Don't Lie to Me (7 page)

“What about?”

“It wouldn't leave this office,” Goldrich said.

Grazko said, or barked, “The woman, for instance.”

I looked at him. “The woman the police talked to me about the other night?”

“We offer our customers a guarantee,” Grazko said.

What did they all know? What had they found out? When embarked on a lie, and when uncertain of your footing, cling to the lie no matter what. “There wasn't any woman with me,” I said. “I can see the police thinking I might have done something like that, but you know me better.” And all the time I was saying it, I was wishing the lie wasn't necessary. How stupid to be harboring my own little falsehood in the middle of a murder investigation!

Goldrich said, “The woman doesn't matter, that isn't the point.”

Grazko waved one of his big hands across his desk at me, saying to Goldrich, “What's he gonna know about the other? He's only been there three weeks.”

“He might have been approached,” Goldrich said. “He might have seen something.” He turned back to me, and said, “If you want to avoid involvement, I can understand that. But if you're keeping something back, you're making a big mistake. The company will be square with you, but only if you're square with us.”

I said, “I'm not keeping anything back.”

Grazko, looking at his watch, said, “We have to get over there pretty soon.”

“There's time,” Goldrich told him. He studied me broodingly for a minute, and then shook his head. “I only wish you did know something,” he said. “But I believe you don't.”

“Thank you.”

“Our asses are hanging out so
far
on this,” Grazko said angrily.

“It happens,” Goldrich told him. “No company has an unblemished record.”

Grazko sighed, and got to his feet. “All right, all right. Let's go on over.”

I said, “You want me, too?”

“Sure,” he said. “What do you think we called you for?”

“To impugn my honesty,” I said.

Grazko looked impatient, but Goldrich quickly said, “That isn't it at all, Mitch. May I call you Mitch?”

I nodded, with some reluctance.

“Mitch,” he said, “we're in a very tough situation here. Now, nobody's perfect, it could be you very innocently have a fact, a bit of information, that could help Allied get off the hook a little. But you don't want to make waves, that's understandable. Nobody's perfect. It was a chance, it was a hope we had, that maybe you could say something that would help us. If we leaned a little more than we meant to, it's because we're upset. Nobody thinks badly of you, Mitch, I promise that.”

Grazko was looking at his watch again. “We got to go,” he said. “The cops said eleven, I want to there early.”

I said, mostly to Goldrich, “Are the police going to come at me the same as you people, wanting to know if I have some innocent fact, was I approached by somebody, do I know something about something?”

“They're just going to ask some questions,” Goldrich said, dismissing it. “Don't worry, I'll be there at all times; in the circumstances I'm your attorney, because the discussion is in the area of your role as an employee of the company.”

I said, “What is this thing that I might be able to help out about, I might know something about?”

“The cops will tell you,” Grazko said impatiently, “when we get there.”

“No,” I said. “I walked into this office blind, I'd rather not do the same thing twice.”

“You can rely on us,” Goldrich said. “We'll stand behind you, you don't have anything to worry about.”

“The way you two are acting,” I said, “I don't think I want you standing behind me. I want you out front where I can see you. What's going on?”

Grazko said, “We're going to be
late.
”

“If I'm not in your confidence,” I said, “fire me.”

“That isn't—” Grazko thrashed around in frustration, then made a violent arm gesture toward Goldrich.
“Tell
him,” he said. “For God's sake, tell him and we'll get it over with.” And he stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him.

Goldrich gave me a small sympathetic smile. “He's feeling upset,” he said. “He's embarrassed because the company's been caught out in a big one. He didn't want to tell you because he doesn't like to even think about it.”

“What happened?”

“The fact is, somebody has been stripping the museum.”

I frowned at him. “Stripping it? Since Friday?”

“God, no. For months, maybe for years. Museum officials say it has to have been going on for at least six months, because of the work involved.”

I shook my head. “Everything was there on Friday,” I said. “They were doing the inventory, they hadn't found anything missing at all by Friday night.”

“Forgeries,” Goldrich said. “Substitutions. They don't know for sure how much yet, but they're beginning to think less than half the material on display is the real thing.”

“Good God!”

“And what makes it worse,” Goldrich said, “particularly from our point of view, is that all the forgery work was apparently done in the museum itself, using museum materials.”

“You mean that workroom downstairs?”

“And the copier in the office on the first floor.”

I remembered that machine; Phil Crane had been using it the other night. A big thing the size of a table-model television set, it was on a worktable near the door. The thing to be copied was placed face down on a pane of glass on top, then covered with a rubber pad. A button was pushed, the machine clicked a while, and a copy slid out of an opening at the bottom front. My first night on the job, I'd been curious about the machine and had run off a copy of part of a newspaper that was in a trash can there. The copy had been more starkly black and white than the newspaper, and on much heavier paper. I said, “That wouldn't make copies that would fool anybody.”

“Not at first,” Goldrich said. “The way it was apparently done, the forger took something from one of the display rooms, say a cartoon from an old magazine. He opened the frame, took the cartoon out, and ran a copy on that machine. He then brought everything down to the workroom and used chemical baths and dry heat in the oven they have down there and whatever else he needed to make the copy look like the original.”

“He couldn't get the texture right,” I said. “That machine uses its own paper, and it's very heavy. Nothing at all like a newspaper or a magazine.”

“That didn't matter,” Goldrich said. “It only had to
look
right, because everything is in a frame with glass over it.”

I nodded. “That's right, you're right.”

“So when he had the copy looking like the original,” Goldrich said, “he put it in the frame, glued fresh brown paper to the back of the frame, copied the original framing notations onto the new paper, and put the copy up on the wall where the original had been.”

I said, “That's a lot of work. How much can they get for the original?”

