The Busy Body Read online

  … one part bar syrup …

  “And I can’t tell you how sorry I am if I caused you any inconvenience.”

  “No, that’s all right. As long as it all comes out right in the end.” … two parts lemon juice …

  “I just can’t believe you’re a gangster. Oh! Was that a terrible thing to say?”

  Engel looked up from his preparations. “Is that what they told you at Police Headquarters?”

  She had both elbows propped on the bar, forearms vertical and fingers entwined, delicate chin resting on her grouped hands, lips smiling again and eyes being … provocative. “They told me you were a desperate character,” she said. “They told me you were in the Mafia and Cosa Nostra and the Syndicate and I don’t know what all.”

  “Diners’ Club? Did they mention Diners’ Club? Or the Masons?”

  She laughed, a tinkly sound. “No, they didn’t. I can see they gave me a slanted report on you.”

  “They’re prejudiced.” … eight parts Scotch; two, four, six, eight …

  “I don’t think you’re a gangster at all.”

  “No?” … shake vigorously …

  “I think you’re charming.”

  “Yes?” … shake …

  “Yes, I do. Like Akim Tamiroff on the Late Late Show. Only taller, of course, and without the mustache. And no accent. And your face is thinner. But the feeling is the same.”

  “Is it?” … vigorously.

  “I’ve never told you my name, have I?”

  Strain into whiskey-sour glass. “No, you haven’t.”

  “Margo,” she said. “Margo Kane.”

  “Engel,” he said, in his turn. “Al—uh, Al Engel.”

  “Yes, I know. How do you do?” She extended a hand, high, the way women do.

  For such a thin hand, it was very warm. Like holding an undernourished but attractive bird. “How do you do?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  Engel released her hand and went back to the drink. Garnish with cherry …

  “Fine, that is,” she went on, “all things considered. My bereavement and all.”

  … and a slice of lemon.

  Engel set the completed drink up on the bar in front of her. “Bereavement? What bereavement?”

  “Well, that’s actually part of what I was going to tell you. It’s all part of the same thing.” Long pale fingers closed around the glass, lifted it to scarlet lips. “Mmmm. You do have the touch.”

  Engel was making a fresh drink for himself now, a much simpler process: an ice cube, a splash of Scotch, a dash of water. “You’ve had a bereavement?” he said, trying to get her back onto the subject.

  “Yes.” A wistful, sad, forlorn look came into her eyes. She tapped the long nails of her left hand on the bar just once, in a ripple, as though expressing the finish of something. “My husband,” she said. “He died quite suddenly yesterday.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. It was quite a shock. So sudden, so terrible, and so unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary?”

  “Yes. He was hardly an old man. Fifty-two. He should have had years and years of life ahead of—I’m sorry, I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  A small white lace handkerchief had appeared in her hand, and tears in the corners of her eyes. She touched them away, shook her head slightly as though upset with herself for having thus given in to emotion, and took a strong swallow of her Scotch sour. “It’s such a terrible thing,” she said.

  Engel was calculating. The husband had been fifty-two, and he by now doubted the wife could be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It was the black clothing contrasting with the white skin that made her seem older at times. He said, “What was it, a heart attack?”

  “No. An accident. One of those stupid … Well, there’s no point going over and over it, it’s happened and there’s an end to it.”

  “You said,” Engel reminded her, “that I’d killed him. That’s how you sicked the cops on me.”

  “I don’t know what came over me when I did that,” she said, and looked lost and bewildered. She touched the back of her hand to her brow.

  Engel felt like saying he did know what had come over him when she said that, because what had come over him had been cops, but she was too easily distracted from her main line of thought, so he said nothing. He just waited, looking attentive.

  “I had come to see Mr. Merriweather,” she said, as though recounting something sad that had happened long, long ago in the dim past, “to talk about the details of the funeral. Of course, my mind was full of thoughts about my husband, and how stupidly unnecessary his death had been—a kind of murder, in a way, murder by Fate, by Destiny, what you will—we never know what life has in store for us around the next cor—”

  “Merriweather,” Engel suggested. “You’d come to see him about the funeral.”

  “Yes. And then, seeing him there, lying there actually murdered, not by Fate but by some person, I suppose I just snapped for a minute.”

  “You snapped,” said Engel. The way she kept skipping from style to style, from age to age, from mood to mood, he could believe she’d snapped for a lot longer than a minute.

  “That must have been it,” she was saying. “You were there, and I got you all confused with Destiny, and poor Mr. Merriweather mixed up with my husband, and just everything all confused.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “I passed out—well, you know that—but when I came to I believe, I truly believe, I was no longer in my right mind. It seemed to me somehow it was my Murray who’d been murdered—” She passed a hand again across her brow, and said, “I can still remember just what I was thinking, and how sensible and natural and right it seemed at the time. Murray had been murdered, and in my mind’s eye I saw the face of his murderer, and it was you.”

  “Just because I happened to be there,” said Engel.

  “Yes. It was just another—accident.” A shadow crossed her face at the words, but then she shook her head and went on: “As soon as I regained consciousness, I tottered away to seek help, and when I saw you standing there by the door I … I said what I did.” Contrition shone in her face now, and embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

  Engel said, “You explained this to the police.”

