The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Marie kidded them about saving the good collars for themselves. She hoped they didn’t hear the note of desperation in her voice, the dread of a drunk who hears “Last call!” at the bar. Her quarrel was with the calendar, not her partners, as Labor Day would mark the end of her labors. Her chances for achievement, for adventure, dwindled with the days. The only thing that didn’t dwindle was Marie. She’d read in Reader’s Digest about the Trapp family singers, who had inspired the Broadway musical The Sound of Music. They had arrived from Austria just before the war, penniless, with the mother pregnant. Knowing that her condition would cost the troupe bookings, Mama bought ever-larger brassieres as she advanced, stuffing the cups so she remained somewhat proportionate even as she expanded. The last Trapp family singer was practically delivered on stage. Marie copied the trick. She’d been strict about her diet, gaining only nine pounds, and wore looser and looser clothes. But just the other day, the Farmer made the first joke: “Hey Marie, maybe you ought to lay off the pasta fazoo!” That clod was never the first to notice anything. A midget would know it was raining before he did.

  On her way into work one morning, Marie stopped at a light two blocks from the precinct. Her eyes were drawn to a scruffy-looking character on the uptown side of the street, doing his junk-hungry jitterbug—feet tapping, neck swiveling, on the lookout for a hot stove to steal. On the downtown side, a housewife walked up the steps to a building, her arms full of groceries, when another woman called out from a second-floor window. “You got any milk, Muriel?”

  “No, sorry, and I don’t got any at home.”

  The action proceeded with the clarity of a diagram: a dotted line for Milkless Mom as she left the building to walk to the store; another, bold and unbroken, as Jitterbug hotfooted it across the street, where no one was home in the second-floor apartment, left corner, facing the front. He must have been thinking, as Marie was, how sweet it could be when everything came together, just like that.

  Ten minutes later, Marie marched one Rodney Shepherd into the precinct. Despite the fact that he’d ransacked an apartment with two infants inside, pocketed the family’s rent money as well as a gold charm bracelet inherited from a beloved aunt, and pulled a switchblade on Marie, Shep quickly became a favorite of hers. Even more so than the Baby-Faced Bandit, though his ravaged, pockmarked visage would never have inspired any dashing nicknames. But he’d popped out like a rabbit from a hat, and he made her feel like a magician.

  And he opened up to her, almost instantly. Male perps often did. Non-junkies sometimes tried to hit on her, but the addicts, whose sex drive always came second in their lives, usually saw her as a motherly figure. He told her he’d have sold the bracelet to a fence named Three-Finger Jack who paid thirty cents on the dollar, the best rate in town. With a sixty-five-dollar-a-day habit, Shep paid keen attention to what the middlemen had to offer. Marie did the math on a scrap of paper and told him that if he saved the money, he could buy a brand-new Plymouth Fury in thirty-nine days. He laughed and then began to whimper, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed.

  “When I saw you today, I didn’t believe you were a cop.”

  “I know. That’s why I had to point a gun at your head.”

  “I thought . . . I thought you were gonna kill me.”

  “Well, Shep, I didn’t want to then, and I don’t want to now. But you were giving some thought to the idea of stabbing me. I’m an understanding person, but I have my limits.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  “No hard feelings. Promise me you won’t carry the knife when you rob a place, next time. A little problem could turn into a big one.”

  “I swear! I thought I was gonna die today. I think I’m gonna have dreams about you shooting me.”

  “Live a better life, and you’ll dream better dreams.”

  “From your lips, to God’s ears.”

  When Marie went to the burglary office, Ed pretended to look at his watch, shaking his head. “We’re never gonna catch bad guys if we don’t get up before them.”

  “You can go back to bed. I got one already.”

  NOT EVERY DAY ended in applause. Not any day in their own squad, where Lt. Macken regarded them as troublemakers, lacking in deference and respect. He wasn’t wrong about what they thought of him.

  “Don’t you worry about Macken, kids,” said Ed as they sat down for lunch at a spaghetti joint in the Village. It was the last week of August, and Al was taking vacation the week after. Marie decided to postpone her maternity leave until he came back. Now was as good a time as any to tell them about it, but Ed was on a roll, and it would have been rude to interrupt.

