The Mugger (9 page)

He could not shake the dead girl from his mind.

Back on the beat Monday morning, Kling should have felt soaring joy. He had been inactive for too long, and now he was back on the job, and the concrete and asphalt should have sung beneath his feet. There was life everywhere around him, teeming, crawling life. The precinct was alive with humanity, and in the midst of all this life, Kling walked his beat and thought of death.

The precinct started with the River Highway.

There, a fringe of greenery turned red and burnt umber hugged the river, broken by an occasional tribute to World War I heroes and an occasional concrete bench. You could see the big steamers on the river, cruising slowly toward the docks farther downtown, their white smoke puffing up into the crisp fall air. An aircraft carrier lay anchored in the center of the river, long and flat, in relief against the stark brown cliffs on the other side. The
excursion boats plied their idle autumn trade. Summer was dying, and with it, the shouts and joyous revelry of the sunseekers.

And up the river, like a suspended, glistening web of silver, the Hamilton Bridge regally arched over the swirling brown waters below, touching two states with majestic fingers.

At the base of the bridge, at the foot of a small stone-and-earth cliff, a seventeen-year-old girl had died. The ground had sucked up her blood, but it was still stained a curious maroon-brown.

The big apartment buildings lining the River Highway turned blank faces to the bloodstained earth. The sun was reflected from the thousands of windows in the tall buildings, buildings which still employed doormen and elevator operators, and the windows blinked across the river with fiery-eyed blindness. The governesses wheeled their baby carriages up past the synagogue on the corner, marching their charges south toward the Stem, which pierced the heart of the precinct like a multicolored, multifeathered, slender, sharp arrow. There were groceries and five-and-tens, and movie houses, and delicatessens, and butchers, and jewelers, and candy stores on the Stem. There was also a cafeteria on one of the corners, and on any day of the week, Monday to Sunday, you could spot at least twenty-five junkies in that cafeteria, waiting for the man with the White God. The Stem was slashed up its middle by a wide iron-pipe-enclosed island, broken only by the side streets that crossed it. There were benches on each street end of the island, and men sat on those benches and smoked their pipes, and women sat with shopping bags clutched to their abundant breasts, and sometimes the governesses sat with their carriages, reading paperbacked novels.

The governesses never wandered south of the Stem.

South of the Stem was Culver Avenue.

The houses on Culver had never been really fancy. Like poor and distant relatives of the buildings lining the river, they had
basked in the light of reflected glory many years ago. But the soot and the grime of the city had covered their bumpkin faces, had turned them into city people, and they stood now with hunched shoulders and dowdy clothes, wearing mournful faces. There were a lot of churches on Culver Avenue. There were also a lot of bars. Both were frequented regularly by the Irish people, who still clung to their neighborhood tenaciously—in spite of the Puerto Rican influx, in spite of the Housing Authority, which was condemning and knocking down dwellings with remarkable rapidity, leaving behind rubble-strewn open fields in which grew the city’s only crop: rubbish.

The Puerto Ricans hunched in the side streets between Culver Avenue and Grover’s Park. Here were the
bodegas, carnicerias zapaterias, joyerias, cuchifritos
joints. Here was
La Via de Putas,
“The Street of the Whores,” as old as time, as thriving and prosperous as General Motors.

Here, bludgeoned by poverty, exploited by pushers and thieves and policemen alike, forced into cramped and dirty dwellings, rescued occasionally by the busiest fire department in the entire city, treated like guinea pigs by the social workers, like aliens by the rest of the city, like potential criminals by the police, here were the Puerto Ricans.

Light-skinned and dark-skinned. Beautiful young girls with black hair and brown eyes and flashing white smiles. Slender men with the grace of dancers. A people alive with warmth and music and color and beauty, 6 percent of the city’s population, crushed together in ghettos scattered across the face of the town. The ghetto in the 87th Precinct, sprinkled lightly with some Italians and some Jews, more heavily with the Irish, but predominantly Puerto Rican, ran south from the River Highway to the park, and then east and west for a total of thirty-five blocks. One-seventh of the total Puerto Rican population lived in the confines of the
87th Precinct. There were 90,000 people in the streets Bert Kling walked.

