Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

“I want to thank you for looking the other way, Mr. Engel,” she said. “When a gentleman treats a lady like a lady, it makes her feel especially like a lady, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, sure. Any time.”

“And you been looking for Charlie? That’s awful nice, Mr. Engel.”

“Well, it was my job. Nick wanted that suit awful bad.”

“Boy, I guess so.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why’d anybody want to swipe Charlie?” she said. “That’s an awful thing to do, that’s disrespectful of the dead, to swipe their bodies.”

“And that’s all I been doing,” Engel said. “So if that guy Rose and his other businessmen were trying to stop me from doing what I was doing, it was looking for Charlie that I was doing. You wouldn’t know anybody named Rose, would you?”

“A colored lady, used to clean the apartment. No men.”

“This guy runs a business of some kind. Maybe a store or some kind of factory or something.”

She shook her head, back and forth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Engel, but if I’d ever met any man named Rose, front name or last name, I’d remember it.”

Engel spread his hands helplessly, and got up again from the bed. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s where I am right now. I got away from the guys that were supposed to take care of me, and I figured I could hide out here overnight because there wouldn’t be anybody here and nobody’d think to look here for me.”

“Well, you can stay,” she said. “You know that, Mr. Engel.”

“If anybody finds out I was here, they could make it rough on you. Either the organization or the cops, both.”

“Oh, foo,” she said, and waved it all away with her visible hand. “Nobody ever bothers about me. Besides, who’s going to tell them you were here? You won’t, and I won’t, and that’s all of us there is.”

“I’ll clear out first thing in the morning,” Engel told her. “What I got to do, I got to keep looking for Charlie. If I can find out where Charlie is, maybe that’ll explain everything else.”

“Mr. Engel, I’ll be eternally grateful to you for looking for Charlie. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

“Well, I’ll do my best,” Engel told her, “for both Charlie’s sake and my own.” He looked around, said, “We can talk some more in the morning, if you want. I’ll go sleep on the sofa in the living room.”

She shook her head, solemnly. “No, you won’t,” she said.

“What?”

She said, “There isn’t much I can do to help you find Charlie, or help you get out of this jam you’re in. There aren’t too many ways I can express my appreciation, but there is one. You turn the light out and come on over here.”

Engel made a vague sort of gesture. “Uhh,” he said, “I oughta just—”

“This is just between us,” she said. “Just friends, no charge or anything like that.”

Engel cleared his throat, and said, “Now, you don’t have to feel obligated or any—”

“I don’t feel obligated,” she said. “I feel that we’re friends, and friends ought to do for each other, and there isn’t much I can do for you but what I can I will. And be more than happy.”

Engel was going to go on protesting, but then he took a closer look at her face, and he could see in her eyes that if he didn’t accept her invitation her feelings would be hurt very badly. Very badly.

Well. One thing about Engel, he always was gallant.

He was Snow White, in a glass coffin, and the Seven Dwarfs were burying him alive. He didn’t seem to be able to move. He hollered at them, but they couldn’t hear him through the glass, and they just carried him over to the hole and put him down in it and started shoveling dirt in. One of them looked like Nick Rovito, and one of them looked like Augustus Merriweather, and one of them looked like Deputy Inspector Callaghan. Two others looked like Gittel and Fox, another one looked like Kurt Brock, and the last one looked like Bashful.

Bashful threw a golden rose in on the casket, and the others all started shoveling dirt. Dirt was bouncing on the glass top of the casket, making him blink because it kept looking as though the dirt was going to come right down on his face. But the glass was in the way, and the dirt landed on it with thud sounds. Thud, thud, thud. And for every thud, he blinked.

It was the blinking woke him up. One of the blinks was so real that he actually opened his eyes on the other side of it, and there were no Seven Dwarfs, there was no glass casket, there was no dirt, no rose, no grave. There was a ceiling with cracks in it, and there was a strange bedroom with muted golden light coming through a window with the shade pulled all the way down.

He blinked once more, while shifting from the dream world to whatever sort of world this was, and then memory and reality and a sense of place came back, and he sat up, looking all over the bed for Bobbi.

She wasn’t there, but on the night table there was a note. Engel reached over, picked it up, and read:

Dear Mister Engel,

Archie Freihofer wanted me to start back to work today so I am supposed to go over to the Coliseum, there is some sort of Home Furnishings Fair going on there and they will want some girls for the buyers and the “visiting firemen” but why they always want to interview the girls in the morning I do not know but that is the way they are.

I will probably not be back tonight so if you want to sleep here again you had better come in the window once more which I will leave unlocked.

There is instant coffee and English muffins and anything else in the kitchen for breakfast.

Good luck and I know Charlie would thank you for your efforts on his behalf just as much as I do.

Sincerely yours,

PS. If your underwear and socks are not dry take some from the middle drawer of the dresser, it is all right. BB

“Underwear and socks?” Engel looked up from the note, and took quick stock. On the chair by the desk his shirt was neatly hung, his tie draped over it. On the hook on the inside of the open closet door was his suit, neatly placed on a hanger. When he leaned to the left he could see his shoes on the floor beside the bed. But his underwear and socks?

Still a bit befuddled by the Seven Dwarfs, but also confused by the note and in a half-awake panic about his underwear and socks, Engel staggered out of the bed and went padding naked from the room in search of his missing garments.

They were in the bathroom, on wire hangers hung on the shower curtain bar over the tub. And they were still wet, or at least damp. “Well,” he muttered. “Fine.” He went padding back to the bedroom.

As he put on a pair of Charlie Brody’s shorts, the thought came to him that he was getting far too closely enmeshed with Charlie Brody, that his own life was being bound up to an unhealthy degree with the past and present of Charlie Brody. “Just let me get you planted where you belong,” he muttered. “That’s all, just let me get this mess straightened out. Then you and me are quits, Charlie.”

An hour later, washed and dressed and breakfasted, he felt much better. He’d slept late and it was now nearly noon; time to be doing.

Doing what? With Bobbi’s help he’d figured a couple of things out last night, but he was still almost completely in the dark. He didn’t know who to blame for anything, didn’t know who to ask questions of nor even what questions to ask, and even if he did know any, his mobility was severely limited at the moment by the fact that both the cops and the organization would be scouring the city for him by now.

Sitting there over a third cup of instant coffee and his second cigarette, he thought about what to do next. If only, he thought, if only there was someone he could send out to do the legwork for him while he himself remained safely out of sight. Get somebody maybe that the organization didn’t even know, like Dolly for instance or—