Don't Lie to Me by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online

hand could make a quick impression of one of those keys and leave no one the wiser.
    Still, the fact of carrying the body upstairs did suggest a desire to conceal the direction of the killer’s movements as well as the origin. Also, it had been placed in the very middle of a square room with doors in all four walls, again tending to confuse, to obscure indications of the direction from which it had come. Not that I thought the killer had chosen the particular room and placement for that conscious reason, but that his conscious desire to cover his tracks had led him to these unconscious lengths.
    From where? I studied each door and window as I passed it, hoping to see some indication of the killer’s route, but of course there was nothing. I passed again the door leading to the basement, and paused to frown at it. There was no exit from the basement to the street, so this couldn’t have been his road, but nevertheless the door held my interest. I had never been below, had never felt any curiosity about it. But tonight my curiosity was high, in anything to do with this building. I went off to get that door’s key.
    This building had originally been a private home, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, having been built sometime before the turn of the century, when there were still fields and farmlands this far north of what was then considered the city. At that time the theater district had been on Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, and Fourteenth Street itself was the uptown shopping center. Now the nearest farm was in Connecticut, the theater district was in the West Forties, and the uptown shopping area was just down the block from here, Madison Avenue in the Fifties and Sixties. Fifteen years ago this building had been sold to the semi-private semi-university group which had turned it into the Museum of American Graphic Art. Money had been spent to re-create the original era of the house, if not its original appearance, while at the same time the plumbing and electricity and so on had been modernized. There had also been structural work done, firming up ancient walls and things like that.
    The result was an attractive large house, three stories plus basement and attic, with a private garden on one side. The basement was used for workshops, the ground floor for both display area and office space, the upper floors for display, and the attic for storage. The financing of all this quietly expensive good taste was a bafflement to me; I knew only that “foundation money” had formed the lion’s share.
    In any event, it was a setting far removed from the atmospheres of violence and sudden death. But if violence and sudden death had not actually happened here they had nevertheless been brought to this place, and the effect was that the house itself seemed different. It now seemed secretive, unhealthily empty, ingrown and unreal.
    I was full of this changed sense of the house when I unlocked the basement door and went down the stairs, but the reality down below was certainly simple and straightforward and mundane. A narrow corridor ran straight ahead toward the front of the building from the foot of the stairs, with a gray concrete floor, a whitewashed stone wall on the right, and a white plasterboard wall on the left. Two small windows high in the stone wall, up next to the acoustical ceiling, were barred on the inside and couldn’t have been used as an entrance.
    There were three doors spaced along the plasterboard wall, all shut but none locked. The nearest led into a cluttered L-shaped storage area that took up the rear portion of the basement including the part under the stairs. Discarded office furniture, picture frames, stacks of newspapers and magazines, filing cabinets, old light fixtures, and in a corner a cracked toilet lid.
    The second door, midway along the corridor, led to the furnace and general utilities. Everything was neat and clean here, the walls had been finished with