The Busy Body

by Donald E. Westlake

  He sat up, with difficulty, finding himself dizzy and a little nauseous. Ahead of him and still pulling away, down now to about twenty miles an hour but far from stopped, the black Chevy was still moving along. It had drifted over to the center lane, but was still going pretty straight. Kenny would see to things like wheel balancing and front-end alignment.

  Engel could imagine Gittel and Fox in the back seat, both scrabbling to get up front, to climb over the seat, each getting in the other’s way, the both of them shouting and jumping and wasting energy.

  While Engel wasted time.

  Right. He got to his feet—he seemed to have muscle aches in about thirty different places—staggered over the mall, across the eastbound lanes of traffic, over the turf on the other side to the metal fence there, climbed the fence, attained one of the little dim streets of Queens, and ran for his life.

  17

  In the Manhattan phone book there were six columns of people named Rose. In the Queens phone book there were three and a half columns of people named Rose. And the particular Rose that Engel was looking for could just as easily live in Brooklyn or The Bronx. Or Long Island. Or Westchester. Or Staten Island. Or New Jersey. Or Connecticut. Or on the Moon.

  Engel shut the two directories and went back to his table, where his coffee was cooling and his cheese Danish was aging. He sat down, glumly took a mouthful of Danish, and looked out the window while he chewed.

  He was in an all-night diner on 31st Street in Queens, about half a mile from Grand Central Parkway. He’d run this far full tilt, and here for the moment he’d gone to ground, and he’d been here fifteen minutes now without yet being able to think what he should do next.

  Very little was clear to him, but included with that little was the indisputable fact he’d been framed. He’d been framed neatly, sweetly and completely, and not only that but he’d been framed by a stranger. In fact, if he’d heard the conversation right, it was a whole group of strangers. The little guy named Rose had only been representing others like himself.

  Would Nick Rovito have taken the unsubstantiated word of a schmo like Rose? No. Nick Rovito would have insisted on the names of other businessmen who would tell the same story, and then he would have checked with those businessmen. That they had told the same story was pretty clear.

  In other words, a whole group of complete strangers had taken it into their heads to frame a guy named Engel. Now, why would a whole group of complete strangers want to do a thing like that?

  Businessmen, too. Solid citizens. Not maniacs, not practical jokers, not a rival mob, nothing like that at all. Husbands and fathers, proprietors of business establishments, payers of taxes, these were the men who had suddenly and inexplicably exerted themselves to put the finger on a guy they didn’t even know.

  Why?

  Slurping at cold coffee, watching the dark empty street outside the diner window, Engel gnawed at that question and his cheese Danish in equal portions, and whereas he was gradually getting somewhere with the Danish he was getting nowhere at all with the question.

  With the Danish gone, with nothing but dregs left in the coffee cup, he decided it was best to table the question awhile and devote himself to thinking about another and a more immediate problem.

  Like, where now?

  He couldn’t go back to the apartment, that was obvious. If Nick Rovito’s boys weren’t there by now, the cops would be. (It was hard to keep in mind, but that was an additional complication: the cops either already were or soon would be after him for the murder of Willy Menchik. As if he didn’t have enough trouble without!) So the apartment was forbidden territory. So was his mother’s place. So, in fact, was any place he’d ever been before.

  He thought fleetingly of Dolly, who even now he could surely reach through her friend Roxanne. But the way Dolly was leaving notes around, one of them was bound to be picked up by somebody dangerous, which meant that Dolly, too, soon or late, would be watched.

  Money? He had about forty bucks on him, less than he usually carried but he’d insisted on paying for dinner up in Connecticut tonight. He also had a watch he could probably pawn in the morning.

  In a second of real despair, he thought of turning himself in to the cops. In exchange for protection and leniency, he could promise to sing for them, do them a Valachi. Of course, there wouldn’t be a chance he’d ever convince them he’d been framed on the Menchik murder, which meant he’d spend the rest of his life—long or short, but probably short—behind bars, and that was almost as bad as not having any life to spend at all.

