The Busy Body

by Donald E. Westlake

  Either the podium or the man said, in a bloodless voice, “Would you care to sign, sir?”

  “I’m not with this crowd,” Engel said, keeping his voice down. “I’m looking for Merriweather. On business.”

  “Ah. I believe Mr. Merriweather is in his office. Through those drapes there, and down the hall. Last door on the left.”

  “Thanks.” Engel started that way, and a voice behind him said, “Say. Just a minute, there.”

  Engel turned his head, and it was the cop again, the one with the yellow brick road on his sleeve. He was pointing a finger at Engel, and he was frowning. “Were you ever a reporter?” he asked. “Did you used to cover City Hall?”

  “Not me. You got me mixed up with somebody else.”

  “I know your face,” the cop said. “I’m Deputy Inspector Callaghan, that ring any bells?”

  It did. Deputy Inspector Callaghan was the cop of whom Nick Rovito once said, “If that bastard would lay off of us and go after them Red Communists like a patriot ought, he’d end the Cold War in six months, the rotten bastard.” Deputy Inspector Callaghan was the cop who years before, when Nick Rovito made the mistake of sending one of the boys around with a cash offer for Callaghan’s loyalty, threw a hammerlock on the boy and double-timed him over to Nick Rovito’s office and threw him over Nick Rovito’s desk into Nick Rovito’s lap and said, “This is yours. But I’m not.” So the name did ring bells for Engel, alarm bells, plus sirens, horns, whistles and kazoos.

  But Engel said, “Callaghan? Callaghan? I don’t remember any Callaghans.”

  “It’ll come to me,” said Callaghan.

  Engel smiled, a little weakly. “Be sure and let me know.”

  “Oh, I will. I will.”

  “That’s good.” Still smiling, Engel backed through the drapes and out of sight.

  He was in a different world now, though just as dim and cluttered a one. Out ahead of him stretched the hallway, narrow and low-ceflinged. Two wall fixtures shaped sort of like candles contained amber light bulbs shaped sort of like candle flames, and these dim amber bulbs were the only source of light. The walls were painted a color that was maybe coral, maybe apricot, maybe amber, maybe beige; the woodwork was done in a stain so dark as to be almost black, and the floor was carpeted in dark and tortuous Persian. If a Pharaoh had died in A.D. 1935, the inside of his pyramid would have looked like this hall.

  Along the right-hand wall were faded small prints of bare-breasted (small-breasted) nymphs cavorting amid Romanesque ruins in which white erect columns were prominent, and along the left-hand wall were doors, these in the same dark wood stain as the moldings. Engel walked down past all these to the one at the very end, shut like all the rest. He rapped a knuckle on it, got no response, and pushed the door open.

  This was Merriweather’s office all right, a small cramped crowded place with a window overlooking a garage wall. The most modern piece of furniture in the room was a roll-top desk. There was no one sitting at it, apparently no one anywhere in the room.

  Engel shook his head in irritation. Now he’d have to go out and ask the podium where else Merriweather might be, and show himself to Callaghan again, and …

  There was a shoe on the floor, down at the corner of the roll-top desk. A bit of black sock showed at the top of the shoe. There was a foot inside there.

  Engel frowned at the shoe. He stepped forward a pace, all the way into the room, and leaned far to the left, until he could see around the angle of the desk, and there, sitting on the floor, wedged into a corner amid the furniture, slumped Merriweather himself, eyes and mouth wide open, all the life flown out of him. The golden hilt of the knife stuck into his chest glittered brilliantly against its background of the red-stained shirt front.

  “Oh ho,” said Engel. He assumed immediately and without reservation that this bumping off of the undertaker was connected somehow with the disappearance of Charlie Brody. Merriweather had been the last one to see Charlie Brody dead, so it figured he’d known something about Brody’s disappearance, which was why Engel had come looking for him. That he was now himself bumped off confirmed Engel’s theory as far as he’d taken it, and also indicated one or more others in on the scheme, whatever it was. Registering all this, Engel commented, “Oh ho.”

  And a female voice, harsh and cold, said, “What are you doing here?”

