sentimental reasons and then out of forgetfulness. It was hanging on a hook in the back of the closet, and the only question was whether I could get to it without making a lot of noise.

  The closet door wasn’t entirely closed. I pulled it slowly open, knowing it sometimes squeaked when moved quickly, and reached in to touch the shoulders of shirts and jackets, acquaint myself with the terrain before trying to push through it. Somewhere low to the floor a belt buckle made a tiny sound, and I froze, and waited, and at last went on.

  And found it. My fingers touched the wood, slid upward to the leather thong, and up to the hook. Slowly I lifted the thong from the hook, and used two hands to slide the stick vertically through clothing and out of the closet. I didn’t breathe at all until I’d finished that operation, and then just stood there for half a minute or so, holding the nightstick in both hands and panting very silently through my open mouth.

  Finally I turned and made my way around the bed and over to the opposite wall, and then along it to the doorway. The door was ajar, open enough for me to slip through without moving it, and then at last I was in a place where some small light showed.

  But very little. The plan of our house has a central hall on the second floor, up to which the stairs lead and off which are all the rooms. This hall has no windows, so the only light sources were the windows in Bill’s room and my study. The doors to both rooms were partly open, and the window shades were half-up, so some dim light did reach the hall; enough to make out the doorways of those two rooms but not to see the stairwell with any confidence.

  I moved toward the unseen stairs, taking one slow step at a time and pausing after every one. Either I had grown used to the cigarette smoke by now or the smoker had finished; in any case, I couldn’t smell it any more. Nor was there still any other sign that I had visitors.

  Were they gone? It was possible I was doing all this charade in an empty house, that Vigevano or someone else had come here, waited awhile, and then departed, leaving behind only the faint whiff of smoke to show that he had passed through.

  I hoped that was the answer, but I wasn’t ready yet to assume it was. I reached the top of the stairs, and inched my foot down to the first step.

  The left side of the stairs is built along the wall, so that was where I walked, knowing there was less chance of creaking at that spot. I went down the stairs sideways, my back against the wall, my arms spread out slightly to both sides along the wall, the nightstick gripped in my right fist. I would lower my left foot slowly to the next step, shift weight gradually, bring down the right foot, pause, listen, wait, and then start the process all over again.

  There were fifteen steps, a number I’d known from long acquaintance. It must have taken me a full three minutes to work my way down them, and still at the bottom I had heard and seen and smelled nothing. Were there no intruders after all?

  At the foot of the stairs, with my back still against the wall, I now had the front door to my left, the living room straight ahead of me, and the kitchen down a short hallway past the stairs on my right. Some illumination came through the glass in the front door, and from the living-room windows, but not enough to make out more than the bulk of furniture.

  I was about to move forward from the wall, thinking to go around the bottom step and down to the right toward the kitchen, when there was a sudden noise from back there, the sound of a step, and then the kitchen swing door pushed open, making the creaking sound it always does, and a rasping voice called in a kind of half-whisper, “Willie!”

  I stepped back against the wall. I couldn’t see anything down toward the kitchen, nothing but darkness.

  Another voice answered from the living room, higher-pitched: “Yeah, what?” I recognized it as Willie Vigevano.

  “Anything?”

  “You’ll know it, Fred, if there is.”

  So Fred Carver was the one in the kitchen, and Vigevano was in the living room. Carver was the older man, the one with the reputation, the one who was supposed to be the leader of this group, but voices don’t deceive: Carver was accepting Vigevano’s supremacy.

  But not without some struggle. “Keep your eyes open,” Carver said sullenly, and the creak of the swing door showed he’d retired before Vigevano could respond.

  Two of them were here. Were the other two?

  And what was I going to do about it? If I could get out of here without their knowing it, I could have them all—assuming they were all here—picked up for breaking and entering. That would give Hargerson all the hint he’d need, of course, and he’d start leaning on them to find out which one had thrown the acid and why. Knowing Hargerson, and knowing the kind of punk these four all were, I knew he’d get his answers pretty quickly, though not in any way he could take into court.

  Would that be the best way? If Hargerson came to it on his own, and if it happened this way, remote from the museum and the killing, it just might miss the publicity and muckraking that would come from tying it in with the murder investigation.

  Or Hargerson might, out of spite or revenge, do his best to make it all as big and nasty as he possibly could anyway.

  Was it worth a try? Yes, I thought it probably was. I already knew how to phrase it to Hargerson over the phone: “A group of from two to four men has broken into my home. I can tell you honestly that two of them I haven’t seen since my years on the force, and the other two I’ve never seen in my life. But they’ve committed a felony by breaking in, and I think you’ll want to take a special interest in them.” That would be enough of a hint for Hargerson; he would take it from there.

