He went up the steps of the nearest building, and when the cab turned the far corner he came back down them again and walked the block to where he wanted to go. The downstairs door was open, and he hurried up the stairs without seeing anyone, stopping in front of the door behind which Charlie Brody had lived his life.
It was the perfect spot. Brody’s wife wouldn’t be coming here for at least a few days more, nor would anyone else be dropping by. Engel and Brody hadn’t been close friends while Brody was alive, so there was no reason for anyone to think of Engel in relation to Brody’s apartment now. Here, in safety and comfort, he could proceed to parts two and three, the why of his framing and the process of getting himself unframed.
The apartment door, of course, was locked, but Engel was in no mood to let that stop him. Judging by the other doors on this floor, and remembering what the inside of the apartment had looked like, he figured out just where and how much of the area of this floor belonged to the Brody apartment, and then he turned away and went on up the rest of the stairs to the roof.
The night was still beautiful, as beautiful as on the ride to Connecticut, but Engel was no longer of a disposition to notice it. He crossed the roof to the rear wall, where the top rungs of a fire escape curved up into sight, and looked over the edge. At each level there was a broad platform, stretching across in front of two windows, one each for adjoining apartments. Two floors down, the window on the right belonged, so far as Engel could judge, to the Brody apartment. To the bedroom, in fact.
Creeping carefully down the fire escape, Engel reflected bitterly that he seemed to be branching out into all sorts of new crimes lately: grave robbing, truck stealing, now breaking and entering. Walking on Grand Central Parkway, there was another offense. Leaving an automobile at forty miles an hour was probably against the law too, and earlier today he’d come perilously close to impersonating a policeman.
“Great,” he muttered. “I’m becoming the Renaissance man of the underworld.”
The window, when he reached it, was locked, just as the door had been. But Engel would waste no time with windows. The upper half of this one was divided into six small panes; taking off his shoe, Engel used the heel to smash in the middle pane in the lower row, the one by the lock. The noise this made was loud, but brief, and Engel doubted anyone would pay attention to it. New Yorkers needed a noise that lasted half an hour or so before they’d begin to wonder if something was up, and even then most of them would avoid going to see what it was.
Engel reached in past the jagged edges of glass, undid the window catch, and then pushed the lower half of the window up and climbed through. He shut the window behind him again, pulled the shade all the way down, and then felt his way around the room, hitting his shin against various anonymous but hard objects, until he found the doorway on the opposite side, beside which was the switch for the light. Engel pushed it, the overhead light came on, and Bobbi Bounds Brody sat up in the bed, saying, “Mr. Engel, you scared the life out of me.”
Engel blinked at her. “I thought,” he said, “I thought you moved out.”
“It felt so funny, sleeping somewheres else. I know I got to move in with Marge and Tinkerbell eventually, but for now I’d rather stay right here, with my memories. Coming back with you like I did this evening, remembering all the good times and like that, I knew, I just knew I wasn’t ready yet to move out. So here I am.”
Engel nodded. “Here you are all right,” he said.
“Mr. Engel, why didn’t you knock on the door?”
“I didn’t think anybody was home.”
“I would of given you a key. All you had to do was call Archie Freihofer, he’d have fixed it up so you could get the key.”
“It’s kind of complicated, Mrs. Brody.”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t call me Mrs. Brody,” she said. “That isn’t my name any more, and I got to get used to it. You better call me Bobbi.”
Engel looked at her. She was holding the pale green blanket up to her neck as she sat there in bed, and above it her friendly but not particularly bright face gazed earnestly and sincerely at him. “Okay, Bobbi,” he said. “I need somebody to talk to, somebody I can trust. I want to make it you.”
“Well, gee, Mr. Engel.” Her eyes widened with a combination of surprise and pleasure and curiosity. “You sit down here,” she said, one bare arm emerging from around the pale green blanket to pat the bed. “You sit right down here and tell me all about it.”
Engel sat down, near the foot of the bed. “To make it short and sweet,” he said, “I been framed. It’s a double frame, both with Nick Rovito and with the cops.”
“Holy cow,” she said.
“You bet. Nick Rovito himself set up the frame with the cops, to keep things neat and simple after a couple of the boys should rub me out.”
“Rub you out? Mr. Engel, you don’t mean it.”
“Yes, I do. He must of called the Committee last night and got their okay. I suppose that’s why he had to set up the other frame.”
“What?”
Engel suddenly realized he’d gradually stopped talking to her and started talking to himself. He shook his head and said, “Let me try and say it straight. Some people framed me with Nick Rovito, told him I was doing something I wasn’t doing. So Nick planned to bump me off, and on the side set up a frame with the cops, so they wouldn’t look too hard for who killed me.”
Eyes wide, mouth open, she nodded her head slowly. “I think I got it,” she said.
“I feel the same way you do,” Engel told her. “I can’t figure it out.”
She said, “Who was it framed you with Mr. Rovito?”
“That’s just it,” Engel said. “That’s just the part that’s crazy. It was businessmen, legit straight honest businessmen. Not guys in the organization at all. And not only that, but businessmen I don’t even know, businessmen I never even met before.”
“Well, maybe it’s a mistake, then.”
Engel shook his head. “One of them identified me. ‘That’s him,’ he said to Nick. I was right there.”
“Boy,” she said. “That’s terrible.”
“And I can’t figure it out. Why should they do it to me?”
She said, “Well, maybe to stop you from doing whatever you were doing.”
He frowned at her. “What? I told you already, it was a frame, I wasn’t doing what they said I was doing.”
“No, no, that isn’t what I mean. I mean what you were really doing. Maybe they wanted to stop you from doing what you were doing. Maybe you were on a job or something that was going to hurt them later on.”
Engel stared at her. “You just thought that up?” he said. “All by yourself?”
“Well, I only thought—”
“No, I’m not putting you down. What I mean is, I never even thought of it that way.”
She blinked, a couple of times. “You think maybe that’s it?”
“Why not? It’s anyway a reason, right? That’s what was driving me nuts all this time, I couldn’t even think of a reason. Right or wrong, that doesn’t matter yet, just so I have some kind of reason why that guy Rose fingered me, so I can at least start thinking about it.”
She said, “What was that name?”
Hope sprang again within Engel’s breast. “Rose,” he said, and waited.
But all she said was, “That’s a girl’s name.”
Engel sagged a little. “It’s his last name,” he said.
“Oh. Well, anyway, if you could figure out what you were doing that they didn’t want you to do, maybe you could figure out why they did this thing.”
“Yeah,” said Engel. “Yeah, that’s the rub.” He got to his feet, and lit a cigarette, and started pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. “That’s the rub,” he said again.