Don't Lie to Me

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Pretty well has to be,” he said, and grinned at me again, and moved to get to his feet, saying, “Well, it’ll all work itself out. I better be on my way.”

  “I’m glad you came by,” I said. That had been true up till our last exchange, but I tried to say it as though it were still true now.

  We walked together toward the entrance. I’d left the light on there, but we had to use the flashlight along the way. Grinella said, “When we find the killer, we’ll get all these questions answered. The woman, everything.”

  “This won’t get opened now, will it?”

  “Hell, no. Not with the thefts tied in.”

  I nodded, not happy. In the normal course of events, the John Doe case would have been opened in a week or ten days, and no more active investigation would ever have been done on it. So all I’d had to do would be nurse my one lie until the investigation came to a stop. But now, with murder and thefts tied together, the case wouldn’t be opened at all. They would keep poking and prying until they got to the bottom of it. Was there any chance at all I could keep Linda undiscovered in a situation like that?

  We were almost to the main entrance. I thought, If I tell Grinella, maybe …

  Somebody knocked at the door. Grinella said, “That’s Hargerson, wondering where the hell I am. I’ll get it.” He stepped ahead of me and opened the panel.

  What happened after that was too sudden and too fast to be sure of. Grinella opened the panel, something vague moved quickly and decisively in the night out there, something like water splashed in like ocean through an open porthole, Grinella screamed and stumbled backward clutching his face, and the lobby was suddenly full of a stomach-churning stench, strong and foul.

  Three locks, three locks. My fingers bumped them like blocks of wood in my haste, and behind me Grinella had fallen to the floor, still clutching his face and crying out in a muffled rasping voice. I yanked the door open and dashed out, and he could be seen running down the sidewalk. A car with lights on and motor running was pulled in by a fire hydrant down there, in a break in the line of parked cars.

  There was no parking permitted directly in front of the museum, so the black Ford now in that space was surely Grinella and Hargerson’s car. I came out yelling, “Hargerson! Hargerson! Stop that car!”

  The idiot. The absolute prize idiot. He got out of his car, and stood glowering across the hood at me. “What the hell are you at?”

  Down there, the runner had leaped into the waiting car, which shot forward toward the corner; the traffic light down there was green.

  “Stop them!” I yelled. “They just threw acid in your partner’s face—will you move it?”

  Then he did, but of course then it was too late. He was still clambering back in behind the wheel when the other car made the turn at the corner. Hargerson tore away in pursuit, his siren lifting, the red light mounted behind the windshield on the middle of the dashboard starting to turn, but he had no idea what the car he was chasing looked like; as he later explained, when he tore around the corner, he saw nothing but half a mile of ordinary traffic. The driver of the getaway car had known enough to drive normally once he was clear of the scene.

  Meantime, I had run back inside. Grinella was groaning and crying behind his hands, thrashing his head back and forth on the floor, kicking his feet like a spoiled child in a tantrum. I raced to the office and started making my phone calls.

  8

  DINK DIDN’T RECOGNIZE ME at first. But it was very early for him—not yet seven-thirty in the morning—and his eyes were still full of sleep. He opened the apartment door and blinked at me, standing there in my gray uniform, and said, “Yeah? What can I do for you?”

  “You can back up, Dink,” I said. “And you can keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “What?” He still didn’t recognize me, but he understood the line of patter. Dink has never been an aggressively violent type—though like most of us he can turn and fight if he has to—so he did as I’d ordered, backing away from his apartment door into the middle of the living room, keeping his hands well out and away from his body, but saying, “Are you kidding? You think I carry heat in my pajamas?”

  He was wearing pale blue pajamas and a maroon robe; he looked like something from a VA hospital. A short man, almost as short as Linda, Dink Campbell has an air of comic loser about him, a fatalistic easygoing acceptance of the disasters flesh is heir to. I didn’t know the source of his nickname, but it suited him to a T.