  But the first problem was to get to that phone. I was still inside this house, with the two or three or four men, and if I made the slightest noise, I’d never manage to get out.

  The front door. I looked toward it again, trying to judge whether or not I dared make a try in that direction, and a shadow moved across the glass, a bulky figure, moving from left to right. And he was inside the house.

  So they were all here. That must be either Knox or Livingston, on guard at the door, waiting for me to come home.

  Why did they think I would be here at all? Unless they’d been at the museum, waiting for me to show up there, and had seen my substitute arrive instead. So they’d come out here to get me, and had found the house dark, and thought I was out somewhere. Now they were all over the first floor, waiting for me to come home.

  The second floor? I tried to visualize the exterior of the house, to think if there was any way I could go out a second-
story window and get to the ground without breaking an ankle, but there was nothing at all useful. We had no sheds with sloping roofs attached to our house, no handy trellises. My wall enclosing the back yard did touch the two rear corners of the house at a height of six feet, but there were no windows that would give handy access to the wall. And while I’m in reasonably good condition for my age, I’m no acrobat; to simply leap out a second-floor window and hope for the best would be to ask for the worst, for a broken bone or a twisted ankle, and enough noise to attract the attention of these four in the house.

  I had continued looking toward the front door while trying to decide what to do next, and I saw the dark shape move by the glass again. He was restless, Knox or Livingston, whichever he was, and moving back and forth just a few feet this side of the door.

  If I could get past him—

  I moved out away from the wall again. I had an advantage here; I knew the house, how to move silently in it, where there was furniture to be avoided. And the other advantage, also, that they didn’t know I was here.

  In the middle of the hall, next to the banister, I could see the shape against the glass again. It was hard to make out exactly, but he seemed to be swaying back and forth on his feet while standing looking out the window toward the street. With his back to me.

  I moved forward, toward him, keeping him between me and the glass, and stopped when once again he went into motion, taking a couple of restless steps to his left and then to the right again. I waited, not moving at all until he had stopped, and then moved closer to him again.

  It had to be done fast and hard, and with accuracy. He was looking out the glass again at the street, and I was behind him, close enough to reach out and touch his back. I moved slightly to one side, not wanting to push him accidentally into the door. I lifted the nightstick up beside and behind my head, braced myself, and then swung as hard as I could at the dim shape of his head, aiming as best I could at a spot just above and behind his ear. And at the second of impact, even while my body was following through, I reached out quickly with my left hand, snagged his clothing with my fingers, and pulled him toward me, not wanting him to fall in any loud or noticeable fashion.

  It must have hit him right; he was absolutely unconscious, a dead weight that sagged back against me and wanted to drop to the floor like a stone. I was still off-balance myself from the force of the blow, and for a second or two I thought the two of us would go crashing into the door and then to the floor; but I got my balance back, and held him with both arms around his chest, and stayed there for maybe half a minute without moving, listening to the silence around me, waiting for Vigevano or one of the others to show that they had heard something.

  But the silence remained complete, and at last I shifted position on him and lowered him slowly to the floor. It was while bending over to do it that I got my first twinge, my first reminder of the stiffness that had plagued me all day yesterday. The long sleep had worked a lot of it out of me, so much so that I hadn’t been reminded of it at all until now.

  I straightened and listened some more, and there was no sound. I moved over to the door, reached for the knob where I knew it would be, and from the living room Willie Vigevano suddenly said, “Mort?”

  So this was Livingston I’d hit. But now what?

  I hesitated, my hand on the knob. If I just ran now, I might get away, though with three of them to chase me, that was by no means sure. But, more important than that, if I got away and left them alerted, they would also get away.

  No, I didn’t want that. I turned away from the door, releasing the knob without ever having turned it. It had been no sound of mine that had set Vigevano off, but probably simply that premonition of something being wrong that sometimes strikes people in stress situations.

  Only a second or two had gone by since Vigevano had spoken; in that time, I’d made my decision and started to move. I strode quickly away from the door and toward the wide living-room doorway, knowing in the dark where it was and what furniture to avoid.

  I didn’t yet know exactly where Vigevano was, but I expected him to speak at least once more, giving me a beam to follow. His calling of Livingston’s name had been casual, untroubled, but when he didn’t get an answer he would surely call again, more sharply.

  He did, as I moved through the doorway into the living room. “Mort? What’s up?”

  He was on the sofa; ahead, and to my right. I went that way, the nightstick poised in my right hand, my left hand out in front of me, ready to grasp his body and to tell my right hand where to aim.