  No. There had to be another way, a better way.

  In order, then; take everything in order. The first thing to do was find a safe place to hole up for a while. The second thing to do was find out or figure out why he’d been framed, and the third thing to do was somehow prove to Nick Rovito that it was a frame.

  “You want anything else?”

  It was the waitress, a woman as stocky as she was surly, who looked in her white uniform like a sadistic nurse. Engel looked at her and shook his head. “Just the check.”

  She slapped it down on the table as though she were trumping his ace, and waddled away again in triumph. Engel left a nickel tip, paid the man behind the counter, and left the diner.

  Outside, on the corner, there was a cabstand, with one lone taxi sitting there all forlorn, its vacancy light glumly burning on its roof, its driver slouched behind the wheel with a copy of the Daily News up in front of his face. He also wore a cap, and had a pencil behind his ear. He also chewed gum.

  Engel stood irresolutely on the sidewalk. If he could think of somewhere to go, he’d use this cab to get there. But first he had to think of a place, a place he could get to but where no one would think of looking for him. Either with someone he knew, or maybe even a place that was deserted, where there—

  Got it.

  Engel snapped his fingers, and allowed a faint ray of hope to soar up his spinal column and light up, briefly, his gloomy mind. Part one worked out; nothing left now but parts two and three.

  He went over to the cab, slid into the back seat, and said, “Manhattan. West 71st Street.”

  The driver slowly turned his head, and said, “Manhattan? Why don’t you take the subway, Mac? Cabs cost too much.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Engel told him.

  “I don’t like Manhattan,” the driver said. “You want to go some place in Queens, any place in Queens, just let me know.”

  “You can’t turn down a fare,” Engel said. “It’s against the law.”

  “You gonna be a hardnose? Give me an address in Queens, I’ll take you.”

  “Good. The nearest precinct house.”

  The driver squeezed his face up. “What, to turn me in?”

  “You know it.”

  The driver sighed, and folded up his paper, and faced front. “I hate hardnoses,” he said.

  Engel lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the back of the driver’s neck. “Tough,” he said, because that’s the way he felt.

  Once he got moving, the driver was one of the fastest men afloat. He was clearly in a hurry to deliver Engel to Manhattan, turn around, and get the hell back to his beloved Queens.

  They tore down 31st Street to Northern Boulevard, to the Queensboro Bridge approach, over the bridge, up Third Avenue to 66th Street, west across 66th Street through Central Park and over to Broadway, up Broadway to West 71st Street, and over 71st Street to the address Engel wanted, which was a good block from where he intended to go.

  The meter read a dollar eighty-five. Engel gave him two dollars and waited for his change. The driver gave it to him, frowning, watching as though he didn’t believe it, and Engel pocketed the fifteen cents, got out of the cab, and slammed the door. The driver said several things, several very angry things, but he was already racing down the block as he said them, so Engel didn’t hear the exact words. Still, he caught the drift.

  He went up the steps of the nearest building, and when the cab turned the f
ar corner he came back down them again and walked the block to where he wanted to go. The downstairs door was open, and he hurried up the stairs without seeing anyone, stopping in front of the door behind which Charlie Brody had lived his life.

  It was the perfect spot. Brody’s wife wouldn’t be coming here for at least a few days more, nor would anyone else be dropping by. Engel and Brody hadn’t been close friends while Brody was alive, so there was no reason for anyone to think of Engel in relation to Brody’s apartment now. Here, in safety and comfort, he could proceed to parts two and three, the why of his framing and the process of getting himself unframed.

  The apartment door, of course, was locked, but Engel was in no mood to let that stop him. Judging by the other doors on this floor, and remembering what the inside of the apartment had looked like, he figured out just where and how much of the area of this floor belonged to the Brody apartment, and then he turned away and went on up the rest of the stairs to the roof.