  “He’s not our friend,” he went on. “We all know that. Think of it this way, though. Every time you look at his pig-ignorant face, and see how he looks at us like we’re Gypsies or communists or whatever else, remember that without his kind of stupidity, we’d be finished. So what if they stop us at half the precincts to ask if we know the Pledge of Allegiance? It’s the same reason we’re there almost every day, coming in with collars. Half the guys in the office look so much like cops, you might as well paint ’em blue. Most of ’em, they’re not exactly contributing to the problem of overcrowded jails. Then, there are guys like the Farmer. Even though he looks more like a police horse than a policeman, the boss has to keep feeding him easy ones.”

  “Like yesterday,” Al said, “When the call came in from the lady who said her ex-boyfriend pushed into her place and took her fur coat.”

  “Or last week, when nobody wanted to take the collar for the kids in the stolen car,” Marie recalled. “Because the Garden sent over all those free tickets for the fights. The guy’s basically on welfare.”

  “There you go.” Ed paused to pop an antacid. “We don’t need handouts. When Macken stops waving hello to us with his middle finger, that’s when we worry.”

  It was an inspirational speech, and Marie almost believed him. Not for the first time, not for the last, she tried not to think about her old boss—it was masochistic to contrast Melchionne with Macken. This gig was all she’d hoped for, aside from the lieutenant; in her last days at the Policewomen’s Bureau, the inspector was the only part of work she could bear. What to make of a man who couldn’t stand them for how good they were making him look? As it was, they were of a mind to make a statement. They had a week left in their first full month together as a team. Al wanted them to run up the score, so they’d have twice as many arrests as the next closest contender. Marie wasn’t opposed, but then she remembered what Shep had told her about Three-Finger Jack. “I don’t mind putting away one bad guy after another. But what if we hurt a lot of ’em, all at once?”

  And so they took a break from their regular hustle of pickup collars and half-day tails, devoting the week to seeing how the master worked. Jack made regular rounds of Automats in the area. The mechanical cafeterias seemed as futuristic as Flash Gordon when Marie was a kid. The food was in glass compartments in vending machines, and you’d drop your nickel into the slot for your dishes of Hungarian goulash, Harvard beets, Boston cream pie. The girls at the front had plastic thimbles on their fingers because they had to make so much change. Now, amid the steely geometry of midtown, the brass filigree and swiveling trays of condiments at the Automats were as old and hokey as . . . Flash Gordon. Still, the fare was fresh and cheap, and the coffee that flowed from the dolphin-head spigots was the best in the city. Hour by hour, day by day, Automat by Automat, they figured out that Jack used a system of runners and appraisers. It was a crackerjack system they were determined to crack.

  It was after five on Friday afternoon in Times Square, and Jack was calling it a day. Marie and Ed were in position behind him, finishing their coffee and picking at a plate of peach melba. After leaving the restaurant, they found Al slouching beside the statue of George M. Cohan. They exchanged notes, muttering in frustration, when they saw Jack leave with an older man in a bespoke black gabardine suit wh
o looked trim and nippy as a terrier. Gabardine shook an admonitory fist, and Jack’s eight fingers gestured in apology. They hadn’t seen Jack seem to be sorry about anything before.

  There was no need to discuss the development. All week they’d thought of Jack as the biggest fish they’d ever hoped to catch. What kind of whale was Gabardine? The two perps headed west on 46th, and the three cops split in pursuit, with Al jogging down to 45th, to parallel them, and Ed and Marie taking opposite sides of 46th, at staggered lengths, behind Jack and Gabardine. When they halted, Marie continued past, slowly.

  “How can I get that?” Jack protested. “Tell me how I can get it, and I’ll get it. You know who I deal with.”

  “How you get it, I don’t care. What I care about, is you get it.”

  “You gotta be reasonable. You gotta tell these people—”

  “These people don’t get told. They tell.”

  “You gotta be reasonable—”

  “Shut up! Cops could be anywhere! And not just cops!”

