The Busy Body Read online

  “Sure,” said Engel. “You have a lot of fun.” He smiled, free and easy, because he knew for once he was clear and clean and safe. Callaghan would be looking for murders Engel had performed, and murder was just about the only felony Engel hadn’t performed recently, so there wouldn’t be anything out there for Callaghan to find but a wild goose and he was welcome to it.

  “I’ll be seeing you again,” Callaghan said. “Don’t leave town, in the meantime, you may be a witness in the Merriweather case.”

  “Sure. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  “Except Sing Sing.”

  On that note Deputy Inspector Callaghan left, taking his surly disposition with him. Engel shut the hall door after him and then went back through the living room and deeper into the apartment. In the bedroom he said, softly, “All right, Mrs. Kane, it’s safe now. He’s gone.”

  There wasn’t any answer.

  Engel frowned. He looked in the soundproof room and it was empty. He looked in the bedroom closet and under the bedroom bed. He called, “Mrs. Kane? Mrs. Kane?” He looked in the bathroom and in the sauna (producer), looked in the kitchen, looked everywhere.

  Finally he got to the rear door, which let out on a narrow room where the cistern and the service elevator were, where his milk would be delivered if he had milk delivered, and she wasn’t there either.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said to himself. “She’s gone again.”

  12

  How many Kurt Brocks could there be? According to Engel’s telephone directories, one in Manhattan, none in Queens, two in Brooklyn, none in The Bronx. Total: three.

  The Manhattan Kurt Brock was nearest, so Engel went to see him first. He wanted to talk to the Kurt Brock who’d been fired by Merriweather, because he wanted to know how long ago this firing had taken place. If Brock had been fired before Charlie Brody’s body arrived at the grief parlor, nothing more was to be said. If he wasn’t fired until more recently than that, there was a good chance he might know something Engel could use.

  Kurt Brock number one lived on West 24th Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues. The south side of that block was one long apartment building, London Terrace, which covered the whole area bounded by 23rd and 24th streets and Ninth and Tenth avenues. Brock lived across the street from this monstrosity, in one of a row of identical elderly narrow buildings four stories high, all converted to one- and two-room apartments, each set back a bit from the sidewalk with greenery or concrete in front, depending on the owner’s whim. The buildings were all run together in a row, with no space at the sides, in the normal New York manner.

  The one Brock lived in had shrubbery and gravel intermixed in its front space, in a vaguely Japanese effect spoiled by a heavily European thick iron fence across the front boundary. Engel pushed open the gate in this, crossed the slate path to the front door, and was about to step inside when a voice above him called, “Kurt! Kurt, did you remember the liquor store?”

  Engel stepped back a pace and looked up. An amiable heavy-set middle-aged woman was looking at him from a second-story window. When she saw his face she stopped smiling, looked baffled for a second, and then said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were Kurt.”

  “Kurt Brock?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “He’s the one I came to see. Isn’t he home now?”

  “He’s gone to the supermarket. Down at the corner. He’ll be back soon, why don’t you sit down and wait?”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a low bench set against the front of the building, beside the door. Sitting on it, one could look across the shrubbery, over the fence, and out to the sidewalk, the street beyond, and—the normally near horizon of New York—the bulging brick apartment building across the way. Engel sat down there, lit a cigarette, and waited. This might be the wrong Kurt Brock, he might be wasting his time right now, but as long as he was here he might as well check this one off the list. No sense coming back twice if he didn’t have to.

  He waited ten minutes, and then the gate was pushed open by a tall slender young man with his arms full of grocery-store sacks. He was about Engel’s height and slenderness, but looked to be half a dozen years younger, probably in his early twenties. He had black hair, dark piercing Mediterranean eyes, prominent cheekbones, sallow skin. All in all, vaguely decadent good looks, as though he might have once upon a time been a gigolo.

  Above Engel’s head, the woman called, “Kurt! Did you remember the liquor store?”

