Don't Lie to Me (10 page)

When had he brought it up? I hadn't heard him at his business downstairs, but he couldn't have heard me either. He had probably known I was there, somewhere in the building with him. More than likely, he had come up to the first floor, had looked around for me, had found me by the illumination of my flashlight, and had simply followed me from room to room, the corpse over his shoulder, until I had passed the spot where he wanted to leave the body.

Though it might have been even more unplanned than that. He'd been following me, not sure yet exactly where the body should be left, and he too had heard the knocking at the front door: Linda. I had turned from my regular route, cut through “Advertising in the Fifties,” hurried downstairs.

The knocking had startled the killer; would people be coming in, turning on lights, filling the rooms? He'd quickly dropped the body in that room I had just crossed, and then followed after me again, this time unencumbered. He had seen Linda enter, had heard us talk, had watched us move away from the entrance. He had known I would be occupied with Linda for some time, my attention distracted; he had gone to the front door, unlocked it, stepped outside, relocked all three locks again, and gone his way.

The image that came into my mind and wouldn't go away again was of myself walking through dark rooms, not knowing I was being followed by a murderer with a naked dead man over his shoulder.

I said to Grinella, “So he was not only killed here, he was killed while I was in the building.”

He waved a dismissing hand. “You're not a suspect,” he said.

“I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of being here while it was happening.”

He raised surprised eyebrows. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I see what you mean. I hadn't thought about it that way.”

The picture of the murderer stayed in my head: dark, in darkness, crouched beneath the weight of the pale corpse, moving silently in my wake, a dozen steps behind me. Trying to shake it, trying to shake the mood it was giving me, I searched for other things to think about, and said, “Of course, now the two things are tied together. The killing, and the thefts.”

“Looks like. Falling out among thieves, maybe.” Then he cocked his head and said, “But it still leaves the question of the woman.”

I'd been feeling so secure in the warmth of Grinella's—and Inspector Stanton's—obvious acceptance of me, that I'd completely forgotten my own dangerous game in all this. I was blank for a second, and I was being honest when I said, “What woman?”

“The one seen leaving here that night, just around the time you found the body.” His bright eyes were studying me, and I was suddenly sure he knew I was lying. Was certain I was lying, but couldn't prove it. “She couldn't be the killer,” he said. “There aren't many women strong enough to do what this guy did. Strangling an able-bodied male, carrying bodies up two flights of stairs.”

“Maybe there wasn't a woman at all,” I said.

“We've got a pretty definite identification on that,” he said. “I don't mean her name, or even a hell of a lot of description. But there was definitely a woman. We know what time she left here, we know what color coat she wore, we know which way she walked from here, we know she didn't lock the door behind herself.”

“Meaning somebody else did,” I said. It was an obvious thing, so I had to say it, but I didn't like it at all.

“Pretty well has to be,” he said, and grinned at me again, and moved to get to his feet, saying, “Well, it'll all work itself out. I better be on my way.”

“I'm glad you came by,” I said. That had been true up till our last exchange, but I tried to say it as though it were still true now.

We walked together toward the entrance. I'd left the light on there, but we had to use the flashlight along the way. Grinella said, “When we find the killer, we'll get all these questions answered. The woman, everything.”

“This won't get opened now, will it?”

“Hell, no. Not with the thefts tied in.”

I nodded, not happy. In the normal course of events, the John Doe case would have been opened in a week or ten days, and no more active investigation would ever have been done on it. So all I'd had to do would be nurse my one lie until the investigation came to a stop. But now, with murder and thefts tied together, the case wouldn't be opened at all. They would keep poking and prying until they got to the bottom of it. Was there any chance at all I could keep Linda undiscovered in a situation like that?

We were almost to the main entrance. I thought, If I tell Grinella, maybe …

Somebody knocked at the door. Grinella said, “That's Hargerson, wondering where the hell I am. I'll get it.” He stepped ahead of me and opened the panel.

