The Mugger 87th Precinct Series, Book 2 - By Ed McBain Page 0,25

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