The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  LIFE AT HOME was happier than ever. Could that be why she thought things were out of balance? Her pregnancy, her delivery had gone beautifully. She adored her little boy, and she wasn’t sick or sad afterward. Why? She didn’t know. Katie and Sandy were angels. Marie saw her life as something that was getting bigger instead of smaller. Harder, too, but she was up for the task. And Sid didn’t get in the way. He didn’t start a fight when she said that the boy would be named James. He didn’t argue with her in the hospital, and he didn’t stay long. He bought a color TV for the living room, even though most shows were still in black-and-white.

  While Marie was on leave, Sid never hit her. She once supposed idly that she hadn’t given him any reason. And then she realized how awful her thinking was—she had no more control over him than she did the weather. The truce wouldn’t last; it never had. As the date approached for her return to work, she contemplated the adjustments she’d have to make. Pumping breast milk, plus periodic uppercuts and low blows. But she had no hesitation about rejoining the battle outside. The only real way home was out the front door.

  The coming summer could never be as golden as the last, she knew, with the heady delight of her new partners, the ticktock urgency of her pregnancy. But the first month back was as dull as matron duty, and even more confined. They were up on a wiretap, listening to “Tommy the Mole” talk with Jewish Abie, Cockeyed Jimmy, Long Beach Frankie, and Fifi Gencarullo as the crew planned an armored-car robbery. The names were more interesting than their conversations.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey. Who’s this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry, the kids are making a racket. What’s up?’

  “The place we met before?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Meet me there again, same time.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  The wiretap plant was in a storeroom of an apartment basement, five feet wide by six long, which barely fit the table with their equipment. The room backed up against an efficient new boiler, and the temperature in their sweatbox never dropped below a hundred degrees. Ed, Al, and Marie worked four-to twelve shifts, mixing up tape-listening and Mole-tailing duties with Ralph and Arthur. Another team had the days. More people should have been assigned, but the lieutenant was of two minds about the case. By rights, a hijacking should have gone to the Safe, Loft, and Truck Squad, but it had been Ed’s informant who provided the lead. Macken was eager to seize the chance at glory, but he was unwilling to devote the time and manpower to do things right. What was the expression? Tutto a posto, niente in ordine. Everything was fine, and nothing was right.

  Tommy the Mole didn’t say much, or do much. On tails, they’d follow him to the barber, the bank, his girlfriend’s, or his other girlfriend’s. There was an inside man at the armored-car company, but only Tommy knew who he was. They could be so cagey on the phone that they wound up confusing the hell out of each other.

  “I got a guy for the stuff we need.”

  “Good.”

  “You think we might need two, or three?”

  “Maybe three is better.”

  “Okay. How much you wanna spend on each?”

  “Couple, maybe three hundred apiece.”

  “Are you kidding? I can get Department of Sanitation uniforms for ten bucks!”

  “Are you an idiot? I’m talking about machine guns.”

  “Shit, I get so shifty sometimes, I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

  “Nah, I know, it makes me crazy. My kid, he asks me about ‘That thing we gotta do,’ and it’s five minutes before I know he’s talking about his Little League game.”

  Though the surveillance teams were cross-eyed with boredom most days, no one doubted Tommy was worth watching, and there was furious protest when Macken announced he’d allow the wiretap to expire at the end of its thirty-day authorization. “What a waste of time! The hell if I’m gonna ask the DA for another thirty days. I can’t have another month go by without arrests from half my squad.”

  He reversed himself after a captain paid a visit to commend him for his dedication to the case. Someone in the office had made a phone call to headquarters, it seemed. Marie struggled not to smile as the lieutenant summoned her to his office, glowering, and sent her to court to renew the wiretap. Did he think she’d break down and confess after five seconds of stink eye? What a dope! She was the last person to have gone over his head, much as she’d have liked. The detectives applauded the informer, but no one even offered any idle speculation about who dunnit. It was better not to know.

