Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

Gittel pushed this door open and entered without knocking. Engel followed him and Fox brought up the rear. Their passage through the meeting room had caused no stir of interest or curiosity, the clientele of missions not normally being of the nosy-parker type.

The office they now entered was a cramped and sloppy room full of second-hand office furniture, on nearly all of which were cardboard cartons stuffed with double-breasted blue pin-stripe suits of a style that even Dennis O’Keefe has stopped wearing. A flabby scabby sloppy type in white religious collar, black clerical suit and red alcoholic nose sat at the desk, adding up numbers on a sheet of yellow paper, doing his work with a thick blunt stub of pencil. He had mud on his shoes, dust on his suit, dandruff on his shoulders, and he ran this joint. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d been heard to say, “where the support of my mission comes from, or what other uses it may be put to. Crime may produce the money, but the money is used for the Lord’s work, and nothing else can have meaning.” Most of the time, except for those rare intervals when he was cold sober, he believed what he said, and he made a far better operator of the mission than any cynic from the organization could have done. Nothing cons like sincerity. This fool’s name was Clabber, and he liked to be called Reverend.

Not Engel nor either of the other two called him Reverend or anything else at the moment. He looked up from his figuring, bleary-eyed, and watched them pass through, across his cluttered sanctum and through the door on the other side into a room painted black.

All black. Walls and ceiling, black paint on soundproofing. Floor, black linoleum. A black wooden kitchen table and four black kitchen chairs stood in the middle of the room, under a ceiling fixture with three bare twenty-five-watt bulbs in it. A man could scream at the walls and bleed on the floor in here, and none of it would make any difference.

Nick Rovito was sitting at the table, and so was another guy, a humble, hangdog, fiftyish loser with a worried face and bad posture. He looked up at Engel, and then quickly away again. He looked like the kind of natural loser who runs a business, goes bankrupt, sets fire to the store for the insurance and manages only to burn himself up.

Nick Rovito pointed at Engel. “Is that him?”

“Yuh.”

“Look at him. Be sure.”

The little guy looked at Engel, his eyes pleading as though he and not Engel were the one on the spot. Looking at him, thinking of business and fires, Engel wondered if Murray Kane could possibly have looked like this, but the answer had to be no. Something like this attached to a woman like Margo Kane? Impossible.

Also irrelevant. There were more immediate things to think about, like Nick Rovito saying, “Look at him. Look at his face. Is it him, or are you wasting my time?”

“It’s him.”

“All right.”

Engel said, “What is this, Nick?”

Nick Rovito got up from his seat at the table, came around, and slapped Engel across the face. “I treated you,” he said, “like my own son. Better.”

“I don’t rate this,” Engel told him. He knew he was in deeper trouble than he’d ever been in his life before, and he didn’t know why, but he had sense enough to keep his head and try for the reasonable approach. Nick Rovito’s slap had stung, but that was nothing.

Nick Rovito was saying to the little guy, “All right, that’s all. Go home. Tell your friends it’s taken care of, and other than that keep your trap shut.”

The little guy seemed to get down from the chair. He was closed in on himself like a spider that’s been poked with a pencil. He scuttled toward the door, blinking, licking his lips, not looking at Engel or anyone.

When he was gone, Engel said, “I don’t know what your grievance is, Nick. And I never saw that guy before in my life.”

“You will never mention my name again,” Nick Rovito said. “I will never mention yours. I wanted you brought here, you greedy little punk, because I wanted to say good-bye. Good-bye.”

“You got to tell me what you think I did,” Engel said. “I been a help to you for four years, I rate a fair shake from you now.”

Nick Rovito stepped back, frowning, squinting. “You never give up,” he said. “Or is there more than one thing I could have you on, and you don’t know which it is? Is that it?”

“I never did anything to you, Nick,” Engel said. “Not once.”

The second slap was harder than the first, because it was backhand. “I told you never to mention my name again.”

Engel sucked blood in from the corner of his mouth. “I been square with you,” he said.

“Tell me one thing,” Nick Rovito said. “Did you find the suit? Did you find it and keep it to yourself? That’s the kind of thing you’d do, isn’t it?”

Engel said, “One of us is crazy,” and that earned him the closed fist. He moved his head enough to catch it on the cheekbone instead of the nose.

Fox said, “Nick, please don’t mark him. We still got to transport him.”

Nick Rovito stepped back again, massaging his knuckles. “You’re right. I shouldn’t lose my temper with him.”

Engel said, “Just tell me what you think I did. I deserve that much.”

“Why waste your time, you punk? You don’t convince me, so drop it”

“All I ask is tell me in words what I did.”

Nick Rovito shook his head. “You just keep trying,” he said. “That’s one of the things I always liked about you, how you just kept trying. You want me to say it in words? Even though that guy Whatsisname, Rose, that guy Rose was here, you still think there’s a chance I mean something else, something you can weasel out of. All right, punk, you want it in words, I’ll say it in words.”

Engel waited, listening harder than he’d ever listened before in his life.

“You used my name,” Nick Rovito said. “You used your connection with me. You went to businessmen, legitimate businessmen like this guy Rose, and you held them up. ‘I’m Al Engel,’ you said. ‘I work with Nick Rovito, and you know who he is. You pay up to me, or I see to it you start getting trouble. Union trouble. Racket trouble. Cop trouble. All sorts trouble.’ That’s what you told them, you rotten greedy bastard. You worked your own racket inside the organisation.”

Engel shook his head. “I never,” he said. He knew how serious a thing that was, to use the threat of the organization for personal advantage. There was nothing you could do more serious than that except try to overthrow Nick Rovito himself. An organization can’t survive if the members are all trying to be boss, and it can’t survive if the members are all out for themselves all the time. So what he was being charged with was enough to make the sweat break out on his forehead and his hands start trembling at his sides.

Nick Rovito said, “I didn’t bring you here to listen to you lie.”

Engel said, “I wouldn’t do such a thing, Ni — I wouldn’t. I never saw that guy Rose before in my life.”

Nick Rovito shook his head. “Then why would he say it? Why would he accuse you? Why would he identify you? If you never saw him before, if he doesn’t know you, why should he take the chance?”

“I don’t know. All I know is I never been less than a hundred per cent with you, and you’ll know that some day.”

Fox laughed, and Gittel motioned like he was playing a violin.

Engel said, “I’m loyal to the end. Callaghan’s watching me, he’ll want to know where I am. He’ll make things hot.”

Nick Rovito grinned and shook his head. “Not if you’re a killer. Cops don’t waste time at all trying to find out who bumped off a killer. And as of tonight you’re a killer.”