The Busy Body

8

The porch stood empty. In the viewing room the departed reclined unviewed. But just inside the main door the podium and the man, trustworthy sentinels, still stood at their posts. Engel said to them, indiscriminately, “The police sent me to talk to Mrs. Merriweather, find out what this is all about. Where is she?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I haven’t seen her go out, so I imagine she’s in the back part of the house somewhere, or possibly upstairs.”

“Right.”

Engel moved off, through the drapes and down the hall, opening doors. There wasn’t much time. His plan, simply, was to find Mrs. Merriweather, kidnap her, take her somewhere safe and quiet, find out what she knew, if anything, about Charlie Brody and about who else would have had access to Charlie’s body, convince her that he hadn’t after all bumped off her husband, and return her to the grief parlor. But first, of course, he had to find her.

He opened every door he came to along the hallway, and they led, in order, to a cloakroom, a broom closet, a small windowless room full of stacked folding chairs, an equally small and windowless room stacked with coffins, a black staircase leading down, a yellow staircase leading up, and the office. All of these were empty, except for the office, and Merriweather was the only one there.

So. Upstairs, then, resting and recuperating from her shocking discovery. Engel went up the yellow stairs.

Here was yet another of the grief parlor’s many worlds. This one was yellow and pink, chintz and terrycloth, light and airy as a toilet-paper commercial, with frills and laces everywhere. Early American bedspreads on beds with Colonial headboards. Bright wallpaper with designs of flowers and leaping figures. A pink hairy toilet-seat cover and pink hairy bathroom rug to match. Throw rugs on waxed floors. The gleam of polished maple everywhere. But no Mrs. Merriweather.

Farther up? Engel found the stairs to the attic and went up to find it a dark barren dusty wooden tent-shape, alive with wasps. Engel sneezed and went back downstairs.

She had to be somewhere. Her husband had just been killed, she’d just reported it to the cops, she had to stick around. Engel prowled the second-floor bedrooms again, still finding no one, went back down to the first floor, and finally decided, because there was no place else to look, to try the cellar.

There was a light switch on the wall at the head of the black stairs leading down. Engel turned it on, and light down there revealed that the stairs were wood and the floor below was concrete painted deck-gray. He went down to a mad scientist’s laboratory. Coffins, steel tables, racks of bottled fluids, tubes and pipes and hoses. A large door led to a walk-in freezer, like those in butcher shops, this one containing several slabs, on two of which figures reclined under sheets. Engel lifted the sheets, but they were both strangers.

He went upstairs again and out to the front door, where podium and man stood like declarations of permanence and immortality amid the mortal clay. Engel said, “You sure she didn’t go out?”

“Who was that, sir?”

“Mrs. Merriweather. Tall woman in black.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

Engel, exasperated, went over and looked in the viewing room, but only the former Whatsisname was on view. He went back to podium and man. “I’m looking for Mrs. Merriweather,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I know. If she isn’t here, perhaps she isn’t back from shopping. She went shopping this morning, and...”

“She was here ten minutes ago! A tall woman in black, right over there by the drapes.”

“A tall woman in black, sir?”

“Mrs. Merriweather. Your boss’s wife.”

“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but no. Mrs. Merriweather is not a tall woman in black. Mrs. Merriweather is an exceedingly short and stout woman, and is usually in pink.”

Engel said, “What?”

“Pink,” said the podium. Or the man.