Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

Engel blinked at her. “I thought,” he said, “I thought you moved out.”

“It felt so funny, sleeping somewheres else. I know I got to move in with Marge and Tinkerbell eventually, but for now I’d rather stay right here, with my memories. Coming back with you like I did this evening, remembering all the good times and like that, I knew, I just knew I wasn’t ready yet to move out. So here I am.”

Engel nodded. “Here you are all right,” he said.

“Mr. Engel, why didn’t you knock on the door?”

“I didn’t think anybody was home.”

“I would of given you a key. All you had to do was call Archie Freihofer, he’d have fixed it up so you could get the key.”

“It’s kind of complicated, Mrs. Brody.”

She shook her head. “You shouldn’t call me Mrs. Brody,” she said. “That isn’t my name any more, and I got to get used to it. You better call me Bobbi.”

Engel looked at her. She was holding the pale green blanket up to her neck as she sat there in bed, and above it her friendly but not particularly bright face gazed earnestly and sincerely at him. “Okay, Bobbi,” he said. “I need somebody to talk to, somebody I can trust. I want to make it you.”

“Well, gee, Mr. Engel.” Her eyes widened with a combination of surprise and pleasure and curiosity. “You sit down here,” she said, one bare arm emerging from around the pale green blanket to pat the bed. “You sit right down here and tell me all about it.”

Engel sat down, near the foot of the bed. “To make it short and sweet,” he said, “I been framed. It’s a double frame, both with Nick Rovito and with the cops.”

“Holy cow,” she said.

“You bet. Nick Rovito himself set up the frame with the cops, to keep things neat and simple after a couple of the boys should rub me out.”

“Rub you out? Mr. Engel, you don’t mean it.”

“Yes, I do. He must of called the Committee last night and got their okay. I suppose that’s why he had to set up the other frame.”

“What?”

Engel suddenly realized he’d gradually stopped talking to her and started talking to himself. He shook his head and said, “Let me try and say it straight. Some people framed me with Nick Rovito, told him I was doing something I wasn’t doing. So Nick planned to bump me off, and on the side set up a frame with the cops, so they wouldn’t look too hard for who killed me.”

Eyes wide, mouth open, she nodded her head slowly. “I think I got it,” she said.

“I feel the same way you do,” Engel told her. “I can’t figure it out.”

She said, “Who was it framed you with Mr. Rovito?”

“That’s just it,” Engel said. “That’s just the part that’s crazy. It was businessmen, legit straight honest businessmen. Not guys in the organization at all. And not only that, but businessmen I don’t even know, businessmen I never even met before.”

“Well, maybe it’s a mistake, then.”

Engel shook his head. “One of them identified me. ‘That’s him,’ he said to Nick. I was right there.”

“Boy,” she said. “That’s terrible.”

“And I can’t figure it out. Why should they do it to me?”

She said, “Well, maybe to stop you from doing whatever you were doing.”

He frowned at her. “What? I told you already, it was a frame, I wasn’t doing what they said I was doing.”

“No, no, that isn’t what I mean. I mean what you were really doing. Maybe they wanted to stop you from doing what you were doing. Maybe you were on a job or something that was going to hurt them later on.”

Engel stared at her. “You just thought that up?” he said. “All by yourself?”

“Well, I only thought—”

“No, I’m not putting you down. What I mean is, I never even thought of it that way.”

She blinked, a couple of times. “You think maybe that’s it?”

“Why not? It’s anyway a reason, right? That’s what was driving me nuts all this time, I couldn’t even think of a reason. Right or wrong, that doesn’t matter yet, just so I have some kind of reason why that guy Rose fingered me, so I can at least start thinking about it.”

She said, “What was that name?”

Hope sprang again within Engel’s breast. “Rose,” he said, and waited.

But all she said was, “That’s a girl’s name.”

Engel sagged a little. “It’s his last name,” he said.

“Oh. Well, anyway, if you could figure out what you were doing that they didn’t want you to do, maybe you could figure out why they did this thing.”

“Yeah,” said Engel. “Yeah, that’s the rub.” He got to his feet, and lit a cigarette, and started pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. “That’s the rub,” he said again.

What had he been doing? Looking for Charlie Brody, that’s all. Was there anything else, anything he’d been in the middle of before the Charlie Brody thing came up? No. Anything for the near future, that he was supposed to get to as soon as the Charlie Brody thing was done? No.

Charlie Brody? They didn’t want him to find Charlie Brody? What kind of sense did that make, a bunch of legitimate businessmen didn’t want him to find a dead body? No sense at all, that’s what kind.

Bobbi finally broke the silence, saying, “Would it help you to talk some more? Is what you were doing anything you could talk about?”

He looked at her. Up to now he’d been keeping the essential fact away from her in order to protect her feelings, but the way she had of all of a sudden seeing answers, maybe he ought to spill everything to her. Besides, if she knew about the swiping of her husband, she might be able to throw some light on it, might be able to think of something in Brody’s past that would tell them where he might be found now.

He sat down on the bed again. “Bobbi,” he said. “I got something to tell you, and maybe you ought to brace yourself.”

“Brace myself?”

“It’s about Charlie.”

“Brace myself? About Charlie? Charlie’s dead, Mr. Engel, what’s there left to brace myself about?”

“Yeah, well, just wait. Do you know very much about what Charlie’s job was?”

“Well, sure. Husband and wife don’t have secrets, why should they? He used to carry stuff, down South and back.” She made a shooting gesture with her visible hand at the arm still hidden by the blanket. “Snow,” she said.

“Do you know how?” Engel asked her. “How he carried the stuff and didn’t get caught?”

She shrugged like an Italian. “I dunno. In a suitcase, I guess. He never said nothing.”

“In a suit,” Engel told her.

She wrinkled up her cheeks and nose. “Huh?”

“In the blue suit. Sewed in the lining. Bobbi, he was buried with a quarter million bucks’ worth of snow in that blue suit.”

“Holy Peoria! You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

She shook her head. “Boy! I’m surprised they don’t send somebody out to dig him up and get the suit back. Boy.”

“They did,” Engel told her. “Me. I dug him up.”

“You did? How was he?”

“Gone.”

“What’s that?”

“We didn’t bury him, Bobbi. That’s what you got to brace yourself for. We buried an empty casket. Somebody swiped Charlie.”

“A Dr. Frankenstein!” she shouted, eyes widening, both hands coming up to be pressed palm-in against her cheeks. The blanket fell away.

Engel politely turned his head, because it was obvious she didn’t wear anything to bed but a ribbon in her hair. “No,” he said to the opposite wall, “it wouldn’t be anything like that, not in the twentieth century.”

“Oh, my gosh. You can turn again, Mr. Engel, it’s okay now.”

He turned, and she had the blanket back up where it belonged. “That’s what I been doing,” he said, “is looking for Charlie.”