The Heckler

“I understand that,” Meyer said, “but is there perhaps a crank or a nut among any of your friends who might just possibly have the foolish notion that it might be nice to see you dead?”

“Impossible.”

“I see.”

“I’m a respected man. I go to temple every week. I got a good wife and a pretty daughter and a son-in-law he’s a periodontist. I got two retail stores here in the city, and I got three stores in farmers’ markets out in Pennsylvania, and I got the loft right here in this neighborhood, on Culver Avenue. I’m a respected man, Meyer.”

“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 thebriss 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 whatdo 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.

“Killme?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 heis 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?”