Don't Lie to Me (3 page)

He meant me. Since he was referring to the kind of private detective whose livelihood comes from gathering divorce evidence, and since I had never done that kind of work in my life and never would, the insult missed its target. Still, the very fact that a gratuitous insult had been tossed in my direction was enough to make me bristle, though I tried not to show it.

Grinella, a more easygoing type, said to me, “You have someplace we can sit down?”

“Sure.”

I took him down to the office, where we repeated the positions that Linda and I had taken less than an hour before; I again on the sofa, Grinella on the chair. He started filling a pipe—I would have guessed him to be a cigarette man, too quick-moving for a pipe—and said, “Looks like a hell of a lot of activity around here tonight.”

“I don't understand it,” I said.

He kept poking his thumb into the bowl of the pipe, watching himself do it. “Somebody got in,” he said, “left a body, went away again.”

“Through locked doors,” I said.

He nodded, and kept watching his hands with the pipe. “Makes it tougher,” he said. “When was the last time you saw that room empty?”

“Ten forty-five.” That was when Linda had arrived.

“And you found the body?”

“Eleven seventeen.”

“Half an hour. Lot of activity for half an hour.” He glanced at me. “You recognize him?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Hard to tell, of course,” he suggested, “with his face like that.”

“I'm pretty sure I don't know him.”

He nodded, and at last put the pipe in the corner of his mouth, but made no move yet toward lighting it. “You got chain locks on all the doors? Or could a man get in with a key?”

I said, “The front door you could get in with three keys. The rear door has a chain and a bolt. The emergency door on the side you could get in with two keys. The fire-escape windows are latched on the inside, but once you opened the window you could open the gate with a key. It's closed with a padlock.”

“Windows disturbed?”

“No. Still latched.”

“Where were you between ten forty-five and eleven seventeen?”

“Partly here, partly doing my rounds.”

He glanced around the room, as though pointing the unfit pipe at different pieces of furniture. “Would you hear somebody coming in the front door?”

“From this room? Not if they were reasonably quiet.”

“What about the side door?”

“Not at all, not from here.”

He looked at me. “Anybody else in here with you tonight?”

Here came my lie. “No,” I said.

When we had first found the body, it had been necessary to make a decision. Keep Linda with me and tell the complete truth, or send her quickly home and play it as though she had never been there. The complete truth—and normal police questions would have brought out the whole thing, from our past affair and Jock's death and my dismissal in disgrace down to Dink's current trouble with his former friends—would have, it seemed to me, not only complicated and confused the issue of the dead man with a huge red herring, but would also have strained several lives unnecessarily: Linda's, Dink's, Kate's and mine. Since I had nothing to do personally with the dead man, but was merely the hired guard who had found him, it seemed to me simpler to keep my own story to a minimum. So I had sent Linda away, and now I was telling Detective Grinella one simple lie.

He accepted it without visible qualms, and said, “Anything missing that you noticed?”

“Stolen?”

“Missing. Not here.”

I shook my head. “I'm pretty sure the displays are still intact,” I said. “If you take one picture down from a row, the blank spot is pretty noticeable.” I gestured toward the desks. “If anything was taken from a desk drawer, or from the storeroom downstairs, I wouldn't know about it.”

“The storeroom? Isn't that part of your rounds?”

“No. Just the display areas. The door to the basement is kept locked at night.”

“You don't have a key?”

I pointed at the door behind him. “There's a complete set of keys on the back of that door. In case of fire, things like that. I don't carry them around with me.”

He got up and went over to the door, which was completely open against the wall. He pulled it partly closed and looked at the key rack on the back. “They all here?”

I could see from where I was sitting. “Yes.”

He nodded, and came back and sat down again. Taking the pipe from his mouth, he brooded at it, and shook his head. “I'll never get used to it,” he said. He gave me a sheepish grin, and put the filled but unlit pipe away in his pocket, while at the same time pulling out a crumpled pack of Marlboros. “I've been trying to give these things up,” he said. “My wife's idea. You smoke?”

“Not any more.”

“You're lucky.” He lit a cigarette, and smiled around it. “I do the pipe pretty good at home,” he said. “But on the job I just need a cigarette. You didn't call the papers, did you?”

“No.”

“Or a TV station. People do that more and more these days. They used to call a newspaper, but now they call a TV station. Changing times.”

“I suppose so.”

“They'll love this one, though. Naked, strangled, locked room. You like publicity?”

“Not a bit,” I said.

He grinned. “You could have some now,” he said. “Talk in front of the TV cameras about how you found the body.”

“I'd rather not, if I had the choice.”

“We'll try and get you out of here before they show up.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I knew he was making the offer at least as much for himself as for me. If the discoverer of the body wasn't around to be interviewed, more attention would be paid to the detectives on the case.

The other plainclothesman came in at that point and gave me a heavy disgruntled look. “You've got a lawyer out here,” he said.

I looked at him. “I do?”

He stood in the doorway and glowered at me. “What do you think you need a lawyer for?”

“I don't,” I said. “Unless the company sent him.”

“What do
they
need a lawyer for?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“He's waiting out by the door.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He grunted, and went away.

Detective Grinella said, “I won't keep you any more. Just give me your name and home address and phone number.”

I waited till he got out pen and note pad, and gave them to him. Then I said, “Does your partner have a reason to be down on me, or is that just his personality?”

Grinella's face was a study in bland innocence. “I don't follow you,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“You can go now,” he said.

“I'm not sure I can,” I told him. “I'm supposed to be on duty here till seven in the morning.”

“I'm pretty sure we'll have our own people around all night,” he said. “Why not check that with your lawyer?”

