The Busy Body

10

Was she twenty? Was she thirty-five? More or less or in between? There was no way to tell.

Again, was she insane, or was she merely mindless, or some combination of the two? And again, as yet there was no way to tell.

Engel closed the door after she’d stepped into the apartment, and followed her into the living room, which she admired by turning around in a smiling circle and saying, “What an interesting place! How fascinating! How original!”

If there was one thing life had taught Engel, it was Wait and See. Don’t ask, don’t assume, don’t jump the gun, don’t try to hurry the world along, just Wait and See. If Madame X here intended to give him an explanation, fine; she’d do it at her own speed and in her own way, and in the meantime Engel would have an unusually fine opportunity to practice Wait and etc. So, coming into the living room after her, he merely said, “You want a drink?”

“Scotch sour?”

“Scotch sour. Right.”

A Scotch sour was unfortunately not one of the drinks he could dial on his electric dispenser, so, as he went around behind the bar, he snaked out the drink guide he’d brought home one time from the liquor store, leafed through it hurriedly while keeping it hidden under the bar, and said, “Sit down, why don’t you? I’ll just be a minute.”

It was a good thing he’d maintained his predecessor’s tradition of a broadly stocked bar, including the refrigerated compartment underneath. A Scotch sour, it seemed, required one each of almost everything he had. While he assembled it, feeling like the witch in “Snow White,” his guest wandered around the living room, admiring the furnishings and the objects on the walls; a murky lightning-streaked abstract entitled “Summer Storm Fire Island” (designer), a primary-hued naturalistic portrait of a sad-faced clown (producer), and matched plaques of ducks in flight (Engel’s mother). “How catholic! How unusual!”

Engel made himself a fresh Scotch and water and carried the two drinks over to where she stood by a side table, admiring its burden of fat red candles (designer) and fat orange oriental wood carvings (producer), plus this week’s issue of Time (Engel). “Scotch sour,” said Engel.

“Ah!” She spun around like a high school girl, all smiles and dimples, but the hand with which she took the drink was pale white and so slender as to be almost bony. But not unpleasantly so, no, not at all unpleasantly so. “Thank you,” she said, and raised the glass, and over it batted at him eyes that belonged to no high-schooler. And the voice? Husky one instant, lilting the next, always interesting.

“Well sit,” suggested Engel, and motioned at the sofa.

“Fine,” she said, and moved at once to a Victorian chair with wooden arms and a seat covered in purple burlap. There she sat, crossed long legs with a nylon rustle, tugged at the hem of her black skirt to cover her knee, and said, “Now we can talk.”

“Good.” Engel settled himself on the sofa.

“What I can’t understand,” she said, smiling brightly at him, “is how one man can be so eclectic.”

Engel couldn’t understand it either, since he didn’t know the word, so he said, “How did you find me?”

“Oh,” she said, offhand, airily waving the hand with the glass in it, “I heard that policeman say your name, and I asked around, and here I am.”

“Asked around where?”

“Police Headquarters, of course.” She sipped at her drink, giving him the eyes again over the rim of the glass. “I’ve just come from there.”

Engel automatically glanced toward the front door. If his sense of timing was right there’d be cops at that door within about half an hour now. Callaghan and company would be slowed down by their imprisonment in the alley, and further slowed down by the confusion of identities back at the grief parlor, but sooner or later they’d get themselves organized and on the move, and when that happened a couple of their foot soldiers would stop by here just to check. Not that they’d expect to find him here, but just because they liked to think of themselves as thorough. The phantom lady’s mention of Police Headquarters reminded him of this, and so he automatically glanced toward...

Come from there?

He said it aloud: “Come from there? Police Headquarters?”

“Well, of course.” She lowered the glass from her lips, and smiled at him with the wattage and intensity of a toothpaste ad. “I couldn’t leave everything all mixed up, could I?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “of course not. You couldn’t do that.”

All at once the smile shrank from her face, and her expression became troubled. “Isn’t there,” she said, a new vibrato trembling in her voice, “isn’t there enough sadness and worry and confusion in the world already?”

“I’d say so,” he said.

“So as soon as I recovered,” she said, the tremolo lessening but still slightly present, “and realized what I’d done, I went straight to Police Headquarters. They didn’t know a thing about it yet, and they had a terrible time finding all those policemen who were chasing you, but I did explain things and they won’t chase you any more after this. They promised me.”

