Don't Lie to Me (17 page)

And George's murderer?

If Tynebourne had killed George, and the girl was the only one who could identify the dead man and draw the connection between him and Tynebourne, then she was in a great deal of trouble. If she was still alive.

My next call wasn't to anyone in Tynebourne's address book, but to the police precinct near the museum. Up till now I'd kept quiet about the girl because I didn't want the presence of police officers to frighten her away; now the situation was changed.

I asked for Hargerson, but they said he wasn't on duty. I said it was important, gave my name and Tynebourne's phone number, and asked them to find Hargerson and have him get in touch with me. “In the next half-hour, if possible,” I said. “It really is urgent.”

They promised to call him at home, and I hung up, and spent the next ten minutes going through Tynebourne's apartment, searching desk drawers and closets, trying to find something to either prove or disprove my suspicions. But there was nothing either way, and I'd about given up when the phone rang.

It was Hargerson. The heaviness of his personality was undimmed by the telephone. He said, “You wanted to tell me about the acid-thrower?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Something else. Something important.”

“I'm not interested in anything else.”

“You're interested in this,” I told him. “It has to do with the John Doe killing in the museum.”

Very reluctantly, he said, “All right, what is it?”

I told him about the original call from the girl, and my agreement to meet her at the museum. He interrupted then to say, “When was this?”

“She called last night, before I went to work. In the early evening.”

“Why didn't you report it then?”

“I had the impression she could be scared away very easily. I wanted to actually see her first.”

“Grandstanding. Just like I said.”

“That wasn't my intention. The point is, she didn't come to see me after all. She called me at the museum and—”

“When?”

“I think it was around two this morning.”

“And?”

“She said she had to go talk to Dan Tynebourne first. He's the young man who—”

“I know who he is. He's with the museum.”

“Yes. She promised to call me again after talking to him, but she didn't. Sometime after four I started calling Tynebourne, but there wasn't any answer. So I came here—I'm in Tynebourne's apartment now—I came here when I got off duty, and the place is empty. I've called a few of Tynebourne's friends, but so far I haven't found him.”

“How'd you get in the apartment?”

“Let myself in,” I said.

“Broke in?”

“Hargerson, you're on a murder case. Do you want to take time out to collar me for breaking and entering?”

“Nobody let you in, that's the point.”

“Nobody let me in,” I agreed.

He said, “So what is it you want from me? Find the girl?”

I told him the connection I had made, from the girl through Tynebourne to George, with the implication that Tynebourne had lied. “Which means he might be the forger,” I said. “And he also might be the murderer.”

“That's a big jump.”

“Granted. But the girl is the link, and she's disappeared, and so has Tynebourne.”

“Hmmm.”

“I thought it was time,” I said, “to turn things over to people qualified to make a search.”

“It's past time,” he said. “It's also past time on the other thing. What is this big mania you've got for holding out on the law? You got a grudge against the force for throwing you out?”

“No. I deserved to be thrown out.”

“You deserved to be put in a box and buried, Tobin.”

“I agree,” I said.

“But instead you're still around. And you blinded my partner.”

“No. I didn't blind him.”

“It was supposed to be for you.”

“That's right. And if it had gotten me, would you have said I'd blinded myself?”

“Depends who did it, and what for. You still playing around with other people's wives?”

“No, I'm not. Shouldn't you be doing something about Tynebourne and the girl?”

“If he's killed her, she's dead. If he hasn't killed her by now, he isn't going to. At least not soon. What's Tynebourne's address?”

I told it to him.

“Fine,” he said. “Stay there, I'll be around in about an hour.”

“No, I'm going home. You don't need me for anything any more.”

“You can identify the girl if we find her.”

“I've never seen her face, only heard her voice. I'm going home. You know where I live, if you want me that's where I'll be. I'm very tired, and I'm stiff, and I need my sleep.”

“You're stiff, huh?” A trace of hard satisfaction sounded in his voice.

“Goodbye, Hargerson,” I said, and hung up.

I
FELL ASLEEP ON
the subway, missed my stop, and had to take another train back from the end of the line. It was nearly ten when I got home, and I was so groggy by then that I couldn't understand at first why Kate and Bill and the car were all gone. But then I remembered. Willie Vigevano had called her to make threats, and Kate had very wisely gone out to Long Island until things should calm down.

I also remembered that I was employed. I called Allied, talked to Grazko, and told him I absolutely couldn't be in to work tonight. He took it well, and even expressed the wish that I would be feeling better soon, so I supposed the night man, Dunworthy, had told him about my two calls of yesterday.

Hunger was combined with my exhaustion. I made myself a cheese and baloney sandwich and a glass of milk, ate them standing in the kitchen, leaning against the drainboard beside the sink, and then plodded heavy-footed up the stairs. I only vaguely remember undressing, pulling down the shades to blot out the day, and falling at last into bed.

I dreamed that I was in a dark boat on a dark ocean at night, lying on the bottom of the boat, without strength to get to my feet. Hands kept reaching over the sides of the boat, clutching at me, and I kept struggling to roll away from them. But as I would roll away from the dimly seen hands on one side, more hands would come over and reach for me on the other, so that I had to keep rolling back and forth, struggling against my own inertia, wearing myself out and never getting anywhere.

That dream must have been shortly after I fell asleep. I didn't remember it when I first woke up, but it came back to me later on; first the frightened straining heavy atmosphere of it, and then the specifics, the boat and the hands and my own inability to escape.

