Policewoman

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  Ask Dr. Small what to do, lady. “No, ma’am,” I said pleasantly, savoring the moment, “I already have. And Mrs. Small, about that letter you and the doctor were going to write to the commissioner—don’t bother. I don’t need it. You see, I have a very valuable friend and I don’t need your letter of commendation.”

  I hung up the receiver before I heard Mrs. Small’s reply.

  5

  “I have killed the child, and he was flesh of my flesh”

  PERIODICALLY, AS A POLICEWOMAN, you have to handle what I consider the rottenest job possible: you put in time on what is called “D.O.A. reserve.” You sit in the Policewomen’s Bureau throughout your tour, awaiting a summons that will take you anywhere in the city where a dead female lies. In the presence of other police officers, you search the dead body and remove any jewelry or any other items that might be secreted on the body. These articles are tagged, enveloped and filed away until such time as relatives make a legitimate claim. This is a legal necessity whenever someone dies outside of a hospital and unattended by a physician.

  In the two weeks I had been on D.O.A. reserve, I had been called on to search two dead women: old women, both of whom had died in their sleep of natural causes. One had been a spinster, a retired saleslady with long, slender, white fingers delicately etched with blue veins. She had lain neatly in a sparkling white bed, covered delicately to her chin with a soft white coverlet sprinkled with pink and green rosebuds. She was as barren of any jewelry as her room was barren of any dirt, any signs of decay. It was apparent that she had been a meticulous woman. Her hair was sparkling silver and well groomed, a trace of pale lipstick was on her lips. I had never seen a dead body before, and looking at her face, sleeping, in repose with a lasting dignity, I forced my mind into some blank emptiness, carefully running my hands over her limbs almost as though afraid to disturb her rest. There was an eloquent silence in the room except for the occasional sounds of the uniformed patrolman and the soft murmurings of the maid who had found her. No tears, no weeping for this dead stranger, and whatever life she had lived had died quietly and completely, without leaving a trace.

  The second D.O.A. was a fat, wrinkled old woman who had been snatched into death secretly. Her family had gathered, waiting, waiting the long days and nights for her departure. The priest had come and gone and come again, but the old woman had held on fiercely, accepting the injections the doctor gave her with a tough determination, refusing to be sent to a hospital. The family had left for their various homes after the old woman had rallied loudly and demanded an end to their deathwatch. The old woman had fought death venomously, refusing to sleep, to close her eyes. One daughter had remained, finally, and had dozed and nodded at the old woman’s bedside and had not heard the deep and triumphant death rattle seize the woman by the throat and throttle her into submission. The daughter panicked on awakening, unable to believe that the tough old woman had finally gone; she began screaming loudly, rushed to the telephone, forgot her brother’s number and asked the operator for the police.

  By the time we arrived, the small apartment was crowded with anguished women and sobbing men and openmouthed children in various stages of grief and excitement. One of the daughters-in-law pushed her husband’s arm as I entered the room.

  “Who’s she?” she demanded.

  The sergeant, hearing, explained. “A policewoman, ma’am. She has to search the body.”

  The woman seemed enraged. “Search the body? For what?”

  Her husband tried to quiet her, but she narrowed her bitter gray eyes. “I want to see her search the body. She wears jewelry. I want to be there.”

  I turned away from the woman, catching the sergeant’s hard grimace, and entered the small, cluttered room where the old woman’s body lay. I noticed the stubby fingers: the nails were caked with some black substance. The woman wore a narrow gold wedding band on her left hand and a large, yellowish diamond ring on her right hand. The patrolman stood next to me and held up a small cloth bag.

  “Take the rings off, put them in here.” And then, kindly, “Is this your first?”

  My fingers were trembling and my mouth was very dry. “No, second. But, well, the first one didn’t have any jewelry. I didn’t really have to do anything.”

  “Don’t worry about it, just get a good grip on the rings, forget about everything but the rings.” And then, in answer to my silent plea, he nodded toward the other room. “I’d do it for you, kid, but the sergeant’s a real stickler.” He whispered words of encouragement. “The fingers won’t hurt you, girlie. Just get a good grip and pull.”

