The Busy Body

11

“Okay, mug,” said Deputy Inspector Callaghan, “let’s you and me talk.”

“Sure,” said Engel. “Come on in.”

But Callaghan was already in, crossing the foyer toward the living room. Engel shut the door and followed him, saying, “I was just about to leave, you know that? I was on my way down to see you.”

Callaghan turned on Engel a fish-eye that made Nick Rovito’s look almost pleasant. “I know,” he said. “I’m sure of that. That’s why I came over, to save you the trouble.”

“No trouble, Inspector. You want a drink?”

“Not on duty.” Callaghan looked around the room. “Looks like a discount house,” he said.

“I like it,” Engel told him, which was true. Callaghan was just a no-taste cop, but the comment still stung.

Callaghan said, “Yeah.” He was still in his uniform, with the yellow brick road on the side. Normally he wore civilian clothes on duty, except for special occasions like parades and funerals. Apparently he’d been in too much of a hurry this time to change. He sighed, now, and took his hat off and tossed it on the sofa, where it couldn’t have looked more out of place. “All right,” he said. “Let’s start the song and dance.”

“What song and dance is that?”

“Where you tell me it’s all a case of mistaken identity, I must have got you mixed up with some other guy, you weren’t near any funeral parlors at all today. Then you come up with the alibi you worked up for yourself, two or three guys you talked to on the phone before I got here.”

Engel took great pleasure in being able to say, “If you mean when you and all those other cops chased me out of Merriweather’s grief parlor today, that’s what I wanted to come down and talk to you about.”

Callaghan’s jaw very obligingly dropped three feet. “You admit it?”

“Well, sure I admit it. And I admit I don’t know how I got away either. I ran down that alley and through that door and out the other side and I was halfway down the next block before I realized you weren’t chasing me any more.”

Callaghan’s jaw climbed back up and arranged itself into a smug smile. He was obviously pleased to see that Engel was going to do at least some lying; it restored Callaghan’s faith in human nature. He said, “So. You didn’t bar that door at the end of the alley, eh?”

“Bar the door? What with?”

“And you didn’t knock a lot of full oil drums down in the way of the door either, is that it?”

“Oil drums? I thought I heard something fall down behind me, but I didn’t look back to see what it was.”

“Of course not. And you didn’t back a truck into the other end of the alley either, have I got that straight?”

“Back a truck? What truck? Where did I get a truck from?”

Callaghan nodded. “For a minute there,” he said, “I thought one of us had gone crazy. But it’s all right, you’re talking straight again.”

“I’ll always talk straight to you, Inspector.”

“Yeah? Then maybe you’ll tell me how come you ran.”

“Because you chased me,” Engel said. “Anybody’d run, they see a hundred cops chasing them.”

“Not if you had a clear conscience.”

“That’s afterward,” Engel told him. “Afterward is when you say to yourself, ‘What the hell, I didn’t do anything.’ But right at the time, all those cops chasing you, a woman says you bumped off her husband, all you do is run.”

“And I’ll tell you why,” Callaghan said. “Because you didn’t know who that woman was, that’s why. You didn’t know if she was the wife of somebody you killed or not. You’ve done at least one killing recently, maybe more, and you let me know it when you ran away.”

“Then why didn’t I keep on running?”

Callaghan gave him a crooked smile. “Mind if I use your phone? To help answer the question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” Callaghan made the word heavily ironic. He went over the phone, dialed, identified himself, asked for someone named Percy, and when Percy came on the wire, said, “Who talked to that Kane woman? Ask him did she ask any questions about Engel, where he lived, who he was, anything like that. Right, I’ll hold on.”

Engel went over to the wooden-armed chair where the Kane woman had first sat, and waited there with his arms folded and his feet stretched casually out in front of him. So far as he could see he was in the clear with the law, unless Callaghan wanted to make something out of the Merriweather murder, but if he did he surely would have mentioned something about it now. So Engel, incurious, just sat and waited.

Callaghan, after a moderately long silence, said, “Yeah? She did? That’s fine.” He grinned crookedly over the phone, said so long, hung up, and turned to Engel. “Now I’ll answer your question,” he said. “You stopped running, and you decided not to set up an alibi for yourself, because the Kane woman came here and told you she’d been to Headquarters to tell her story and get you off the hook.”

“She did?”

“Yes, she did. She got your address from one of our boys at Headquarters, because she said she wanted to send you a letter and apologize. But she didn’t send you a letter, she came here in person, straight from Headquarters.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yeah, that’s a fact.” Callaghan pointed toward the bar. “She had a drink while she was here, there’s the glass. She probably left just before I got here.”