  Engel spun around and saw, standing in the doorway, a tall thin frigid beauty dressed all in black. Her black hair was done in a thick single braid coiled around her head, in the Scandinavian manner. Her face was long and bony, the stretched skin white as parchment, devoid of make-up except for a blood-red slash of lipstick. Her eyes were dark, almost black, and her expression was haughty, cold, contemptuous. She had the palest, thinnest hands Engel had ever seen, with long narrow fingers ending in nails painted the same scarlet as her lips. She seemed about thirty.

  She hadn’t, obviously, yet seen the body tucked behind the desk, and Engel didn’t know exactly how to break the news to her. “Well, I …” he said indefinitely, and motioned vaguely toward the former Merriweather.

  Her eyes followed his movement, and widened. She stepped deeper into the room, the better to see, and Engel got from her a whiff of perfume that for some reason reminded him of green ice. Engel said, “He was … uh …”

  Ten or fifteen years fell away from the woman’s face, leaving her a child with wide eyes and slack jaw. “Criminy!” she said, in a voice much younger and squeakier than before. Then her eyes rolled up, her knees gave way, and she fell on the floor in a faint.

  Engel looked from Merriweather sprawled dead on one side of him to the woman in black sprawled unconscious on the other, and decided it was time to leave. He stepped over the lady, went back to the dim hallway, and shut the door. After adjusting his tie and his jacket and his breathing, he walked nonchalantly back down the hall and through the drapes to the vestibule.

  Man and podium were still in place, beside the front door. Solemn-faced coppers in dark uniforms speckled with lint moved in and out of the viewing room. Engel crossed toward the door, being silent and calm and unobtrusive, and the damn Callaghan popped up again, clutching at Engel’s sleeve, saying, “Insurance company. You work for an insurance company.”

  Engel said, “No, no, you got me mixed up with …” And trying to get his arm back and keep moving toward the door.

  “I know your face,” Callaghan insisted. “Where do you work? What do you—?”

  A shriek stopped everything. It made a sound like a freight train with its brakes on, and everybody froze, cops going in and out, Callaghan all a-clutch, Engel with his hand out toward the door.

  With a creaking you could almost hear, every head turned toward where the sound had been. Now, in the utter silence afterward, everyone looked, and everyone saw the woman in black standing in the doorway, hands up and out dramatically to thrust away the drapes, lips and nails scarlet, face dead-white, gown black.

  One pale slender hand moved, one ruby-tipped finger pointed at Engel. “That man,” announced the shattered voice, “that man has killed my husband.”

  7

  “Engel!” shouted Callaghan. He released Engel’s sleeve to snap his fingers, and then, belatedly, realized what the woman had just said. “Hey!” he shouted, and grabbed again.

  But it was too late. Engel was already through the doorway and halfway across the lawn. He vaulted the Grief Parlor sign, attained the sidewalk, and ran for dear life.

  Behind him, voices shouted, “Stop him!” Behind him, cheap lumpy black shoes from the Army & Navy Store thudded in his wake. About half a block behind him and coming strong was a pack of patrolmen of all shapes and all sizes, all alike in their blue uniforms and white gloves and red faces.

  Engel crossed a major street, against the light, being narrowly missed by a city bus, a TR-2, a Herald Tribune truck and a Barracuda. Behind him, the intersection was abruptly a sea of chaos, with cops and cars snarling together like long hair when it’s been washed
. Half the cops halted in the middle of the street and held their hands up to stop traffic so the other half could go through, but the second half couldn’t get through because the first half was blocking the way. So were the city bus and the Barracuda, both of which had stalled. So was a Mustang, which had ran into the tail of the Barracuda. So was a bohemian-looking young lady on a motor scooter, who had stopped in the middle of everything to see what was going on.

  Still, most of the cops managed to get across the intersection and take up the chase again, hallooing to Engel to stop, to give himself up, to cease from resisting arrest.

