The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  It was as if they’d worked together for ages. Al disappeared down the alley. Ed and Marie weren’t there for fifteen seconds before an old Italian woman in widow’s weeds doddered through the lobby, head down. She opened the door before she noticed the awful redhead and the old slob. She tried to pull the door shut, but Marie had a better grip, and she stuck her foot inside to block it. Marie didn’t want to be rough with the nonna, but if they took too much time for explanations, Mickey Burns could be working his crowbar at another nonna’s door. Ed pushed past to take the stair to the right, and Marie deflected a series of slaps from the widow as she threatened to call the cops: “Esci! Chiamo la polizia!”

  Marie lifted her wig and showed her badge, though neither gesture succeeded as reassurance, together or apart. She started to laugh at the next insult, which she hadn’t heard in ages—“Masca femina!”—and felt a gob of spit on her cheek as she rushed past to take the stairs on the left. When she had time, she’d be disgusted. She ran up each flight on the buckled linoleum, stopping at every floor to peek out and listen. She tried to move quietly even as she maintained her speed and found Mickey on the fifth-floor landing, pie-eyed, with a needle in his arm. She was on the floor below. She felt as if she’d barged in on him in the bathroom.

  “Hi,” he said, with a length of rubber tube in his mouth, the other end of which was tied around his arm. Marie opened the door to the fourth-floor hall and bellowed, “Here we are, boys!”

  Mickey began to chuckle, but he took his time to complete his injection. Cops or robbers, he’d get his fix. Marie took out her badge and her gun. She felt ridiculous in her wig, but taking it off right now would be too confusing. “Police. Easy now. Put your hands up.”

  Mickey stood up, and the hypodermic dangled for a moment from the crook of his elbow. He hesitated, bent, and took it out from his flesh. He smiled a wild smile as he held the hypo and waved it at her. It seemed less like a weapon than a little flag in the hand of a child, watching a parade. “Easy now,” she said. “Put that away.”

  Instead, he ran into the fifth-floor hallway. Marie yelled, “Coming back your way, Ed!” and took off up the stairs. He was lighter on his feet than he looked, and she was still stiff from sitting, slightly out of breath. She should have cut over, intercepting him on the way down. As soon as she made the fifth floor, she heard Ed on the landing below her. She yelled, “Go back! He’s on the other side!”

  Ed disappeared, and Marie raced across the hall to descend the stairs at a gallop. She couldn’t see Burns, but she’d just reached the second floor when she heard his tread shift from heel-heavy, four-stairs-at-time stomps to the slip-and-slide sprint across old linoleum. He was in the lobby then, and then she heard him shout, “Outta my way!”

  And then she heard a muffled thud, the clatter of something metal rattling on the floor—The knife? The crowbar?—and she doubled her pace, hoping Burns had collided with Al. Instead, she saw the old nonna sprawled on her back, her cane a few feet away from her. Marie was tempted to stop and help when the woman reached for her cane. She hissed in inglese: “He runs from you, you witch!”

  That was true, Marie supposed. She barreled through the door into the street and spotted Burns heading west. He hadn’t lost much ground after knocking down nonna, and Marie didn’t have much more wind. She nearly ran into a car when she crossed the street and made a final dash to close the gap. When he stumbled for a moment on broken pavement, she took her gun from her holster, and fired into the air. “Mickey Burns! The next one’s going in your back!”

  Whether it was the sound of the gun or his name, Mickey stopped and held his hands up. Marie didn’t give any more orders. She didn’t want him to hear the exhaustion in her voice. She walked up to him slowly, recovering her strength. The street hadn’t been crowded, but people began to stop, and heads popped out of windows. It was time to move. She came up behind him and put the barrel of the gun against his back, directing him to put his hands on the wall. Ed came huffing along, and he cuffed Burns as Marie made a gingerly search of his pockets, plucking out a hypodermic needle, a switchblade, and a dirty handkerchief, which she returned unexamined, for now, to his pocket. Ed seized a handful of Burns’s hair and banged his head against the tenement wall. “That’s for the old lady. You’d hurt a lot more if she wasn’t such a bitch.”

  They took his arms and marched him into the street, blocking the path of a taxi. Ed took his shield out to show the driver and ordered him to take them to the precinct. As they pulled away, Al ran out from the lobby, and Ed called out the window. “We got him! Meet us back at the house! And look for a crowbar somewhere inside!”

