The Busy Body

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Gone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We didn’t bury him, Bobbi. That’s what you got to brace yourself for. We buried an empty casket. Somebody swiped Charlie.”

  “A Dr. Frankenstein!” she shouted, eyes widening, both hands coming up to be pressed palm-in against her cheeks. The blanket fell away.

  Engel politely turned his head, because it was obvious she didn’t wear anything to bed but a ribbon in her hair. “No,” he said to the opposite wall, “it wouldn’t be anything like that, not in the twentieth century.”

  “Oh, my gosh. You can turn again, Mr. Engel, it’s okay now.”

  He turned, and she had the blanket back up where it belonged. “That’s what I been doing,” he said, “is looking for Charlie.”

  “I want to thank you for looking the other way, Mr. Engel,” she said. “When a gentleman treats a lady like a lady, it makes her feel especially like a lady, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, sure. Any time.”

  “And you been looking for Charlie? That’s awful nice, Mr. Engel.”

  “Well, it was my job. Nick wanted that suit awful bad.”

  “Boy, I guess so.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why’d anybody want to swipe Charlie?” she said. “That’s an awful thing to do, that’s disrespectful of the dead, to swipe their bodies.”

  “And that’s all I been doing,” Engel said. “So if that guy Rose and his other businessmen were trying to stop me from doing what I was doing, it was looking for Charlie that I was doing. You wouldn’t know anybody named Rose, would you?”

  “A colored lady, used to clean the apartment. No men.”

  “This guy runs a business of some kind. Maybe a store or some kind of factory or something.”

  She shook her head, back and forth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Engel, but if I’d ever met any man named Rose, front name or last name, I’d remember it.”

  Engel spread his hands helplessly, and got up again from the bed. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s where I am right now. I got away from the guys that were supposed to take care of me, and I figured I could hide out here overnight because there wouldn’t be anybody here and nobody’d think to look here for me.”

  “Well, you can stay,” she said. “You know that, Mr. Engel.”

  “If anybody finds out I was here, they could make it rough on you. Either the organization or the cops, both.”

  “Oh, foo,” she said, and waved it all away with her visible hand. “Nobody ever bothers about me. Besides, who’s going to tell them you were here? You won’t, and I won’t, and that’s all of us there is.”

  “I’ll clear out first thing in the morning,” Engel told her. “What I got to do, I got to keep looking for Charlie. If I can find out where Charlie is, maybe that’ll explain everything else.”

  “Mr. Engel, I’ll be eternally grateful to you for looking for Charlie. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best,” Engel told her, “for both Charlie’s sake and my own.” He looked around, said, “We can talk some more in the morning, if you want. I’ll go sleep on the sofa in the living room.”

  She shook her head, solemnly. “No, you won’t,” she said.

  “What?”

  She said, “There isn’t much I can do to help you find Charlie, or help you get out of this jam you’re in. There aren’t too many ways I can express my appreciation, but there is one. You turn the light out and come on over here.”

  Engel made a vague sort of gesture. “Uhh,” he said, “I oughta just—”

  “This is just between us,” she said. “Just friends, no charge or anything like that.”

  Engel cleared his throat, and said, “Now, you don’t have to feel obligated or any—”

  “I don’t feel obligated,” she said. “I feel that we’re friends, and friends ought to do for each other, and there isn’t much I can do for you but what I can I will. And be more than happy.”

  Engel was going to go on protesting, but then he took a closer look at her face, and he could see in her eyes that if he didn’t accept her invitation her feelings would be hurt very badly. Very badly.

  Well. One thing about Engel, he always was gallant.

  18

  He was Snow White, in a glass coffin, and the Seven Dwarfs were burying him alive. He didn’t seem to be able to move. He hollered at them, but they couldn’t hear him through the glass, and they just carried him over to the hole and put him down in it and started shoveling dirt in. One of them looked like Nick Rovito, and one of them looked like Augustus Merriweather, and one of them looked like Deputy Inspector Callaghan. Two others looked like Gittel and Fox, another one looked like Kurt Brock, and the last one looked like Bashful.

