The Heckler

The caterers arrived and with them they brought enough food to feed the entire Russian Army together with a few Yugoslavian partisans, or so it seemed. Actually they brought only enough food to feed the four hundred and thirty lunch guests who were to occupy the four hundred and thirty folding chairs. They brought little bottles containing Martinis and Manhattans, and they brought celery and olives and carrot sticks, and they brought onion soup, and they brought roast beef and turkey and candied sweet potatoes and asparagus tips au gratin and coffee, tea or milk, and orange sherbet and chocolate layer cake and little mints and—man, David Raskin positively flipped! The caterers insisted that he had called them and ordered this veritable feast and Raskin told them he didn’t know four hundred and thirty people in the entire world, let alone four hundred and thirty people he would care to invite for lunch, and the caterers said he had ordered the stuff, they had prepared all the food, what the hell were they supposed to do with it all, this wasn’t folding chairs which you could return, this was food, food, FOOD, especially cooked and prepared for the occasion, who was going to pay the bill?

“The man who ordered thismegillah!” Raskin shouted.

“Youordered it!” the caterers shouted back.

“I ordered nothing! Get it out of here! Get it out! Out! Out! Out!”

And that was when the orchestra arrived.

There were fourteen musicians in the orchestra, and they were all carrying their instruments, instruments like trombones and saxophones, and a bass drum, and a bass fiddle, and trumpets, and even a French horn or two. And they were also carrying music stands and they wanted to know where they should set up, and Raskin told the leader—a small man with a Hitler mustache and a personality to match—that he could go set up in the River Dix, just get the hell out of his loft, he did not order any damned orchestra! To which the man with the Hitler mustache said, “You came down to the union personally and left a twenty-dollar deposit when you hired the band!”

“Me!”Raskin shouted. “Icame down to thefirshtunkenuh union? I don’t even know where your dirty unionis, I came down? Get out of here with those drums!” and that was when the men returned to pick up the chairs, and the way Raskin finally got everybody out of the place was by calling Meyer again, who rushed over and tried to settle things as best he could.

That was on the fifteenth, and a jolly Wednesday that was, by George.

On Monday the twentieth, only four items arrived, and they were obviously a mistake.

The four items were:

2 PICKS

2 SHOVELS

David Raskin mopped his feverish brow.

“I didn’t order these,” he said.

The delivery boy shrugged and consulted the order slip. “Two picks and two shovels. Says so right here.”

Patiently, Raskin said, “I didn’t order them. You see, there’s a crazy man who—”

“Two picks and two shovels,” the delivery boy said firmly. “Deliver to the loft at twelve thirteen Culver Avenue. See? Says so right here. Can you read that, mister?”

“I can read it, but I didn’t order—”

“Deliver to the loft at twelve thirteen Culver Avenue after Darask Frocks, Inc. has vacated the premises. Oh.” The delivery boy’s voice dropped as he continued reading. “Call Frederick 7-3548 before delivery. Oh.”

“I got news for you,” Raskin said. “That’s my phone number, but I ain’t never vacating these premises. So forget this delivery.”

“They’ve already been paid for,” the delivery boy said.

And suddenly, David Raskin felt extremely shrewd. Suddenly, David Raskin was confronted with the single clue which would split this mystery wide open, suddenly David Raskin was presented with that opportunity which comes to all men but once in a lifetime, the chance to solve something, the chance to be a hero.

“Tell me,” he said casually, though his heart was pounding,“who ordered the picks and shovels?”

The delivery boy looked at his slip. “Here’s the name of the man right here,” he said.

“What is it? What is it?” Raskin asked excitedly.

“L. Sordo,” the delivery boy replied.

NOW, WHEREASMeyer Meyer, by his own admission, had not read “The Red-headed League,” hehad read a book by a gentleman known as Ernest Hemingway, and the title of that beautiful volume wasFor Whom the Bell Tolls, which is about a lovely guerilla girl laid in Spain. There is a memorable character called El Sordo in the book and, as any half-wit knows,el sordo in Spanish means “the deaf one” or, because of the masculineo ending, “the deaf man.”

It seemed obvious to Meyer at this point that someone with a hearing deficiency was the person responsible for the various threats everyone had been receiving. The gentleman at the Sandhurst Paper Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, had told Meyer not too long ago that the person who’d ordered the envelopes had said, “Excuse me, but would you talk a little louder? I’m slightly deaf, you know.”