  The next week, the case started to heat up, as Tommy the Mole’s ingrained caution began to rub against the other men’s need for money. Ralph Marino was in the plant on Monday when Jimmy Long Beach called to complain about his gambling debts. The interest cost him a hundred dollars every week. Tommy shut him up by telling him that there would be at least $750,000 in the armored car, “And if you want to go back to robbing candy stores, don’t let me stop you.”

  Marie was on duty Tuesday when a new subject called. “Hey, it’s Cheech.”

  “Who?”

  “Fifi’s brudder-in-law.”

  “Yeah, right. How long you been out?”

  “Couple of months. Fifi, he’s married to my sister, Mimi.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, you know how Fifi, how he always spits, how he hacks up a lot of phlegm?”

  “The man eats cigarettes. Five packs a day. What do you want from me, a cough drop?”

  “No, I just wanna tell you, we had dinner last night, at his house. Mimi made the cavatelli with the pork gravy, and—”

  “No recipes, Cheech. You never know who’s listening.”

  Marie smiled at Tommy’s dry aside, but it slid right past Cheech. “Right, right. Anyway, Fifi pukes blood all over the table. I call the ambulance, they bring him to Beth Israel. They’re doing all kinds of tests, but the doctors, they say it don’t look good. Probably the Big C.”

  “No! Goddam it!”

  Fifi was the wheelman, a cool head who could speed down an alley at sixty miles an hour with two inches on either side of the car. He wouldn’t be easy to replace. Marie was as rattled as Tommy was by the news. Was the job over? Had the past six weeks been wasted?

  Tommy went on the move. He’d been something of a homebody before—ducking out for a meet, a date, a meal, never out past ten—but now he ranged around the city in his Oldsmobile, fifteen hours a day, from diners to bars to social clubs, rarely staying long. The surveillance team should have had more people, more cars, walkie-talkies, but there was no point in asking Macken for anything. Old-school dirty tricks would have to do, like when Ed slashed a tire when the Mole was parked outside a discotheque. Ed thought they’d been made, and they needed time to bring Ralph in from home to switch up the tail—needless to say, Marie wasn’t the one to make that the call, in case Mrs. Marino answered the phone. And when the Mole joined another no-neck thug in a late-model Cadillac, Ed knocked out the left taillight, so Marie could follow with ease. Things were getting rushed on both sides; a misstep was inevitable.

  On Friday night, an unidentified male called Tommy. “It’s me. It’s time we met. It’s now or never. Monday night at seven. Hoboken, the park by the church.”

  Finally! That weekend, if Marie thought about police work at all, it was of the bricks and bottles raining from uptown rooftops—the Harlem riots had begun. She wasn’t sorry to miss them. The temperature was in the nineties on Saturday afternoon. She was sweating in the backyard, elbow deep in zucchini, when Katie ran out, yelling, “Ed says you have to get to a park in Jersey, right away!”

  Marie had on a tattered old dress, her hair up in curlers. She grabbed her gun and car keys, her shield and ID, before taking the phone. “Hoboken?”

  “Hoboken, I’m already at Al’s, picking him up.”

  “Half an hour.”

  “See you there.”

  There was
n’t time to ask any of the dozen questions that buzzed in her head. She jumped in her car and flew into the city, nearly getting arrested as she sped through the Lincoln Tunnel. When she finally arrived, she was exhausted as if she’d run the whole way, and she sat down to collect herself on a park bench. She looked down at her legs and pulled her ragged dress over her dirty knees. There was no sign of Ed or Al. She didn’t see Tommy the Mole, either, which was a relief. She stood and began to stroll around, wondering why the meeting was changed on such short notice. Would it happen tonight? She almost didn’t care. She was back on the set, back in action.

  The park was crowded. There were pairs and threesomes of mothers with baby carriages, dawdling until infant cries prompted them to push on; older solitaries sat enrapt by their Bibles or racing forms; a pack of boys were playing dice—kind of—chasing after each wild throw like cats after mice. There were a couple of wider, whiter men, in suits and ties, which Marie wouldn’t have expected on a Saturday.

