Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct

  “Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”—Detroit Free Press

  “Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.”—Washington Post

  “The best crime writer in the business.”—Houston Post

  “Ed McBain is a national treasure.”—Mystery News

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.”—Robert B. Parker

  “I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

  “McBain tells great stories.”—Elmore Leonard

  “Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.”—The London Times

  “The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”

  —Miami Herald

  “You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”—Chicago Tribune

  “McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”—Los Angeles Daily News

  Killer’s Choice

  AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL

  Ed McBain

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1957 Hui Corporation

  Republished in 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  eISBN: 9781477855508

  This is for Angela and Len

  The city in these pages is imaginary.

  The people, the places are all fictitious.

  Only the police routine is based on established

  investigatory technique.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  Those of you who have been following this tiresome and seemingly endless introductory saga already know that my venal, heartless, and greedy publishers refused to let me kill off Steve Carella in THE PUSHER but insisted instead that in THE CON MAN he not only remain alive but become a ***STAR*** with a proper ***STAR'S*** wife.

  Well.

  Shortly after the publication of the novel in which both Carella and Teddy ascended into the stellar firmament, I was summoned to the offices of Pocket Books, Inc., at 630 5th Avenue, presumably to receive congratulations on successfully having elevated the status of these two erstwhile peasants, not to mention having bowed obsequiously and shamelessly to the demands of Mammon.

  Back then—well, to this day, as a matter of fact—there was a statue outside the building that I’m told was supposed to be Atlas shouldering the world, but which everyone thought was Benito Mussolini instead, the statue’s jaw bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the jaw of the fallen Italian dictator. Be that as it may, I took the elevator up to the offices where my publishers were doubtless waiting to glad hand me. Ah, innocent fool.

  One of the people I dealt with at Pocket Books was a man I shall call Ralph—who was definitely not Herbert Alexander, the editor who first encouraged me to develop my concept for the 87th Precinct. That concept, for those of you who have not been paying attention (and who can blame you?) was simply that of a conglomerate hero in a mythical city.

  This may sound all too familiar in this day and age of casual television rip-offs, but at the time it was fresh and original. Within this concept, police officers—male and/or female—would play out their personal stories against a larger backdrop of crime and punishment. A cop who’d been a hero or heroine in the last book could become a mere sidekick in the next one. Cops could be transferred in and out of this inner-city precinct, coming and going in a teeming metropolis whose haunting song existed nowhere but in my own imagination. Does the tune still sound bluesy and familiar?

  Needless to say, the concept had already been compromised when my selfish and money-grubbing publishers convinced me against my better judgment to elevate a mere bit player like Carella to the role of leading man. But I had suffered enough in that dank dungeon to which they’d remanded me, hanging me by my shackled wrists, forcing me to drink only oily water and eat only maggoty bread, and I had no desire to continue the futile argument further. They wanted Carella to be a ***STAR***, so okay, he was a goddamn ***STAR***. And his wife for good measure.

  So here I was, all grins and great expectations, waiting to be told by Ralph—which is not his real name because I don’t want to go back to that dungeon again—what a good and well-loved person I was.

  “Carella can’t be your hero,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Carella,” he said. “No hero. Can’t. Be. Your. Hero.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Can’t,” Ralph said.

  “But you told me—”

  “We were wrong.”

  “Okay,” I said, “how about going back to the old hero? The conglomerate hero, remember? Put them all together, they spell—”

  “We need one hero,” Ralph said. “An attractive person who can carry—”

  “I thought Carella was an—”

  “Carella is not an attractive person.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “He is a married man.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You have created a hero who is a married man,” Ralph said.

  Before television, Ralph was the only person I knew who used the word created to define something that had been written by a mere mortal. Before Ralph and before television, only God could create something. Nowadays, if a person writes a television script about a divorced or widowed and retired transit authority turnstile inspector who is raising his five children—two of whom are Asian and one of whom is black—in a house also inhabited by his crotchety but witty mother who is half Jewish and half Irish—this person can claim to have created a wonderfully fresh and inventive new series.

  The credit on the screen will read, “Created By.”

  Well, I suppose if that’s okay with God…

  “Heroes can’t be married,” Ralph said.

