Murder in Midtown

by Liz Freeland

  The room where the women were held was a cold, windowless place. At least, like the rest of the building, it was fairly new and clean.

  Jenks leaned against the doorway and frowned at the cells with their floor-to-ceiling bars. “When you meet old Schultzie, you should ask him how this station used to be. He’s been here since even before Clubber Williams in the wild old days, when it was anything goes. Back then, vagrants used to spend the nights down in the basement. That was before this new place was built. Now they got women down here, and running water, and beds with mattresses.”

  “Where do the vagrants go now?”

  “They sleep on newspapers in the park, or along the waterfront. Or here, if we arrest them.” He laughed dryly. “That’s progress for you.”

  Several women launched themselves at the bars, rattling them to get our attention and shouting out requests. Wide, wild eyes stared at me as a cacophony of “Something to drink!” and “Hungry” and “When am I going to get out?” echoed around the room.

  Jenks snarled at them. “Aw, behave! I brought you a nice new matron.”

  One of the figures reclining on a wood bench in the dim recess of a cell coughed out a laugh. “That’s a matron? Looks like a kid.”

  I knew better now than to pipe up defensively. Jenks didn’t give me a chance to, anyway. “She could be in diapers and she’d still be Officer Faulk to you.”

  Officer Faulk. My shoulders straightened. It was the first time I’d heard those words. So far I’d just been Two, girlie, or Officer Two.

  One woman curled in a ball against a wall moaned. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Sure you are.” Jenks leaned toward me and whispered loudly, “Don’t let them fool you with their sob stories. They’re none of them as innocent as they claim to be, and the ones crying sick or acting crazy are mostly just bucking for a chance to spend the night in a soft bed at Bellevue.”

  And how would you know that?

  “Donnelly don’t like it when the officers coddle the prisoners,” he said.

  “But they’re not really prisoners, are they? Not in the true sense. They haven’t been convicted of anything.”

  Jenks shook his head in disgust. “You’ll learn.”

  He made learning sound like doom, but I was eager. “What next?” I asked.

  “That’s it.”

  I gaped at him. I’d expected there would be at least a bit more of an orientation period than this.

  “Did you expect someone to hold your hand for ten hours?”

  “Of course not.” Although I had, actually.

  “Then have at it. If you need something, give a shout. And if you’re wanted upstairs, you’ll hear that bell.” He pointed to a round brass piece above one of the doors.

  His exit caused a renewed flurry of rattling bars and shouts for help, water, food, a telephone call. They obviously thought I’d be an easier mark than Jenks. They weren’t wrong. Unlike Jenks, I couldn’t see all these women as guilty. True, a few hardened types looked like what they probably were—prostitutes still tricked out and painted for their nightly perambulations. Others I wasn’t so sure about. One woman told me she’d been brought in for shoplifting.

  “But I was only looking,” she explained in a desperate voice. “I forgot I’d even picked up that bracelet.”

  “Sure,” one of the prostitutes jeered at her. “That’s why they call you Millie Pockets.”

  Millie Pockets stuck her tongue out at the woman, who in turn made a retort about what lewd acts Millie could perform with that tongue. Blushing, and kicking myself for blushing, I scolded the women the way my eighth-grade physical culture teacher had reproached us for singing risqué songs during recess.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” moaned the woman curled up in the corner.

  I passed a glass of water to her. She did look green, but the liquor fumes coming off her told me she was drunk. I suspected she just needed to sleep it off.

  As the night progressed, more women were brought in, mostly prostitutes picked up off the streets of the Tenderloin. These were the unfortunate women who didn’t have the luxury of working in one of the numerous houses in the area, where a madam saw to it that they weren’t caught—usually by paying the police to leave her establishment alone. My women were on their own, and though they sassed and groused, they bore their incarceration with an air of weary acceptance. Most had been here before and knew the ropes better than I did. A few even kept a deck of cards on their person, just in case of arrest, to guard against boredom. Most of the arresting officers let them keep their cards and cigarettes, they said. The basement air was blue with smoke, and the flutter of shuffling cards punctuated the hours.