The streets were alive with humanity.

And all he could think of was death.

He did not want to see Molly Bell, and when she came to him, he was distressed.

She seemed frightened of the neighborhood, perhaps because there was life within her, and perhaps because she felt the instinctive, savagely protective urge of the mother-to-be. He had just crossed Tommy, a Puerto Rican kid whose mother worked in one of the candy stores. The boy had thanked him, and Kling had turned to go back on the other side of the street again, and that was when he saw Molly Bell.

There was a sharp bite to the air on that September 18, and Molly wore a topcoat, which had seen better days, even though those better days had begun in a bargain basement downtown. Because of her coming child, she could not button the severely tailored coat much further than her breasts, and she presented a curiously disheveled appearance: the limp blonde hair, the tired eyes, the frayed coat buttoned from her throat over her full breasts and then parting in a wide V from her waist to expose her bulging belly.

“Bert!” she called, and she raised her hand in a completely feminine gesture, recapturing for a fleeting instant the beauty that must have been hers several years back, looking in that instant the way her sister, Jeannie, had looked when she was alive.

He lifted his billet in a gesture of greeting, motioned for her to wait on the other side of the street, and then crossed to meet her.

“Hello, Molly,” he said.

“I went to the station house first,” she said hurriedly. “They told me you were on the beat.”

“Yes,” he answered.

“I want to see you, Bert.”

“All right,” he said.

They cut down one of the side streets and then waited with the park on their right, the trees a blazing pyre against the gray sky.

“‘Allo, Bert,” a boy shouted, and Kling waved his billet.

“Have you heard?” Molly asked. “About the autopsy report?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I can’t believe it,” she told him.

“Well, Molly, they don’t make mistakes.”

“I know, I know.” She was breathing heavily.

He stared at her for a long moment. “Listen, are you sure you should be walking around like this?”

“Yes, it’s very good for me. The doctor said I should walk a lot.”

“Well, if you get tired—”

“I’ll tell you. Bert, will you help?”

He looked at her face. There was no panic in her eyes, and the grief, too, had vanished. There was only a steadfastness of purpose shining there, a calm resolve.

“What could I possibly do?” he asked.

“You’re a cop,” she said.

“Molly, the best cops in the city are working on this. Homicide North doesn’t let people get away with murder. I understand one of the detectives from our precinct has been working with a policewoman for the past two days. They’ve—”

“None of these people knew my sister, Bert.”

“I know, but—”

“You knew her, Bert.”

“I only talked to her for a little while. I hardly—”

“Bert, these men who deal with death…My sister is only another corpse to them.”

“That’s not true, Molly. They see a lot of it, but that doesn’t stop them from doing their best on each case. Molly, I’m just a patrolman. I
can’t
fool around with this, even if I wanted to.”

“Why not?”

“I’d be stepping on toes. I’ve got my beat. This is my beat; this is my job. My job isn’t investigating a murder case. I can get into a lot of trouble for that, Molly.”

“My sister got into a load of trouble, too,” Molly said.

“Ah, Molly,” Kling sighed, “don’t ask me, please.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I can’t do anything. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you come to see her?” Molly asked.

“Because Peter asked me to. As a favor. For old time’s sake.”

“I’m asking you for a favor too, Bert. Not for old time’s sake. Only because my sister was killed, and my sister was just a young kid, and she deserved to live a little longer, Bert, just a little longer.”

They walked in silence for a time.

“Bert?” Molly said.

“Yes.”

“Will you please help?”

“I—”

“Your Homicide detectives think it was the mugger. Maybe it was, I don’t know. But my sister was pregnant, and the mugger didn’t do that. And my sister was killed at the foot of the Hamilton Bridge, and I want to know why she was there. The killer’s cliff is a long way from where we live, Bert. Why was she there? Why? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“My sister had friends; I know she had. Maybe her friends know. Doesn’t a young girl have to confide in someone? A young
girl with a baby inside her, a secret inside her? Doesn’t she tell someone?”

“Are you interested in finding the killer,” Kling asked, “or the father of the child?”

Molly considered this gravely. “They may be one and the same,” she said at last.

“I…I don’t think that’s likely, Molly.”