  I followed him into the apartment, closing the door behind me, looking quickly around this small neat semi-dark living room, and for just a second I faltered, I grew confused. This was a different apartment from the one where I used to meet Linda, back when Dink was in jail and I was on the force, but most of the furniture was the same. Even the placement was similar, sofa and chairs and lamps all organized just about the way they had been in my earlier life.

  And Dink, standing there in his pajamas and his open robe, gaping at me and holding his hands out from his sides where I could see them, he was a kind of cruel parody of the past he’d never seen, though I knew by now he’d heard about it. Sometimes, when I’d been working the graveyard shift, I would go to see Linda at six or seven in the morning, and she would meet me in a nightgown and robe, in a room like this, surrounded by this furniture.

  I hadn’t thought of that room for three years, nor the bedroom either. When remembered lust had upset me the other night on first seeing Linda again, there had been no images involving place, no recollection of setting to help build my desire. I hadn’t thought of rooms and lamps and sofas, so it had come as a bewildering surprise to realize all at once where I was. In the past I had burned with high passion when I had rushed in amid this furniture; I had rushed in now in the grip of high passion of a different sort, and the two passions had collided in the moment of recognition, the past cooling the present and leaving me for just an instant confused and uncertain, without my footing.

  It was Dink’s belated recognition of me that got me moving again. I saw it in his eyes a second before he said, in utter astonishment, “Tobin! For Christ’s sake, Tobin!”

  I pushed the door shut behind me and pointed to the brown armchair. “Sit down, Dink,” I said.

  He had let his hands fall to his sides, and now it was my gray Allied uniform he stared at, saying, “What the hell is going on? You’re not a cop.”

  “Just sit down, Dink,” I said. “For eight hours I’ve been wanting to hit somebody. Don’t make it you.”

  He made patting soothing gestures in the air toward me, and backed over to drop into the brown armchair. “I don’t know what you’re after,” he said, “but I’m not out for trouble. I leave everybody else alone, everybody else leaves me alone.”

  “I wish that was the truth, Dink,” I said, but it was a meaningless statement. The fact was, another underwater root from the past had just caught me; without thinking, I had told Dink to sit in the brown armchair. Now I realized two things: first, that I had picked that chair because I myself had never sat in it, and second, that the only sensible place for me to sit and talk with him in that chair was the sofa.

  Secondary shocks are never as severe as the first. With almost no hesitation at all, I sat down on the sofa on which I had made love to Dink’s wife possibly a hundred times, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, and I said, “But it isn’t the truth. People aren’t leaving you alone.”

  “You aren’t leaving me alone.” He was trying to figure out whether it would be a good idea to get indignant or not. “Everything was fine until—”

  “Let me fill you in, Dink,” I said.

  “That’d be great.” But sarcasm didn’t sit well on his shoulders; it came out sounding sincere.

  “A little before midnight last night,” I said, “somebody knocked on the door at the museum where I’m the night guard. There was a cop with me at the time, a plainclothesman. He thought it was his partner, and he opened the panel in the door, and somebod
y threw acid in his face.”

  I watched Dink look startled, a natural first reaction. Then I saw him look scared, wondering if for some reason he was going to be accused of being the acid thrower. All this in the first two or three seconds, and immediately followed by a wise look, a closed and wary look as it came to him where I was actually going. Defensively, trying to assume the innocent reaction of just a second before, he said, defiantly, “Well, I didn’t do it. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I said, “Dink, it took me about two hours to realize that acid hadn’t been aimed at the cop. It had been aimed at me.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen, now, this is the honest-to-God truth. I don’t hold a grudge. We both know what I’m talking about, we don’t have to spell it out. I let bygones be bygones, and that’s it. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”

  I said, “Dink, I don’t suppose you know for sure yet which one of them did it. But I want you to find out for me. I want you to call me at home by eight o’clock tonight and tell me the name.”

  I remembered that look of outraged innocence from when I’d arrested him on his last burglary charge. “What do you come to me for? I was home in bed all night!”

