Don’t Lie to Me

A Mitchell Tobin Mystery

Donald E. Westlake

For Sandy,

Ave et Vale, et

Ave et Vale, et

…

Contents

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1

MY FLASHLIGHT ARCED ACROSS ancient political cartoons: menacing eagles with the leering faces of long-dead politicians, incredibly stout laughing men labeled “The Railroads,” tall slender downcast women trailing banners in the dust. Each print had been carefully preserved, mounted, framed and fronted by non-reflecting glass, and given a guard—me—to protect it at night from thieves and vandals. My shoes made echoing sounds on the uncarpeted wooden floor, and I angled the flashlight from left to right as I walked along the white-walled corridor where the cartoon display was hung.

Until I became aware that not all the sounds were echoes of my own movements. I stopped, and listened, and heard someone far away knocking on the museum’s front door. My watch said ten forty-five; who would be coming here at this hour of night?

My normal route would next have taken me through the section labeled “Comic Strips Between the World Wars,” but by turning left at the next doorway, I could instead cut through “Advertising in the Fifties” to the main staircase, and from there directly down one flight to the front entrance. As I went that way, striding but not running, the tock-tock at the door stopped, then repeated itself briefly, then stopped again. Whoever was out there was insistent, but not urgent.

This was the third night of my third week at this job, and I still wasn’t sure in my mind whether I would keep it or not. In many ways it was the ideal employment for me, but somehow that very fact frightened me and made me leery of staying with it very long. For instance, one of the advantages of the job was its solitude—I was alone here four nights a week, nine P.M. till seven A.M.—and in the eleven nights I’d worked so far, this was the first interpolation from another human being. I both welcomed and resented it, which is why I strode but didn’t run, and also why I wasn’t sure this job would be healthy for me over a long period of time.

The main entrance to this building, the Museum of American Graphic Art, was a wide wooden door with a small square speakeasy panel in it. I wasn’t afraid of armed robbery—the contents of the museum, while no doubt valuable, required protection more from destructive teenagers and overenthusiastic collectors than from professional criminals—but it was easier to slide open the panel than unlock the door, so that’s what I did.

At first I didn’t recognize her; she was only a short slender blond woman standing out there in the semi-dark, her features and expression hard to read in the dim spill from a nearby streetlight. It had been nearly three years since I’d seen her, and her face was in shadow, and I’d never expected to see her anywhere ever again; still, I should have known who she was.

But I didn’t. I said, “Yes?”

She peered at me; I suppose she was having trouble with recognition herself, both because of my own impersonality and the uniform hat I was wearing. Then she said, “Mitch?” and the voice did it. I knew who she was.

“Oh,” I said. I don’t know what my own voice could have sounded like. I was unable to move.

“Can I talk to you?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. Our faces were framed for each other by the open panel—like those cartoons upstairs—and I couldn’t think of a word to say, or a single thing to do.

“It’s about Danny,” she said. She spoke both apologetically and reassuringly, letting me know that she wouldn’t have come to me to talk about herself, or about us.

“Danny,” I repeated. Everyone else called Linda Campbell’s husband “Dink,” and he was by profession a burglar. I had met her, in fact, while arresting her husband for plying his trade; that had been in my fourteenth year on the force.

“Please,” she said. And that one word was so complex, begging so many things for so many different reasons, that it compelled a simple answer to resolve it. Either a final yes or a final no, but nothing in between.

“Hold on,” I said, admitting defeat, “while I unlock the door.”

I closed the panel just as she was starting to smile, but I didn’t immediately do anything about the three locks that had to be unfastened before I could let her in. I stood where I was for a moment, the fingertips of both hands touching the door without actually pushing against it, my eyes on the closed panel, and what I sensed mostly was this thickness of wood between us.

And time. Seven years ago I had met Linda, when my partner Jock Sheehan and I went to the Campbell apartment to pick up Dink for a burglary he’d recently done. It had taken Linda and me over a year to go to bed together, by which time Dink was already serving his time for the charge on which I’d arrested him. We were, I suppose, an irretrievably shabby couple, both of us married, I the cop who’d arrested her husband, but somehow none of that ever seemed to intrude in the hours we spent together. We seemed to have no history with one another, and while sex always remained important between us, talk was important, too. I don’t know what about—books, movies, politics, the weather, what does it matter?

It is an accepted truism that a contented husband doesn’t have affairs, but was I discontented at home during those years? I don’t think so. Kate and I even at the best of times have had a relationship long on mutual acceptance and short on conversation, and I do know I always liked to talk to Linda more than to Kate, but in the length of my marriage Linda has been my only adultery. And that took so long to come about, and seemed so removed from the rest of my life, that it never really appeared to me as adultery at all; except that it had to be hidden from Kate.

It was only while on duty that I could see Linda, of course, which meant one other person knew the secret: my partner, Jock. He covered for me during the hours I spent with Linda, and was covering for me when he was shot down by a numbers runner who’d unexpectedly turned to narcotics, turning an arrest that should have been a simple one-man job into a disaster that had ended Jock’s life and my police career. After eighteen years on the force and three years in Linda’s bed.

I hadn’t seen her since that final meeting, during which Jock had been killed forty blocks away, and in the last three years I had just started to adjust myself to life with the multiple betrayer I knew myself to be. I had spent over two years unemployed, supported by savings and by Kate—who had forgiven me even though the Department had not—and only recently had taken out a private detective license, with the help of one or two old friends from my days on the force. I still couldn’t bring myself to work with other people, but I could now take one-man jobs, and was listed as a part-time operative with three agencies in Manhattan. I had gone down very close to suicide or a mental breakdown, and was only just starting to come back up again; only just starting to ease the weight of guilt and permit myself to come back up again.

And now here was Linda, just the other side of this door. Bringing it all with her again, like swirls of fog around her coat.

There was nothing else to do; I unfastened the three locks and pulled open the door. “Come in,” I said.

When she stepped forward into the light it was as though the last three years had ceased to exist, as though I’d dreamed them. Her face was unchanged, even to the hesitant private smile with which she had always greeted me, and her voice was as well-remembered as a song from childhood. “Thank you, Mitch,” she said.

I was so stunned by the discovery of my still wanting her that at first I couldn’t say a thing. I gestured to her to come further into the lobby, and busied myself with closing and relocking the door; all three locks, as though the mixture of memory and desire she’d brought with her were still outside, and could be kept at bay.

“I followed you,” she said, talking to the back of my head. “I’ve been outside in the car since nine o’clock.”

I didn’t want to want her, and I knew I wouldn’t do anything about trying to get her back, but still I was very nervous, and afraid that when I turned I would show her something in my face or manner that would tell her the truth. I had never gone back to see her after learning that Jock was dead, and so far as I knew, she never had made any attempt to contact me. In a small way, I felt guilty about having turned my back so completely and abruptly, but that guilt had been for a long time buried beneath too many much larger guilts, and now lacked the force to drive me to action.

The three locks were refastened. Reluctantly I turned and faced her smile again and said, “Hello.” I was afraid to smile because I knew I wanted to take her in my arms and I didn’t want to know if she would let me.

“I should have come to see you at home,” she said, still with the same small deprecatory smile. “It would have been better, to talk to you with—your wife.” She had never met Kate, nor had I ever talked with her much about my wife or my marriage.

We had to get out of the past and into the present, and right away. I said, “There’s a problem with Dink?”

“Yes.” She looked around the small lighted furniture-less lobby. “You’re the only one I could come to,” she said, and faced me again.

“If I can help,” I said, and stopped there.

“Don’t be cold to me, Mitch,” she said. “I’m not going to—”

Drag me into the past, she meant. I was suddenly ashamed of myself, and said, “Come on into the office, we can sit down.”

“Thank you.”

I had switched on the lobby light on the way in, and now I turned it off again on the way out and we went down the hall behind my flashlight beam toward the white rectangle of the office. It was the only room I kept lighted all night, where I would sit and listen to a transistor radio between my hourly rounds.

As we walked down the hall, side by side but not touching, once again indistinct to each other in the darkness, she said, “I just couldn’t do it, Mitch, go see you in your home. I was there yesterday, and again today, and I just stayed in the car and looked at the house.”

“And followed me here.”

“Yes. And finally came in. Because of Danny.”

“Is he getting out?”

“He is out,” she said.

At the office doorway I switched off the flashlight and gestured for her to precede me. I wanted to shut the door behind me and close us in, as though to keep us from being seen by eyes in the darkness, but I left it open. I said, “Are you living with him?”

She turned in the middle of the room. “Of course,” she said. “He’s my husband.”

“Does he know about us?”

“About you?” I noticed the change of pronoun; she said, “Yes, he does, Mitch. We’ve gotten past it.”

“Good,” I said, and hoped the regret didn’t show. “Sit down.”

In addition to a couple of desks and swivel chairs and filing cabinets, the office contained a maroon leatherette sofa and armchair; Linda took the chair, and I sat near her at one end of the sofa.

“Danny has a job,” she said, and was suddenly embarrassed, I couldn’t think why. “He’s working for a cardboard box maker over in Brooklyn.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“He doesn’t want to get involved in all that old stuff again.”

“I’m glad,” I said. These were just sounds I was making, true enough but superficial: the police officer pleased to hear of the ex-con going straight. But at the same time I was trying to understand the source of her embarrassment.

Then she said, earnestly, “He’s really doing very well, Mitch. This time he’s going to make it, I know he is.” And I finally saw why it was she was so embarrassed; it was difficult for her to show me, the ex-lover, just how totally Dink Campbell was the center of her life.

I knew, of course, that if Linda had come back crying to start our affair again, I wouldn’t have done it, I would have pushed her away with fear and an utter lack of desire. I knew that even now I didn’t truly want her back, and would make no attempt to recapture her. But her unavailability was so complete that it permitted other feelings to rise in me, undampened by fear of consequences; we had been together for three years, and it had not been through the desire of either of us that it had come to an end.

So that what I was feeling wasn’t truly desire, but merely regret, which is desire’s shadow, and to be ignored. The easiest way to ignore it would be to focus myself entirely in the present, so I said, “If Dink is doing well in an honest job, and if things are good between the two of you, then it has to be something else. Somebody putting pressure on him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Old friends,” I suggested, “wanting him to come back in with them, work a few jobs.”

“That’s part of it,” she said. “You know he was always the lock specialist.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We’re saving our money now,” she said, “so he can open a locksmith’s shop.”

I suddenly found myself grinning, with tension almost completely gone. I said, “Dink Campbell as a locksmith. He’ll be a good one.”

Her answering smile agreed to the comedy, but also took pride in her man. “Yes, he will,” she said. “If they give him the chance.”

“They don’t have another lockman, is that it?”

“That’s right. Then there’s some money they want.”

“From Dink?”

“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “There was a job they were on one time, and they had to split up, and two of them say Danny had the money, and now they all want their shares.”

“He says he didn’t have it?”

“He didn’t have it. He doesn’t have it.”

“All right,” I said.

“They say Danny should either give them the money, or help them on a few more jobs until they make it up.”

“And if he won’t?”

“They’ll lean on him,” she said. “Beat him up sometime. Maybe come beat me up while he’s at work. They gave him time to think it over.”

“How much time?”

She shook her head. “Until they come back,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month.”

“What’s Dink’s attitude?”

“He doesn’t want to go back,” she said. “If he gets caught again, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison and he knows it, and he doesn’t want it.”

“But?”

“He doesn’t want me to get hurt,” she said. “I know that’s what it is. If he was on his own he wouldn’t worry, he’d handle it somehow, but he hates the idea of going to work and leaving me alone.”

I said, “How many of them are there?”

“Four.”

“You know their names?”

“Partly.”

I got up and went to the nearest desk and found pen and paper. “Okay,” I said.

She said, “Mitch?”

I looked across the room at her.

She said, “Danny doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t like me asking you to help him.”

“All right,” I said.

“You can understand that.”

The things I had done to Dink made me look down at the blank sheet of paper again. “Yes, I can,” I said.

“So if you can do something—”

“Dink shouldn’t know it’s from me.”

“I’m sorry, Mitch, I wish—”

Quickly I said, “It’s all right. I can’t do anything officially myself anyway, so my name will have to stay out no matter what.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Who are they?”

“One of them is named Fred Carver. He’s the one in charge.”

“I know him,” I said, and wrote his name down.

“Then there’s one Danny calls Knox. I don’t know his first name.”

“Right,” I said, putting the name down. It was new to me.

“And one called Mort.”

I looked at her. “Mort Livingston?”

“I don’t know.”

It was too common a first name, and I didn’t know if Mort Livingston was even around any more. Dink had been put away seven years ago, and I myself had been off the force three years; a lot of faces change in three years. I just wrote down the first name, and let it go at that.

“The fourth one is just a kid,” she said. “Named Willie Vigevano.”

“Never heard of him,” I said. “How do you spell the name?”

She spelled it, and said, “He’s just a kid, no more than seventeen or eighteen. But he’s the one who scares me. Him, and Fred Carver.”

I remembered Fred Carver as a bruiser, a fairly unintelligent man who became leader of small groups by cowing them with the threat of his fists. He’d been sent up once or twice, but not as yet for anything serious, though that was clearly in his future.

I said, “That’s four. That’s all of them?”

“Yes.”

I put the paper away in my wallet, and said, “I was making my rounds when you knocked. Walk with me, I want to ask some questions.”

“All right,” she said.

The rounds could have waited, I suppose, but I did feel a certain responsibility to do the job well, and I had already made myself late. Also, there was a strangeness and discomfort in being alone in a room with Linda, the two of us in a conversation so unlike the past, our eyes of necessity meeting from time to time; it had been easier while walking down the dark hall with the flashlight, and I wanted to reconstruct that.

I didn’t go back to where I’d left off, but started at the beginning again, doing the ground floor first and going up the rear stairs afterward. The rounds took longer than usual, Linda being distracted from time to time by different things on display, as I had been myself the first week here. I allowed us to move at her pace, shining the light on whatever took her interest, and made no hurry out of asking my questions. I wanted to know her address, and the address of the paper-box factory where Dink worked in Brooklyn. I wanted to know where Fred Carver and the others hung out these days, and where they had met Dink, and what had been said on both sides, and whether or not they had been to Linda and Dink’s apartment; they had. I wanted to know what the chances were of Dink moving away to some other city, and she said they were very poor, Dink still being a man full of the wrong kind of pride, who would wither and die if he ever allowed himself to be driven away from his home by threats.

We had come this far when we entered “Advertising in the Fifties,” this being the room I had cut through to reach the main stairs when Linda had knocked at the door. We were now coming in from another direction, and would cross that earlier route of mine.

Linda was the first to see it. She was slightly ahead of me, and I bumped into her when she stopped and said, “Oh.”

The physical contact between us—our first—confused me for just a second. Then I looked past her and saw the naked dead man lying on his face in the middle of the floor, and forgot all that.

2

THE FIRST PATROL CAR was there in seven minutes. They were both young and already beginning to be a little too heavy in the torso; riding in the car so much is what does it. When I saw them I felt a surprising embarrassment, one I hadn’t expected. All three of us were in uniform, theirs dark blue and mine a medium gray, and although mine was quiet and restrained, I nevertheless felt dressed up like a parody of them, a burlesque cop. The old phrase “You don’t deserve to wear the uniform” went through my head, and of course that was it, the same guilt about Jock in yet another way.

One of them said, “We had a report on a death.”

“This way.”

In coming downstairs after finding the body, I had turned on every light I’d passed, so we went upstairs now in a white glare. The room with the body was square and small, about ten feet on a side, with white walls and ceiling, dark wood floor, a backless black-upholstered bench against one wall, and mounted magazine advertisements from the fifties all the way around. The bench was the only furniture, so that the pale body on the wooden floor was completely alone. It was strange how small and unreal it looked; in the setting, it could have been a modern sculpture rather than a man.

“Did you touch it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Neither did they. Standing on either side of it, gazing down for a moment, they looked like the paranoid dream of a police state; a pair of brutal cops over their prostrate victim.

One of them glanced over at me. “You know who it is?”

“I haven’t seen his face.”

“You call anybody else?”

“My office.”

They both frowned at me. “What office?”

“Allied Protection Service.” I patted my shoulder patch, with the company name on it in yellow letters in a triangle formation. “They’re sending somebody over,” I said.

“Why?”

“To protect their interests, I suppose.”

They looked at each other, and one said, “I’ll call in.”

“Right.”

He said to me, “Come along,” and I went with him. Going down the stairs he said, “Any other entrances?”

“Two.”

“Check them recently?”

“Not since I found the body.”

“Take a look now,” he said, “and then wait by the front door.”

“All right.”

There was a fire emergency exit that opened onto the garden beside the building, and a rear door that led to an alley between two apartment houses and out to the next street. Both were locked and undisturbed. I went up the rear stairs to check the fire-escape windows on both the second and third floors, and the metal gates remained closed and locked over both of them. I took the front stairs down from the third floor and found the patrolman waiting for me just inside the main entrance. He frowned when he saw me coming down the stairs, and said, “Where’d you go?”

I told him about the fire escape. He nodded and said, “Okay.”

“I can’t think how he got into the building,” I said. “He wasn’t here the last time I made my rounds.”

“Kept ahead of you,” he suggested.

“Naked? What did he have in mind?”

He shrugged, and I remembered the credo of the uniformed patrolman: leave the thinking to the Detective Squad. He changed the subject then, saying, “You ever on the force?”

“I used to be.”

“You’re better off the way you are,” he said, and went on to tell me anecdotes illustrating the public’s lack of respect for the police.

He was interrupted a few minutes later by the arrival of two plainclothesmen. One was short and wiry and Italian, and said his name was Grinella. The other was big and heavy-set and truculent, and he didn’t give his name. The uniformed patrolman gave them his report, and Grinella told him, “Stay on the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grinella turned to me. “Lead the way, will you, Mr. Tobin?”

“Of course.”

We went upstairs, where the other uniformed patrolman turned from reading a Volkswagen ad mounted on the wall, and for a minute we all studied the dead body some more. Grinella asked a few questions and I answered them. Still no one touched the body.

I was still in the room when the assistant medical examiner arrived. He knelt beside the body, touched it, satisfied himself it was dead, and then rolled it over. Then we could see what had been done to it. It was as though someone had killed him by injecting gallons of purple paint into his head, so much paint that it had bulged his face outward, the eyes popping, fat tongue straining out of the mouth, cheeks bulging. The paint had discolored the flesh, and some of it had seeped out around the eyes and from the nostrils and the corners of the mouth.

Except, of course, that there was no purple paint. It was blood, and it was the result, not the cause. The assistant medical examiner, still kneeling beside the corpse, looked up at the detectives and said, “Clipped him on the jaw here, where this mark is. Knocked him out. Then wrapped wire around his neck. Did a good tight job.” He pointed, and the line where the wire was embedded in the skin of the neck was just barely visible. The wire couldn’t be seen at all, only the crease it caused.

Detective Grinella said, “In this room?”

“Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“When this happens, bowel and bladder release. It’s just automatic. Somebody cleaned him up after he was dead.”

“And brought him here,” Detective Grinella said.

“Yes.”

The detectives looked at one another. The bigger one said, “I’ll call. You talk to the keyhole.”

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.

3

KATE 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.

“He’s asleep. I’ll make something nice.”

She came toward me, reaching for the paper bag, and when I gave it to her our fingers touched. We both smiled at the same time, and I said, “You know me now.”

“Yes.”

We kissed, and she went out to the kitchen, and I headed for the hall phone, where I called a friend of mine still on the force, Marty Kengelberg. I had no idea what his duty hours were, but just took a chance. He wasn’t in, so I left my name, and went upstairs to change out of the uniform into slacks and shirt.

Kate made a production out of dinner. There was no real reason for it, since even with this all-night job of mine we still ate most of our meals together, but there’s always a kick in unexpected time off, an aura of playing hookey from the regular routine. Also, I think Kate had a feeling that some sort of milestone had been passed in the reconstruction of our life together, and wanted to mark it or to celebrate it. I myself was aware of greater complexities than that, but took pleasure in her pleasure.

We ate in the dining room, by candlelight, and afterward went upstairs to bed together and made love. Kate fell asleep very quickly, but I was keyed up by the night’s happenings, and was in any case on a schedule that wouldn’t have normally found me in bed before eight in the morning, so I was still awake a little after three when the phone rang. We have a bedroom extension, which I answered on the first ring, and it was Marty Kengelberg. I said, “Hold on while I switch phones.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t want Kate to wake up. I put on a robe, went downstairs, took the hall phone off the hook, hurried back up to the bedroom, hung up the extension there, dashed back down again, and said, “Marty? You there?”

“Listen, did I wake you up? The message said—”

“No, I was awake.”

“It said call any time tonight.”

That wasn’t exactly the message I’d left, but I let it go. I said, “No, it’s all right, I’m awake.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not with me,” I said. “With Dink Campbell.”

There was a little silence, in which I could hear Marty remembering who Dink Campbell was, and then he said, “Uh-oh. Bothering you?”

“Nothing like that, Marty. He’s out, and he wants to go straight, and some of his old friends are giving him a rough time.”

“That happens,” he said. He didn’t sound very interested.

“I was asked if I could help,” I said.

Again the little silence. This time he sounded careful and a bit remote when he said, “You want to tell me who asked?”

“Linda Campbell.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mitch—”

“I’m not seeing her, Marty, I haven’t seen her for three years. She came to me because she didn’t know who else to go to, and because Dink won’t ask for help himself.”

I heard him sigh. “How we get into these things,” he said.

“I know.”

“What do you want, Mitch?”

“If some attention could be paid to these guys, it might help.”

“Keep them moving, huh? Distract them a little.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about them.”

I told him the names and background I knew, and then he said, “Mitch, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“I may be out of line …”

“Ask anyway.”

“You aren’t expecting, are you, some kind of gratitude on this?”

I knew at once what he meant. I said, “From Linda Campbell? Goddammit, Marty—”

“It was a question in my head,” he said. “I just wanted to bring it out and look at it.”

“Well, put it back again,” I said. “I didn’t seek her out, Marty, I didn’t go to her and I won’t. And believe me she won’t be coming back to me.”

“It’s none of my business anyway,” he said. “You just take an interest in an old friend.”

Marty had stood by me at a time when I wouldn’t stand by myself. He was primarily the one who had made it possible for me to get my ticket to operate as a private detective. He was my oldest and truest friend, and I’d only gotten irritated because he’d tapped a fantasy I’d been burying: the grateful Linda coming to see me once more. I knew she wouldn’t, I knew I wouldn’t in any case follow through, but the fantasy had been there, and he’d turned over the rock hiding it, and I’d gotten mad at him for it. I said, “Marty, I promise you I’m in control. If anything, I’m trying to pay off a debt to Dink.” Which was also true.