“But it’s a possibility, isn’t it? And your Homicide detectives are doing nothing about that possibility. I’ve met them, Bert. They’ve asked me questions, and their eyes are cold, and their mouths are stiff. My sister is only a body with a tag on its toe. My sister isn’t flesh and blood to them. She isn’t now, and she never was.”

“Molly—”

“I’m not blaming them. Their jobs…I know that death becomes a commodity to them, the way meat is a commodity to a butcher. But this girl is my sister!”

“Do you…do you know who her friends were?”

“I only know that she went to one club a lot. A cellar club, one of these teenage…” Molly stopped. Her eyes met Kling’s hopefully. “Will you help?”

“I’ll try,” Kling said, sighing. “Strictly on my own. After hours. I can’t do anything officially, you understand that.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“What’s the name of this club?”

“Club Tempo.”

“Where is it?”

“Just off Peterson, a block from the avenue. I don’t know the address. All the clubs are clustered there in the side street, in the private houses.” She paused. “I belonged to one when I was a kid, too.”

“I used to go to their Friday-night socials,” Kling said. “But I don’t remember one called Tempo. It must be new.”

“I don’t know,” Molly said. She paused. “Will you go?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t knock off until four. I’ll ride up to Riverhead then and see if I can find the place.”

“Will you call me afterward?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“Thank you, Bert.”

“I’m only a uniformed cop,” Kling said. “I don’t know if you’ve got anything to thank me for.”

“I’ve got a lot to thank you for,” she said. She squeezed his hand. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

“All right,” he said. He looked down at her. The walk seemed to have tired her. “Shall I call a cab for you?”

“No,” she said, “I’ll take the subway. Good-bye, Bert. And thank you.”

She turned and started up the street. He watched her. From the back, except for the characteristically tilted walk of the pregnant woman, you could not tell she was carrying. Her figure looked quite slim from the back, and her legs were good.

He watched her until she was out of sight, and then he crossed the street and turned up one of the side streets, waving to some people he knew.

Unlike detectives, who figure out their own work schedules, patrolmen work within the carefully calculated confines of the eight-hour-tour system. They start with five consecutive tours from 8:00
A.M.
to 4:00
P.M.,
and then they relax for fifty-six hours. When they return to work, they do another five tours from midnight to 8:00
A.M.,
after which another fifty-six-hour swing commences. The next five tours are from 4:00
P.M.
to midnight. Comes the fifty-six-hour break once more, and then the cycle starts from the top again.

The tour system doesn’t respect Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays. If a cop’s tour works out that way, he may get Christmas off. If not, he walks his beat. Or he arranges a switch with a Jewish cop who wants Rosh Hashanah off. It’s something like working in an aircraft factory during wartime. The only difference is that cops find it a little more difficult to get life insurance.

Bert Kling started work that Monday morning at 7:45
A.M.,
the beginning of the tour cycle. He was relieved on post at 3:40
P.M.
He went back to the house, changed to street clothes in the locker room down the hall from the detective squadroom, and then went out into the late-afternoon sunshine.

Ordinarily, Kling would have walked the beat a little more in his street clothes. Kling carried a little black loose-leaf pad in his back pocket, and into that pad he jotted down information from wanted circulars and from the bulls in the precinct. He knew, for example, that there was a shooting gallery at 3112 North 11th. He knew that a suspected pusher was driving a powder-blue 1953 Cadillac with the license plate RX 42-10. He knew that a chain department store in the midtown area had been held up the night before, and he knew who was suspected of the crime. And he knew that a few good collars would put him closer to detective/3rd grade, which, of course, he wanted to become.

So he ordinarily walked the precinct territory when he was off duty, a few hours each day, watching, snooping, unhampered by the shrieking blue of his uniform, constantly amazed by the number of people who didn’t recognize him in street clothes.

Today he had something else to do, and so he ignored his extracurricular activities. Instead, he boarded a train and headed uptown to Riverhead.

He didn’t have much trouble finding Club Tempo. He simply stopped into one of the clubs he’d known as a kid, asked where Tempo was, and was given directions.

