The Busy Body

by Donald E. Westlake

  Holding Dolly’s résumé in one hand and the false fingernail in the other, Engel nodded to himself with cynical detachment. This, he told himself, was the way things always went. At any other time, any other time, he’d have left a message for Dolly in a minute, have gotten together with her by sundown today, and … and so much for the timing of destiny’s bounty. Resignedly, bitterly, he crumpled note and nail into one hand, and with the other unlocked his way into his apartment.

  The phone was ringing, speaking of timing. He dropped note and nail on the small table beside the door, glanced at himself in the oval mirror above the table to see if his expression was as disillusioned as he thought it was (it was), walked across the pale beige broadloom carpet on which bearskins and small rectangular Persians and occasional outsize orange cushions were scattered, picked up the phone from the end table beside the white leather sofa, and said, “I can’t talk to you now, Mom, I’m working.”

  “I’m only your mother,” she said. “So two nights in a row I cook you the kind of meal you never get, not because I’m like one of those mothers you see on television that’s always interfering, eat a little chicken soup, that sort of mother, you know I’m not. But because of a special occasion, and I was proud of you yesterday beyond my wildest dreams, and I wanted to express my admiration and appreciation in the only way I can, which is cookery, the only thing I’ve ever done well. And now on both nights you aren’t coming?”

  “What? What both nights?”

  “Last night,” she said, “and tonight.”

  “Mom, I am working. This is no lie, this is no excuse, I am working. I am working harder and with more problems than ever before, and I can’t talk to you now. I got to make some phone calls.”

  “Aloysius, I’m not merely your mother, you know that, I am also your confidante, your sharer of the ins and outs of the world, just like I was with your father even though he never did attain such heights as you, but the son always does exceed the father, that goes without saying.”

  “I can’t talk about this on the phone,” Engel told her.

  “So come to dinner. You’ve got to eat dinner some place, why not here?”

  “I’ll call you when this is over. Right now I got to make some important phone calls, if I don’t I’m in trouble.”

  “Aloysius—”

  “I’ll call you when I get a minute free.”

  “If you—”

  “I promise.”

  “You wo—”

  “I won’t forget.”

  When this time she didn’t have anything immediately to say, but let two or three seconds of silence elapse, Engel said, “Bye now, Mom, I’ll call you,” and promptly hung up. Just as promptly he picked up the receiver again, preparing to dial, and heard a tinny voice saying, “Aloysius? Aloysius?”

  She hadn’t hung up, and until she did the connection wasn’t broken. Quickly Engel put the receiver down again. He counted to ten, then cautiously picked the receiver up, and this time he heard the precious dial tone.

  He called Nick Rovito’s office, but was told that Nick Rovito personally wasn’t there. Engel identified himself and said, “Tell him it’s urgent, and I’m at home, and would he call me right away.”

  “Right.”

  Next he called a man named Horace Stamford, once upon a time an attorney of some reputation, but, since his disbarment, upgraded to being the man in charge of the legal end of the organization’s affairs. When he got Stamford on the line, Engel said, “I’m going to need a cover for this afternoon.”

  “Details,” said Stamford. He prided himself on his speed, accuracy, detachment and planning ability, and therefore spoke in clipped sentences, like a telegram from someone who didn’t know much English.

  Engel gave him the details of his day’s activities, not bothering to explain why he’d been doing what he’d been doing. It wasn’t a part of Stamford’s job to know that. He merely told him about going to the funeral parlor, about finding Merriweather dead and being identified by Callaghan and being pointed at by the woman who claimed to be Merriweather’s wife but wasn’t and making his escape. Then, “Callaghan took a long time to get a fix on me,” he said, “and I don’t think he’s really sure yet. Besides, when they find out the woman who pointed at me wasn’t the dead guy’s wife after all, that’ll confuse them more. So all I need is a cover for this afternoon.”

  Arranging cover was a part of Stamford’s job. Engel listened as Stamford clucked to himself at the other end of the line, shuffling papers and so on. Finally Stamford said, “Races. Trotters. Freehold Raceway over in Jersey. You went with Ed Lynch, Big Tiny Moroni and Felix Smith. You picked one winner, Toothache, in the third race, at four to one. You had ten dollars on her. You had lunch in the American Hotel in Freehold; steak. You went down in Moroni’s new car, a Pontiac Bonneville convertible, white. The top was down. You took the Lincoln Tunnel, the Jersey Turnpike and Route 9, and retraced exactly. You’ll be arriving back in the city in five or ten minutes. They’ll let you off at 34th Street and Ninth Avenue and you’ll take a cab downtown. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.” Stamford hung up.

  So did Engel, and the phone immediately rang. He picked it up and said, “Nick?”

  But it was his mother’s voice that said, “We got cut off, Aloysius. And now I been getting a busy signal.”

  “We didn’t get cut off,” he told her. “I hung up. And I’m going to do it again. And you do it, too. I’ll talk to you when I get a chance, right now I’m waiting for a call from Nick Rovito and I can’t tie up the phone.”

  “Aloysius—”

  “Hang up or I move to California.”

  “Oh!”

