Policewoman

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “Look,” Tyewells said to me, leaning down. He was a tremendously powerful looking man. “That woman in there got stuff on her. You ever see ‘H’?”

  “No. Well, you know, in the Academy. In the display case.”

  “Yeah,” Tyewells said, in some effort at patience. “Well, this is not the Academy, and she got the stuff on her, because if she don’t, then what we got us here is a bunch of irate citizens. You know?” Tyewells took a deep breath and seemed sorry somehow that I was present. “Now, look, they teach you how to make a good search? I mean a good search?”

  Detective Tyewells’ eyes sought some sign of recognition, of assurance from my face. I had a vague impression that he was trying to be delicate; he didn’t know he sounded patronizing. “If she has the ‘H’ on her,” I said coldly, “you’ll be the first to know!”

  Tyewells made some kind of sound, a noise halfway between a groan and a laugh, and he tipped his hat as I walked past him and entered the smaller room.

  The Irish detective, Quileen, was leaning against the desk, his eyes riveted on the woman.

  “She hasn’t had a chance to dump it. We didn’t leave her out of our sight. Make it good,” he said, and left.

  The woman was a small, drab-skinned Puerto Rican with long, stringy, dirty black hair. She was smoking a cigarette, and she cupped the ashes into the palm of her hand neatly, then dumped the accumulation to the floor without looking at the grayish snowflakes. I thought for a moment, trying to remember the procedure. You patted a man down for a weapon. They said other policewomen would tell us how to search a female prisoner. But somehow, no one ever had.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  The woman shrugged, not answering me, but it was apparent that she had understood me. “Okay, I’m Policewoman Uhnak. I have to search you. It would be easy all around if you’d just hand it over now.” I waited for a moment, hoping, oh God, how I was hoping, that she would slip a hand inside her dress and hand me a neat little package, and that would be that. The woman regarded me without expression, the way someone with no affinity whatever for cats would regard a Siamese.

  “All right, then.” I took a deep breath. “Strip.”

  If the word was a shock to my own mind, it registered only as a command. For the woman, in fantastic response, calmly stood up; slipped out of her shoes and shrank down even smaller than she had seemed. Not looking at me, but not ignoring my eyes, in concentration on her task, she fumbled and pulled at the zipper of her black dress, which was much too long for her. She let the dress fall to the floor, then bent and tossed it on the chair, then unhooked her stockings which were streaked with runs. Then, casually and without any visible emotion, she slipped off her panty girdle and bra. Her underwear was filthy from long use and no washing. She stood there naked and unconcerned in front of me, a slight smile on her mouth; my face must have shown the burning redness I could feel.

  I indicated the garments she had strewn about the floor and chair. “Pick them up, one at a time, and shake them over here, over the desk.” I didn’t want to touch anything from her body. And now, watching her, knowing nothing would fall from her clothing, I knew what Detective Tyewells had meant. I probably had known the minute he had said it, but my mind had rejected the necessity. A good search.

  The woman was amused by my discomfort, and I gritted my teeth and pushed her away from the desk, then pulled my hand back. It felt diseased and unclean.

  “All right,” I said, “the game is over. Hand over the ‘H.’”

  The woman’s mouth stretched, showing the four gold front teeth, and then she flung a lank strand of black hair over her thin shoulder and, grinning, twisted her body obscenely. “You want it, cookie,” she leered, “you come and get it!”

  Shock and anger are closely related: one can be turned into the other and used for the other. She apparently did not realize that my anger was anything deeper than annoyance, or even arrogance. “You put that little package of ‘H’ on the table, lady, or I will throw you out that window!”

  Her smile faded immediately, and she shrugged.

  “H’okay, h’okay, police-lady, you don’t need to get tough.”

  And she produced the cylinder from her secret hiding place and put it on the desk.

  “Open it,” I said.

  There were eight little packets of white powder encased in plastic envelopes on the desk. “Get dressed,” I said, turning from her, unable to look at her again.