  Engel, meanwhile, had ran nearly a full block farther, and was beginning to get a stitch in his side. Ahead of him, at the corner, a young student policeman in gray-blue uniform and blue hat was talking into a police phone on a telephone pole. As the noise of the chase reached his ears he leaned slightly to one side, so he could see around the pole, and, with the telephone still to his ear, goggled at Engel running full tilt toward him and a capering mass of men in blue coming on strong behind.

  Engel saw the student cop, saw him react, saw him speak hurriedly into the telephone and hang it up, saw him grip his nightstick and come warily out from behind the telephone pole, and saw a yawning alley to his left, between two ware-houses or factory buildings. Engel turned on a dime and pelted down the blacktop into the alley.

  The sides were grimy brick, extending up half a dozen stories. The end was wood, weathered vertical slats ten or twelve feet high, a rickety-looking wall bowed outward in the middle up above.

  In the middle down below there was a door, at the moment shut. Engel raced toward it, reminding God that he hadn’t killed Merriweather and that he had been in church just yesterday morning, and when he got to the door it opened to his push. He stepped through and shut the door behind him.

  Well, well. On this side there was another alley, with a large black truck idling in the middle of it, its engine chugging quietly to itself. There was also a long thick wooden bar leaning against the rear alley wall, and on both sides of the door through which Engel had just come, there were brackets apparently designed for the bar. Engel tried the bar and it worked beautifully, sealing the door shut.

  Scant seconds after he’d sealed the door the shouting, charging mass of constables surged against it with a series of thuds. The door held. The wall, though wobbly-looking, was supported on this side by cross beams and end braces, and it too held.

  A hammering commenced, and shouts of “Open up!”

  Extending along the rear wall from the door rightward to the side wall was a stack of oil drums lying on their sides, the stack higher than Engel’s head. A few odd sticks and some rope kept the stack from collapsing. Engel yanked a stick, tugged at two ropes, and the oil drums, with a rumble, came rolling down across the doorway, completely blanketing the rear of the alley. It would take a team of men twenty minutes to clear enough of those away to get at the door.

  “Open up! Open up! Open in the name of the law!”

  Engel moved on.

  This alley was somewhat wider than the other, but still he had to snake along sideways next to the truck, which was facing out, its closed back toward the wall where all the thumping and yelling was coming from, and when he got to the truck cab and found it empty he promptly climbed aboard, remembered about putting it into first gear, and drove it out of the alley.

  It took less than a minute to drive it around the block and back it into the alley on the other side, which was still alive at its deeper end with cops, including the pupil patrolman, who was lustily hammering away at the barred and blockaded door with his nightstick. None of the cops noticed when a big black truck which fitted the alley opening the way a cork fits a wine bottle was gently nudged and wedged into place, rear end first. Not, that is, until it was too late.

  As Engel shut off the truck engine and pocketed the key, a new chorus of shouts erupted from the alley, more outraged, more desperate and more furious than before.

  Engel walked calmly away, dropping the truck ignition key down the sewer at the corner, which appeared to be in a state of turmoil. Next to a Barracuda and a Mustang, which were locked nose to tail, two young men in sport coats were fighting. A lot of people were standing around a city bus, which apparently refused to start. Two police cars, with red dome lights circling, helped to block the intersection, while the four patrolmen who had been in them stood around a bohemian-looking young lady on a motor scooter, who was explaining to them at great and inaccurate length exactly what had happened. A growing mass of people and vehicles was forming a great circle about these foci, and the rumors at the outer fringes of this circle were fantastic. One group, in fact, under the impression that the crowd had formed to watch someone on a ledge, was wagering back and forth as to whether that someone would or would not jump.

  “Excuse me,” said Engel. “Pardon me. Excuse me.” He worked his way through the crowd on one side, around the tussling young men, past the bohemian-looking young lady and the four fascinated fuzz, around the stalled bus with its irritated riders and apoplectic driver, through the crowd on the other side, and on the rest of the way back to the grief parlor.

  He still had questions to ask.