  I hadn’t expected him to turn on the light. When the table lamp on the far side of the sofa suddenly flared, I was staring almost directly at it, and I wound up more blinded than I’d been in the dark.

  But I knew where Vigevano was, and I kept coming, avoiding the coffee table out of long habit. He was struggling to get up from the sofa, his eyes no doubt nearly as blinded in the sudden light as my own. He yelled, “Fred! He’s here!” And I was on him.

  My aim this time was nowhere near as accurate as it had been with Livingston. I swung side-arm at the voice, and caught him a sideswipe hit on the cheek and the side of the head. It was enough to knock him off the sofa and daze him, but he wasn’t completely unconscious.

  I was now between the sofa and the coffee table, and Fred Carver would be coming in from the kitchen any second. I kicked the coffee table out of the way, squinted, shielded my eyes from the light with my left hand, and swung at the curly-haired head in front of me as he sat there on the floor, half-stunned.

  The second blow was also inaccurate, catching him as much on the shoulder as the head, but still it put him out of commission at least for a while; he flopped over onto his face as I heard the swing door flap open behind me.

  I jumped over Vigevano’s body. The dining-room doorway was to my right. I ran in there, meaning to cut diagonally across to the other door to the kitchen, and then through the kitchen and into the back yard. I could get over my six-foot wall without too much difficulty, and from there, away.

  All hope of getting Hargerson here to arrest them was now gone. The only thing left was to get myself out of danger.

  Back in the living room, I heard Fred Carver’s voice: “Jerry! Go round the other way!”

  Jerry—that would be the fourth man, Knox. So I would probably be meeting him in the kitchen.

  The light in the living room had robbed me of most of my night vision, but I still wasn’t ready for normal light either. And my haste was making me forget the details of my own house; I slammed my hip painfully into the corner of the dining-room table on the way by.

  I reached the door to the kitchen and pushed it open, and all the lights had been turned on. I raced in, squinting, trying to see in all directions at once, and something hit me a hard blow across the bridge of my nose, just below my eyes. The force of it stopped me and almost knocked me down, and for a second or two I could neither see nor think. It was an automatic gesture to put my arms up in front of my face, so that the next blow landed on my forearms, stunning me so that I dropped the nightstick.

  But I had the thong around my wrist. The nightstick fell, twisted on the end of the thong, and caught me sharply on the elbow. That, and the pain in my forearms, brought me back to myself, and I blinked around through my arms and saw a big heavy-set guy swinging a broom handle around for a third time.

  I ducked under and away from that one, losing my balance in the process and going down on one knee. My flailing left arm hit the stove, and I used it to pull myself up again.

  Missing me had made Jerry Knox lose his own balance, though not as badly as I had. Still, it gave me an extra few seconds to get to my feet and try a counterattack, lunging at him, the nightstick in my hand again and upraised over my head.

  But he was fresher than me, and less damaged, and had had more time to set himself. Instead of swinging the broom handle again, he jabbed the end of it very hard into my stomach.

  I gagged, and felt
myself toppling over forward, and couldn’t do a thing to stop it from happening. My hands splayed out in front of me, and I hit the kitchen floor hard, the nightstick bouncing next to my right hand.

  The pain in my stomach was so severe that I wanted to do nothing but curl up around it like a bug around a pin. But I wouldn’t let it happen; I immediately started struggling my feet under me, and moved my right hand for the nightstick again.

  A heel came down hard on my right hand and stayed there, bearing down. A voice above me said, “You make one move, you son of a bitch, I’ll knock your head right off your body.”

  I didn’t move.

  19

  THEY LET ME UP when Fred Carver came into the room, Jerry Knox first stooping to slip the thong of the nightstick off my wrist. I got up slowly, rubbing the back of my hand where Knox had stepped on it. My eyes were watering, and the flesh of my face felt puffy around my eyes and nose. I squinted at the two of them, and waited for whatever would happen next.

  I recognized Fred Carver; he hadn’t changed much in the last few years. I’d helped to pick him up three or four times back in the old days, though never on anything that had stuck. A big and beefy man, with thinning brown hair and a manner of wronged belligerence as though someone had just purposely short-changed him, Fred Carver was tough only in the limited sense that he pushed people around if they were weaker than he was, or in a position where they couldn’t fight back. The barroom brawler, half bully and half coward, was obvious in his face, in his every movement, in his words, in the very sound of his voice.

  And Jerry Knox was more of the same; just younger, that’s all, with bushy red hair. And maybe a little less belligerence, a little more self-confidence; now that he’d bested me, Knox showed no inclination to do anything further to me.