  Bashful threw a golden rose in on the casket, and the others all started shoveling dirt. Dirt was bouncing on the glass top of the casket, making him blink because it kept looking as though the dirt was going to come right down on his face. But the glass was in the way, and the dirt landed on it with thud sounds. Thud, thud, thud. And for every thud, he blinked.

  It was the blinking woke him up. One of the blinks was so real that he actually opened his eyes on the other side of it, and there were no Seven Dwarfs, there was no glass casket, there was no dirt, no rose, no grave. There was a ceiling with cracks in it, and there was a strange bedroom with muted golden light coming through a window with the shade pulled all the way down.

  He blinked once more, while shifting from the dream world to whatever sort of world this was, and then memory and reality and a sense of place came back, and he sat up, looking all over the bed for Bobbi.

  She wasn’t there, but on the night table there was a note. Engel reached over, picked it up, and read:

  Dear Mister Engel,

  Archie Freihofer wanted me to start back to work today so I am supposed to go over to the Coliseum, there is some sort of Home Furnishings Fair going on there and they will want some girls for the buyers and the “visiting firemen” but why they always want to interview the girls in the morning I do not know but that is the way they are.

  I will probably not be back tonight so if you want to sleep here again you had better come in the window once more which I will leave unlocked.

  There is instant coffee and English muffins and anything else in the kitchen for breakfast.

  Good luck and I know Charlie would thank you for your efforts on his behalf just as much as I do.

  Sincerely yours,

  Bobbi Bounds

  PS. If your underwear and socks are not dry take some from the middle drawer of the dresser, it is all right. BB

  “Underwear and socks?” Engel looked up from the note, and took quick stock. On the chair by the desk his shirt was neatly hung, his tie draped over it. On the hook on the inside of the open closet door was his suit, neatly placed on a hanger. When he leaned to the left he could see his shoes on the floor beside the bed. But his underwear and socks?

  Still a bit befuddled by the Seven Dwarfs, but also confused by the note and in a half-awake panic about his underwear and socks, Engel staggered out of the bed and went padding naked from the room in search of his missing garments.

  They were in the bathroom, on wire hangers hung on the shower curtain bar over the tub. And they were still wet, or at least damp. “Well,” he muttered. “Fine.” He went padding back to the bedroom.

  As he put on a pair of Charlie Brody’s shorts, the thought came to him that he was getting far too closely enmeshed with Charlie Brody, that his own life was being bound up to an unhealthy degree with the past and present of Charlie Brody. “Just let me get you planted where you belong,” he muttered. “That’s all, just let me get this mess straightened out. Then you and me are quits, Charlie.”

  An hour later, washed and dressed and breakfasted, he felt much better. He’d slept late and it was now nearly noon; time to be doing.

  Doing what? With Bobbi’s help he’d figured a couple of things out last night,
but he was still almost completely in the dark. He didn’t know who to blame for anything, didn’t know who to ask questions of nor even what questions to ask, and even if he did know any, his mobility was severely limited at the moment by the fact that both the cops and the organization would be scouring the city for him by now.

  Sitting there over a third cup of instant coffee and his second cigarette, he thought about what to do next. If only, he thought, if only there was someone he could send out to do the legwork for him while he himself remained safely out of sight. Get somebody maybe that the organization didn’t even know, like Dolly for instance or—

  Somebody they didn’t know.

  Like he didn’t know Rose. Like that

  He squinted in a cloud of cigarette smoke and worked that one out. He didn’t know Rose. Rose had framed him to stop him from doing what he was doing, which was looking for Charlie Brody. Rose had done it on behalf of somebody else, somebody Engel did know.

  “Oh ho,” he said. Out loud. “Somebody I know doesn’t want me looking for Charlie Brody. This somebody has a way to put pressure on this guy Rose and some other businessmen to make them say stuff to frame me.”

  All well and good, but what did it mean?