  I felt a steady, grinding nausea, an urge to run from the room. I didn’t want to see her sallow, thin face or to share further in the viewing of her body. There was something so dreadful about a woman who would unprotestingly disrobe when told to do so, a woman who had no feelings about revealing gray, dirty underwear to hostile eyes. Who felt no sense of degradation when ordered to do a degrading thing, but who did so without a flicker of emotion, with nothing showing in her eyes, nothing twitching at her lips. And I didn’t like the feeling of being in a position to say “strip” or “dress,” to have this power over a person, this authority. It was a mutual humiliation, and I felt my part heavily and with disgust. This was a woman totally without hope, and she had revealed herself to me with no feelings about herself, just as though it didn’t matter; and so nothing mattered, nothing meant anything to her.

  She didn’t ask for help with her zipper, and though I knew she was struggling, arms bent at jagged angles, I was unwilling to touch her, to touch any part of her. My hand was still conscious, like a separate living thing, of the one brief contact with her shoulder.

  Tyewells was right outside the door, and he entered immediately when I looked out. “Eight packets,” I said. He regarded me, looking for something in my face, his own a mask of brown, intelligent amusement. He nodded, then held up his hand to Lieutenant Bouvreau across the room. His index finger and thumb formed a circle.

  “We got it. Everyone can relax. The ‘H’ is here.” Then Tyewells nodded to me curtly, but it was a kind of approval. Okay, kid, okay.

  The remainder of my tour was relatively quiet. I spent midnights to mornings in my small office listening to my prisoners singing softly to themselves, quarreling across the bars, complaining, sobbing, sleeping fitfully, snoring, coughing, cursing. I was getting the feel of them; the strong physical sense of their misery and hopelessness was rubbing into my skin like a tangible thing, like a warm, sticky, unclean liquid. I could feel the oppressive air of internment, of confined women, grinding into me with a terrible intensity. They were only detained here overnight, these dreadful, wasted women, to face court in the morning and probably a more definite term of imprisonment. They spent just one night here, but I felt like I was serving time in my own special cell. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at them, at their faces, at their eyes reflecting years of living and time spent in ways foreign and strange and incomprehensible to me. I tried speaking to them. I let them use me for the small, insignificant favors that were so vital to them, now, in this place. I gave them combs, Kleenex, cigarettes, coffee, candy. In talking to them, I tried to trace some pattern to lives which otherwise seemed governed by an insane and shapeless fate.

  Sitting at my desk, drinking the endless cups of tea to keep me awake through the nights, I could feel their scorn, their hatred and contempt and bitterness, not directed at me, but at everyone and everything in their world which had put them in this place where a comb or a clean paper cup was important and meaningful.

  These were the things I hadn’t known. These were the people I hadn’t known. It wasn’t like in the movies at all. It was a slow-moving, steady, repetitious monotony. Even the Friday and Saturday nights of activity when the Detective Squad Room was filled with people had a sameness: complainants wailing in anxiety or outrage; suspects glowering, sullen, or protesting, frightened; mothers of sons, asking plaintively, “Where is he? What did you do with him?” and detectives answering, “You should have asked that before, lady. You should have worried about where he was before.” />
  And I knew, now, that the special atmosphere of a police precinct was made up of these things: of an anguish and a despair that hangs in the air as thick as the cigarette smoke and as stained as the coffee containers.

  And that all detectives, those in the Harlem precinct and those of my childhood fantasies, all detectives, no matter what their color or size or shape, they all have the same eyes: hard and knowing.

  3

  “You will build a hard, impenetrable wall around yourself”

  I CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHY any policewoman would want to be permanently assigned to the office of the Policewomen’s Bureau. About the only advantage is that you work a steady tour and get more week ends off. Outside of that, it is nothing more than an office job. Taking phone calls, typing up reports of interviews with complainants, keeping work schedules, filing—all the dull, deadly, systematically bland routines I have always encountered with a sense of annoyance and resentment bordering on desperation. Yet, I learned that the women on such permanent assignment considered themselves a kind of elite little band. But they could keep it. After my tour of matron duty, I was assigned to the Bureau for my 8 to 4 tour and kept at a desk. It was good to be home in time to prepare dinner for Tony, and for us to be able to go to a movie together, or just for a walk and to know that our evenings were our own. That was for a week.

