Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Telegram for Miz Ackerman,” the voice added.

And was it indeed a telegram? It was possible, Miss Ackerman acknowledged. People were forever dying and other people were apt to communicate such data by means of a telegram. It was easier to buzz whoever it was inside than to brood about it. The door to her own apartment would remain locked, needless to say, and the other tenants could look out for themselves. Florence Ackerman had been looking out for her own self for her whole life and the rest of the planet could go and do the same.

She pressed the buzzer, then went to the door and put her eye to the peephole. She was a small birdlike woman and she had to come up onto her toes to see through the peephole, but she stayed on her toes until her caller came into view. He was a youngish man and he wore a large pair of mirrored sunglasses. Besides obscuring much of his face, the sunglasses kept Miss Ackerman from noticing much about the rest of his appearance. Her attention was inescapably drawn to the twin images of her own peephole reflected in the lenses.

The young man, unaware that he was being watched, rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Telegram,” he said.

“Slide it under the door.”

“You have to sign for it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Miss Ackerman said. “One never has to sign for a telegram. As a matter of fact they’re generally phoned in nowadays.”

“This one you got to sign for.”

Miss Ackerman’s face, by no means dull to begin with, sharpened. She who had been the scourge of several generations of fourth-grade pupils was not to be intimidated by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “Slide it under the door,” she demanded. “Then I’ll open the door and sign your book.” If there was indeed anything to be slid beneath the door, she thought, and she rather doubted that there was.

“I can’t.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a singin’ telegram. Singin’ telegram for Miz Ackerman, what it says here.”

“And you’re to sing it to me?”

“Yeah.”

“Then sing it.”

“Lady, are you kiddin’? I’m gonna sing a telegram through a closed door? Like forget it.”

Miss Ackerman made the clucking noise again. “I don’t believe you have a telegram for me,” she said. “Western Union suspended their singing telegram service some time ago. I remember reading an article to that effect in the Times. ” She did not bother to add that the likelihood of anyone’s ever sending a singing telegram to her was several degrees short of infinitesimal.

“All I know is I’m supposed to sing this, but if you don’t want to open the door—”

“I wouldn’t dream of opening my door.”

“—then the hell with you, Miz Ackerman. No disrespect intended, but I’ll just tell ’em I sang it to you and who cares what you say.”

“You’re not even a good liar, young man. I’m calling the police now. I advise you to be well out of the neighborhood by the time they arrive.”

“You know what you can do,” the young man said, but in apparent contradiction to his words he went on to tell Miss Ackerman what she could do. While we needn’t concern ourselves with his suggestion, let it be noted that Miss Ackerman could not possibly have followed it, nor, given her character and temperament, would she have been likely at all to make the attempt.

Neither did she call the police. People who say “I am calling the police now” hardly ever do. Miss Ackerman did think of calling her local precinct but decided it would be a waste of time. In all likelihood the young man, whatever his game, was already on his way, never to return. And Miss Ackerman recalled a time two years previously, just a few months after her retirement, when she returned from an afternoon chamber music concert to find her apartment burglarized and several hundred dollars’ worth of articles missing. She had called the police, naively assuming there was a point to such a course of action, and she’d only managed to spend several hours of her time making out reports and listing serial numbers, and a sympathetic detective had as much as told her nothing would come of the effort.

Actually, calling the police wouldn’t really have done her any good this time, either.

Miss Ackerman returned to her chair and, without too much difficulty, picked up the threads of the game show. She did not for a moment wonder who might have sent her a singing telegram, knowing with cool certainty that no one had done so, that there had been no telegram, that the young man had intended rape or robbery or some other unpleasantness that would have made her life substantially worse than it already was. That robbers and rapists and such abounded was no news to Miss Ackerman. She had lived all her life in New York and took in her stride the possibility of such mistreatment, even as residents of California take in their stride the possibility of an earthquake, even as farmers on the Vesuvian slopes acknowledge that it is in the nature of volcanoes periodically to erupt. Miss Ackerman sat in her chair, leaving it to make a cup of tea, returning to it teacup in hand, and concentrated on her television program.

The following afternoon, as she wheeled her little cart of groceries around the corner, a pair of wiry hands seized her without ceremony and yanked her into the narrow passageway between a pair of brick buildings. A gloved hand covered her mouth, the fingers digging into her cheek.

She heard a voice at her ear: “Happy birthday to you, you old hairbag, happy birthday to you.” Then she felt a sharp pain in her chest, and then she felt nothing, ever.

“Retired schoolteacher,” Freitagsaid. “On her way home with her groceries. Hell of a thing, huh? Knifed for what she had in her purse, and what could she have, anyway? Livin’ on Social Security and a pension and the way inflation eats you up nowadays she wouldn’t of had much on her. Why stick a knife in a little old lady like her, huh? He didn’t have to kill her.”

“Maybe she screamed,” Ken Poolings suggested. “And he got panicky.”

“Nobody heard a scream. Not that it proves anything either way.” They were back at the station house and Jack Freitag was drinking lukewarm coffee out of a Styrofoam container. But for the Styrofoam the beverage would have been utterly tasteless. “Ackerman, Ackerman, Ackerman. It’s hell the way these parasites prey on old folks. It’s the judges who have to answer for it. They put the creeps back on the street. What they ought to do is kill the little bastards, but that’s not humane. Sticking a knife in a little old lady, that’s humane. Ackerman, Ackerman. Why does that name do something to me?”

“She was a teacher. Maybe you were in one of her classes.”

Freitag shook his head. “I grew up in Chelsea. West Twenty-fourth Street. Miss Ackerman taught all her life here in Washington Heights just three blocks from the place where she lived. And she didn’t even have to leave the neighborhood to get herself killed. Ackerman. Oh, I know what it was. Remember three or maybe it was four days ago, this faggot in the West Village? Brought some other faggot home with him and got hisself killed for his troubles? They found him all tied up with things carved in him. It was all over page three of the Daily News. Ritual murder, sadist cult, sex perversion, blah blah blah. His name was Ackerman.”

“Which one?”

“The dead one. They didn’t pick up the guy who did it yet. I don’t know if they got a make or not.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Not to me it don’t.” Freitag finished his coffee, threw his empty container at the green metal wastebasket, then watched as it circled the rim and fell on the floor. “The Knicks stink this year,” he said. “But you don’t care about basketball, do you?”