“They turned me into a dishrag,” he groaned. “Three weeks on nothing but milk and Maalox. I’ve lost twenty pounds. But don’t worry, I’m coming back strong. They won’t turn a spade over me, just yet. Are you ready to get to work?”
Marie hesitated. She was in no position to air doubts or set conditions, even though the legend she’d anticipated looked more like a liability. But everything had been so tentative and temporary, from the hotel rotations to her tryout with Al, that she didn’t want to go on with any false assumptions. She kept her foot on the brake. “I’m ready. You don’t have a problem working with a woman, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said evenly. “I don’t want to work with a woman. I want to work with a cop. And from what I hear, that’s what you are.”
Marie turned away, fearful that her eyes would well up, as she began to drive back to the city. “Let me know if you want to take the wheel any time, Ed. I’m good either way, but Al here likes to take in the scenery.”
Ed turned around to the back seat. “You didn’t tell her, lad?”
“Nah, not yet.”
Ed shook his head. “You should have told her. Let’s keep the surprises to a minimum, at least among the three of us.”
Al grunted, and Marie was intrigued. Ed went on, “You didn’t think Al was perfect, did you? We’re all a bit damaged, on top of being second-class citizens. Me, I’m an old man with a stomach like Swiss cheese.”
“Plus, you’re going to hell,” offered Al helpfully. “You’re a left-footed traitor to your race. I already told her that. She took it in stride.”
Marie had been told of Ed’s handicap. He was a member of the Emerald Society, the fraternal organization for Irish cops, but not the Holy Name Society, which was for Catholics. Ed’s religion wasn’t a secret—he was president of the St. George Association, for Protestant cops—though most of his fellow Irishman thought it a true and needless shame. After all, a Jew would always be a Jew, a Negro a Negro, but all Ed had to do to join the majority, body and soul, was to sign on the dotted line. It had not been an asset to his career. Just to be safe, Marie was a dues-paying member of the Columbia Association, for Italian cops, and the Holy Name Society as well, but she only expended effort with the Policewomen’s Endowment Association. The major tribes were represented in the “line organizations,” as they were called, but their clout was more proportionate to their numbers on the Job, rather than the city at large. There was Pulaski for Poles, Steuben for Germans, Shomrim for Jews, the Guardians for Negroes, Vikings for Scandinavians, St. Paul’s for Greeks. Was that all of them? The Hispanic Society was for Puerto Ricans, and maybe some stray Cubans or Argentinians. The Emerald Society was one of the newer ones, founded long after Columbia and Shomrim. No one had seen any need for it, since the department was an Irish clubhouse. And if you didn’t like it, you could complain to anyone you wanted, from Commissioner Murphy to District Attorney Hogan to President Kennedy.
Ed went on, “Now, Marie, you’ve been with young Al for a couple of weeks now, and you’re a trained observer. You tell me, what’s wrong with him?”
She glanced in the rearview mirror to see the reaction from the back seat. Al didn’t seem distressed, but he wasn’t smiling, either. He and Ed could roughhouse in a way that she couldn’t join in, just yet. “He could spring for a twenty-cent cigar now and then,” she offered.
“I’m from the right country, but the wrong religion,” Ed went on, teas-ingly. “Marie’s from the wrong country, and she’s the wrong sex, and I don’t think there’s any cure for either. On paper, Al’s Irish Catholic, but I’d bet fifteen out of sixteen great-grandparents knew the words to “La Borinqueña” and not “Danny Boy.” You ask him, all’s he gonna say is he’s American, and that’s fine by me. The thing is, Al is, Al has . . . the way I’d put it—”
Marie didn’t like Ed’s sudden stammer, after his bracing bluntness. Al leaned forward. “I have epilepsy, Marie. I’m epileptic. The department, they’d have never hired me, if they knew. I’m a good detective, I think you know that. But I have seizures now and then. Not often, but they can happen. That’s why I don’t drive.”
Ed leaned over, his voice dropping deeper. “Al trusts you, Marie. I do, too, even though we’ve only known each other for about ninety seconds. He said this would work out, and I believe him. Three’s a lucky number. We’re three defective detectives. Anything else wrong with you, honey, that me and Al should know? We’re laying it all out here.”