  On my 4 P.M. to 12 midnight tour the following week, I was assigned to work with a partner, May Evans. She was a woman in her late thirties, with blondish hair and eyebrows and a thin face. May had a singular look of competence; it was evident in her manner, her way of talking brusquely and with some humor and without wasting words. Everything was sharp and clean-cut and without adjectives.

  May led me around Manhattan: a kind of guided tour, showing me things I hadn’t seen before. Not the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, but the shifting crowd that watched the diners aimlessly, for the weather was too warm for ice skaters. She pointed out, quickly, sharply, surely. “Him, with the brown suit, watch him.” And sure enough, the man would move into a group of women, closer, then move out again, seemingly without purpose, and we would come up close behind him and notice those things about him: a certain grayish cast to his lips, a certain vacant look in his eyes which focused on space, a certain lack of expression, a blankness about him as he dreamed his own fantastic dreams of pleasure, triggered by his brushing, casual contact with the clothing or hip or shoulder of some woman tourist.

  “Bumper,” May said briskly. “That’s what we call him—that’s what he does. One of the garden variety: he presses against them, and most women just think it’s a little crowded and will move away, or maybe not even notice him. Then he gets a little more brazen, maybe causing a woman to turn around and look at him. He’ll be staring off, and the woman will think she imagined it or maybe give him a dirty look, or move, and he’ll just drift off to another crowd.”

  “What do we do about it?” I didn’t remember any section about “bumpers” in the Penal Code.

  May laughed, a short intaking of breath. “Depends. If he is a real desperado, we go after him. Keep him under observation, keep track of his moves—you know, give him enough rope. When we decide we have enough, we can pick him up on ‘dis-con’ 722-1 or 2, but it’s a lousy pinch and it’s tough to make it stick. In court, he’ll say he was on his lunch hour, which is probably true; that he works across the street—true again; that he was just spending some time in the sunshine.”

  “So we really haven’t got him on anything.”

  “Well,” May said, “if we are very lucky, which we rarely are, we might get some indignant woman, someone he really got fresh with, who is willing to be the complainant. Or, he might take a fancy to one of us—you because you’re small, me because I’m ten pounds overweight. We let him come to us, we don’t set ourselves up for a creep like this. It’s too dirty. Say he thinks I’m nice, likes my broad beam,” she patted her hip quickly, “or likes my blue dress—it reminds him of Mother. So he uses me as his target, making contact with me. Taking into consideration his various moves, we bag him. I’m the complainant on action, not just on observation.” May sighed. “Of course, he’d probably beat us in court anyway. Then again, we watch a guy, see all his moves, and we just might get him exposing himself, right out here in the open, only really in secret, in the crowd, because who would ever even notice him?”

  We made a tour of midtown movies, the big flashy first-runs and the crummy, scratchy ones that were filled with people trying to pass time in their lives, to fill the emptiness with something, hoping for some miracle to be shown them on the large gray screen. But we didn’t watch any of the pictures: we watched the people. We sat in the back of the theater and May said, “Him.” She spotted them instantly—the “seat-hoppers.”

  “He made a move when we first came in, did you notice?”

  I hadn’t, of course.

  “Now watch. There he goes. Keep your eye on him—I’ll give him about ten minutes.”

  In less time than that, the black figure moved again. I had noticed a “seat-hopper” of my own, a bulky, lumbering figure who grunted up the aisle, then returned, crackling candy wrappers, to search the rows of seats.

  “He’s just a hungry one,” May said. “I bet fatso won’t move again until he runs out of nourishment.”

