It took less than a minute to drive it around the block and back it into the alley on the other side, which was still alive at its deeper end with cops, including the pupil patrolman, who was lustily hammering away at the barred and blockaded door with his nightstick. None of the cops noticed when a big black truck which fitted the alley opening the way a cork fits a wine bottle was gently nudged and wedged into place, rear end first. Not, that is, until it was too late.
As Engel shut off the truck engine and pocketed the key, a new chorus of shouts erupted from the alley, more outraged, more desperate and more furious than before.
Engel walked calmly away, dropping the truck ignition key down the sewer at the corner, which appeared to be in a state of turmoil. Next to a Barracuda and a Mustang, which were locked nose to tail, two young men in sport coats were fighting. A lot of people were standing around a city bus, which apparently refused to start. Two police cars, with red dome lights circling, helped to block the intersection, while the four patrolmen who had been in them stood around a bohemian-looking young lady on a motor scooter, who was explaining to them at great and inaccurate length exactly what had happened. A growing mass of people and vehicles was forming a great circle about these foci, and the rumors at the outer fringes of this circle were fantastic. One group, in fact, under the impression that the crowd had formed to watch someone on a ledge, was wagering back and forth as to whether that someone would or would not jump.
“Excuse me,” said Engel. “Pardon me. Excuse me.” He worked his way through the crowd on one side, around the tussling young men, past the bohemian-looking young lady and the four fascinated fuzz, around the stalled bus with its irritated riders and apoplectic driver, through the crowd on the other side, and on the rest of the way back to the grief parlor.
He still had questions to ask.
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.
9
There was a note on his apartment door, down on Carmine Street. It was written with Chinese-red lipstick on a large sheet of paper and stuck to the door with a false fingernail. It read: Honey, I’m back from the Coast. Where are you, baby, don’t you want to see your Dolly any more? Leave a message with Roxanne’s service.
Your sugar tongue,
Engel blinked at the message, at the reference in its finale to an old private joke he’d once upon a time shared with Dolly, and at the golden implications beckoning to him from the lip-sticked paper. He plucked the false fingernail, turned the paper over, and saw that Dolly had used one of her résumés, a listing of the clubs and theaters where she’d worked. Dolly was what she called an exotic dancer, which is a dancer who gradually dances out of her clothing, and she was one of the fringe benefits Engel had derived when he’d made the big leap, four years ago, to Nick Rovito’s right hand.
Holding Dolly’s résumé in one hand and the false fingernail in the other, Engel nodded to himself with cynical detachment. This, he told himself, was the way things always went. At any other time, any other time, he’d have left a message for Dolly in a minute, have gotten together with her by sundown today, and... and so much for the timing of destiny’s bounty. Resignedly, bitterly, he crumpled note and nail into one hand, and with the other unlocked his way into his apartment.
The phone was ringing, speaking of timing. He dropped note and nail on the small table beside the door, glanced at himself in the oval mirror above the table to see if his expression was as disillusioned as he thought it was (it was), walked across the pale beige broadloom carpet on which bearskins and small rectangular Persians and occasional outsize orange cushions were scattered, picked up the phone from the end table beside the white leather sofa, and said, “I can’t talk to you now, Mom, I’m working.”