The Busy Body

6

The sign on the front lawn that said

was three feet wide and in neon, but it was blue neon, for dignity. Behind this sign and beyond the manicured lawn was the building, a robber baron’s town house when it was built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, its gables and bay windows all done in a rotten stucco now painted a gloomy brown. A broad empty porch spread across the broad vacuous face of the house, and as Engel came up the slate walk he saw that this porch was full of uniformed policemen.

He broke stride for a second, but of course it was too late, he’d already been seen. Trying his best to look nonchalant, he came walking on.

There were maybe thirty of the cops on the porch, and they didn’t seem to have anything to do with Engel’s presence here. They were standing around in groups of three and four, talking together in low voices. They were all wearing their white Mickey Mouse gloves, and their uniform coats were miserably tailored in the time-hallowed custom of the force, and when Engel got over the jolt of seeing them all there, he realized it had to be just another wake. Merriweather, no bigot, planted the departed on both sides of the law.

The glances that were turned on Engel as he went up the stoop and into the middle of the swarm of cops were curious but cursory. Nobody was very interested. Engel crossed the porch, opened the screen door, and bumped into a guy coming out. “Woops,” said Engel.

The guy, flailing his arms around as he staggered off-balance, was a cop, short, stocky, middle-aged. His uniform sleeve was so covered with yellow stripes and chevrons and hashmarks it looked like the yellow brick road. He grabbed hold of Engel while he got his equilibrium back, and then he said, “That’s o — Say! Don’t I know you?”

Engel squinched his cheeks up as he took a cautious close look at the cop’s face, but didn’t recognize him as anyone who’d ever collared him or had dealings with him connected with the organization. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that I know of.”

“I could swear...” The cop shook his head. “Well, it don’t matter. You on your way in to see him?”

Engel might have said yes if he’d known who “him” was. Instead, he said, “No, I got business with the undertaker. Merriweather.”

The cop hadn’t yet let go of Engel’s arm. Now he frowned, saying, “I could swear I’ve seen you some place. I never forget a face, never.”

Engel worked his arm free. “Must be somebody else,” he said, edging his way around the cop and through the doorway. “Must be somebody...”

“It’ll come to me,” the cop said. “I’ll think of it.”

Engel let the screen door close between them and gratefully turned his back on the cop. He was inside at last, and the place looked exactly the same as for Charlie Brody’s wake yesterday, except for the uniforms. But there was the same orange-brown semi-darkness, the same muffled Art Nouveau appearance to everything, the same sickly scent of flowers, the same thick carpeting, the same sibilant whispering from the mourners.

Just inside the door, on the right, stood a podium and a man. The man was taller, the podium somewhat thinner, and both gave off the same sepulchral air of Gothic anemia. Both were mostly in black, with a white oblong at the top. The white oblong at the top of the man was his face, a chalky droopy affair like the face of a bleached basset hound. The white oblong at the top of the podium was an open book, in which the mourners were to inscribe their names. Next to the book, attached to the podium by a long purple ribbon, there lay a black pen.

Either the podium or the man said, in a bloodless voice, “Would you care to sign, sir?”

“I’m not with this crowd,” Engel said, keeping his voice down. “I’m looking for Merriweather. On business.”

“Ah. I believe Mr. Merriweather is in his office. Through those drapes there, and down the hall. Last door on the left.”

“Thanks.” Engel started that way, and a voice behind him said, “Say. Just a minute, there.”

Engel turned his head, and it was the cop again, the one with the yellow brick road on his sleeve. He was pointing a finger at Engel, and he was frowning. “Were you ever a reporter?” he asked. “Did you used to cover City Hall?”

“Not me. You got me mixed up with somebody else.”

“I know your face,” the cop said. “I’m Deputy Inspector Callaghan, that ring any bells?”

It did. Deputy Inspector Callaghan was the cop of whom Nick Rovito once said, “If that bastard would lay off of us and go after them Red Communists like a patriot ought, he’d end the Cold War in six months, the rotten bastard.” Deputy Inspector Callaghan was the cop who years before, when Nick Rovito made the mistake of sending one of the boys around with a cash offer for Callaghan’s loyalty, threw a hammerlock on the boy and double-timed him over to Nick Rovito’s office and threw him over Nick Rovito’s desk into Nick Rovito’s lap and said, “This is yours. But I’m not.” So the name did ring bells for Engel, alarm bells, plus sirens, horns, whistles and kazoos.

But Engel said, “Callaghan? Callaghan? I don’t remember any Callaghans.”

“It’ll come to me,” said Callaghan.

Engel smiled, a little weakly. “Be sure and let me know.”

“Oh, I will. I will.”

“That’s good.” Still smiling, Engel backed through the drapes and out of sight.