  “It means,” Engel said aloud, “it means I was getting close. I didn’t know it myself, but somewhere along the line I started to get close, and I made this somebody nervous enough to fix me.”

  Right. Engel dropped his cigarette in his coffee, got up from the table, and went back to the bedroom, where he sat at the little desk and armed himself with pencil and paper. The thing to do now was make a list of every single person he’d talked to since he’d started looking for Charlie Brody. Thinking back, he gradually compiled his list:

  Mrs. Brody

  Margo Kane

  Inspector Callaghan

  Kurt Brock

  Fred Harwell

  Archie Freihofer

  Some list. Squinting at it, tapping it now and again with his pencil, Engel kept trying to find somebody on it who might have a hankering to steal Charlie Brody, to frame Engel, to murder Merriweather, but nobody seemed at all right for the job.

  Mrs. Brody? Bobbi? What would she swipe her husband for? How would she be able to pressure Rose into helping with the frame? Well, she might have met Rose while she was working for Archie Freihofer before she got married, and she might be able to blackmail him, threaten to go to his wife or something. She could, maybe, but there was no sense in it. No, and she was too open, too guileless; she’d never be able to run a scheme as complicated as this one was getting.

  Margo Kane? In the first place she already had a dead husband, so what would she need with somebody else’s? In the second place there wasn’t any connection that Engel had found between Margo Kane and Charlie Brody in Brody’s lifetime, so why should there be any connection now? As a matter of fact, Margo didn’t even know Engel was looking for Brody’s body, so she couldn’t very well be the one trying to stop him from finding it.

  Callaghan? As with everybody else, there was no reason for him to want a body. Beyond that, Callaghan was just too damn honest, honest to the point of stubborn bullheadedness, far too honest to be involved in anything as shady as all this. He might have been able to pressure Rose, but other than that he was out of it. He was involved, as was Margo Kane, merely through the circumstance of having been at the grief parlor the same time as Engel.

  Kurt Brock? He’d admitted he was the next to the last person to see Charlie Brody’s corpse, but other than that he seemed to have no connection with anything. None with Brody, none with Rose. No motive for anything. In fact, he was the only one in the crowd who couldn’t possibly be the guy Engel was after, if he assumed the guy he wanted was also the killer of Merri-weather. Brock was covered on that, and if Callaghan had accepted his alibi it was good enough for Engel.

  Fred Harwell? He was almost the only one who’d known about the value of the suit, but Fred would surely have been content to swipe the suit instead of the whole body. Unless, of course, there’d been a time factor, and it was simpler to just take the whole body and go rather than stick around trying to get the suit off it. But Harwell had been in the organization for years, and knew the score; he wouldn’t be dumb enough to try something cute like this. As to setting up Rose, Harwell was a possible but hardly a probable.

  Archie Freihofer? All Archie knew or cared about was his women. It was impossible to see Archie stealing dead bodies, particularly male bodies, impossible to see him stabbing Merri-weather or scheming with Rose or any of the rest of it.

  Yeah, but that was the trouble. It was impossible to see any of these people doing any of the things that some one of them sure as hell had done.

  Unless, of course, there was a name missing from this list, somebody Engel hadn’t gotten onto yet.

  But if Engel hadn’t come across him yet, the bastard, why should he sic Rose on Engel?

  He shook his head and went over the whole thing again, and over it again, and over it again. Of the six people on the list, he could think of only one with even a hint of a motive for stealing Charlie Brody, and that was Fred Harwell. He’d been Brody’s boss, he’d known what was in the suit. But of course Fred swore he hadn’t known until too late that the suit had been used to bury Brody in. But still …

  Fred Harwell? He might have taken the body, if the suit was too tough to get off in a hurry. He might have set up Rose, it was possible Fred had the contacts for a piece of work like that. And he might have killed Merriweather, if he and Merri-weather had been in on the body snatching together or if Fred was afraid Merriweather had found out the truth somehow and might talk.