  She was right. May explained the “seat-hoppers”: “They fit into several categories. Some will sit behind a woman who has an empty seat next to her. Women are notoriously careless about their pocketbooks; at least half the women in a movie will put their coat and pocketbook on an empty seat next to them. They figure it’s safe, there’s no one near them. They don’t think about the guy in the row behind, who just tips the seat, gets the pocketbook, removes the wallet and good-by. Then, of course, there is our friend, the degenerate who hops around the theater making new contacts. The minute he sits down, he stares at the screen and starts operating real slow, just a leg a little closer. You know the type, you’re a woman, you’ve gone to the movies alone.”

  Yes, and you sit there, feeling strangely uncomfortable, but also slightly guilty. Imagining it, you push your foot against his, just testing; he moves away a tiny bit, and you are satisfied. But still, there is some peculiar feeling, and he persists and you can feel, not exactly feel, but sense the pressure, the warmth, the something wrong. Finally, you are sure—shocked sure—and you either get up indignantly, stamping on his foot as you go, or give him one hard kick, if you have the nerve. Then he takes off wordlessly, and slinks about the movie house for another seat.

  I came home from these 4 to 12s exhausted but at the same time exhilarated, telling Tony these things—these things that were there all the time and that I was just now learning to see. It was like focusing on the fascinating culture of ants or bees, being caught up in the minutiae that put everything else out of line.

  “See that man?” I would say when we went to a movie to see a picture. “Watch him.”

  Tony would sink down in his seat. “You know, I can’t enjoy a movie any more with you. He’s going to the bathroom. Relax and watch the picture.”

  But he would be caught up in it too, and by the third move, would poke me. “What do you think he is—degenerate or bag opener?”

  Improving his vision, through me, Tony would come in furious from his subway ride home. “There was this miserable ‘bumper’ and this poor dopey kid; she must have been unconscious not to feel him. I wedged myself against him, and when the door opened at 14th Street, I shoved him out. You should have seen him scramble for another door.”

  On our last 4 to 12, May was at the office before me for the first time.

  “You know something,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to break the ice tonight.” Two of the other girls I had graduated with had made their first pinches. I was still waiting, and I had a feeling that tonight would be different. It was.

  May didn’t look up from the slip of paper, and she spoke with a cigarette dangling from
her lips. “We have a special assignment. We have to take some kids to the Foundling Hospital.”

  I felt a little silly and embarrassed at her complete failure to give any credence to my “feeling”; she had ignored my words and finished her note-taking. A plainclothesman drove us up to East Harlem. After two weeks away from the neighborhood, the vital, exciting, real, modern, sense-of-going-somewhere atmosphere of mid-Manhattan had almost obliterated the oppression of those dark garbage streets. The driver pulled up alongside a bright red fire chief’s car which was parked in front of a fire hydrant. The driver, a gray-haired fireman, nodded solemnly at us, then went on reading his magazine.

  The building was a tenement, different from its neighbors only because of the smoky, charred odor and the groups of curious people, dark-eyed, excited and nervous. At every landing in the hallway, groups of tenants were gathered, some looking down the stairwell to the third floor, others craning their necks upward.

  “Pin your shield on your jacket,” May said, and I noticed hers was already on.

  Firemen were talking to people, entering the various flats, checking things off on long sheets attached to clipboards, trying to make themselves understood, following that age-old absurdity that if you talk English loud enough, anyone can understand you.

  The odor was thick on the third floor. Mixed with the smell of smoke and wet dirt there was another odor, an alarming odor that was at once familiar and known, yet never encountered before.

  There were four doors on the landing, three of them open, filled with people, large-eyed, dark-skinned, small, narrow-boned and talking incessantly in Spanish. May spoke to a fireman who was still wearing his heavy rubber coat and boots, the large cumbersome hat hiding most of his face. I noticed that the people in the doorway seemed to be staring at one corner of the landing, a blackish, dry spot. The tall fireman walked over to me with May, and all I could see of his face was a square jaw and a wide mouth.