He was mollified, and we talked a little more, and I went back upstairs to bed. Where I dreamed about hunting hyenas in a darkened movie theater.

4

I GOT UP AT eleven and called Allied. Grazko, the supervisor there, told me he didn’t know yet whether I would be working that night. “The museum’s shut down today,” he said. “If the cops are out by tonight, I suppose they’ll want you back. I’ll let you know.”

“Have they found out who did it?”

“They don’t even know who it was done to,” Grazko said. “The body’s a John Doe.”

That amazed me. With all of the record-keeping today, all of the dossiers, all of the sources of fingerprinting, there are hardly any John Does left in the world at all. Except children, of course. Trying to remember the body, if it had looked like a teenager—there had been no way to tell from the face—I said, “Was he an adolescent?”

“They figure about twenty-five.”

“That’s old to be a John Doe.”

“Except Mex,” he said. Grazko had lived several years in Arizona, and all non-native Americans were Mexican to him.

I pictured the body as Caucasian, average in height and build. The hair had been moderately long, in the current style, and there had somehow been the undefinable feeling that he was American by birth and residence. But that could have been simply unthinking assumption.

Grazko said, “Anyway, that’s not our problem. We leave that to the bottles.” Meaning the Police Department. I smiled at the thought of Grazko in conversation with Detective Grinella’s unnamed partner, the tough one who called private detectives “keyholes”; the two were almost brothers in their personalities, but I couldn’t see any brotherly love developing between them.

I said, “Shall I call you this afternoon?”

“No, we’ll buzz you when we know the story. You’ll be home?”

I said I would, and hung up, and spent most of the afternoon working on my wall. I’d started the wall half a year after being thrown off the force, and at first it had done nothing but fill my need for something to do with my hands and my mind. It had been my own home-remedy version of occupational therapy, my kind of basket-weaving.

The idea of the wall was that it completely enclosed my back yard. When finished, it would mark the perimeter of the yard on three sides, with the house itself enclosing the fourth. There were no doors or windows in the wall, no breaks of any kind. I had made the footing of concrete block, and the wall itself was brick, two rows with dirt packed between. When finished—if I ever finish it—the wall would be ten feet high and two feet thick. It is now six feet high, just over my head, and the work has been slowed even more—six feet in nearly three years isn’t very fast—by the necessity to build and move scaffolding from which to work. I have never wanted the wall to be complete, and have always been aware that the process of working on it was its own goal, but in the last few months I’ve spent less and less time on its construction, as though the need for basket-weaving had begun to recede into the past.

But today I felt the need to occupy myself again. And most of the time out there was spent in fantasies in which I was given the opportunity to demonstrate my determination not to start anything with Linda again. The demonstrations were made to Linda, to Kate, to Marty, and even just to myself.

Grazko called back at four-thirty to say the museum wanted me to come to work as usual this evening. “The cops finished already,” he said. “You ask me, they’re going to Open it.”

“Open” is a form of Newspeak; it means “close.” The Open File—in some police departments called the Pending File—contains unsolved cases which are not actively being investigated. They are cases which have been closed without resolution.

“So everything’s back to normal,” I said.

“Almost. The museum’s shut down. But they still want somebody there at night.”

To find the bodies, I thought; but Grazko and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which I would say that kind of thing aloud. We said so long to one another, I told Kate I would be working tonight, and she adjusted dinner to suit.

I got to the museum a few minutes early, and found it as brightly lighted as when it was open. The front door was unlocked, and Muller was at his usual place inside. Allied also furnished daytime guards to the museum, three of them, of whom Muller was the senior man. Stout and sixtyish, Muller had spent thirty years in the Army as an MP, and was now living comfortably on Army retirement pay. He worked for Allied mostly to occupy his mind and keep from going stale. Not from going fat, certainly.

There seemed to be activity within the museum, a lot of it. I said, “I thought the place was closed.”

“It is. They’re doing an inventory, want to see if anything’s gone.”

It turned out Muller was the only daytime guard on duty. The museum had various unofficial threads of connection with New York University, and several graduate students were now in the process of checking the contents of the building against the catalogue. They were working under the direction of the two men who were the principal links between museum and university, they being both faculty members at NYU and directors of the museum. One of these was Ernest Ramsey, whose specialty was American history, a short, slender, neat, fussy man in his fifties, with a gray spade beard and the manner of running his life from lists; we had met four or five times in the three weeks of my employment here, and I had always had the feeling that each sentence he said to me was afterward checked off on a clipboard he maintained in his head. The other was named Phil Crane, from the Art Department at the university; an intense, long-haired man in his late thirties, he wore a heavily undisciplined beard to go with his love beads and bell-bottom slacks, and tended to pepper his language with the slang of the moment. Ramsey and Crane made a comic contrast with one another, though neither seemed aware of it; the one the traditional university professor, pedantic and edgy and impatient with people outside his specialty, the other the new breed of committed don, striving frantically to remain in touch with his students. Yet they found a kind of common meeting ground here, involved with a museum devoted to nostalgia.

Still, their influences never truly mingled. Among the young people taking the inventory, the Ramsey students could clearly be separated from the Crane students. The Ramseyites were more traditional, more scholarly, more clean-cut and old-fashioned, while the Cranettes leaned toward beards and beads and bells.

Leaving Muller, who promised to let me know when he was going to leave, I went down the hall to the office, and found Phil Crane himself there, running off copies of a page of the Village Voice on the copier there. “Hi,” he said, when I walked in. “You’re Tobin, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” I put my lunchbag down in its usual place, on the corner of a desk; I felt self-conscious about carrying a lunchbag, as though it were foolish or simple-minded, like wearing knickers.

The copier could be programmed to do a maximum of ten copies at a time. Crane had apparently set it to its top output; he came away from it, and it kept on clicking and working away. “That must have been a real down for you last night,” he said.

“It was.”

“A hell of a thing,” he said. “You walk into a room and zap! A dead body, staring right at you.”

“He wasn’t staring,” I said. “He was face down. It was just as well.”

“Still. And you all alone.”

“Not entirely,” I said. “He was there.”

Crane barked with laughter. “Mr. Tobin,” he said, “you exceed my expectations. You groove on crisis, I know you do. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“It cools you out,” he said. “You go along, you go along, everything’s quiet, then there’s a crash, and you’re cool. Am I right?”

I grinned at him. “You mean I’m good under pressure.”

“Man, I mean you live under pressure. It picks you up.”

“No,” I said. “I like a quiet life.”

He gave me a knowing look. “Not you,” he said. “You’re a fatality freak. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“You don’t know it,” he said, “but I groove with you. I really and truly dig where you are. You let it come to you, and that’s good. I’m the same.”

I wasn’t sure why, but he made me feel like laughing. Not derisive laughter, but happy laughter, agreeing with him. I said, “You think we’re that much alike?”

He shook his head, with a kind of mournful smile. “No, no,” he said, without emphasis. “We don’t pick up on the same kind of thing. But we react the same, you and me. You ever try grass?”

“Yes.” I was referring to things from a long time ago, back when marijuana was a lot more esoteric than it is now.

“Didn’t do you anything, did it?” He said it as a challenge.

“As a matter of fact, no, it didn’t.”

He nodded, grinning at me. “Try it more than once?”

“Yes.”

“Still a bummer?”

“Still no reaction,” I said, assuming that was what he’d meant.

“I knew it,” he said, nodding some more, grinning in satisfaction. “I’m the same way. The kids can’t stand me, they’re flying and I’m on the ground.”

I had to smile back. I said, “Why is that?”

“Control,” he said. “Mastery of self. You and me, we just won’t ever let go, put down the reins and relax. You ever been hypnotized?”

“No.”

“Nobody ever tried?”

I shook my head.

“Try it some time,” he told me. “It won’t work. You take any hypnotist you want, any professional. You try, you go into it and want to get hypnotized. Just to see what it is, say.” He shook his head, then glanced over at the copier and noticed it had stopped working. Walking over to it, he said, “You won’t go under. It’s the same as with the grass.”

“Have you tried it?”

Grinning again, reprogramming the copier for ten more, he said, “Five different times. I drive them right up the wall.” He struck a stern pose, and did a parody voice combining Viennese professor and Times Square homosexual: “Professor Crane, you are not cooperating.”

“Are you cooperating?”

He cocked his head to one side, looking past me, thinking it over. “I guess I’m not,” he said, sounding surprised. “I want to, but I just won’t let it happen. Like with the grass. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Control,” he said. “When you found the body, I bet you were very cool.”

I smiled a little ruefully, remembering that moment. “I didn’t feel cool, believe me.”

“No? I bet it didn’t show. You don’t let anything blow your mind, not grass, not anything. Not even finding a dead body in the middle of the floor.”

“You give me too much credit,” I said.

Suddenly he’d lost interest in the conversation. “I don’t think so,” he said, and turned back to the copier, saying, “All set here? Right.”

I watched him gather up an armload of copies. He seemed self-absorbed while getting ready to leave, but then gave me another friendly smile and said, “Nice talking to you.”

“The same.”

“Keep your cool,” he said, and grinned, and left the office.

A minute later I followed him. Down by the front door, I saw Crane and Ernest Ramsey in conversation, with several of Crane’s students nearby; then Crane and his people left, and Ramsey went off toward the display rooms. I went over to Muller and said, “You don’t have to wait for these people to leave.”

“No problem,” he said. “They’ll be out in a minute or two.” Over the last few weeks I’d picked up an impression of Muller as a man who preferred being on the job to being at home. I knew nothing of his home life, and might have been mistaking extreme conscientiousness for reluctance to go home.

Muller and I stood talking by the front door now as the Ramsey students trailed out, one or two at a time. Ramsey himself came along last, and paused to tell Muller that the inventory would continue for the next two or three days, that the museum would remain closed for that time, and that only Muller himself would be required for daytime duty until the reopening. Muller promised to pass it all on to Grazko, and Ramsey turned to me. Like Crane, I had seen Ramsey three or four times in the last few weeks, but we had never actually been introduced. Now Ramsey said, “You’re Tobin, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“The guard who found the body?” He was apparently a man who liked to nail down the details.

“That’s right,” I said.

“You seem to have handled things very well.”

“I didn’t have to do anything but call the police.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “you seem to have remained remarkably calm under the circumstances.”

Like Phil Crane, Ramsey was saying I was cool. It was meant as a compliment, and I realized his chilly manner was his natural style and not at all aimed at me, but I couldn’t seem to avoid bristling a bit in response. I made a conscious effort to remain calm under these circumstances, too, and said, “Thank you.”

He looked around and said, “Astonishing how he could have gotten in here.”

“Someone with a key,” I suggested. “In the front door or the side.”

He shook his head, being brisk and positive. “We aren’t that careless with keys,” he said. “These students, for instance, none of them have keys.”

“If it’s that tight,” I said, “the police should be able to come up with the answer very soon.”

“But the man was a stranger to us,” he said. “A stranger to everybody. Are you sure this door was locked?”

“All three locks,” I said. I was offended by the question, but since I assumed Ramsey had asked it out of ignorance rather than malice, I didn’t show my offense.

“And you let no one in here?”

I thought of Linda; that, combined with two offensive questions in a row, made me more openly angry. “If I had,” I said, “I would have told the police about it.”

He looked at me with impatient doubt, not sure whether he should check off that answer on his clipboard or not. Finally he gave a fretful shrug and said, “Well, well.” He nodded. “We’ll let the police handle it.”

“Yes,” I said.

Ramsey left, trailing the last of his students, and Muller grinned at me. “Civilians,” he said.

The word struck me funny, which improved my mood. “He just doesn’t like things unanswered,” I said.

“Then he’ll live a very nervous life,” Muller said. “See you tomorrow.”

“So long.”

I locked the door three times after Muller left, and made my first rounds, double-checking each door and window along the way. Everything was locked up tight.

The room containing “Advertising in the Fifties” was as bare and anonymous now as it had been at this same hour last night. The body was gone, leaving no traces. There had been small bloodstains on the floor where the face had been lying, but they too were now gone.

My pattern was to spend about half the time sitting in the office at the first floor rear, listening to the radio, and the other half walking my rounds through the displays. Tonight I felt more restless, and walked more than necessary, thinking about things.

It was the murdered man who occupied my thoughts now; Linda had receded from existence the minute I had arrived here for work. But the museum itself was the strongest reminder of the dead man, and I found myself poking at the puzzles with which he had surrounded himself in death. The greatest of these, of course, were the traditional two: who had killed him and why had he been killed? But these were unanswerable, unguessable, given my role and the amount of information I possessed, so I tended instead to pick at the secondary puzzles around those main two.

For instance, why was he naked? How did he happen to be a John Doe? Why was he moved from the place where he had actually been killed? Why had the body been cleaned up, presumably by the killer? Why had it been brought here, to this museum? And why had it been carried all the way up to the second floor—what was the significance of that room that made the killer carry his burden up the stairs to it rather than leave it just inside whichever door he had used as an entrance?

Ah. The phrasing itself in that last question had suggested at least one possible answer. By carrying the body to the second floor, the killer had left a question as to just which entrance to the museum had been used. Making the killer, perhaps, someone with a key to only one door. If Ramsey were to be believed about the caution the museum took with keys, that just might be a significant detail.

Except for two things. First, even if it was a significant detail, there was nothing for me to do with it; it was hardly weighty enough evidence to offer Detective Grinella, to say nothing of his partner. And second, there was the key rack behind the first-floor office door. The museum might want to be careful about keys, but anyone with a gob of wax hidden in his hand could make a quick impression of one of those keys and leave no one the wiser.

Still, the fact of carrying the body upstairs did suggest a desire to conceal the direction of the killer’s movements as well as the origin. Also, it had been placed in the very middle of a square room with doors in all four walls, again tending to confuse, to obscure indications of the direction from which it had come. Not that I thought the killer had chosen the particular room and placement for that conscious reason, but that his conscious desire to cover his tracks had led him to these unconscious lengths.

From where? I studied each door and window as I passed it, hoping to see some indication of the killer’s route, but of course there was nothing. I passed again the door leading to the basement, and paused to frown at it. There was no exit from the basement to the street, so this couldn’t have been his road, but nevertheless the door held my interest. I had never been below, had never felt any curiosity about it. But tonight my curiosity was high, in anything to do with this building. I went off to get that door’s key.

This building had originally been a private home, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, having been built sometime before the turn of the century, when there were still fields and farmlands this far north of what was then considered the city. At that time the theater district had been on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, and Fourteenth Street itself was the uptown shopping center. Now the nearest farm was in Connecticut, the theater district was in the West Forties, and the uptown shopping area was just down the block from here, Madison Avenue in the Fifties and Sixties. Fifteen years ago this building had been sold to the semi-private semi-university group which had turned it into the Museum of American Graphic Art. Money had been spent to re-create the original era of the house, if not its original appearance, while at the same time the plumbing and electricity and so on had been modernized. There had also been structural work done, firming up ancient walls and things like that.

The result was an attractive large house, three stories plus basement and attic, with a private garden on one side. The basement was used for workshops, the ground floor for both display area and office space, the upper floors for display, and the attic for storage. The financing of all this quietly expensive good taste was a bafflement to me; I knew only that “foundation money” had formed the lion’s share.

In any event, it was a setting far removed from the atmospheres of violence and sudden death. But if violence and sudden death had not actually happened here they had nevertheless been brought to this place, and the effect was that the house itself seemed different. It now seemed secretive, unhealthily empty, ingrown and unreal.

I was full of this changed sense of the house when I unlocked the basement door and went down the stairs, but the reality down below was certainly simple and straightforward and mundane. A narrow corridor ran straight ahead toward the front of the building from the foot of the stairs, with a gray concrete floor, a whitewashed stone wall on the right, and a white plasterboard wall on the left. Two small windows high in the stone wall, up next to the acoustical ceiling, were barred on the inside and couldn’t have been used as an entrance.

There were three doors spaced along the plasterboard wall, all shut but none locked. The nearest led into a cluttered L-shaped storage area that took up the rear portion of the basement including the part under the stairs. Discarded office furniture, picture frames, stacks of newspapers and magazines, filing cabinets, old light fixtures, and in a corner a cracked toilet lid.

The second door, midway along the corridor, led to the furnace and general utilities. Everything was neat and clean here, the walls had been finished with plasterboard, and there was an acoustical ceiling like that in the corridor.

The final door led to a workroom, with high tables along the walls, each with its own long fluorescent light fixture hanging over it. Again the acoustical ceiling and plasterboard walls and concrete floor, except that two or three scatter rugs were spread around on the concrete in this room, apparently at random. In this room the ads and cartoons and comic strips were made ready for display, taken from their original sources, mounted on heavy cardboard, framed behind non-reflecting glass. Some of the older and more battered items had to be practically reconstructed from yellowed brittle newspaper sheets or magazine pages, and this room was equipped for all such rehabilitation.

I was fascinated, without really understanding what was done here. I knew that the table covered with an old piece of rug tacked down around all the edges was used for cutting glass. I knew that the acrid smell of chemicals in the air must come from that row of brown glass bottles on a high shelf, used somehow in the restoration of old materials. But the small tools, thin and fragile-looking, were a complete mystery to me.

Apparently the work was sometimes dirtying, because stained clothing hung from hooks on the wall near the door to a small lavatory. Three or four smocks, plus trousers and old shirts, and an old basketball jacket with vague color differences on the back where some design had once appeared—“Hell’s Angels,” maybe, or a high school letter, or the name of a company sponsoring a bowling team.

The workroom was reassuring; it was as though the calm competence of it was convincing me that no dead man ever had been found in this building, nor ever could be. Not in a building like this.

It might be that some sort of reassurance like that was all I’d been seeking after all; when I left the workroom and switched off the light and headed for the stairs, my mood was lighter and I felt no more curiosity or desire to pry into dark corners.

I was upstairs, locking the basement door behind me, when I became aware of the reflected glow of a flashlight. I immediately switched off my own, and moved as silently as I could in the direction of the light.

Two flashlights. They were both in the display room nearest the office. I was unarmed, and regretted it for the first time.

A voice said, “Where the hell is he?”

“Beats me,” said a second voice, and shouted, “Hey!”

I said, “Here I am,” and as they came out the doorway I flicked my light on them, and saw that they were Detective Grinella and his partner. I said, “What’s going on?”

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.

5

THE 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?”

“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.

6

THE 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.”

He gave us a rundown, adding nothing I didn’t already know. In fact, the only interesting part of his talk was its one omission; he never once mentioned the John Doe. He wasn’t here on a murder investigation, and he was making no bones about it; he was here because some papers had been stolen from some important people.

Since I was toward the rear of his audience, it was relatively easy for me to let my mind wander; unfortunately, it insisted on wandering to that workroom. I looked around, trying to find something else to attract my attention, and my eye lit on a sand-filled cigarette receptacle to one side of the doorway just behind me. A partly crumpled cigarette pack was lying on the sand among the jutting cigarette butts; Marlboro, it was, Grinella’s brand. But no, it wasn’t either; I looked more closely and saw that the lettering was wrong, though the design was right. M-a-something.

Maverick. That’s what it was. Then I remembered hearing a radio commercial for that brand recently, and being surprised to hear a cigarette commercial until it had turned out to be a station in Canada. Maverick was apparently the Canadian brand name for Marlboro; they used the same pack design and the same music theme in their commercials. I’d heard it over the weekend, up in Plattsburg, near the Canadian border.

Things happen in threes, they say. Here I’d run across Maverick cigarettes twice in three days; I wondered if there’d really be a third.

Up front, Inspector Stanton was finishing his rundown. He was a stocky man, gray-haired under his uniform cap, and he was clearly uncomfortable about his footing on that upholstered bench. I think he would have liked a handy shoulder to brace himself against, but his dignity wouldn’t let him ask for one. He got to the end of his explanation of what had been going on, and then said, “With your cooperation, we should be able to clear this up, find the guilty party, and restore the originals in very short order. Everyone directly connected with the museum is in this room. I want to make it clear that I don’t look upon you all as suspects, but as potential witnesses. It may be that no one in this room knows the whole truth about what’s been going on here. But one of you may know one little fact, another knows another little fact, and so on. We want to get all those facts and put them together and get this mess cleaned up, and do it fast. So we’re going to ask you to give us statements now, and sign them, and we’ll also ask you to be available in case we want to check with you further. Let us know where you can be reached, tell us if you plan to travel anywhere.”

He explained the logistics of the statement-taking; he himself wouldn’t talk individually to every one of us, though he would be seeing many of us along the way. Several teams of detectives would do the actual questioning, in different rooms of the museum. If we would all cooperate, we could be out of here in plenty of time for lunch. That’s what he said, but since it was now quarter past eleven, and statements were going to be taken from possibly forty people, I didn’t see how he planned to make it all work out. Though I guessed that the most important people—the museum directors, for instance—would be taken first, while the least important—graduate students and private guards—would be the ones to cool their heels the longest.

Inspector Stanton finished at last, and climbed down from the bench with evident relief. He was followed by the detective teams, reading off lists of names and telling people what rooms they should go to. There were three pairs of detectives, each with a stenographer. The entire Allied group was to be questioned by Grinella and Hargerson, as it turned out, and they wanted us in a room on the second floor.

The room we were to wait in was “Advertising in the Fifties,” the place where I’d found the John Doe. We nine from Allied were joined there by two girl students; they took the only bench, and the rest of us stood in the middle of the room, talking together in low tones. I knew a few of the uniformed men, and was introduced to the rest. Tendler and Twain were Muller’s assistants on the Monday-Friday day shift. Daniels worked the weekend days, when the museum was closed, and O’Keefe worked the three nights that I had off. Finally, Edwards was there, he being my predecessor on the night shift.

I was interested to meet Edwards, since if anyone from Allied was involved in the thefts, he would have been the one with the strongest opportunity, but one look at him convinced me he was innocent. A frail man in his early sixties, he had washed-out blue eyes, false teeth that clicked, and a mournful line of talk—mostly about his ailing wife and thoughtless children. The thoughtless children appeared to be men and women in their thirties, all of whom were living in California. In self-defense, no doubt.

The interrogations were delayed by Goldrich, who went off to tell the detectives that he wanted to be present during all the questioning of Allied employees. The problem was referred to Inspector Stanton downstairs, who agreed to it, leaving only one more brief delay while a folding chair was found for Goldrich to sit in. After which Goldrich returned to us, because the girl students were to be talked to first.

It all went quickly enough, once it got started. The girls took about three minutes each to give their statements, and departed giggling and bouncing down the stairs; I wondered if they’d been aware that they’d waited in the room where the body had been found.