The impulse to confess took hold of her, as if she’d been caught in the pull of a riptide. But she couldn’t talk, not about her marriage or her pregnancy. Not yet, not now, though at least one of those subjects wouldn’t remain a secret for long. She replied haltingly: “I’m good, guys. And I think you’re right, Ed. This could be pretty good, this thing.”
Ed nodded and extended a hand. “I don’t think I have to mention that Al’s situation, it stays between us. Agreed?”
As Marie clasped Ed’s clammy hand, Al leaned forward, sticking his head between them. “You promise? They’d fire me for this, if they knew. I got kids—”
“I promise, Al.”
“You swear?”
“I swear to God, on my heart.”
Al reached out, and she took his hand. It felt almost feverish in comparison to Ed’s. “Shake on it?”
“Yeah.”
Marie felt a sudden spasm in his grasp, and Al began to thrash in the back seat, his legs kicking, and Ed screamed, “Get a spoon! He’ll swallow his tongue!”
Marie almost crashed into oncoming traffic, but she turned off to the right, and—Thank God!—there was a spot to swerve into before they wrecked. Turning around, she saw the rhythm of Al’s fit was slowing, easing. She breathed in deeply and reached out to touch his forehead, uselessly, as if he were a child having a nightmare. And then she saw that Ed’s spasms were picking up where Al’s had left off, rapid and jerky. Would they both die on her first day with them? When tears began to roll down Ed’s flushed face, she became suspicious, and when Al covered his own with a handkerchief, she knew. Both of them were bastards.
“I should shake both of you sons of bitches! It would serve you right, Al, if you had a real fit, and I thought you were joking. And as for you, you goddam Protestant, you could have three strokes, and I’d sit here doing my nails before I’d call an ambulance.” She stamped on the gas pedal, throwing them both against their seats.
Once Ed recovered, he dried his eyes with his sleeve. He turned to Al and said, “It’s true what they say. Women really don’t have a sense of humor.”
They’d resolved to make an arrest that day, to mark Lennon’s return and to start the new partnership off right. None anticipated any difficulty. As most break-ins were committed by addicts, drug collars were encouraged. Some arrests were better than others, of course—the schlemiel who made his monthly quota by dragging in whatever puking dope fiend he could waylay on the 30th wouldn’t last long, unless he was the Farmer. But a number was still a number, and one beat zero, every time.
They cruised for hours through Gramercy, where there had been a recent spree by a bogus door-to-door radio repairman whose sales pitch was a ploy to find unguarded apartments. “Why would I spend ten bucks to fix a five-dollar radio?”
—Sorry, Ma’am. Maybe your neighbors . . .
“Don’t bother. Everyone on the floor is at work, except Mrs. Abrams, in #2C, and the Hausers, in 2D, who don’t have two nickels to rub together . . .”
—Thank you, Ma’am.
It was an hour before quitting time when they took a break at the Chock Full o’Nuts in Times Square to reconnoiter over coffee. Their spirits were low.
“Maybe tomorrow,” O’Callahan began, “we can—”
“Bite your tongue.”
Lennon was at least half-serious, but the younger man rolled his eyes and sipped his coffee, unperturbed by the rebuke. Marie wasn’t ready to call it a day, either. Whatever their problem was, i
t wasn’t that they looked like cops. O’Callahan wore his standard baggy undershirt and dungarees, and passers-by took no more notice of him than they would have a pigeon. Lennon was also unlikely to be taken for a government official, in his dill-pickle corduroy. Sweat trickled from his forehead, leaving dark little slashes on his lapels. When he proposed they take a stroll west toward Eighth Avenue, she was afraid he’d get heatstroke. She pinched the fabric of his coat. It was heavy as a horse blanket. “You know what you should try, Ed? One of those Spanish shirts, the loose kind you don’t tuck in.”
“Already, with the fashion advice?”
As he leaned over to take in her attire, which was admittedly more Farmers’ Almanac than Harper’s Bazaar, she was reminded that her attempts to match O’Callahan’s pumpboy plainness strained her wardrobe as much as her chic evenings in the hotel bars. She only had so many clothes she’d wear for gardening, and some looked more gardened-in than others. Again, she found it hard to measure his precise level of semiseriousness. “Not that green isn’t your color, Ed, but with the other shirt, you could lose the jacket, and your gun wouldn’t show.”