  The daughter-in-law standing on the other side of the bed could hear the sounds but not the words. She raised her face, suspiciously. “What are you whispering about? What are you doing with those rings? Why is she taking them off?”

  The patrolman sighed patiently. “Regulations, ma’am. We’ll put everything in this bag, and you or your husband can check the items and sign for them and pick them up at headquarters.”

  The yellow diamond had a dirty, unpleasant, dull cast. Trying not to touch the hand, I grasped the ring between two fingers and tugged. The ring wouldn’t budge. The flesh had swollen and the finger claimed the ring for its own: the tough old lady wasn’t giving up without a fight. I tried again but it wouldn’t slide. I could hear the sergeant’s voice in the other room, could feel the daughter-in-law watching closely. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and grasped the dead hand with my own left hand, trying not to think, and yanked as hard as I could and it finally came free. I dropped the stiff hand back onto the bed. A shiver jerked my spine, then went up between my shoulder blades. I pulled the covers down quickly and looked at the terrible feet, sticking up with thick yellow toenails. “No ankle bracelets,” I said stiffly. The patrolman smiled. He looked so old to be a cop. I wondered why he hadn’t retired about twenty years ago. He had an ancient face, but a kind expression. “Did you really think there would be?”

  The daughter-in-law had to tend to a runny-nosed little boy who gaped, wide-eyed, at his dead grandmother, then threw himself on the floor and howled. She had to heave him to his heavy feet and drag him out of the room.

  I began to feel giddy from the heat of the room and the noise of the mourners and that big lump of a woman lying on the bed, so fierce and resentful, as if she were going to sit up at any minute and bellow. Her jaw had stiffened and her upper lip had curled, revealing dirty teeth. I couldn’t stop looking at her, but my hands wouldn’t reach out any more. “That’s it,” I said, and we took the bag with the two rings to the outer room. The daughter-in-law left her son sitting on a chair snuffling and pushed aside two sisters to examine the rings. The sisters did not look at the bag, but looked up, wet-faced and in surprise when their sister-in-law suddenly began shouting.

  “Wait a minute, just you wait a minute! Where are her bracelets? What have you done with her bracelets?”

  The sergeant looked up, and everyone in the room seemed to be staring at me, even the messy little boy. The woman was furious and her voice was shrill. “Don’t try to fool around with me. I know you people! You police! She always wore her bracelets.” She pushed her husband’s hand off her arm. “You remember, the gold bracelet with the diamond and the one with the ruby. She always said I could have them. Where are they? Where the hell are they?”

  “Monica,” her husband pleaded, “come on now, shut up, please. Have some respect. Mama’s in there dead.”

  “Yeah, she’s dead and I want to know where her bracelets are! Who do I see around here?” And to the sergeant, “You! You’re their boss or something, huh? My mother-in-law always wore bracelets, she even slept with them. They are very valuable. Where are they?” The sergeant’s face was ruddy, and slowly the flushing of blood boiled through his heavy cheeks. He turned from the woman with great effort and asked me, “Any bracelets, officer?”

  I could feel the pounding at my temples and the cold moisture running down my arms. I hadn’t searched the woman’
s arms under the gray nightgown. “I didn’t see any, sarge.”

  Very quietly, he said, “Let’s go inside and take another look.”

  The dead woman’s wrists, freckled and stained with age, were sticking out of the crumpled sleeves of her flannel nightgown. The sergeant ran his hands quickly up the woman’s arms to the shoulder, then stiffened and turned, red-faced, to me.

  His voice was high-pitched, surprising in such a big man. “Did you check her arms? Did you run your hands up her arms?”

  “No, sergeant.”

  “Well, do it now,” he said tersely.

  The bracelets were high above the woman’s elbows: two narrow brownish-gold bangles, one with a rusty diamond chip, the other with a dull red ruby chip. I pulled them off the woman’s arms, desperately bunching the dead fingers together in order to free the bracelets from her hands.