Grazko was next, followed by Muller and then the other two day men; all fast and efficient. Essentially, Inspector Stanton was mapping the territory this time through, not hoping for any great revelations this early in the game. A little later he would be coming back to individuals who interested him, then with more specific goals in mind for the interrogation.

Daniels and O’Keefe went next, and now it was down to Edwards and me. We sat together on the bench, and Edwards whined on about his family. I’d turned him off some time before, reducing my responses to an occasional grunt or nod of the head.

Inspector Stanton had stopped by a couple of times during the statement-taking, just walking through this room, spending a minute or so inside, and then coming back through and out again. While O’Keefe was still in there, Stanton appeared once more and went in.

I was wondering if they were saving me for last, and if so, why. I supposed Hargerson wanted to say a few things to me unrelated to the problem of stolen cartoons. Under the circumstances, I didn’t know if Goldrich’s presence would be an asset or a liability.

But they took me ahead of Edwards, after all. The room they were using was “Comic Strips Between the World Wars”; this is where I’d been when I’d first heard Linda knocking at the main door. It was a long narrow room, almost a hallway, and they had set up a folding table and several chairs at the end to the left. Grinella and Hargerson were behind the table, the male stenographer to one side, and Goldrich a bit apart and sideways so as to face the rest of the group. Inspector Stanton was leaning his back against the wall behind the detectives, watching with an abstracted manner, his arms folded over his chest.

It was a simple run-through. They asked questions and I supplied answers: how long I’d worked here, what my hours were, what I knew of museum routine, who I had seen here and when. Neither John Doe nor the woman visitor was mentioned, nor was my own past until the very end, when Inspector Stanton suddenly said to the stenographer, “No need to copy this.”

“Yes, sir.” He left pad and pen on the table, and leaned back in his chair.

Stanton said to me, “You were on the force once yourself, Tobin.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I looked into your history.”

I couldn’t help glancing at Hargerson, knowing he was the one who would have brought my history to Inspector Stanton’s attention. But Hargerson was busy scanning some notes he’d made, and so was Grinella.

“Based on your history,” Stanton said, “I wouldn’t have much use for you. In fact, I was a bit surprised to see you’d been given a private investigator’s ticket. So I looked into it a little more, and it turns out you still have some friends on the force.”

Did he consider that good or bad? It could go either way, and I couldn’t tell which it was from his expression. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“They think well of you,” he said. “Further, they tell me you’ve been helpful once or twice in the last few years.”

“A little,” I said.

He gave a small smile. “On murder cases,” he said. “Do you feel helpful on this one?”

The smile had told me he was on my side. I returned it, and said, “I’m afraid not, sir. Not this time.”

Hargerson was now frowning at me. The tones of voice had communicated themselves to him, and he wasn’t happy.

Stanton said, “Well, do keep your eyes open.”

“I will,” I said.

He nodded, dismissing me. “Thanks for your cooperation.”

“Thank you, sir.” I didn’t look at Hargerson again, but got up and left the room. Edwards took my place, and I headed downstairs. I was free now until nine tonight, so I might as well go straight home.

Heading for the front door, my eye was caught by another butt-can standing against the wall, and I suddenly realized I’d already had my third run-in with Maverick cigarettes. A crumpled pack in a wastebasket. The design of the pack had been familiar, but the lettering a little off, so that I hadn’t really noticed it, but still it had stuck in my mind. In a wastebasket in the workroom downstairs, next to a carton where old rags were kept.

My hand was on the doorknob, but I didn’t go out. I could hear faint murmurings, interrogations still going on in various parts of the building. I pictured the workroom again, my mind full of that workroom now, with the small detail of the cigarette package in the wastebasket. What were the other details of the room?

I turned to go back upstairs, and halfway up I met Inspector Stanton coming down. He looked at me with mild surprise, saying, “Forget something?”

“I remembered something,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”

He stopped. “Of course.”

We stood across from one another on the stairs, and I said, “The other night, I was thinking about the body I found, and the trouble somebody went to in carrying it up these stairs. Why not just open the door and throw it in? Then I thought it might have been done by somebody with a key just to one door, and they wanted to leave a question as to which route was used coming in.”

He looked thoughtful. “That’s possible,” he said.

“But now I think he was murdered here,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m not even sure.” The leap from cigarette packages would be very hard to explain. “I just think he was. He was killed with picture-hanging wire. I think it was done down in the workroom in the basement. There’s a concrete floor, so it could be cleaned up. There’s a sink in there, and a toilet behind a partition. There’s work clothes hanging on hooks, and I think John Doe’s clothes are with them. And his underwear in a rag carton down there. I don’t know what he did with the shoes.”

Stanton rubbed a knuckle thoughtfully along his jaw. “You’re saying the murderer killed him in the basement, then stripped him, cleaned him up, washed the clothes, put them with work clothing, carried up the naked body, and put it on the second floor so we’d think it had been brought in from outside.”

“Yes.”

“Why clean him up?”

“He can’t carry him dirty. Not and be sure he isn’t leaving some kind of trail. And there’d be smells. Down in the workroom he could mask the odors by spreading some of those chemicals around after he’d finished washing up.”

“The question is, would the clothes still be there.” Then he answered his own question, saying, “Yes, they probably are. The museum hasn’t been back to normal since the killing. First the inventory, and now the theft investigation.”

“One thing more,” I said. “The other night I saw an empty pack of Canadian cigarettes in the wastebasket down there. That may be why he’s a John Doe, because he’s Canadian.”

Stanton smiled at me. “There, you see,” he said. “You can be helpful, if you try.”

7

THE SHOES WERE INSIDE the trousers. The killer had tied the laces together and hung the shoes inside, one down each trouser leg with the laces across the crotch. Then he’d put the trousers on a hook in the workroom, along with the dead man’s shirt and zippered jacket. The socks were stuffed inside the shoes, and the underwear had been ripped into pieces and jumbled into the rag carton. All the pockets of trousers and shirt and jacket were empty.

I learned all this twelve hours after my talk with Inspector Stanton. In the intervening time, I took the subway home, worked a bit on my wall, napped, ate two meals, talked with Kate, listened to Bill describe a rock band he and some friends were starting in which he was to be the drummer, and returned to the museum to report to work at the usual hour of nine o’clock.

Muller was there, as always, plus a few students continuing the inventory. They all had the look of Crane people, but Crane himself wasn’t present; another young man was in charge, and in a strange way he combined elements of both Crane and Ramsey in his makeup. He was dressed in the Crane manner and used similar slang in his speech, but his style was pedantic and fussy and impatient, very much like Ramsey. He came over to the door where Muller and I were chatting, a minute or two after my arrival, and said without preamble to Muller, “We’ll be staying awhile. No point waiting.”

“Good enough,” Muller said, and walked on down toward the office to get his lunchbox.

The young man looked at me. “You’re Mr. Tobin, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

He extended a hand, but briskly, as though he knew it was the expected gesture and wanted to get it over with. “I’m Dan Tynebourne,” he said.

I took the hand, and we shook very briefly. “How do you do? Are you with the university?”

“City,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“City College. I have an instructorship there. Excuse me.”

“Of course,” I said, but I was talking to his back.

Muller was approaching. I grinned at him, shaking my head, and said, “Charming, Dan Tynebourne.”

“That’s just his way,” Muller said. He himself had been a guard here for three years, and knew everybody. “He’s a good boy, really.”

“I didn’t know the museum had a tie-in with City College, too.”

“They don’t, except him. He went to NYU, he’s one of Crane’s boys.”

“He had the look.”

He chuckled. “You can sure tell them apart, can’t you?”

I said, “If he went to NYU, and he’s still connected with Crane, why isn’t he with the university any more?”

“Seems they have a rule about hiring their own graduates. Won’t do it, don’t want to be too … what you call it.”

“Inbred,” I suggested. “They want cross-pollination from other schools, is that it?”

“Right. But he and Crane are still thick as thieves, and one of these days Dan will switch over and get back to NYU. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“So long,” I said. I locked the door behind him and went off to find Dan Tynebourne. He was in the first-floor room called “The Civil War,” sitting on a bench with an actual clipboard in his lap. I remembered my feeling that Ernest Ramsey kept a symbolic clipboard in his mind, checking off on it each movement and detail of his day, and I was reconfirmed in my impression of Tynebourne as an amalgam of the two older men.

The oldest displays in the museum were on the first floor, and these were the ones which had been most heavily pilfered. “Advertising in the Fifties” upstairs hadn’t been touched at all, since the material was too recent and still too available for any one item to be very valuable, but some of the first-floor rooms, like this one devoted to graphics connected with the Civil War and done at the time of that war, now assayed as high as ninety percent forgery.

Tynebourne was writing something on the top sheet of his clipboard, and didn’t look up when I entered the room. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge my presence at all until I came to a stop directly in front of him; then he glanced up, impatiently and distractedly. He had a long thin face, very long straight brown hair, but no beard, and he looked as though he never went outdoors in daylight. One could visualize him sleeping on a cot amid the book-stacks in the rear of some rarely used library. He said, “You wanted something?”

“I’ve locked the front door,” I said, “and I’ll be in the office. Let me know when you’re all leaving, all right?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, and gave his attention right back to the clipboard.

Well, that was a short conversation. I went away to the office, sat down, switched on the radio, and waited for the students to finish up before making my first rounds.

When Tynebourne came into the office about five minutes later, I thought he was simply going to tell me the students were leaving now, but that wasn’t it at all. “Listen,” he said. “I was rude before.”

It’s tough to find an answer to a statement like that, especially when it’s true. “You weren’t bad,” I said. “I didn’t mind.”

“I get into head trips,” he said. “I just don’t pay attention around me. I wanted you to know that’s what it was. I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything like that.”

I understood then that he didn’t think of himself as apologizing—and he wasn’t—but simply as explaining. He had, at a surprisingly early age, come to terms with his own personality and decided to live with it rather than try to change it. He was willing to explain his eccentricities to people who might have been affected by them, but not to apologize for them.

Well, that was all right with me. I said, “I didn’t feel insulted. I just thought you were busy.”

“I was. The thefts, you know.”

“I know.”

“What do you think about them?”

An odd question; I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I said, “Think about them? In what way?”

“Well, what’s your attitude? Do you hate the people who did it, or do you feel sorry for them, or do you think they’re mental cases, or what?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea,” I said. “I don’t hate them, there’s no reason to hate people who steal old drawings, I just think they go through a lot of work and a pretty big risk for not much return.”

He hadn’t quite come into the room; now he leaned against the doorjamb, folded his arms, and looked at me with a deep frown. “Not much return? How do you figure that?”

I said, “Well, say they take a print from that room you were in before, from the Civil War. Say it’s worth a hundred dollars. If they’re very lucky, they may be able to fence it for a third of that. Say thirty dollars. For thirty dollars they do maybe five or six hours of very delicate complicated work, and they risk being caught and charged with grand larceny, which means twenty years in prison. For thirty dollars. It just doesn’t seem worth it.”

“Well, I guess they must have a reason,” he said.

“I suppose so. Maybe the police will learn it when they catch up with them.”

“You think they will?”

“Catch them?” I nodded. “I’m pretty sure they will, yes.”

“Why?” He asked the question briskly, not as though challenging my statement but as though interested to hear expert opinions on subjects away from his own specialty. That was a way in which he was like neither Ramsey nor Crane.

“Because it’s got mixed up with a murder investigation,” I said. “And because there’s enough important people connected with this museum who can put pressure on the Police Department to come up with the guilty parties. And because they’ve really been very careless. They were lucky up till now, incredibly lucky—doing the forgeries right here in this building, using the museum’s own equipment. They could get away with it so long as they weren’t noticed; but now that there’s a concentrated search on for them, it shouldn’t take long to turn them up.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said, with sudden and surprising savagery. “Do you realize what people like that would do to the originals?”

I almost laughed aloud; what an oddball yet consistent attitude for him to take. I said, “I imagine they treat the originals very carefully, since they want to get top dollar when they sell them.”

“I wish we’d never known the truth,” he said. “We were all just as happy, looking at the forgeries. Now we look at the same thing that made us happy last week, and this week it’s a bummer.” He didn’t use slang as frequently as Crane, yet with Tynebourne the slang was more noticeable somehow; possibly because the few slang words he did use were jammed into his sentences any which way, whether they fit or not.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “It does seem as though it shouldn’t really matter what piece of paper a drawing is on. It’s the drawing itself that counts, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes I think so,” he said. “Sometimes I think you don’t get the projection, get the aura, unless it’s the real thing. You might think you do, if you don’t know it’s a forgery, but in reality you don’t.”

I couldn’t follow that reasoning, so I said, “I suppose it depends on the person.”

“Do you suppose maybe they’re humanitarians?”

The suddenness of the shift lost me completely. I said, “Humanitarians? Who?”

“The thieves.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow you. How could they be humanitarians?”

“Well, you know,” he said, “there’s all these good causes around that need money. And here’s all this money tied up in this place here, it’s this really useless place when you stop to think about it, and the money could maybe be used someplace else to do some good. You know?”

“It’s an unlikely motivation for theft,” I said.

“Well, but it’s happened. Like in Ireland, the IRA robbing banks to get money to support the rebellion.”

I smiled, nodding, and said, “Yes, you’re right. I suppose it is possible.”

“But you don’t like it.”

“Well, there are so many places where more money could be gotten with less effort.”

He said, “Then why do it here anyway? Whatever their reason?”

This took us full circle, back to his original question. I gave it approximately the same answer: “I really can’t say. When the police catch them, I’m sure that’s one of the questions they’ll ask. Maybe they’ll find out.”

“In the meantime,” he said, shifting gears again, “they made us one hell of a lot of work.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You hear about the controversy?”

“I don’t think I have.”

“About whether to open up or not, and whether to show the forgeries or not.”

“Ah,” I said. “Yes, I can see where that could be a problem.”

“If they take all the forgeries down,” he said, “all you’re going to have is all these blank walls. A real down for anybody to come in here.”

“Of course.”

“But if they leave them up, they’ll have to tag them somehow. Facsimiles, call them, or something like that. And then you’ll have rooms full of tags, and it could be embarrassing to see how much stuff really isn’t here any more. I mean, they ripped off a hell of a lot of stuff.”

“So I understand.”

“I say leave it closed,” Tynebourne said. “The public never cared about this place anyway. Leave it closed, and just let legitimate scholars in.”

I could see that as being Tynebourne’s proposal in any case, forgeries or no forgeries. He was a total ivory-tower man, and didn’t much like the ivory tower being available to the common herd.

A very attractive girl appeared then, just behind Tynebourne, saying, “We’re all set, Dan.”

He looked at her in surprise, as though he’d never seen her before, and then said, “Fine. Be right with you.”

I got to my feet. The radio had been playing soft music under our conversation, but now I switched it off, because I would be going to do my rounds as soon as I locked up behind Tynebourne and his assistants.

The girl had been somewhat optimistic in her report; it was a few more minutes before they were all actually at the front door and ready to leave. Tynebourne himself was the last to get there, having wandered off to get his raincoat and clipboard. They all trailed away into the night at last, and I locked up after them, did my usual first tour, and found everything locked and quiet. I went down to the workroom, and saw no visible changes; though perhaps there was less clothing hanging from the hooks than before.

There was, as I found out an hour and a half later. It was just ten past eleven when Grinella came knocking at the door. I opened the panel, saw him standing out there, and let him in. While I was relocking the door, he said, “Inspector Stanton asked me to come by sometime tonight and say thank you.”

“It worked out, what I told him?”

“One hundred percent,” he said. He then told me about finding the clothing, and said, “The most interesting item is the shoes. They’re an American brand, but they’re old and beat-up, and they were reheeled in Canada. We checked with the company that made the shoes, and they discontinued that model four years ago.”

“So he’d been living in Canada for at least four years,” I said. “But before that he’d lived somewhere in the United States.”

“Looks that way,” Grinella said. He seemed in a good mood, and in no hurry to be on his way. “The rest of his clothing was Canadian,” he said, “except the jacket. That’s American, but it’s also old. Looks like the kind of thing a guy might pick up in college and then keep around.”

“They put his age at around twenty-five, don’t they?”

“Right. You know what we figure?”

“I think I do,” I said. And then, because we were both just standing there by the door, I said, “Do you want to come to the office and sit down?”

“Why not?”

The two of us walked down the hall behind my flashlight beam. I said, “Where’s your partner?”

“Out in the car.” There was something comic in the inflection of his voice, as though he thought something were funny. I looked at him, but the light was too uncertain to read his face, and when we walked into the office, where the lights were already switched on, his expression was completely normal and bland.

We both sat down, and I said, “You figure him for a draft evader.”

“Right. He cleared out of this country before he ever got processed for anything, and that’s why we don’t have his prints on file.”

“He was taking a chance, coming back.”

“Bigger than he thought, the way it worked out.” Grinella smiled and shook his head. “He should have stayed where he was safe.”

“You think you’ll identify him now?”

“There’s hope. The draft resisters are mostly up around Toronto. We wired the Toronto police the particulars, and now we’ll see if one of the Americans there turns up missing.”

“My impression is,” I said, “that that’s pretty much of a shifting population.”

“Well, they have organizations. They help each other find jobs, and like that. It isn’t really wonderful, but there’s at least some record-keeping. We have a chance.”

Another thought occurred to me. I said, “What’s the report on time of death?”

He grinned. “I thought you’d ask that. No earlier than eight forty-five, no later than ten P.M.”

The museum had closed, and I had come on duty, at nine. Killer and victim had surely gone downstairs together just before closing time. At nine everybody had left, I had locked the door, switched off the remaining extra lights, started my first round. And while I’d been walking, one man in the basement workroom had twisted a length of wire around the other man’s neck, and had held him down, flopping like a fish, until he had first soiled himself and then died. Had the murderer known the bodily embarrassment his victim would leave with him? Or had he expected the death to be neat and tidy, like in the movies? Whether he’d anticipated the complication or not, he’d reacted quickly enough, stripping off the dead man’s clothes, cleaning them, cleaning the body, perhaps also having to wash a bit of concrete floor. And then he had carried the body upstairs—thrown across his shoulder, more than likely—and had left it in the middle of a bare room, to be found by me.

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.

8

DINK 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.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” he said, but he looked troubled now, and he seemed to be frowning and squinting as though to avoid looking at that doorway to my right. “But why put the pressure on me?” he asked me. “You want to help the cops, go ahead. But why lean on me?”

“If I have to, Dink,” I said, “I’ll go to Grinella’s partner and I’ll tell him the whole truth. I’ll tell him what I’ve been covering up in a murder investigation he’s working on, and why I’ve been covering, and what I did that made Carver and Knox and Mort and Willie Vigevano sore at me. Grinella’s partner is a very tough guy. His name is Hargerson. You know him?”

He shook his head.

“He reminds me a lot of Krauss,” I said, talking about a brutal bastard I’d known in the old days. “George Krauss, remember him?”

Dink nodded, with great reluctance.

“Hargerson is the same kind,” I said. “If I have to tell him the whole truth, he’ll make things as rough for me as he possibly can. Maybe have my private operator’s ticket taken away, so I’ll lose my job. But that isn’t a tenth of what he’ll do to you.”

Dink was very nervous. “Tobin,” he said. “Listen, now. All I want to do is keep my nose clean.”

“We all feel the same way,” I said. “Dink, I swear and vow you don’t want peace and quiet one bit more than I do. But we don’t have peace and quiet, Dink, we have a good guy blinded, and you and I both helped to do it to him. Now, goddammit, Dink, we’re going to make it up. We’re at least going to see to it that the guy pays for it.”

“Without going to the other cop? How the hell you gonna do it?”

“Leave that up to me,” I said. “You just get me the name. Which one of them threw the acid. Also which one of them drove the car. And if you could get me the make and license number of the car, it would be a big help.”

He gave a scared laugh, and said, “You don’t want much.”

“I want him serving indefinite time upstate,” I said.

He gave another quick glance at the doorway, and this time I could see guilt and a plea for help mixed in his expression. When he looked back at me, his brow was furrowed and he said, “All right, up to a point. Let’s say I know what you’re talking about up to a point. But how does it get from you and me to Fred and those guys?”

“Come on, Dink, you know how,” I said. “All of a sudden some trouble came on those four, some heat they couldn’t understand. Maybe somebody even told them to stay the hell away from you. So what they did, they came to you and they wanted to know what you thought you were doing. And you told them you didn’t know a thing about it, which was the truth. But they didn’t buy it, and they scared you.”

“I scare easy,” Dink said. “But I don’t remember any of this stuff.”

“Linda does,” I said, and had less trouble with the name than I’d anticipated. I’d been avoiding it for some time. “She remembers it,” I said, “because when the guys let you go you came and talked to her, because you figured she had to be the one somehow. She was the one who’d made the heat for those guys, and when you asked her about it she told you. And you went and told Fred Carver and the others. And Grinella got blinded.”

Dink was trying again not to look at the doorway. “Now, look,” he said. “You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

“Check it out with Linda,” I said. “She’ll remember. Won’t she, Dink?”

He sat there in his robe and pajamas and slippers, like some convalescent, and stared unhappily at my knees. He twisted his mouth around, but he didn’t say anything.

I said, “Won’t she remember, Dink?”

He still didn’t say anything. His mouth kept moving, and he gave his head a quick shake—but as though rejecting a thought of his own, not a statement of mine.

“Dink?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

“I hope you can,” I said. “Because if you can’t, I’ll have to go to Hargerson. There’s no other way.”

He sighed, and slumped back even more inside the robe, and opened his eyes to look at me. I’d never seen him look so wounded or so adult or so touching. “Man,” he said quietly, “you sure bring a lot of trouble into my life.”

There was nothing I could say to that. It was the truth, and the only part of it I didn’t regret was the original burglary arrest, since he had after all been actually guilty. But maybe I regretted that, too; it had started the rest. I’d met Linda as a result of that arrest, and everything else had followed from it. In one way of looking at things, Dink’s ineptness at burglary seven years ago had caused Grinella’s blinding last night.

Now he was over there rubbing his face with his hands, and for just an instant he had the same posture of hands against face as Grinella last night on the floor. I said, quickly, “That’s all I wanted to say, Dink.” I pushed myself to my feet, suddenly feeling very drained, very tired.

He dropped his hands from his face and looked up at me with a weariness to match my own. “It was enough,” he said. “You said enough.”

I didn’t look toward the doorway. I went the other way instead, toward the hall door, and let myself out without saying another word. I didn’t look back before closing the door; I was afraid I would see Linda crossing the room to comfort him.