  “Right here.” He waved a smaller brown paper bag held in his right hand, out at the perimeter of the larger grocery sacks. When he smiled up at the woman in the window his face softened, he looked much more pleasant and much less cynically worldly-wise.

  “There’s a man here to see you,” the woman called, presumably pointing down at the top of Engel’s head.

  The smile vanished at once, and Kurt Brock’s face took on such a guarded, wary quality it was almost as though steel plates had been erected all around it. He came forward walking catlike, ready to leap in any direction, the armful of grocery sacks unfortunately spoiling the effect. “You wanted to see me?”

  “You’re the Kurt Brock who worked for Augustus Merriweather.” Engel had begun the sentence as a question, midway through had thought better of it, and had finished it as a direct statement. He instinctively didn’t want Brock to see any doubt or indecision in him.

  Brock’s wariness lessened, replaced by feigned weariness. “You’re from the police again, I suppose.”

  Engel made a head-and-hand motion that might have meant yes.

  “I’ve already made a statement twice,” Brock said. “Once on the phone, and once to two patrolmen who came around.”

  “Red tape,” Engel explained, knowing it was an explanation that would satisfy anybody about anything official.

  It satisfied Brock, who sighed, shrugged behind the grocery sacks, and said, “Very well. Come along upstairs.”

  “I’ll carry one of those for you.”

  “Would you? Thanks.”

  They went into the building and up the stairs, Brock leading the way, Engel following, each carrying a sack of groceries. Brock also carried the smaller package from the liquor store, and stopped at the door to the second-floor front apartment in order to deliver it. There was a delay while the woman thanked Brock, found her purse, paid him for the bottle, and thanked him all over again, while the sack of groceries in Engel’s arms steadily put on weight. In the interval, with nothing else to do, he memorized the contents of the sack, as much of them as he could see: celery, English muffins, eggs, raspberry yogurt, tomatoes. Plus cans of this and that down at the bottom of the sack, which he couldn’t see but his arms could feel.

  Finally the liquor transaction was done and Brock led the way up one more flight, fumbled with his key, and let Engel into a small neat room that somehow didn’t look like a place where anyone lived. It had more the appearance of an anteroom or dressing room; a place where one came to rest and prepare for something to be done outside. Perhaps the matador, before going out to meet the bull, would dress and bless himself in a room like this, tucked away beneath the stands. Perhaps the brand-new Presidential candidate, before going out to address the convention, would sit and go over last-minute changes in his speech in a room like this, past a small door behind the platform.

  The room was functional, that’s why, merely functional. A studio couch which was presumably a bed by night was now covered neatly with zebra-stripe material and two ornamental orange cushions. A neat breakfast set, table and two chairs of formica and tubular chrome and orange seating material, was tucked away against the wall next to a tiny, clean, white, barren kitchenette. The carpet was gray, the curtains orange and white, the rest of the furniture bright and neat and functional and uninteresting, of the kind loosely called Danish Modern but which might with more accuracy be called Motel Standard.

  Brock said, “Do you mind if I put these things away while we talk? I have some p
erishables.”

  “Go ahead.” Engel put his grocery sack on the table, flexed his arms, and said, “As I get it, you were on the phone to Merriweather just before he was killed.”

  “Yes.” Brock opened the refrigerator door and started putting things away. Within the refrigerator his food was lined and stacked as neatly as on any supermarket’s shelf. “At least, that’s what the police say. I know when I tried to call him back the line was busy.”

  “Because the phone was knocked off the hook when he was killed, I know.” Engel lit a cigarette, thinking carefully. Brock had assumed he was a cop, and that was good because it meant he’d answer questions. But now the problem was to ask the questions a cop might reasonably ask and still get the answers Engel wanted. He tossed his match into a gleaming spotless glass ashtray inscribed Acapulco Hilton, and said, “You were calling about your job, is that it?”

  “Yes. Getting it back, yes.”

  “I don’t have that part straight. You quit your job, you were laid off, you were fired, what was it?”

