Don't Lie to Me

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Book: Read Don't Lie to Me for Free Online
Authors: Donald E. Westlake
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.”
    â€œIf it’s that tight,” I said, “the police should be able to come up with the answer very soon.”
    â€œBut the man was a stranger to us,” he said. “A stranger to everybody. Are you sure this door was locked?”
    â€œAll 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.
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œThen he’ll live a very nervous life,” Muller said. “See you tomorrow.”
    â€œSo 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

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