9

I HAD BEEN FEELING such urgency when I’d gotten off duty at the museum that I’d taken a cab across town to Dink’s apartment off West End Avenue in the eighties, but coming out I no longer felt any urgency at all, just great exhaustion. I had to go home now, and sleep, and hope Dink would be able to call by this evening at eight o’clock. If he could possibly get the answers I wanted, he’d pass them on to me, I was sure of that; particularly with Linda prodding him, which she would do. But if I didn’t hear from him, I’d have to report it.

The nearest subway was over at Broadway and 86th. I walked to it, blinking in morning sunlight directly in my eyes, took a downtown train, and by a complicated series of changes, eventually wound up on the train that would take me out to my own neighborhood in Queens. I dozed uneasily on the trip out, uncomfortable in my uniform, and my eyes were burning when I walked from my stop toward the house.

A block from home the black Ford pulled in to the curb just ahead of me, and I recognized it at once and knew what it meant. All I could think was, I’m too tired to cope with this. I kept walking, and when I was even with the car Hargerson got out of it and said, “Tobin. Come here.”

I turned to him, and couldn’t keep from squinting in the sunlight. “What is it now?”

“Get in the car,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” Toughness was second nature to him, but there was an element from our past encounters that was missing this time; he wasn’t going out of his way to be offensive. Instead, he was merely being hard and direct.

I thought he might be even more dangerous this way than the other. Still, there wasn’t much choice; I had to deal with him whether I wanted to or not. I said, “I’m very tired, Hargerson. I’ve been up all night.”

“Me, too. Get in.”

I walked around the car and got in, my knees hampered slightly by the radio. But it was an easily remembered adjustment to the specifics of a Detective Division car; I shifted into the optimum position almost without thinking about it. While Hargerson put the car in gear and drove away from the curb, I took off my uniform cap and closed my eyes against the sunlight reflecting from the hood. I was feeling physically worse by the second: tired, stomach uneasy, head aching, eyes burning, nerves uncertain.

I recognized that I was at that state of exhaustion where almost any concession will be made for the sake of being left alone. In my earlier days on the force, back when a confession was worth bringing into court, it had been an ordinary technique to try to reduce a suspect to this condition, when he would be willing to trade a detailed confession for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I had to stay aware of that, had to guard against it. Already it was seeming as though the simple truth would be the best way to handle things, and I had to remind myself again that in fact it was the worst way, it was the last resort.

Earlier, during my final few hours on duty last night, I had tried to work out a simple truth that would cover the necessary territory without spreading, and it just wasn’t possible. I had considered telling the whole story while leaving out only the one fact that my meeting with Linda had taken place in the museum, and I had come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work. They would want to know—Hargerson, for instance, would want to know—who I’d talked to on the force about pressuring Fred Carver and the others, and when I’d talked to him. And the answer would be Marty Kengelberg, on the same night I’d found the body. It wouldn’t take much for Hargerson or anybody else to realize the unknown woman seen leaving the museum that night had to have been Linda Campbell.

And at that point my own original lie would be exposed, and Linda would be driven directly into the middle of the murder-and-forgery case. She would be a witness, having been in the building the night of the murder. More than that, she would be a public spectacle. The killing had originally gotten a pretty splashy play in the newspapers and on television because of the strangeness of its details—Newsweek had even done a small piece on it, with a photo of the room where I’d found the body—but it had pretty much faded from the media when nothing further happened. The discovery of the thefts had made the newspapers, but not television. Only the Mystery Woman, as the papers inevitably called her, kept the thing newsworthy at all. Once the Mystery Woman was found, and the rest of the story came out, the sexual implications would drive the case right back into prominence; and surely they would rehash all the old stuff about Linda and me, open those old wounds all over again.

Three years ago, when Jock’s death and my removal from the force had been a brief but noisy public scandal, I had seen the phrase LOVE NEST more than once in headlines referring to Linda and me. Those headlines and those stories would still be on file in the newspaper morgues; a fast rewrite man could make titillating current reading out of them today, combining them with the understood suggestion—it would never quite be said out loud—that Linda and I were apparently still at it, despite everything that had happened the first time, despite even her husband now being out of jail. And here we’d be, sensationalized again, combined once more with sudden death; Jock Sheehan the first time, and now the John Doe. TRAGEDY STALKS EX-COP AND FORMER MISTRESS. Or would they bother to dilute their story with the word “former”?

I didn’t want to go through all that again if I didn’t have to. No, and I didn’t want Linda run through it again, either. Or Kate, for that matter; especially Kate. I’d do it if it was the only way to get the guy who’d blinded Grinella, because I accepted the precedence of Grinella’s claim to redress over my own claim to peace and quiet. But I would try it the other way first; I would try it the other way as long as I could.

Which meant withstanding Hargerson. He had obviously also come to the realization that the acid had been meant for me, and when I hadn’t volunteered anything, he’d decided to meet me for a private talk. So he’d waited near my home, and now he had me.

But at first he didn’t do anything about it. We drove for several blocks together in silence, me keeping my eyes closed most of the time, opening them on occasion to see where we were. Inside, I was trying to build my strength and my resolve.

It turned out we were heading for a construction site about a mile from my house. In a four-square-block area all of the perfectly sound middle-class private homes were being torn down. There was no indication yet which particular manifestation of Ant City would replace them. The crews were still in the process of ripping down the comfortable walls and gouging yellow holes in the earth. I tended to avoid this area when I could, because it made me think about their doing the same to my own home; I liked to think my wall would slow them down, though I knew it wouldn’t stop them.

The whole area was enclosed by wire fencing, and Hargerson parked near one of the gates, where yellow-helmeted workmen were arriving to start the day. He switched off the engine and looked at me and said, “Who threw it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me for a few seconds, his heavy head thrust forward toward me, his expression watchful and brooding. He was waiting for me to say something else, and when I didn’t, he shrugged and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

We got out of the car. He used his badge to get us through the gate, and we walked down a long board ramp and across the hollowed-out portion. All around us yellow machinery was starting up, roaring, beginning to move this way and that on metal treads. The air was dry with dust and oil.

Another ramp on the opposite side of the excavation led up to where houses were still in the process of being torn down. Hargerson stopped at the foot of it and looked at me. He had to shout because of the machinery behind us: “Who threw it?”

“I truly don’t know.”

He shrugged again, and we started up the ramp.

Hargerson had a technique I understood and admired. Most interrogators in his position would have argued details with me, proved to me that I had to have been the target of the acid-thrower, and so on. Hargerson had no small talk of that type; he took the provable things for granted, he let the other person do the dialogue himself inside his head, and all he asked was the last question. It was an extremely effective technique, but only if done with total conviction; not many men can resist the temptation to argue with the suspect. Hargerson was one of them.

Silence can create more pressure than words, if it’s done right. Hargerson knew how to do it right; even knowing what he was doing, I felt it working on me, felt the nervousness building.

We went up the ramp, and down the shattered remnant of a street. A half-dozen houses were in the process of being demolished, and another three or four at the far end were waiting their turn. The growling of machinery in the pit was now the background noise, while the foreground was full of hammering and crashing and the occasional shriek of nails being wrenched out of wood. Bulldozers and other heavy equipment had passed through here, making rubble of the pavement, through which it was somewhat awkward to walk.

The last house on the left was completely intact. Small, two-story, one-family, with a front porch and fairly new shingle siding. There was a television antenna on the roof. Hargerson led the way up the stoop of this house, and across the porch, and through the half-open doorway.

The living room was empty, and had the too-small look of all empty rooms. An enamel pot was on the floor in one corner, and on one wall was a framed photograph of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reading comic strips over the radio; that had been during a newspaper strike in his administration.

I had just enough time to notice these things, when Hargerson turned and hit me very hard in the stomach, just below the belt. I’d been bracing myself for some sort of physical threat, but it had come so abruptly that it caught me unawares. It knocked the breath out of me, and I went staggering back, trying desperately to keep my feet, terrified of what he would do to me once I hit the floor.

But I did hit the floor, and he did nothing. He stood in the middle of the room, his hands at his sides, and watched me. I had landed painfully on my back and left side, and I rolled over slowly, trying to breathe. The pain was worse in my throat, trying to force the air in, than in my stomach where he’d hit me. The first inhalation was very noisy, and agony to my throat; after that, they grew progressively easier.

He waited till I was breathing almost normally, still sitting on the floor, holding one hand to my throat. Then he took a step closer and said, “Who threw it, Tobin?”

I shook my head.

This time I knew what would happen. He wouldn’t aim for my head, because he wouldn’t want to mark me visibly if he could avoid it. His shoe came toward my ribs, on the left side, and instead of trying to duck away from it I lunged toward it, trying to engulf his foot with my body, throw him off-balance with my weight, and topple him to the floor. But it didn’t work; he kept his balance, and swung a hard rabbit punch to the back of my neck that flattened me face down on the dusty boards, leaving me stunned and dizzy and unable to move, while he stepped around and kicked me twice in the side.

In an ordinary fight, I might have stood a chance with Hargerson. He had a year or two on me, he was somewhat stronger and probably in a bit better shape, but we weren’t totally mismatched, and I think I could have given him some trouble along the way. But not like this; he’d moved first, without warning, and I never had a chance after that to catch up.

We spent a long time in there, and he never once let me get all the way to my feet. He used fists and knees and shoes, and from time to time paused to let me catch my breath or my wits, and each time he asked me the same question. I held him off with determination for a while, and then with anger; for a time I was screaming through my raw throat that I would kill him, that I would follow him, I would find my chance, I would kill him dead. But he just kept at his methodical work, and steadily beat anger too out of me, and at the last I was resisting with nothing at all. I don’t know why I didn’t finally tell him the truth; it just seemed as though this thing would go on until it was time for it to stop, as though there was nothing I could do to cut it short, so why even try. I guess what I was resisting with at the end was despair.

And, finally, with unconsciousness. I was dazed and half-conscious most of the way through it in any case, and one time it simply became more, and I was gone.

For three hours. I came up out of it very slowly, driven up mostly by pain, and when I was awake enough to remember what had happened, I looked at my watch and it was nearly twelve o’clock. I raised myself to a sitting position, and Hargerson had left. Or would he be coming back? Was he simply taking a break somewhere?

From the neck down, I didn’t seem to have one muscle that wasn’t aching. My arms trembled when I leaned on them to stand, and when at last I did get to my feet, I found I was in a half-crouched position, with my arms wrapped around my ribs. I walked like a man who’s been bedridden for six months, and every breath I took burned in my throat and ached in my chest.

Hargerson was nowhere around. I had left my uniform cap back there on the floor, but there was no way for me to bend over and pick it up. I hobbled out onto the porch, where the thin bright October sun shone straight down, and looking to my left, the opposite direction from the pit we’d crossed, I saw another gate in the fence, standing open.

The worst part was getting down the stoop; I could walk fairly well on level ground. I made my way across the rubble and through the gate, and walked a block to a laundromat with a telephone. I called Kate to come get me, which she did about fifteen minutes later. Three or four women in the laundromat kept looking at me, sitting in a chair by the front window, breathing through my open mouth. I knew my uniform was filthy, and my face was probably streaked with dirt and sweat. My movements were stiff, and I couldn’t seem to breathe normally; no wonder they kept frowning toward me from where they sat together amid the washers.

I hadn’t told Kate anything on the phone. When she saw me she started asking questions, touching me in her concern, and I said, “Later. I can’t talk yet.”

She brought me home, and ran a hot bath for me, and lying in it I told her what had happened. She wanted to do something about Hargerson, she got outraged and protective, she wanted to call Marty Kengelberg or Inspector Stanton, but I said, “Kate, I can’t prove it, and he’ll deny it. And they’ll just start asking me the same questions themselves.”

“You just have to let him get away with it?”

“I don’t have any choice.”

“But he beat you!”

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”

She looked at me. “Is that really any consolation?”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “But there’s nothing to be done, so why even think about it?”

“You have to pay him back,” she said. Kate is usually so stolid a woman; I’d never seen her so intense.

I shook my head. Remembering my own screamed threats while Hargerson was beating me, I almost smiled. I said, “Some debts just don’t get paid, Kate. That’s one of them.”

“What if he does it again?”

“I’ll keep out of his way from now on.”

“Will you be able to?”

I closed my eyes. The water was so warm. “God knows,” I said.

10

THE EVENING WAS FULL of phone calls. I got out of bed at seven, still stiff and aching but at least capable of moving around, and Dink called at seven twenty-five, while I was finishing a meal midway between breakfast and dinner. He said, “You want the names over the phone?”

“Definitely.”

“Vigevano threw it,” he said.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“He’s bragging about it,” Dink said. “He’s the one. And Mort drove the car.”

“That’s Mort Livingston?”

“Yeah.”

“Fred Carver wasn’t there at all,” I said.

“Nowhere near.”

I said, “But he ordered it.”

“Oh, sure. He does all the ordering, everything is up to him.”

“What about the car? You get the model and license plate?”

“No, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They stole it special for the job, and then ditched it.”

I said, “Give me an address for Vigevano.”

He was hesitant, very reluctant. “That’s pushing me kind of far,” he said.

It seemed a strange place to draw the line, and I had little sympathy for it. I said, “Give it to me, Dink.”

“Look,” he said. “He lives with his mother. Marie. They got a phone.”

“Which borough?”

“Manhattan.”

“All right.”

I was about to hang up, but he said, “Listen.”

“What?”

“They didn’t give up, you know.”

“I didn’t think they had.”

“Willie’s glad he got a cop instead,” Dink said. “But he still wants you.”

“I know.”

“I just thought I’d tell you.”

It was a friendly act. It was from such an unexpected source, that’s the only reason I wasn’t giving it a proper reaction. I forced myself, saying, “I appreciate it, Dink. Thanks.”

“Thought you’d like to know,” he said.

“I’m glad you told me.”

We both said so long, and I broke the connection and then called Allied. Grazko wasn’t there, but the night man was on: Dun-worthy. I said, “I had a kind of accident today, I’m sort of banged up. Can you replace me tonight?”

“This is damn short notice.” Dunworthy was an irritable man who loved paperwork, hated people, and took all breaks in routine as a personal insult.

“I was hoping I could go in,” I said, “but I just don’t think I can do it.”

“Well, what happened?”

“I don’t think I ought to talk about it over the phone.”

At least he had that much sense; he didn’t argue the point. “We’ll fill in,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, and hung up, and went upstairs to dress. I expected Hargerson would be hanging around me, so when I left the house I would first have to find him, and then lose him. I didn’t want him around while I was dealing with Willie Vigevano.

I was sorry to be in such bad physical shape at the moment. That, and not having a gun, were my two main problems after Hargerson.

I had dressed and was on my way downstairs when the phone rang again. Kate took it on the hall phone, and said to me as I reached the foot of the stairs, “It’s for you. A girl.”

“A girl?” I took the phone and said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Tobin?” The girl sounded both young and frail; one of those hesitant about-to-faint voices.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Mitchell Tobin? The man who was the guard who found the body at the museum?”

“That’s right. Who is this?”

“I’m—somebody who might, uh, might know who, who it was. Who the body is.”

“You should go to the police,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t want to do anything if it isn’t George,” she said. “I don’t want to—I wouldn’t want to make any trouble for anybody.”

“Miss, I’m just not the person for you to talk to.”

“Well, if you could answer one question,” she said, “it could help me. It could help me know if it was him or not.”

“What question?”

“Well—On his right leg, on the back, above the knee, was there a kind of birthmark? It was sort of—orange, and kind of small, and shaped like a, like a kind of a rectangle. Only small. Was there anything like that?”

I tried to remember the body, but I honestly couldn’t recall whether the right leg had had a birthmark or not. I said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t say yes or no. It was a shock, seeing him, and I guess I just didn’t look that closely.”

“Oh, dear. Don’t you remember anything about him?”

“Miss, really, the police aren’t that terrible. Why not get in touch with them? They could show you the body, or at least photographs of it, and you could see for yourself if—”

“Oh, no, no, no more dead bodies! No, I couldn’t stand any more dead bodies!”

That was a weird thing to say. Was this merely a crank, nothing more? But for years and years on the force a part of my job had been answering the phone, and after a while you begin to develop a sense of which callers are cranks, which ones are straight. This girl sounded as though she were wilting even as we spoke, but I still didn’t think she was a crank. I said, “Well, if you don’t want to go to the police, what about coming to see me?” Kate, I thought, would be a calming influence on the girl, if I could get her to come out here. “We could talk,” I said. “I could tell you what I remember, and you could try to prod my memory.”

“I don’t know …”

“Well, it’s up to you,” I said. “You say you don’t want to go to the police, so I thought this would be an alternative.”

“Yes, I suppose, I suppose …”

Today was Wednesday. John Doe had been killed last Thursday, and had made the papers and television on Friday. If it had taken this girl five days to make her move, and if it was then a move so indirect as to call the person who’d found the body and ask about birthmarks, her fragility quotient had to be incredibly high, and I would have to treat her with a great deal of care. I said, “We can do this any way you want. You pick the time and place, and that’s where we’ll meet.”

“Well …”

“Miss, really,” I said, “you’ll have to make up your mind.” I wouldn’t have displayed so much impatience, but my mind was full of Willie Vigevano.

“All right,” she said. “The paper said you’re the guard at night at the museum. That’s where I’ll meet you.”

“But—”

“No, I couldn’t go anyplace else. I’ll come to the museum tonight. But not if there’s anyone else around.”

“What time tonight?” I could still maybe take care of Vigevano, organize things to include this girl.

But she said, “No, I won’t tell you. Just sometime tonight. I don’t want to talk to anybody else, just you.”

I remembered Inspector Stanton, whose good will had protected me from Hargerson; up to a point. For some strange reason I won’t try to explain, it was because of Stanton that I let an anonymous telephone call turn my plans inside out. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be there tonight. But you heard about the policeman who was blinded by acid?”

“Yes, I did. That was terrible.”

“Yes. When you come, knock three times, then pause, then knock twice more. If I don’t come after a minute or two, knock the same way again, because the first time I might be on my rounds upstairs and not hear you.”

“All right, I will. Three times, and then twice.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll be there tonight,” she said, and hung up.

Dunworthy was not happy when I called back. I told him I felt I could go in to work after all, and he said, “Do you realize what you just put me through?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I want to do right by the company. Before, I didn’t feel well enough to go in to work, but now I feel a lot better. I don’t want to let the company down.”

“You don’t want to lose the day’s pay,” he said petulantly. “I know you people.”

“I’m sorry to cause you trouble,” I said.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said savagely, and banged the phone down in my ear.

11

I KNEW HARGERSON WAS probably somewhere in the vicinity if he wasn’t on duty, and I wanted to talk to him, so I walked slowly from the house to my subway stop, looking for him. I would have walked slowly in any case, because of the stiffness of my body; I would have preferred to have spent tonight lying flat on my back under several blankets. As it was, my mind was full of Hargerson and Willie Vigevano and the girl on the telephone, and my body had to trail along in the wake of my thoughts.

It wasn’t Hargerson I saw, however, half a block from the subway, nor was it Vigevano. It was Marty Kengelberg, leaning against the fender of a fairly new Pontiac. When I saw him, I smiled at first and started to hurry toward him, but two things erased the smile and slowed me down again: my own body and his expression. He looked grim and wary and uncomfortable, and neither friendly nor unfriendly.

And what was Marty doing here anyway? I didn’t know yet what the trouble was, but it was something. Approaching him, I said, “Hi. What are you doing around here?”

“Waiting for you,” he said. He pushed away from the fender and gestured at the car. “Get in, I’ll drive you to the museum.”

Was he still worried that I’d started up again with Linda? If he was going to lecture me on the subject, it would be a very embarrassing ride for both of us. Still, he hadn’t left me much choice. “Thanks,” I said, trying to act as though everything was fine, and the two of us got into the Pontiac.

Marty is big and dark-haired and slow-moving, with an air of quiet, unhurried strength. He was agitated now, but agitation only made him slower, more solid and stolid. He didn’t say anything until we were rolling along in traffic, and then he said, “It’s the Museum of American Graphic Art, right?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t tell me when you called that night.”

“I’ve only been there a month,” I said.

“I got it out of the paper,” he said.

So had the girl on the telephone. I wasn’t sure where Marty was going, what these flat statements were leading toward, so this time I said nothing.

After a minute he said, “That’s the place had the killing.”

“That’s right.”

“The same night you called me.”

Then I understood. He was the only one in the position to put two and two together, and he’d done it. “Oh,” I said.

He glanced at me without expression and looked back at the road. “The detectives are looking for a woman in the case.”

“Yes, it’s her.”

“Linda.”

“Yes. I didn’t want her involved in—”

“I know,” he said, nodding. Even his impatience was slow. “I know what you wanted to do.”

“I still do,” I said.

Again he glanced at me, and this time there was something in his face. Not hostility; combativeness. We were still friends, but he was going to disagree with me. He said, “Other things have happened.”

“I know. I know they have.”

“I’m talking about the officer who was blinded.”

“Marty, I—”

“Let me finish.” He was facing front again, and I could see how difficult this was for him. But just because it was so difficult, I knew he would be unchangeable.

One more complication. Hargerson, Vigevano, the John Doe killing, and now Marty. What was I going to do about Marty?

He said, “The detectives on the case think the two things are tied in. The killing and the acid.”

“Hargerson doesn’t,” I said.

He frowned. “Who?”

“Grinella’s partner. The blinded man’s partner. His name is Hargerson, and he’s figured it out that I was the target. He leaned on me today to tell him the story.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

He gave me an interested look. “Is that why you were walking like that? You looked stiff.”

“That’s why.”

He faced front and gave the world in general a sour smile. “Now I’m asking the same question,” he said.

I said, “Willie Vigevano threw the acid. Mort Livingston drove. They stole the car for that purpose and ditched it later.”

The look he gave me this time was full of astonishment. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.” I told him about my meeting with Dink, and Dink’s phone call.

He said, “You wouldn’t tell Hargerson. Why tell me?”

“You’re my friend. I can ask you to let me do it my way. I can show you I’m not going to let it slide, that I’ve already worked on it enough to know which ones did it.”

He said, “You can’t get them charged for the acid-throwing without the whole story of Linda coming out.”

“We’ll see. Will you give me time?”

“How much?”

“As long as it takes.”

He frowned, not liking it very much, then looked at me and said, “I’ll give you my help if you want it.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Say the word.”

“Maybe later on. Not yet.”

“What I’m saying is,” he pointed out, “that I’ll be glad to help you do it yourself, but that in any case it’s going to get done. If you can’t do it, the whole thing is just going to have to come out.”

“I know. I’m already prepared for that.”

“You are, really?”

“I am.”

He nodded, satisfied, and changed the subject, asking me about Kate. We spent the rest of the trip making small talk about families, and didn’t mention the blinding again.