  This was an old threat, but a seldom-used one, reserved for final emergencies when all else had failed. When all the appeals of fact, of logic and of emotion had been exhausted, there was at last the specter of California. Once Engel mentioned California, his mother knew at once and without question that he was serious and that what he wanted was important.

  But the funny thing was, the threat to move to California was hollow where everything else Engel had said, about working and about waiting for the call from Nick Rovito, was real. Engel hated California, would rather have lived in Sing Sing than California, and desired nothing of California other than that it stay peaceably where it was, on that other coast, three thousand miles away.

  And yet he knew, if the day should ever come when this ultimate threat, too, was ignored by his mother, he would no longer have any choice. He would have to move to California. The alternative—staying in New York with no ultimate defense against his mother—was the only thing he could think of worse than living in California.

  At the moment, though, the threat was still potent. “Oh!” said his mother, when he voiced it. “If it’s important, I won’t interrupt. Call me when you get a minute.”

  “I will,” Engel promised, and this time they hung up together.

  While waiting for the call from Nick Rovito, Engel went on into the bedroom and changed his clothes, since the rushing around he’d had to do had left him feeling a bit rumpled. He wished he could take a shower, but there wasn’t time. Besides, Nick Rovito might call while he was in there, and he wouldn’t hear the phone ring.

  Engel’s apartment had originally been owned by a darling boy of a thing who designed costumes for Broadway musicals, and who had sold most of his furniture to the second owner, a television producer of strongly heterosexual if not marital bent, who replaced some of his predecessor’s more flighty peaks of imagination with equipment more suited to his own personality: the bar and white leather sofa in the living room, the mirror on the bedroom ceiling, the movie projector set into one of the living-room walls, the master light switch on the end table beside the sofa. When Engel in his turn had moved in, buying the furnishings from the TV man—who was, come to think of it, moving to California, as had the designer before him—he made yet a few changes of his own. He added a fals
e back to a bedroom closet, soundproofed the small room off the bedroom which neither of the former tenants had found any use for but in which Engel could now hold business discussions with absolute security—the way the law tapped phones and bugged private homes these days was not only illegal it was absolutely immoral—added the paintings of famous horses to the bedroom walls, put an electric garbage disposal in the kitchen and had strong wire mesh put on the outside of all the windows. By now the apartment was complex, fascinating and bewildering. The main colors throughout were purple and white and black and green. The designer’s candelabra sat on the producer’s bar next to Engel’s electric drink dispenser.

  From this last, Engel, in fresh clothing, dispensed himself a drink, then prowled the apartment and waited for the phone to ring. He was wearing slacks now, and a sport shirt, and casual Italian shoes with crepe soles. The ice tinkled in the glass he held, and anyone seeing him would have said, “Rising young executive in some sort of interesting business.” Which would have been perfectly accurate.

  Engel was on his second drink before the phone rang. He strode across the living room, stood beside the sofa, and picked up the receiver.

  It was Nick Rovito. “I got your message, kid. How’s tricks?”

  “Bad, Nick.”

  “No suit?”

  “No suit, and complications. The undertaker needs an undertaker.”

  “Mortician. He likes you should call him mortician.”

  “Mortician, undertaker, he could use either one.”

  “Am I following you, Engel?”

  “Yes. Also, there’s a woman involved, I don’t know who she is. Tall, slender, good-looking in an icy way, played me and a whole bunch of cops for suckers and then cut out.”

  “Don’t give me no details,” Nick Rovito said. “All I want is results, or instead, a general picture about how results are on the way.”

  “It’s getting complicated, Nick.”

  “Then make it simple. The simple thing is, Nick Rovito wants the suit.”

  “I know, Nick.”

  “It ain’t the profit, it’s the principle. Nick Rovito don’t get robbed.”

  Engel knew that when Nick Rovito started talking about himself in the third person it meant his pride was hurt, his back was up, and his mind was set. So all he said was, “I’ll get it, Nick, I’ll get the suit.”

  “Good,” said Nick Rovito. Click, said the phone.

  Engel hung up. “The suit,” he muttered to himself. He looked around the room, as though to find it somewhere here, maybe hanging on the back of a chair or draped over a bar stool. “Where the hell,” he said aloud, “am I going to find that goddam suit?” When he got no answer, he drained his glass and turned toward the bar to make himself another drink.

  Halfway there he was detoured by the sound of the doorbell ringing: a chimed quote from “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” an inheritance from the designer. Frowning, Engel set the empty glass down on the bar, went out to the foyer, and opened the door.

  Standing there was the mystery woman, all in black. “Mr. Engel?” she said, and smiled prettily. “May I come in? I believe I owe you an explanation.”

  10

  Was she twenty? Was she thirty-five? More or less or in between? There was no way to tell.

  Again, was she insane, or was she merely mindless, or some combination of the two? And again, as yet there was no way to tell.

  Engel closed the door after she’d stepped into the apartment, and followed her into the living room, which she admired by turning around in a smiling circle and saying, “What an interesting place! How fascinating! How original!”

