The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  The exception Marie had made was in telling Sid about his transfer. Had that been three years ago already? For once, she’d been tough-minded. She didn’t just fling herself like a virgin into a volcano, desperate to appease. There was danger in suggesting she was better-informed—better-anythinged—than he was, but the gambit had paid off as extravagantly as one of Gino’s bets at the track. She’d framed the news as a reward for his medal, with the early tip-off a favor from Mrs. M. Marie claimed no credit, but Sid knew she’d been responsible. He didn’t have to love her as a husband, or to respect her as cop, but this time—Finally!—he’d understood that she could be of value to him. That he should be a little less loose with his temper, less fast with his hands, was a breakthrough. Marie would have looked back on the months that followed as a second honeymoon, had there been a first.

  Did that tramp really say what Marie thought she said? Enough. She had to get ready for work. Halfway up the stairs, she realized she was still doing the old lady walk. Was it nine years of marriage or five years of policing that made her feel ancient? Or maybe there were so many heavy thoughts in her head that she was getting bowlegged from carrying them. Enough. So many people had said to Marie, “How amazing! You and your husband, both police! The stories you must have, the adventures, it must never be dull!” Did they ever work together, did they ever compete? Did they ever practice with the handcuffs at home, ha-ha-ha! Over time, random cop comments that passed her way painted Sid as a likable loafer and a petty grifter, never passing up an opportunity for a laugh, a buck, a dame. Few cops respected him, but most liked him. A charmer and a joker. One thing that a few said at social events over the years—often with whiskey on their breath, hastily added after indiscreet hints about his being lazy or a ladies’ man—was that he was never mean. Marie supposed she was glad to hear that. No one else got hurt.

  Marie had never been mean, but no one would accuse her of being soft anymore, not even in Narcotics. Cowering less at home had been good for her posture; the grueling and often gruesome nature of the “new investigative portfolio” had thickened her skin. She had too many cases to form sentimental attachments, even if she were so inclined. She hadn’t cried in a long time. She didn’t cry last night, or this morning. A black eye wouldn’t kill her. That Sid cheated was old news. She’d told him off last night, and she’d chased away his mistress this morning like a neighbor’s dog on the lawn. The old Marie couldn’t have done that.

  She grabbed a blouse and business suit from the closet. One outfit for the morning stakeout, the other for the afternoon meeting in Queens, at the DA’s. Maybe she’d get a referral for a divorce lawyer there. She had picked out a charcoal suit, but put it back when she realized that was what Carmen had been wearing. Blue today, yes. Other lady-friends of her husband had called the house, but none had ever visited. This one wanted kids with him. Good luck with that plan, sister! The prospect of more children was about as appealing to Sid as an iron lung.

  Marie had no regrets that her diaper-changing days were behind her. She tried to picture the conversation between Carmen and Sid: Of course, baby, I’d love to have kids with you, but my bitch of a wife won’t let me go, and I won’t have bastards. That had to be his pitch, the reason Carmen showed up in her Sunday best, with a face looking like it had been in the Friday-night fights. Marie did like the hat. She had one like it. The hell with it, she’d bring it along. It went with the suit. And with the bruise, covering it with a little shadow.

  And so off to Queens, to Union Turnpike in North Jamaica Estates, where she would spend the morning observing the office and residence of one Dr. Harvey Lothringer, obstetrician and gynecologist. One small comfort in the absence of professional conversations with her husband was that he wouldn’t get Lothringer’s name if he did knock up Carmen. Still, Sid had to know that Marie had been working the abortionist racket. Several cases had been in the papers—though none lately, with the newspaper strike—and other cops would have brought them up. Wouldn’t he look foolish, not knowing? Oh, Sid always had a line. Maybe, “You know, these cases, they’re just so sickening, Marie doesn’t like to talk about them. We just have the one kid, and we’d like more, so it’s hard for her.”