  “Oh, yes. They were angry at first, but finally they said they did understand how it could have happened.”

  “You talked to Deputy Inspector Callaghan?”

  “Not in person, no. On the telephone. He was still on his way to Headquarters when I left.”

  “Excuse me one second,” Engel said. “I got to make a phone call.”

  “Certainly.”

  Engel came out from behind the bar, crossed the room to the phone, and dialed Horace Stamford again. As he stood there waiting for the call to be completed, he observed casually how tastefully the Widow Kane perched on a bar stool, one slender shapely leg crossed over the other, black-sheathed rump rounding neatly onto the purple plush.

  Then Stamford came on. Engel identified himself and said, “The machine we talked about before. Has it started operating yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Then cancel.”

  Stamford asked no questions. Accuracy was his forte, not knowledge. “Will do,” he said.

  Engel hung up and went back over to the bar, this time sitting on the stool next to his guest. “Business,” he said.

  “Gangster business, I suppose.” She looked at him appraisingly, a friendly smile on her lips. “It’s so hard for me to think of you—”

  She was interrupted by the sound of the fawn’s afternoon. Her eyes widened, and she said, “I can’t be found here!”

  “What? Why—?”

  “Murray’s sisters! They’ll try to break the will anyway, I know they will, bringing up a lot of ancient history, trying to smear me, tell lies about me, insinuations, you know the kind of thing.” The fawn announced his afternoon again, making her rush: “If I’m found here,
the day after Murray died, in the apartment of a strange bachelor—!”

  “In back,” Engel told her. “Go hide in the bedroom. Or the office back there, the little room with the soundproofing, that’d be best.”

  “Oh, bless you! You’re so kind, so …” There was probably more, but she was already leaving the room.

  Once Engel could no longer see or hear her, he headed for the front door. On the way it occurred to him this could very well be Dolly, and if it was, and she was insistent, it could lead to complications he didn’t much care to think about. Thinking about them anyway, he opened the door.

  It wasn’t Dolly, but it might better have been Dolly. Even Dolly would have been better than Deputy Inspector Callaghan.

  11

  “Okay, mug,” said Deputy Inspector Callaghan, “let’s you and me talk.”

  “Sure,” said Engel. “Come on in.”

  But Callaghan was already in, crossing the foyer toward the living room. Engel shut the door and followed him, saying, “I was just about to leave, you know that? I was on my way down to see you.”

  Callaghan turned on Engel a fish-eye that made Nick Rovito’s look almost pleasant. “I know,” he said. “I’m sure of that. That’s why I came over, to save you the trouble.”

  “No trouble, Inspector. You want a drink?”

  “Not on duty.” Callaghan looked around the room. “Looks like a discount house,” he said.

  “I like it,” Engel told him, which was true. Callaghan was just a no-taste cop, but the comment still stung.

  Callaghan said, “Yeah.” He was still in his uniform, with the yellow brick road on the side. Normally he wore civilian clothes on duty, except for special occasions like parades and funerals. Apparently he’d been in too much of a hurry this time to change. He sighed, now, and took his hat off and tossed it on the sofa, where it couldn’t have looked more out of place. “All right,” he said. “Let’s start the song and dance.”

  “What song and dance is that?”

  “Where you tell me it’s all a case of mistaken identity, I must have got you mixed up with some other guy, you weren’t near any funeral parlors at all today. Then you come up with the alibi you worked up for yourself, two or three guys you talked to on the phone before I got here.”

  Engel took great pleasure in being able to say, “If you mean when you and all those other cops chased me out of Merriweather’s grief parlor today, that’s what I wanted to come down and talk to you about.”

  Callaghan’s jaw very obligingly dropped three feet. “You admit it?”

  “Well, sure I admit it. And I admit I don’t know how I got away either. I ran down that alley and through that door and out the other side and I was halfway down the next block before I realized you weren’t chasing me any more.”

  Callaghan’s jaw climbed back up and arranged itself into a smug smile. He was obviously pleased to see that Engel was going to do at least some lying; it restored Callaghan’s faith in human nature. He said, “So. You didn’t bar that door at the end of the alley, eh?”

  “Bar the door? What with?”

  “And you didn’t knock a lot of full oil drums down in the way of the door either, is that it?”

  “Oil drums? I thought I heard something fall down behind me, but I didn’t look back to see what it was.”

  “Of course not. And you didn’t back a truck into the other end of the alley either, have I got that straight?”

  “Back a truck? What truck? Where did I get a truck from?”

  Callaghan nodded. “For a minute there,” he said, “I thought one of us had gone crazy. But it’s all right, you’re talking straight again.”

  “I’ll always talk straight to you, Inspector.”

  “Yeah? Then maybe you’ll tell me how come you ran.”

  “Because you chased me,” Engel said. “Anybody’d run, they see a hundred cops chasing them.”

  “Not if you had a clear conscience.”

