Don't Lie to Me (9 page)

“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.