  The daughter-in-law scowled. “I understand how they work it now. When they got Mama downtown, they’d divide the bracelets. I’m gonna report them. Don’t tell me to shush, Frank. I knew what they were up to!”

  I think it was because of his resentment of the daughter-in-law that the sergeant didn’t give me an official reprimand. He should have, of course, and back at the precinct I listened wordlessly to his abusive lecture, agreeing with him, nodding, the humiliation burning my cheeks. His anger, however, was diverted when he thought of the daughter-in-law, and he ended with a severe warning. We could all have been in serious trouble had the woman made an official complaint, but the son had assured the sergeant that his wife was upset—with grief—and that he would not let her go any further in the matter. The daughter-in-law, at any rate, had seemed placated once she held the treasured bracelets in her hands.

  I was determined, on my third call, that I would be thorough. All the way to the address, on the Lower East Side, the patrolman assigned as the D.O.A. driver regaled me endlessly with stories about the various bloody, headless, armless corpses that he had searched; about the bloated look of drowned people and the mess of subway suicides and the gore of jumpers. Whether he did this to show me that all of this was just natural and that one had to adopt a casual attitude toward dead people or to reassure me that my next D.O.A. couldn’t possibly compare to his own messy storehouse of memories, I didn’t know. I only wished he would shut up—and take a bath occasionally. He smelled terrible.

  The address was of a tenement on a street of tenements and garbage-laden lots. I walked up the four flights of stairs, trying not to breathe the inevitable smell of ancient, rotting, narrow hallways and wooden staircases. I could feel the dampness and heaviness folding around my body as though I had stepped into a shower of steam and filth.

  The neighbors were standing at each landing, looking upward, talking in excited tones, pushing each other’s bodies with their elbows as I passed. They noted my blue uniform and drew back slightly to let me pass in a gesture of respect, yet at the same time of contempt for the official, the outsider.

  I avoided their eyes, their faces, but was aware of their bodies: large, sweaty, heavy with rich and ugly odors. The door of one of the three flats on the top floor was flung open, and I could hear the rumble of masculine conversation. I tried to breathe shallowly, not wanting to fill myself with this breathless air, yet I felt a desperate need to fill my lungs. When I entered the room lit with bare yellow bulbs, the patrolman glanced up, nodded at me, then continued with his work, jotting notes in his memo book.

  A large, dark-haired man with heavy black brows turned from where he was bending under the sink and nodded at me. “I’m Lieutenant Storenoff,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Policewoman Uhnak, from D.O.A. reserve.”

  His voice was low and growling. “D.O.A. reserve?” His brows shot up at the patrolman.

  “Gee, Lieutenant, I called the Bureau. This is what they sent me.”

  They both regarded me, and I had a vague, passing hope that I was sent in error and they were going to send me back.

  The lieutenant finally grunted, “Doesn’t matter.” Then he jerked his head toward the curtained doorway leading to the next room. “We’ve got a woman in there,” he said.

  I started for the room, but he said, “No, wait a minute. Sit down for a minute.”

  He continued making some notations in his book and I looked around for a place to sit. That was a homicide car we had seen parked outside the building; what was waiting for me in the next room?

  Concentrating on the room I was in, I tried to fix it in my mind, to find some cohesiveness in the conglomeration of items. The walls were a faded pink, the molding was outlined in pale blue. In the middle of the room was a small, battered kitchen table. An overstuffed chair in one corner was covered with a reddish material, with thick vines creeping up its sides and around the cushion. The windows were covered with long, stiff curtains made from strips of bright material sewn together crazily without thought to pattern or design. Between the two long narrow windows there was a picture of a sad and sallow-faced Virgin holding a fat, flaccid child against her shoulder. She was staring at the child with slightly crossed blue eyes, and the child was grinning vacantly. There was a small stove and refrigerator against the wall opposite the windows, next to a scarred sink, and the water dripped. Underneath the sink was a dirty army blanket, and next to the army blanket was a chair. I sat down on the edge of it.

  “Hey, don’t sit there!” the lieutenant said, turning to me. “Jesus, you’ve got your foot on him!”

