Don't Lie to Me by Donald E. Westlake

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.
    â€œStop 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
    D INK 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?”
    â€œYou can back up, Dink,” I said. “And you can keep your hands where I can see them.”
    â€œWhat?” 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