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

pieces of paper from a museum endowed by foundations and connected to a university and in other ways also no doubt plugged in to what has appropriately been called the Establishment had brought a full inspector out in complete uniform.
    The inspector was peering down at our end of the room, and now he called, “Are we all in here now?”
    He got a murmur back from the group.
    â€œAll right, fine. My name is Stanton, Inspector William Stanton.” He paused, perhaps to give us time to recognize his name from the newspapers. I did not, but I knew inspectors tended to get frequent newspaper coverage, so perhaps some of the people around me did remember the name. However, there was no audible response, so he went on: “Most of you know what we’re doing here, but just to get the record straight and avoid starting a rumor factory, let me give you a rundown.”
    He gave us a rundown, adding nothing I didn’t already know. In fact, the only interesting part of his talk was its one omission; he never once mentioned the John Doe. He wasn’t here on a murder investigation, and he was making no bones about it; he was here because some papers had been stolen from some important people.
    Since I was toward the rear of his audience, it was relatively easy for me to let my mind wander; unfortunately, it insisted on wandering to that workroom. I looked around, trying to find something else to attract my attention, and my eye lit on a sand-filled cigarette receptacle to one side of the doorway just behind me. A partly crumpled cigarette pack was lying on the sand among the jutting cigarette butts; Marlboro, it was, Grinella’s brand. But no, it wasn’t either; I looked more closely and saw that the lettering was wrong, though the design was right. M-a-something.
    Maverick. That’s what it was. Then I remembered hearing a radio commercial for that brand recently, and being surprised to hear a cigarette commercial until it had turned out to be a station in Canada. Maverick was apparently the Canadian brand name for Marlboro; they used the same pack design and the same music theme in their commercials. I’d heard it over the weekend, up in Plattsburg, near the Canadian border.
    Things happen in threes, they say. Here I’d run across Maverick cigarettes twice in three days; I wondered if there’d really be a third.
    Up front, Inspector Stanton was finishing his rundown. He was a stocky man, gray-haired under his uniform cap, and he was clearly uncomfortable about his footing on that upholstered bench. I think he would have liked a handy shoulder to brace himself against, but his dignity wouldn’t let him ask for one. He got to the end of his explanation of what had been going on, and then said, “With your cooperation, we should be able to clear this up, find the guilty party, and restore the originals in very short order. Everyone directly connected with the museum is in this room. I want to make it clear that I don’t look upon you all as suspects, but as potential witnesses. It may be that no one in this room knows the whole truth about what’s been going on here. But one of you may know one little fact, another knows another little fact, and so on. We want to get all those facts and put them together and get this mess cleaned up, and do it fast. So we’re going to ask you to give us statements now, and sign them, and we’ll also ask you to be available in case we want to check with you further. Let us know where you can be reached, tell us if you plan to travel anywhere.”
    He explained the logistics of the statement-taking; he himself wouldn’t talk individually to every one of us, though he would be seeing many of us along the way. Several teams of detectives would do the actual questioning, in different rooms of the museum. If we would all cooperate, we could be out of here in plenty of time for lunch. That’s what he said, but since it was now quarter