Donald Westlake - The Busy Body

Rose looked at him, through eyes reddened by coughing and sneezing. Comprehension came into them, and he ducked his head down, putting his arms up, crossed over his head to protect himself. “Please,” he said, the word muffled by the fact he was talking into his chest. “Please don’t.”

Engel slapped his forearms. “Look at me, you moron,” he said.

Rose peeked at Engel through his arms.

“You got one minute,” Engel told him. “One minute to tell me who sent you to frame me. If I don’t get the name in one minute, you’re a casualty.”

“I’ll tell,” squeaked Rose. “You don’t have to threaten me, I’ll tell.”

“Fine,” said Engel.

Cautiously Rose lowered his arms. “I didn’t want to do it at all,” he said, “but what choice did I have? I even said if they hurt me I’ll tell the truth, I’m no hero for somebody else, why should I? A man can be pushed so far only and that’s enough.”

“You’re right. That’s enough. Just the name.”

Rose made a motion with his hands as though throwing away the whole thing, washing his hands of it, leaving it behind him. “Mrs. Kane,” he said. “Murray Kane’s widow, she should have burned up with her husband.”

“Margo Kane?”

“Didn’t I say it?”

“How?” Engel wanted to know. “How’d she get you to do it?”

“I’m a businessman. A businessman is in business only if other businessmen give him business. Murray Kane was a very important and a very vicious man, Mr. Engel, believe me. With his two brothers also in business, with what he had on this one and that one, he wanted from you a little favor you didn’t say no. And the wife the same. Do I want half my customers all of a sudden in somebody else’s trucks? So me she calls, and half a dozen others the same way, and what choice we got?”

“You were killing me,” Engel told him. “You know that, you bastard?”

“I swear I didn’t. ‘It’ll get him fired,’ she said. That’s all she wanted, she said, was get you fired.”

Could it be? Somebody outside the organization, who didn’t exactly know the ethics or the values in the organization; it was possibly so. Maybe Mrs. Kane really hadn’t wanted any more than to get Engel fired.

As though you could get fired from the organization! If Nick Rovito gave out a pink slip, the color came from blood.

Engel got to his feet. “All right,” he said. It was obvious Rose didn’t know anything else. The one to see now was Margo Kane.

But even while he was thinking that, it still failed to make sense. Had Margo Kane stolen Charlie Brody? Had Margo Kane killed Merriweather? If so, why, and why? Knowing who — even assuming he had the who absolutely right this time — still didn’t tell him a damn thing about why.

Well. Later. This was neither the time nor the place to be reflective. Engel hurried out of the room again, leaving Rose soggy and scared amid the wet scramble of his papers. Engel hurried down the stairs, across the concrete floor, and out to the street, getting there just as two cars squealed to a stop in front of him.

The one on the left was a pink and white Pontiac, and out of it climbed Gittel and Fox.

The one on the right was a green and white patrol car, and out of it climbed two cops.

Engel turned and ran.

Behind him there were shouts of “Hi!” and “Ho!” and “Halt!” It was the beginning of things all over again, with him running from the grief parlor, except that this time the cast of cops was smaller and there was the added element of Gittel and Fox.

At Eleventh Avenue he turned left, at West 38th Street he turned right. Looking over his shoulder, he saw, half a block back and coming strong, one of the cops and Fox. Which meant the other cop was on the patrol-car radio and Gittel was on the nearest phone.

Escaping on foot was no good, he couldn’t distance the two directly behind him, and any minute there’d be a whole double army looming up in front of him.

He ran across Tenth Avenue, snarling traffic.

Between Ninth and Tenth there was one of those trucks with the ride on the back. The operator was standing beside the open door of the cab, a line of children was waiting by the curb, a group of children was in the little cars of the ride — these shaped like flying saucers — and the radio was blaring a song of teen-age love. The truck was fire-engine red and explosion-orange and Atlantic Ocean blue and banana-yellow and Central Park green, and had just recently been washed and polished all over. It shone like a real flying saucer, that had just landed from Mars.

Engel didn’t think twice. He ran up, shoved the owner out of the way, climbed into the cab, remembered to shift it into first, and he and the truck went tearing down the street.

What a getaway! The glittering rainbow of a truck rocking and careening down the street, the children whooping and hollering as their twenty-five-cent ride suddenly began to exceed their wildest dreams, the little flying saucers swooping and circling on the back, the loudspeaker blaring... People along the right of way smiled and laughed, little children waved their hands and jumped up and down and in their excitement lost their grip on balloons, shopkeepers trotted out to the sidewalk in their aprons to wave and smile beneath straw hats, the drivers of cars and buses and trucks pulled over and, laughing, waved him through...

And then the loudspeaker began to talk. “BE ON THE LOOKOUT,” it told the world, “FOR ALOYSIOUS ENGEL, SIX FOOT ONE INCH TALL, WEIGHT—”

Engel was a nervous wreck. He sat in a bar at the end of no-where and shakily raised a glass of Scotch on the rocks to his lips, sipped, and put the glass down again.

He’d finally abandoned that damn truck and its load of delighted kids in the middle of 14th Street, near Eighth Avenue. With the instinct of a hunted animal, he’d then gone to ground, ducking into the first hole he saw, which happened to be the entrance to the subway. He went down flight after flight of concrete stairs flanked by yellow tile walls, and at the very bottom found the dingiest old subway train in the world, sitting down there as though time had stopped along about 1948. It had passengers to match, all sitting there silent and fat and kind of seedy, most of them reading newspapers which must surely have been predicting the election of Thomas E. Dewey. Engel had gotten aboard this train, and the doors had shut behind him, and the train had started off through the dark tunnel, stopping now and again, going under the East River to Brooklyn, eventually coming up for air and riding along as an elevated for a while, coming down to sit like a regular train at ground level by the time it reached the end of the line.

Engel had never ridden this line before. He got off the train when it came to its last stop, and he was still in 1948. Wooden platform. Low buildings all around, old unrich residential, two-family houses. Engel walked to the nearest bar, ordered Scotch on the rocks, and waited for his nerves to settle down.

The bar was named Rockaway Grill. Wasn’t there a section of Queens called Far Rockaway? Engel said to the barman, “What section is this?”

“Canarsie.”

Canarsie. Engel said, “In Brooklyn?”

“Sure in Brooklyn.”

“Good. You got a Manhattan phone book?”

“Yeah. Hold on.”

In the phone book Engel found Kane, Murray 198 E 68 ELdrdo 6-9970. “Thanks,” he said, and pushed the phone book back across the bar. “Fill the glass again.”

“Right.”

“A double.”

“Right.”

Three doubles later he was calm enough to leave the bar, go back to the subway station, and take the next train back to Manhattan. He got out at Union Square, and it was just five o’clock, and everybody had showed up for the rush hour. Since he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it’s impossible to go anywhere at rush hour in New York, and it would be better to wait till after dark before he did any more traveling anyway, he went into a little restaurant on University Place and had himself a meal.