“You want to play dress-up? Sure, on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“I get to pick out clothes for you, too.”
“You’re on. Benny’s Thrift is right around the corner.”
“You know they sell wigs, don’t you?”
“Be careful what you wish for, Lennon.”
Twenty minutes later, Ed and Marie were slumped on the stoop of a side street in the West 40s. Marie was in a threadbare red blouse and wig of bright copper curls, Ed in a black toupee and stained cream-colored guayabera shirt. They could have been starring in a Skid Row version of I Love Lucy—one look and you’d change the channel. But they aimed to be unwatchable, at least to the junkies who’d begun to gather down the block like crows around a carcass.
Hell’s Kitchen was far from the worst neighborhood in the city. There were plenty of jobs nearby that paid decent wages. Men worked on the waterfront, in freight cargo and the luxury steamship trade, and the rail yards, where the New York Central, Erie, and Pennsylvania lines converged. Hell’s Kitchen supplied Broadway with many of its stagehands, bartenders, and waiters and it had given the city any number of cops and firemen, priests and nuns. On the other hand, it had also produced her husband. If it were a decent neighborhood, she and Ed would have been run off their stoop.
Marie settled in to observe, as Ed seemingly—she hoped—dozed against the rail. The bray of traffic from Eighth and Ninth Avenues was audible but muted, and cooking smells from open windows mostly improved the fumes of incinerators and diesel exhaust. A few skinny ginkgoes cast narrow, patchy shadows as the afternoon sun warmed the sandstone and brick tenements. Marie made out a water tower on one roof, a pigeon coop on another. Laundry lines spiderwebbed between the buildings. Many of the fire escapes had been repurposed as yards, with lawn chairs and potted plants providing refuge from the heat. She watched two bony girls jump rope on the sidewalk, maybe ten years old, both in pigtails. A fourth-floor window opened above them for a housewife to beat a carpet, and the girls screeched as the cinders and dust descended. One looked up and howled, “You crazy old bat, you did that on purpose! You watch, your dog’s gonna wind up poisoned!”
“Sorry! Sorry, dears. Here’s for your trouble—”
A stout white arm in a sleeveless housedress dropped something from the window. A note? A dollar? One of the girls picked it up, and the other huddled close. What was it? The other girl struck a match on the curb with a practiced hand. Cigarettes. Marie shook her head and looked away. Gesu, aiutami . . . Santissima Vergine benedicami. They were Sandy’s age. They sat together on the stoop and made no effort to conceal what they were doing. You’ve come a long way, baby. A skinny Puerto Rican boy walked by and gently wagged a finger, slowing down but not stopping. One of the girls spat. The other barked, “Mind your own damn business, dope fiend.”
Marie sat up a little straighter. Was he a dope fiend? She hadn’t made him for one. He didn’t look more than twenty, and his reaction to the nicotine twins showed a decency that made his habit an even greater shame. And yet he joined the other lowlifes down the block, hovering by an alley. She supposed the girls had a point about his advice on healthy living.
“Yeah, the Puerto Rican kid is in the mix,” she said. Ed had told her to announce the action as if it were a ball game on the radio, as it would help her keep track of the players. “Twenty years old, white T-shirt, blue jeans. He talked to the kid in the striped shirt, it’s like a sailor shirt, I think French sailors have them. He’s the maître d’, I think. He—the stripe guy—“
“Frenchy, let’s call him Frenchy,” Ed muttered, without looking up. Sometimes he kept so still she was afraid he was napping.
And so they settled in for the better part of an hour, waiting with the junkies, and waiting like them, too, with mounting frustration. More addicts gathered, wastrel solitaries and hungry-eyed pairs, and none of the original retinue departed. Few stood still for long; when they did, they made it look like an exertion, as if they were treading water. Marie had little to tell Ed, whose breathing was growing more somnolent. She hated to think of herself as having less self-control than the addicts, but her behind was getting numb from being stuck to the stoop. When a young boy ran up to Frenchy, whispered a few words, and dashed away again, the addicts crowded in for the news.
