The Mugger 87th Precinct Series, Book 2 - By Ed McBain Page 0,27

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