I don't believe I was dreaming at all when the phone woke me. I came up slowly out of very heavy sleep, as though I'd taken a drug of some kind, and for what seemed like a very long time I couldn't make my mind understand what that intermittent ringing was all about. It was calling to me, but what did it want me to do?

Telephone. It seemed like a terribly important discovery, gained at great cost, when I finally understood that what I was hearing was the telephone. I twisted around under the covers, finally got my arms out, and hiked myself to a sitting position before reaching for the phone beside the bed.

It was Hargerson. He didn't bother to identify himself, but the heavy voice was unmistakable. “We got your people,” he said.

I was still not entirely awake; I thought he meant Vigevano and Fred Carver and the other two. But how had he known about them? I said, “How did you do that?”

“Fished them out of the Hudson River,” he said. “Both of them, Tynebourne and the girl.”

Now I was awake. Awake enough to realize the room was in total darkness; I'd found the phone by automatic memory, before being awake enough to realize I wasn't seeing anything. Frowning into the darkness, I said, “You mean they were dead? Both of them?”

“That's right,” he said. “In Tynebourne's car. It was driven off the end of one of the piers down where they had that fire, where the piers aren't used any more.”

“It couldn't have been an accident.”

“No,” Hargerson said, “it wasn't. The preliminary report is, they were both fed something to knock them out, probably barbiturates. Then they were put in Tynebourne's car, taken to the pier, driven into the water. I suppose he figured we'd think they'd gone out there for privacy and accidentally drove off the edge.”

“Very stupid,” I said.

“He's stupid, but he's strange. Like cleaning up the John Doe and carrying him upstairs from the workroom. That was stupid, because it didn't do him any good, but it was strange. Strange enough to confuse things.”

“But not this time.”

“No, not this time.”

I rubbed my free hand over my forehead. My body still wanted to be asleep. I said, “What time is it?”

“Quarter to nine.”

Quarter to nine; I'd slept almost eleven hours. “I was asleep,” I said.

“Well, you're awake now, right?”

I nodded, which of course he couldn't see; in fact, I couldn't see it myself, in the dark. Then I frowned and said, “Hargerson?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you call me? Why did you tell me all this?”

“You don't know? You really can't figure it out?”

From his manner, he had something unpleasant in mind, but I couldn't guess what it could possibly be. “No, I can't,” I said.

“It's because they're yours, too,” he said. “You had to keep things to yourself until it was too late, and because of it they're dead. My partner's eyes, and Tynebourne, and the girl—all yours.”

“That isn't right,” I said. “That isn't fair.”

But he'd hung up.

I lay there for a while with the dead phone to my ear, frowning into the darkness. I knew that Hargerson was wrong, but it bothered me just the same. I'd lived with so much real guilt for so long that I seemed to automatically accept whatever guilt was thrust in my direction.

I had done everything I could with that girl; as it was, I'd almost pushed too hard more than once. No other tactic would have brought her to safety, and certainly contacting the police wouldn't have done it.

The point is, there was a murderer out there. I hadn't set him off, and I hadn't kept him going or protected his anonymity. His reason for killing the John Doe in the first place was impossible to guess, but he had obviously killed Tynebourne and the girl to protect himself, to keep them from identifying the John Doe and telling whatever they knew about him.

The phone began to whine in my ear. How long had I been lying here, thinking about things, uselessly holding the telephone? I reached out in the dark and put the receiver away in its cradle, and lay back down again on the pillow, trying to think. My dream of the boat and the hands came back to me now, and I understood what it had meant: Vigevano on the one side, the killer on the other. And nothing effective I could do about either.

I kept brooding on it all, without the slightest suspicion that I was going back to sleep. And then I was gone.

I
WAS AWAKE.

In total darkness, the transition from dreamless sleep to a kind of vegetative consciousness was so gradual that I remained totally unaware of it; that is, when I first became aware of the cigarette smoke I suddenly realized that I was awake, and had been awake for some time, and had been asleep for some time before that. But my first conscious thought was of the smoke, the faint acrid whiff of cigarette smoke.

I wasn't alone in the house.

I had been lying on my right side, and now I turned my head upward very slightly and listened. My eyes were open, staring into the dark, knowing that a night table and wall and corner of dresser were straight ahead in the blackness, but not knowing if anything else was now also there. I breathed very shallowly, with my mouth closed, and listened, and strained my eyes in the darkness, and heard and saw nothing.

There was only the faint smell of the cigarette smoke.

It seemed to me at last that I must be alone in the room. Surely, if someone else were in here with me, I would have heard him breathing, or he would have made some sort of move by now. There was someone in the house, someone other than me, but I no longer believed they were in this room.

Back when I was on the force, and spending a portion of my life working at night and sleeping during the day, I had put heavy shades on the two windows in this room, shades which blocked daylight and on the brightest day reduced this place to a deep twilight. The windows faced the back yard, where there were no artificial light sources after dark, so that by night the blackness in this room was complete. I might as well have been as blind as Grinella.

But that would be also true of anyone else in here. There was no point waiting for your eyes to get used to the darkness; the dark in here was too total.

There was no point, in fact, waiting for anything; so I finally moved. I rolled very slowly over onto my back, allowing the covers to turn with me and ruck up under me, so that when I was on my back my right side was completely uncovered. That made it easier to slip out of the bed, moving very, very slowly, shifting my weight only in tiny increments, trying to keep the bedsprings from creaking or the floorboards from groaning or my own bones from cracking. He wasn't in this room, but he could be just outside the door, and any small noise might attract his attention.

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.