The Busy Body

by Donald E. Westlake

His apartment, too, looked like any other apartment in the area, respectable if somewhat seedy, predictable and staid. An imitation Persian carpet lay on the living-room floor. A bulky sofa and two chairs, one of which matched the upholstery of the sofa, were arranged about the room exactly as they would have been arranged by any other family in the neighborhood. The television set—a console, with an unused phonograph on the right and seldom-used radio on the left—faced the sofa. Lamps, tables, all appropriate and all predictably situated. On the wall above the sofa was a painting of a dirt road in the woods in autumn, with the trees all orange and gold; it might have been a jigsaw puzzle except for the absence of little lines where the pieces were joined.

  Bobbi Bounds, the former Mrs. Brody, sat in the middle of all this, quietly weeping. When Engel came in she said, in a small voice, “I’m sorry, Mr. Engel, but I just can’t help it. This place is so full of memories.”

  Which only meant that no matter how typical a thing is, it is still somehow individual.

  “I won’t take long, Mrs. Brody,” Engel promised. “I’d just like to take a quick look through Charlie’s papers or whatever.”

  “He kept a little desk in the bedroom,” she said. “You’re welcome to look. I haven’t touched a thing yet, I just didn’t have the heart.”

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  The bedroom was the inevitable encore to the living room, with the addition of a small roll-top desk in the corner by the closet with the mirror on its door. Engel sat down at this desk, rolled up the top, which hadn’t been locked, and spent the next fifteen minutes going through the papers stuffed in the drawers and pigeonholes.

  Nothing. Bills, ads clipped out of newspapers, old rent and utility receipts, some travel brochures, income tax records, personal letters, all sorts of junk, but not a thing that helped Engel figure out where Brody was now or why he was there.

  The problem was, he couldn’t begin to imagine why anybody wanted Brody’s body in the first place. If only he could figure out a reason, maybe he could get somewhere. But there wasn’t anything in the contents of this desk to give him a reason, or even a hint of a reason.

  He went through the dresser drawers, too, as long as he was there, and the pockets of the clothing in the closet, and gradually searched the whole room, and still found nothing.

  Back in the living room, the widow had stopped her weeping and was sitting now with a soft and resigned stillness. Engel told her, “There’s a couple of things I’d like to talk to you about. Why don’t we go out and have a drink? Better to talk in a bar.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Engel. You’re a very kind man.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  Mrs. Brody switched off all the lights and carefully locked the door after them. They went downstairs and out to the street and up to 72nd Street, which was the nearest business district. In a Chinese restaurant-plus-bar called The Good Earth they sat at a table, ordered only drinks to the disgust of the scrutable Oriental who served them, and then Mrs. Brody said, “I hope you found what you were looking for, Mr. Engel.”

  “Well, I’m not sure. Every little bit helps, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  He reflected that neither of them knew what he was talking about, and on that reflection allowed the silence to stretch between them.

  The problem was, what sort of question could he ask her? She didn’t know her husband’s body was missing, and Engel didn’t have the heart to give her the news. Also, there was no reason to tell her. But what could she know about why it might be taken, or by whom?

  The questions that came to his mind were all the wrong kind. He couldn’t ask if Charlie had any enemies, because an enemy is something you have before you kick off, not after. So what then?

  Following an obscure line of thought, he said, “Did your husband belong to any, uh, groups, Mrs. Brody? You know, fraternal organizations and like that.”

  “Fraternal—?” The way she looked at him, she had no idea what a fraternal organization was.

  Sometimes a high school education got in the way of full communication with the sort of individual one had to deal with in this world. Engel said, “Like the Masons or the Elks or the Rotarians and like that. Or the American Legion, the VFW. Maybe the John Birch Society. I don’t know, just groups.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Charlie wasn’t a joiner. He was very proud of that, not being a joiner. Every once in a while somebody would come around, join this committee, join that group, fight this, demand that, you know the kind of thing you get, and Charlie always use to say, ‘Not me, thanks, I’m no joiner.’ It used to make them so mad they could spit.”

  “What about religion?” Engel asked her. “What religion was he?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” she said. “He was brought up some sort of Protestant, I guess Methodist. But he wasn’t actively in the church at all. I mean, for instance, we had a civil ceremony. In Las Vegas, in one of the marriage chapels there. It was really very beautiful.”

  She looked as though she were going to start crying again in a second, but instead she dipped her nose into her drink.

  Engel said, “He never joined any kind of religious group?”

  “No. Not a one. He wasn’t a joiner, you know?”

  Engel knew. But he’d been hoping, he’d been hoping. He’d all of a sudden gotten this wild idea about a crazy religious cult, Druids or something, and when one of their number died they took the body themselves and had some special thing they did with it. He knew it was far-fetched, but if it turned out to be so, then it didn’t matter how far-fetched it was.

  Except it wasn’t so.

  And Engel had run dry. He kept the conversation going as best he could, but he was stuck and he knew it. He only stayed for the one drink, and then took a cab back downtown to get ready for dinner with Mrs. Kane.

  Life was just one damn widow after another.

  15

  Another note:

  Are you going to phone

  me, or aren’t you?

