The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Later on, Marie learned that Reverend Bill reported Sid to the Medical Division, which had done nothing. He’d also met with the police commissioner of Yonkers, which might have saved her life. Her home had been classified as a “sensitive location,” as if it were the residence of the Israeli ambassador. The radio car responded within minutes. Sid was suspended for thirty days, and his guns were removed indefinitely, pending the results of psychiatric evaluation. Marie was given two weeks of medical leave, which she was happy to take, and then she was given another two. Once her teeth were fixed, she wasn’t ashamed to go outside anymore. She wasn’t in any rush to return to Marilyn, but she was starting to worry. The department surgeons were known for their ruthlessness in sending cops back to work. Even if the halt and the lame were unfit for patrol, they could always be parked somewhere to answer telephones. Their indulgence with her was troubling.

  At the end of May, Marie was visited by two officers in plainclothes. Surprise visits from the Medical Division were standard practice to weed out malingerers, and the consequences for being caught—in good health, or out of the house without permission—were severe. It occurred to her that they had never come by before. Between maternity and various injuries, she’d been on leave for a year. Had they trusted her until now, or had they forgotten her? What made her suddenly special?

  “Are you Policewoman Carrara?”

  “I’m Detective Carrara. Who are you?”

  “We’re from Inspections. We need to take your gun.”

  “May I see the order? It would have to be from Operations, right? Or is it the First Deputy Commissioner?”

  “I don’t have it with me.”

  Marie shut the door. She didn’t think they were lying, but there had to be a mistake. Even after she confirmed the order had been issued, she was sure there had been an error—someone must have mixed up “Carrara, M.” with “Carrara, S.”—but she had no choice but to comply. As she took the receipt, she told them, “If you were planning to stop back later on, let me save you the trouble. I’m going to be out of residence. I’m going to see your boss and find out what the hell is going on.”

  When Marie barged into the office of the chief surgeon, he informed her that the decision had been made for her own safety. He was long-faced and sallow, with an unlit pipe clenched in his teeth, like General MacArthur. Marie wondered why he wore a white coat when he only examined papers. “How do you figure, Doctor?”

  “Well, the man is still your husband, and he still has access to your residence.”

  “You’ve ordered him to stay away, haven’t you? It’s a condition of employment, isn’t it?”

  The department could order a police officer not to see his brother if he was a convicted felon; it could order him not to visit his mother, if the brother lived with her. It could order a man to divorce his wife if she became addicted to drugs. It generally avoided such intrusions, but it reserved every right to intrude. “Yes, of course. Regrettably, sometimes orders are disobeyed. What’s to prevent him from coming back to take it, and using it on you? He has made threats, you know.”

  Marie had been told that Sid had continued in his previously uncommon candor with his psychiatrist: “Yep, I really will kill her, if I get the chance.” If he wanted to get his hands on a gun, it wouldn’t take him long. He didn’t need hers. But by taking her gun, the department was making sure that the next fight would be even less fair than the past ones had been. Didn’t she have a right to defend herself? Wasn’t it her job? Marie planned to make just that point, when the doctor made another: “You can imagine how it would look for the department if he killed you with your own gun, after he threatened to do just that.”

  It was a good thing that Marie didn’t have her gun then. Just kidding! No, she was fully in control when she replied, “It would be very embarrassing, I’m sure.”

  The department surgeon was so impressed that he actually looked at her. “Exactly! I’m glad you see the bigger picture.”

  “Of course. If the bullets didn’t kill me, the embarrassment would.”

  Marie thought he’d bite off the end of his pipe. He closed her file. “To be honest, Mrs. Carrara, it’s been my experience that when marriages go sour, both parties bear a certain amount of blame. I believe it’s better for the department not to take sides in these matters.”

  Marie was readying a more politic rebuttal when the doctor surprised her again. “In a month or two, it wouldn’t surprise me if you were back together, telling everyone it was all just a tempest in a teapot. After all, your husband, Serafino, his present residence is the home of your sister and her husband. Mr. and Mrs. Salvatore . . . whatever. I’m not going to look it up. I’m sure you know their names.”

  Marie nodded, as if what he’d said was old news. She couldn’t react, knowing that her reaction would betray her. As her sister had. She felt sick. Marie doubted that Ann had volunteered to take Sid in, but she hadn’t refused him, either. She hadn’t taken a stand. Marie had failed to defend herself for years, but her cowardice was confined to her own cause. This was too much to swallow. She couldn’t. She’d vomit all over this awful man’s awful white coat, and then she might never be able to get back to work. No, now was the time to pretend that she knew, that it didn’t matter. She’d talk about something else.

  “Doctor, if you take my gun, you know they’ll take my detective shield as well. I worked very hard to get it, and I’ve only had it a couple of months. To deprive me of the ability to work, to support my family, is unjust. Especially now. You can request my personnel records if you have any questions about me. I assume that the psychiatrist assigned to my husband has reviewed his. You’re right that the breakup of a marriage is a tragedy for both sides, but the blame isn’t equal. I worked very hard to fix my marriage, and I always kept my private life private. I’m ashamed to be here, but I have nothing to be ashamed of, as a wife or a cop.”