The street with the museum on it was one-way, the wrong way. Marty offered to drive around the block, but I said, “No, I’m early anyway. Let me walk a little. I have to work the stiffness out.”

“If you say so.” He pulled to the curb and said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” I got out of the car, and he waved and drove off, and I headed for the museum. I had stiffened up some more on the long ride in, and walked very slowly.

Midway between corner and museum I saw the black Ford, engine idling, sitting by a fire hydrant. Hargerson. I stepped painfully out into the street between two cars farther back, and walked up to the Ford on the driver’s side. I could see him through the rear window, alone in the car, a heavy stolid shape: Marty, without the humanity.

He had his side window rolled down. I stopped there and leaned against the top of the car and said, “Hargerson.”

He had been looking toward the museum and hadn’t seen me approach. He looked up at me with neither surprise nor pleasure, and said nothing at all.

I said, “Now that we’re past the tough-guy stage, let me tell you something.”

“Don’t get the idea we’re past anything, Tobin,” he said. “Not if you want to get to work tonight.”

“Listen,” I said, “we both want the same thing, whether you believe it or not. If you leave me alone, I’ll give you the people who blinded Grinella, I promise I will. But you have to let me do it my way, you have to trust me that much.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve already proved to yourself that you won’t get it out of me any other way.”

He frowned, studying me. I knew he wanted more than anything else to open up my head and spend some time looking around inside. I could understand and sympathize with his feelings, but that didn’t change the fact that I had to defuse him if I was going to accomplish anything on my own.

In a small way, Hargerson was facing now the same kind of thing I’d had in front of me when Jock was killed: he was feeling responsible for what had happened to his partner, and he was frustrated in his desire for revenge. I couldn’t dislike or condemn him for what he was doing, because it wasn’t that different from what I would do in the same circumstances myself; but I could try to get him to stop.

I said, “Look. Give me some time. If I don’t come through, you can always change tactics.”

“How much time?” He asked the question heavily, as though any amount I might ask for would turn out to be too much.

Today was Wednesday, most of it gone. “Till the weekend,” I said.

“Saturday.”

“Give me the whole weekend.”

He frowned, not liking it. “What can you do then that you can’t do now?”

“Just give me the time.”

He gave an angry shrug and said, “All right, Monday morning. If nothing happens before then, on Monday morning you will find yourself being booked for two or three felonies.”

I knew he meant that, and I knew he could make it stick. Find heroin in my car. Shake me down and find policy slips. Put me in a line-up and have some hooker identify me as the guy who mugged her. There were a lot of felonies Hargerson could pull out of the sack and throw at me, and every one of them would stick. He was talking about sending me to prison for five or ten years, and he meant it.

“Monday morning,” I said. “That’s all the time I need.” Which I hoped was the truth.

12

MULLER WAS ON THE DOOR, as usual. “Better stay out of the office,” he said. “They’re having a fight in there.”

“Who?”

“Ramsey and Crane.”

“What are they fighting about?”

He shrugged, shaking his head; the internal politics of the museum didn’t interest him in the least. “Who knows,” he said. “They’re just fighting, that’s all.”

So instead of going into the office, I went off into the first display room on the right, planning to leave my lunchbag on a bench in there. I’d intended to drift on down toward the office after that, on the chance that the fight included raised voices—I was interested in everything having to do with the museum these days—but I was distracted by Dan Tynebourne, sitting alone and fretful in a corner of the display room. Wearing his Phil-Crane-Style clothing, but sitting there with an Ernest-Ramsey-like air of discomfort, he seemed most like a tall child dressed up for a masquerade party he doesn’t really want to attend.

He looked up at my entrance, and then got quickly to his feet, and I was surprised at how agitated he was. “Mr. Tobin,” he said, with a peculiarly strong emphasis, making my name sound like a cross between a command and a cry for help.

“Good evening,” I said. I put my lunchbag down on a bench to my right.

He was walking toward me, his limbs slightly uncoordinated. “Give me your opinion,” he said, and this time the phrase was entirely command.

I understood that it wasn’t my opinion he wanted, but simply an opinion. He’d been sitting alone in here—waiting for the fight to end?—his mind full of some problem, and bursting to verbalize it with the next person he saw, whoever it might be. Had he tried talking with Muller? If so, I could imagine how frustrating Muller’s blank wall of indifference must have been.

As for myself, the museum interested me, and so did the people connected with it. I said, “I’d be happy to. What’s the problem?”

“The question is,” he said, frowning past me at the wall as he carefully phrased his thoughts, “should the museum open to the public or shouldn’t it?”

The same problem as before. Could that be what Ramsey and Crane were fighting about? It seemed impossible. I said, “Well, what are the arguments on both sides?”

“Oh, hell,” he said, suddenly angry, “I suppose it’s elitism, I suppose it really is, but so what? Egalitarianism can go too damn far. Woodstock was a hype, as far as I’m concerned.”

None of which made any sense to me at all, so I asked a more direct question: “Is that what Ramsey and Crane are fighting about?”

He gave me an agonized look. “I can understand both sides,” he said. “That’s what makes it such a down for me.”

“Ramsey wants to keep it closed, is that it?”

“Phil says that’s elitism,” Tynebourne said. “He says it’s antidemocratic, and of course it is, isn’t it? But Jesus Christ, the public never gave a damn whether this place was open or not!”

Tynebourne’s position was both comic and sad. He had miscast himself, it was as simple as that. His personality and attitudes fitted him thoroughly to be in Ernest Ramsey’s camp, but he had chosen to make Phil Crane his hero. The contradiction could continue unresolved so long as Ramsey and Crane were in overall agreement, but once a dispute arose between them, the same dispute had to take place, in more concentrated and perhaps more painful form, within Dan Tynebourne. His natural instincts now sided with Ramsey’s the-public-be-damned attitude, but his acquired convictions made him wish to favor Crane’s egalitarianism.

I said, “Well, does Crane want the museum open with the forgeries on the walls or taken down?”

“Oh, he doesn’t care about forgeries,” Tynebourne said, with such impatience that I could see this element was really not a part of the dispute. “Real or fake, it doesn’t matter to Phil.”

“Or you?” I asked the question because his instinctive pedantry, it seemed to me, should make him very sensitive to the question of real versus fake.

But he said, “Why should it? A copy of a copy, what difference does it make? None of these things are original artworks, they’re all copies from magazines or newspapers.”

“Then why close the museum?”

He gave me a sudden sharp look, opened his mouth, paused, then looked away and said, “Oh, yes. I see what you mean.”

I suspected he was seeing more than I’d meant. Not wanting to disabuse him of his belief, I said nothing, but waited for him to explain to me what revelation I’d just given him.

Which he did. “You mean,” he said, “that the forgeries really aren’t a legitimate reason to close the museum, since they’re only copies from copies anyway. So that means the only reason to want to close the museum is elitism. The forgeries are just an excuse.”

Which was well beyond anything I’d had in mind with my small question, but I could only agree with his conclusions. I said, “It does seem as though people who come here will enjoy the copies just as much as the originals.”

“Right on!” he said, in real delight, and as usual the slang phrase seemed terribly awkward when he delivered it.

He stood smiling around the room at the displays, and I watched him, amused at how animated he had become when the conflict in him had been resolved. If it really had.

“We open,” he said, talking to himself more than me, and nodded emphatically. Then he turned back to me again, saying, “Phil was right. That’s the amazing thing, he’s always right. He comes up with some wild things sometimes, he’ll really blow your mind with some of his ideas, but he’s always right. I’ve got to remember that.”

“Good,” I said.

“I’d better go talk to them,” he said, and abruptly left the room.

I was used to Dan Tynebourne by now, and knew that his rudeness wasn’t really rudeness, but simply insensitivity. Most people would have closed out the conversation in some way, in a normal social ritual, but that kind of thing never even occurred to Tynebourne. It wasn’t that he deliberately chose to be offensive and antisocial to the people around him, and that lack of deliberate choice removed the sting from his behavior.

I followed after him, and as I approached the rear of the building I actually could hear voices raised in anger. Or at least one voice; it sounded like Crane’s, though I couldn’t be sure.

How could people get emotional over a question like this? But on the other hand, I could remember brawls and killings from my days on the force that had been inspired by arguments over even smaller matters. I remember one wife who’d been beaten into the hospital by her husband for having bought the wrong brand of beer.

But whatever the subject of a fight, people have a consistency of style in waging it. That is, whether arguing over something important or something trivial, each person will fight in his usual way, and his way will be in line with his general personality.

And so it was with Crane and Ramsey. Dan Tynebourne left the office door open when he went in to join them—it was part of his own consistency of style that he’d be too preoccupied with his own thoughts to shut the door in the middle of a fight—and I loitered just down the corridor out of their sight, blatantly eavesdropping.

Crane was in a highly dramatic fury; he was shouting at Ramsey, his speeches an awkward amalgam of high-flown democratic tub-thumping and cutting paperback psychology descriptions of Ramsey. He reminded me most of arguments between the principals in dramatic programs on television, his line of patter being full of the same heavy cargo of exposition combined with undigested chunks of philosophy and psychoanalysis. This seemed at first to be a rather obsolete anger-form in a Now Person like Phil Crane—Kirk Douglas has been delivering diatribes like that in the movies for twenty years—but then I realized it was the drama rather than the era that counted. Crane dressed and spoke in a flamboyant and dramatic way under any circumstances, so it was only natural he would choose the most flamboyant and dramatic way to conduct an argument.

Ernest Ramsey was a different matter. In boxing terms, he was a jabber: in and out, giving small stings, never undertaking a sustained-attack. His attack was personal, aimed entirely at Crane’s appearance and mannerisms and friends and assumptions and private life, and he spoke in a much lower tone of voice than Crane, dropping his brief cold little barbs into the open spaces in Crane’s dissertation. He picked at Crane’s grammar, at his understanding of democracy, at his sloppy use of psychological terminology, at anything and everything Crane offered to him as a target. Of the two, Ramsey was by far the coolest, and in terms of points scored and scars given, was clearly the winner of the fight, if any verbal onslaught like that could be said to have a winner.

The interesting thing in all this was that the subject of the fight—whether or not to reopen the museum—had been all but forgotten by the principals. Crane referred to it obliquely from time to time in his democracy paragraphs, but the field of conflict had shifted entirely to their general animosity toward one another. It was an animosity that had been buried and under control for a long time, but apparently the tensions of the last week had been working on both of them, and all it had taken was one difference of opinion to bring the whole thing out into the open.

Which meant that Dan Tynebourne had a great deal of difficulty at first in attracting their attention. He had walked into the office with the apparent belief that he had solved the problem, and that the fight would automatically therefore end. Once the situation had become resolved in his own head, he clearly could see no reason why anyone else should remain confused or at odds. So he walked in and said, “Professor Ramsey, I finally understand what it is we’re—”

And that was as far as he got, the first try. Crane and Ramsey both simply ignored him and kept right on talking through everything he tried to say. He was almost comic in his baffled attempts to break into their closed circle of conflict, and standing outside in the hall, I found myself smiling as I listened. Because Tynebourne obviously thought they were still fighting about the museum, and not about one another.

Eventually, however, Tynebourne did manage to get enough words of his own into the mix for his own changed position to be made clear, and Phil Crane leaped on it at once: “Ah-hah! Even Dan comes around!” Tynebourne, of course, was Crane’s protégé, and his earlier semi-defection to the Ramsey point of view must have rankled in Crane and helped to set the stage for the fight.

Ramsey, however, was prepared to take on entire armies of Crane supporters. “The opinions of your Mortimer Snerd,” he said, “don’t interest me.”

But Tynebourne’s presence did have to change things, and I was surprised at what that change turned out to be. The fact was, Tynebourne wasn’t angry, and therefore wasn’t fighting. Nothing that was said to him made him angry or altered him from his course of simply explaining the revelation that had come to him. He wanted to explain it, and the words that came at him from the other people in the room were simply interruptions that had to be waited out or waded through. And what finally happened was, Ramsey became embarrassed. His cold angry remarks had worked well with Phil Crane, but by having no effect at all on Dan Tynebourne, they seemed to make Ramsey himself more aware of the kind of thing he was saying. Like a happy drunk made awkward by being in the presence of someone unhumorously sober, Ramsey’s rage foundered on the earnestness of Dan Tynebourne, and he became flustered and embarrassed.

But not defeated. “We’ll let the Board decide,” he said at last, and came abruptly out of the office, so quickly that I had no opportunity to pretend to be merely walking by. His face was red, his shirt and tie disheveled, and when he saw me his embarrassment and anger combined and focused on me and he said, more heatedly than anything he’d said to Crane, “What are you doing here?”

I looked at my watch. “It’s after nine o’clock,” I said. “It’s my responsibility now to see that nothing gets broken.”

“You people have done well so far, haven’t you?”

Being Allied’s most recent employee, and not identifying myself with the company in any case, I saw no reason to respond to that. “I do my best,” I said. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked past him into the office.

I’d expected Ramsey to say something more, but he marched away without a word. It was Phil Crane who gave me an angry smile and said, “Well, Mister Cool. You groove on other people’s bad scenes, huh?”

Crane and Tynebourne were standing near one another in the middle of the room, Crane looking angry and hot and triumphant, Tynebourne earnest and pained and embarrassed. It was Tynebourne who answered for me, saying, “Mr. Tobin was the one who made me see things, Phil. He was the one who saw through the whole elitist put-on.”

For some reason, this defense of me flattened Crane’s mood entirely; he went from angry triumph to deflated annoyance, his expression becoming petulant as he said, “What difference does it make? Open, shut, who cares? This place is a bad trip now, I’m sick of it.”

Tynebourne said, “But it isn’t really different, that’s the point. They’re still copies on the walls, just like they always were. You used to say that yourself.”

“I used to say a lot of shit,” Crane said. He gave Tynebourne a sullen look. “You coming?”

“Sure,” Tynebourne said. He clearly didn’t know what had altered Crane’s mood—I didn’t know either, and maybe Crane didn’t know himself—but he seemed to feel responsible for it, and to want to make Crane feel better. “Anything you say, Phil,” he said, and came very near to patting the older man on the arm.

Crane, like Ramsey before him, pushed past me without another word, and it was Tynebourne, oddly enough, who made the apologetic farewell for them both, saying, “Thanks for talking to me before.”

“That’s all right.”

“This last week has been a bummer for everybody,” he said.

I felt that I knew that better than any of them, but I didn’t say so. I said, “I suppose it has,” and followed him down the corridor to say good night to Muller and lock up after I had been left alone in the building.

13

THE PHONE WOKE ME, shortly after eleven. It was Kate, and she said, “A little while after you left, someone called and made threats. He said he was the one who’d thrown the acid at the policeman.”

I was having trouble waking up, understanding where I was, what was going on. All I recognized was Kate’s voice, not the room I was in or the desk I was sitting at. I said, “Kate? Kate?”

“Did I wake you?”

“Listen,” I said, trying to wake up, make order out of chaos. “Listen, what’s going on? Somebody threatened you?”

“I’m at Grace’s,” she said. “Bill and I came right out as soon as we got the call. I thought I shouldn’t take time to phone you until we got here.”

I was finally waking up; I remembered now where I was, and about the acid, and Willie Vigevano. I said, “He called you? Who did he threaten, you or me?”

“He said he knew you weren’t home, and you were stupid to leave me there, because he still had more acid.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.” I kept rubbing my face with my free hand, trying to get my mind working.

“I woke you,” she said. “I knew you shouldn’t try to go to work tonight.”

“I was very stupid,” I said. “I should have known he’d hit at me through you. I’m sorry, I was very stupid.”

“Well, we’re perfectly safe now,” she said. “We’re out here at Grace’s, and we’ll just stay here for the next few days.”

I’d had too much to think about, and the result was that I hadn’t been thinking clearly enough about any part of it. There were too many unconnected complications. “I’ll take care of things,” I said. “This situation has just drifted, but I’ll take care of it now.”

“Don’t put yourself in danger, Mitch,” she said. “There’s no need for it, Bill and I are perfectly all right where we are. I just wanted you to know what happened, but there’s nothing you have to do.”

There was a lot I had to do, but I said, “I’ll take care of myself, don’t worry. I’ll take care of myself, and everything else.”

She said, “How do you feel now?”

I felt stiff again. I’d been sleeping with my head and arms down on the desk top, and my body was almost as stiff as when I’d regained consciousness on that empty house’s floor. I said, “Not bad. Just groggy from being asleep, that’s all.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Please be careful.”

“Yes. I will.”

We both said goodbye, and I hung up, and got to my feet to move around a bit and work the stiffness out. And wake myself up. I’d fallen asleep almost immediately after finishing my first rounds, nearly two hours ago.

The girl who’d called me; had she been here? Would I have heard her knock? I became angry at myself for falling asleep, for not thinking clearly enough about Willie Vigevano, for not having done something definite and useful to get myself out of this morass. One small lie about Linda, and the complications from it just kept getting more and more complicated.

I left the office and went down the hall to the men’s room and scrubbed my face with cold water. I was angry and confused and irritated with myself, and I was frustrated because I was stuck in this building for another eight hours, there was nothing I could do anywhere about any of the things that needed to be done. And I had no idea if that girl had tried knocking on the door, if she’d already been here and given up and gone away again.

I went back to the office for my flashlight, and made my rounds of the building, finding everything quiet and peaceful. And as I walked I thought about things, and I wondered what I was going to do. About Vigevano, first of all. He had to be dealt with, that was clear enough, because of Grinella and because of Kate and because of Hargerson, but what was I going to do about him? I’d been thinking that I could handle that situation somehow, rig up something that would bring him to book, but that was something else I hadn’t really thought through. If I did manage to get Vigevano and Mort Livingston arrested for the blinding of Grinella, they would talk, they would explain their motive, and it would be one small step from that to Hargerson’s realization that Linda Campbell must have been the woman seen leaving the museum, and that I had been lying all along. If I set Vigevano up for something else instead—as Hargerson had threatened to do to me—it wouldn’t solve my own problem with Hargerson, who would have no way of knowing that vengeance had been done.

If only, I thought, Hargerson and the others would solve the John Doe murder and the forgeries, there would no longer be any problem. If that situation were solved and out of the way, I could tell the truth about Linda because the truth would no longer have any news value. It was only the connection with a murder case that made it something the newspapers would eat up, and only the connection with a murder case that made it something the police would start poking around in.

Could I wait for them to find the killer? It had been six days already, and they seemed to have made no progress at all. The John Doe hadn’t been identified, the problems of the forgeries hadn’t been solved, and so far as I could tell, nothing new had been learned in three or four days.

What was the alternative? I was very remote from the case to consider trying to solve it myself, so that was out. Simply waiting and hoping for the best was the method I’d been using so far, and it had only made things worse. So it looked as though I’d have to do something positive, try to thin out these complications myself as best I could.

Beginning with Willie Vigevano and his threat to Kate. That couldn’t be tolerated, but had to be dealt with at once. Finishing my rounds, I went back to the office and got out the Manhattan phone book. Dink had said Vigevano lived in Manhattan with his mother, Marie, and there she was in the phone book, Mrs. Marie Vigevano on Bedford Street, down in Greenwich Village. It was nearly midnight, so I thought the odds were good that I would get the son rather than the mother when I called, but it was a woman’s voice that answered, with a slight but noticeable Italian accent. I said, “Is this Marie Vigevano?”

“Yes? Who’s calling?”

“Is your son Willie there, please?”

“No, he’s out.”

“Would you give him a message?”

“Sure.”

“Tell him Mitch Tobin called, and—”

“Just a minute, I’ll get a pencil.”

I waited, and when she came back I repeated my name, spelled it for her, and gave her my phone number here at the museum. “Would you tell Willie,” I said, “that I’d like him to call me tonight. Any time tonight. But if he can’t call me tonight, I’ll come over and talk to you tomorrow.”

“Talk to me?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What you want to talk to me for?”

“I’d rather talk to Willie,” I said, “but if he’s unavailable I’ll talk to you. Will you tell him that?”

“You selling something?”

“No. Willie knows who I am.”

“I’ll tell him when he comes in,” she said. “He should be home pretty soon.”

“Fine. I’ll be at this number all night.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said. She sounded curious, but not worried.

I hung up, and turned on the radio low, and listened to music, and waited.

14

WHEN THE PHONE RANG at ten past two, I expected it to be Vigevano, so I suppose my voice was a little harsh when I answered. But it wasn’t Vigevano, it was the girl who had called me at home and arranged to meet me here; I recognized the frail voice when she said, doubtfully, “Is this Mr. Tobin? Excuse me, I wanted to talk to Mr. Tobin.”

I consciously made my manner less gruff, saying, “This is Mr. Tobin. You’re the girl I talked to before, aren’t you?”

“I wanted you to know why I wasn’t there,” she said.

“You are coming, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

It seemed to me important to meet this girl, talk with her, find out what her story was. I said, “I’d very much like to talk to you, Miss—”

She didn’t respond with her name. She said, “I want to talk to somebody else first. I’m going over to see him now, and then we’ll decide what to do. But I have to see him first.”

“Who?”

“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.” She sounded terrified of her own capacity to make trouble; from the sound of her voice, she was perpetually on the verge of tears. “We have to decide first,” she said. “That’s why I’m not there yet. I just wanted to call and explain, so you wouldn’t think … I didn’t want you to think I just didn’t show up.”

I said, “Will you at least call me again, after you talk to this other person?”

“Oh, I hate to make promises. I don’t know what’s going to happen, we’ll just have to work it out. Don’t make me promise, I’m just not sure yet.”

I said, “Miss, I know you don’t want to tell me your name or anything like that, at least not yet. But may I ask you one question?”

“Well, I guess so. I mean, you can ask it. I don’t know if I can answer or not.”

“I understand that. When we talked before, you said something about dead bodies, not wanting to see any more dead bodies. Would you mind telling me what you meant?”

“Oh.” The word was so small and distant I was suddenly afraid she was about to faint.

I said, “If you don’t want to, if it’s too painful for you—”

“I was in a place,” she said, speaking suddenly very quickly, as though wanting to get it all over with. “I was in a place, and they put the bodies in the trees. They didn’t bury anybody, they put them all, everybody that died, they just put them in the trees. That was their religion. They just wouldn’t change, they thought it was awful to put dead people in the ground. So you’d go out of the village, and in the trees there’d be the bodies, and you never knew when you’d see one. And I used to be terrified that I’d die, and nobody would find out about it in time, and they’d put my body in a tree, and nobody would ever know where I was or what happened. I used to have nightmares all the time about it.”