  Brock finished putting his groceries away and shut the refrigerator door. “I was fired,” he said. He grinned sheepishly, and shrugged. “I suppose I deserved it,” he said, and folded up the grocery sacks and put them away.

  “You were fired when?”

  Brock came out of the kitchenette, leaving it as spotless and unused-looking as before he’d gone into it It made Engel vaguely uneasy to be in the presence of a man who traveled with no wake; as though he’d seen a cat walk through mud and leave no tracks. It was somehow ghostly.

  Brock said, “Fired yesterday. Why don’t you sit down, Mr.—?”

  “Engel.” When there’s no need to lie, don’t lie. Engel sat down in a trim lightweight chair with wooden arms and frame, bright-hued foam rubber cushions, and a look of transience, while Brock settled himself gracefully on the zebra-striped studio couch. He was wearing black slacks, somewhat tight, and a lime-green polo shirt.

  Engel said, more to himself than Brock, “Fired yesterday …” Which meant Brock was still an employee when Charlie Brody had come under Merriweather’s care. Engel said, “What were you fired for?”

  Brock smiled again, that boyish pleasant grin. “Incompetence,” he said, “sheer incompetence. Plus being too often late for work and not taking a sufficiently whole-hearted interest in my profession.” The smile broadened, became positively collegiate. “Somehow,” he said, “I never could see myself being a mortician the rest of my life.”

  Nor could Engel. He said, “How did you go to work for him in the first place?”

  “I was a chauffeur for a while. I worked for some people on Long Island, until …” He shrugged casually. “That’s all past, a long story and not related. When I needed another job, I thought I would still drive. I almost went to work for a taxi-cab company, but then I answered an ad in the Times and it turned out to be Mr. Merriweather, looking for someone to drive the hearse.”

  “Is that what you did, drive the hearse?” Which would be unfortunately removed from any connection with Charlie Brody’s body.

  “At first. But Mr. Merriweather took an interest in me, and so I suppose did Mrs. Merriweather. At any rate, he was training me to be his assistant, eventually perhaps his partner. So I wound up doing general work for him, just about everything there is to do in a funeral home.”

  “And then he fired you?”

  Brock again combined the smile and shrug. “The more I learned about the business,” he said, “the less I was enthralled by it. On the other hand, I wasn’t at all ready to leave that employment, which is why I phoned him today, to see if he’d calmed down and would take me back.”

  “Had he?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to find out.”

  All things considered, Engel was willing to guess there was more to the story than Brock had told, and his further guess was that the rest of the story had to do somehow with Mrs. Merrieather. Had Brock been doing a little extracurricular work there? Or had Mrs. Merriweather merely tried too hard to be helpful to Brock with her husband, with or without Brock’s request that she do so? It was something like that anyway, and Engel was pleased with himself for figuring it out, but on the other hand, it wasn’t getting him any closer to Charlie Brody and that goddam blue suit, so he said, “I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Brock, I don’t know a thing about the undertaker business, and now with Mr. Merriweather murdered I’ve got to do some learning. I’ve got to know the routine, the methods, what Mr. Merriweather’s normal day was like, you see what I mean?” Engel, saying all this, could barely keep a smile of pleasure from spoiling the whole effect. It was just that he was working with his own memory of interviews with cops in order to try to sound like a cop himself, and he was proudly sure he was doing just fine.

  Apparently he was. Brock leaned forward in an attitude that declared his desire to help, and said, “Anything I can tell you, Mr. Engel, I’ll be glad to.”

  “I tell you what,” said Engel. “Let’s take the last body you worked on, you and Mr. Merriweather, you tell me everything that’s done from beginning to end.”

  “Well, not everybody likes that kind of detail, Mr. Engel.”

  “I don’t mind. In my business …” Engel let the sentence end with his own smile-shrug combination, then said, “We’ll just take the last body you worked on. What would that be?”

  “The last client?”

  “Client?”

  Brock’s sudden smile this time was slightly sardonic. “That was Mr. Merriweather’s word,” he said. “He’s a client himself now, isn’t he?”