  8

  The porch stood empty. In the viewing room the departed reclined unviewed. But just inside the main door the podium and the man, trustworthy sentinels, still stood at their posts. Engel said to them, indiscriminately, “The police sent me to talk to Mrs. Merriweather, find out what this is all about. Where is she?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I haven’t seen her go out, so I imagine she’s in the back part of the house somewhere, or possibly upstairs.”

  “Right.”

  Engel moved off, through the drapes and down the hall, opening doors. There wasn’t much time. His plan, simply, was to find Mrs. Merriweather, kidnap her, take her somewhere safe and quiet, find out what she knew, if anything, about Charlie Brody and about who else would have had access to Charlie’s body, convince her that he hadn’t after all bumped off her husband, and return her to the grief parlor. But first, of course, he had to find her.

  He opened every door he came to along the hallway, and they led, in order, to a cloakroom, a broom closet, a small windowless room full of stacked folding chairs, an equally small and windowless room stacked with coffins, a black staircase leading down, a yellow staircase leading up, and the office. All of these were empty, except for the office, and Merriweather was the only one there.

  So. Upstairs, then, resting and recuperating from her shocking discovery. Engel went up the yellow stairs.

  Here was yet another of the grief parlor’s many worlds. This one was yellow and pink, chintz and terrycloth, light and airy as a toilet-paper commercial, with frills and laces everywhere. Early American bedspreads on beds with Colonial headboards. Bright wallpaper with designs of flowers and leaping figures. A pink hairy toilet-seat cover and pink hairy bathroom rug to match. Throw rugs on waxed floors. The gleam of polished maple everywhere. But no Mrs. Merriweather.

  Farther up? Engel found the stairs to the attic and went up to find it a dark barren dusty wooden tent-shape, alive with wasps. Engel sneezed and went back downstairs.

  She had to be somewhere. Her husband had just been killed, she’d just reported it to the cops, she had to stick around. Engel prowled the second-floor bedrooms again, still finding no one, went back down to the first floor, and finally decided, because there was no place else to look, to try the cellar.

  There was a light switch on the wall at the head of the black stairs leading down. Engel turned it on, and light down there revealed that the stairs were wood and the floor below was concrete painted deck-gray. He went down to a mad scientist’s laboratory. Coffins, steel tables, racks of bottled fluids, tubes and pipes and hoses. A large door led to a walk-in freezer, like those in butcher shops, this one containing several slabs, on two of which figures reclined under sheets. Engel lifted the sheets, but they were both strangers.

>   He went upstairs again and out to the front door, where podium and man stood like declarations of permanence and immortality amid the mortal clay. Engel said, “You sure she didn’t go out?”

  “Who was that, sir?”

  “Mrs. Merriweather. Tall woman in black.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  Engel, exasperated, went over and looked in the viewing room, but only the former Whatsisname was on view. He went back to podium and man. “I’m looking for Mrs. Merriweather,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I know. If she isn’t here, perhaps she isn’t back from shopping. She went shopping this morning, and …”

  “She was here ten minutes ago! A tall woman in black, right over there by the drapes.”

  “A tall woman in black, sir?”

  “Mrs. Merriweather. Your boss’s wife.”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but no. Mrs. Merriweather is not a tall woman in black. Mrs. Merriweather is an exceedingly short and stout woman, and is usually in pink.”

  Engel said, “What?”

  “Pink,” said the podium. Or the man.

  9

  There was a note on his apartment door, down on Carmine Street. It was written with Chinese-red lipstick on a large sheet of paper and stuck to the door with a false fingernail. It read: Honey, I’m back from the Coast. Where are you, baby, don’t you want to see your Dolly any more? Leave a message with Roxanne’s service.

  Your sugar tongue,

  DOLLY

  Engel blinked at the message, at the reference in its finale to an old private joke he’d once upon a time shared with Dolly, and at the golden implications beckoning to him from the lip-sticked paper. He plucked the false fingernail, turned the paper over, and saw that Dolly had used one of her résumés, a listing of the clubs and theaters where she’d worked. Dolly was what she called an exotic dancer, which is a dancer who gradually dances out of her clothing, and she was one of the fringe benefits Engel had derived when he’d made the big leap, four years ago, to Nick Rovito’s right hand.