  Al gave a thumbs-up and returned to the building, while the taxi went the few blocks to the station. Marie was warm from the chase. She yanked her wig off and tucked it inside her purse. When she nodded at Ed to follow suit with his toupee, he did so with some reluctance, she thought. Still, they were met skeptically at the precinct. Though their office was upstairs, the lieutenant asked to see their ID cards as well as their shields.

  The reception was warmer upstairs at the detective squad, where they would process the arrest. One of the men, a tubercular-looking character in a shadowy corner, croaked a kind of welcome from behind an ashtray the size of a dinner plate, piled so high with butts that its silhouette looked alpine. “Is that you, Lennon?”

  “Moriarty?”

  “I heard you died, Eddie. Is it true?”

  “Nah, Joe, I heard those rumors, too, and I believed them myself for a while. But there’s life yet in these bones. You’re the picture of health, as ever. Did you just come from a blood drive? How much did they give you?”

  “A pint of O Negative now and then is all I need, Eddie. Now, I recognize the gent in your bracelets, the well-known man-about-town Mickey Burns, but the young lady is unfamiliar to me. Is she employed by the police department, or have you hired a traveling nurse? Or is it Mrs. Lennon, chaperoning you on your appointed rounds? I tell you, Eddie, you married well. But I hope you haven’t come up here with some two-bit junk collar.”

  Marie felt Burns stiffen, and he turned to her, addled with opiates but genuinely offended. “Are you really his wife? You can’t arrest me, you got no right!”

  Marie slapped the hat off his head and pushed him into the holding cell, where Ed followed to search him again. “Shut up, you jackass,” she said.

  Moriarty tipped his cadaverous head back and let loose a high, rasping cackle that devolved into another cough. He hacked up what must have been half a teacup of phlegm and spat it in the corner. Marie waited as Ed searched Burns, patting pockets down before turning them inside out, and she picked up the hat from the floor. She felt along the inner band and plucked out two packets of heroin. Ed found three engagement rings sewn into the cuffs of Burns’s trousers. He dropped them on Moriarty’s desk. They were engraved, “To Peg from Mike,” “To Kate from Joe,” “A Odilia de Juan.” Forever, Love, Te Adoro. Marie placed the switchblade, the heroin, and the hypo in a line on one side of them. And Al, who arrived then, added the crowbar to the sequence. The arrangement of objects made them read like a story in hieroglyphics, telling of the ruin of addiction. Moriarty laughed again.

  “Now I know you’re not dead yet, Eddie. Good catch.” He opened his desk drawer to take out a notepad and a jeweler’s loupe, which he snugged into the socket of his eye. Picking up one ring, then another, he began to write down the inscriptions. “I’ll close cases with these, Eddie. Thanks. One day, you’ll have to introduce me to your wife and son.”

  Marie found a typewriter, while Al scratched out the handwritten reports. The back-and-forth bitch-and-blather between Lennon and Moriarty kept them entertained until the phone rang. Moriarty looked at it resentfully and drew deeply on his last inch of cigarette, dropping it on his desk when it burnt his finger. “Shit. Moriarty here. What is it?”

  His eyes bulged, and he began to cough as if there were a rat in his lung. He stuck the receiver of the phone under hi
s armpit, until he recovered. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Tell me about this so-called kidnapping . . .”

  Marie clacked out TWO GLASSINES OF WHITE POWDER on the voucher. Al had sweet-talked the knocked-down nonna into telling him what happened, and even though she wouldn’t show up for court, they could charge Mickey with assault. It would make it harder for a judge to throw the case away. Marie began to put the paperwork together, thinking of what they’d done, what they needed, how they could make it better, when she heard Lennon ask Moriarty, “Are you kidding? A kidnapping, in daylight, in midtown? How many calls did you get?”

  Moriarty shook his head and rose with labor from his desk. “You know how it always happens, when you’re ready to go home in half an hour? The other guys are out on a liquor store stickup. I ought to cover this myself.”

  Ed asked, “What’s the story, Joe?”