“The museum people say the average missing item will go for something over a hundred dollars. Of course, there's some things in there that are worth a lot more. Two or three thousand, say.”

“For one old political cartoon.”

Goldrich nodded. “If it's rare enough,” he said. “And in good enough condition. And if the cartoonist is well enough known. Nast, for instance. Or an early children's illustration by N. C. Wyeth.”

“And if it hadn't been for the John Doe,” I said, “they might not have known about it for years.”

“That's right.”

I felt myself wondering if the forger had the same attitude toward the murderer as I did: irritation at having a completely unrelated private secret threatened by this outsider's crime. Unless, of course, the forgeries and the murder were connected. I said, “Do they have a name for the John Doe yet?”

“Not that I know of.” Goldrich sat back in his chair, hooking his thumbs into the top of his trousers. “Now you can see why Grazko is so ticked off,” he said.

Which was another element I hadn't given sufficient thought to. “Of course,” I said. “All of this was being done with an Allied operative on guard in the building.”

“For months,” Goldrich said.

“I was down in that workroom last week,” I said. “You can't hear anything down there, and when you're upstairs you can't hear anything from the workroom.”

“That made it easier for him,” Goldrich said. “The point is, Allied was there to protect the place, and it was being stripped right under the company's nose.”

“Under my nose, too,” I said. “For the last three weeks.”

“Too bad he wasn't working there when you went downstairs last week.”

“I suppose he was going to lie low till the murder investigation was done.”

“Probably.”

A picture came into my mind of my flashlight beam sweeping down a line of framed drawings. I said, “But I would have noticed if something was gone. While they were doing the switch, there'd be an empty spot along the wall. I'd have noticed it.”

Goldrich shook his head. “They'd substitute something from the workroom. There's always new things down there being put together. They'd just stick any old framed cartoon or ad or whatever in the spot until they were ready to bring the forgery up.”

I said, “Unless an Allied man was working with them.”

Goldrich offered his thin smile again. “You see? That's the natural assumption. Grazko and I of course think it's wrong.”

“What happened to the man whose place I took? Did he quit or retire or something?”

“Sorry. His name's Edwards, his wife got sick, he wanted to switch to day work. We have him with a furrier now, in midtown.” Goldrich pointed a finger at me and said, “Take a word of advice. Don't make the same suggestion to Grazko. He's really upset about this.”

“I can see that.”

Goldrich sighed, and got to his feet. “And now we really will be late, and he'll be upset about that, too. Any more questions?”

“Not yet,” I said.

T
HE MUSEUM WASN'T OPEN
to the public, but was more crowded this morning than it had probably ever been on any day that the public had been allowed in. Since my own connection with the museum was only three weeks old, was extremely peripheral, and was limited to that part of the day when the place was closed and empty, I recognized almost none of the faces I saw, but I could guess who they all were. The gray-haired men in suits would be museum directors and officials. The boys and girls in sweaters and bell-bottom slacks would be the NYU students who did various free work around here. A few rumpled-looking men in brown suits would probably be from insurance companies, law firms, perhaps a foundation or two which had put money into this operation. Several plainclothes detectives were obvious in the mix, among them both Grinella and Hargerson; I flinched at the sight of Hargerson, wondering if he had looked me up by now, and if so, what he would say. I also saw both Phil Crane and Ernest Ramsey. And finally there were the people from Allied Protection Service: Grazko, Goldrich, Muller, three or four others in our gray uniform, and myself.

Grazko, Goldrich and I had arrived at just eleven, to find the museum already full. We had traveled uptown by cab, and Grazko hadn't said a word. He hadn't, in fact, said anything at all since leaving me with Goldrich to be told of Allied's misfortune.

I would guess there were fifty people present, grouped in small clusters of like type, mostly silent, scattered through the front two display rooms. Grazko and Goldrich and I joined the rest of the Allied contingent, and after brief hellos we all stood around, feeling uncomfortable and uncertain what was to happen next.

I kept thinking about the workroom downstairs. It would be empty now, and since it was windowless, it would look exactly the same both day and night. It would look now as it had on the night I went down to see it, and I kept trying to visualize it as I had seen it then. There was a vague irritation in me to see the place again, to compare it with my mental image. I had no idea why I should feel like that, and kept trying to think about other things—what was happening at this moment in these rooms up here, for instance—but it kept gnawing away in the back of my head, distracting and annoying me. Like the sand in the oyster, I thought; but what pearl could I possibly produce?

After about five minutes there was some sense of disturbance in the other display room: a general shuffling about, movement in that direction. A voice from in there called over the hubbub, “Would everybody move in here, please?” Our group from Allied joined the rest, and we walked through the wide doorway, helping to jam the next room to overflowing.

At the far end of the room, a uniformed policeman was standing on one of the upholstered benches, looking a trifle uncertain of his soft footing. This wasn't a mere patrolman, but a full inspector, his hatbrim and sleeves loaded with braid and insignia. A simple John Doe murder had produced patrolmen and a team of detectives, but the stealing of pieces of paper from a museum endowed by foundations and connected to a university and in other ways also no doubt plugged in to what has appropriately been called the Establishment had brought a full inspector out in complete uniform.

The inspector was peering down at our end of the room, and now he called, “Are we all in here now?”

He got a murmur back from the group.

“All right, fine. My name is Stanton, Inspector William Stanton.” He paused, perhaps to give us time to recognize his name from the newspapers. I did not, but I knew inspectors tended to get frequent newspaper coverage, so perhaps some of the people around me did remember the name. However, there was no audible response, so he went on: “Most of you know what we're doing here, but just to get the record straight and avoid starting a rumor factory, let me give you a rundown.”