Don't Lie to Me (11 page)

“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.

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.