  The most troubled woman I dealt with that first night was named Cora—Crazy Cora, the others dubbed her. She arrived in a state of delirium tremens, seeing mice on the floor. There were probably rodents living in that building somewhere, but I never saw any that night. But to Crazy Cora, they were everywhere, and she mumbled fervent prayers that they wouldn’t nibble away her toes before morning. On her side of the cell, it was just her and her invisible mice. The rest of the women formed a resentful huddle on the other side.

  After hours of incoherent rambling, she calmed down somewhat. In fact, she became too quiet and slumped against the bars. The look of her inert body panicked me. I didn’t want a prisoner to die, especially not on my first night on the job. When I moved closer to check on her, she grabbed my arm. “You’ve got to help me,” she pleaded.

  “I told you, there are no mice.”

  “No! Not that!” Her hand tightened on my arm. “I mean about all the repeating things.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I doubted she did, either. I tried to work my arm free from her grip, but her hold was tenacious.

  “I keep going over all the things,” she said. “Over and over.”

  I tried to unclaw her from my sleeve. “Why do you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” She rocked forward, bracing her head between two bars as if she could squeeze her cranium into a vise. “It’s my brain telling me to remember, so that it might all come out different.”

  “For God’s sake, shut up,” one of the prostitutes muttered. “My brain just wants some rest.”

  “I feel sick,” my green-hued woman moaned.

  Cora lowered her voice. “My brain won’t let me forget.”

  “Forget what?” I asked.

  “All the terrible things. Terrible,” she repeated, still trying to stick her head between the bars. “But I keep going through it. The baby. The iron on the fire. I only stepped outside for a moment—just to talk to the neighbor.” A keening wail came out of her, and for once it was the only sound in the room. The women who weren’t asleep stared at Cora with eyes wide open. “Do you think I’ll ever make it right, if I go over it and over it? It’ll never turn out different, will it?”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, speaking through a quiet stream of tears, “My brain says I got to repeat it all or I’ll never learn. That’s what it says—go over it all so I can see it clearly. See what I did.” Another wail. “Oh, God! I’m so sorry!”

  She sank to the ground, out of my reach.

  I couldn’t leave her alone. I just couldn’t. I opened the cell, letting myself in and kneeling down beside her. “Cora, try to rest . . .”

  She looked up at me with wild eyes, and in the next moment there was a sharp crack on the back of my head. I sank to the floor. My vision blurred, but I saw two of the prostitutes running out of the cell, slamming the door behind them. Then Crazy Cora dashed after them.

  So much for trying to comfort the afflicted.

  Across the cell, the moaning woman slumped against the wall let out a belch and finally released a nauseating spew of bile. As the vile stench reached my nostrils, serving as a stomach-turning sal volatile against my threatening unconsciousness, I groaned, less from disgust at the smell than at my own
stupidity.

  Thus far, my first night as a policewoman could not be deemed a great success.

  CHAPTER 16

  I dragged home as the rest of the city was stretching and yawning back to life. At six in the morning there weren’t many people in the streets. Grocers and butchers in aprons as white as they’d appear all day were opening their doors as I passed. Trucks roared past, along with the occasional horse-drawn dray clopping by on its delivery route. I both admired and pitied the horses in town, beautiful working beasts being crowded out by ever-multiplying, smoke-spewing motor vehicles. A milkman carrying a basket rattling with glass bottles tipped his hat to me as I stopped to pat his horse’s muzzle, but I could barely work up a smile in return. My head still ached from being sapped from behind, and my pride smarted from having allowed a jailbreak on my very first shift.

  Granted, as escape attempts went, it hadn’t been very successful. The two prostitutes were caught before they’d managed to sneak out of the building. Crazy Cora had been picked up an hour later stripping down to her shift and bust ruffle in front of the Metropolitan Life tower. Nevertheless, my new colleagues made hay from my bungle and had ribbed me over it mercilessly for the rest of my shift.