  If you don’t want to

  see me any more, just

  say so.

  I can take a hint.

  It wasn’t signed, but it was on a résumé again, in lipstick again, and attached to the door with a false fingernail again, so Engel had a pretty good idea who it was from.

  “Life is cruel,” he said aloud. He took the note down and went into the apartment.

  It was ten after seven, and he spent the next forty-five minutes showering, changing, and generally getting ready for his evening with Mrs. Kane. After all, he told himself, she was at the funeral parlor today, and she knows Kurt Brock, and Kurt Brock was the next to the last one to see Charlie Brody, so I can look at it like I’m still working. There could be some connection between Margo Kane and Charlie Brody’s body.

  There could? Engel, adjusting his tie before the one-way mirror (producer), looked himself in the eye and made a face at himself. What would a woman like Margo Kane want with a body like Charlie Brody?

  Well, he told himself defensively, you never knew. That’s all, you just never knew.

  Sure.

  She arrived punctually at eight, coming in smiling and effervescent, wearing now a forest-green knit dress in which she looked almost—but not quite—too thin to be interesting. Her lipstick and nail polish were a less violent shade than before, and her raven-black hair hung in soft folds now around her face.

  She came in saying, “I would have insisted on meeting you again if only to see your apartment once more. It’s just the most fascinating place I’ve ever been in.”

  Engel felt his hackles beginning just slightly to rise. He didn’t know exactly why, but he had the feeling there was somehow a touch of mockery in her references to his apartment He said, “I’m ready to go if you are. Or,” belatedly, “do you want a drink first?”

  She seemed surprised, whether by his tone or his offer he couldn’t tell. “We don’t have to,” she said. “We could have a d
rink at the restaurant.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  They didn’t speak again until they were down in her car, the Mercedes-Benz sports car again, the top still down, once again parked in front of a fire hydrant. Then Engel said, “Don’t you ever get tickets, parking like this?”

  “You mean those little green cards people put under the windshield wiper?” She laughed, and started the engine. “I have a drawer at home full of those,” she said, and pulled away from the curb.

  She was a good driver, if a little too competitive. She jockeyed the Mercedes through the narrow Village streets, occasionally leaving shouters and fist-shakers in her wake, and eventually found a ramp up to the West Side Highway, heading north. Comfortably settled in the middle lane, she glanced at Engel and said, “You seem somehow withdrawn tonight. As though you had a rough day.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I did all right. I had a rough day.”

  “Gangster business?”

  The phrase was meant to make him laugh, and he did. “Gangster business,” he said. “I’m looking for something that belongs to my boss.”

  “Something stolen?”

  “Lost, strayed, or stolen. I’ll tell you when I find it.”

  “Was that why you were at the funeral parlor today? Looking for it there?”

  Engel decided not to give her any sort of specific answer. A simple lie—that he’d been there to pay the Brody bill, for instance—would have ended the matter there and then, but he knew she meant to pump him for his reason for seeing Kurt Brock and it amused him to play it dumb but cozy, make her work for her misinformation. So he said, “Not really. I have all kinds of gangster business.”

  “Oh, then it was gangster business that brought you there.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Listen, it’s too nice a night to talk about funeral parlors.”

  “Of course,” she said, but she couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice.

  It was now fully night, a beautiful spring night in the only time of the year when New York City is habitable. At no other time is the air clear, is the sky clean, do the streets and buildings give any indication of personality and color beneath the all-embracing grime. Speeding up the West Side Highway, elevated above the crasser level of the truck-bound streets, the city on their right and the Hudson River and Jersey shore on their left, they were as close as human beings can get to the setting of a thirties movie musical.

  There were, naturally, huge billboards boosting beer and trucking companies lining the route on their right, interrupting the view of the city, and across the river, in red neon letters quite large enough to be read from here, blinking slowly on and off, was the one word: SPRY. Women in passing automobiles, caught up in a drifting romantic dream, on seeing that word in the middle of the panorama of night, turned to their husbands and, “Remind me from now on,” they said, “to use Crisco.”

  Mrs. Kane tried no longer on the drive to get information out of Engel. They talked casually, comfortably, about the weather and the city and the driving and other impersonal subjects, and when the silences came between topics they let them come without worrying about them.

  At 72nd Street the West Side Highway became the Henry Hudson Parkway. No longer an elevated highway, it raced now amid landscaped greenery, bulky elderly apartment houses on their right. Ahead, gleaming across the river with all its lights, was the George Washington Bridge.

  Engel had no idea where Mrs. Kane was taking him, and he didn’t worry about it. He sat back in the good car and relaxed. No more did he try to kid himself that he was working. He’d stopped working for today. Tomorrow was soon enough to worry some more about Charlie Brody.

  At the bridge they left Henry Hudson and his Parkway, joined the Cross-Bronx Expressway for an elevated trip through some of the less attractive purlieus of New York, thence to the Hutchinson River Parkway north out of the city and out of the state. At the Connecticut line the name changed to Merritt Parkway, and at that point Engel said, “Where we going?”

  “A little place I know. Not much farther.”

  “We have to drive back, too, you know.”

