“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?”
“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 anyreal 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. Butsuppose, 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. Heis 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!”
2.
THE GENTLEMAN THEY FOUND in Grover Park had been dressed for the approaching summer. Or perhapsundressed 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.
He had, in fact, if a summary glance at the wounds in his chest meant anything, been killed by a shotgun at fairly close range. He lay on his back under the trees and a small knot of experts in death surrounded the body and made faces indicative of disgust and empathy and boredom and indifference, but mostly of pain. Steve Carella was one of the policemen who looked down at the body of the naked man. Carella’s eyes were squinted almost shut even though there was no sunshine under the canopy of the trees. There was a sour look on Carella’s face, a look of disapproval and anger laced with discomfort. He looked at the man and he thoughtNobody should die in April, and he noted automatically the shotgun wounds on the man’s chest and, just as automatically, he noticed that there was a single large entrance wound and several zones of small satellite perforations produced by pellets which scattered from the main charge. The large entrance wound told him that the gun had been fired anywhere from one to three yards away from the victim. Up to a yard’s distance, the shotgun would have produced a wound with a lot of tattooing, burning, and blackening. And beyond three yards, the shot would have dispersed, and formed constellationlike patterns on the victim’s skin. Knowing this, and not knowing much more than this at the moment, Carella’s mind made the associations unconsciously and unemotionally while another part of him looked down at this person who had once been a man and who was now a ludicrously naked, loosely jointed pile of fleshy, angular rubbish—no longer a man; simply something soft and spongy, but not a man. Life had been robbed from this mass of flesh, and now there was nothing but death housed in the skin case. Carella wiped a hand across his mouth even though he was not sweating.
It was cool in the copse of trees where the policemen worked. Flashbulbs popped around the dead man. A powdered chalk line was sprayed onto the ground, outlining the body. The laboratory technicians searched the bushes for footprints. The men stood about in uneasy clusters, discussing the world’s heavyweight champion fight, the pennant race, the nice weather they’d had this past week, anything but death which stared up at them from the ground. And then they finished their work, all the work they could do for the time being. They hoisted the corpse onto a stretcher and carried it to the path, and then out of the park and over to the curb where an ambulance was waiting. They slid the corpse into the back of the meat wagon, and took it to General Hospital where the autopsy would be performed. Carella thought for a moment about the stainless-steel autopsy table which was laced with troughs like a carving board’s troughs to catch the blood—the table slightly tilted—and channel it toward the basin at the far end, he thought of that goddam unemotionally sterile stainless-steel table, and he thought of scalpels and he tightened his fists in anger and again he thoughtNobody should die in April, and he walked out to the police sedan parked at the curb and drove back to the precinct house. He could not find a parking space closer than two blocks away. He parked the car on Grover Avenue and walked back to the building facing the park.