  It all seemed so unlikely. Yet it was the only possibility Engel seemed able to come up with, so finally he decided there was nothing to do but follow it up. He’d go back and see each of the people on this list a second time, no matter how unlikely they seemed, and this time he’d see could he find the links in the chain. And he’d start off with Fred Harwell.

  He left a note for Bobbi:

  Thanks for the hospitality. I had a good sleep and a good breakfast. I’ll be in touch, if I get the chance.

  He didn’t sign it, just in case the wrong eyes saw it; he didn’t want to get her in trouble. He left it propped on the kitchen table and went out of the apartment.

  Down on the street there was a red and yellow truck with a carnival-type ride on the back, gaily painted little spaceships that went around and around a central hub where the motor was mounted, while a loudspeaker on the roof of the truck cab blared rock and roll from a radio station. Grinning children whirled around while more children stood in line beside the truck, waiting their turn.

  Engel stopped and looked at it, feeling nostalgia for the simple days of his own childhood in Washington Heights. These trucks plied the poorer neighborhoods of New York all spring and summer, one of the city’s less odious harbingers of the warm months. This was the first one Engel had seen this year, and it affected him much the way the first robin affects the country dweller.

  Until, that is, the loudspeaker finished its rock and roll and segued into the news. The children in their tin spaceships now whirled around to the tensions of the day, which included:

  “Police today are searching for Aloysius Eugene Engel, alleged gangland killer, who last night shot and killed in Jersey City—”

  And so on. With description: “Engel is described as six foot one inch tall, sallow complexion, dark brown hair and brown eyes, strong build. He is believed to be armed and dangerous.”

  Unarmed, feeling anything but dangerous, Engel fled away down the sidewalk.

  He was a block and a half away before he remembered his underwear was still in Bobbi’s bathroom.

  19

  To look at Fred Harwell’s place of business, you’d never know he had charge of a multimillion-dollar operation with employees in the hundreds and customers in the tens of thousands. But, on the other hand, Fred Harwell’s operation was not the sort o
f business that put up glass buildings to itself on Fifth Avenue. Given the nature of his trade, a grimy and bankrupt-looking brick building on Tenth Avenue was just the perfect location for his home office.

  This building was between 45th and 46th streets. The first and second floors housed a Spanish-language phonograph record company that specialized in low-fi records of people shaking gourds. The fourth floor was the office and warehouse of a company that sold odd-looking women’s underwear via mail order and did all its advertising in muscle-man magazines. Between these two, on the third floor, behind the name Afro-Indic Importing Corporation, lurked Fred Harwell and his organization of dope peddlers.

  Another of those carnival-ride trucks was parked just down the block from this building as Engel arrived, but was happily playing music instead of Engel’s description. Engel walked past it, went into Fred’s building, and up the two flights of murky grimy stairs to the third floor, where there was a short hallway and two doors, one unmarked and one lettered AFRO-INDIC IMPORTING CORP.

  The main motif up here was ancient wood flooring, with broad dust-filled holes between the slats. Cracked and dented plaster walls were painted a heavy shade of green reminiscent of the interior of the Minotaur’s stomach, and from somewhere there came a pervasive odor of soggy moldering cardboard.

  Engel pushed open the door and entered a small barren room containing a wooden desk, a wooden filing cabinet, a hat rack, two huge dusty windows bare of curtains or blinds or drapes, a crumbling brown leather sofa, and Fred Harwell’s mistress name of Fancy, who was very plain.

  Engel had no idea if Fancy knew the latest on himself, so he just bluffed it through to see what would happen. “Hi, Fancy,” he said. “I come to see Fred.”

  She looked surprised, but that was only natural; he didn’t come around here very often. “He’s in,” she said. “You want I should announce you?”

  “Naw, that’s okay.” Engel waved airily and crossed the room and pushed open the other door on its far side.

  Fred Harwell looked up from his desk, where he’d been hard at work on last Sunday’s Times crossword puzzle. “All” he said, and then, as realization struck him, “Al? For Christ’s sake, Al—”