He shook his head and went over the whole thing again, and over it again, and over it again. Of the six people on the list, he could think of only one with even a hint of a motive for stealing Charlie Brody, and that was Fred Harwell. He’d been Brody’s boss, he’d known what was in the suit. But of course Fred swore he hadn’t known until too late that the suit had been used to bury Brody in. But still...
Fred Harwell? He might have taken the body, if the suit was too tough to get off in a hurry. He might have set up Rose, it was possible Fred had the contacts for a piece of work like that. And he might have killed Merriweather, if he and Merriweather had been in on the body snatching together or if Fred was afraid Merriweather had found out the truth somehow and might talk.
It all seemed so unlikely. Yet it was the only possibility Engel seemed able to come up with, so finally he decided there was nothing to do but follow it up. He’d go back and see each of the people on this list a second time, no matter how unlikely they seemed, and this time he’d see could he find the links in the chain. And he’d start off with Fred Harwell.
He left a note for Bobbi:
Thanks for the hospitality. I had a good sleep and a good breakfast. I’ll be in touch, if I get the chance.
He didn’t sign it, just in case the wrong eyes saw it; he didn’t want to get her in trouble. He left it propped on the kitchen table and went out of the apartment.
Down on the street there was a red and yellow truck with a carnival-type ride on the back, gaily painted little spaceships that went around and around a central hub where the motor was mounted, while a loudspeaker on the roof of the truck cab blared rock and roll from a radio station. Grinning children whirled around while more children stood in line beside the truck, waiting their turn.
Engel stopped and looked at it, feeling nostalgia for the simple days of his own childhood in Washington Heights. These trucks plied the poorer neighborhoods of New York all spring and summer, one of the city’s less odious harbingers of the warm months. This was the first one Engel had seen this year, and it affected him much the way the first robin affects the country dweller.
Until, that is, the loudspeaker finished its rock and roll and segued into the news. The children in their tin spaceships now whirled around to the tensions of the day, which included:
“Police today are searching for Aloysius Eugene Engel, alleged gangland killer, who last night shot and killed in Jersey City—”
And so on. With description: “Engel is described as six foot one inch tall, sallow complexion, dark brown hair and brown eyes, strong build. He is believed to be armed and dangerous.”
Unarmed, feeling anything but dangerous, Engel fled away down the sidewalk.
He was a block and a half away before he remembered his underwear was still in Bobbi’s bathroom.
19
To look at Fred Harwell’s place of business, you’d never know he had charge of a multimillion-dollar operation with employees in the hundreds and customers in the tens of thousands. But, on the other hand, Fred Harwell’s operation was not the sort of business that put up glass buildings to itself on Fifth Avenue. Given the nature of his trade, a grimy and bankrupt-looking brick building on Tenth Avenue was just the perfect location for his home office.
This building was between 45th and 46th streets. The first and second floors housed a Spanish-language phonograph record company that specialized in low-fi records of people shaking gourds. The fourth floor was the office and warehouse of a company that sold odd-looking women’s underwear via mail order and did all its advertising in muscle-man magazines. Between these two, on the third floor, behind the name Afro-Indic Importing Corporation, lurked Fred Harwell and his organization of dope peddlers.
Another of those carnival-ride trucks was parked just down the block from this building as Engel arrived, but was happily playing music instead of Engel’s description. Engel walked past it, went into Fred’s building, and up the two flights of murky grimy stairs to the third floor, where there was a short hallway and two doors, one unmarked and one lettered AFRO-INDIC IMPORTING CORP.
The main motif up here was ancient wood flooring, with broad dust-filled holes between the slats. Cracked and dented plaster walls were painted a heavy shade of green reminiscent of the interior of the Minotaur’s stomach, and from somewhere there came a pervasive odor of soggy moldering cardboard.
Engel pushed open the door and entered a small barren room containing a wooden desk, a wooden filing cabinet, a hat rack, two huge dusty windows bare of curtains or blinds or drapes, a crumbling brown leather sofa, and Fred Harwell’s mistress name of Fancy, who was very plain.
Engel had no idea if Fancy knew the latest on himself, so he just bluffed it through to see what would happen. “Hi, Fancy,” he said. “I come to see Fred.”
She looked surprised, but that was only natural; he didn’t come around here very often. “He’s in,” she said. “You want I should announce you?”
“Naw, that’s okay.” Engel waved airily and crossed the room and pushed open the other door on its far side.
Fred Harwell looked up from his desk, where he’d been hard at work on last Sunday’s Times crossword puzzle. “All” he said, and then, as realization struck him, “Al? For Christ’s sake, Al—”
Engel shut the door. “Not a word, Fred,” he said. “Play it very cool.”
“Al, what are you doing here? Do you know how hot you are?”
“Yeah, I know how hot I am. What I don’t know is who lit the fire under me.”
Fred pressed the palms of his hands against his chest. “All Me?”
“You tell me.”
“Why would I, Al? Answer me that, why would I?”
“I don’t know yet. I got theories, that’s all.”
Fred shook his head back and forth. “This is crazy,” he said. “Everything’s crazy. One second I’m sitting here doing my job like always, everything’s jake, and the next second you come in and say I did something to you. Like what? Like how? Like why?”
Engel said, “What about me? One second I’m doing my job like always and the next second I’m a dead man, I got the cops and the organization both after me.”
Fred raised both hands, palms up. “Al, that’s the chance you took,” he said. “I always figured you were too smart to try a stunt like that, but there you are. And if it got back to Nick Rovito, why figure I or anybody else did it to you? You did it to yourself, Al.”
“Now wait a second,” said Engel. “Hold on a second, there. That was a frame-up, Fred. I never been on the take in my life.”
“Then I’m sorry. If that’s true, I’m sorry, Al, but what can I do? I can’t talk to Nick, I can’t—”
Engel decided to throw a curve and see what happened. “I just been to see Rose,” he said.
Fred squinted. “Rose who?”
“You don’t know who Rose is?”
“One of Archie’s girls?”
“Come off it, Fred. Rose is a man and you know it.”
Fred blinked several times, then suddenly flashed a very weak and shaky smile. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He was leaning farther back in his chair now, farther away from Engel. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Rose is a man, I forgot that.”
“What are you doing, you simple bastard? Are you humoring me?”
“Oh, no,” said Fred. “No, no, Al, not a bit of it.”
“Rose is a last name, too, you moron. Like Billy Rose. You gonna tell me Billy Rose is a woman?”