  She spotted Tommy first, as he stood beside a tall, thin man in sunglasses and a tweed cap, the brim pulled low. He wore an oversized short-sleeved shirt, canary yellow. A bit showy, but the inside man wouldn’t be a street guy, wouldn’t know how to stay under the radar. He and Tommy walked a few paces and stopped to talk, and then walked and stopped again, looking around, watching to see if they were watched. She sat down on a bench before they passed her.

  As she did so, she saw Al charge up the path, his arms flailing, making odd grunting noises. Marie froze, horrified. What the hell was he doing? She turned her head just enough to see if Tommy and Yellow Shirt noticed. Of course they had. What the hell was wrong with Al? Was he blind? Was he drunk? As far she knew, he wasn’t much of a drinker. Was he—

  And then she saw that Al was deaf. He’d sprinted to join a party of two men and two women in their twenties. When one had something to say, they’d stop to face one another, their hands dancing in the air, touching their mouths, their hearts, their foreheads. Al looked like a catcher giving pitch signals, or like he was playing an imaginary saxophone, not at all well. Mostly, he looked like an idiot. The four deaf people—had it been a double date that he’d barged into?—responded with vigorous countersigns before they realized he was harmless. They thought he was an idiot, too. Tommy and Yellow Shirt shrugged and walked on: Just some dummies. Al threw up his hands like a jilted boyfriend. He was a nonentity now, and he could sit and watch, wherever he wanted. Marie smothered her giggles. She was more than a little proud of him.

  She stayed put for another few minutes, watching her suspects drift away, not quite out of eyesight. Her sense of relief faded. Someone had to stay on them. Where was Ed? There was no chance of overhearing anything. If only she could deputize the deaf couples and enlist them to lip-read. The best move was to tail Yellow Shirt to a car or an address, to make an ID. Even if they had to sit on him through the night, and then all day and night again Sunday, following him to work Monday morning. She wondered when she’d get a chance to wash and change. As she was, she stood out—harmlessly, clownishly, for now—but she couldn’t be seen by them again.

  And then she saw Ed. He was in a straw hat, Bermuda shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, and his otherwise blindingly white legs also showing evidence of Saturday gardening. They rushed to embrace, and then they growled in each other’s ears.

  “What the hell is this, Ed? You just passed the Mole and the inside man.”

  Marie felt the tension in his body and stepped back when she heard the anger in his voice, barely contained. “Yellow shirt. Yeah, I saw.”

  She leaned in close, as if to remind him to keep his voice low. “What’s going on? Why such short notice? What gives?”

  “We’re lucky we were called at all.”

  Ed explained how the random detective on the morning shift overheard an abrupt call to Tommy: Monday’s the day for the job, let’s meet tonight.

  “Good for him,” said Marie. “I’m glad he wasn’t getting a coffee, or beer, when it came up on the wire. Or was he? Why the delay?”

  “There was no delay,” Ed shook his head. Words left him painfully, as if he were passing kidney stones. “He called the good lieutenant. Four hours ago.”

  Marie shook a little, trying to suppress a spasm of disgust. Ed took her arm, and they began to walk. She had a headache. “I don’t want to ask . . .”

  “It’s worse than you think,” he said. “Macken calls everybody except us, but Arthur heard later, and he called me. Macken’s been here for hours, with a bunch of local cops. Why he thinks he needs an army is beyond me. The stickup won’t be today. That man could screw up a one-car funeral.”

  “Ed, please don’t tell me—”

  “Let’s move over, so you can see how he’s deployed his forces.”

  Right away, Marie spotted an unmarked police car, a dark-blue Ford, with an extra radio antenna that stuck out like an oil derrick. Two wide, white men in white shirts and dark, narrow ties were inside. Farther down the street, she saw another dark Ford. She clutched Ed’s arm as they walked ahead. “He really called out the cavalry, didn’t he? And he didn’t want to call us. Where’s that idiot hiding?”

