Killer's Choice

CHAPTER ONE

The liquor store reeked.

Shards of glass covered the floor like broken chords from a bop chorus. Long slivers and short slivers, jagged necks of bottles, the round flat bottoms of bottles, glistening, tinkling underfoot so that you waded through a shallow pool of shattered glass. A hand had swept across the shelves, swept in a destructive frenzy. Eight-dollar Scotch and twenty-five-cent wine had been spilled to the floor and mingled in the democracy of total destruction. The stench assailed the nostrils the moment you entered the shop. The alcohol spread over the bare wooden floor, sloshed in aromatic puddles underfoot, channelled by the dams and dikes of broken glass.

The girl lay among the glass and the liquid, lay face downward, her mouth partially opened. The girl was a redhead. Her eyes seemed too large for her face because they were bulging in death. The girl had been shot four times in the chest, and her blood still ran, mingling with the alcohol on the floor. Her hair was long, wet and straggly now because her cheek was against the bare wood of the floor, and her hair, her clothes, her body were soaked with alcohol.

It was difficult to talk inside the shop. There wasn't a cop present who didn't enjoy a hooker of booze now and then. But the alcohol fumes inside the shop, despite the fact that the door was open and a mild June breeze was blowing, were overpowering. They caught at the nose, and the throat, and the lungs until breathing them brought on a little dizziness.

Detective Steve Carella was glad to get outside. He enjoyed whisky, and could knock over a fifth with the best of them. But he could never stand a drunkard breathing in his face, and the liquor store smelled like a convention of drunks all trying to tell the same bad joke simultaneously.

The bad joke was the redhead lying on the floor of the shop. She would have been a bad joke at any time of the year, but especially in June when the world was coming alive, when the month of weddings had mated spring's exuberance with summer's warmth. Carella liked being alive, and he was tolerant enough to want to share the experience with everyone. Forced by his occupation to deal with the facts of sudden death, he had still never grown used to the dispassionate facade his colleagues presented. Carella liked to think there was dignity in human beings. They boffed, they drank, they belched, they fought, they swore—but they stood erect.

From somewhere in his memory, probably from a long-forgotten college anthropology course, he dug out the sentence, 'Man stands alone—because man alone stands.' The anthropological implications were many, but Carella chose to ignore them. He liked to think of man as standing. Death knocked a man down. Death stole a man's dignity. A dead man didn't care whether or not his hair was parted. A dead girl didn't worry about whether or not her slip was showing. The postures of death managed to simplify a human being to an angular mound of fleshy rubble. And so looking at what had once been a woman—a woman who smiled prettily, and kissed her lover, and adjusted her stockings, and applied lipstick with utmost feminine care—looking at what had once been warm and alive, Carella felt overwhelming sadness, a sense of tragedy which he could not quite grasp.

He was glad to get outside.

On the sidewalk, the police department held its conference. This was the cocktail party of law enforcement. There were no drinks, and these men did not gather to discuss the latest novel by a twelve-year-old French girl, but there was the same feeling of camaraderie almost, the same easy relationship that comes from knowing men share the same profession.

The two men from Homicide North were called Monoghan and Monroe. Both were huge. Both wore tweed sports jackets over grey flannel slacks.

'We don't usually go out on stuff like this,' Monoghan said to Carella.

'Not generally,' Monroe said.

'The Skipper saves us for tough nuts,' Monoghan said.

'The hard ones,' Monroe added.

'No crimes of passion.'

'Love, hate, like that,' Monroe explained.

'Premeditated stuff,' Monoghan said.

'Thought out beforehand,' Monroe amplified.

'We're his top men,' Monoghan said modestly.

'Crackerjacks,' Monroe said.

'The 87th Precinct is flattered,' Carella said, grinning. He was a tall man wearing a blue worsted suit, a white handkerchief showing at the breast pocket. His shirt was white, and his tie was a blue-and-gold rep, and he talked to the Homicide dicks standing in athletic nonchalance, a man completely at home within the hard, lithe muscularity of his body. His eyes were brown, and his cheekbones were high, and there was a clean-shaved almost-Oriental look to his face, heightened by the secret amusement with which he viewed Monoghan and Monroe.

'The 87th should be flattered,' Monoghan said.

'Overwhelmed,' Monroe added.

'Ecstatic,' Carella said.

'Everybody wants to get in the act,' Monoghan said.

'Don't misunderstand me,' Carella said. 'It's just that we appreciate getting Homicide North's top men.'

'He's kidding us,' Monoghan said.

'Ribbing us,' Monroe added.

'He thinks the 87th can do without us.'

'He thinks he doesn't need us.'

'Who needs us?'

'Like a hole in the head.'

'He's telling us to go home.'

'He's telling us politely to go to hell.'

'Well, frig him,' Monoghan said.

Carella grinned, and then his face went serious. He looked into the shop. 'What do you make of it?' he asked.

Monoghan and Monroe turned simultaneously. Inside the store, the police photographer leaned closer to the body lying on the alcohol-soaked shards. His flash bulb popped.

'It looks to me,' Monoghan said thoughtfully, 'like as if somebody went berserk.'