  News of my ineptitude reached Fiona, the policewoman on the morning shift, even before we met.

  “So you’re Two,” she said, unpinning her hat. She was a tall woman, thick set, with brown hair pulled back in a bun. She looked as if she’d been born to wear her sensible blue wool skirt and shirt, which, I couldn’t help noticing, were of sturdier stuff than my uniform, which was already ripped in two places.

  Fiona’s nose wrinkled. I’d mopped the cell twice, but a lingering odor of sick clung to the area.

  “It’s been a long night,” I said. “But I guess you heard.”

  Her expression softened a fraction. “The boys upstairs give you a hard time? They’re a bunch of lugs, but most of them are okay when they’re separated from the pack. It’s when they’re together that they act like hyenas.”

  “I’ll mop again.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Go home and don’t think about this place for twelve hours.” She smiled. “And let me write down the name of a seamstress who’ll make you up a uniform tough enough to withstand this place.”

  All through the night, I’d managed to hold myself together fairly well, but Fiona’s kindness made me want to collapse at her feet in a puddle.

  Her expression had approached a smile when she handed me the slip of paper. “Chin up,” she said.

  The words rattled me. That’s what Muldoon had said. Now I knew why. He’d probably foreseen how I’d feel. He knew I’d envisioned myself doing the job of a male policeman—rubbing elbows with the community, using my wits to solve problems, doing my bit to make the city keep ticking along with some semblance of law and order. In reality I was consigned to a basement room, charged with minding what most would consider the dregs of the city’s female population.

  When I got home, I was thankful that Callie was still sound asleep. I crawled into my bed, ready to sink into oblivion. But first I had to battle the voice of Crazy Cora, telling me I just have to go over and over it. She was crazy—obviously—but the words spoke to me in a mad sort of way. I thought of Guy’s murder, and all the people with opportunity and motive. What was I missing? An unsettling certainty that I’d heard or seen something crucial but failed to understand its significance gripped me.

  How many days on the job before they started calling me Loony Louise?

  * * *

  “So how did it go?” Callie asked me that afternoon.

  “Fine.” I was too exhausted and too stubborn to admit that I was disappointed and demoralized. What would be the point of whining? I wasn’t going to quit.

  For the next few days, I did my time at the police station, then came home and slept even longer than I needed to. But when I woke, I was still tired. I felt isolated. I just couldn’t confess to Callie—or Otto, or Aunt Irene, or anyone else who asked—that I’d started ticking off the minutes and the hours at work like a prisoner awaiting parole. My charges were the ones behind bars, but occasionally I wondered if I weren’t the one who was really trapped. Most of them had a hope of being released by a judge in the morning, whereas I’d already been sentenced to stay at the Thirtieth Street Station for at least three months. In a jail, essentially. Even when I wasn’t at work, I counted down my remaining hours of freedom until I had to go back to being Officer Two, precinct laughingstock.

  Some of my colleagues were kind, like Officer Schultz. The old-timer had no intention of retiring but was too arthritic to walk a beat of more than three blocks’ radius. Mostly he stayed at the station as a sort of doorman, sweeping up, cleaning spittoons, and telling stories.

  My third night on the job, he approached me in the coffee cubby carrying a greasy cone of waxed paper in his old veined hand.

  “Brought you a donut, Louise.” He held it out to me, his face flushing in the dim light from the bare bulb high overhead. Droopy bags under his eyes gave him the air of a sweet old bloodhound. “A real one, from a place down on Flatbush near where I live. You only get sad excuses for donuts here in town now.”

  The gesture seemed so kind that I took the donut from him as if he were handing me a wax paper cone of gold. “Thank you, Officer Schultz.”

  “Call me Schultzie. I don’t mind.”

  “Thank you, Schultzie. And thanks for reminding me I have a name other than Two.”

  “Just takes time to get used to the people around here.” He laughed and added confidentially, “Well, I’ve been here thirty years and I admit I’m still not used to some of them.”

  “The trouble is, I spend most of my time in the basement.”

