Donald Westlake: The Busy Body

Nick Rovito made a disgusted face and said, “His suit. Charlie’s blue suit, that’s how come. That’s what I want you to get me, Engel, the blue suit that dumb broad buried Charlie in.”

Engel didn’t get it for a second. He’d been thinking one way, and now it was some other way. He said, “You don’t want the body?”

“Wha’d I want with a body? Don’t talk stupid.”

Somebody else around the table said, “What’s so hot about this blue suit, Nick?”

Nick Rovito said, “Tell him, Fred.”

Somebody else around the table — it was Fred Harwell, he’d been one of the pallbearers, too, Charlie’d worked direct for him — said, “Holy Jesus, Nick, you mean the blue suit?”

Nick Rovito nodded. “That’s the one. Tell them about it.”

“Holy Jesus,” said Fred. But then he didn’t say anything else. He acted stunned.

Nick Rovito told the story for him. “Charlie was a traveling man,” he said. “He traveled for Fred here. He traveled to Baltimore, and then he traveled back to New York. On the train, so there’s no reservations. Right, Fred?”

“Holy Jesus,” said Fred. “That blue suit”

“That’s the one.” Nick Rovito puffed at his cigar and tapped some pale gray ash in the ashtray in front of him and said, “What Charlie did, he took things places. To Baltimore, he took money. From Baltimore back to New York, he brought horse, not yet cut. You got it now?”

Somebody around the table said, “In the suit? In it?”

“Sewed in the lining on the way down, the dough. Sewed in the lining on the way back, the horse. That suit was ripped up and sewed back together again once, twice a week for three years. You’d never see seams so good in a suit that old. Right, Fred?”

“Holy Jesus,” said Fred. “I never thought.”

“When Charlie kicked the bucket,” Nick Rovito said, “he’d just come back from Baltimore. He had a couple hours before the drop, so he went home to make himself a cup of coffee, and the rest is history. Right, Fred?”

“It slipped my mind,” said Fred. “It absolutely slipped my mind.”

“A quarter of a million dollars’ worth of heroin slipped your mind, Fred. And I knew it did, I knew you forgot all about it, and we got to talk about that sometime.”

“Nick, I don’t know why it happened, I swear to Christ I don’t. I’ve had so much on my mind lately, this school rezoning’s been driving me out of my mind, all of a sudden every kid on the payroll is all together at the same school and all the customers are to hell and gone the other side of Central Park, then there’s been this rumor going around about airplane glue that’s taking the customers away, and I—”

“We’ll talk about that some other time, Fred. Right now the important thing is we get that suit back. Engel?”

Engel looked alert.

Nick Rovito said, “You got it, Engel? Tonight you dig him up and get me that suit.”

Engel nodded. “I got it, Nick,” he said.

Somebody around the table said, “Like Burke and Hare, huh, Nick?” and Nick Rovito said, “Yeah.”

Engel said, “Yeah, come to think of it. Alone, Nick? That’s a hell of a lot of digging. I need somebody to pitch in.”

“So get somebody.”

Somebody around the table said, “Hey! I got an idea, Nick.”

Nick Rovito looked at him. Not the fish-eye, just blank, waiting.

The guy said, “I got this guy, this Willy Menchik. The one that fingered Gionno?”

Nick Rovito nodded. “I remember,” he said.

“We got the clearance to rub him, just day before yesterday. I had it set up for over in Jersey, Friday night, he’s on this bowling league, see? And it struck me, a bowling ball, now, that looks a hell of a lot like the old-fashioned kind of bomb, you know what I mean? So I thought I’d—”

“You’re supposed to rub Menchik,” Nick Rovito reminded him. “Not the whole goddam Bowlorama.”

“Sure, so this is better. We can double up. Willy goes with Engel, see, and helps him dig it up, and then Engel rubs him and leaves him in the coffin with Charlie, and covers it all up again, and who’s to find Willy? You gonna look for him in a grave?”

Nick Rovito smiled. He didn’t do that very often, and it made all the boys around the table happy to see him do it now. “That’s pretty nifty,” he said. “I like the feel of that.”

Somebody around the table said, “It’s like a poetic humor, huh, Nick?” and Nick Rovito said, “Yeah.”

Somebody else around the table said to Engel, “Maybe Charlie’d like that, huh, Engel? Somebody to pass the time with.”

Somebody else around the table said, “You can throw in a deck of cards.” He laughed when he said it, and everybody else around the table laughed except Engel and Nick Rovito. Nick Rovito smiled, which for him was the same as laughing. Engel looked glum. He looked glum because he felt glum.

Somebody around the table said, “They can play honeymoon bridge!” All the boys laughed again at that, and Nick Rovito even chuckled, but Engel still kept looking glum.

Nick Rovito said, “What’s the matter, Engel? What’s the problem?”

“Digging up a grave,” said Engel. He shook his head. “I don’t like the whole idea of it.”

“So what are you, superstitious? It’s a Catholic cemetery, there won’t be no evil spirits around.” All the boys laughed again, and Nick Rovito looked pleased with himself.

Engel said, “That isn’t it. It’s the work involved. It’s manual labor, Nick.”

Nick Rovito sobered up right away, knowing what Engel meant. “Look, kid,” he said. “Look, if it was just a hole in the ground I wanted, I’d hire some bum to dig, am I right? But this is a special case, you know what I mean? I need somebody on the inside, and trustworthy, and young and strong enough so he don’t get a heart attack himself when he starts in digging, you follow me? You’re my right hand, Engel, you know that, you’re my right arm. It’s like I’m out there digging myself when you’re out there digging.”

Engel nodded. “I know that,” he said. “I appreciate that. It was only the principle of the thing.”

“I understand,” Nick Rovito told him. “And don’t you worry, you bring back that suit, there’s a nice bonus in it for you.”

“Thanks, Nick.”

“Plus the geetus for rubbing Willy,” said somebody else around the table. “Don’t forget that, Engel.”

Willy. That was something else, something Engel hadn’t thought about yet. Except for Conelly, when it was kill or be killed and Engel was caught up in the suddenness and excitement of the whole thing anyway, Engel had never rubbed anybody in his life, which apparently all the boys around the table including Nick Rovito had now forgotten. Engel wasn’t even sure he could rub somebody, just like that, in cold blood.

Still, he hadn’t spoken up when the idea was first presented, and besides, Nick Rovito had looked so happy about it when it was suggested that Engel knew the worst thing he could do was try and wriggle out of it now, so, reluctantly, he said, “Yeah, about Willy. Where do I check out a gun?”

Nick Rovito shook his head. “No gun,” he said. “You take your coat off to dig, he sees the gun, he’s spooked. And a great big loud shot in a cemetery in the middle of the night, maybe somebody hears it, and you don’t get time to fill the grave in again.”

Somebody around the table said, “What the hell, Engel, you got a shovel.”

“I got to hit him with the shovel?”

“Do it any way you want, kid. But no gun, that’s all.”

Engel shook his head. “What a job. I might as well be legit. Dig half the night and conk some guy on the head with a shovel. I might as well gone straight.”