  That wasn’t hard at all. Was it possible she learned to lie from Sid? He was a master, after all, and she amazed herself with the brazenness and fluency of her deceit as an undercover. Did she have reason to be grateful to him for that, too? That would make three things she owed him for, aside from Sandy and her job. Maybe she’d give him Harvey Lothringer’s number, in a pinch, if the good doctor wasn’t locked up by then. No, Sid wouldn’t spring for the five hundred dollars Harvey charged. More likely to go for the twenty-buck job from the uptown country granny with a branch from a slippery elm tree, who’d learned the old remedies and knew about female innards from her days on the farm. For all Marie knew, she’d wind up tailing Sid as he drove Carmen to some veterinarian’s assistant at Belmont racetrack who owed him a favor. She shuddered at the thought. She couldn’t wish anything like that on anyone, even Carmen.

  When Marie first started working abortion cases—ABs, they called them—she had been so exhausted by the episode with Charlie that she told her sister Dee that the work was “a breath of fresh air.”

  “Marie,” Dee had said, hesitating.

  “Yeah?”

  “I translate wiretaps for the Brooklyn DA. Nine-to-five, no bodily fluids. I get bored sometimes. But you? You really need a change of pace.”

  Since then, Marie had visited too many teenagers in emergency rooms to let her heart break for any of them. Not just teenagers. She had learned to decipher the scrawled handwriting on the charts, which told of puncture wounds, blood poisoning, infection. Girls who didn’t want to have babies now, and never would again. Girls who made mistakes, and then made bigger ones, trying to fix them. Marie refused to see herself in them. She’d done that with Charlie, and it wasn’t something she’d ever do again. As she saw it now, the separation between her lives made both halves possible. She’d rebuilt the wall between them to be unbreachable as the one in Berlin.

  Marie didn’t have to be a detective to understand her life anymore, but she had to be a cop to keep the peace on its rougher corners. She was a real cop now, and whoever didn’t believe her could go to hell. She worked to fix things in the city, day after day, and if they weren’t set right by the time she went to bed—whenever that was—she still slept like a baby, because she needed her sleep if she was going to try again the next morning.

  Besides, the women were never in trouble with the law. None were arrested, at least. They were treated as if they’d attempted suicide, more or less; they didn’t have the right to do what they’d done, but they were to be pitied, not punished. In New York, it was a misdemeanor to obtain an abortion, and a felony to perform one, but the city only went after the abortionists. The women were enlisted as witnesses against those who gave them what they’d begged for, what they paid for. None of the girls refused to cooperate, and few required much persuasion, feeling guilty relief at having escaped both arrest and pregnancy. Only the dying ones kept their secrets. Marie remembered the last words of a fourteen-year-old as she hemorrhaged in Kings County Hospital: “She made me promise not to tell.”

  No such effort against empathy was required with the abortionists, whether they were washerwomen or Park Avenue surgeons. None that Marie met had shown an interest in anything but money, in making the most that the heartless market would bear. And the market talk she heard often worked its way into her nightmares: “It’s thirty-five bucks.”

  “I only got twenty-five.”

  “Tell you what, find another girl with the same problem, I’ll do you both for fifty.”

  “But what if I can’t—”

  “The longer you wait, the worse it is.”

  That much was true. The woman who offered the two-for-one special knew that much about biology.

  Marie had met both girls the same night in a Bronx hospital,
where they were treated for sepsis and chemical burns in the uterus. One was terrified that her mother would find out; the other had no family at all. Marie indulged herself in a moment of pity then: Poor kids . . . Most of the hospital cases were poor kids. They were the ones who could only afford the home remedies. Girls who could come up with a hundred bucks usually could find a doctor, and they were spared all manner of butchery. Still, the amateurs were somehow less cold-blooded than some of the professional men, whose conversations Marie heard on wiretaps.

  There had been Doctor D., in Brooklyn, who refused to work on women after the first trimester, because of the risk of complications. He didn’t turn them away, however; for a fee, he referred them to a nurse who was willing to gamble with the old catheter method. On a Monday afternoon, Marie stepped into the basement of the candy store where she had a wiretap plant and listened to the weekend’s talk. Sunday morning began with a call to the nurse about a fifteen-year-old he was sending her. She was at least four months pregnant. The girl would be with her grandmother, and the nurse was to decide whether the AB was worth the danger.

