Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

“I am?”

“You went out with a gun tonight, and you killed a punk name of Willy Menchik. Over in Jersey, as he came out of the Bowlorama. You shot him, and then you dropped the gun when you ran away. The cops have it by now, and they’ll find your fingerprints all over it.”

More and more Engel was convinced he was dreaming. “My prints?”

“You might call me a string saver,” Nick Rovito said. “I never throw anything away. Like the gun you used on Conelly?”

“You kept it?”

“A nice set of prints, kept fresh in cold storage. By morning Callaghan will be looking for you with a warrant on murder one. By tomorrow night hell find you, rubbed out. No witnesses, no questions, no evidence. No need to waste time and money on a trial for you. Hell wash his hands and go think about something else.”

It was true. Engel shook his head, trying to rid himself of the notion, trying to make the last half-hour go away and not have happened, but it did no good.

Nick Rovito gave him a mock salute. “Good-bye, you punk,” he said. “Good-bye, you second-rate cheap bastard.”

“Nick—”

“Take him out of here.”

Gittel and Fox closed in, getting him by the arms just above the elbow, squeezing hard, in a grip he’d used himself more times than he could count. They took him out of the black room and through the office with its blinking fool and through the main meeting room and out to the street and across to the car.

The hubcaps were all gone. So was the radio antenna. So was the glass from the taillights. The glove compartment had been rifled and the rear seat had been slashed with a knife.

Gittel looked this way and that along the quiet street. “Those kids,” he said. “They got no respect for nothing.” To Engel he said, “You drive again.”

Fox said, “Are you crazy?”

“Engel won’t try nothing. Will you, Engel?”

Engel would, but he said, “Not me. I know you guys.”

“That’s right,” said Gittel. “He’ll play on our sympathy, and on friendship, and he’ll try to buy us off, but he won’t pull anything cute, will you, Engel?”

“You know me, I guess,” said Engel.

Fox said, “I am doubtful. I just want you to know that.”

They all got into the car again, Engel behind the wheel and the other two in back. Fox let Engel know he had his gun out and ready for anything, and Gittel again told Fox there was nothing to worry about. Engel asked where to now and Gittel said, “Triborough Bridge. Up to a Hundred Twenny-fifth Street.”

“Right.”

Engel bided his time. He concentrated a lot of his attention on the car, shifting constantly back and forth, pushing the car uptown practically by physical strength. He also, in order to keep Gittel and Fox unsuspicious, talked away to the two in the back seat, using the exact techniques Gittel had prescribed for him, alluding to their past friendship, trying for their sympathy, subtly leaving himself open to suggestion on bribes. But he didn’t expect any of this to do him any immediate good. What he had to do, somewhere along the line, was purely and simply get away from these two.

The tollbooths for the Triborough Bridge were right up in the middle of the bridge. Engel contemplated simply getting out of the car there and walking away, doubting that Gittel and Fox would dare shoot him next to the tollbooths, but the problem was there was nowhere to run away to. If the toll-booths had been down at ground level he might have tried it, but not this way, stuck on the bridge on foot.

After the bridge they directed him onto the Grand Central Parkway, which curved around through Queens. “Take it to the Long Island Expressway,” Gittel told him, “then take the Expressway east.” Which meant out on the Island, out away from New York.

Grand Central Parkway was landscaped on both sides, with a central mall. Now, a little after one o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t much traffic moving in either direction.

Engel waited, biding his time. He stayed in the farthest left lane of the three, driving at about forty miles an hour. He waited, driving along, talking to the two guys in the back seat, and finally the conditions were just right. There was no traffic near him in any lane. The road was straight. There were no overpasses immediately ahead.

He put the gear shift in neutral, opened the door, and rolled out onto the mall. As he left, he heard somebody say, “Hey!”

It was quite a sensation, hitting turf at forty miles an hour. Engel had rolled himself into a ball as he was leaving the car, and now he just went tumbling forward, end over end, until he gradually lost momentum and opened out flat on his back in the middle of the greenery.

He sat up, with difficulty, finding himself dizzy and a little nauseous. Ahead of him and still pulling away, down now to about twenty miles an hour but far from stopped, the black Chevy was still moving along. It had drifted over to the center lane, but was still going pretty straight. Kenny would see to things like wheel balancing and front-end alignment.

Engel could imagine Gittel and Fox in the back seat, both scrabbling to get up front, to climb over the seat, each getting in the other’s way, the both of them shouting and jumping and wasting energy.

While Engel wasted time.

Right. He got to his feet — he seemed to have muscle aches in about thirty different places — staggered over the mall, across the eastbound lanes of traffic, over the turf on the other side to the metal fence there, climbed the fence, attained one of the little dim streets of Queens, and ran for his life.

In the Manhattan phone book there were six columns of people named Rose. In the Queens phone book there were three and a half columns of people named Rose. And the particular Rose that Engel was looking for could just as easily live in Brooklyn or The Bronx. Or Long Island. Or Westchester. Or Staten Island. Or New Jersey. Or Connecticut. Or on the Moon.

Engel shut the two directories and went back to his table, where his coffee was cooling and his cheese Danish was aging. He sat down, glumly took a mouthful of Danish, and looked out the window while he chewed.

He was in an all-night diner on 31st Street in Queens, about half a mile from Grand Central Parkway. He’d run this far full tilt, and here for the moment he’d gone to ground, and he’d been here fifteen minutes now without yet being able to think what he should do next.

Very little was clear to him, but included with that little was the indisputable fact he’d been framed. He’d been framed neatly, sweetly and completely, and not only that but he’d been framed by a stranger. In fact, if he’d heard the conversation right, it was a whole group of strangers. The little guy named Rose had only been representing others like himself.

Would Nick Rovito have taken the unsubstantiated word of a schmo like Rose? No. Nick Rovito would have insisted on the names of other businessmen who would tell the same story, and then he would have checked with those businessmen. That they had told the same story was pretty clear.

In other words, a whole group of complete strangers had taken it into their heads to frame a guy named Engel. Now, why would a whole group of complete strangers want to do a thing like that?

Businessmen, too. Solid citizens. Not maniacs, not practical jokers, not a rival mob, nothing like that at all. Husbands and fathers, proprietors of business establishments, payers of taxes, these were the men who had suddenly and inexplicably exerted themselves to put the finger on a guy they didn’t even know.

Why?

Slurping at cold coffee, watching the dark empty street outside the diner window, Engel gnawed at that question and his cheese Danish in equal portions, and whereas he was gradually getting somewhere with the Danish he was getting nowhere at all with the question.