Ed Mcbain - The Heckler

Casually, the deaf man struck up a conversation with her. The girl, as he’d suspected, would not qualify for a teaching position at Harvard. Their first conversation, as he later recalled it, went something like this. He had ordered a chocolate eclair for dessert.

The girl said, “I see you have a sweet tooth.”

“Yes, indeed,” the deaf man said.

She had cocked one eyebrow coquettishly. “Well, sweets for the sweet,” she answered, and swiveled away from the table.

Slowly, he had engaged her in further conversations, strengthening his opinion of her potential. When he finally asked her out, he was certain she would accept immediately—and she did.

That evening, the fourteenth of April, he had dazzled her with his brilliance at dinner. She sat in wide-eyed wonder, contributing little to the conversation, fascinated with his speech. They walked under a star-scattered sky later, guided imperceptibly by the deaf man to an apartment on Franklin Street. When the deaf man suggested that they go up for a drink, the girl demurred slightly, and he felt a quickening of passion; this would not be a pushover; there would be a struggle and a chase to whet his appetite.

They did not talk much in the apartment. They sat on the modern couch in the sunken living room and the girl took off her shoes and pulled her knees up under her, and the deaf man poured two large snifters of brandy, and they sat rolling the glasses in their hands, the girl peeking over the edge of her glass the way she had seen movie stars do, the deaf man drinking the brandy slowly, savoring the taste of the lip-tingling alcohol, anticipating what he would do to this girl, anticipating his pleasure with a slow cruelty that began mounting inside him, a carefully controlled cruelty—control, he reminded himself, control.

By midnight, the girl was totally witless.

Half naked, she did not know what was happenng to her, nor did she care; she had no mind; she possessed only a body which was alive in his arms as he carried her down a long white corridor to the first of three bedrooms. Her stockings were off, she realized; he had taken off her stockings; firmly cradled in his arms, her skirt pulled back, she realized she was naked beneath the skirt, her blouse hung open; he had somehow removed her bra without taking off her blouse, she could see the white beating expanse below her neck and suddenly he was standing over her and she was looking up at him expectantly and seeing him and feeling sudden fear, the fear of true and total invasion, and then she knew nothing.

Nothing. She knew nothing. She was drawn toward a blazing sun, pulled away from it, he knew nothing inviolate, every secret place of her succumbed totally to his vicious onslaught, every aching pore of her was his to claim, she was drugged, she was not herself, she was not anyone she knew, she had been carried mindlessly to the edge of totality, violated and adored, cherished and possessed, worshiped and ravaged, there was no cessation, no beginning and no end, she would remember this night with longing and excitement, remember it too with shame and guilt as the night she surrendered privacy to a total stranger, with an abandon she had not known she’d possessed.

At three in the morning, he gave her a gift. He crossed the room and she was too weary to follow him even with her eyes, and suddenly he was beside her again, opening a long carton, pulling the filmy silk from within its tissue paper folds.

“Put this on,” he said.

She obeyed him. She would have obeyed whatever command he’d given her. She rose and pulled the black gown over her head.

“And your shoes.”

She obeyed. She felt somewhat dizzy, and yet she longed to be in his arms again. The short nightgown ended abruptly above her thighs. She felt his eyes upon her, sweeping the curve of her leg, the long accentuated curve dropping to the high-heeled spike.

“Come here,” he said, and she went to him hungrily.

WELL, THE FIFTEENTHwas the middle of the month, and a hell of a month it was shaping up to be so far.

All things considered, and not even taking into account the petty little daily crimes which bugged every man working the squad, April so far—despite the lovely weather—was beginning to assume the characteristics of a persistent migraine. And no man on the squad had a bigger headache than Meyer Meyer.

Meyer, it seemed, had become the man officially assigned to the Heckler Case. That it was now a bona fide “case,” there seemed to be no doubt. What had started with David Raskin as a simple series of threatening phone calls and foolish pranks had somehow mushroomed into something with the proportions of an epidemic. Slowly, bit by bit, the complaints had come in until the list of shop or restaurant owners reporting threatening calls and acts of harassment had grown to a total of twenty-two. Some of the complainants were truly terrified by the threats; others were simply annoyed by the disruption of their business. Meyer, taking the calls, became more and more convinced that one man, or group of men, was responsible for the heckling. In any case, the modus operandi seemed identical.

But what he couldn’t understand was what the hell was so important about April thirtieth?

Or why these particular shops had been chosen? A haberdashery, a Chinese restaurant, a tie store, a leather goods shop, a candy shop—what was so important about these particular locations?

Meyer simply couldn’t figure it.

Nor was Steve Carella much better off with his case, the case of the almost-naked dead man found in Grover Park. Why, he wondered, had anyone wanted old John Smith dead? Or, for that matter, why would the dead man have taken an assumed name? And such a phony one at that? John Smith! My God! How many hotel and motel registers in the United States carried that pseudonym daily? And who was this deaf guy? And why had twenty-two-year-old Lotte Constantine wanted to invest time and money in sixty-six-year-old John Smith? (The obvious alias rankled every time he thought of it.) The deaf man. Who? And he pulled a face at the ironies of fate. The one person who meant everything in the world to him was a deaf mute, his wife Teddy. And now his adversary was someone known only as the deaf man. The juxtaposition was irony with a knife-edge, but Carella was not amused. He was only puzzled. Truly and honestly puzzled.

And when it’s going bad, you might expect the people who are causing you trouble to let up for a while, mightn’t you? When two stalwart and intelligent detectives were struggling with two separate nuts which seemed uncrackable and which caused both men a considerable loss of sleep, when these two intrepid protectors of the innocent, these indefatigable investigators, these supporters of law and order, when these two darned nice fellows were trying their utmost to get out from under two miserable cases, wouldn’t it have been decent and only cricket to leave them alone, to allow them a respite from their torments? Friends, wouldn’t it have been the decent thing to do? Cop lovers of the world, wouldn’t it have been the only nice way, the only good way, the only fair way?

Sure.

On April 15, which was a balmy spring day blowing fresh breezes off the River Harb to the north, the harassment began anew.

It began with a difference, however.

It seemed to be concentrated against Dave Raskin, as if all armies had suddenly massed on poor Raskin’s frontiers and were pressing forward with their spring invasion. If you looked at this sudden offensive one way, you could assume the enemy was doing his best to plague Raskin and the cops. But if you looked at it another way, you could think of the concentrated attack as a guide, a signpost, a singling-out of the one store among twenty-five, a divine hand pointing, a divine voice saying, “Look and ye shall see; knock and it shall be opened unto ye.”