  Marie covered her ears as Dr. D. complained to his mother about why he didn’t want come to dinner at his brother’s. “I don’t know what’s worse, the pot roast, or hearing his stupid wife go on and on about how much money he makes!”

  And then the nurse called, screaming, “They brought it back to me, and it’s breathing! It’s—”

  Alive. Marie wanted to stop the tape and replay it, hoping she hadn’t heard right, but she couldn’t move. “Calm down!” he barked. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Doc, when I examined her, I figured she was at least five months. But the grandmother insisted, and offered an extra two hundred. I did the job, sent ’em home, told ’em it would pass. Twenty-two years, I’ve had sick ones, ones who died, never ones . . . It came out breathing. They called. What do I tell them?”

  “You tell them to shut up and calm down! That’s first. Then, you tell them to cut the cord. Put a pillow on its face for a couple of minutes, and the problem’s over. Make sure you get the girl penicillin tabs tomorrow, and we’re all riding easy.”

  Marie stopped the tape and went to the bathroom. She needed to splash water on her face before she listened to the rest.

  “Holy shit, Doc, they brought it to me: it’s in a pillow case, and it’s still breathing. They just left, they left it with me. It’s a boy. A goddam boy. I feel sick. I don’t know what to do. Can I bring it to you?”

  There was a pause before Dr. D. responded. Marie guessed that he’d panic, that he’d hang up and run, but the crisis made him decisive. She was almost impressed. “Listen, you idiot, you bring that thing here, and you’ll wind up in the dump with it. You understand me? You’re not thinking. Sit down and listen to me. Put the thing down. Don’t touch it, don’t do anything until I tell you what to do.”

  Dr D. took a long breath, and then he told the nurse to tie it up in newspaper. She was to take the bundle for a long walk and leave it in a trashcan, somewhere far away. And the plan worked. Marie spent the next several days with the Homicide Squad, the Brooklyn DA, and the Department of Sanitation, excavating garbage dumps. They never found the body.

  Since she’d been on the abortion wiretaps, Marie hadn’t gone back to her own doctor. Though her constitution was strong, her diet healthy, and her habit of exercise maintained since the academy, she routinely worked herself to exhaustion. When she caught a cold, she toughed it out with orange juice and salt-water gargles. She’d begun to think of doctors as worse than ordinary people, and she strained against the assumption. These were not typical doctors, she told herself. No one on a wiretap was a typical person, though she supposed that the men Dee listened in on were typical gangsters. She’d filled in for a while when Dee was out on mater-nity—her third, Michael—and found the conversations grindingly mundane, mostly gripes about traffic and indigestion and kids. She’d expected to hear about nonstop murder plots, and the banality was a shock. Hearing physicians brag about cheating on taxes and wives, laughing in contempt for patients, was sickening. She’d had to renegotiate her earlier, unquestioned views of several institutions—marriage, the police department—although she remained faithful to both. Yes, there were bad husbands, bad cops, but it didn’t mean that love and justice were lies.

  Marie had interviewed hundreds of women over the years about how they found their abortionist. A few said that their own doctors would have done it but wouldn’t risk their licenses. Other doctors demanded such extravagant fees that the women resorted to the next tier of medical competence—a nurse, maybe, or a pharmacist. Even a mortician, once. Among the doctors, there was a never a hint of any principle in effect; profit was all that mattered. Marie was delighted to work the MD cases. They were educated men, privileged men, with choices available to them; they were respected men, sworn to do no harm.

  Marie parked her car four blocks away from Dr. Lothringer’s house, so no one would see the bag lady get out of a car. She had her cane and a bag of breadcrumbs to feed pigeons, in case she found a park bench. Also, a few dog biscuits, which an old cop had taught her to carry. If she found a good observation post where a neighbor’s mutt raised a rumpus, she might make a peace offering. This was a pro forma surveillance, requested by Mrs. M., should the Queens DA have any questions.