  I leaped to my feet. “On who?”

  The lieutenant closed his notebook and jammed it into a back pocket. He bent over heavily, for he was a large man, not fat, but big, and he pulled the blanket back.

  “Here,” he said. “The kid. Take a look.”

  There was a small, crumpled body under the sink lying half on its side, its face lying in a thick pool of its own blood. There were great open gashes about the head and face and long swollen red welts on the bare white arms and legs. One fat white hand was pressed down flat, and under the hand was a kind of rag doll. The fingernails of the hand were gnawed down almost to the roots: dried blood lined each nail. For some reason I could not take my eyes off the chewed nails. I felt a cry coming from somewhere deeper inside of me than seemed possible and I clenched my teeth to hold it in, to force it back, but a small sigh like the catching of breath escaped and I nearly gagged on the force of the cry that was rushing against my throat.

  “Nice, huh?” the lieutenant said, and he tossed the cover over the body.

  “What happened?” I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  “There’s an old woman in there. Come here. Look at her.”

  He held aside the long curtain and I looked into the next room and saw an old woman, round and small and dressed in black, sitting and rocking on the edge of a high bed, her misshapen shoes skimming the floor. She was moaning softly, clutching her body, her long, yellowed gray hair falling across her face.

  Lieutenant Storenoff let the curtain drop back into place. “She’s the grandmother. She says that some strange big man, some big black man came in and beat the kid to death. With that broom,” he pointed across the room and my eyes followed his finger, “and that frying pan. Some stranger, she says.”

  His voice was oddly flat and soft, without expression, and he recited the words in some incredibly rational way. I searched his tiny black eyes to see if he really believed this: he said it so calmly. But his face revealed nothing. A large square face with dark stubble on the cheeks and huge jaws and heavy lips, and those terrible dark little eyes. I had heard about homicide men: his face was a mask.

  “Some stranger?” I asked in bewilderment. “But why? Why would any stranger ...”

  I stopped speaking, for he blinked at me in an expression of cold contempt. “We requested a policewoman from the Bureau; there must have been some cross-up and they sent you from reserve. But as long as you’re here, you’ll do,” he said, making the best of a poor bargain. Then, to the patrolman, “Keep an eye on Gra
ndma. We’re going to visit some of the neighbors.” He motioned to me to follow and did not look at me again.

  They were eager to talk, the neighbors, nodding their heads and inviting us into their homes. Three of the women came into one of the flats, while their husbands stood leaning against various doorways. One was sitting on the edge of the sink one flight directly below the place where the boy’s body lay. The woman offered coffee, which the lieutenant accepted and I refused. I was afraid of choking on the air and the liquid and the sounds of their voices.

  This old woman, they told us, this Angelina Bacardi, had had a terrible life. A sad and terrible and thankless life, and she such a good old woman. Fervently crossing themselves with their rough, reddened hands, rolling their eyes to the cracked, chipping ceiling and intoning the name of the Virgin, they told, speaking in relays, how Angelina Bacardi had been the mother of six good children, and then had given birth to that one: Annamarie, with the thick black curls and flashing eyes. This little one, she had been her father’s favorite. Old Guido cherished her, adored her, worshiped her, this child of their old age. But it was wrong and turned out badly.

  The three women exchanged glances, nodded at each other, clucked their tongues in growing excitement. I noticed one of the husbands, a small, hard, muscular man, leaning against the sink. I watched as he moved the tip of his shoe, digging it into a small hole in the linoleum; his face had stiffened and he seemed to be exerting great pressure with his foot.

  “The boy,” the lieutenant asked quietly, “who was the boy?”

  That started again the flow of scornful words with the strange undertones I could not quite identify.

  That Annamarie, that beautiful angel, they said. When she was fifteen, everyone in the neighborhood knew what she was, that cheap little thing. Everyone but Guido, because he didn’t want to know, but he had to know sooner or later. That is the one thing you cannot hide. She had the child, the Devil’s child, and she didn’t even know who the father was. How could she have known: no one knew, it could have been any one of ten or more. Yes, any one of fifty.