The story itself sounded like a nightmare. Had I been wrong earlier, was this merely another crank? I said, “Where was this place?” half expecting her to answer with Atlantis or Ur or Mars or something like that.

But she said, “Guatemala. Back in the jungle, we were supposed to be building a school and teaching them things, but—It was just impossible, I couldn’t do it any more. I even went back after the first time, I thought I should, I thought I was just a coward, but I couldn’t do it any more. I broke down.”

From the sound of her voice, faint and trembling, she was on the verge of breaking down again. I said, “Was this with the Peace Corps, you mean?”

“Yes. I was—”

I waited, but the sentence had apparently stopped, so I took a somewhat dangerous leap, saying, “Was George in the Peace Corps, too?”

“What? Why do you—?” She sounded now like a terrified sparrow thrashing around in a small room, trying to find the window.

“I thought maybe that’s where you knew him,” I said, trying to calm her simply with the calmness of my own voice. “You said you thought the dead man was somebody you knew named George, and I thought he might have been somebody you met in the Peace Corps. Or in Guatemala.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.”

“Were you in Canada with him?”

Another dangerous thrust, that one, and it produced total silence. I said, “Miss?”

A voice so faint I could barely hear it said, “Are you playing with me? Do you already know everything?”

“Only that his clothes were from Canada,” I said. “Your friend George, was he in Canada at one time?”

Faint, faraway: “Yes.”

“So it may be him.”

No stronger: “Yes.”

“Could you tell me George’s last name?”

“I don’t want to—I don’t think I should—I wouldn’t want to make trouble.”

“It can’t make trouble for George. Not if he’s dead.”

“I have to find out what Dan thinks. I could be making an awful mistake, it could be something else entirely, I wouldn’t want to—Well, I just wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

I said, “Dan?”

“What?”

“You said Dan. Do you mean Dan Tynebourne?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, God.”

“Miss, I don’t want to push you into anything you don’t want to do. If you want to talk to anybody else first, that’s all—Miss? Miss?”

But she’d hung up.

15

I COULD HAVE CALLED Dan Tynebourne. I could have called Dunworthy, the night man at Allied, and had myself relieved from duty the rest of the night, and gone over to Tynebourne’s apartment. But I was afraid of losing the sparrow entirely, of pushing the girl so much that she would either disappear or just simply refuse to talk any more, so I did nothing. It seemed to me best to let that situation stew along on its own for a while, and see what developed.

And there was also the call from Willie Vigevano. I thought it likely he’d respond, that he would understand the threat in my call to his mother. Not that I intended to do anything to Marie Vigevano, but I did intend to make menacing noises in that direction, and to convince Vigevano that the conflict was strictly between the two of us, that all families were out of bounds, his and mine both. It seemed to me he would probably be the type who would believe that everybody else was capable of behavior as scummy as his own, and that I could therefore make my threat credible to him. At least I intended to try.

By four o’clock, however, I was beginning to wonder if I’d miscalculated. Surely Vigevano was home by now, and had received my message; if he were going to call, surely he would have called by now. Making my slow rounds through the museum, following my flashlight beam through the darkened rooms, I began to make up alternate scenarios for Vigevano’s movements and reactions, ranging from his going out to my home and hiding himself there to attack me when I got back in the morning, to his getting together with Fred Carver and the others to make a frontal attack on this museum.

And what if the girl decided to come here after all, and her arrival coincided with Vigevano’s? I was trying to juggle too many balls in the air at once; the complications were beyond keeping track of.

When the phone rang at twenty past four, in fact, I had given up completely on hearing from Vigevano tonight and assumed this time that it was the girl calling; which gave me a perfect score, making me wrong in guessing the identity of every caller. It was Vigevano.

“What’s the idea calling my home?” That was the first thing he said, after my hello.

I said, “Vigevano?”

“You know who this is, never mind the crap. Who the hell do you think you are, bothering my old lady?”

“You called my wife. I called your mother. If you want to make a next move, it’s up to you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You understand me, Vigevano,” I said.

“What, you’re gonna hurt an old lady? A Captain Nice like you? You think I’m a dumbbell?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What was that?”

God, he wanted to sound tough. I said, “If you think I won’t pay you back in kind for anything you do to me, you are a dumbbell, yes.”

“You lousy bastard, we don’t need any of that crap. It’s between you and me. Nobody else, just you and me.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“You want to know where I am right now? Right this minute?”

“Not in particular,” I said.

“Yeah, you yellow fink, I guess you don’t. I’m a block from your stinking museum, how about that?”

Would he come over? I felt a sudden excitement at the thought, an eagerness to have him come here, combined with a deep regret that I wasn’t armed. I said, “That’s closer than I thought you’d get.”

“Come out,” he said. “Come on out, turn right, come down to the corner. Just you and me.”

If I hadn’t already suspected that he had his friends with him, this repetition of “just you and me” would have tipped me off. As it was, I knew an unpleasant surprise had been prepared for me somewhere between here and the corner. “I’ll see you when I’m ready,” I said. “In daylight, and when I’m ready.”

“You’re yellow,” he said. “You sneak behind people’s back, you bring the law down on them, but you don’t come out front like a man.”

There was something very adolescent about this situation, being taunted to come out and fight, and the absurdity was doubled when I remembered that it was a cowardly acid-thrower who was doing the taunting. “You’ll meet me,” I said. “When I’m ready.” And I hung up.

I’d expected him to call back, but he didn’t. I stayed in the office for a few minutes, brooding at the phone, waiting for the call and thinking about things. What if the girl did come over now, would Vigevano and his friends do something to her? It would probably be very easy to frighten her away forever, even if they didn’t actually harm her. I thought about calling Marty Kengelberg and asking him to cover the outside of the museum for me, but he too might frighten her away, if she saw him out there.

It would be better after all if she didn’t come. I was very reluctant to acknowledge that, but finally I saw there was no other way to handle it, and I got out the Manhattan phone book again and looked up Dan Tynebourne. He turned out to live on West 24th Street, in Chelsea; I dialed the number, and let it ring twenty times before accepting the fact that Tynebourne was out rather than asleep.

Were they already on their way over here? If the girl was coming, it made sense that she would bring Tynebourne with her, since she seemed like someone who felt too frail to do much on her own. But assuming they were coming, what could I do to keep Vigevano and the others from interfering?

I left the office right after the unsuccessful attempt to call Tynebourne, and went up to the second floor, where three long narrow windows across the front overlooked the main entrance and the street. I’d used the flashlight in coming up, and used it again while dragging a bench over by one of the windows, but then I switched it off and sat in darkness, looking out at the empty street. It was heading toward five in the morning, the deadest hour of the day in New York, and barely one car in five minutes traveled down the block while I was sitting there. Nor did I see any pedestrians at all, not Vigevano or anyone else.

Sitting there, looking out the window at the street, I gradually became aware of the dark museum behind me. There were no lights on at all, no lights anywhere in the building except the one I’d left on far away downstairs in the office, and none of that illumination reached anywhere near where I was. I would turn around every once in a while and look behind me, but the darkness was almost complete back there, the white display walls merely vague gray forms in the black.

I couldn’t help thinking about the John Doe, and about the killer carrying him naked from room to room that night last week, following in my wake. I kept visualizing it, and imagining it happening again; I could almost hear the small sounds of his passage.

But of course there was no one behind me, it was simply nerves and an overactive imagination. There were no noises, there was no one carrying a naked dead body from room to room of the museum. Still, my back was tensed and hunched most of the time I was sitting there, and it was sometimes difficult to keep looking out at the street when what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world was spin around and fan the flashlight beam over the full interior of the building.

I never quite did that, though I did come close. But I waited it out, and shortly after six the sky began to lighten slightly, traffic picked up a little, and the first pedestrians began to walk by. Then I could without embarrassment turn around, switch on the flashlight, see the empty room, and make a great deal of noise in dragging the bench back to its original position.

I tried Tynebourne again at six-thirty, this time letting the phone ring thirty times, and once more there was no answer. I called the operator and asked her to check the number and be sure it was functioning, and she said it was.

I was beginning to be afraid that the girl had decided not to talk to me again after all. Whatever connection she and Tynebourne had together, whatever they had discussed, it now seemed they had decided to keep their own counsel. Tynebourne had probably taken her away somewhere for safety from me and anyone else who might want to question her. She did, after all, know that she had slipped and mentioned Tynebourne’s name, and that I had picked it up. So it could be that both of them now planned to stay out of sight for a while. In trying to push the girl to tell me more, I might have pushed her into total silence.

I’d have to find them, that’s all. They were amateurs at hiding, and amateurs tend to hide with friends. I would find them.

16

WHEN I LEFT THE museum, shortly after seven, I looked around but saw no sign of Willie Vigevano or any of his friends. Of the four, I would remember and recognize Fred Carver and Mort Livingston, but it seemed to me I’d also be able to spot Vigevano. The fourth man, Knox, was the only one I’d be unsure about, but I wouldn’t expect him or any of the others to travel alone. Punks like that move in packs.

They also prefer the dark, and we were now into full daylight. After one quick look around to satisfy myself that they’d crawled back into their holes for the day, I put Vigevano and the others from my mind and turned my attention back to Dan Tynebourne and the unnamed girl.

My body was still stiff, but I didn’t ache so much any more, and for some reason I wasn’t sleepy. The two-hour nap in the office must have helped somewhat, but I think more than that I was refreshed by being free of the museum, able to go out and move, and with definite objects in view.

The first being Tynebourne and the girl. It had occurred to me they might be holed up in his place after all, just refusing to answer the phone, so I hailed a cab and headed for Chelsea.

Tynebourne lived in an apartment building converted from three red-brick townhouses. Two of the entrances had been sealed off, leaving only the one in the middle building. A foyer worthy of a much larger structure had been inserted into this entrance, with the mailboxes and doorbells along the right-hand wall.

Tynebourne, Daniel, was in apartment 3-C. I rang the bell a few times and waited and nothing happened. It wasn’t yet seven-thirty in the morning, and I was hesitating over ringing the superintendent’s bell when a middle-aged woman came out of the building, apparently on her way to work. I caught the door before it closed behind her; she gave me a quick suspicious look, but I suppose the uniform reassured her, because she didn’t say anything.

There was no elevator. I went up the stairs to the third floor, and found the door to 3-C. I rang the bell, and waited some more, and tried the knob, but the door was locked.

I was alone in the hall. I listened and heard no one coming down the stairs, and took out my wallet to get my gasoline credit card, the only credit card I own. It’s a thin rectangle of plastic, and in recent years these credit cards have become the burglar’s most valuable tool.

And, at the moment, mine. The plastic is strong, but it bends. I inserted it between the door and the jamb and fiddled with it until I’d slipped the door lock open. If there’d been a second lock with a straight bolt, I couldn’t have opened the door that way, but a singly locked door can almost always be opened with patience and a credit card.

There were no lights on inside. I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by finding people in bed, so after I’d entered the apartment and closed the door behind me, I called, “Tynebourne? Dan Tynebourne?”

No answer. I moved forward, slowly, inspecting the place.

It was empty. Tynebourne had a small place—living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen and bath—and there was no one in it. The second time through I switched on the lights, since little daylight came in through windows facing onto a narrow airshaft, and spent some time looking the place over. I was hoping to find some indication of where Tynebourne and the girl might have gone, or perhaps some indication of the girl’s name or the full name of the George who she thought might be our John Doe.

I found neither, but I did see plenty of further evidence of the split in Dan Tynebourne’s personality. In his books, Jerry Rubin nestled with Henry James. On his walls, a print of the Unicorn tapestry was hung next to a poster of Che Guevara. His records were an amalgam of Jefferson Airplane and Mozart, and beside his bed I found a heavily annotated paperback copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Looking at his marginal remarks, I saw him torn between the nihilism of the terrorists in that book and his own apparently natural love of tradition and heritage and history. He was trying to be in love with both Now and Then, even though the currently accepted way to love Now is by rejecting Then.

On one side of the living room was a desk made of a door on wrought-iron legs. Half-corrected students’ papers from his courses at City College were here, plus some tortured writing he had apparently been doing himself in an attempt to resolve the Now versus Then conflict in his head. There was also a telephone, and beside it a personal address book. I looked through it, and found no one named George, nor anyone with an address in Canada.

There weren’t, in fact, very many names in the book at all. Phil Crane was there, with both home and office numbers. The museum was there. Perhaps a dozen individuals were listed, not including Ernest Ramsey.

Well, I might as well begin. I sat at Tynebourne’s desk, opened his address book, and started calling his friends.

The first was someone named Edward Barber, and I woke him up. He was angry about it, and irritated at my calling him in search of Dan Tynebourne. “What the hell would he be doing here?”

“I think he might be with a friend,” I said.

“Well, he isn’t with me. Christ on a crutch.”

“Do you know any friend of his named George? Someone who’s been living in Canada?”

“Who the hell are you, fellow?”

“My name is Tobin,” I said. “I’m a friend of Dan’s, I work at the Museum of American Graphic Art.”

“That piece of crap,” he said. “I would much rather be asleep.” And he hung up.

Phil Crane was next. I tried him at home, and he was there. “This is Mitch Tobin,” I said. “You know, the night guard at the museum.”

“Yes, sure,” he said. “Captain Cool. How’s it shaking?”

“I’m looking for Dan Tynebourne.”

“Dan? What for?”

“I wanted to talk with him. He isn’t home, I thought he might be visiting a friend.”

“He’s probably gone to work.”

“No, he hasn’t been home for several hours.”

“Listen,” he said, “what’s going down? You suddenly sound very heavy. What’s happening?”

“I’m just looking for him, that’s all. It’s nothing serious. There was a girl who wanted to talk with me, and she was going to see Tynebourne first, that’s all.”

“A girl? Talk to you? What girl?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I didn’t feel like going through a whole explanation every time. “The point is, I want to talk to him, and I want him to know I don’t mean to cause any trouble for him, and I thought he might have decided to stay with a friend for a while. So I’m calling his friends.”

“Well, if I see him, I’ll tell him to get in touch with you.”

“Thank you.”

“You want to give me your phone number?”

“All right.” I gave him my home number, and he said, “Where’s that? In Queens?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the address, too, why don’t you? In case he doesn’t want to talk on the phone.”

I gave him the address. “I’m not sure when I’ll be home.”

“Sure, man, that’s okay. If I see him, I’ll lay the message on him.”

“Thank you. By the way, do you know of any friend of Tynebourne’s named George?”

“George? George who?”

“I don’t know the last name. I think he might have lived in Canada for a while.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “Maybe a student of his over at City.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“Anything else?”

“No,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Okay. Later, man.”

“So long.”

The next was Edna Fuller, with an address in Brooklyn. I let it ring a dozen times, but there was no answer. I found scratch paper and pen on the desk, and wrote Edna Fuller’s name and address down on it.

I was becoming sleepy. There was something about sitting here in this quiet empty apartment, after my all-night vigil at the museum—despite the two-hour nap—that was soporific, that was making my eyelids heavy and my mind sluggish. I turned to the next name in Tynebourne’s address book—William Goldberg, on East 17th Street in Manhattan—but before dialing the number I pushed away from the desk, got to my feet, and went out to the kitchen in search of coffee.

There was a jar of instant coffee on top of the refrigerator. I made a cup, my movements slow and uncoordinated, and carried it back to the desk with me. The aroma helped a little, and while waiting for the coffee to cool sufficiently to be drinkable I called William Goldberg.

I got a woman’s voice. I asked for William Goldberg, and she said, “Oh, he’s on the Coast right now. He won’t be back for another two weeks.”

“I’m looking for a friend of his, mainly,” I said. “Dan Tynebourne. Do you know him?”

“No, I’m subletting here. I don’t know many of Bill’s friends.”

I said, “Well, just in case he should show up there or call, would you pass a message on for me?”

“I told you, he’ll be in L.A. for two more weeks.”

“No, I don’t mean Goldberg, I mean Dan Tynebourne.”

“Why would he come here?”

I thought it possible that Tynebourne was there. If he was with a friend, the friend would naturally deny it. All I could hope for was that my message would be transmitted, and that Tynebourne would believe it. I said, “It’s just a chance he might show up there. If he does, would you tell him Mitch Tobin called? Would you tell him I’m anxious to get in touch with him?”

“Listen,” she said. “You got me out of bed.”

“I’m sorry. I just want Dan Tynebourne to know it’s safe for him to—”

“I don’t know any Dan Tynebourne,” she said. “And I don’t know you, and there’s no point leaving any messages. I’m sorry, but I’m just subletting here, and I don’t want to talk any more.”

Which made the second time I’d been hung up on.

I tried the coffee, and it was still too hot, but I drank some anyway. And reached for the phone to make another call.

Linda Jenkins, with an address in the Bronx. I got her mother, who said Linda had already left for her job at the bank. When I mentioned Dan Tynebourne, she said, “Oh, that was over long ago.”

“Linda isn’t a current friend of Dan’s?”

“Not for a year or more. Linda has a very nice young man now.”

I wondered what the mother had opposed in Tynebourne; his rudeness, perhaps. On a sudden hunch, I said, “Would a friend of Linda’s have been in the Peace Corps recently? In Guatemala?”

“Guatemala? Linda doesn’t know anybody like that.”

“Are you sure? Maybe some old school chum.”

“I know Linda’s friends,” she said, with such assurance that I felt I had to believe her. So much for that hunch.

But it did divert me for the moment from Tynebourne’s address book. If the girl had wanted to talk things over with Tynebourne, the implication was that he must also know the person named George, who might be our John Doe. A photograph of the John Doe, touched up by a police artist to make it look more human, had been circulated among the people connected with the museum, and Tynebourne along with everyone else had claimed not to recognize it, but he might have been lying.

Was Tynebourne the forger?

I suddenly felt very, very stupid. If I hadn’t been so tired, and if there hadn’t been the distraction of Willie Vigevano—But that didn’t matter. The point was, if the girl had wanted to talk to Tynebourne about George, Tynebourne had to know George. If George was the John Doe, Tynebourne had to have lied about not recognizing the photograph that had been passed around. If Tynebourne had lied, he must have had a reason, and what better reason than self-protection? What better reason than that he himself had been George’s partner in the forgeries?

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.

17

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.

18

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.

So it would be Vigevano. And not alone, no, all four of them would be here, waiting for me.

Of course; they were waiting for me. They had come to a darkened house, the car gone from in front of it, and had taken it for granted I wasn’t home. So they had settled in to wait, to take me by surprise whenever I should return.

Except that now, if I remained very silent and very careful, the surprise would be in the other direction.

But first I needed my clothing. A shirt and trousers are no physical protection against any weapon, of course, but they are a psychological protection of the most important kind—a naked man does not fight with any sense of confidence.

I knew my own room, could move around it with some assurance, though very slowly. I dressed, pausing at every inadvertent rustle and scrape, and leaving off only my shoes.

I needed a weapon. I had no gun in the house, but I remembered an old nightstick from my early days on the force, kept over the years first for sentimental reasons and then out of forgetfulness. It was hanging on a hook in the back of the closet, and the only question was whether I could get to it without making a lot of noise.

The closet door wasn’t entirely closed. I pulled it slowly open, knowing it sometimes squeaked when moved quickly, and reached in to touch the shoulders of shirts and jackets, acquaint myself with the terrain before trying to push through it. Somewhere low to the floor a belt buckle made a tiny sound, and I froze, and waited, and at last went on.

And found it. My fingers touched the wood, slid upward to the leather thong, and up to the hook. Slowly I lifted the thong from the hook, and used two hands to slide the stick vertically through clothing and out of the closet. I didn’t breathe at all until I’d finished that operation, and then just stood there for half a minute or so, holding the nightstick in both hands and panting very silently through my open mouth.

Finally I turned and made my way around the bed and over to the opposite wall, and then along it to the doorway. The door was ajar, open enough for me to slip through without moving it, and then at last I was in a place where some small light showed.

But very little. The plan of our house has a central hall on the second floor, up to which the stairs lead and off which are all the rooms. This hall has no windows, so the only light sources were the windows in Bill’s room and my study. The doors to both rooms were partly open, and the window shades were half-up, so some dim light did reach the hall; enough to make out the doorways of those two rooms but not to see the stairwell with any confidence.

I moved toward the unseen stairs, taking one slow step at a time and pausing after every one. Either I had grown used to the cigarette smoke by now or the smoker had finished; in any case, I couldn’t smell it any more. Nor was there still any other sign that I had visitors.

Were they gone? It was possible I was doing all this charade in an empty house, that Vigevano or someone else had come here, waited awhile, and then departed, leaving behind only the faint whiff of smoke to show that he had passed through.

I hoped that was the answer, but I wasn’t ready yet to assume it was. I reached the top of the stairs, and inched my foot down to the first step.

The left side of the stairs is built along the wall, so that was where I walked, knowing there was less chance of creaking at that spot. I went down the stairs sideways, my back against the wall, my arms spread out slightly to both sides along the wall, the nightstick gripped in my right fist. I would lower my left foot slowly to the next step, shift weight gradually, bring down the right foot, pause, listen, wait, and then start the process all over again.

There were fifteen steps, a number I’d known from long acquaintance. It must have taken me a full three minutes to work my way down them, and still at the bottom I had heard and seen and smelled nothing. Were there no intruders after all?

At the foot of the stairs, with my back still against the wall, I now had the front door to my left, the living room straight ahead of me, and the kitchen down a short hallway past the stairs on my right. Some illumination came through the glass in the front door, and from the living-room windows, but not enough to make out more than the bulk of furniture.

I was about to move forward from the wall, thinking to go around the bottom step and down to the right toward the kitchen, when there was a sudden noise from back there, the sound of a step, and then the kitchen swing door pushed open, making the creaking sound it always does, and a rasping voice called in a kind of half-whisper, “Willie!”

I stepped back against the wall. I couldn’t see anything down toward the kitchen, nothing but darkness.

Another voice answered from the living room, higher-pitched: “Yeah, what?” I recognized it as Willie Vigevano.

“Anything?”

“You’ll know it, Fred, if there is.”

So Fred Carver was the one in the kitchen, and Vigevano was in the living room. Carver was the older man, the one with the reputation, the one who was supposed to be the leader of this group, but voices don’t deceive: Carver was accepting Vigevano’s supremacy.

But not without some struggle. “Keep your eyes open,” Carver said sullenly, and the creak of the swing door showed he’d retired before Vigevano could respond.

Two of them were here. Were the other two?

And what was I going to do about it? If I could get out of here without their knowing it, I could have them all—assuming they were all here—picked up for breaking and entering. That would give Hargerson all the hint he’d need, of course, and he’d start leaning on them to find out which one had thrown the acid and why. Knowing Hargerson, and knowing the kind of punk these four all were, I knew he’d get his answers pretty quickly, though not in any way he could take into court.