  What was going on here? Who was Gabardine to scold uncatchable Jack for carelessness? It pained Marie to keep walking, but she had no choice. She couldn’t pretend to tie her slip-on shoes. If only she were in her old lady getup! She’d be burnt if she tried to rejoin the tail.

  Marie stood beside a pay phone on the corner, pretending to fish for change. When she felt a tap on her shoulder, she knew that it was him. Turning around, she instinctively began to reach for her gun. Up close, Gabardine was an affable old stranger offering a dime for her phone call. When she stayed her hand and forced a smile, he stared at her, as if rereading a story he didn’t want to believe: her hand moving to her, the lie in her eyes. He knew at once that she was neither a stranger nor a friend. Whatever kind of bad guy he was, he was very good at it. Marie’s heart broke to see him walk away.

  Gabardine didn’t stop at the curb, didn’t look up at the traffic or the light, and when he walked into the street, the taxi hit him so hard that his shoes remained where he took his last steps. Black broughams, freshly shined.

  The next day, they learned that he had been identified as a suspect in at least a dozen gangland murders, going back to the days of Prohibition. He was wearing a watch that belonged to a witness to one of them, who had vanished without a trace in 1937. Marie hadn’t caught him, but he hadn’t gotten away.

  SOMETHING WONDERFUL WAS going on that summer, something almost eerie. A stroke of luck became a streak, and then something else. Even their wrong turns went right. If it had happened to anyone else, Marie would have suspected a fix instead of a miracle. She didn’t understand it, and she didn’t think she had to just yet. She didn’t want the summer to end. And she wasn’t going to be the killjoy who said that it was over.

  Beyond their immediate chain of command, their labors had not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. It always annoyed Lt. Macken to have to call them into his office with a request from another squad or the FBI to help locate or identify a suspect. Though he took few pains to conceal his distaste, he was in no position to refuse when a captain from the Homicide Division asked for Marie to be temporarily assigned to him when Al was on vacation. She was able to arrange for Ed join her. The murder was of an elderly woman named Adelaide Jenkins, who had lived in one of the doorman buildings near University Avenue in the Village. Adelaide was a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, doggedly independent. She had fine things in her home, friends nearby, and she had been determined to maintain her life as it was, as long as she could. One day, when she’d returned from the greengrocer’s, she’d seen that her apartment door was open. Inside, she’d surprised a burglar who stabbed her with a carving fork. It was sticking upright in her chest when she was found.

  An informant had come up with a nickname—“Shep”—as a suspect, and a search of the alias files had produced, among others, one Rodney Shepherd, male white, twenty-seven years old, five-foot eleven, one hundred and forty-five pounds, acne-scarred, who had last been arrested for another flat burglary by one Policewoman Marie Carrara. Marie wished she were surprised that he was out on bail. And she wondered—if Shep had in fact killed her—why he hadn’t used the switchblade? Had he kept his promise to stop carrying one? The carving fork had been identified as the victim’s property. There was no need for this murder, no cause for it, even by corkscrew junkie logic. She was eighty-five years old and weighed ninety-five pounds. He could have knocked her over with his bad breath. Marie didn’t want to kill Shep, but she hoped to appear in his dreams, waking and otherwise.

  Shep moved around: he’d racked up collars in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, and he usually gave a Bowery flophouse as his address, though no one there recognized his picture. They didn’t know where he laid his head at night, or where he’d hit next. But he’d told Marie who his favorite fence was, and his sixty-five-dollar-a-day habit would likely soon reunite him with Three-Finger Jack. The week spent tailing the fence hadn’t been wasted, after all.

  They knew Jack’s routines, his preferred tables—toward the middle, facing the front—which allowed them to arrive before he did. Jack was alert to surveillance, but it didn’t occur to him that his watchers would be waiting for him, instead of trailing behind. During their earlier days with him, they’d learned to eat as little as possible, or they’d be stuffed and stupefied by midday, and there was only so much coffee they could drink without springing leaks. They promised each other that, if either of them died of clogged arteries, the other would try to have it designated a death in the line of duty. How did the old jingle go? Oh, how I love the Automat, the place where all the food is at!

