Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

“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.

“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.”