  “I know you were, Dink.” I held up four fingers, and counted off the names. “It might have been Fred Carver,” I said. “It might have been Knox. It might have been Mort. Or it might have been the new kid, Willie Vigevano. You find out for me which one of them it was.”

  Each name hit him like an arrow going into his forehead; he blinked, he grunted, his head bobbed back. Still, when I was finished he went on with the denials: “You can’t make any connection between any of those guys and me. You can’t even make a connection between them and you.” His eyes shifted away from me for a second, and then shifted back. “I am staying clean,” he said. “Grade-A number-one clean. That means completely.”

  I knew that Linda was now up, and in the doorway behind me and to my right; the spot where Dink’s glance had shifted to. But she wasn’t coming into the room, and Dink wasn’t making any overt acknowledgment of her presence, so I too pretended the two of us were still alone. But just as Dink had been playing to the new audience when he’d suddenly started talking about staying clean, I too now played to that audience, saying, “Dink, the cop that got the acid in his face is named Grinella. He’s been blinded. The first word is, they’re not absolutely sure, but they think he’s blind for the rest of his life. That acid was meant for me, so I feel responsible. I feel responsible to this extent, Dink; I want the guy who did it to pay for it.”

  “Sure, that’s fine,” he said, but he looked troubled now, and he seemed to be frowning and squinting as though to avoid looking at that doorway to my right. “But why put the pressure on me?” he asked me. “You want to help the cops, go ahead. But why lean on me?”

  “If I have to, Dink,” I said, “I’ll go to Grinella’s partner and I’ll tell him the whole truth. I’ll tell him what I’ve been covering up in a murder investigation he’s working on, and why I’ve been covering, and what I did that made Carver and Knox and Mort and Willie Vigevano sore at me. Grinella’s partner is a very tough guy. His name is Hargerson. You know him?”

  He shook his head.

  “He reminds me a lot of Krauss,” I said, talking about a brutal bastard I’d known in the old days. “George Krauss, remember him?”

  Dink nodded, with great reluctance.

  “Hargerson is the same kind,” I said. “If I have to tell him the whole truth, he’ll make things as rough for me as he possibly can. Maybe have my private operator’s ticket taken away, so I’ll lose my job. But that isn’t a tenth of what he’ll do to you.”

  Dink was very nervous. “Tobin,” he said. “Listen, now. All I want to do is keep my nose clean.”

  “We all feel the same way,” I said. “Dink, I swear and vow you don’t want peace and quiet one bit more than I do. But we don’t have peace and quiet, Dink, we have a good guy blinded, and you and I both helped to do it to him. Now, goddammit, Dink, we’re going to make it up. We’re at least going to see to it that the guy pays for it.”

  “Without going to the other cop? How the hell you gonna do it?”

  “Leave that up to me,” I said. “You just get me the name. Which one of them threw the acid. Also which one of them drove the car. And if you could get me the make and license number of the car, it would be a big help.”

  He gave a scared laugh, and said, “You don’t want much.”

  “I want him serving indefinite time upstate,” I said.

  He gave another quick glance at the doorway, and this time I could see guilt and a plea for help mixed in his expression. When he looked back at me, his brow was furrowed and he said, “All right, up to a point. Let’s say I know what you’re talking about up to a point. But how does it get from you and me to Fred and those guys?”

  “Come on, Dink, you know how,” I said. “All of a sudden some trouble came on those four, some heat they couldn’t understand. Maybe somebody even told them to stay the hell away from you. So what they did, they came to you and they wanted to know what you thought you were doing. And you told them you didn’t know a thing about it, which was the truth. But they didn’t buy it, and they scared you.”

  “I scare easy,” Dink said. “But I don’t remember any of this stuff.”

