What had he been doing? Looking for Charlie Brody, that’s all. Was there anything else, anything he’d been in the middle of before the Charlie Brody thing came up? No. Anything for the near future, that he was supposed to get to as soon as the Charlie Brody thing was done? No.
Charlie Brody? They didn’t want him to find Charlie Brody? What kind of sense did that make, a bunch of legitimate businessmen didn’t want him to find a dead body? No sense at all, that’s what kind.
Bobbi finally broke the silence, saying, “Would it help you to talk some more? Is what you were doing anything you could talk about?”
He looked at her. Up to now he’d been keeping the essential fact away from her in order to protect her feelings, but the way she had of all of a sudden seeing answers, maybe he ought to spill everything to her. Besides, if she knew about the swiping of her husband, she might be able to throw some light on it, might be able to think of something in Brody’s past that would tell them where he might be found now.
He sat down on the bed again. “Bobbi,” he said. “I got something to tell you, and maybe you ought to brace yourself.”
“Brace myself?”
“It’s about Charlie.”
“Brace myself? About Charlie? Charlie’s dead, Mr. Engel, what’s there left to brace myself about?”
“Yeah, well, just wait. Do you know very much about what Charlie’s job was?”
“Well, sure. Husband and wife don’t have secrets, why should they? He used to carry stuff, down South and back.” She made a shooting gesture with her visible hand at the arm still hidden by the blanket. “Snow,” she said.
“Do you know how?” Engel asked her. “How he carried the stuff and didn’t get caught?”
She shrugged like an Italian. “I dunno. In a suitcase, I guess. He never said nothing.”
“In a suit,” Engel told her.
She wrinkled up her cheeks and nose. “Huh?”
“In the blue suit. Sewed in the lining. Bobbi, he was buried with a quarter million bucks’ worth of snow in that blue suit.”
“Holy Peoria! You mean it?”
“I mean it.”
She shook her head. “Boy! I’m surprised they don’t send somebody out to dig him up and get the suit back. Boy.”
“They did,” Engel told her. “Me. I dug him up.”
“You did? How was he?”
“Gone.”
“What’s that?”
“We didn’t bury him, Bobbi. That’s what you got to brace yourself for. We buried an empty casket. Somebody swiped Charlie.”
“A Dr. Frankenstein!” she shouted, eyes widening, both hands coming up to be pressed palm-in against her cheeks. The blanket fell away.
Engel politely turned his head, because it was obvious she didn’t wear anything to bed but a ribbon in her hair. “No,” he said to the opposite wall, “it wouldn’t be anything like that, not in the twentieth century.”
“Oh, my gosh. You can turn again, Mr. Engel, it’s okay now.”
He turned, and she had the blanket back up where it belonged. “That’s what I been doing,” he said, “is looking for Charlie.”
“I want to thank you for looking the other way, Mr. Engel,” she said. “When a gentleman treats a lady like a lady, it makes her feel especially like a lady, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, sure. Any time.”
“And you been looking for Charlie? That’s awful nice, Mr. Engel.”
“Well, it was my job. Nick wanted that suit awful bad.”
“Boy, I guess so.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why’d anybody want to swipe Charlie?” she said. “That’s an awful thing to do, that’s disrespectful of the dead, to swipe their bodies.”
“And that’s all I been doing,” Engel said. “So if that guy Rose and his other businessmen were trying to stop me from doing what I was doing, it was looking for Charlie that I was doing. You wouldn’t know anybody named Rose, would you?”
“A colored lady, used to clean the apartment. No men.”
“This guy runs a business of some kind. Maybe a store or some kind of factory or something.”
She shook her head, back and forth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Engel, but if I’d ever met any man named Rose, front name or last name, I’d remember it.”
Engel spread his hands helplessly, and got up again from the bed. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s where I am right now. I got away from the guys that were supposed to take care of me, and I figured I could hide out here overnight because there wouldn’t be anybody here and nobody’d think to look here for me.”
“Well, you can stay,” she said. “You know that, Mr. Engel.”
“If anybody finds out I was here, they could make it rough on you. Either the organization or the cops, both.”
“Oh, foo,” she said, and waved it all away with her visible hand. “Nobody ever bothers about me. Besides, who’s going to tell them you were here? You won’t, and I won’t, and that’s all of us there is.”
“I’ll clear out first thing in the morning,” Engel told her. “What I got to do, I got to keep looking for Charlie. If I can find out where Charlie is, maybe that’ll explain everything else.”
“Mr. Engel, I’ll be eternally grateful to you for looking for Charlie. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“Well, I’ll do my best,” Engel told her, “for both Charlie’s sake and my own.” He looked around, said, “We can talk some more in the morning, if you want. I’ll go sleep on the sofa in the living room.”
She shook her head, solemnly. “No, you won’t,” she said.
“What?”
She said, “There isn’t much I can do to help you find Charlie, or help you get out of this jam you’re in. There aren’t too many ways I can express my appreciation, but there is one. You turn the light out and come on over here.”
Engel made a vague sort of gesture. “Uhh,” he said, “I oughta just—”
“This is just between us,” she said. “Just friends, no charge or anything like that.”
Engel cleared his throat, and said, “Now, you don’t have to feel obligated or any—”
“I don’t feel obligated,” she said. “I feel that we’re friends, and friends ought to do for each other, and there isn’t much I can do for you but what I can I will. And be more than happy.”
Engel was going to go on protesting, but then he took a closer look at her face, and he could see in her eyes that if he didn’t accept her invitation her feelings would be hurt very badly. Very badly.
Well. One thing about Engel, he always was gallant.
18
He was Snow White, in a glass coffin, and the Seven Dwarfs were burying him alive. He didn’t seem to be able to move. He hollered at them, but they couldn’t hear him through the glass, and they just carried him over to the hole and put him down in it and started shoveling dirt in. One of them looked like Nick Rovito, and one of them looked like Augustus Merriweather, and one of them looked like Deputy Inspector Callaghan. Two others looked like Gittel and Fox, another one looked like Kurt Brock, and the last one looked like Bashful.
Bashful threw a golden rose in on the casket, and the others all started shoveling dirt. Dirt was bouncing on the glass top of the casket, making him blink because it kept looking as though the dirt was going to come right down on his face. But the glass was in the way, and the dirt landed on it with thud sounds. Thud, thud, thud. And for every thud, he blinked.
It was the blinking woke him up. One of the blinks was so real that he actually opened his eyes on the other side of it, and there were no Seven Dwarfs, there was no glass casket, there was no dirt, no rose, no grave. There was a ceiling with cracks in it, and there was a strange bedroom with muted golden light coming through a window with the shade pulled all the way down.