  The night was still beautiful, as beautiful as on the ride to Connecticut, but Engel was no longer of a disposition to notice it. He crossed the roof to the rear wall, where the top rungs of a fire escape curved up into sight, and looked over the edge. At each level there was a broad platform, stretching across in front of two windows, one each for adjoining apartments. Two floors down, the window on the right belonged, so far as Engel could judge, to the Brody apartment. To the bedroom, in fact.

  Creeping carefully down the fire escape, Engel reflected bitterly that he seemed to be branching out into all sorts of new crimes lately: grave robbing, truck stealing, now breaking and entering. Walking on Grand Central Parkway, there was another offense. Leaving an automobile at forty miles an hour was probably against the law too, and earlier today he’d come perilously close to impersonating a policeman.

  “Great,” he muttered. “I’m becoming the Renaissance man of the underworld.”

  The window, when he reached it, was locked, just as the door had been. But Engel would waste no time with windows. The upper half of this one was divided into six small panes; taking off his shoe, Engel used the heel to smash in the middle pane in the lower row, the one by the lock. The noise this made was loud, but brief, and Engel doubted anyone would pay attention to it. New Yorkers needed a noise that lasted half an hour or so before they’d begin to wonder if something was up, and even then most of them would avoid going to see what it was.

  Engel reached in past the jagged edges of glass, undid the window catch, and then pushed the lower half of the window up and climbed through. He shut the window behind him again, pulled the shade all the way down, and then felt his way around the room, hitting his shin against various anonymous but hard objects, until he found the doorway on the opposite side, beside which was the switch for the light. Engel pushed it, the overhead light came on, and Bobbi Bounds Brody sat up in the bed, saying, “Mr. Engel, you scared the life out of me.”

  Engel blinked at her. “I thought,” he said, “I thought you moved out.”

  “It felt so funny, sleeping somewheres else. I know I got to move in with Marge and Tinkerbell eventually, but for now I’d rather stay right here, with my memories. Coming back with you like I did this evening, remembering all the good times and like that, I knew, I just knew I wasn’t ready yet to move out. So here I am.”

  Engel nodded. “Here you are all right,” he said.

  “Mr. Engel, why didn’t you knock on the door?”

  “I didn’t think anybody was home.”

  “I would of given you a key. All you had to do was call Archie Freihofer, he’d have fixed it up so you could get the key.”

  “It’s kind of complicated, Mrs. Brody.”

  She shook her head. “You shouldn’t call me Mrs. Brody,” she said. “That isn’t my name any more, and I got to get used to it. You better call me Bobbi.”

  Engel looked at her. She was holding the pale green blanket up to her neck as she sat there in bed, and above it her friendly but not particularly bright face gazed earnestly and sincerely at him. “Okay, Bobbi,” he said. “I need somebody to talk to, somebody I can trust. I want to make it you.”

  “Well, gee, Mr. Engel.” Her eyes widened with a combination of surprise and pleasure and curiosity. “You sit down here,” she said, one bare arm emerging from around the pale green blanket to pat the bed. “You sit right down here and tell me all about it.”

  Engel sat down, near the foot of the bed. “To make it short and sweet,” he said, “I been framed. It’s a double frame, both with Nick Rovito and with the cops.”

  “Holy cow,” she said.

  “You bet. Nick Rovito himself set up the frame with the cops, to keep things neat and simple after a couple of the boys should rub me out.”

  “Rub you out? Mr. Engel, you don’t mean it.”

  “Yes, I do. He must of called the Committee last night and got their okay. I suppose that’s why he had to set up the other frame.”

  “What?”

  Engel suddenly realized he’d gradually stopped talking to her and started talking to himself. He shook his head and said, “Let me try and say it straight. Some people framed me with Nick Rovito, told him I was doing something I wasn’t doing. So Nick planned to bump me off, and on the side set up a frame with the cops, so they wouldn’t look too hard for who killed me.”

  Eyes wide, mouth open, she nodded her head slowly. “I think I got it,” she said.

  “I feel the same way you do,” Engel told her. “I can’t figure it out.”

  She said, “Who was it framed you with Mr. Rovito?”

