The Mugger

8

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.