Don't Lie to Me (6 page)

I had been careful not to aim the light directly in their faces. They were less careful, particularly the one whose name I didn't know; blinding me, he said, “Where the hell were you?”

“Get that light out of my eyes,” I said, turning away from it. “Come on into the office, there's a light on in there.”

They followed me in, and I saw they both had the same personalities as last night; Grinella easygoing but quick, his partner irritable and heavy. The partner said again, “Where were you?”

“Downstairs,” I said. “Did you knock?”

“We pretty well kicked the door in,” Grinella said, but just as a comment, not as an accusation.

“I didn't hear it. I was looking over the workroom downstairs.”

“We let ourselves in,” Grinella said.

His partner said, “That part of your rounds, Tobin?”

“No, it isn't,” I said. “I know your partner's name, but I don't know yours.”

He seemed startled by the question, and more disgruntled than ever. He hesitated, and then said, “I'm Detective Hargerson.” He gave me the impression that by having asked the question I had scored a very tough victory over him, one which earned me a small token of grudging respect.

I said, “How do you do?”

“I asked you,” he said, “is the downstairs workroom part of your rounds?”

“No, it isn't.”

“What were you doing down there?”

“I'd never seen it before, I was curious to take a look at it.”

“Because of the killing?”

“I suppose that's what gave me the idea,” I said.

“Gonna be a private dick like in the movies? Snoop around, find something we missed, catch the killer all by yourself?”

“Hardly,” I said. “That's not my job.”

“You're goddamn right,” Hargerson said.

“A funny kind of curiosity,” Grinella said casually. “To send you downstairs like that.”

“Not so funny,” I said. “A man was found dead in here last night. By me. It gave the building a different feeling to it tonight.”

Grinella said, “You found him upstairs. Tonight you went looking downstairs.”

I said, “Is there any point to all this? I was curious about the basement, so I went down and looked. I'm not trying to take your jobs away from you, I've got a job of my own and I'm happy with it.”

Hargerson frowned at me. “You just come on too strong,” he said.

I looked at him. I thought,
I
come on too strong? But I didn't say that; I didn't say anything.

Grinella took the opportunity of the silence to change the subject. He said, “We came here for a reason. We had a report a woman was seen leaving here last night, around eleven.”

What would an innocent man say? How would he behave? I frowned slightly and said, “Leaving here?”

“That would be just before or just after you reported the body,” Grinella said.

I said, “You think she was the one left the body here?” This was just the kind of false scent I'd been trying not to give them. I said, “She'd have to be pretty strong, wouldn't she? To carry a dead body up a flight of stairs like that. If she was on her own, I mean.”

“That's the question,” Hargerson said. He leaned on the phrase.

Grinella said, “You didn't see her, did you?”

“If I'd seen anybody,” I said, “I would have told you last night.”

“That's right, sure.” He nodded. “I just like to double-check.”

“I didn't see her,” I said.

Grinella glanced at Hargerson, then looked back at me. His expression was pleasant, casual. He said, “Of course, it could go the other way, too. I mean, we'd understand if that's the way it was.”

I said, “What other way?”

“Well, take it like this. It's a long night, you're alone, you might get lonely. You might have a friend stop in to keep you company. Maybe it's a friend you don't want your wife to know about.”

I was shaking my head.

He grinned and said, “Wait, now, hear me out. Let's say you
do
have this friend. You're with her, and that's why you don't hear or see somebody come along and deposit the body. You find the body, you tell your friend to take off, you don't want her name connected in this because it'll get back to your wife. Or maybe your wife doesn't care, but the company you work for,
they'd
get a little bugged. So you send her away, and you say you were all alone here.”

“It could certainly work that way,” I said. “But it didn't.”

“A woman left here,” Hargerson said.

I looked at him. “Is that a definite report? Or just a maybe?”

Grinella answered me. “Let's just say,” he said, “that for now we think we ought to take the report and believe what it says. Which means we're either going to take off after a woman who turns out to be the killer, or we're going to waste our time looking for somebody who turns out to be just a friend of yours that you wanted to keep quiet. See what I mean?”

“I see.”

“We're all men of the world,” Grinella suggested. “If the friend theory is the truth, why not tell us about it? We can keep it quiet, it won't go any further than the three of us in this room. And it'll save us a lot of trouble and waste of time.”

Fortunately I'd known this offer was coming, so I didn't have to hesitate and think it over. I'd made my decision to keep Linda out, and any reversal now would not be as simple and trouble-free as Grinella suggested. They'd insist on her name. They'd insist on questioning her. They'd turn up Dink, an ex-con, and roust him a little just to see if anything would fall out of the tree. They'd make a lot of waves in my personal life, and I didn't want them to. And I'd had time during Grinella's preamble to work all that out for myself, so that the instant he was finished talking, I could say, “I wish I could save you the time and trouble, but I told you the truth from the beginning. So far as I knew, I was alone here last night. I didn't have any friends with me.”

Hargerson said, “And here you are tonight, you aren't even at your post. You're off someplace. Maybe your friend is back again, maybe you're some kind of poontang sex maniac.”

I laughed. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for the compliment.”

He gave a sour grunt, and extended his hand toward me, palm up. “Let's see the basement key.”

It was still in my pocket. I gave it to him, and he went off. I looked at Grinella and said, “Is your partner really and truly going to the basement to look for a girl?”

“Seems that way,” Grinella said. He was still casual and relaxed.

I shook my head, and went over to my usual chair to sit down. Grinella remained standing, leaning his back against the wall over by the door. After a minute he said, “I hear you used to be on the force.”

I wondered where he'd heard, and how much he'd heard. I said, “That's right.”