  If there was one thing life had taught Engel, it was Wait and See. Don’t ask, don’t assume, don’t jump the gun, don’t try to hurry the world along, just Wait and See. If Madame X here intended to give him an explanation, fine; she’d do it at her own speed and in her own way, and in the meantime Engel would have an unusually fine opportunity to practice Wait and etc. So, coming into the living room after her, he merely said, “You want a drink?”

  “Scotch sour?”

  “Scotch sour. Right.”

  A Scotch sour was unfortunately not one of the drinks he could dial on his electric dispenser, so, as he went around behind the bar, he snaked out the drink guide he’d brought home one time from the liquor store, leafed through it hurriedly while keeping it hidden under the bar, and said, “Sit down, why don’t you? I’ll just be a minute.”

  It was a good thing he’d maintained his predecessor’s tradition of a broadly stocked bar, including the refrigerated compartment underneath. A Scotch sour, it seemed, required one each of almost everything he had. While he assembled it, feeling like the witch in “Snow White,” his guest wandered around the living room, admiring the furnishings and the objects on the walls; a murky lightning-streaked abstract entitled “Summer Storm Fire Island” (designer), a primary-hued naturalistic portrait of a sad-faced clown (producer), and matched plaques of ducks in flight (Engel’s mother). “How catholic! How unusual!”

  Engel made himself a fresh Scotch and water and carried the two drinks over to where she stood by a side table, admiring its burden of fat red candles (designer) and fat orange oriental wood carvings (producer), plus this week’s issue of Time (Engel). “Scotch sour,” said Engel.

  “Ah!” She spun around like a high school girl, all smiles and dimples, but the hand with which she took the drink was pale white and so slender as to be almost bony. But not unpleasantly so, no, not at all unpleasantly so. “Thank you,” she said, and raised the glass, and over it batted at him eyes that belonged to no high-schooler. And the voice? Husky one instant, lilting the next, always interesting.

  “Well sit,” suggested Engel, and motioned at the sofa.

  “Fine,” she said, and moved at once to a Victorian chair with wooden arms and a seat covered in purple burlap. There she sat, crossed long legs with a nylon rustle, tugged at the hem of her black skirt to cover her knee, and said, “Now we can talk.”

  “Good.” Engel settled himself on the sofa.

  “What I can’t understand,” she said, smiling brightly at him, “is how one man can be so eclectic.”

  Engel couldn’t understand it either, since he didn’t know the word, so he said, “How did you find me?”

  “Oh,” she said, offhand, airily waving the hand with the glass in it, “I heard that policeman say your name, and I asked around, and here I am.”

  “Asked around where?”

  “Police Headquarters, of course.” She sipped at her drink, giving him the eyes again over the rim of the glass. “I’ve just come from there.”

  Engel automatically glanced toward the front door. If his sense of timing was right there’d be cops at that door within about half an hour now. Callaghan and company would be slowed down by their imprisonment in the alley, and further slowed down by the confusion of identities back at the grief parlor, but sooner or later they’d get themselves organized and on the move, and when that happened a couple of their foot soldiers would stop by here just to check. Not that they’d expect to find him here, but just because they liked to think of themselves as thorough. The phantom lady’s mention of Police Headquarters reminded him of this, and so he automatically glanced toward …

  Come from there?

  He said it aloud: “Come from there? Police Headquarters?”

  “Well, of course.” She lowered the glass from her lips, and smiled at him with the wattage and intensity of a toothpaste ad. “I couldn’t leave everything all mixed up, could I?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “of course not. You couldn’t do that.”

  All at once the smile shrank from her face, and her expression became troubled. “Isn’t there,” she said, a new vibrato trembling in her voice, “isn’t there enough sadness and worry and confusion in the world already?”

  “I’d say so,” he said.

  “So as soon as I recovered,” she said, the tremolo lessening but still slightly p
resent, “and realized what I’d done, I went straight to Police Headquarters. They didn’t know a thing about it yet, and they had a terrible time finding all those policemen who were chasing you, but I did explain things and they won’t chase you any more after this. They promised me.”

  “They promised you.”

  “Yes.” The smile flashed on again, like a searchlight being switched on, and she said, “The police are really very sweet, when you get to know them.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Of course,” she said, “they couldn’t understand why you’d run away like that if you hadn’t done anything wrong, but I understood it right away.”

  “You did.”

  “Well, of course. All at once someone accuses you of something perfectly dreadful, and a whole army of policemen start running at you … I’d have run away myself.”

  “But you explained it,” said Engel. “You went to the cops and explained it so they won’t chase me.”

  “Well, I thought I should. I thought it was my duty.” She sipped, eyed, smiled, said, “You make a really fine Scotch sour, really fine.”

  “I wish,” Engel told her, “I kind of wish you’d explain it to me. What you explained to the cops.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here. You see, when my—Oh. May I have another of these first?”

  “Sure. Sure.” Engel got to his feet, took the empty glass from her outstretched hand, and went back over behind the bar. He’d left the drink guide open, and now he began again to assemble the drink. One cocktail shaker, half full of cracked ice …

  The mystery woman came over, undulating slowly across the room like something seen through water, and hitched herself gracefully onto one of the purple-topped bar stools. “You’re really a very interesting man,” she said.