What happened after that was too sudden and too fast to be sure of. Grinella opened the panel, something vague moved quickly and decisively in the night out there, something like water splashed in like ocean through an open porthole, Grinella screamed and stumbled backward clutching his face, and the lobby was suddenly full of a stomach-churning stench, strong and foul.

Three locks, three locks. My fingers bumped them like blocks of wood in my haste, and behind me Grinella had fallen to the floor, still clutching his face and crying out in a muffled rasping voice. I yanked the door open and dashed out, and he could be seen running down the sidewalk. A car with lights on and motor running was pulled in by a fire hydrant down there, in a break in the line of parked cars.

There was no parking permitted directly in front of the museum, so the black Ford now in that space was surely Grinella and Hargerson's car. I came out yelling, “Hargerson! Hargerson! Stop that car!”

The idiot. The absolute prize idiot. He got
out
of his car, and stood glowering across the hood at me. “What the hell are you at?”

Down there, the runner had leaped into the waiting car, which shot forward toward the corner; the traffic light down there was green.

“Stop
them!” I yelled. “They just threw acid in your partner's face—will you
move
it?”

Then he did, but of course then it was too late. He was still clambering back in behind the wheel when the other car made the turn at the corner. Hargerson tore away in pursuit, his siren lifting, the red light mounted behind the windshield on the middle of the dashboard starting to turn, but he had no idea what the car he was chasing looked like; as he later explained, when he tore around the corner, he saw nothing but half a mile of ordinary traffic. The driver of the getaway car had known enough to drive normally once he was clear of the scene.

Meantime, I had run back inside. Grinella was groaning and crying behind his hands, thrashing his head back and forth on the floor, kicking his feet like a spoiled child in a tantrum. I raced to the office and started making my phone calls.

D
INK DIDN'T RECOGNIZE ME
at first. But it was very early for him—not yet seven-thirty in the morning—and his eyes were still full of sleep. He opened the apartment door and blinked at me, standing there in my gray uniform, and said, “Yeah? What can I do for you?”

“You can back up, Dink,” I said. “And you can keep your hands where I can see them.”

“What?” He still didn't recognize me, but he understood the line of patter. Dink has never been an aggressively violent type—though like most of us he can turn and fight if he has to—so he did as I'd ordered, backing away from his apartment door into the middle of the living room, keeping his hands well out and away from his body, but saying, “Are you kidding? You think I carry heat in my pajamas?”

He was wearing pale blue pajamas and a maroon robe; he looked like something from a VA hospital. A short man, almost as short as Linda, Dink Campbell has an air of comic loser about him, a fatalistic easygoing acceptance of the disasters flesh is heir to. I didn't know the source of his nickname, but it suited him to a T.

I followed him into the apartment, closing the door behind me, looking quickly around this small neat semi-dark living room, and for just a second I faltered, I grew confused. This was a different apartment from the one where I used to meet Linda, back when Dink was in jail and I was on the force, but most of the furniture was the same. Even the placement was similar, sofa and chairs and lamps all organized just about the way they had been in my earlier life.

And Dink, standing there in his pajamas and his open robe, gaping at me and holding his hands out from his sides where I could see them, he was a kind of cruel parody of the past he'd never seen, though I knew by now he'd heard about it. Sometimes, when I'd been working the graveyard shift, I would go to see Linda at six or seven in the morning, and she would meet me in a nightgown and robe, in a room like this, surrounded by this furniture.

I hadn't thought of that room for three years, nor the bedroom either. When remembered lust had upset me the other night on first seeing Linda again, there had been no images involving place, no recollection of setting to help build my desire. I hadn't thought of rooms and lamps and sofas, so it had come as a bewildering surprise to realize all at once where I was. In the past I had burned with high passion when I had rushed in amid this furniture; I had rushed in now in the grip of high passion of a different sort, and the two passions had collided in the moment of recognition, the past cooling the present and leaving me for just an instant confused and uncertain, without my footing.

