Ed Mcbain - The Heckler

“Of course,” Meyer said understandingly. “Well, tell me, Dave, could one of your friends be playing a little joke on you, maybe?”

“A joke? I don’t think so. My friends, you should pardon the expression, are all pretty solemn bastards. I’ll tell you the truth, Meyer, no attempt to butter you up. When your dear father Max Meyer died, God rest his soul, when your dear father and my dear friend Max Meyer passed away, this world lost a very great funny man. That is the truth, Meyer. This was a hilarious person, always with a laugh on his lips, always with a little joke. This was a very funny man.”

“Yes, oh yes,” Meyer said, and he hoped his lack of enthusiasm did not show. It had been his dear father, that very funny man Max Meyer who—in retaliation for being presented with a change-of-life baby—had decided to name his new son Meyer Meyer, the given name to match the surname. This was very funny indeed, the gasser of all time. When Max announced the name at the briss those thirty-seven years ago, perhaps all the guests, including Dave Raskin, had split a gut or two laughing. For Meyer Meyer, who had to grow up with the name, the humor wasn’t quite that convulsive. Patiently he carried the name like an albatross. Patiently he suffered the gibes and the jokes, suffered the assaults of people who decided they didn’t like his face simply because they didn’t like his name. He wore patience as his armor and carried it as his standard. Omnia Meyer in tres partes divisa est: Meyer and Meyer and Patience. Add them all together, and you got a Detective 2nd/Grade who worked out of the 87th Squad, a tenacious cop who never let go of anything, who doggedly and patiently worried a case to its conclusion, who used patience the way some men used glibness or good looks.

So the odd name hadn’t injured him after all. Oh yes, it hadn’t been too pleasant, but he’d survived and he was a good cop and a good man. He had grown to adult size and was apparently unscarred. Unless one chose to make the intellectual observation that Meyer Meyer was completely bald and that the baldness could have been the result of thirty-seven years of sublimation. But who the hell wants to get intellectual in a detective squadroom?

Patiently now, having learned over the years that hating his father wasn’t going to change his name, having in fact felt a definite loss when his father died, the loss all sons feel when they are finally presented with the shoes they’ve wanted to fill for so long, forgetting the malice he had borne, patiently reconstructing a new image of the father as a kind and gentle man, but eliminating all humor from that image, patiently Meyer listened to Raskin tell about the comedian who’d been his father, but he did not believe a word of it.

“So it isn’t a man trying to be funny, believe me,” Raskin said. “If it was that, do you think I’d have come up here? I got nothing better to do with my time, maybe?”

“Then what do you think, Dave? That this man is really going to kill you if you don’t get out of the loft?”

“Kill me? Who said that?” It seemed to Meyer in that moment that Dave Raskin turned a shade paler.

“ Kill me? Me?”

“Didn’t he say he was going to kill you?”

“Well yes, but—”

“And didn’t you just tell me you didn’t think this was a joke?”

“Well yes, but—”

“Then apparently you believe he is going to kill you unless you vacate the loft. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Isn’t that correct?”

“No, that’s not correct!” Raskin said with some indignation. “By you, maybe, that is correct, but not by me. By me, it is not correct at all. Dave Raskin didn’t come up here he thinks somebody’s going to kill him.”

“Then why did you come up, Dave?”

“Because this heckler, this pest, this shmuck who’s calling me up two, three times a week, he’s scaring the girls who work for me. I got three Puerto Rican girls they do pressing for me in the Culver Avenue loft. So every time this bedbug calls, if I don’t happen to be there, he yells at the girls, ‘Tell that son of a bitch Raskin I’m going to kill him unless he gets out of that loft!’ Crazy, huh? But he’s got the girls scared stiff, they can’t do any work!”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Meyer asked.

“Find out who he is. Get him to stop calling me. He’s threatening me, can’t you see that?”

“I see it, all right. But I don’t think there’s enough here to add up to extortion, and I can’t—This guy hasn’t made any real attempts on your life, has he?”

“What are you gonna do?” Raskin asked. “Wait until he kills me? Is that what? And then you’ll make a nice funeral for me?”

“But you said you didn’t think he was serious.”

“To kill me, I don’t think so. But suppose, Meyer. Just suppose. Listen, there are crazy people all over, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“So suppose this crazy nut comes after me with a shotgun or a butcher knife or something? I get to be one of those cases in the newspaper where I went to the police and they told me to go home and don’t worry.”

“Dave—”

“‘Dave, Dave!’ Don’t ‘Dave’ me. I remember you when you was in diapers. I come here and tell you a man said he’s going to kill me. Over and over again, he’s said it. So this is attempted murder, no?”

“No, this is not attempted murder.”

“And not extortion, either? Then what is it?”

“Disorderly conduct,” Meyer said. “He’s used offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive, or insulting language.” Meyer paused and thought for a moment. “Gee, I don’t know, maybe we have got extortion. He is trying to get you out of that loft by threatening you.”

“Sure. So go pick him up,” Raskin said.

“Who?” Meyer asked.

“The person who’s making the calls.”

“Well, we don’t know who he is, do we?”

“That’s simple,” Raskin said. “Just trace the next call.”

“Impossible to do in this city,” Meyer said. “All our telephone equipment is automatic.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Meyer said. “Does he call at any specific time?”

“So far, all the calls have come in the afternoon, late. Just about closing time, between four and five.”

“Well, look,” Meyer said, “maybe I’ll stop by, this afternoon or tomorrow. To listen in on the calls, if any come. Where’s the loft?”

“Twelve thirteen Culver Avenue,” Raskin said. “You can’t miss it. It’s right upstairs over the bank.”

In the streets, the kids were yelling “April Fool!” as the punch line to their first-of-April jokes. And they chased each other into Grover Park the way kids will always chase each other, leaping the stone walls and cavorting along the path and ducking behind trees and bushes.

“Watch out, Frankie! There’s a tiger on that rock!” and then they shouted “April Fool!”

And then dashing off again to duck behind another rock or another tree, the punch line old and clichéed by this time, but delighting them nonetheless each time it was shouted.

“Over your head, Johnny! An eagle! April Fool! ”

Running over the close-cropped grass and then one of the boys ducking into the trees again, and his voice coming from somewhere in the woods, a voice tinged with shock and awe, reaching out for the path.

“Frankie! There’s a dead guy in here!”

And this time no one shouted “April Fool!”

THE GENTLEMAN THEY FOUNDin Grover Park had been dressed for the approaching summer. Or perhaps undressed for it, depending on how you chose to view the situation. No matter how you chose to view it, he was wearing only a pair of black shoes and a pair of white socks, and that’s about as close to being naked as you can come in the streets of any big city. Not that this gentleman was overly worried about arousing the ire of the law. This gentleman was dead.