Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

“I’ll call you when I get a minute free.”

“If you—”

“I promise.”

“You wo—”

“I won’t forget.”

When this time she didn’t have anything immediately to say, but let two or three seconds of silence elapse, Engel said, “Bye now, Mom, I’ll call you,” and promptly hung up. Just as promptly he picked up the receiver again, preparing to dial, and heard a tinny voice saying, “Aloysius? Aloysius?”

She hadn’t hung up, and until she did the connection wasn’t broken. Quickly Engel put the receiver down again. He counted to ten, then cautiously picked the receiver up, and this time he heard the precious dial tone.

He called Nick Rovito’s office, but was told that Nick Rovito personally wasn’t there. Engel identified himself and said, “Tell him it’s urgent, and I’m at home, and would he call me right away.”

“Right.”

Next he called a man named Horace Stamford, once upon a time an attorney of some reputation, but, since his disbarment, upgraded to being the man in charge of the legal end of the organization’s affairs. When he got Stamford on the line, Engel said, “I’m going to need a cover for this afternoon.”

“Details,” said Stamford. He prided himself on his speed, accuracy, detachment and planning ability, and therefore spoke in clipped sentences, like a telegram from someone who didn’t know much English.

Engel gave him the details of his day’s activities, not bothering to explain why he’d been doing what he’d been doing. It wasn’t a part of Stamford’s job to know that. He merely told him about going to the funeral parlor, about finding Merriweather dead and being identified by Callaghan and being pointed at by the woman who claimed to be Merriweather’s wife but wasn’t and making his escape. Then, “Callaghan took a long time to get a fix on me,” he said, “and I don’t think he’s really sure yet. Besides, when they find out the woman who pointed at me wasn’t the dead guy’s wife after all, that’ll confuse them more. So all I need is a cover for this afternoon.”

Arranging cover was a part of Stamford’s job. Engel listened as Stamford clucked to himself at the other end of the line, shuffling papers and so on. Finally Stamford said, “Races. Trotters. Freehold Raceway over in Jersey. You went with Ed Lynch, Big Tiny Moroni and Felix Smith. You picked one winner, Toothache, in the third race, at four to one. You had ten dollars on her. You had lunch in the American Hotel in Freehold; steak. You went down in Moroni’s new car, a Pontiac Bonneville convertible, white. The top was down. You took the Lincoln Tunnel, the Jersey Turnpike and Route 9, and retraced exactly. You’ll be arriving back in the city in five or ten minutes. They’ll let you off at 34th Street and Ninth Avenue and you’ll take a cab downtown. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Stamford hung up.

So did Engel, and the phone immediately rang. He picked it up and said, “Nick?”

But it was his mother’s voice that said, “We got cut off, Aloysius. And now I been getting a busy signal.”

“We didn’t get cut off,” he told her. “I hung up. And I’m going to do it again. And you do it, too. I’ll talk to you when I get a chance, right now I’m waiting for a call from Nick Rovito and I can’t tie up the phone.”

“Aloysius—”

“Hang up or I move to California.”

“Oh!”

This was an old threat, but a seldom-used one, reserved for final emergencies when all else had failed. When all the appeals of fact, of logic and of emotion had been exhausted, there was at last the specter of California. Once Engel mentioned California, his mother knew at once and without question that he was serious and that what he wanted was important.

But the funny thing was, the threat to move to California was hollow where everything else Engel had said, about working and about waiting for the call from Nick Rovito, was real. Engel hated California, would rather have lived in Sing Sing than California, and desired nothing of California other than that it stay peaceably where it was, on that other coast, three thousand miles away.

And yet he knew, if the day should ever come when this ultimate threat, too, was ignored by his mother, he would no longer have any choice. He would have to move to California. The alternative — staying in New York with no ultimate defense against his mother — was the only thing he could think of worse than living in California.

At the moment, though, the threat was still potent. “Oh!” said his mother, when he voiced it. “If it’s important, I won’t interrupt. Call me when you get a minute.”

“I will,” Engel promised, and this time they hung up together.

While waiting for the call from Nick Rovito, Engel went on into the bedroom and changed his clothes, since the rushing around he’d had to do had left him feeling a bit rumpled. He wished he could take a shower, but there wasn’t time. Besides, Nick Rovito might call while he was in there, and he wouldn’t hear the phone ring.

Engel’s apartment had originally been owned by a darling boy of a thing who designed costumes for Broadway musicals, and who had sold most of his furniture to the second owner, a television producer of strongly heterosexual if not marital bent, who replaced some of his predecessor’s more flighty peaks of imagination with equipment more suited to his own personality: the bar and white leather sofa in the living room, the mirror on the bedroom ceiling, the movie projector set into one of the living-room walls, the master light switch on the end table beside the sofa. When Engel in his turn had moved in, buying the furnishings from the TV man — who was, come to think of it, moving to California, as had the designer before him — he made yet a few changes of his own. He added a false back to a bedroom closet, soundproofed the small room off the bedroom which neither of the former tenants had found any use for but in which Engel could now hold business discussions with absolute security — the way the law tapped phones and bugged private homes these days was not only illegal it was absolutely immoral — added the paintings of famous horses to the bedroom walls, put an electric garbage disposal in the kitchen and had strong wire mesh put on the outside of all the windows. By now the apartment was complex, fascinating and bewildering. The main colors throughout were purple and white and black and green. The designer’s candelabra sat on the producer’s bar next to Engel’s electric drink dispenser.

From this last, Engel, in fresh clothing, dispensed himself a drink, then prowled the apartment and waited for the phone to ring. He was wearing slacks now, and a sport shirt, and casual Italian shoes with crepe soles. The ice tinkled in the glass he held, and anyone seeing him would have said, “Rising young executive in some sort of interesting business.” Which would have been perfectly accurate.

Engel was on his second drink before the phone rang. He strode across the living room, stood beside the sofa, and picked up the receiver.

It was Nick Rovito. “I got your message, kid. How’s tricks?”

“Bad, Nick.”

“No suit?”

“No suit, and complications. The undertaker needs an undertaker.”

“Mortician. He likes you should call him mortician.”

“Mortician, undertaker, he could use either one.”

“Am I following you, Engel?”

“Yes. Also, there’s a woman involved, I don’t know who she is. Tall, slender, good-looking in an icy way, played me and a whole bunch of cops for suckers and then cut out.”

“Don’t give me no details,” Nick Rovito said. “All I want is results, or instead, a general picture about how results are on the way.”