“Get sick of the hours?” Which meant he didn't know why I'd left, which meant he didn't know anything at all. He had probably talked to the patrolman last night, the one who'd asked me if I'd ever been on the force. I'd given him a bald yes, without explanations.

But now Grinella wanted explanations. I said, “Personal problems.”

“Ah.” He nodded, then said, “With me, it's the hours. Me and my wife both. We just get used to one shift, boom I'm switched to the next one.”

“I remember that,” I said. I remembered a lot from the eighteen years; it had been the only life I'd ever wanted. I'd been inside precinct houses a couple of times in the last few years, and every time it had gotten me all over again; the smell, the look, the feel of the place, reminding me of the times when everything had been good.

“Still,” Grinella was saying, “I guess I must like it okay. I mean, here I am, right?”

“That's right,” I said.

We kept talking like that, slow-paced, unimportant, skipping along the surface, for the next ten minutes, until Hargerson at last came back. He walked into the room and said to Grinella, “You hear me?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Hargerson might have handed the key back to me; instead, he dropped it on the nearest desk. “Let's go,” he said.

I said, “You went down to the workroom and shouted, to see if I really could have heard you two at the door or not.”

He gave me a level stare. “So?”

“I told you about it,” I said. “It would have been better if you'd told it to me.”

“I'm not up on my Emily Post,” he said.

“I know.”

He put his hands in his pants pockets and stood flatfooted, looking at me. “While we're getting names straight,” he said, “let me see do I have yours. Mitchell Tobin?”

“That's right.”

“Any record?”

“That's a hell of a question,” I said. “What do you want to be offensive for?”

“I'm doing my job,” he said. “No reason my job should offend you. Isn't that right?”

I looked at Grinella. “I was always lucky in my partners,” I said.

He chuckled, but he said, “Me, too. See you around.”

I walked them to the door. They'd let themselves in with skeleton keys, opening all three locks, but had only bothered to relock one of them. I opened it, let them out, fastened the three locks, walked back to the office, put the basement key back on the rack, started off on another tour of the display area. And all the time the last thing I'd said to Grinella kept circling in my head: “I was always lucky in my partners.” I'd said it fast, without thinking, aiming a shaft at Hargerson in a way he couldn't respond to directly, and only after it was out of my mouth had I realized what I'd done, and what I'd said. Yes, I was always lucky in my partners, but my partners weren't always lucky in me. Jock Sheehan wasn't lucky to be my partner, I didn't bring him any luck at all.

I knew Hargerson would be looking into my history now, not because he thought for one second that I'd had anything to do with the dead John Doe, but because he was irritable and I was within range. He would look into my background, and he would find it all there, and I would be seeing Hargerson again. And he would have something to say to me about partners and luck.

Miserable, I completed my uneventful round, and went to sit again in the office. If only the killer had left his John Doe somewhere else. If only I had found another agency to work for. If only Linda had picked a different night to come ask me her favor.

But the “if only” song could begin much, much further back than that. Silently I sat there in the office and sang it.

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
Saturday, first of my three days off. Starting early last spring, and continuing all through the summer, Kate and I had been taking long weekend trips together, driving up into New England or over to Pennsylvania or down as far as the Carolinas. Our marriage hadn't come to an end at the time of my disgrace, but it hadn't really gone on either; it had fallen into a kind of suspended animation, as though it had been flash-frozen—which is, I suppose, a pretty accurate description of what in truth did happen—and ceased to have any meaningful existence after that for more than two years. The trips had been Kate's idea, and it was a good one; they helped a lot in the thawing process. Bill is old enough now to be left alone for a few days, so each weekend we just get into the car and start driving, sometimes with no specific destination at all in mind.

This time we drove up to Lake Champlain; Plattsburg, Dannemora, that area up near the Canadian border. It was October and many places were already closed for the winter, but up in the mountains the leaves had changed their colors and were really beautiful to look at. And it was pleasant not to be surrounded by so many tourists as in the summer.

We came back late Monday night—I drove the last three hundred miles with Kate asleep in the back seat—and there was a note on the kitchen table from Bill, saying that Allied had called and wanted me to call the office first thing in the morning.

The result was, I only got four hours' sleep, since I'd expected to be able to stay in bed till noon, to readjust myself to the late schedule of a working night. I got up a little after eight, and was reasonably conscious and functional by the time the Allied office was open at nine.

I got Grazko, and he was brusque and irritable: “Where've you been?”

“Took a trip upstate,” I said. “Up around Plattsburg.”

“Come into the office at ten-thirty. We got problems.”

“All right,” I said. It didn't occur to me, the state I was in, to ask him what kind of problems we had until I was already off the phone. Well, I'd find out when I found out. I had more coffee, left the house a little before ten, took the subway to Manhattan, and walked into the Allied office on Lexington Avenue four minutes early.

The attorney, Goldrich, was in the office with Grazko. The two of them looked at me as I walked in as though I were a stranger to them and they had little hope of my making them cheerful. Grazko said, “You're here at last. Sit down, sit down.”

“I'm early,” I pointed out.

He brushed it away as though it were an irritating horsefly. Grazko is six foot three and very wide; the kind of body the uniform designers had in mind. He has a square-jawed grouchy face, and gray hair that sticks up an inch long all over the top of his head. There's no hair on the sides at all, his ears are like gnarled rafts in an ocean of milk. His head looks like a novelty item found in a cheap gift shop: a hairbrush made to look like a human head.

But it was Goldrich who spoke next, saying as I sat down in the last remaining chair in Grazko's small, crowded but neat office, “Things are getting much more difficult. It's time we all put our cards on the table.”

“All right,” I said.

Goldrich said, “Do you have anything to say to us?”