Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

Somebody they didn’t know.

Like he didn’t know Rose. Like that

He squinted in a cloud of cigarette smoke and worked that one out. He didn’t know Rose. Rose had framed him to stop him from doing what he was doing, which was looking for Charlie Brody. Rose had done it on behalf of somebody else, somebody Engel did know.

“Oh ho,” he said. Out loud. “Somebody I know doesn’t want me looking for Charlie Brody. This somebody has a way to put pressure on this guy Rose and some other businessmen to make them say stuff to frame me.”

All well and good, but what did it mean?

“It means,” Engel said aloud, “it means I was getting close. I didn’t know it myself, but somewhere along the line I started to get close, and I made this somebody nervous enough to fix me.”

Right. Engel dropped his cigarette in his coffee, got up from the table, and went back to the bedroom, where he sat at the little desk and armed himself with pencil and paper. The thing to do now was make a list of every single person he’d talked to since he’d started looking for Charlie Brody. Thinking back, he gradually compiled his list:

Mrs. Brody

Margo Kane

Inspector Callaghan

Kurt Brock

Fred Harwell

Archie Freihofer

Some list. Squinting at it, tapping it now and again with his pencil, Engel kept trying to find somebody on it who might have a hankering to steal Charlie Brody, to frame Engel, to murder Merriweather, but nobody seemed at all right for the job.

Mrs. Brody? Bobbi? What would she swipe her husband for? How would she be able to pressure Rose into helping with the frame? Well, she might have met Rose while she was working for Archie Freihofer before she got married, and she might be able to blackmail him, threaten to go to his wife or something. She could, maybe, but there was no sense in it. No, and she was too open, too guileless; she’d never be able to run a scheme as complicated as this one was getting.

Margo Kane? In the first place she already had a dead husband, so what would she need with somebody else’s? In the second place there wasn’t any connection that Engel had found between Margo Kane and Charlie Brody in Brody’s lifetime, so why should there be any connection now? As a matter of fact, Margo didn’t even know Engel was looking for Brody’s body, so she couldn’t very well be the one trying to stop him from finding it.

Callaghan? As with everybody else, there was no reason for him to want a body. Beyond that, Callaghan was just too damn honest, honest to the point of stubborn bullheadedness, far too honest to be involved in anything as shady as all this. He might have been able to pressure Rose, but other than that he was out of it. He was involved, as was Margo Kane, merely through the circumstance of having been at the grief parlor the same time as Engel.

Kurt Brock? He’d admitted he was the next to the last person to see Charlie Brody’s corpse, but other than that he seemed to have no connection with anything. None with Brody, none with Rose. No motive for anything. In fact, he was the only one in the crowd who couldn’t possibly be the guy Engel was after, if he assumed the guy he wanted was also the killer of Merriweather. Brock was covered on that, and if Callaghan had accepted his alibi it was good enough for Engel.

Fred Harwell? He was almost the only one who’d known about the value of the suit, but Fred would surely have been content to swipe the suit instead of the whole body. Unless, of course, there’d been a time factor, and it was simpler to just take the whole body and go rather than stick around trying to get the suit off it. But Harwell had been in the organization for years, and knew the score; he wouldn’t be dumb enough to try something cute like this. As to setting up Rose, Harwell was a possible but hardly a probable.

Archie Freihofer? All Archie knew or cared about was his women. It was impossible to see Archie stealing dead bodies, particularly male bodies, impossible to see him stabbing Merriweather or scheming with Rose or any of the rest of it.

Yeah, but that was the trouble. It was impossible to see any of these people doing any of the things that some one of them sure as hell had done.

Unless, of course, there was a name missing from this list, somebody Engel hadn’t gotten onto yet.

But if Engel hadn’t come across him yet, the bastard, why should he sic Rose on Engel?

He shook his head and went over the whole thing again, and over it again, and over it again. Of the six people on the list, he could think of only one with even a hint of a motive for stealing Charlie Brody, and that was Fred Harwell. He’d been Brody’s boss, he’d known what was in the suit. But of course Fred swore he hadn’t known until too late that the suit had been used to bury Brody in. But still...

Fred Harwell? He might have taken the body, if the suit was too tough to get off in a hurry. He might have set up Rose, it was possible Fred had the contacts for a piece of work like that. And he might have killed Merriweather, if he and Merriweather had been in on the body snatching together or if Fred was afraid Merriweather had found out the truth somehow and might talk.

It all seemed so unlikely. Yet it was the only possibility Engel seemed able to come up with, so finally he decided there was nothing to do but follow it up. He’d go back and see each of the people on this list a second time, no matter how unlikely they seemed, and this time he’d see could he find the links in the chain. And he’d start off with Fred Harwell.

He left a note for Bobbi:

Thanks for the hospitality. I had a good sleep and a good breakfast. I’ll be in touch, if I get the chance.

He didn’t sign it, just in case the wrong eyes saw it; he didn’t want to get her in trouble. He left it propped on the kitchen table and went out of the apartment.

Down on the street there was a red and yellow truck with a carnival-type ride on the back, gaily painted little spaceships that went around and around a central hub where the motor was mounted, while a loudspeaker on the roof of the truck cab blared rock and roll from a radio station. Grinning children whirled around while more children stood in line beside the truck, waiting their turn.

Engel stopped and looked at it, feeling nostalgia for the simple days of his own childhood in Washington Heights. These trucks plied the poorer neighborhoods of New York all spring and summer, one of the city’s less odious harbingers of the warm months. This was the first one Engel had seen this year, and it affected him much the way the first robin affects the country dweller.

Until, that is, the loudspeaker finished its rock and roll and segued into the news. The children in their tin spaceships now whirled around to the tensions of the day, which included:

“Police today are searching for Aloysius Eugene Engel, alleged gangland killer, who last night shot and killed in Jersey City—”

And so on. With description: “Engel is described as six foot one inch tall, sallow complexion, dark brown hair and brown eyes, strong build. He is believed to be armed and dangerous.”

Unarmed, feeling anything but dangerous, Engel fled away down the sidewalk.

He was a block and a half away before he remembered his underwear was still in Bobbi’s bathroom.

To look at Fred Harwell’s place of business, you’d never know he had charge of a multimillion-dollar operation with employees in the hundreds and customers in the tens of thousands. But, on the other hand, Fred Harwell’s operation was not the sort of business that put up glass buildings to itself on Fifth Avenue. Given the nature of his trade, a grimy and bankrupt-looking brick building on Tenth Avenue was just the perfect location for his home office.