Don't Lie to Me by Donald E. Westlake Page A

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.”
    â€œJust 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œYou 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—”
    â€œLet me fill you in, Dink,” I said.
    â€œThat’d be great.” But sarcasm didn’t sit well on his shoulders; it came out sounding sincere.
    â€œA 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 somebody threw acid in his face.”
    I watched Dink look startled, a