  “All right, who was the last client you worked on?”

  “That would be the retired policeman, O’Sullivan. He was buried this morning.”

  Engel covered his disappointment. “Of course,” he said. “That was the last one you worked on.”

  “Of course,” said Brock, “I didn’t deal with him all the way through, I got fired first, but I could tell you what part I did, and then what Mr. Merriweather did after I left, it’s all standard stuff.”

  “I’d rather,” Engel told him, seeing a ray of hope, “you told me about a client you actually worked on all the way through. Who would that be, the one before O’Sullivan?”

  “Yes, that would be another man, a Mr. Brody.”

  “Brody.”

  “Yes. Heart attack. I think he was a salesman of some kind.”

  Engel settled more comfortably on the chair, and said, “Fine. Tell me about him.”

  “Well, it was the widow who called. Some business associate of her husband’s had recommended Merriweather, I think. I went out with the pickup car, made the initial arrangements with the widow and met with the doctor, and the pickup team with me put the client in the travel box.”

  “Travel box,” said Engel.

  “That’s what we call it. Looks pretty much like a regular casket, but with handles coming out of each end, like a stretcher. I think the city boys use a wicker basket, which would be more practical for cleaning and everything, but families might get upset if they saw a client stuffed away in a basket, so we use the travel box.”

  “Sure,” said Engel.

  Brock seemed to consider. “Nothing special about the Brody case,” he said. “Well, one thing. There’d been an accident of some sort, he was burned rather badly about the head, so there wouldn’t be any viewing. Actually, there’s the whole area of cosmetology we didn’t get into with Brody, maybe I ought to pick a different client to tell you about.”

  “No, no, that’s fine, we’ve started with this man Whats-isname—”

  “Brody.”

  “Right, Brody. We’ve started with him, let’s finish with him. Then, if there’s anything different you’d do normally, we can go back over it again.”

  Brock shrugged and said, “If you think that’s the way to do it.”

  “I do.”

  “Then fine. All right, we brought Brody back and put him in the icebox overnight. In the morning t
he widow came in—with some friends of her husband’s, I think—and they selected the casket, worked out the arrangements; I remember it struck me it was a surprisingly big funeral they were setting up for a little salesman, whatever he was.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we embalmed him, of course. Or actually we did it the night before.”

  “Embalmed.”

  “Yes. We drain the blood out of him, and put the embalming fluid in.”

  “In the veins.”

  “And arteries, yes.”

  Engel was beginning to feel slightly less than well. He said, “Then what?”

  “Then of course we clean out the internal organs and—”

  “Internal organs.”

  Brock motioned at his own torso. “Stomach,” he said. “All that.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then we fill the cavity with cavity fluid and—”

  “Cavity?”

  Brock made the same motion as before. “Where the internal organs were.”

  “Oh,” said Engel. He lit a cigarette and it tasted like a barn in summer.

  “That’s all done the night before,” said Brock. “When we get the client. Then we wait till the next morning for the restoration.”

  “That’s when Brody’s wife came.”

  “Well, that’s what’s happening upstairs. Downstairs, usually, there’s the restoration. Cosmetics, you know, this and that, we make the client look as though he’s sleeping. Sew the lips shut, use make-up for any little deformities, any little problems—”

  “Yeah, fine, that’s fine.”

  “Of course, with Brody we didn’t do all that, because there wasn’t a viewing.”

  “Right.”

  “We did some of course, the normal embalming procedures, but there was hardly any face there to put make-up on, you know. And no lips to sew.”

  Engel swallowed and put his cigarette out. “Yeah, well, then what?”

  “Then we arrange the client in his casket. Well, no, first he goes back in the icebox till the viewing, or the wake, whatever you want to call it. Then we arrange him in the casket and bring him upstairs for the viewing. With Brody there was a wake, but no viewing. Closed casket. He got a pretty big crowd anyway, a lot more than I expected. I can’t figure out what he sold, to get that kind of crowd at his wake.”