He was in a different world now, though just as dim and cluttered a one. Out ahead of him stretched the hallway, narrow and low-ceflinged. Two wall fixtures shaped sort of like candles contained amber light bulbs shaped sort of like candle flames, and these dim amber bulbs were the only source of light. The walls were painted a color that was maybe coral, maybe apricot, maybe amber, maybe beige; the woodwork was done in a stain so dark as to be almost black, and the floor was carpeted in dark and tortuous Persian. If a Pharaoh had died in A.D. 1935, the inside of his pyramid would have looked like this hall.

Along the right-hand wall were faded small prints of bare-breasted (small-breasted) nymphs cavorting amid Romanesque ruins in which white erect columns were prominent, and along the left-hand wall were doors, these in the same dark wood stain as the moldings. Engel walked down past all these to the one at the very end, shut like all the rest. He rapped a knuckle on it, got no response, and pushed the door open.

This was Merriweather’s office all right, a small cramped crowded place with a window overlooking a garage wall. The most modern piece of furniture in the room was a roll-top desk. There was no one sitting at it, apparently no one anywhere in the room.

Engel shook his head in irritation. Now he’d have to go out and ask the podium where else Merriweather might be, and show himself to Callaghan again, and...

There was a shoe on the floor, down at the corner of the roll-top desk. A bit of black sock showed at the top of the shoe. There was a foot inside there.

Engel frowned at the shoe. He stepped forward a pace, all the way into the room, and leaned far to the left, until he could see around the angle of the desk, and there, sitting on the floor, wedged into a corner amid the furniture, slumped Merriweather himself, eyes and mouth wide open, all the life flown out of him. The golden hilt of the knife stuck into his chest glittered brilliantly against its background of the red-stained shirt front.

“Oh ho,” said Engel. He assumed immediately and without reservation that this bumping off of the undertaker was connected somehow with the disappearance of Charlie Brody. Merriweather had been the last one to see Charlie Brody dead, so it figured he’d known something about Brody’s disappearance, which was why Engel had come looking for him. That he was now himself bumped off confirmed Engel’s theory as far as he’d taken it, and also indicated one or more others in on the scheme, whatever it was. Registering all this, Engel commented, “Oh ho.”

And a female voice, harsh and cold, said, “What are you doing here?”

Engel spun around and saw, standing in the doorway, a tall thin frigid beauty dressed all in black. Her black hair was done in a thick single braid coiled around her head, in the Scandinavian manner. Her face was long and bony, the stretched skin white as parchment, devoid of make-up except for a blood-red slash of lipstick. Her eyes were dark, almost black, and her expression was haughty, cold, contemptuous. She had the palest, thinnest hands Engel had ever seen, with long narrow fingers ending in nails painted the same scarlet as her lips. She seemed about thirty.

She hadn’t, obviously, yet seen the body tucked behind the desk, and Engel didn’t know exactly how to break the news to her. “Well, I...” he said indefinitely, and motioned vaguely toward the former Merriweather.

Her eyes followed his movement, and widened. She stepped deeper into the room, the better to see, and Engel got from her a whiff of perfume that for some reason reminded him of green ice. Engel said, “He was... uh...”

Ten or fifteen years fell away from the woman’s face, leaving her a child with wide eyes and slack jaw. “Criminy!” she said, in a voice much younger and squeakier than before. Then her eyes rolled up, her knees gave way, and she fell on the floor in a faint.

Engel looked from Merriweather sprawled dead on one side of him to the woman in black sprawled unconscious on the other, and decided it was time to leave. He stepped over the lady, went back to the dim hallway, and shut the door. After adjusting his tie and his jacket and his breathing, he walked nonchalantly back down the hall and through the drapes to the vestibule.

Man and podium were still in place, beside the front door. Solemn-faced coppers in dark uniforms speckled with lint moved in and out of the viewing room. Engel crossed toward the door, being silent and calm and unobtrusive, and the damn Callaghan popped up again, clutching at Engel’s sleeve, saying, “Insurance company. You work for an insurance company.”

Engel said, “No, no, you got me mixed up with...” And trying to get his arm back and keep moving toward the door.

“I know your face,” Callaghan insisted. “Where do you work? What do you—?”

A shriek stopped everything. It made a sound like a freight train with its brakes on, and everybody froze, cops going in and out, Callaghan all a-clutch, Engel with his hand out toward the door.

With a creaking you could almost hear, every head turned toward where the sound had been. Now, in the utter silence afterward, everyone looked, and everyone saw the woman in black standing in the doorway, hands up and out dramatically to thrust away the drapes, lips and nails scarlet, face dead-white, gown black.

One pale slender hand moved, one ruby-tipped finger pointed at Engel. “That man,” announced the shattered voice, “that man has killed my husband.”