He blinked once more, while shifting from the dream world to whatever sort of world this was, and then memory and reality and a sense of place came back, and he sat up, looking all over the bed for Bobbi.
She wasn’t there, but on the night table there was a note. Engel reached over, picked it up, and read:
Dear Mister Engel,
Archie Freihofer wanted me to start back to work today so I am supposed to go over to the Coliseum, there is some sort of Home Furnishings Fair going on there and they will want some girls for the buyers and the “visiting firemen” but why they always want to interview the girls in the morning I do not know but that is the way they are.
I will probably not be back tonight so if you want to sleep here again you had better come in the window once more which I will leave unlocked.
There is instant coffee and English muffins and anything else in the kitchen for breakfast.
Good luck and I know Charlie would thank you for your efforts on his behalf just as much as I do.
Sincerely yours,
PS. If your underwear and socks are not dry take some from the middle drawer of the dresser, it is all right. BB
“Underwear and socks?” Engel looked up from the note, and took quick stock. On the chair by the desk his shirt was neatly hung, his tie draped over it. On the hook on the inside of the open closet door was his suit, neatly placed on a hanger. When he leaned to the left he could see his shoes on the floor beside the bed. But his underwear and socks?
Still a bit befuddled by the Seven Dwarfs, but also confused by the note and in a half-awake panic about his underwear and socks, Engel staggered out of the bed and went padding naked from the room in search of his missing garments.
They were in the bathroom, on wire hangers hung on the shower curtain bar over the tub. And they were still wet, or at least damp. “Well,” he muttered. “Fine.” He went padding back to the bedroom.
As he put on a pair of Charlie Brody’s shorts, the thought came to him that he was getting far too closely enmeshed with Charlie Brody, that his own life was being bound up to an unhealthy degree with the past and present of Charlie Brody. “Just let me get you planted where you belong,” he muttered. “That’s all, just let me get this mess straightened out. Then you and me are quits, Charlie.”
An hour later, washed and dressed and breakfasted, he felt much better. He’d slept late and it was now nearly noon; time to be doing.
Doing what? With Bobbi’s help he’d figured a couple of things out last night, but he was still almost completely in the dark. He didn’t know who to blame for anything, didn’t know who to ask questions of nor even what questions to ask, and even if he did know any, his mobility was severely limited at the moment by the fact that both the cops and the organization would be scouring the city for him by now.
Sitting there over a third cup of instant coffee and his second cigarette, he thought about what to do next. If only, he thought, if only there was someone he could send out to do the legwork for him while he himself remained safely out of sight. Get somebody maybe that the organization didn’t even know, like Dolly for instance or—
Somebody they didn’t know.
Like he didn’t know Rose. Like that
He squinted in a cloud of cigarette smoke and worked that one out. He didn’t know Rose. Rose had framed him to stop him from doing what he was doing, which was looking for Charlie Brody. Rose had done it on behalf of somebody else, somebody Engel did know.
“Oh ho,” he said. Out loud. “Somebody I know doesn’t want me looking for Charlie Brody. This somebody has a way to put pressure on this guy Rose and some other businessmen to make them say stuff to frame me.”
All well and good, but what did it mean?
“It means,” Engel said aloud, “it means I was getting close. I didn’t know it myself, but somewhere along the line I started to get close, and I made this somebody nervous enough to fix me.”
Right. Engel dropped his cigarette in his coffee, got up from the table, and went back to the bedroom, where he sat at the little desk and armed himself with pencil and paper. The thing to do now was make a list of every single person he’d talked to since he’d started looking for Charlie Brody. Thinking back, he gradually compiled his list:
Mrs. Brody
Margo Kane
Inspector Callaghan
Kurt Brock
Fred Harwell
Archie Freihofer
Some list. Squinting at it, tapping it now and again with his pencil, Engel kept trying to find somebody on it who might have a hankering to steal Charlie Brody, to frame Engel, to murder Merriweather, but nobody seemed at all right for the job.
Mrs. Brody? Bobbi? What would she swipe her husband for? How would she be able to pressure Rose into helping with the frame? Well, she might have met Rose while she was working for Archie Freihofer before she got married, and she might be able to blackmail him, threaten to go to his wife or something. She could, maybe, but there was no sense in it. No, and she was too open, too guileless; she’d never be able to run a scheme as complicated as this one was getting.
Margo Kane? In the first place she already had a dead husband, so what would she need with somebody else’s? In the second place there wasn’t any connection that Engel had found between Margo Kane and Charlie Brody in Brody’s lifetime, so why should there be any connection now? As a matter of fact, Margo didn’t even know Engel was looking for Brody’s body, so she couldn’t very well be the one trying to stop him from finding it.
Callaghan? As with everybody else, there was no reason for him to want a body. Beyond that, Callaghan was just too damn honest, honest to the point of stubborn bullheadedness, far too honest to be involved in anything as shady as all this. He might have been able to pressure Rose, but other than that he was out of it. He was involved, as was Margo Kane, merely through the circumstance of having been at the grief parlor the same time as Engel.
Kurt Brock? He’d admitted he was the next to the last person to see Charlie Brody’s corpse, but other than that he seemed to have no connection with anything. None with Brody, none with Rose. No motive for anything. In fact, he was the only one in the crowd who couldn’t possibly be the guy Engel was after, if he assumed the guy he wanted was also the killer of Merriweather. Brock was covered on that, and if Callaghan had accepted his alibi it was good enough for Engel.
Fred Harwell? He was almost the only one who’d known about the value of the suit, but Fred would surely have been content to swipe the suit instead of the whole body. Unless, of course, there’d been a time factor, and it was simpler to just take the whole body and go rather than stick around trying to get the suit off it. But Harwell had been in the organization for years, and knew the score; he wouldn’t be dumb enough to try something cute like this. As to setting up Rose, Harwell was a possible but hardly a probable.
Archie Freihofer? All Archie knew or cared about was his women. It was impossible to see Archie stealing dead bodies, particularly male bodies, impossible to see him stabbing Merriweather or scheming with Rose or any of the rest of it.
Yeah, but that was the trouble. It was impossible to see any of these people doing any of the things that some one of them sure as hell had done.
Unless, of course, there was a name missing from this list, somebody Engel hadn’t gotten onto yet.
But if Engel hadn’t come across him yet, the bastard, why should he sic Rose on Engel?