  She glanced at him again, amused. “Do gangsters have to get up early in the morning?”

  “That depends.”

  They left the Parkway at the Long Ridge Road exit, and drove north a few miles farther before at last she turned off the road and into the parking lot next to a one-time barn now converted into a restaurant called The Turkey Run.

  Inside, The Turkey Run was determinedly rustic. Everything was wood, and none of it was smooth. Enough carriage wheels were suspended from the ceiling or hung on the walls or used as room dividers to keep the Conestoga Company in stock for a month. If the lamps on the walls and on the tables didn’t look like kerosene lamps it wasn’t the designer’s fault.

  There would be, the mustachioed and absurdly-French waiter told them, a short wait for a table. Would they prefer to wait at the bar?

  They would. Over a Scotch sour, Mrs. Kane became moody. “Murray and I used to come here so often,” she said. “It’s hard to believe we’ll never come here again. All that’s behind me now, that way of life.”

  “It must have been a shock,” Engel said, because you had to say something in response to a line like that.

  “And so—so silly,” she said. “So unnecessary.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She smiled at him, a little crookedly, and rested her hand on his forearm. “You’re sweet,” she said. “And yes I do. I’ve had no one to talk to, no one. I’ve had to keep it all bottled up inside.”

  “That’s no good,” Engel said. He found himself thinking how different this one would be from Dolly, contrasting in imagination their individual styles and responses, and forced his mind away at once from such conjectures. That was pretty low of him, he thought, all things considered.

  “Murray was a garment manufacturer,” she said. “In negligees.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Evening Mist Negligees? You don’t know the brand name?”

  Engel shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Well, of course, women would be more likely to know it.”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s how I met him. I was a model, and we met at a style show. At first I thought—well, the things people say about the garment business are all true, but—but Murray was different. So sweet, so attentive, so sincere. We were married in seven weeks, and I never regretted it, not for a minute. Of course, there was the age difference, but that didn’t bother us. How could it? We were in love.”

  Engel said, “Uh huh,” and pulled at his drink.

  Mrs. Kane also worked a bit at her Scotch sour. “We had an apartment in town,” she said, “and a place in the country. Not far from here, near Hunting Ridge. That’s how I happen to know this restaurant, we used to come here so often, so often. And then, of course, Murray had his business, in a loft on West 37th treet. That’s where it happened.”

  “Mm hmm?”

  “Murray—well, Murray was more than just a businessman. He’d started in the trade as a designer, and he still did many of his own designs for Evening Mist. He liked very often to stay in the plant in the evenings, alone, after everyone else had gone, and work in his office.” She closed her eyes. “I can just see him there, the big fluorescent light on over his head, he bent over his desk, the rest of the loft dark and silent, the bolts of cloth stacked up everywhere.” Abruptly again she opened her eyes. “The way the Fire Department reconstructed it,” she said, “some of the wiring had become frayed and dangerous. It was such an old building. All at once there was a short-circuit, a fire. All that delicate flimsy cloth, bolt after bolt of it, the fire just swept through it. Of course the sprinklers went on, but they weren’t enough. The rest of the building survived, but the interior of the loft was burned to a crisp.”

  Engel reached out and took her hand, and found it cold. “If you don’t want to—”

  “But I do, I do
. Murray was cut off, you see, from both doors. Being in his own little cubicle, separated from the rest of the floor, it protected him a little, but not enough. In that heat, in all that flame—”

  Engel said, “Easy. Easy.”

  She stopped, held her breath, then let it out in a long sigh. “That’s over,” she said. “I’m sorry I used you this—”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “You’re very sweet, and I am sorry, but I had to say it, I had to talk about it just once. Now it’s done, and I’ll never speak of it again.” She smiled bravely, and picked up her drink. “To the future,” she said.

  “To the future.”

  They got their table shortly after that, and she was true to her word. They talked no more about the late Murray, and concerned themselves once again with lighter and less personal topics. Once when Engel called her Mrs. Kane she insisted that from now on he call her Margo, which after that he did. From time to time she tried to find out gently what he’d been up to at the funeral parlor, but Engel continued for the fun of it to evade her questions. And while she was away to the powder room, he found himself thinking of her in Dolly-like terms once again, and once again he shoved such thoughts down and nailed the lid.

  The drive back to the city was as pleasant as the drive up. She drove Engel to his door, and as they shook hands in the car and thanked one another for a lovely evening, it seemed to Engel for one fleet second she expected him to kiss her, but he put the idea down to too much night air and too much Scotch. She did say, “May I come again to see your apartment? All of it this time.”

  “Whenever you want,” he said.

  “I’ll call you.”

  He got out of the car, and she waved and drove away.

  Upstairs, he was disappointed to see no note on the door. Had Dolly given up on him? Maybe he shouldn’t have wasted tonight after all, maybe he should have been hard at work clearing up the problem at hand.

  Well. Tomorrow.

  He unlocked the door and went into his apartment and the lights were on. While he was still reacting to that, two of the boys came walking into view, their hands suspiciously close to their jacket lapels. Engel recognized them as organization muscle, but he didn’t recognize the expression on their faces and couldn’t figure out what they were doing here like this.