  “Why not?”

  “Married men are unappealing to women,” he said.

  “They’re appealing to their wives,” I said.

  “That’s exactly the point. We need a hero who’ll be appealing to all women, not just his wife. Carella is married, how can he be a hero?”

  “You’re the ones who told me he was the hero. You told me I couldn’t kill him because he was the goddamn hero.”

  “Yes, but when we told you that he wasn’t the goddamn hero yet, now was he?”

  “Well, no, but he’s the hero now…”

  “Not if he’s married. A married person cannot be a hero.”

  “Are you suggesting that he divorce Teddy?”

  “No, no…”

  “Then what? Murder her? Teddy?”

  “No, no…of course not. We’re suggesting that you create a new hero.”

  “Not Carella.”

  “Not Carella.”

  Easy come, easy go, I thought.

  “A new hero who isn’t married,” Ralph said. “A handsome hero who—”

  “Well, Carella’s not too bad looking, you know…”

  “But he’s not handsome.”

  “No, I guess he’s not what you’d call ‘handsome.’”

  “Then how can he be a hero? We need a handsome hero with whom men can identify and with whom women can fall in love.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If we want this series to be big success.”

  We.

  All at once, I had a collaborator.

  I remembered what the French used to do with collaborators.

  “So?” Ralph said. “Do you think you can do that? Create a handsome hero who’s attractive to women and who’s definitely not married?”

  “You forgot the part about men being able to—”

  “Identify with him, correct. Can you create such a hero?”

  I remembered the rats and the spiders. I remembered the hunchbacked jailer who used to slide my meager gruel under the door. I remembered the man in the black leather hood
with the word MOTHER tattooed in a heart on his left bicep, the whip in his right hand.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Folks…meet Cotton Hawes.

  —ED McBAIN

  NORWALK, CONNECTICUT

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1991

  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, channeled 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 whiskey 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 that 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 gray 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 flashbulb popped.

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

  Meyer Meyer would miss the bar mitzvah, of that he was certain.

  Naturally, he could not complain. He had arranged with the lieutenant to be off on the day of the bar mitzvah, but the lieutenant had not known there would be a homicide the day before. In the 87th, of course, there was the possibility of a homicide happening any day. You just had to plan your bar mitzvahs so that they didn’t clash with your homicides.

  Not that Meyer Meyer really gave a damn. The child being confirmed was an obnoxious little monster named Irwin, whom the family fondly called “Irwin the Vermin.” But the child was his wife’s sister’s son, and that made Meyer his uncle, and he supposed he should have felt some sort of familial affection for the dear lad. Besides, his wife would never let him hear the end of this. Sarah would rant and rave for a week about the big bar mitzvah she missed. His dinners would come from cans. His bridal chamber would not echo to the rhythm of resounding springs. Oh well, ah zei gei-tus.

  The man sitting opposite Meyer Meyer in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct did not know that Meyer was going to miss the confirmation of Irwin the Vermin. He couldn’t have cared less. Murder had been done in the man’s liquor store, and there was one thing and one thing alone on his mind.

  “Four thousand dollars worth of stock!” he shouted. “Who’s supposed to pay for that? Me? Am I supposed to take the loss?”

  “Would you like the police department to send you a check, Mr. Phelps?” Meyer asked. He asked the question patiently, and with guileless blue eyes, for Meyer Meyer was a very patient man. His father, you see, had considered himself something of a homegrown comedian and had thought it would be sidesplittingly humorous to give his son a given name that would match his surname. The result was Meyer Meyer, a truly hilarious masterpiece, a very funny bit of nomenclature. Meyer happened to be an Orthodox Jew who was raised in a predominantly Gentile neighborhood. If the kids in the streets needed any further provocation for beating him up whenever the opportunity presented itself, Meyer’s double-barreled name provided it. He had, over the years, developed an almost supernatural patience concerning the accidents of birth and the vagaries of funny fathers. The patience had left almost no physical scars—except a completely bald head before Meyer had reached the age of thirty. He was now thirtyseven, and he was missing a bar mitzvah, and he leaned across the desk with utmost patience and waited for Mr. Phelps’s answer.