  “That’s afterward,” Engel told him. “Afterward is when you say to yourself, ‘What the hell, I didn’t do anything.’ But right at the time, all those cops chasing you, a woman says you bumped off her husband, all you do is run.”

  “And I’ll tell you why,” Callaghan said. “Because you didn’t know who that woman was, that’s why. You didn’t know if she was the wife of somebody you killed or not. You’ve done at least one killing recently, maybe more, and you let me know it when you ran away.”

  “Then why didn’t I keep on running?”

  Callaghan gave him a crooked smile. “Mind if I use your phone? To help answer the question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.” Callaghan made the word heavily ironic. He went over the phone, dialed, identified himself, asked for someone named Percy, and when Percy came on the wire, said, “Who talked to that Kane woman? Ask him did she ask any questions about Engel, where he lived, who he was, anything like that. Right, I’ll hold on.”

  Engel went over to the wooden-armed chair where the Kane woman had first sat, and waited there with his arms folded and his feet stretched casually out in front of him. So far as he could see he was in the clear with the law, unless Callaghan wanted to make something out of the Merriweather murder, but if he did he surely would have mentioned something about it now. So Engel, incurious, just sat and waited.

  Callaghan, after a moderately long silence, said, “Yeah? She did? That’s fine.” He grinned crookedly over the phone, said so long, hung up, and turned to Engel. “Now I’ll answer your question,” he said. “You stopped running, and you decided not to set up an alibi for yourself, because the Kane woman came here and told you she’d been to Headquarters to tell her story and get you off the hook.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes, she did. She got your address from one of our boys at Headquarters, because she said she wanted to send you a letter and apologize. But she didn’t send you a letter, she came here in person, straight from Headquarters.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yeah, that’s a fact.” Callaghan pointed toward the bar. “She had a drink while she was here, there’s the glass. She probably left just before I got here.”

  “Fancy that.”

  Callaghan said, “That’s the trouble with you punks, you all think you’re smart, smarter than anybody, and all the same you’re nothing but stupid. Stupid. You’ll die in jail, Engel, and maybe in the chair.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes, you will.” Callaghan pointed a knobby finger at Engel. “You were stupid today,” he said. “You let me know there was something to look for. You let me know you’ve done at least one killing recently. Now I start looking. You think I won’t find what I’m looking for?”

  “That’s what I think, all right,” said Engel. “I don’t kill people, I’m not the type. I got spooked today, that’s all, just the way anybody would in a situation like that.”

  “I’ll get the goods on you, Engel, don’t you think I won’t. I’ll remember that business about the alley a long, long time.”

  “Why not set me up for the Merriweather killing?” Engel asked him, pushing the subject because he wanted to know why Callaghan hadn’t mentioned it.

  Callaghan said, “I wish I could, but the timing’s off. We know to the minute when Merriweather was killed, and it was before you were even inside the front door. I’m your alibi on that killing.”

  “What do you mean, you know to the minute when he was killed?”

  “What do you care for?”

  Engel cared because the Merriweather killing was, he was convinced, connected somehow with the missing Charlie Brody and his missing suit, but what he said was, “It’s a provocative statement, that’s all. You say you know to the minute when he was killed, and it was when you and I were out front, so it’s a provocative statement. I’ve got a natural curiosity about how come you know to the minute when he was killed.”

  Callaghan said, “He was talking on the phone. He said, ‘There’s
someone at the door, I’ll call you back.’ Then he broke the connection. The party he was talking to had something to say to him right away, and dialed his number again, and got a busy signal. The reason for that is, when he was stabbed he knocked the phone off his desk and the receiver came off the hook. So he was killed between the time he hung up and the time the fellow he was talking to finished dialing again and got the busy signal, which is about a minute, and this fellow knows what time that minute was because he was late for an appointment and looking at his watch the same time he was dialing.”

  “Who was he talking to?”

  Callaghan frowned. “You ask a lot of questions. Get the habit from talking to cops?”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Engel said, “I was just curious, that’s all, just making conversation.”

  “It was a fellow named Brock, Kurt Brock. Merriweather’s assistant. Merriweather fired him yesterday, or laid him off, I couldn’t get it straight which, and Brock was talking to him about coming back to work for him. When Merriweather hung up, Brock thought he was just giving him the brush-off, and he had a date to get to, so that’s why he called back right away.”

  “Giving himself and me alibis,” Engel said.

  Callaghan said, “Sharp, aren’t you? We checked that, and he’s alibied from the other end. His landlady knows he was there, and knows when he left. She’s one of those landladies knows everything happens on the block.”

  Engel said, “So I’m in the clear.”

  “I could make trouble for you if I wanted,” Callaghan told him. “Malicious mischief, maybe, or obstructing a policeman in the performance of his duty. You committed about thirty-seven misdemeanors this afternoon, whether you know it or not. But I don’t want you on any misdemeanor, that’s the easy way out. Get you a fine, maybe thirty days in the Tombs if I’m lucky, you can shrug that off as just the price for a good story you can tell around the bars. No, what I want you on is a felony, a big felony. Something that’ll stick, and something that’ll get you out of circulation for good. Something like murder one, say, that ought to do the trick.”