Would that be the best way? If Hargerson came to it on his own, and if it happened this way, remote from the museum and the killing, it just might miss the publicity and muckraking that would come from tying it in with the murder investigation.

Or Hargerson might, out of spite or revenge, do his best to make it all as big and nasty as he possibly could anyway.

Was it worth a try? Yes, I thought it probably was. I already knew how to phrase it to Hargerson over the phone: “A group of from two to four men has broken into my home. I can tell you honestly that two of them I haven’t seen since my years on the force, and the other two I’ve never seen in my life. But they’ve committed a felony by breaking in, and I think you’ll want to take a special interest in them.” That would be enough of a hint for Hargerson; he would take it from there.

But the first problem was to get to that phone. I was still inside this house, with the two or three or four men, and if I made the slightest noise, I’d never manage to get out.

The front door. I looked toward it again, trying to judge whether or not I dared make a try in that direction, and a shadow moved across the glass, a bulky figure, moving from left to right. And he was inside the house.

So they were all here. That must be either Knox or Livingston, on guard at the door, waiting for me to come home.

Why did they think I would be here at all? Unless they’d been at the museum, waiting for me to show up there, and had seen my substitute arrive instead. So they’d come out here to get me, and had found the house dark, and thought I was out somewhere. Now they were all over the first floor, waiting for me to come home.

The second floor? I tried to visualize the exterior of the house, to think if there was any way I could go out a second-story window and get to the ground without breaking an ankle, but there was nothing at all useful. We had no sheds with sloping roofs attached to our house, no handy trellises. My wall enclosing the back yard did touch the two rear corners of the house at a height of six feet, but there were no windows that would give handy access to the wall. And while I’m in reasonably good condition for my age, I’m no acrobat; to simply leap out a second-floor window and hope for the best would be to ask for the worst, for a broken bone or a twisted ankle, and enough noise to attract the attention of these four in the house.

I had continued looking toward the front door while trying to decide what to do next, and I saw the dark shape move by the glass again. He was restless, Knox or Livingston, whichever he was, and moving back and forth just a few feet this side of the door.

If I could get past him—

I moved out away from the wall again. I had an advantage here; I knew the house, how to move silently in it, where there was furniture to be avoided. And the other advantage, also, that they didn’t know I was here.

In the middle of the hall, next to the banister, I could see the shape against the glass again. It was hard to make out exactly, but he seemed to be swaying back and forth on his feet while standing looking out the window toward the street. With his back to me.

I moved forward, toward him, keeping him between me and the glass, and stopped when once again he went into motion, taking a couple of restless steps to his left and then to the right again. I waited, not moving at all until he had stopped, and then moved closer to him again.

It had to be done fast and hard, and with accuracy. He was looking out the glass again at the street, and I was behind him, close enough to reach out and touch his back. I moved slightly to one side, not wanting to push him accidentally into the door. I lifted the nightstick up beside and behind my head, braced myself, and then swung as hard as I could at the dim shape of his head, aiming as best I could at a spot just above and behind his ear. And at the second of impact, even while my body was following through, I reached out quickly with my left hand, snagged his clothing with my fingers, and pulled him toward me, not wanting him to fall in any loud or noticeable fashion.

It must have hit him right; he was absolutely unconscious, a dead weight that sagged back against me and wanted to drop to the floor like a stone. I was still off-balance myself from the force of the blow, and for a second or two I thought the two of us would go crashing into the door and then to the floor; but I got my balance back, and held him with both arms around his chest, and stayed there for maybe half a minute without moving, listening to the silence around me, waiting for Vigevano or one of the others to show that they had heard something.

But the silence remained complete, and at last I shifted position on him and lowered him slowly to the floor. It was while bending over to do it that I got my first twinge, my first reminder of the stiffness that had plagued me all day yesterday. The long sleep had worked a lot of it out of me, so much so that I hadn’t been reminded of it at all until now.

I straightened and listened some more, and there was no sound. I moved over to the door, reached for the knob where I knew it would be, and from the living room Willie Vigevano suddenly said, “Mort?”

So this was Livingston I’d hit. But now what?

I hesitated, my hand on the knob. If I just ran now, I might get away, though with three of them to chase me, that was by no means sure. But, more important than that, if I got away and left them alerted, they would also get away.

No, I didn’t want that. I turned away from the door, releasing the knob without ever having turned it. It had been no sound of mine that had set Vigevano off, but probably simply that premonition of something being wrong that sometimes strikes people in stress situations.

Only a second or two had gone by since Vigevano had spoken; in that time, I’d made my decision and started to move. I strode quickly away from the door and toward the wide living-room doorway, knowing in the dark where it was and what furniture to avoid.

I didn’t yet know exactly where Vigevano was, but I expected him to speak at least once more, giving me a beam to follow. His calling of Livingston’s name had been casual, untroubled, but when he didn’t get an answer he would surely call again, more sharply.

He did, as I moved through the doorway into the living room. “Mort? What’s up?”

He was on the sofa; ahead, and to my right. I went that way, the nightstick poised in my right hand, my left hand out in front of me, ready to grasp his body and to tell my right hand where to aim.

I hadn’t expected him to turn on the light. When the table lamp on the far side of the sofa suddenly flared, I was staring almost directly at it, and I wound up more blinded than I’d been in the dark.

But I knew where Vigevano was, and I kept coming, avoiding the coffee table out of long habit. He was struggling to get up from the sofa, his eyes no doubt nearly as blinded in the sudden light as my own. He yelled, “Fred! He’s here!” And I was on him.

My aim this time was nowhere near as accurate as it had been with Livingston. I swung side-arm at the voice, and caught him a sideswipe hit on the cheek and the side of the head. It was enough to knock him off the sofa and daze him, but he wasn’t completely unconscious.

I was now between the sofa and the coffee table, and Fred Carver would be coming in from the kitchen any second. I kicked the coffee table out of the way, squinted, shielded my eyes from the light with my left hand, and swung at the curly-haired head in front of me as he sat there on the floor, half-stunned.

The second blow was also inaccurate, catching him as much on the shoulder as the head, but still it put him out of commission at least for a while; he flopped over onto his face as I heard the swing door flap open behind me.

I jumped over Vigevano’s body. The dining-room doorway was to my right. I ran in there, meaning to cut diagonally across to the other door to the kitchen, and then through the kitchen and into the back yard. I could get over my six-foot wall without too much difficulty, and from there, away.

All hope of getting Hargerson here to arrest them was now gone. The only thing left was to get myself out of danger.

Back in the living room, I heard Fred Carver’s voice: “Jerry! Go round the other way!”

Jerry—that would be the fourth man, Knox. So I would probably be meeting him in the kitchen.

The light in the living room had robbed me of most of my night vision, but I still wasn’t ready for normal light either. And my haste was making me forget the details of my own house; I slammed my hip painfully into the corner of the dining-room table on the way by.

I reached the door to the kitchen and pushed it open, and all the lights had been turned on. I raced in, squinting, trying to see in all directions at once, and something hit me a hard blow across the bridge of my nose, just below my eyes. The force of it stopped me and almost knocked me down, and for a second or two I could neither see nor think. It was an automatic gesture to put my arms up in front of my face, so that the next blow landed on my forearms, stunning me so that I dropped the nightstick.

But I had the thong around my wrist. The nightstick fell, twisted on the end of the thong, and caught me sharply on the elbow. That, and the pain in my forearms, brought me back to myself, and I blinked around through my arms and saw a big heavy-set guy swinging a broom handle around for a third time.

I ducked under and away from that one, losing my balance in the process and going down on one knee. My flailing left arm hit the stove, and I used it to pull myself up again.

Missing me had made Jerry Knox lose his own balance, though not as badly as I had. Still, it gave me an extra few seconds to get to my feet and try a counterattack, lunging at him, the nightstick in my hand again and upraised over my head.

But he was fresher than me, and less damaged, and had had more time to set himself. Instead of swinging the broom handle again, he jabbed the end of it very hard into my stomach.

I gagged, and felt myself toppling over forward, and couldn’t do a thing to stop it from happening. My hands splayed out in front of me, and I hit the kitchen floor hard, the nightstick bouncing next to my right hand.

The pain in my stomach was so severe that I wanted to do nothing but curl up around it like a bug around a pin. But I wouldn’t let it happen; I immediately started struggling my feet under me, and moved my right hand for the nightstick again.

A heel came down hard on my right hand and stayed there, bearing down. A voice above me said, “You make one move, you son of a bitch, I’ll knock your head right off your body.”

I didn’t move.

19

THEY LET ME UP when Fred Carver came into the room, Jerry Knox first stooping to slip the thong of the nightstick off my wrist. I got up slowly, rubbing the back of my hand where Knox had stepped on it. My eyes were watering, and the flesh of my face felt puffy around my eyes and nose. I squinted at the two of them, and waited for whatever would happen next.

I recognized Fred Carver; he hadn’t changed much in the last few years. I’d helped to pick him up three or four times back in the old days, though never on anything that had stuck. A big and beefy man, with thinning brown hair and a manner of wronged belligerence as though someone had just purposely short-changed him, Fred Carver was tough only in the limited sense that he pushed people around if they were weaker than he was, or in a position where they couldn’t fight back. The barroom brawler, half bully and half coward, was obvious in his face, in his every movement, in his words, in the very sound of his voice.

And Jerry Knox was more of the same; just younger, that’s all, with bushy red hair. And maybe a little less belligerence, a little more self-confidence; now that he’d bested me, Knox showed no inclination to do anything further to me.

The same was not true of Fred Carver. Once I was on my feet, he came over and stood in front of me and said, “So you’re tough, are you? You like to make trouble, do you?” He swung his right arm to hit me backhanded across the face. It was a clumsy slap, but I too was clumsy and couldn’t entirely get away from it; he caught me partly, on the portion of my face that already ached, making my eyes burn and water even more. I staggered back against the wall, and leaned there, blinking, trying to see, keeping my arms up to protect myself.

But he didn’t come after me. Knox had distracted his attention, saying, “Okay, we got him. Now what?”

“Now we teach him a lesson,” Carver said angrily.

“Yeah, but how’d he get in here, that’s what I want to know.”

“Who cares? We’ve got him, that’s all.”

“People are expecting me back,” I said, mumbling through thick lips.

“You shut up,” Carver told me.

“That’s what I meant,” Knox said. “How do we know there won’t be more show up?”

“Because he’s alone.”

“He is now. And where the hell is Mort?”

It was all too much for Carver to think about at once. He gave me an enraged look, gave Knox one almost as angry, and turned to glare at the swing door to the hallway. “Keep an eye on him,” he said, and lunged away out the swing door.

I looked at Knox. Was there anything I could do? He’d put the broom handle down now, and had my nightstick in his right hand, the thong around his wrist. Even if I were in the best of condition, I wouldn’t have been able to fight him and beat him, nor would I have been able to get out of this room without being brought down by that stick. In my current state, there was no hope at all, nothing to do but stand there and wait.

The kitchen door was still swinging, little quick arcs, when Carver yelled from up by the front door, “Goddammit, look at this! Jerry, bring that son of a bitch out here!”

I started moving even before Knox gestured at me with the nightstick. He didn’t bother to say anything, and I preceded him through the swing door. For one brief second I tried to visualize myself slamming that door behind me into Knox, then rushing on Carver and bowling him over and getting through the front door and clear, but it wasn’t going to happen and I knew it.

Carver was standing over Mort Livingston, who was lying on his back just where I’d left him. He glared at me and yelled, “Look what you did! He’s bleeding!”

I didn’t say anything. I stopped in the hallway, and Knox jammed me in the back with the nightstick to make me move on.

As I came opposite the living-room doorway, Willie Vigevano came boiling suddenly out of it, yelling at me and swinging both fists. There was a small line of blood down one side of his face.

I fell away from his first rush, backing against the wall by the stairs, but then I saw an opening and hit him in the face as hard as I could with my left fist. It stopped him for a second, but before I could do anything else Knox had clubbed me on the shoulder and Carver was yelling for everybody to cut it out.

I couldn’t really fight now, only defend myself a little bit if directly attacked. So I stood there like a drayhorse, and Carver and Knox between them convinced the outraged Vigevano to wait awhile, not to waste his time attacking me until more pressing problems had been solved. Vigevano kept saying he wanted to get at me to kill me, but Carver and Knox—mostly Knox—kept telling him the important thing first was to take care of Livingston and get everybody out of this house, just in case I had anybody who might be coming around looking for me.

Vigevano was finally calmed down, and they went back to look at Livingston again. That is, Carver and Vigevano did; Knox stood guard over me, slapping the nightstick into his left palm and giving me alert looks as though he might enjoy testing his skill on me if I would give him the chance.

They sat Livingston up, leaning his back against the wall not far from the door, and spent some time calling him and slapping his face; but to no effect. I could see that a bit of blood had trickled from his nose, and knew he had a concussion; from the look of him, he was going to be out for quite a while.

Knox was gradually getting impatient with their efforts, and finally he said, “Willie, come over here and watch this bird. I’ll get Mort awake.”

“With pleasure,” Vigevano said. He came over, grinning angrily, and Knox gave him the nightstick. Vigevano didn’t bother about the thong on his wrist, but shook the nightstick close to my face and said, “Try something, smart boy. Try something.”

I didn’t move.

Knox went over and crouched in front of Livingston and rolled his eyelid back. “Hey, Mort,” he said. There was no response to that, nor to his slapping Livingston on the cheek.

“We did all that,” Carver said.

Knox straightened and stood looking down at Livingston. “What he needs is some whiskey,” he said. “I got some in the car.” He opened the door, took one step outside, was shot in the forehead, and crashed backward into the hall.

20

I WAS AS STUNNED as anybody else, but I was more desperate. Before either of them had recovered, I shoved Vigevano backward into the living room, and was running for the kitchen.

But running isn’t exactly the word. I had taken a great deal of punishment in the last several minutes, and much more punishment just yesterday; my body didn’t want to move any more, didn’t want to have to make any fast responses. I didn’t run for the kitchen, I lumbered toward it, I shambled toward it.

Still, I made it through the swing door, and across the brightly lighted kitchen, and out the rear door, where I fell down the back stoop onto the lawn and went on all fours toward the nearest pile of bricks for my wall.

My wall. It was now six feet tall, running all the way around the yard, with no entrances or breaks anywhere on its three sides. In normal physical condition, I could have climbed that wall and gotten to the other side without too much difficulty, but not now. My arms trembled at every exertion, and my legs could barely support my weight; they hadn’t been able to carry me down the steps from the back porch. I had spent two years building this wall, and now it had trapped me.

I lay panting behind the bricks, hoping to build up strength in however much time I had before Carver and Vigevano came after me. But that time would be counted in seconds, and what I needed now was days—days to rebuild my strength and let my battered body heal itself.

Still, I did have this little breather, this moment of comparative freedom, that shot from out of the night had done that much. And it had reduced my opposition by one more, also, so that what had originally been four men lined up against me was now down to two.

And it had done a third thing. It had told me who had killed the John Doe.

It’s strange how the mind works, sometimes going on about its own business regardless of what is happening in the real world all around it. The instant the shot had been fired, I had known who had fired it and why, and from that I had known who had killed the John Doe and Dan Tynebourne and the girl—I supposed she was a Jane Doe now, at least for the moment—and why those killings had been done. The knowledge was absolutely useless to me in my present condition, but I did know it.

The shot had combined with two other things, both of them statements made to me by Dan Tynebourne. Two things I had heard him say, which told me the who and the why, not only of the killings, but of the forgeries.

Now I would be willing to talk to Hargerson. Now I would be happy to tell him the complete story of the woman seen leaving the museum, and my call to Marty Kengelberg, and the names and motives of those who had blinded Grinella. I would be pleased to tell him all that, because I would also be able to tell him who had done the killings, and the two things were not at all related, and the discovery of the murderer would obliterate public interest in the inadvertent little sideshow that Linda and I had almost been forced to put on.

But there was only one thing wrong with my current willingness to talk to Hargerson: the back door of the house had just opened and closed, and Willie Vigevano was coming looking for me with a knife.

I was crouched down behind the bricks, and I felt around the general area for something, anything, with which to defend myself. My hand hit something metal, and a wooden handle, and I grabbed for it—a trowel. Not much against a knife, particularly in my current condition, but it was something. A trowel in my right hand, and a brick in my left. I shifted position, got my feet under me, and waited there crouched, aching and burning in every part of my body, fully expecting to be killed at some point in the next few minutes; perhaps few seconds.

Vigevano had come out alone. Light-spill from the kitchen windows outlined him for me, and helped him pick his way through the minor construction site that I had made of my back yard. He came forward very cautiously, more cautiously than I would have thought necessary with me for his only opponent, and he moved with his head and upper torso thrust forward, the knife stretched out ahead of himself as though it were a mine detector. The knife moved left and right and left, back and forth like the head of a snake, and Vigevano moved slowly out across the yard.

Where was Carver? I kept peering up over the pile of bricks toward the house, expecting Carver to come out, but as time went by and he still hadn’t showed, I realized he wasn’t going to be coming out at all. Either he was still toward the front of the house, believing himself pinned down by the sniper from outside—whom I expected to be long gone by now—or he had run away, leaving only Vigevano still determined to take vengeance on me.

So we were one and one, after all, Vigevano and I; what he had offered me over the phone last night. Except that it was hardly an even match, given my condition and his weaponry.

He was getting closer. His face was in silhouette, but I could imagine the strained tense smile it was wearing, the squinting around his eyes as he tried to find me in the litter of the back yard. The light from the kitchen threw long black shadows amid the mounds of bricks and lumber, in one of which I was hiding, and all of which would prove difficult for him to see into.

He was nearly to me. My knees ached from crouching, my eyes were watering, my grip on both my weapons was shaky and uncertain. I waited.

He was parallel with me, still staring out deeper into the yard. I looked up at him, perhaps six feet away from me, and waited for him to see me; when he did, I would move.

And he kept going. His head turned in my direction twice, and both times he failed to see me. He took another cautious step, and another, and was completely past me; I was looking now at his back.

Despite myself I relaxed a little, my forearms lowering till my knuckles touched the ground, my head sagging forward. Vigevano took another step away from me.

Could I escape while his back was turned? I thought of it, even turned my head to look toward the house, but I knew I’d never make it. Even if Carver weren’t still in the house, it would be impossible. I wouldn’t be able to get there from here without making some noise that would attract Vigevano, and I was in no condition now to outrun him.

I turned my head again, to look once more at Vigevano. There was only one thing to do.

I straightened, very slowly, having to lean on the pile of bricks for support. My knees didn’t want to unbend. I was really in hopeless shape for what I had to do, but there just wasn’t any choice.

I headed toward Vigevano. I was trying to move quickly and silently, but I did neither.

Vigevano heard me while I was still too far away. He spun around, the knifeblade sparkling in the light from the kitchen, and now I could see the strain and hatred in his face.

We lunged at one another simultaneously, his movements smoother and faster than mine. But I also threw the brick in my left hand, awkwardly, throwing it underhanded, not to wound but merely to distract and confuse. He was now facing the light, so I must have been no more than a bulky silhouette to him, and he probably didn’t know at first what the black thing was that came flying up at him. He ducked away from it, losing the momentum of his charge, and I swung the edge of the trowel with all my might at the wrist of his knife-hand.

He yelled. The knife dropped to the ground, but the impact with his wrist had pulled the trowel out of my own uncertain grip. Now, for the moment, neither of us had a weapon.

When he had called me at the museum last night, I had thought of Vigevano as trying to pull me back into the fight situations of childhood; now we were there with a vengeance. What I did next was an automatic schoolyard reaction; I closed with him and wrapped my arms around his waist.

We used to call this the bear hug. My right arm was around his waist and clutching the inner crook of my left elbow. My left forearm was lifted like the lever of a slot machine, and all I had to do was bend the forearm back toward my shoulder to increase the pressure. My face was tucked in against his neck for protection, and I was applying as much pressure as I possibly could.

Vigevano had been in schoolyards, too. He knew that a bear hug will finally drive all the breath out of your body and leave you limp and defenseless and barely half-conscious, and he knew all the schoolyard defenses. He kicked my shins, he tried to knee me, he punched me in the ribs and the kidneys, he tried to get a grip in my hair to bend my head back so he could get at my face, he rabbit-punched me in the back of the neck, he even bit my shoulder. But I knew this was my last chance for survival out here, and nothing was going to make me give up the grip.

It seemed to take forever for him to weaken. For a while I was afraid my own strength would give out before his, and I tried to squeeze even harder, though already my left arm was bent back on itself so far that no blood was getting into the fingers of my right hand. And still he clawed and fought and pummeled me, twisting his body from side to side, trying to get away.

And abruptly he stopped. His breath gasped in my ear, and his hands were resting on my shoulders. We were like a parody of lovers. In a voice so hoarse and breathless it seemed to be coming from a machine rather than a man, he said, “You’re killing me.” And his left hand beat feebly against my right shoulder.

Now I knew I had him. Until this instant, I had been defeatist, I had fully expected to die out here, I had been struggling only because one struggles, one does not go quietly. But now I knew I would win, and the knowledge made me stronger, and I bent him backward, squeezing, and he made hoarse cries like some starving buzzard, and we both toppled over, me getting my arms out just in time so that he landed heavily on his back and I landed on top of him.

He was still conscious, but he couldn’t fight me any more. I crawled up to a kneeling position astride his chest—the schoolyard again—and hit him with my fists until I was sure he was out. And then I just sat there for a minute, worn out, my body collapsing after the struggle.

But I couldn’t do that; Carver might still be around, Livingston might have regained consciousness, Vigevano himself would be coming back to life pretty soon. There was still a lot I had to do.

Beginning with Vigevano. I wanted to immobilize him, and I thought at first of tying his wrists and ankles, but I doubted my hands were capable right now of tying knots. I felt the pulse in the side of his neck, and it was beating rapidly; it wouldn’t be very long before he was conscious again.

I couldn’t very well stand over him with a brick and knock him out every time he came to. I grimaced down at him with a deep sense of irritation, and finally gave it all up for the moment and decided to concentrate elsewhere.

The house. Carver, Livingston, Knox.

I climbed off Vigevano and struggled to my feet. I was tottering like a drunk. I looked around vaguely for the knife Vigevano had dropped, failed to find it, and gave it up. Instead, I moved toward the house, stumbling along, my arms hanging at my sides.

Carver was gone. The front door was ajar, and Knox and Livingston were both lying in the front hallway. I shut the door and looked at them both and Knox was as dead as I’d known he was. Livingston was still unconscious, and his breathing had an unhealthy bubbling sound to it; I had given him a bad concussion.