“Okay, this is make-or-break time,” Marie said. Frenchy raised his hands, and most of the junkies walked away. Sorry kids. One or two stayed, as if there might be something to argue about. There would be no dope for them today, not here. There would be nothing for any of them, cops or junkies. Marie felt mournful. Their first day together had brought them nothing.
“What a waste of time,” Marie groused. “If I can unpeel my keister from the concrete, I have to drag it into a ladies’ room somewhere.”
She started to rise, but Ed held her arm. “Hang tight for a minute. Let’s wait for them to clear out before we do, so it doesn’t look like we were watching.”
Marie groaned and settled back down. How long had it been since she’d chatted with Doris Day about beauty secrets? Tell me, Doris, how do you deal with chronic stoop-butt? Ed didn’t have to feign any stiffness when he stood, and neither did Marie. She was about to stretch her legs when Al approached from Eighth Avenue. He dipped down beside them to tie his shoe. “Mickey Burns is around the corner, heading uptown. I saw him try a couple of car door handles.”
Ed asked, “What’s he wearing?”
“Black-and-blue checkered shirt, fedora. He’s taking his time, but he’s on the hunt. I’m gonna high-tail it up Ninth and cut back across, so he comes to me.”
They separated without further words. Ed led Marie east, toward Eighth. She was thrilled by the news. “Who’s Mickey Burns?”
“Mickey’s a regular, but I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“Tall? Short? Thick? Thin? Black? White?”
“White, medium height, on the chunky side. Maybe thirty years old.”
“So what’s his story?”
“Doper, as usual, and a flat burglar,” Ed went on, meaning a house-breaker. “A nasty bit of business. He’ll run, and he’ll fight. And he may have a little crowbar on him, or a blade. I hope you didn’t wear heels today.”
“Can’t you catch Mickey the Chunky Junkie in those slippers I bought you?”
At Benny’s, Marie had been delighted to find a pair of pointy-toed patent leathers in Ed’s size. It wouldn’t have been sporting for him to refuse them.
“Age before beauty, my dear,” he said.
“One day, I’ll wise up and see through your empty flattery.”
“One day, maybe.”
Arm in arm, they strolled to the corner and headed north. Ed was on the outside, and he watched the east side of Eighth. Marie peeked in the windows of bars and luncheonettes, scanning inside for a fedora, a checkered shirt. They
walked slowly, stopping at corners to scan the cross streets. After three blocks, they picked him up at a pay phone where he’d stopped to fish for stray coins. They plodded past him and waited at the light. Ed twisted his head around as if he were trying to unscrew it, producing all manner of awful crackles and clicks that she felt as much as she heard. “You need some oil in those old joints, Tin Man.”
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Look yonder, across the way. That was a signal to young Al, on the far side of the street.”
Marie saw Al, barely visible behind a pretzel cart. He pulled on his ear in reply to Ed’s neck-crack. She was impressed. “You still need some oil.”
The light changed, and they faltered across the street, settling down on another stoop just west of the corner. Al took up residence at another phone booth. Mickey slouched against a parked car and tried the door handle. Marie tensed, and she could feel Ed tense, too: Mickey was a fish who was ready to bite. There was a lot of foot traffic on the avenue, and it was a bold move to break into a car there. Was Mickey that slick, or did he think no one cared? He drifted westbound, touching each car handle, as if for luck. Toward the end of the block, he ducked into an apartment building, catching the front door as a tenant walked out, before it could shut and lock. He was in. Ed asked, “Are you ready, young lady?”
Mickey was their last chance for a perfect first day. The three met in front of the building. Ed tried the door, which was locked. Al said, “Let me go in the alley, check the back. I’ll come to the front and let you in, if I can.”
“Good,” said Ed. “By the size of this joint, it has to have at least two stairwells. Me and Marie can each take one, work our way up. If we get in before you, stay in the lobby. Remember, Mickey’s a tough customer, and a man in need. Al, if you hear a lady scream, run to beat the devil to get there, because it’ll probably be me.”
The Policewomen's Bureau Page 34