Tempo covered the entire basement level of a three-story brick house off Peterson Avenue on Klausner Street. You walked up a concrete driveway toward a two-car garage at the back of the house, made an abrupt left turn, and found yourself face to face with the back of the house, the entrance doorway to the club, and a painted sign pierced with an elongated quarter note on a long black shaft.

The sign read:

Kling tried the knob. The door was locked. From somewhere inside the club, he heard the lyric, sonnet-like words to “Sh-Boom” blasting from a record player. He raised his fist and knocked. He kept knocking, realizing abruptly that all the
sh-booming
was drowning out his fist. He waited until the record had exhausted its serene, madrigal-like melody and then knocked again.

“Yeah?” a voice called. It was a young voice, male.

“Open up,” Kling said.

“Who is it?”

He heard footsteps approaching the door and then a voice close by on the other side of the door. “Who is it?”

He didn’t want to identify himself as a cop. If he were going to start asking questions, he didn’t want a bunch of kids automatically on the defensive.

“Bert Kling,” he said.

“Yeah?” the voice answered. “Who’s Bert Kling?”

“I want to hire the club,” Kling answered.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“If you’ll open the door, we can talk about it.”

“Hey, Tommy,” the voice yelled, “some guy wants to hire the club.”

Kling heard a mumbled answer, and then the door lock clicked, and the door opened wide on a thin, blond boy of eighteen.

“Come on in,” the boy said. He was holding a stack of records in his right hand, clutched tight against his chest. He wore a green sweater and dungaree pants. A white dress shirt, collar
unbuttoned, showed above the V-neck of the sweater. “My name’s Hud. That’s short for Hudson. Hudson Patt. Double
t.
Come on
in.”

Kling stepped down into the basement room. Hud watched him.

“You’re kind of old, ain’t you?” Hud asked at last.

“I’m practically decrepit,” Kling replied. He looked around. Whoever had decorated the room had done a good job with it. The pipes in the ceiling had been covered with plasterboard, which had been painted white. The walls were knotty pine to a man’s waist, plasterboard above that. Phonograph records, shellacked and then tacked to the white walls and ceiling, gave the impression of curious two-dimensional balloons that had drifted free of their vendor’s strings. There were easy chairs and a long sofa scattered about the room. A record player painted white and then covered with black notes and a G clef and a musical staff stood alongside a wide arch through which a second room was visible. There was no one but Hud and Kling in either of the two rooms. Whoever Tommy was, he seemed to have vanished into thin air.

“Like it?” Hud asked, smiling.

“It’s pretty,” Kling said.

“We done it all ourselves. Bought all those records on the ceiling and walls for two cents each. They’re real bombs—stuff the guy wanted to get rid of. We tried playing one of them. All we got was scratches. Sounded like London during an air raid.”

“Which you no doubt remember clearly,” Kling said.

“Huh?” Hud asked.

“Do you belong to this club?” Kling asked back.

“Sure. Only members are allowed down during the day. In fact, nonmembers ain’t allowed down except on Friday and
Sunday nights. We have socials then.” He stared at Kling. His eyes were wide and blue. “Dancing, you know?”

“Yes, I know,” Kling said.

“A little beer sometimes, too. Healthy. This is healthy recreation.” Hud grinned. “Healthy recreation is what strong, red-blooded American teenagers need, am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s what Dr. Mortesson says.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Mortesson. Writes a column in one of the papers. Every day. Healthy recreation.” Hud continued grinning. “So what do you want to hire the club for?” he asked.

“I belong to a group of war veterans,” Kling said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re…uh…having a sort of get together, meet the wives, girlfriends, like that, you know.”

“Oh, sure,” Hud said.

“So we need a place.”

“Why don’t you try the American Legion Hall?”

“Too big.”

“Oh.”

“I figured one of these cellar clubs. This is an unusually nice one.”

“Yeah,” Hud said. “Done it all ourselves.” He walked over to the record player, seemed ready to put the records down, then turned, changing his mind. “Listen, for what night is this?”

“A Saturday,” Kling said.

“That’s good—because we have our socials on Friday and Sunday.”

“Yes, I know,” Kling said.

“How much you want to pay?”

“That depends. You’re sure the landlord here won’t mind our bringing girls down? Not that anything funny would be going on or anything, you understand. Half the fellows are married.”