  “Linda does,” I said, and had less trouble with the name than I’d anticipated. I’d been avoiding it for some time. “She remembers it,” I said, “because when the guys let you go you came and talked to her, because you figured she had to be the one somehow. She was the one who’d made the heat for those guys, and when you asked her about it she told you. And you went and told Fred Carver and the others. And Grinella got blinded.”

  Dink was trying again not to look at the doorway. “Now, look,” he said. “You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

  “Check it out with Linda,” I said. “She’ll remember. Won’t she, Dink?”

  He sat there in his robe and pajamas and slippers, like some convalescent, and stared unhappily at my knees. He twisted his mouth around, but he didn’t say anything.

  I said, “Won’t she remember, Dink?”

  He still didn’t say anything. His mouth kept moving, and he gave his head a quick shake—but as though rejecting a thought of his own, not a statement of mine.

  “Dink?”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

  “I hope you can,” I said. “Because if you can’t, I’ll have to go to Hargerson. There’s no other way.”

  He sighed, and slumped back even more inside the robe, and opened his eyes to look at me. I’d never seen him look so wounded or so adult or so touching. “Man,” he said quietly, “you sure bring a lot of trouble into my life.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. It was the truth, and the only part of it I didn’t regret was the original burglary arrest, since he had after all been actually guilty. But maybe I regretted that, too; it had started the rest. I’d met Linda as a result of that arrest, and everything else had followed from it. In one way of looking at things, Dink’s ineptness at burglary seven years ago had caused Grinella’s blinding last night.

  Now he was over there rubbing his face with his hands, and for just an instant he had the same posture of hands against face as Grinella last night on the floor. I said, quickly, “That’s all I wanted to say, Dink.” I pushed myself to my feet, suddenly feeling very drained, very tired.

  He dropped his hands from his face and looked up at me with a weariness to match my own. “It was enough,” he said. “You said enough.”

  I didn’t look toward the doorway. I went the other way instead, toward the hall door, and let myself out without saying another word. I didn’t look back before closing the door; I was afraid I would see Linda crossing the room to comfort him.

  9

  I HAD BEEN FEELING such urgency when I’d gotten off duty at the museum that I’d taken a ca
b across town to Dink’s apartment off West End Avenue in the eighties, but coming out I no longer felt any urgency at all, just great exhaustion. I had to go home now, and sleep, and hope Dink would be able to call by this evening at eight o’clock. If he could possibly get the answers I wanted, he’d pass them on to me, I was sure of that; particularly with Linda prodding him, which she would do. But if I didn’t hear from him, I’d have to report it.

  The nearest subway was over at Broadway and 86th. I walked to it, blinking in morning sunlight directly in my eyes, took a downtown train, and by a complicated series of changes, eventually wound up on the train that would take me out to my own neighborhood in Queens. I dozed uneasily on the trip out, uncomfortable in my uniform, and my eyes were burning when I walked from my stop toward the house.

  A block from home the black Ford pulled in to the curb just ahead of me, and I recognized it at once and knew what it meant. All I could think was, I’m too tired to cope with this. I kept walking, and when I was even with the car Hargerson got out of it and said, “Tobin. Come here.”

  I turned to him, and couldn’t keep from squinting in the sunlight. “What is it now?”

  “Get in the car,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” Toughness was second nature to him, but there was an element from our past encounters that was missing this time; he wasn’t going out of his way to be offensive. Instead, he was merely being hard and direct.

  I thought he might be even more dangerous this way than the other. Still, there wasn’t much choice; I had to deal with him whether I wanted to or not. I said, “I’m very tired, Hargerson. I’ve been up all night.”

  “Me, too. Get in.”

  I walked around the car and got in, my knees hampered slightly by the radio. But it was an easily remembered adjustment to the specifics of a Detective Division car; I shifted into the optimum position almost without thinking about it. While Hargerson put the car in gear and drove away from the curb, I took off my uniform cap and closed my eyes against the sunlight reflecting from the hood. I was feeling physically worse by the second: tired, stomach uneasy, head aching, eyes burning, nerves uncertain.