'That went all right,' he remarked, got into the elevator car, and rode down to the lobby. 5
The sun was coming up in Rick Cowley's living-room window when the telephone rang. Rick was fifty, red-eyed, haggard, half drunk. He picked up the telephone with a hand that shook badly. He hardly knew where he was, and his tired, aching mind kept insisting all this was a dream. Had he been, less than three hours ago, down at the borough morgue on First Avenue, identifying his ex-wife's mutilated corpse less than a block from the chic little French restaurant where they took only the clients who were also friends? Were there police outside his door, because the man who had killed Mir might also want to kill him? Were these things true? Surely not. It surely had to be a dream . . . and maybe the phone wasn't really the phone at all but the bedside alarm. As a rule, he
hated that f**king thing . . . had thrown it across the room on more than one occasion. But this morning he would kiss it. Hell, he would French-kiss it. But he didn't wake up. Instead he answered the telephone. 'Hello?'
'This is the man who cut your woman's throat,' the voice in his ear said, and Rick was suddenly wide awake. Any lingering hope he'd had that this was all just a dream dissipated. It was the sort of voice you should only hear in dreams . . . but that is never where you hear it.
'Who are you?' he heard himself asking in a strengthless little voice.
'Ask Thad Beaumont who I am,' the man said. 'He knows all about it. Tell him I said you're walking around dead. And tell him I'm not done making fool's stuffing yet.'
The phone clicked in his ear, there was a moment of silence, and then the vapid hum of an open line.
Rick lowered the telephone into his lap, looked at it, and suddenly burst into tears..6
At nine that morning, Rick called the office and told Frieda that she and John should go home - they would not be working today, nor for the rest of the week. Frieda wanted to know why and Rick was astounded to find himself on the verge of lying to her, as if he had been busted for some nasty and serious crime - child molestation, say - and couldn't bring himself to admit it until the shock was a little less acute.
'Miriam is dead,' he told Frieda. 'She was killed in her apartment last night.'
Frieda drew in her breath in a quick, shocked hiss. 'Jesus-God, Rick! Don't joke about things like that! You joke about things like that, they come true!'
'It is true, Frieda,' he said, and found he was on the edge of tears again. And these - the ones he'd shed at the morgue, the ones he'd shed in the car coming back here, the ones he'd shed when that crazy man called, the ones he was trying not to shed now these were only the first. Thinking of all the tears in his future made him feel intensely weary. Miriam had been a bitch, but she had also been, in her own way, a sweet bitch, and he had loved her. Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a man looking in at him through the window, even though the window was fourteen stories up. Rick started, then saw the uniform. A window-cleaner. The window-cleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. The hand seemed to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds, and he let it fall back onto his thigh almost as soon as he had raised it.
Frieda was telling him again not to joke, and he felt more weary than ever. Tears, he saw, were only the beginning. He said, 'Just a minute, Frieda,' and put the phone down. He went to the window to draw the drapes. Crying over the telephone with Frieda at the other end was bad enough; he didn't have to have the goddam window-cleaner watch him do it. As he reached the window, the man on the scaffold reached into the slash pocket of his coverall to get something. Rick felt a sudden twinge of unease. Tell him I said you're walking around dead. (Jesus - )
The window-cleaner brought out a small sign. It was yellow with black letters. The message was flanked with moronic smiley-smile faces. HAVE A NICE DAY! it read. Rick nodded wearily. Have a nice day. Sure. He drew the drapes and went back to the phone. 7
When he finally convinced Frieda he wasn't joking, she burst into loud and utterly genuine sobs - everyone at the office and all the clients, even that goddam putz Ollinger, who wrote the bad science fiction novels and who had apparently dedicated himself to the task of snapping every bra in the Western world, had liked Mir - and, sure enough, Rick cried with her until he finally managed to disengage himself. At least, he thought, I closed the drapes.
Fifteen minutes later, while he was making coffee, the crazy man's call jumped into his head again. There were two cops outside his door, and he hadn't told them a thing. What in hell was wrong with him?.Well, he thought, my ex-wife died, and when I saw her at the morgue it looked like she'd grown