Don't Lie to Me (15 page)

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.

W
HEN 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.

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.