“They promised you.”

“Yes.” The smile flashed on again, like a searchlight being switched on, and she said, “The police are really very sweet, when you get to know them.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course,” she said, “they couldn’t understand why you’d run away like that if you hadn’t done anything wrong, but I understood it right away.”

“You did.”

“Well, of course. All at once someone accuses you of something perfectly dreadful, and a whole army of policemen start running at you... I’d have run away myself.”

“But you explained it,” said Engel. “You went to the cops and explained it so they won’t chase me.”

“Well, I thought I should. I thought it was my duty.” She sipped, eyed, smiled, said, “You make a really fine Scotch sour, really fine.”

“I wish,” Engel told her, “I kind of wish you’d explain it to me. What you explained to the cops.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. You see, when my — Oh. May I have another of these first?”

“Sure. Sure.” Engel got to his feet, took the empty glass from her outstretched hand, and went back over behind the bar. He’d left the drink guide open, and now he began again to assemble the drink. One cocktail shaker, half full of cracked ice...

The mystery woman came over, undulating slowly across the room like something seen through water, and hitched herself gracefully onto one of the purple-topped bar stools. “You’re really a very interesting man,” she said.

... one part bar syrup...

“And I can’t tell you how sorry I am if I caused you any inconvenience.”

“No, that’s all right. As long as it all comes out right in the end.” ...two parts lemon juice...

“I just can’t believe you’re a gangster. Oh! Was that a terrible thing to say?”

Engel looked up from his preparations. “Is that what they told you at Police Headquarters?”

She had both elbows propped on the bar, forearms vertical and fingers entwined, delicate chin resting on her grouped hands, lips smiling again and eyes being... provocative. “They told me you were a desperate character,” she said. “They told me you were in the Mafia and Cosa Nostra and the Syndicate and I don’t know what all.”

“Diners’ Club? Did they mention Diners’ Club? Or the Masons?”

She laughed, a tinkly sound. “No, they didn’t. I can see they gave me a slanted report on you.”

“They’re prejudiced.” ...eight parts Scotch; two, four, six, eight...

“I don’t think you’re a gangster at all.”

“No?” ...shake vigorously...

“I think you’re charming.”

“Yes?” ...shake...

“Yes, I do. Like Akim Tamiroff on the Late Late Show. Only taller, of course, and without the mustache. And no accent. And your face is thinner. But the feeling is the same.”

“Is it?” ...vigorously.

“I’ve never told you my name, have I?”

Strain into whiskey-sour glass. “No, you haven’t.”

“Margo,” she said. “Margo Kane.”

“Engel,” he said, in his turn. “Al — uh, Al Engel.”

“Yes, I know. How do you do?” She extended a hand, high, the way women do.

For such a thin hand, it was very warm. Like holding an undernourished but attractive bird. “How do you do?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Engel released her hand and went back to the drink. Garnish with cherry...

“Fine, that is,” she went on, “all things considered. My bereavement and all.”

... and a slice of lemon.

Engel set the completed drink up on the bar in front of her. “Bereavement? What bereavement?”

“Well, that’s actually part of what I was going to tell you. It’s all part of the same thing.” Long pale fingers closed around the glass, lifted it to scarlet lips. “Mmmm. You do have the touch.”

Engel was making a fresh drink for himself now, a much simpler process: an ice cube, a splash of Scotch, a dash of water. “You’ve had a bereavement?” he said, trying to get her back onto the subject.

“Yes.” A wistful, sad, forlorn look came into her eyes. She tapped the long nails of her left hand on the bar just once, in a ripple, as though expressing the finish of something. “My husband,” she said. “He died quite suddenly yesterday.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. It was quite a shock. So sudden, so terrible, and so unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary?”

“Yes. He was hardly an old man. Fifty-two. He should have had years and years of life ahead of — I’m sorry, I’ll be all right in a minute.”

A small white lace handkerchief had appeared in her hand, and tears in the corners of her eyes. She touched them away, shook her head slightly as though upset with herself for having thus given in to emotion, and took a strong swallow of her Scotch sour. “It’s such a terrible thing,” she said.

