Read The Third Victim for Free Online Page A

playing. But he’d never played their games. They’d all been monsters—small, shrunken monsters, pack-shrieking, baboon-gibbering.
    A nearby door was opening—the salesroom door. Two voices: a man’s voice and a woman’s. Glancing aside, he recognized Howard Goss and Florence Klein, both assistant buyers, one from carpets, one from housewares. Intellectuals. Snobs. Lovers, some said. Sometimes, secretly watching them, he’d imagined the obscenity of their coupling. They clawed at each other. Tore each other’s flesh, panted, slavered. They were unclean. Like them all, unclean.
    He could feel their eyes on him as he bent over the bright blue lamp base. He’d placed his right palm on one side of the carton, his left palm on the other side. With elbows locked, his body was inclined over the carton, head bent, eyes down, staring at the table. He might be praying. It could be a church, this large, cluttered storeroom. The gurgle of the coffee machine could be a water font, close beside the entry. The cigarette smell could be candles, two for a quarter.
    “Why don’t you try it without sugar?” Howard Goss was saying. “Mortify the flesh.”
    “Because I’m not interested in mortifying the flesh,” came the prompt, brittle-voiced reply. “I’m interested in gratifying the flesh.”
    “Hey. Great. When?”
    She seemed to snort. Spoons were clinking against china. Something metal snapped: Howard’s cigarette lighter. A Zippo—a small oblong fire machine, gleaming in Howard Goss’s hair-mottled hand. On each of Howard’s long fingers were two tufts of coarse black hair. Ten fingers. Twenty tufts. Or was the thumb a…
    “Did you see that letter in the paper today?” It was Howard Goss’s voice, pitched to a low, intimate note. Unclean—unclean.
    “God, yes. When’re they going to catch him, anyhow? It gives me the creeps. It really does.”
    “Maybe never. You never know. Nuts can be almost impossible to catch.”
    “Why do you say that?” Her tone was aggressive. She was from New York—a quick-speaking, eye-blinking Jewish girl with a moustache beginning on her upper lip. They were hairy-together, she and Howard Goss. And together they bickered, constantly. With words, they tore at each other. Words, and their genitalia. Hairy—hairy.
    “Because nuts don’t have a motive,” came Howard Goss’s prompt reply, taking up her challenge. “Or at least no rational motive. And since policemen are rational human beings, more or less, they can’t cope with—”
    “Most murderers, though, are insane. I mean, it’s a simple matter of definition. Sane people, you know, don’t go around—”
    “As it happens, lover, you’re wrong. It just so happens that I’m a criminology buff, of sorts. And the facts are—the statistics—that most murderers are ordinary people who get drunk and have an argument with someone in their family. So they go to the dresser drawer and get the family revolver, and they wipe out their spouse, or whoever. That’s how the average murder is committed. Most murderers are actually married to their vic—”
    “But we aren’t talking about that kind of a murderer, Howard. We’re talking about Ta rot. And I’m saying that he’s got to be insane. All you’ve got to do is read those letters, and you know that he’s—”
    “I’m not disputing that. What I’m telling you—the way the discussion began, if you’ll remember—is that homicidal maniacs are difficult to apprehend, simply because they aren’t rational. They select their victims at random. It’s a—a lottery.”
    “Yes, but their M.O., so called, is the same.”
    “Ah. Yes.” The man’s voice was elaborately patronizing. “There you have it. And that’s what’s so interesting about this Tarot. I mean, you’re right. Their M.O.s don’t change. So then we come to Tarot. And we discover that he’s committed two different murders, both times out.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “I mean that the first