“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.”
7
“Engel!” shouted Callaghan. He released Engel’s sleeve to snap his fingers, and then, belatedly, realized what the woman had just said. “Hey!” he shouted, and grabbed again.
But it was too late. Engel was already through the doorway and halfway across the lawn. He vaulted the Grief Parlor sign, attained the sidewalk, and ran for dear life.
Behind him, voices shouted, “Stop him!” Behind him, cheap lumpy black shoes from the Army & Navy Store thudded in his wake. About half a block behind him and coming strong was a pack of patrolmen of all shapes and all sizes, all alike in their blue uniforms and white gloves and red faces.
Engel crossed a major street, against the light, being narrowly missed by a city bus, a TR-2, a Herald Tribune truck and a Barracuda. Behind him, the intersection was abruptly a sea of chaos, with cops and cars snarling together like long hair when it’s been washed. Half the cops halted in the middle of the street and held their hands up to stop traffic so the other half could go through, but the second half couldn’t get through because the first half was blocking the way. So were the city bus and the Barracuda, both of which had stalled. So was a Mustang, which had ran into the tail of the Barracuda. So was a bohemian-looking young lady on a motor scooter, who had stopped in the middle of everything to see what was going on.
Still, most of the cops managed to get across the intersection and take up the chase again, hallooing to Engel to stop, to give himself up, to cease from resisting arrest.
Engel, meanwhile, had ran nearly a full block farther, and was beginning to get a stitch in his side. Ahead of him, at the corner, a young student policeman in gray-blue uniform and blue hat was talking into a police phone on a telephone pole. As the noise of the chase reached his ears he leaned slightly to one side, so he could see around the pole, and, with the telephone still to his ear, goggled at Engel running full tilt toward him and a capering mass of men in blue coming on strong behind.
Engel saw the student cop, saw him react, saw him speak hurriedly into the telephone and hang it up, saw him grip his nightstick and come warily out from behind the telephone pole, and saw a yawning alley to his left, between two ware-houses or factory buildings. Engel turned on a dime and pelted down the blacktop into the alley.
The sides were grimy brick, extending up half a dozen stories. The end was wood, weathered vertical slats ten or twelve feet high, a rickety-looking wall bowed outward in the middle up above.
In the middle down below there was a door, at the moment shut. Engel raced toward it, reminding God that he hadn’t killed Merriweather and that he had been in church just yesterday morning, and when he got to the door it opened to his push. He stepped through and shut the door behind him.
Well, well. On this side there was another alley, with a large black truck idling in the middle of it, its engine chugging quietly to itself. There was also a long thick wooden bar leaning against the rear alley wall, and on both sides of the door through which Engel had just come, there were brackets apparently designed for the bar. Engel tried the bar and it worked beautifully, sealing the door shut.
Scant seconds after he’d sealed the door the shouting, charging mass of constables surged against it with a series of thuds. The door held. The wall, though wobbly-looking, was supported on this side by cross beams and end braces, and it too held.
A hammering commenced, and shouts of “Open up!”
Extending along the rear wall from the door rightward to the side wall was a stack of oil drums lying on their sides, the stack higher than Engel’s head. A few odd sticks and some rope kept the stack from collapsing. Engel yanked a stick, tugged at two ropes, and the oil drums, with a rumble, came rolling down across the doorway, completely blanketing the rear of the alley. It would take a team of men twenty minutes to clear enough of those away to get at the door.
“Open up! Open up! Open in the name of the law!”
Engel moved on.
This alley was somewhat wider than the other, but still he had to snake along sideways next to the truck, which was facing out, its closed back toward the wall where all the thumping and yelling was coming from, and when he got to the truck cab and found it empty he promptly climbed aboard, remembered about putting it into first gear, and drove it out of the alley.