“Fancy that.”

Callaghan said, “That’s the trouble with you punks, you all think you’re smart, smarter than anybody, and all the same you’re nothing but stupid. Stupid. You’ll die in jail, Engel, and maybe in the chair.”

“Will I?”

“Yes, you will.” Callaghan pointed a knobby finger at Engel. “You were stupid today,” he said. “You let me know there was something to look for. You let me know you’ve done at least one killing recently. Now I start looking. You think I won’t find what I’m looking for?”

“That’s what I think, all right,” said Engel. “I don’t kill people, I’m not the type. I got spooked today, that’s all, just the way anybody would in a situation like that.”

“I’ll get the goods on you, Engel, don’t you think I won’t. I’ll remember that business about the alley a long, long time.”

“Why not set me up for the Merriweather killing?” Engel asked him, pushing the subject because he wanted to know why Callaghan hadn’t mentioned it.

Callaghan said, “I wish I could, but the timing’s off. We know to the minute when Merriweather was killed, and it was before you were even inside the front door. I’m your alibi on that killing.”

“What do you mean, you know to the minute when he was killed?”

“What do you care for?”

Engel cared because the Merriweather killing was, he was convinced, connected somehow with the missing Charlie Brody and his missing suit, but what he said was, “It’s a provocative statement, that’s all. You say you know to the minute when he was killed, and it was when you and I were out front, so it’s a provocative statement. I’ve got a natural curiosity about how come you know to the minute when he was killed.”

Callaghan said, “He was talking on the phone. He said, ‘There’s someone at the door, I’ll call you back.’ Then he broke the connection. The party he was talking to had something to say to him right away, and dialed his number again, and got a busy signal. The reason for that is, when he was stabbed he knocked the phone off his desk and the receiver came off the hook. So he was killed between the time he hung up and the time the fellow he was talking to finished dialing again and got the busy signal, which is about a minute, and this fellow knows what time that minute was because he was late for an appointment and looking at his watch the same time he was dialing.”

“Who was he talking to?”

Callaghan frowned. “You ask a lot of questions. Get the habit from talking to cops?”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Engel said, “I was just curious, that’s all, just making conversation.”

“It was a fellow named Brock, Kurt Brock. Merriweather’s assistant. Merriweather fired him yesterday, or laid him off, I couldn’t get it straight which, and Brock was talking to him about coming back to work for him. When Merriweather hung up, Brock thought he was just giving him the brush-off, and he had a date to get to, so that’s why he called back right away.”

“Giving himself and me alibis,” Engel said.

Callaghan said, “Sharp, aren’t you? We checked that, and he’s alibied from the other end. His landlady knows he was there, and knows when he left. She’s one of those landladies knows everything happens on the block.”

Engel said, “So I’m in the clear.”

“I could make trouble for you if I wanted,” Callaghan told him. “Malicious mischief, maybe, or obstructing a policeman in the performance of his duty. You committed about thirty-seven misdemeanors this afternoon, whether you know it or not. But I don’t want you on any misdemeanor, that’s the easy way out. Get you a fine, maybe thirty days in the Tombs if I’m lucky, you can shrug that off as just the price for a good story you can tell around the bars. No, what I want you on is a felony, a big felony. Something that’ll stick, and something that’ll get you out of circulation for good. Something like murder one, say, that ought to do the trick.”

“Sure,” said Engel. “You have a lot of fun.” He smiled, free and easy, because he knew for once he was clear and clean and safe. Callaghan would be looking for murders Engel had performed, and murder was just about the only felony Engel hadn’t performed recently, so there wouldn’t be anything out there for Callaghan to find but a wild goose and he was welcome to it.

“I’ll be seeing you again,” Callaghan said. “Don’t leave town, in the meantime, you may be a witness in the Merriweather case.”

“Sure. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Except Sing Sing.”

On that note Deputy Inspector Callaghan left, taking his surly disposition with him. Engel shut the hall door after him and then went back through the living room and deeper into the apartment. In the bedroom he said, softly, “All right, Mrs. Kane, it’s safe now. He’s gone.”

There wasn’t any answer.

Engel frowned. He looked in the soundproof room and it was empty. He looked in the bedroom closet and under the bedroom bed. He called, “Mrs. Kane? Mrs. Kane?” He looked in the bathroom and in the sauna (producer), looked in the kitchen, looked everywhere.

Finally he got to the rear door, which let out on a narrow room where the cistern and the service elevator were, where his milk would be delivered if he had milk delivered, and she wasn’t there either.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said to himself. “She’s gone again.”