There were footsteps behind her.
Light, clicking through the rain.
She turned, thinking it might be a John making an approach. She squinted through the rain, could make out only somebody tall and thin, dressed all in black. She pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
“Want a date?” she asked.
The shots thundered into the night, four of them in succession. The first bullet missed her, but the second one entered her body just below the left breast and killed her instantly. The third shot ripped into her larynx and the fourth, as she staggered backward dead, entered her face just to the right of her nose, and blew out an exit wound the size of a half-dollar at the back of her head. Her wig fell off as she collapsed to the pavement. It lay on the sidewalk beside her open skull, the rain drilling its synthetic blond fibers, the rain pocking the spreading puddle of thick red blood.
5
Carella hated mysteries.
In mysteries, there were never funerals or wakes. In mysteries, the victim got shot or stabbed or strangled or clubbed to death, and then was conveniently forgotten. In mysteries, a corpse was only a device to set an investigative pot boiling. In real life, the murder victim was a person, and this person usually had relatives or friends who arranged for a wake and a decent burial. The dead man, in keeping with tribal custom everywhere, was accorded the same respect and dignity he would have earned had he died peacefully in his sleep. He had once been a person, you see, and you do not sweep people under the rug just so a private eye can keep things moving along at a brisk clip.
The wake for George Chadderton was held in the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback. Further uptown, near Pettit Lane, a similar wake was being held for a young black hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins who’d been murdered the night before in Midtown South, while Carella was poring over Chadderton’s notebook. Carella did not know about the second murder. This was a very big city, and the Midtown South precinct was a good three miles from the Eight-Seven. The man who’d caught the squeal on the Hawkins murder was named Alex Leopold, a detective/third who’d been transferred from a Calm’s Point precinct three months earlier. He did not know Carella and had never worked with him. The two Homicide cops who’d put in their obligatory appearance at the scene of the second murder were not Monoghan and Monroe, who’d gone home to bed after leaving the scene of the Chadderton murder, but were instead a similar pair of dicks named Forbes and Phelps. Mandatory autopsies had been performed on both the Chadderton and Hawkins corpses, and recovered bullets had already been sent to the Ballistics Section. But two different men at Ballistics were working the two different cases, at microscopes not six feet from each other, and they had instructions only to report their findings to the two separate detectives working the two cases in different sections of Isola. There had been no witnesses to the second murder — no citizen eager to step forward and say that Clara Jean Hawkins had been slain by a tall, slender man or woman dressed entirely in black. At ten minutes to twelve that Saturday morning, September 16, as Carella approached the doors of the funeral home, neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department had the faintest notion that the murders might have been linked.
It was still raining. He was wearing a soggy trench coat and a soggier rain hat, and feeling very much the way he looked after only six hours of sleep on a cot in the precinct locker room. Chadderton’s notebook was in a sodden manila Police Department evidence envelope he carried under his arm. He had studied it till close to 5:00 A.M., and had found nothing in the lyrics that would point a finger at a possible murderer. From Chadderton’s appointment calendar, he had made a list of names he wanted to ask Chloe about. He intended to do that when he returned both books to her — with apologies for his behavior the night before. A call to the Medical Examiner’s Office this morning had informed Carella that Chadderton’s body had been picked up at the hospital at 8:00 A.M. for transfer to the funeral home on St. Sab’s. Presumably the body had by now been drained of its blood and the contents of its stomach, intestines, and bladder. Presumably, the mortician had already injected by trocar or tube a solution of formaldehyde that would cause coagulation of the body’s proteins. Presumably, the mortician had worked with wax and cosmetics to repair Chadderton’s shattered left cheekbone and disguise the gaping holes in his neck and the top of his skull. Carella wondered whether there would be an open coffin. Mourners usually chose to see their departed loved ones as sleeping peacefully; either that, or they chose not to view them at all.
The funeral director was a short, very dark black man who told Carella that the body would be ready for viewing at 2:00 P.M., in the Blue Chapel. He further informed Carella that Mrs. Chadderton had been there earlier today, to receive the body and to make all the arrangements, and had left at approximately 11:00 A.M. She had mentioned that she would not be back until five. Carella thanked the man, and stepped outside into the pouring rain again. He went back in a moment later, and asked if he might use the telephone. The man showed him into an office opposite the Pink Chapel. In the Isola directory, Carella found a listing for George C. Chadderton at 1137 Raucher Street. He dialed the number and let it ring twelve times. There was no answer. He could not imagine that Chloe Chadderton had gone to work on the day following her husband’s murder, but he looked up the number of the Club Flamingo, dialed it, and spoke to a woman who identified herself as one of the bartenders. She told him that Chloe was expected at twelve noon. He thanked her, hung up, jotted the club’s address into his notebook, and then went outside to where he’d parked his car. He had forgotten to close the window on the driver’s side, which he’d partially opened earlier to keep the windshield from fogging. The seat was soaking wet when he climbed inside.
Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising topless, bottomless, noon to 4:00 A.M. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. “It’s a topless club,” she’d said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One. In the other window was an equally large sign promising generous drinks, free lunch. Carella was hungry — he’d had only a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He opened one of the two entrance doors and stepped into the club’s dim interior. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, he stood just inside the entrance doors, listening to the canned rock music that blared from speakers all around the room. Dead ahead was a long oval bar. Two girls, one on either side of the bar, were gyrating in time to the rock music. Both girls were wearing sequined, high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps and fringed G-strings. Both girls were bare-breasted. Neither of them wore anything under the G-strings. Neither of them was Chloe Chadderton.