  “Like I said, it’s crap. Somebody sees a young guy running down the street, a couple of odd characters in pursuit. There’s a shot fired, and then the guy is dragged into a cab by a redhead and some other geezer. ‘White slave trade’ is the thought of the lieutenant downstairs. He lacks imagination, or maybe he has too much of it. Who hails a cab for a kidnapping? Still, we got other calls on the gunshot. People in this neighborhood know it when they hear it. I gotta go through the motions, at least.”

  Moriarty put on his suit coat and tightened his necktie. “Well, Eddie, it’s been swell. I suppose you know where the coffee and spittoons can be found.”

  “Joe, settle yourself,” Ed said soothingly, laying a hand on Moriarty’s bony shoulder. “You’ll be home on time today.”

  Marie didn’t need the cue for her part. She donned her wig as Ed pulled his toupee from his pocket and dropped it on his pate. They linked arms and took a theatrical bow, doffing their hairpieces. “Does this match your description?”

  Moriarty clapped and clapped, and then he whistled until another coughing fit overtook him. Marie rushed over to him with a cup of water. When his breath came back, he smiled and looked at his watch. “By my clock, you guys solved a kidnapping in ten seconds. A record, I think. You just might have a future in this business.”

  15 YOU CAN’T BELIEVE HOW SWEET IT CAN BE

  The more maladjusted policemen, as measured by the Rorschach test . . . tended to be more satisfied with their work than the less maladjusted.

  —Solis L. Cates “Rorschach Responses, Strong Blank Scales, and Job Satisfaction among Policemen.”

  Journal of Applied Psychology, 1950.

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1963

  1430 HOURS

  Talk of the police department as family had never meant much to Marie, given that such sentiments were usually voiced by blowhard bosses at funerals, or by the boys after the fifth beer. That there was a fraternity among the men was undeniable, and Marie felt a distinctly daughterly devotion to Mrs. M., but the only policewoman who was like a sister was her sister Dee. If Sid had partners who were like brothers to him, they were strangers to her, and she was in no rush to acquire any in-laws. Did she have to put a name to what she had with Lennon and O’Callahan? All of them knew that they were more than the sum of their parts, working and otherwise. Ed had a regimen of pills to take throughout the day—one kind twenty minutes before meals, another just after—and he gobbled all manner of antacids. Marie had a mental map of every clean toilet south of 65th Street, and she visited them incessantly, out of precaution if not need. And with Al, so far so good, touch wood. It didn’t really matter what she called them, she supposed, because she knew they’d come whenever she called. Other cops grabbed her ass much less often now, which was also nice.

  Week after week, they ranked number one, two, and three in arrests for the squad by ever-larger measures, even though they had to whack up the credit by an extra share. Several detectives were dismissive—the has-been, the mute maybe-half-breed, and the girl—as if there weren’t something real or right about them. The naysayers and backbiters spurred them to make a bolder show, and the notion of themselves as underdogs remained even as they consistently led the pack. This double-minded sense of grievance and superiority made them work all the harder. And they loved working, more than they were willing to admit, even to one another.

  Work was better play than any childhood game. What kid was ever told, “Go out and look for trouble, and don’t come home till you find it”? They had half of Manhattan as their playground. They could have shown their badges at the Empire State Building and swung like King Kong from the spire. They covered the Garment District, the Flower District, the Diamond District, and all the lesser intersections where coffee roasters or furriers or sheet-music sellers plied their trades. There were neighborhoods that they could have found blindfolded. Passing east on Fulton Street, you’d be hit with a wall of fish-reek from the market; walking north, the fishiness was overpowered by the acrid odor of the tanneries; farther north still, you were awash with the scent of cinnamon and cloves from spice warehouses. They could have Peking duck for lunch on Mott Street, pasta e fagioli on Mulberry, pierogies on Second Avenue, knishes on Orchard. Mammoth glass-and-steel towers rose all over midtown, but no matter how the wrecking balls swung, you didn’t have to walk far to find the past. On Tenth Avenue in the forties, you could smell straw and manure and hear horses being shod; two miles down, in the slaughterhouse district, the gutters ran red with blood. On the Lower East Side, Hasidic Jews looked as if they’d stepped out from the Middle Ages; all over the city, you could see nuns in flowing habits and veils, brown and blue, white and black, that testified to devotions dating back a thousand years and more.