  Four days into their feeding frenzy, they observed Jack at one of his tables beside the gleaming chrome-and-glass machines at the Times Square store, receiving visitors like a ward boss. He was stout, middle-aged, sallow, always dressed in in a cheap but respectable suit of blue or gray pinstripe. He tended to keep his left hand, with the missing pinkie and ring fingers, under the table, and he shielded it to conceal his lost digits when he needed both hands. When a young patrolman walked in through the revolving door, Jack noticed but didn’t appear to be perturbed, sipping his coffee and sending a runner on an errand. When the cop passed Ed and Marie, he didn’t give them a second glance. Marie was taken by how young he was, how new he seemed. He was built like a linebacker, but he was so fresh-faced that he looked like he didn’t need to shave.

  And then she saw Shep outside on the sidewalk, pacing, then stopping to press his face against the glass. Marie gave Ed an elbow and rose. She was a beatnik today, with a wig of straight brown hair that descended to her waist, tortoise-shell spectacles of clear glass, one of Sid’s silk dress shirts loosely bound with a belt. Ed was professorial, with a tweed coat, baggy brown chinos, and an eye patch. They walked to the front, and when Shep had stepped into the revolving door, traversing the circuit from two o’clock to four, Ed put his foot down to stop it, trapping Shep in the glass. Shep was confused, at first, pushing forward, then back; he glared at Ed and then began to berate him. And then Shep saw Marie, her hand reaching for the gun holstered on her hip, covered by the loose shirttails. Hadn’t he dreamt it would end like this? He raised his hands and nodded. Marie went forward in the door, so she would be out in the street to meet Shep there, and Ed made sure that Shep didn’t get off the merry-go-round until he was delivered outside to his partner.

  That was easy, she thought. Shep popped out from behind the glass for them like a dish of Jell-O, and they didn’t even have to spend a nickel. He shook like Jell-O, too, as they walked him down the block, each cop with a junkie arm. The streets were mobbed today, even more than usual, and they had to pummel and bump their way through the crowds to find a quiet spot to search and cuff him. Not everyone on the street would be helpful, even if they knew that they were cops.

  “All right, Shep,” Marie said. “It’s all over now, you can relax. Where’s the switchblade?”

  “I don’t, I haven’t carried it, not since . . . not since we tal
ked.”

  “Good, Shep. Anything else? You got a hypo? A razor? Anything?”

  “A hypo, in my pants pocket, in the metal cigar tube.”

  “Glad you told me,” Marie said. “I’m gonna take it out of your pocket.”

  Ed was quick to add, “You know we’re gonna have to lock you up for it, for possession of narcotics paraphernalia.”

  Shep nodded, and Marie admired Ed’s improvisation. She’d never locked up anyone for murder before. It hadn’t occurred to her that Shep didn’t know what they knew, and there was no need to bring up Adelaide Jenkins until they were safely in the precinct. Once they found a lobby or an alley, they’d stop. Marie could feel Shep shiver, and she smelled the sour sweat pumping from his pores. She kept her hand on her gun. Not far to go, and they would be done.

  And then she heard the blow as much as she felt it, the Pock! of some kind of pipe or club as it struck against her hip. The blow caught her gun, mostly, but it also hit her hand, and her arm flailed away from her body like a ship’s cable snapping loose. She felt someone behind her, seizing her by the hair. She stood, stunned and weak-kneed, as Shep dropped to the sidewalk beside her. The next second stretched out like elastic. What was this? Maybe Three-Finger Jack made her from this surveillance, or the last one, and he’d hit her with a bat, shivving Shep to shut him up forever. No? She lurched forward, leaving her wig behind. No. She couldn’t feel her hand, or feel her gun. What was this?

  Marie turned as she lurched forward. She felt like she was back in the revolving door. She saw the blue uniform, one hand holding a yard of auburn hair, the other with a nightstick raised to strike again, and then she heard Ed’s voice tear through the air: “Put that club down, you goddamned rookie! We’re with Homicide! If you’ve hurt either my partner or my perp, you’re walking a beat in Staten Island tomorrow! And not the nice part of Staten Island, wherever that is!”