It wasn't my lawyer, but it seemed pointless to correct him. I collected the bag with my uneaten lunch in it, wished Grinella luck in his campaign against cigarettes, and went down to the main entrance to see the lawyer.

He said his name was Goldrich. He was about fifty, short and brisk and irritable. He looked and acted like a failed Oscar Levant. He said, “They finished with you?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then. My car's outside.”

So I wasn't to work here any more tonight. I went out with him, and we got into his car, a recent Pontiac. The back seat was littered with old magazines, empty paper bags, crumpled cigarette packages and other debris. The ashtray in front was open, and so full of butts that it couldn't be closed. Road maps and empty diet soft drink cans were on the floor under my feet.

Goldrich started the car, and we drove a block in silence. Then he said, “Where do you live?”

“Queens.”

“So do I. What part?”

I told him, and he offered to drive me home. I accepted, and he patted a cassette tape recorder on the seat between us. “Before I turn this on,” he said, “let me ask you one question off the record. Just between us, and to help me make the right decisions.”

I waited.

He glanced at me, then looked out at the nighttime traffic around us. We were heading down Second Avenue toward the Midtown Tunnel. He said, “Did you do it?”

I couldn't believe I'd understood him. I said, “Do what?”

“Kill him.”

“Of course not.”

He gave a shrug. “You're locked in with him,” he said, “just the two of you. It's not an altogether stupid question.”

“Anybody with a key could get in there.”

“Anybody with a key,” he said, “is a customer.”

“I'm an employee.”

He glanced at me again, and patted the air to placate me. “Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we'd turn our backs on you. I just want to know the story, so I can proceed. Face it, a company like Allied gets men with a lot of different backgrounds. It wouldn't be the first time there was trouble.”

“I didn't kill him,” I said. “I didn't know him.”

“Fine. Now I'll turn it on.”

He did, and asked me questions, and I told him the night's events, once again leaving out Linda. Goldrich, as I had told the truculent detective, was not my lawyer, he was Allied Protection Service's lawyer, it was the company's interest that animated him, not mine.

After he'd finished his questions and shut off the recorder, I said, “What about tomorrow night?”

“What about it?”

“Do I work at the museum or don't I?”

“I wouldn't know. You better call the company.”

“All right.”

We had nothing more to say to one another after that, and drove across Queens together in silence.

K
ATE WAS STILL UP
, watching an Andy Hardy movie on television. She switched the set off when I came in, and said, “What's wrong?” She looked concerned, but showed no tension.

I'd had plenty of time to rehearse all this, compress it down to the juice. “There was a killing at the museum,” I said. “Nothing to do with me.”

“Did you see it?” Kate is a rawboned woman, thirty-eight years old, with the look about her of a pioneer wife. You could visualize her on the driver's seat of a Conestoga wagon. She is calm but fast, with controlled strength, qualities that had made her perfect as the wife of a cop. In the last three years I've needed her even more.

I said, “No, I didn't see it happen, but I found the body and called in the report. Linda Campbell was with me.”

It was only in the silence after I stopped talking that I realized this was the first time I had ever spoken Linda Campbell's name in front of my wife. Kate knew the name, of course—the departmental red tape of my dismissal, along with Jock's death, had made me a three days' wonder in the newspapers at the time—but she had never before heard me say it.

I fought down the desire to defend myself, to assure her I hadn't been seeing Linda before tonight. I said, “She came to me for help for her husband. She'd come here first, but didn't have the courage to get out of the car and come ring the bell.”

Kate looked at me. I desperately wanted to read her face, but I could find no signs in it. She said, “When did she come here?”

“Tonight. And last night. And tonight she followed me to work.”

“Her husband's out of jail?”

“He wants to go straight, and he's having some trouble with old friends.”

“What could you do?”

“Put pressure in the other direction.” I nodded toward the hall phone. “I will, when we're done talking.”

“Who was the dead man? One of the old friends?”

That was the question that told me she was hurt. I don't know why. I was afraid to move closer to her, put my arms around her, for fear she would flinch; that had happened in the past, but not for a long time. I said, “No. It was nothing to do with her. And I'm nothing to do with her, Kate.”

She said, “It must have been very tough for you.”

“Seeing her again? It brought a lot of old aches out.” I had to push forward; I said, “I didn't mention her to the police. They think I was alone when I found the body.”

She frowned. She truly didn't know why I would have done that. She said, “What for?”

“Because of the past. The man was murdered by somebody. They'll start looking into the past. If a woman was there, they'll look into
her
past. If I say she was with me, they'll look into my past.”

She said, “Then why tell me? Wouldn't it be simpler just to forget it? Or do you have to see her again?”

“No, I don't,” I said. “When I lie about her to the police, it's to simplify my life and their investigation. But if I lie to you, I'm creating something where there isn't anything.”

She looked at me with an expression that was a dim echo of the look she used to give Bill when he was small and she'd caught him in a not-particularly-terrible fib. She said, “Nothing at all?”

I remembered the unwanted sense of desire I'd felt when Linda had first come into the museum, but I also knew what my conscious mind wanted and what course I would be following, and I said, “Nothing at all. Not a trace.”

She didn't exactly change expression, but her face softened somehow, and she nodded at the brown paper bag in my hand and said, “You didn't even get a chance to eat your lunch.”

I welcomed the change of topic. “We can put it in the refrigerator, I'll take it tomorrow night.”

“We could have a dinner together now,” she said, “if you're hungry.”

“We could go out somewhere.”

“It's after midnight.”

“Bill must know someplace open. Is he home?” Bill was sixteen, the age when most of his life was spent away from the house.