What a mess. I went back to the kitchen, opened the junk drawer, and got out the length of picture wire I’d remembered as being in there. I carried this back out to the yard, found Vigevano still out, and rolled him heavily over onto his face. I wound picture wire around his wrists and ankles until I was satisfied he wouldn’t be able to get away from it, and then went back into the house again.

God, I wanted to stop moving! I reached for the phone.

21

THE SIRENS STARTED WHILE I was still walking, just over a block away from the house. I hunched my shoulders a bit and trudged on. The siren went past a block to my right, and I heard it descend and die as they came to a stop in front of my house.

I had only made the one phone call before leaving, contacting the local precinct. Knox was going to stay dead forever and didn’t matter, but Livingston needed to be hospitalized as quickly as possible and I didn’t want Vigevano given time to get away, so I’d phoned the precinct and given them the address of my house and said there was some trouble there. I hadn’t given my name, and immediately after the call I’d left the house. It was a continuing effort to move, but I had to finish this thing now, tonight. Tomorrow I could sleep. Tomorrow I would sleep for days.

Our neighborhood tavern was ahead, its dim red neon sign extending out over the sidewalk. It was the nearest place I knew of with both a pay phone and a place to sit down. I headed for it, trudging along, placing one foot doggedly in front of the other, and finally reached the door and pushed it open and went in.

I have never been one to spend my evenings in the local bar, so I wasn’t known by the bartender and his four customers; I was simply one of those occasional strangers who drop in, have a drink or two, and are never seen again. They all glanced at me curiously as I walked in, but when they saw I wasn’t a friend they all turned their attention back to the television set at the far end of the room. What looked like the eleven o’clock news was on, which was the first I had any indication what time it was.

The bartender strolled down the bar toward the spot where I was heading, and we came to rest at the same instant, he saying, “What can I do for you?”

I asked for Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, feeling I needed something that would be both a pick-me-up and an anesthetic. When he brought it, I shoved him a five-dollar bill and asked for change for the pay phone. I then took two or three quick sips of my drink, slipped a dime from the change he put on the bar in front of me, and walked across the floor to the booth at the rear. I was grateful for the dim lighting in the bar; it not only obscured my beat-up appearance, it also hid the stiff awkwardness of my movements. The dimness, and the general lack of interest in me; the bartender had kept one eye on the television set while serving me, and was now back to watching full time.

I sat in the phone booth, inserted my dime, and laboriously dialed the number of Hargerson’s precinct. He wasn’t there, of course, but I said it was important I get in touch with him, and left my name and the number of this phone. The detective I was talking to promised to pass the message on, and I went back outside to attract the bartender’s attention again and say, “If that phone rings, it’ll be for me.”

“Sure,” he said, and looked at the screen again.

There were a couple of tables near the phone booth. I got my drink from the bar and went over to sit at one of the tables, letting my body sag into relaxation until I realized I was on the verge of passing out again; after which I forced myself to sit up straighten

A siren went by, an ambulance this time. The customers glanced toward the street, but were more interested in television. I sipped at my drink and waited.

Sirens continued to go by intermittently in the half-hour before Hargerson called me back. A second ambulance went through, and several more police cars, and then each ambulance separately returned again. There would be chaos and confusion at my house, with no one there capable of answering questions; except Vigevano, who would be unlikely to want to answer any.

The thought of the explanations that would have to be made was staggering. The time was coming—tomorrow, the day after—when I would have to talk and talk and talk. But not yet, not until this was all finished and I’d had my chance to rest.

Except, of course, for talking to Hargerson. He called at last, half an hour after I’d left the message, and I said, “If you’ll trust me and do what I say, I’ll give you the whole thing tonight, everything you want.”

“What do you mean, the whole thing? All I want is who threw the acid.”

“And who killed the John Doe,” I said. “And who did the forgeries at the museum, and why.”

He was silent for a second, and then said, “You have all of that? All of a sudden you’ve got it?”

“All of a sudden,” I said.

“You didn’t have it before, but now you do.”

“I’ll explain the whole thing,” I promised. “But there isn’t enough to arrest the killer yet. I need you for that.”

“Tobin, what the hell are you up to?”

“Getting this mess over and done with,” I said. “So I can have a peaceful life again. I promise I’ll give you everything you want. Will you let me run it my own way?”

A longer pause this time; then he said, “All right, Tobin. Everybody thinks you’re hot shit. So far I don’t see it, but I’ll go along. Up to a point.”

“That’s all I could ask for. Now, there was some trouble at my house tonight, so I’m not there. A pickup may be out on me, but I don’t want to talk to anybody officially until we clean up the museum mess. I’d like you to come meet with me, but just you. All right?”

“I’ll come alone,” he said. “What we do after that depends on you.”

“Of course.”

“If you’re full of crap, I turn you over to whoever wants you.”

“Naturally,” I said. “I take that for granted.”

“Good.”

I told him the name and address of the tavern, and he said he would be there in less than an hour. I left the booth, went to the bar, and got myself another Jack Daniel’s. Then I sat down at the table again to wait.

22

A HAND WAS GRIPPING my shoulder, shaking me without gentleness. A voice said, “Okay, come on, come on.”

I sat upright, terrified without knowing why. As I stared around at the dark barroom, I slowly came to remember where I was and what was happening and why I was here.

The bartender was the one holding my shoulder. He was giving me a look of disapproval tinged with disgust; I wasn’t the kind of customer he wanted. “You don’t sleep it off in here, fella,” he said. “You go home, or you go wherever you want.”

I’d fallen asleep, without even realizing it. I stared past his arm at the television set; a talk show had been starting when Hargerson had called, and it was still going on. I said, “What time—?” But my mouth was too dry. I cleared my throat, licked my lips, tried again: “What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “Ten to one.”

The customers were dividing their attention between the talk show and me. I said, “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“You go on home,” he said, and tugged a bit at my shoulder.

I realized he had taken a closer look at me now and seen the condition of my face and clothing and had decided I was a bum. There was no choice any more; he didn’t want my kind in his bar. So I struggled to my feet, with some not very gentle assistance from him, and made my way stiffly to the door and the street.

There were no more sirens. The mess at my house had been cleaned up by now, but there would probably still be a man on duty there, waiting for Kate or me to come home.

I looked around, and a car was parked in darkness to my left, under a tree and some distance from the nearest lightpost. I went over to the car and sat on the fender and waited, shivering a bit, feeling very cold after my unexpected nap.

It was about fifteen minutes later that the black Ford pulled up in front of the bar and Hargerson got out, looking bigger and tougher than ever under the red neon. I slid off the fender and moved forward, but Hargerson was already heading for the tavern, and I had to call his name, surprising myself by how hoarse and cracked my voice was when I tried to raise it.

I guess he didn’t recognize it as a voice he knew. He stopped with his hand out toward the tavern door, about to push it open, and turned his head to frown in my direction. I shuffled toward him, making the best time I could, and he said, doubtfully, “Tobin?”

“Let’s get in the car,” I said.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you the whole story,” I said. I was still walking, angling now across the sidewalk toward the black Ford.

He held the passenger door open for me, which was the first I’d realized just how bad I must actually look. I crawled into the car and he shut the door and trotted around to get behind the wheel and say, “All right, give.”

“Drive,” I said. “We’re going to the museum. I’ll tell you the story along the way.”

Hargerson had his moments; happily this was one of them. He didn’t argue, he just started the car and pulled away from the curb.

It took a long time to tell him the whole thing, though he very rarely interrupted with questions. But a kind of dark iris kept trying to close in from the periphery of my vision, narrowing the circle through which I could still see, and I knew if that iris ever closed completely, I would be out for several hours; so I had to keep pausing to catch my breath, shift position, force the iris a bit further open once more.

He only needed to ask two questions before he understood and accepted my reasons for telling the initial lie about Linda. And then he had one comment: “You shouldn’t have called your friend the same night. You should have waited a few days for the killing to blow over.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “But it was a very upsetting thing, an emotional thing, seeing Linda after three years, and I just went ahead and did it. To get it over with, I think.”

“So it was Carver and his friends that threw the acid?”

“Willie Vigevano threw it. Mort Livingston drove the car. Fred Carver gave the orders.”

“How’d they get to you? How’d they find out about you?”

So I told him about Dink, and the sequence of events, and my meeting with Dink which had produced the names. And then the call to me from Vigevano, and then the four of them being in my house tonight, and what had happened. He gave me a startled look when I told him about Knox being shot from outside the house: “I don’t follow that.”

“Once again,” I said, “somebody else took something that was meant for me. That’s happened twice in the last week, first with Grinella and then with Knox.”

“You’re not a good man to be around,” he said. “But if all four of them are in there, who’s shooting at you?”

“The guy who killed the John Doe,” I said.

“Why? What’s he got against you?”

“The dead girl talked to me. He doesn’t know how much she said, he doesn’t know what connections I might make. Particularly once the girl has been identified, since she probably has a direct relationship with the killer.”

“She’s been identified,” he said. “Her name’s Carol Beck. She graduated from NYU five years ago and spent four years in the Peace Corps.”

“In Guatemala.”

Another frowning look at me. “That’s right,” he said. “She just got back a couple months ago. She had a nervous breakdown, that’s why she came back.”

“I didn’t know about that.”

“What they call culture shock,” he said. “People who can’t make it in a real primitive society, or a different society, and crack up.”

I remembered what she’d said about the bodies in the trees, and her fear of her own body ending in a tree after death. Not that what she’d been given in her own culture was that much better; but in water or in air, a dead body is still dead.

I said, “She must have graduated the same year as Dan Tynebourne.”

“I suppose so,” he said. “Around the same time.”

“When the John Doe is identified,” I said, “he’ll turn out to be a classmate of theirs, and his first name is George.”

“You told me that name when you first called me about the girl being missing. It hasn’t led us anywhere yet.”

“It will.”

He brooded for a few seconds, and then said, “You think you know who the killer is.”

“Yes.”

“Then why are we going to the museum? Why not go pick him up?”

“Because I don’t have anything you could get an indictment with. But maybe we can talk him into bringing some evidence with him.”

He continued to frown out the windshield as we drove along, still crossing Queens toward Manhattan. “Don’t give me a name,” he said. “Give me your reasons.”

I found myself grinning at Hargerson’s profile; his sense of competition led him to some strange behavior. I said, “All right. The first thing is the forgeries themselves. The profit in the robberies was very small, particularly considering the amount of work involved in doing the copies. You could spend the same amount of time washing dishes in some diner and still make almost as much.”

He nodded. “Very small potatoes. That’s been a problem, why anybody should do a thing like that.”

“Not for profit,” I said. “That’s the point. It wasn’t done for the usual profit motive. It was done to divert money from a place the thieves considered useless to places they considered useful. Dan Tynebourne talked to me about the forgeries once, and asked me if I thought the thieves were maybe humanitarians. He meant they might be people interested in social causes, who would prefer to see money used for those causes than to see it used to display old cartoons. He presented it as a theory, of course, but what he was doing was talking about himself.”

“He was the thief?”

“One of them. I think there were four originally. Tynebourne, the John Doe, the girl—”

“Carol Beck.”

“Carol Beck, right. And Phil Crane.”

Hargerson gave me a sharp look. “Crane? The professor?”

“He was probably the instigator,” I said. “Last night there was an argument at the museum between Crane and Ernest Ramsey about whether or not the place should be reopened with all those forgeries on the wall. Tynebourne was on the fence about it for a while, but then came down on Crane’s side. At one point he said to Crane something about the forgeries simply being copies of copies, not copies of originals, since what they have there is mostly prints from newspapers and magazines anyway. The idea being that the real things are copies and the forgeries are copies, so they’re all the same. And then he said to Crane, ‘You used to say that yourself.’ I didn’t pick it up then, but the sentence can only mean that Crane used to say it before the forgeries were generally known to be forgeries.”

“I follow it,” Hargerson said, “but I wouldn’t like to explain it to an assistant DA.”

“Neither would I. But it’s enough to convince me that Crane was a part of the forgeries, and that the idea was not to steal money but to liberate it. Take from the Establishment and give it to the people.”

He shook his head, with an expression of disgust. “A thief is a thief,” he said.

“People can convince themselves of things, if they want to. Anyway, Carol Beck left the scheme when she graduated, and went off to the Peace Corps, leaving the three men. The John Doe went to Canada to avoid the draft, and I suppose he was the one who sold the originals, coming back down to New York every once in a while to pick up some more. Tynebourne and Crane did the forgery work, and Crane distributed the money.”

He said, “You’re saying Crane did the killings.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why?”

“I suppose he was diverting the cash to his own pockets instead of things like free lunch programs. The John Doe found out, and confronted him with it, and was going to expose him if Crane didn’t replace the money. That would be down in the workroom. Crane could get in the side door and down into the basement without the night guard knowing he was there; he’d probably been doing it for months, going down there with Tynebourne or the John Doe, working on the forgeries or turning originals over to the John Doe to take to Canada.”

Hargerson said, “So he killed the John Doe to keep from having the whistle blown.”

“He killed him out of panic, I think,” I said. “And then was afraid to leave the body in the workroom because it might lead to the discovery of the forgeries or in some other way connect directly with him. So he stripped it and cleaned it, and cleaned the room, and brought the body upstairs to try to suggest it had been brought in from outside.”

“Why didn’t Tynebourne identify the body?”

“Crane must have told him some stranger had evidently done the killing, and awkward questions would be raised if the body was identified, so they should both keep quiet. But once Carol Beck came in, with her fears and neuroses about dead bodies, wanting to give it identification so it could be treated right, Crane had to kill both Tynebourne and the girl. And then he had to try for me.”

Hargerson grunted. “I half wish he’d got you,” he said.

I looked at him, thinking, Only half? So I’d come up in Hargerson’s estimation. But I didn’t say anything.

23

CRANE ANSWERED THE PHONE on the third ring, and I said, “This is Mitch Tobin.”

There was a short pause, and then a sudden bark of laughter, and he said, “Oh, man, you’re a groove! What a head trip you put me through just then, you sounded so down and heavy there: This is Mitch Tobin. You are beautiful, man.”

He wasn’t bad himself. He had to have been sure I was already dead, but the pause after I’d given my name had been very short, and he was already adapted to the new situation. I said, “I hope you don’t mind me calling you at this time of night, but I’ve got a problem, and I thought maybe you could help me out.”

“Well, sure, Mitch, I dig you fine, you know that.”

“Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “Somebody tried to shoot me tonight. Down at my house.”

“Shoot you! With a gun? You mean, to kill?”

“That’s right.”

“Man, you’re very lucky they missed.”

“I ducked,” I said. He didn’t know yet that he’d actually killed someone else by mistake, and there was no point telling him. If he believed his gun hadn’t killed anybody yet, he would be less likely to get rid of it. “It was very close,” I said.

“Well, you’re damn lucky,” he said.

“Well, I got to thinking about it, afterward, wondering why anybody would want to kill me, and I decided it probably had to have something to do with the killing here in the museum.”

“Sure,” he said. “That scans.”

“There were a couple of things I’d taken from Dan Tynebourne’s apartment,” I said, “that I thought might be useful if I ever had to defend myself with the police.”

“What? Wait a second, Mitch, start that one again.”

“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said. “You know the Mystery Woman who was supposed to have left here the night of the murder?”

Of course he knew about her. He must have seen her, while skipping out of here after leaving the John Doe upstairs. But he said, “Wasn’t there something in the papers about that?”

“Yes. I said there hadn’t been anybody here.”

“Oh, Mitch,” he said, and I could hear the roguish grin in his voice. “You mean you fibbed to the fuzz, man.”

“I knew she didn’t have anything to do with the killing,” I said. “And we’re both married, and it could have been misinterpreted.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I know what you mean,” he said, with very heavy-handed humor.

“Well, they suspect me,” I said. “The police do. So I don’t want to go to them if I don’t have to. I want to keep out of their way. But I thought if they ever did come around I could just show them this evidence and get them to think about other things besides me.

“That’s very smart, Mitch. What evidence?”

“Papers,” I said. “And you know who I think they point to?”

“No, who?”

“Ernest Ramsey.”

There was another little silence, and another sudden burst of laughter. “Ramsey! Are you sure, Mitch?”

“No, I’m not. And I don’t want to get somebody in trouble if I’m wrong. These papers could mean somebody else, I realize that. And I thought you probably knew the museum as well as anybody, so you could look at them and tell me what you think. Because if he’s going to shoot at me, I’m going to have to go to the police.”

“Well, yeah, that makes sense. Where are you now, Mitch?”

“At the museum. I thought I was safer here, so I sent the other guard home and took his place. Could you come over here tonight?”

“Uhhhh … Listen, Mitch.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t be there right away,” he said.

Hargerson was across the room from me. I glanced over at him and smiled. Just as Willie Vigevano’s ‘just you and me’ repetition had told me he wasn’t alone, Phil Crane’s careful tone of voice in saying ‘I couldn’t be there right away’ told me he’d taken the bait. I knew what he would plan now, and how he would handle it.

I said, “Well, when?”

“I’ve got people here,” he said. “You know, we’re blowing a little grass. I could maybe be there around, uh, five. Okay?”

It was now just after one-thirty. “That’s fine,” I said. “I’d really appreciate that.”

“Okay, Mitch. Around five it is.”

We both hung up, and I said to Hargerson, “He bit.”

“You sure?”

“He said he’d be here around five. That means he’ll show up within the next hour.” I glanced at the phone. “But he’ll call back first,” I said, and as I finished talking the phone rang. I said, “See what I mean?” and picked up the receiver.

It was Crane. He said, “Listen, man, I wanted to be sure it was really okay. Five isn’t too late, is it?”

What he’d wanted was to be sure I was really here. I said, “No, I’ll be here all night.”

“Fine,” he said. “See you later, Mitch.”

“See you later.”

We hung up again. Hargerson said, “That was him, huh?”

“Yes. He’ll be coming over pretty soon now.”

“Right,” Hargerson said, and got to his feet, and walked out of the room. I watched him go, and it occurred to me that my life was now in that man’s hands, and I experienced one moment of doubt and misgiving. What if Hargerson simply waited till Crane killed me? Then he’d catch the killer red-handed, and also repay me for the blinding of Grinella.

Except that I didn’t believe Hargerson’s mind worked that way. He would do his own vengeances, he would move in straight lines and perform blunt actions. And somehow, in the last hour, he and I had become something of a partnership; a very tenuous and short-term partnership, and one without much liking on either side, but a true partnership just the same.

We had come here to the museum, and Hargerson had used his police authority to send my replacement guard home, after I’d assured him he would be paid for a full night’s work. I’d thought of using him in the trap, but he wasn’t armed and he shouldn’t be expected to involve himself in dangers that had nothing to do with his job, so it was better that he went home.

Now the two of us were alone here in the museum. As usual, the lights were out everywhere but in this office. Hargerson was to have stationed himself where he could watch the approach to this room, and all I had to do now was sit here in the light and wait for Crane to come to me. I also had to remain conscious, which was the most difficult part of all. The black iris wanted to close itself entirely; it was a constant struggle to keep it even partly open.

Crane was even more cautious than I’d expected. He called again about five after two: “Listen, Mitch, this thing looks like it’s going on here the rest of the night. It’ll be more like six when I get there, okay?”

“I go off at seven,” I said. “Any time before then.”

“Crazy. See you around six.”

We both hung up, and I wondered if Hargerson was hiding close enough to have heard my half of the conversation. The temptation was strong to call out to him, but I knew I shouldn’t, and that it was pointless, and that if he was smart he wouldn’t answer anyway. But I did wish for the contact.

About ten minutes later I thought I heard a sound out there in the hall, something like the anonymous scuttle a rat makes inside a wall. Was it Hargerson shifting from one place to another? Was it Crane arriving? I waited, looking at the doorway, the iris almost completely gone, my body tense as my ears strained to hear something more. But nothing further happened, and I relaxed again, and five minutes later Phil Crane was standing in the doorway, grinning at me. “Hi, Mitch,” he said.

I looked at him. I wanted to look past him for Hargerson, but I didn’t. “Hello,” I said.

He’d been standing with his hands relaxed at his sides, but now he lifted one and showed me the gun he was holding. An efficient-looking revolver, with a longer barrel than most concealment weapons. It was more like the kind of gun they used in the Old West. Still grinning, he said, “I don’t want to Bogart you, man, but right now I want you to get up and walk over here.”

I said, “What are you doing? What’s this all about?”

“Forget it, Mitch,” he said, smiling happily at me. “You didn’t fake me out for a second on the phone, man. We know all about each other. Now come over here.”

I got up and went around the desk and walked toward him. There was nothing to say. But where was Hargerson?

Crane gave me a faintly surprised look. “Man, you look like you’ve been in a pit with alligators.”

“I have.”

He stepped back as I reached the doorway, and gestured with the gun. “Go down to the front door,” he said. “Be careful you don’t trip over your pal.”

I walked forward into darkness, and behind me Crane switched on a flashlight, so that I could see Hargerson lying like a sack of laundry on the floor. I stepped around him, and walked on.

“Open the door, Mitch.”

All three locks were fastened. I opened them, and pulled open the door. Not looking around, I said, “Where are we going?”

“Just outside. No more killings in the museum, Mitch, it makes people suspicious.”

Damn Hargerson. I stepped outside, and went down the stoop, and behind me Crane said, “I want you to walk right across the street.”

I knew he meant to shoot me when I reached the middle of the street. I moved slowly, hoping Hargerson would regain consciousness in time to save me, hoping traffic would come down the street, pedestrians, something, anything, and all of a sudden Dink Campbell came boiling out of a car to my right, running toward me, yelling, “Tobin, I’ve got to talk to you!”

Crane was firing as I turned, but he was shooting at Dink and me at the same time, and we were both moving, and the sudden change had startled him, and he didn’t hit a thing. I ran forward crouching and hit him in the stomach with my shoulder, and the two of us went crashing to the sidewalk. But Crane still had the gun in his hand, and he was fresher and stronger than me, and no matter how I flailed after that revolver, I couldn’t reach it.

Then Dink was beside us, and he kicked Crane twice; once in the gun-hand and once in the head. Crane flopped like a wet towel flung to the floor, and I rolled painfully off him and sat up in the street, blinking and panting.

Dink said, loudly and angrily, “What the hell did you do to the guys? The cops were around my place, they think I did it! I’m not taking any raps for you, Tobin!”

He’d just saved my life. I wondered how he’d feel about it when he knew. “Oh, shut up, Dink,” I said, and the iris closed in completely, and I went away.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1972 by Tucker Coe

Cover design by Alexander Doolan

978-1-4804-2896-6

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