She jumped to her feet. “What about you?” she shrieked. “Charlie Brady’s body, Charlie Brady’s body, can’t you think of anything else? You’ve been driving me crazy, you never stop, what’s the use of it? The man’s dead, what do you want with his body?”
“What do you want with it?”
“Nothing, I don’t have it, I don’t know what you’re—”
“You’ve got it!” Engel snapped at her. “You didn’t get it yourself, you sent somebody else to get it for you, but you got it! What do you—?” And he stopped, open-mouthed.
She looked at him. “What?” she said.
“Uh huh,” he said. He was looking into the middle distance, but his expression was more as though he were looking inward, watching a movie being screened on the inside of his skull. “Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “That’d do it,” he said.
“Do what?” She came closer to him, dropping the handkerchief in her distraction. “What are you thinking now?”
“Things going bad,” he said. “Spending faster than you earn, you’d do it, that’s your style. And stealing from the business, that’d fit in. And probably owe the government back taxes. Everything closing in all at once.” He spread his arms around. “You’ve got a place like this—”
“We rent the top two floors,” she said quickly. “That helps with taxes and upkeep. Murray and I just live here and downstairs.”
“A Mercedes,” he said, “That’d be your car, your husband would have a car of his own, a Cadillac...”
“Lincoln,” she said. “Continental. Cadillac is common.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Everything goes together nice.”
“I wish,” she said, “I really wish I knew what you were talking about.”
He looked around, and there was another set of closed double doors at the far end of the room. He moved toward them, slowly, saying, “It’s easy when you look at it right, put everything together the right way. Like a jigsaw puzzle. Like you always send somebody else to do what you can’t do, you do that all the time. So the only question is, what did you send Charlie Brody to do that you couldn’t do yourself?”
“You are completely out of your mind. Come away from there.”
“And the answer,” he said, his hands touching the doors, “is that you sent Charlie Brody to take the place of” — he slid the doors open — “you,” he said to the heavy-set glint-eyed man standing there in the darkness.
The heavy-set man smiled, and took a gun from his pocket, and aimed the gun at Engel.
“Murray Kane,” said Engel. “You’re Murray Kane.”
“How do you do, Mr. Engel,” said Murray Kane.
Behind Engel, the woman said, “Now see what you’ve done? You’ve just made things impossible for yourself.”
“My wife is correct, Mr. Engel,” said Kane. “You have made things impossible for yourself.”
“Insurance,” said Engel. He didn’t have time yet to think about the mess he was in; he’d just figured things out and he was still involved with fitting all the pieces in place. “You’ll be insured to the hilt, and your wife collects. Your debts die with you, and your wife can sell the business. The two of you take off for anywhere, Brazil, Europe—”
“The Caribbean,” said Kane.
“And you’re set for life.”
Kane smiled again. “For death,” he said softly. “Set for death.”
“So,” said Engel, “your wife got close to Kurt Brock—”
Kane’s smile soured a trifle. “Perhaps a bit too close,” he said, and directed his sour smile past Engel to his wife.
“I did what I had to do,” she said. “This was your idea, Murray.”
“What you had to wait for,” said Engel, “was a suitable body, a body loused up some way so there’d be no viewing. Then Brock stole the body, you put it in your factory and set fire to the place, and as far as anybody’s concerned Murray Kane is dead.”
“As a doornail,” said Kane.
“But Merriweather got suspicious somehow.”
Kane’s smile twisted even more. “He eavesdropped. He overheard Brock and my wife talking. He tried to blackmail us, to cut himself in for a percentage.”
Mrs. Kane said, “You were just going to talk to him, that’s all. You and your temper.”
“He was too greedy,” said Kane. “A fool, and too greedy.”
Mrs. Kane said, “If we’re going to talk, why don’t we all sit down?”
“Of course,” said Kane. “Mr. Engel, forgive me. I didn’t mean to keep you standing. If you will be so good as to walk very slowly to that chair there, and sit down with no sudden or excitable moves, I would be most appreciative.”
They all sat down in the living room, at a good distance from one another. Mrs. Kane said, “Now, where were we? Oh, yes. Murray went to see Mr. Merriweather, and I had the most awful premonition, so I followed him. I knew poor Kurt had been fired, for nuzzling with me behind the flowers, and when I saw you standing in the office, Mr. Engel, from behind, I thought you were Kurt, and I was terribly afraid you’d see Murray. You see, Kurt doesn’t know my husband’s alive.”
Murray smiled again. “Kurt understands an entirely different plot,” he said, “culminating in his running off to Hawaii with Margo and half a million dollars.”
“Poor Kurt,” said Mrs. Kane. “He’ll be so disappointed. At any rate, I saw you and thought you were Kurt, and so I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ because of course I knew you’d been fired. Then you turned around, and you weren’t Kurt, and Mr. Merriweather was dead, and it was too much for me, so I fainted.”
Murray said, “My wife faints whenever things are too much for her, Mr. Engel.”
“Then I woke up,” said Mrs. Kane, “and Murray was there. He’d been hiding on the cellar staircase. Well, the building was just full of policemen, so what was I to do?”
Engel said, “You sicked them on me.”
“Just so Murray could get away. Then things began to get complicated. I kept having to see you, to find out what you were doing, whether you were dangerous to us or not. And finally I had to get you in trouble with your boss, though I truly didn’t mean you to get in as much trouble as you did.”
The husband said, “You should have let well enough alone, Engel. My wife went to the trouble of calling Rose and the others back, fixing things up for you again. You should have quit while you were ahead.”
“I still had my job to do,” Engel said.
Mrs. Kane got to her feet and said, “All right, now we’ve told you everything. Now will you, for the love of God, tell me something?”
“You? Sure, what?”
“What are you up to, Mr. Engel? What do you keep snooping around for?”
“Charlie Brody. I was sent to get his body back.”
“But why? How did you even know he was missing?”
“I dug up his coffin and he wasn’t in it.”
The Kanes looked at each other. Mrs. Kane said, “Mr. Engel, I’ve got to know why. What set you off?”
“Charlie’s suit,” Engel said.
“His suit?”
“There was something in it my boss wanted.”
They looked at each other again. Mrs. Kane said, “The suit. All the time, it wasn’t the body at all, it was the suit.”
“We wanted the body suitable,” said Kane, “and he wanted the body’s suit.”
Engel said, “What did you do with it?”
Mrs. Kane shrugged. “I have no idea. Kurt took care of all that. I gave him one of Murray’s suits to dress it in.”