  He cast a glance at the stairway. “I don’t envy you, and that’s a fact. Walking the beat, there were some nights when I was ready to just hack my feet off rather than go another block. But even that was better than being cooped up down where you are.”

  As far as giving encouragement went, he’d missed the mark. Still, I appreciated the sympathy. “Thanks for the donut.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “Two!” Jenks’s exclamation was a whip cracking through our moment of camaraderie. “I’ve been ringing and ringing for you. Then I decided to track you down. Now I stumble into this Romeo and Juliet scene between you and Schultzie.”

  “Donuts don’t actually figure into Romeo and Juliet,” I said.

  “Huh?” Jenks took a gander at the wax paper in my hand, then shot an irritated glance at Schultz. “You brought Two a Flatbush donut? And I thought I was your pal. I guess brotherhood doesn’t count for much next to love’s old sweet song.”

  From the set of Schultz’s jaw, I guessed Jenks was one of those people it would take longer than thirty years to get used to.

  “C’mon.” Jenks jerked his long chin at me. “I need one of your girls.”

  He started walking, and I followed. “Which one?”

  If he heard, he didn’t let on. “You shouldn’t encourage Schultz like that. He’ll spend the whole night yakking at you and you’ll never get anything done.”

  “I didn’t send him a summons,” I said defensively. “I was just in the coffee room, doing the sergeant’s bidding, minding my own business. Unlike some I could mention.”

  Jenks’s eyes narrowed on me. “Give a woman a job and suddenly she’s a snippy britches.”

  Good thing we’d reached the basement, because I’d reached the end of my patience with Jenks. “Which woman did you want to see?” I asked.

  “Gal called Mary McCarty. Two detectives upstairs want a word with her.”

  If they got even a single word, it would be a miracle. Mary, a girl of around eighteen, had been picked up for soliciting. After protesting her innocence, she hadn’t said a word beyond giving her name and address. Her case seemed peculiar because she didn’t dress at all like a girl walking the streets. Her clothes were quality, she wasn�
�t painted up like a lady of the evening, and she didn’t speak in gutter slang. She barely spoke at all.

  “Why do they want her?” I asked.

  He lowered his voice. “Her stepfather’s a big noise. Leonard Cain.”

  The name hit me like a lightning bolt. All I could think of was his glowering at me on the train. I’d never imagined a man like him having family.

  “Seems little Mary was out doing stepdaddy’s work for him. Drumming up business, or making deliveries.”

  I thought of Mary’s quiet, dignified demeanor as she sat in a cell with prostitutes and a pickpocket. “She doesn’t look like a criminal to me.”

  “Oh, and you’re an expert, are you?”

  True, I’d only been on the job a few days, but even in that amount of time I’d come to recognize various stamps of guilt displayed by the hardened, the resigned, the unrepentant. Or the utter defeat of the vagrants and the intoxicated. Mary hadn’t seemed hardened, defeated, or intoxicated. She just seemed . . . lost.

  “Have the detectives located Mary’s mother? Perhaps she could shed some light . . .”

  “Cain’s old lady came by and told us she’s glad the kid’s in jail. Says she’s no-good baggage and oughta be locked up to teach her a lesson.”

  I frowned. “So much for motherly love.”

  He shrugged. “I always thought mothers were overrated myself.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who needs ’em?”

  “Exactly.”

  Shaking my head, I led him over to the cell where Mary sat, hands in her lap, eyes on the floor. She didn’t look up until I’d unlocked the steel door. “Detectives want to speak to you, Mary,” I told her.

  The girl trained her blue eyes first on me, then on Jenks, who was muscling me out of the way. Before he could grab her bodily, she stood. She had a slight, still-girlish frame, with red-blond hair and porcelain skin.

  “Just follow Detective Jenks,” I told her.

  Mary hesitated, and Jenks sighed impatiently. “What’s the matter? Is she a dummy?”

  “No, she can speak.” But why didn’t she want to? If I’d been arrested wrongly, as she claimed to have been, I’d be arguing at the top of my lungs to get myself free.