It was Dink's belated recognition of me that got me moving again. I saw it in his eyes a second before he said, in utter astonishment, “Tobin! For Christ's sake,
Tobin!”

I pushed the door shut behind me and pointed to the brown armchair. “Sit down, Dink,” I said.

He had let his hands fall to his sides, and now it was my gray Allied uniform he stared at, saying, “What the hell is going on? You're not a cop.”

“Just sit down, Dink,” I said. “For eight hours I've been wanting to hit somebody. Don't make it you.”

He made patting soothing gestures in the air toward me, and backed over to drop into the brown armchair. “I don't know what you're after,” he said, “but I'm not out for trouble. I leave everybody else alone, everybody else leaves me alone.”

“I wish that was the truth, Dink,” I said, but it was a meaningless statement. The fact was, another underwater root from the past had just caught me; without thinking, I had told Dink to sit in the brown armchair. Now I realized two things: first, that I had picked that chair because I myself had never sat in it, and second, that the only sensible place for me to sit and talk with him in that chair was the sofa.

Secondary shocks are never as severe as the first. With almost no hesitation at all, I sat down on the sofa on which I had made love to Dink's wife possibly a hundred times, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, and I said, “But it isn't the truth. People aren't leaving you alone.”

“You aren't leaving me alone.” He was trying to figure out whether it would be a good idea to get indignant or not. “Everything was fine until—”

“Let me fill you in, Dink,” I said.

“That'd be great.” But sarcasm didn't sit well on his shoulders; it came out sounding sincere.

“A little before midnight last night,” I said, “somebody knocked on the door at the museum where I'm the night guard. There was a cop with me at the time, a plainclothesman. He thought it was his partner, and he opened the panel in the door, and somebody threw acid in his face.”

I watched Dink look startled, a natural first reaction. Then I saw him look scared, wondering if for some reason he was going to be accused of being the acid thrower. All this in the first two or three seconds, and immediately followed by a wise look, a closed and wary look as it came to him where I was actually going. Defensively, trying to assume the innocent reaction of just a second before, he said, defiantly, “Well, I didn't do it. I didn't have anything to do with it.”

I said, “Dink, it took me about two hours to realize that acid hadn't been aimed at the cop. It had been aimed at me.”

“Listen,” he said. “Listen, now, this is the honest-to-God truth. I don't hold a grudge. We both know what I'm talking about, we don't have to spell it out. I let bygones be bygones, and that's it. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”

I said, “Dink, I don't suppose you know for sure yet which one of them did it. But I want you to find out for me. I want you to call me at home by eight o'clock tonight and tell me the name.”

I remembered that look of outraged innocence from when I'd arrested him on his last burglary charge. “What do you come to
me
for? I was home in bed all night!”

“I know you were, Dink.” I held up four fingers, and counted off the names. “It might have been Fred Carver,” I said. “It might have been Knox. It might have been Mort. Or it might have been the new kid, Willie Vigevano. You find out for me which one of them it was.”

Each name hit him like an arrow going into his forehead; he blinked, he grunted, his head bobbed back. Still, when I was finished he went on with the denials: “You can't make any connection between
any
of those guys and me. You can't even make a connection between them and
you.”
His eyes shifted away from me for a second, and then shifted back. “I am staying clean,” he said. “Grade-A number-one clean. That means completely.”

I knew that Linda was now up, and in the doorway behind me and to my right; the spot where Dink's glance had shifted to. But she wasn't coming into the room, and Dink wasn't making any overt acknowledgment of her presence, so I too pretended the two of us were still alone. But just as Dink had been playing to the new audience when he'd suddenly started talking about staying clean, I too now played to that audience, saying, “Dink, the cop that got the acid in his face is named Grinella. He's been blinded. The first word is, they're not absolutely sure, but they think he's blind for the rest of his life. That acid was meant for me, so I feel responsible. I feel responsible to this extent, Dink; I want the guy who did it to pay for it.”