  “That’s just it,” Engel said. “That’s just the part that’s crazy. It was businessmen, legit straight honest businessmen. Not guys in the organization at all. And not only that, but businessmen I don’t even know, businessmen I never even met before.”

  “Well, maybe it’s a mistake, then.”

  Engel shook his head. “One of them identified me. ‘That’s him,’ he said to Nick. I was right there.”

  “Boy,” she said. “That’s terrible.”

  “And I can’t figure it out. Why should they do it to me?”

  She said, “Well, maybe to stop you from doing whatever you were doing.”

  He frowned at her. “What? I told you already, it was a frame, I wasn’t doing what they said I was doing.”

  “No, no, that isn’t what I mean. I mean what you were really doing. Maybe they wanted to stop you from doing what you were doing. Maybe you were on a job or something that was going to hurt them later on.”

  Engel stared at her. “You just thought that up?” he said. “All by yourself?”

  “Well, I only thought—”

  “No, I’m not putting you down. What I mean is, I never even thought of it that way.”

  She blinked, a couple of times. “You think maybe that’s it?”

  “Why not? It’s anyway a reason, right? That’s what was driving me nuts all this time, I couldn’t even think of a reason. Right or wrong, that doesn’t matter yet, just so I have some kind of reason why that guy Rose fingered me, so I can at least start thinking about it.”

  She said, “What was that name?”

  Hope sprang again within Engel’s breast. “Rose,” he said, and waited.

  But all she said was, “That’s a girl’s name.”

  Engel sagged a little. “It’s his last name,” he said.

  “Oh. Well, anyway, if you could figure out what you were doing that they didn’t want you to do, maybe you could figure out why they did this thing.”

  “Yeah,” said Engel. “Yeah, that’s the rub.” He got to his feet, and lit a cigarette, and started pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. “That’s the rub,” he said again.

  What had he been doing? Looking for Charlie Brody, that’s all. Was there anything else, anything he’d been in the middle of before the Charlie Brody thing came up? No. Anything for the near future, that he was supposed to get to as soon as the Charlie Brody thing was done? No.


  Charlie Brody? They didn’t want him to find Charlie Brody? What kind of sense did that make, a bunch of legitimate businessmen didn’t want him to find a dead body? No sense at all, that’s what kind.

  Bobbi finally broke the silence, saying, “Would it help you to talk some more? Is what you were doing anything you could talk about?”

  He looked at her. Up to now he’d been keeping the essential fact away from her in order to protect her feelings, but the way she had of all of a sudden seeing answers, maybe he ought to spill everything to her. Besides, if she knew about the swiping of her husband, she might be able to throw some light on it, might be able to think of something in Brody’s past that would tell them where he might be found now.

  He sat down on the bed again. “Bobbi,” he said. “I got something to tell you, and maybe you ought to brace yourself.”

  “Brace myself?”

  “It’s about Charlie.”

  “Brace myself? About Charlie? Charlie’s dead, Mr. Engel, what’s there left to brace myself about?”

  “Yeah, well, just wait. Do you know very much about what Charlie’s job was?”

  “Well, sure. Husband and wife don’t have secrets, why should they? He used to carry stuff, down South and back.” She made a shooting gesture with her visible hand at the arm still hidden by the blanket. “Snow,” she said.

  “Do you know how?” Engel asked her. “How he carried the stuff and didn’t get caught?”

  She shrugged like an Italian. “I dunno. In a suitcase, I guess. He never said nothing.”

  “In a suit,” Engel told her.

  She wrinkled up her cheeks and nose. “Huh?”

  “In the blue suit. Sewed in the lining. Bobbi, he was buried with a quarter million bucks’ worth of snow in that blue suit.”

  “Holy Peoria! You mean it?”

  “I mean it.”

  She shook her head. “Boy! I’m surprised they don’t send somebody out to dig him up and get the suit back. Boy.”

  “They did,” Engel told her. “Me. I dug him up.”

  “You did? How was he?”