Engel was calculating. The husband had been fifty-two, and he by now doubted the wife could be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It was the black clothing contrasting with the white skin that made her seem older at times. He said, “What was it, a heart attack?”

“No. An accident. One of those stupid... Well, there’s no point going over and over it, it’s happened and there’s an end to it.”

“You said,” Engel reminded her, “that I’d killed him. That’s how you sicked the cops on me.”

“I don’t know what came over me when I did that,” she said, and looked lost and bewildered. She touched the back of her hand to her brow.

Engel felt like saying he did know what had come over him when she said that, because what had come over him had been cops, but she was too easily distracted from her main line of thought, so he said nothing. He just waited, looking attentive.

“I had come to see Mr. Merriweather,” she said, as though recounting something sad that had happened long, long ago in the dim past, “to talk about the details of the funeral. Of course, my mind was full of thoughts about my husband, and how stupidly unnecessary his death had been — a kind of murder, in a way, murder by Fate, by Destiny, what you will — we never know what life has in store for us around the next cor—”

“Merriweather,” Engel suggested. “You’d come to see him about the funeral.”

“Yes. And then, seeing him there, lying there actually murdered, not by Fate but by some person, I suppose I just snapped for a minute.”

“You snapped,” said Engel. The way she kept skipping from style to style, from age to age, from mood to mood, he could believe she’d snapped for a lot longer than a minute.

“That must have been it,” she was saying. “You were there, and I got you all confused with Destiny, and poor Mr. Merriweather mixed up with my husband, and just everything all confused.”

“I’ll say.”

“I passed out — well, you know that — but when I came to I believe, I truly believe, I was no longer in my right mind. It seemed to me somehow it was my Murray who’d been murdered—” She passed a hand again across her brow, and said, “I can still remember just what I was thinking, and how sensible and natural and right it seemed at the time. Murray had been murdered, and in my mind’s eye I saw the face of his murderer, and it was you.”

“Just because I happened to be there,” said Engel.

“Yes. It was just another — accident.” A shadow crossed her face at the words, but then she shook her head and went on: “As soon as I regained consciousness, I tottered away to seek help, and when I saw you standing there by the door I... I said what I did.” Contrition shone in her face now, and embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

Engel said, “You explained this to the police.”

“Oh, yes. They were angry at first, but finally they said they did understand how it could have happened.”

“You talked to Deputy Inspector Callaghan?”

“Not in person, no. On the telephone. He was still on his way to Headquarters when I left.”

“Excuse me one second,” Engel said. “I got to make a phone call.”

“Certainly.”

Engel came out from behind the bar, crossed the room to the phone, and dialed Horace Stamford again. As he stood there waiting for the call to be completed, he observed casually how tastefully the Widow Kane perched on a bar stool, one slender shapely leg crossed over the other, black-sheathed rump rounding neatly onto the purple plush.

Then Stamford came on. Engel identified himself and said, “The machine we talked about before. Has it started operating yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“Then cancel.”

Stamford asked no questions. Accuracy was his forte, not knowledge. “Will do,” he said.

Engel hung up and went back over to the bar, this time sitting on the stool next to his guest. “Business,” he said.

“Gangster business, I suppose.” She looked at him appraisingly, a friendly smile on her lips. “It’s so hard for me to think of you—”

She was interrupted by the sound of the fawn’s afternoon. Her eyes widened, and she said, “I can’t be found here!”

“What? Why—?”

“Murray’s sisters! They’ll try to break the will anyway, I know they will, bringing up a lot of ancient history, trying to smear me, tell lies about me, insinuations, you know the kind of thing.” The fawn announced his afternoon again, making her rush: “If I’m found here, the day after Murray died, in the apartment of a strange bachelor—!”

“In back,” Engel told her. “Go hide in the bedroom. Or the office back there, the little room with the soundproofing, that’d be best.”

“Oh, bless you! You’re so kind, so...” There was probably more, but she was already leaving the room.

Once Engel could no longer see or hear her, he headed for the front door. On the way it occurred to him this could very well be Dolly, and if it was, and she was insistent, it could lead to complications he didn’t much care to think about. Thinking about them anyway, he opened the door.

It wasn’t Dolly, but it might better have been Dolly. Even Dolly would have been better than Deputy Inspector Callaghan.