  “Right around the corner,” Ed muttered. “I ran into him, on the way. He’s with the Farmer and one of the locals, in one of their cars. He kept touching the switches, like a kid with a new toy. The Jersey cop practically slapped his hand away. His opinion of big-city detectives must have gone right down the toilet.”

  They were within twenty yards of Tommy and Yellow Shirt when the two men began to stare at them. It was time to put on another little show. “Take me home!” Marie moaned, breaking away from Ed to collapse on a bench. “I don’t know why I ever bother with you!”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “You were gonna take me out to dinner!”

  “The way you look? Are you nuts? Keep it down, people are looking at ya!”

  Tommy and Yellow Shirt shook their heads and resumed their conversation. Ed led Marie to a bench, where she sobbed on his shoulder. They were invisible, still in play. The bell of an ice cream truck sounded, and children raced toward it. Marie wouldn’t have minded something cold and sweet. If the surveillance went on long enough—

  Just then, she heard a siren, a rising wail that broke off sharply, and then a braying klaxon—Oooh-ahh! Oooh-ahh! Oooh-ahh!—as if warning of an air raid. They were finished. The sound of a police car was an ordinary noise, but it was close by, and there was no police car in sight. The itinerant men in white shirts wandering through the park halted in unison. The klaxon stopped, seconds later.

  Tommy the Mole and Yellow Shirt didn’t shake hands or wave goodbye as they broke apart. Ed and Marie waited until Yellow Shirt had some thirty yards on them and then followed. At the far end of the park, he went into the public lavatory. Marie sat down on a bench near the entrance, and Ed left his hat and Hawaiian shirt with her before taking a position near a bus stop. She was glad he’d worn an undershirt. She hoped Ed had nickels, in case Yellow Shirt took the bus. She settled in and waited, checking her watch. The case was blown, but there was still a chance of salvaging something. There wouldn’t be any stickup on Monday, but Tommy might postpone the job instead of canceling it. Yellow Shirt was the key.

  At the lavatory, there was a modest amount of traffic, with two or three men going in and out every minute. After five minutes, she figured Yellow Shirt had business that couldn’t be finished standing up—maybe the sound of the siren had a laxative effect. Most of the men went in alone, aside from a father and a young boy entered together. Another man, another, a pair. The father and the boy walked out. Ten minutes. Was there something else going on? Was Yellow Shirt looking for a different kind of relief? She couldn’t go inside, and she didn’t want to summon Ed back from his observation point. Where was Al? Twelve minutes.

  And then Al walked up to her, eyes wide, eager for news. She hissed at him, “Yellow Shirt’s in the john. He must be constipated. Check it out.”<
br />
  As Al disappeared inside the lavatory, Ed began to drift back toward Marie. He lifted his hands, palms up—What gives?—and Marie raised one hand in response, palm out: Halt, wait. A moment later, Al emerged, holding a yellow shirt in one hand, a tweed cap in the other. That was it. The day was over, and the case was done. Marie had underestimated the inside man, his slickness and quickness. As for the competence of certain of her own colleagues, she tried not to dwell on it. After all, it was her day off, and it was a sunny weekend, and she could get back to her zucchini. Ed, Al, and Marie looked at one another for a moment, and then they walked away as wordlessly as Tommy and Yellow Shirt had, minutes before. They were finished, and there was nothing more to say.

  18 YOU WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

  Sentence first—verdict afterwards.

  —Lewis Carroll

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  JULY 20, 1964

  1615 HOURS

  Someone had to be punished, that much was clear. On Monday afternoon, Lt. Macken was terse and impassive as he informed them of their assignments: Marie and Al were confined to the office for the next two weeks to update the mug shot files. Ed would be assigned to a steady midnight shift at a Brooklyn hotel, guarding a witness to a homicide. The lieutenant left as soon as his instructions were complete. There were no questions or comments until Al stuck his head out the window to confirm the departure. When he saw Macken and the Farmer on the sidewalk below, he took a coffee mug from the nearest desk and made to hurl it at them, until Ed grabbed his hand.