Don't Lie to Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind of basket-weaving.
    The idea of the wall was that it completely enclosed my back yard. When finished, it would mark the perimeter of the yard on three sides, with the house itself enclosing the fourth. There were no doors or windows in the wall, no breaks of any kind. I had made the footing of concrete block, and the wall itself was brick, two rows with dirt packed between. When finished—if I ever finish it—the wall would be ten feet high and two feet thick. It is now six feet high, just over my head, and the work has been slowed even more—six feet in nearly three years isn’t very fast—by the necessity to build and move scaffolding from which to work. I have never wanted the wall to be complete, and have always been aware that the process of working on it was its own goal, but in the last few months I’ve spent less and less time on its construction, as though the need for basket-weaving had begun to recede into the past.
    But today I felt the need to occupy myself again. And most of the time out there was spent in fantasies in which I was given the opportunity to demonstrate my determination not to start anything with Linda again. The demonstrations were made to Linda, to Kate, to Marty, and even just to myself.
    Grazko called back at four-thirty to say the museum wanted me to come to work as usual this evening. “The cops finished already,” he said. “You ask me, they’re going to Open it.”
    â€œOpen” is a form of Newspeak; it means “close.” The Open File—in some police departments called the Pending File—contains unsolved cases which are not actively being investigated. They are cases which have been closed without resolution.
    â€œSo everything’s back to normal,” I said.
    â€œAlmost. The museum’s shut down. But they still want somebody there at night.”
    To find the bodies, I thought; but Grazko and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which I would say that kind of thing aloud. We said so long to one another, I told Kate I would be working tonight, and she adjusted dinner to suit.
    I got to the museum a few minutes early, and found it as brightly lighted as when it was open. The front door was unlocked, and Muller was at his usual place inside. Allied also furnished daytime guards to the museum, three of them, of whom Muller was the senior man. Stout and sixtyish, Muller had spent thirty years in the Army as an MP, and was now living comfortably on Army retirement pay. He worked for Allied mostly to occupy his mind and keep from going stale. Not from going fat, certainly.
    There seemed to be activity within the museum, a lot of it. I said, “I thought the place was closed.”
    â€œIt is. They’re doing an inventory, want to see if anything’s gone.”
    It turned out Muller was the only daytime guard on duty. The museum had various unofficial threads of connection with New York University, and several graduate students were now in the process of checking the contents of the building against the catalogue. They were working under the direction of the two men who were the principal links between museum and university, they being both faculty members at NYU and directors of the museum. One of these was Ernest Ramsey, whose specialty was American history, a short, slender, neat, fussy man in his fifties, with a gray spade beard and the manner of running his life from lists; we had met four or five times in the three weeks of my employment here, and I had always had the feeling that each sentence he said to me was afterward checked off on a clipboard he maintained in his head. The other was named Phil Crane, from the Art Department at the university; an intense, long-haired man in his late thirties, he wore a heavily undisciplined beard to go with his love beads and bell-bottom slacks, and tended to pepper his language with the slang of the moment. Ramsey and Crane made a comic contrast with