Don't Lie to Me Read Online Free PDF

want, Mitch?”
    â€œIf some attention could be paid to these guys, it might help.”
    â€œKeep them moving, huh? Distract them a little.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œTell me about them.”
    I told him the names and background I knew, and then he said, “Mitch, can I ask you a question?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œI may be out of line …”
    â€œAsk anyway.”
    â€œYou 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—”
    â€œIt was a question in my head,” he said. “I just wanted to bring it out and look at it.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œHave they found out who did it?”
    â€œThey 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?”
    â€œThey figure about twenty-five.”
    â€œThat’s old to be a John Doe.”
    â€œExcept 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?”
    â€œNo, 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