  But the heart of their territory, and the heart of the city—if there was such a thing—was Times Square, where Broadway broke from the rigid city grid like a runaway train. Everything was there, high and low, bright and dark, beckoning you to buy, to bet, to join, from barking sergeants at the Army recruiting station to the brigades of whispering pimps. There were local sharpies in black leather jackets, sailors on leave in their swindle-me whites. If you wanted to go to a nightclub, there was the Peppermint Lounge for rock and roll, Birdland for jazz, the Palladium for Latin. The movie joints, like the Rivoli and the Capitol, were of palatial size and appointment, while the real theaters were on the side streets. Barefoot in the Park at the Biltmore and Oliver! at the Imperial were hits, but the season had been full of flops that shouted of flopdom—the marquees for A Rainy Day in Newark and The Irregular Verb to Love made Marie wonder if they were spelling tests for apprentice stagehands.

  As for the show on the streets, it was never dull, and it never closed. Soapbox screamers proclaimed the true black nature of Israel; they denounced the Communist puppeteers who secretly controlled J. Edgar Hoover; they wailed in warning of the end of the world. Masses of people stood and gaped at the dazzle of lights, the twinkle and blaze of distractions—Canadian Club! Camel Cigarettes! Live Girls! Happy Hour! Fortunes Told!—that always delighted, even when they glinted with doomsday fire.

  There were so many strangers with secrets they were eager to share: Psst! “You need a watch? How about one for your girl? You need a girl?” Psst, c’mere! “I’m in a situation. I found a thousand-dollar bill, and the bank isn’t open yet.” Psst!

  More than a million people a day staggered through, most of them goggle-eyed. They could catch matinees of Wild Gals of the Naked West or Blood Feast on the sticky seats of the grind joints, play Pokerino or pinball at the arcades, gawk at the flea circus or the bearded lady at Hubert’s Dime Museum. They could buy Hypno-Discs or X-ray Specs or plastic vomit at the Funny Store. If the taxi dancers at Honeymoon Lane looked as if they might have been foxtrotting since that sailor kissed that nurse on V-J Day, wasn’t that part of the fun?

  The new trio from the Manhattan South Burglary Squad was wholly at home among the hustlers. One day, Marie was a major in the Salvation Army, with a blue suit and a bell; the next, a go-go dancer. Ed was a tourist, a telephone repairman, an uptown swell on a tear, searching for the 52nd Stre
et jazz joints that had closed ten years before. Al had neither the inclination nor the need for disguises, though once he went blind, so to speak, with dark glasses, a cane, and tin cup. He made a couple of bucks in change. Ed and Marie were flattered by the furious threat of one of their collars—a sixty-year-old pressman for the Times with a thriving lunchtime cocaine sideline—who bellowed at them, “You two are done here! You’re finished! When I get out, everyone’s gonna know to watch out for the blond chick, and the red-faced Irishman with the Santa Claus beard!”

  They would drift, stroll, dawdle, watching how the shadier characters did the same, reading their moods, their maneuvers. What they did, and how they did it, was largely up to them. Not every thief was a junkie, but every junkie would steal. Yes, there were a few rich dopers who could draw on trust funds, and more than a few pretty ones who could sell themselves, but neither money nor beauty lasted long. There were addicts with fifty-dollar-a-day habits, more than most stockbrokers could afford. Eighteen thousand dollars a year! It was an astonishing figure, almost three times Marie’s salary. And there were armies of addicts in the city, tens of thousands of them, their numbers ever growing even as they died like flies. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t dull.

  Ed and Marie paired together most often as Al ambled around on his own. In the car or on foot, Ed and Marie looked like a couple, instead of a couple of cops. Still, they worked in various combinations—two could still go out hunting, when the third was tied up in court with an arrest. They buddied up to court officers and clerks with coffee and pastries to get their cases called early as not to miss out on the fun. Marie was envious when Ed and Al came in with anything impressive or interesting when she wasn’t there. Couldn’t they have waited for her? They picked up the man who’d been doing the “radio repair” bit, making him from a vivid description—left-handed, prominent Adam’s apple, red Esso jacket with one sleeve rolled up—supplied by a commercial artist who worked from home. There was the oaf who fell through the skylight when they chased him, and the stuporous goon who was so dirty they wouldn’t have bothered with him, except that he kept on hacking away at a pay telephone with a screwdriver when they told him to take a hike. It turned out that he was wanted for two rapes in Baltimore.