“Oh, certainly,” Hud said, suddenly drawn into the fraternity of the adult. “I understand completely. I never once thought otherwise.”

“But there
will
be girls.”

“That’s perfectly all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure. We have girls here all the time. Our club is coed.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s a fact,” Hud said. “We got twelve girls belong to the club.”

“Girls from the neighborhood?” Kling asked.

“Mostly. From around, you know. Here and there. None of them come from too far.”

“Anybody I might know?” Kling asked.

Hud estimated Kling’s age in one hasty glance. “I doubt it, mister,” he said, the glowing bond of fraternal adulthood shattered.

“I used to live in this neighborhood,” Kling lied. “Took out a lot of girls around here. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of the girls in your club aren’t their younger sisters.”

“Well, that’s a possibility,” Hud conceded.

“What are some of their names?”

“Why do you want to know, pal?” a voice from the archway said. Kling whirled abruptly. A tall boy walked through the arch and into the room, zipping up the fly on his jeans. He was excellently built, with wide shoulders bulging the seams of his T-shirt, tapering down to a slender waist. His hair was chestnut brown, and his eyes were a deeper chocolate brown. He was extremely
handsome, and he walked with arrogant knowledge of his good looks.

“Tommy?” Kling said.

“That’s my name,” Tommy said. “I didn’t get yours.”

“Bert Kling.”

“Glad to know you,” Tommy said. He watched Kling carefully.

“Tommy’s president of Club Tempo,” Hud put in. “He gave me the okay to hire the place to you. Provided the price was right.”

“I was in the john,” Tommy said. “Heard everything you said. Why’re you so interested in our chicks?”

“I’m not interested,” Kling answered. “Just curious.”

“Your curiosity, pal, should concern itself only with hiring the club. Am I right, Hud?”

“Sure,” Hud answered.

“What can you pay, pal?”

“How often did Jeannie Paige come down here, pal?” Kling said. He watched Tommy’s face. The face did not change expression at all. A record slid from the stack Hud was holding, clattering to the floor.

“Who’s Jeannie Paige?” Tommy said.

“A girl who was killed last Thursday night.”

“Never heard of her,” Tommy said.

“Think,” Kling told him.

“I am thinking.” Tommy paused. “You a cop?”

“What difference does it make?”

“This is a clean club,” Tommy said. “We never had any trouble with the cops, and we don’t want none. We ain’t even had any trouble with the landlord, and he’s a louse from way back.”

“Nobody’s looking for trouble,” Kling said. “I asked you how often Jeannie Paige came down here.”

“Never,” Tommy said. “Ain’t that right, Hud?”

Hud, reaching for the pieces of the broken record, looked up. “Yeah, that’s right, Tommy.”

“Suppose I am a cop?” Kling said.

“Cops have badges.”

Kling reached into his back pocket, opened his wallet, and showed the tin.

Tommy glanced at the shield. “Cop or no cop, this is still a clean club.”

“Nobody said it was dirty. Stop bulging your weight-lifter muscles and answer my questions straight. When was Jeannie Paige down here last?”

Tommy hesitated for a long time. “Nobody here had anything to do with killing her,” he said at last.

“Then she
did
come down?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“Every now and then.”

“How often?”

“Whenever there was socials. Sometimes during the week, too. We let her in ‘cause one of the girls…” Tommy stopped.

“Go ahead, finish it.”

“One of the girls knows her. Otherwise we wouldn’t’ve let her in except on social nights. That’s all I was gonna say.”

“Yeah,” Hud said, placing the broken record pieces on the player cabinet. “I think this girl was gonna put her up for membership.”

“Was she here last Thursday night?” Kling asked.

“No,” Tommy answered quickly.

“Try it again.”

“No, she wasn’t here. Thursday night is Work Night. Six kids from the club get the duty each week—different kids, you understand. Three guys and three girls. The guys do the heavy work,
and the girls do the curtains, the glasses, things like that. No outsiders are allowed on Work Night. In fact, no members except the kids who are working are allowed. That’s how I know Jeannie Paige wasn’t here.”

“Were you here?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said.

“Who else was here?”

“What difference does it make? Jeannie wasn’t here.”

“What about her girlfriend? The one she knows?”