  Marie had gotten AB wiretaps in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, but never in Queens, where the DA, Frank O’Connor, was a celebrity of sorts. He’d been a defense lawyer, and one of his cases had been made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. The Wrong Man, with Henry Fonda. Marie had seen parts of it, working the theaters for the Degenerate Squad. It was the story of an innocent Italian musician mistaken for a holdup man. A sad story—the real robber was arrested in the end, during the second trial, but the musician’s wife went crazy and wound up in an institution. O’Connor was supposed to be tough on cops, routinely tossing out cases he didn’t think passed legal muster. Marie wasn’t worried. This one was ready to go, as far as she was concerned. She had more than enough evidence for a wiretap.

  Ordinarily, Marie posed as a patient to visit a doctor and ask for the AB. If they agreed, she applied for a wiretap. The doctor’s name might come from a hospitalized patient, or a talkative perp eager to make a deal. Anonymous letters came in, and occasionally even a signed one, from an ex-wife or girlfriend. When Marie went in to see one of the doctors, her favored imposture was that of a bookmaker’s girlfriend, a good-time gal who didn’t mind who knew it. Short skirts and go-go boots, hair up in a beehive if she had the time. She mostly called herself Lana, for old time’s sake, except for when she wore her red wig. Then, she was Charlie, and she’d come on even stronger. It was a more fun than playing an ingénue. The conversation ordinarily followed the same script.

  “Undress and get up on the table, so I can examine you.”

  “Fat chance. I’m a big girl, all grown up, and I’m less than two months along. I got a lab report. I’ve been to two of you bums after my own coward doctor, and the way they stare and grab around in there, I should be charging them. Look, I got the cash. Look! Don’t touch. That’s today’s rule. But I don’t want to do it today, because my fella—he’s in the sporting world, if you know what I mean—he got us ringside seats for the fights Friday at the Garden, and we’ll be going to Toots Shor’s after, for a party with Mister Jackie Gleason. All I need from you is a yes or a no for Monday, and we can both be on our merry way.”

  Marie guessed that Charlie would have been pleased to be of assistance, but she didn’t care much, one way or the other. Some doctors paid no mind to her half-a-whore folderol, as long as the money was green. Others raised a knowing eyebrow when she talked about men whose pelvic exams had a note of tourism to them. More than one suggested they ought to have some fun now, since she couldn’t get more pregnant. Often, they gave her attitude right back at her. “Spare me the baloney about how you can’t stand to spread your legs for a guy. You wouldn’t be here in t
he first place, if that was true. Be here Tuesday, 10 a.m.”

  There was no need for that with Dr. Lothringer. Marie had two witnesses, a young unmarried couple from the Bronx named Helen and Benny. Helen’s name had come up on a wire in the Bronx, on a doctor who usually steered his girls to an AB shop in Manhattan. Lothringer had dealt with them as if they were Soviet agents delivering microfilm. They were given a number to call, and then directed to an apartment lobby near Grand Central, just after midnight; they would show five hundred dollars to a strange man with an accent, who sent them home again. Within the hour, they would receive another call, from a woman, giving them final instructions regarding the time and place. After scribbling down the information, Helen asked, “What’s the doctor’s name?”

  “You don’t need to know,” said the woman, hanging up the phone.

  The next afternoon, Helen and Benny went to the address on Union Turnpike, where Marie trudged now. An ordinary ranch house on a corner plot, with an attached garage, adjacent to a supermarket parking lot that was separated by an eight-foot-tall wood-slat fence. Dr. Lothringer—male white, approximately forty, five-ten, two hundred pounds, eyes brown, hair brown, no distinguishing characteristics—had barked at them for being fifteen minutes early. The maid was still there. Waiting in the house or even outside in their car was forbidden. They were to drive around until the precise time of the appointment.