  When the doctor said he would abide by the determination of a psychiatrist as to her fitness for duty, she indulged herself in some cautious hope. Though it took several weeks to get an appointment, she was delighted when the man told her he’d recommend her restoration to full duty forthwith. A week after that, she started to get angry again. Two weeks later, when she went back to see the chief surgeon, she wasn’t allowed in. She began to call him every day to demand to know what was happening. She made calls to everyone she knew—Mrs. M., the PEA and the DEA, the Columbia Association, Reverend Bill. Ed Lennon pushed every Protestant he knew, Irish and otherwise, and Casper and Murtagh pulled all the Irish and Catholic strings at their disposal. Three weeks later, she was told that she was being sent back to the psychiatrist for reevaluation. When Marie saw him, at the end of July, he was angrier than she was, and he allowed her to hear him shout on the telephone as he took out his red pen and wrote in block capitals: TO BE RESTORED TO FULL DUTY, FORTHWITH. It was lovely and touching how many people believed in her. It would have mattered so much if it mattered at all. August passed without any news.

  Had Marie known she would have had the summer off, she might have been able to enjoy it. She finally asked her divorce lawyer to recommend a labor lawyer, who filed a notice of claim against the city just before Labor Day. The next day, someone from the union called to ask where she wanted to go. Marie was ready with her answer. The Property Recovery Squad worked on identifying fences and other traffickers in high-end stolen goods, from specialized machine parts to fine art. Peg Disco, who followed Mrs. M. as head of the Policewomen’s Bureau, had begun there as a third-grade detective and left as a first-grader. She told Marie that they let you alone there, that they let workers work. It would be perfect.

  22 YOU ARE WHERE YOU ARE

  We’re here, because

  We’re here, because

  We’re here, because we’re here!

  —Sung by British soldiers during the First World War to the tune of Auld Lang Syne

  AUGUST 30, 1969

  1930 HOURS

  Wh
en Marie had been at the Missing Persons Bureau for three years, she thought of something funny. After four more years, could she be declared dead? Not that she was complaining. She complained as infrequently as she joked. She never understood why she wound up here. She’d heard she almost went to the Property Clerk, instead of Property Recovery, and whenever she was bored, she reminded herself she could be logging bags of evidence at a warehouse in Brooklyn. She’d heard that the boss at Property Recovery had blocked her arrival—“I already had a woman here! Let somebody else take a turn!” She heard that someone downtown thought he was doing her a favor, getting her a desk job. Accident or sabotage or act of God, it didn’t matter. She’d long ago learned to be wary of department rumors. More than one person had asked her over the years, “Is it true you got into a shoot-out with your husband?”

  This wasn’t the way her career was supposed to end, she’d think, but then she’d realize that it hadn’t ended. The thought neither troubled nor comforted her. Missing Persons wasn’t the worst assignment. She was in the office at eight, and she was out by four. Three nights a week, she was a college student, studying poetry and sociology and art history. On balance, it wasn’t the worst trade-off. She didn’t love the Job anymore, and not just because it didn’t love her back. She didn’t need it as much as she used to, but she sometimes missed it like an old flame. Maybe I should report it missing, ha! Was half a life better than a double life? Nope. No jokes, no complaints. Those went with the old life, for worse and for better. Mostly, she was too busy for regrets.

  All of them were plenty busy at Missing Persons. On average, a detective caught fifteen cases a day. Fifteen a day meant seventy-five per week, three hundred a month. They typed and typed, and they made phone calls, and then they typed more. It was unusual to go outside to look for someone. Runaway daughters and husbands usually returned home, and other wanderers could sometimes be found, leading new lives in Mexico or Miami or Greenwich Village. Other cases were closed with morgue IDs. Every morning, there was a daily tally of who had washed up on shore, or had turned up DOA in alleyways or in flophouses, or who had keeled over in movie theaters or on city buses. There were homicides, suicides, car wrecks, and ever-higher numbers of overdoses. Corpses were matched with cases, male and female, black, white, and brown, with approximate ages and weights, particularities like scars, birthmarks, or tattoos, or—Jackpot!—dental records, X-rays, fingerprints. The reports went into folders, and the folders went into filing cabinets, and most were never seen again.

  Everyone who worked there was being taken care of, somehow. Many of the detectives were competent, but they needed the steady schedule to care for ailing wives or handicapped children; others were drinkers or bunglers who couldn’t hack it in the wider cop world. There were rebels and malcontents who had stepped on someone’s toes, deservedly or not, and though their abilities varied, their attitudes didn’t. There were more women than in most investigative units. By and large, they weren’t being punished, or put on a shelf; they were wives and mothers, drawn to the stability of the schedule. There was also a cohort of gal pals of chiefs and city councilmen who needed an assignment that entitled them to gold shields while keeping their evenings free. Marie wasn’t really a cop anymore.

  But she wasn’t a wife, either. Life had gone on, which wasn’t always such a sure bet. It was far better to be a divorcée in 1969 than it would have been ten years before. Women could get mortgages and credit cards without a man cosigning for them. The first two women sergeants, Gertrude Schimmel and Felicia Spritzer, were now Lt. Schimmel and Lt. Spritzer, and they were soon to be made captains. Not all the ladies at the DA’s office were secretaries. One even prosecuted homicides, although DA Hogan asked her to obtain written permission from her husband to do so. As for Marie, she was mostly content with college and wholehearted Mama-dom. Sandy was sixteen now, Baby Jim five, and Marie cherished her time with them. She’d been sad to see Katie move on, but she’d stood in the mother-of-the-bride spot at the wedding at Reverend Bill’s church on Bainbridge Avenue. Sandy was the flower girl, and Baby Jim carried the ring on a little pink pillow. Katie stayed in touch, even after she moved out west with her husband. Marie didn’t hire another housekeeper. She and Sandy would look after the baby and each other. For the first time, she wasn’t afraid in her own home, and she didn’t have to lie about what happened there.

  Marie didn’t worry about Sandy. What terrified her was the world her daughter walked out into every day. The way New York was destroying itself, there could have been a Manhattan Project dedicated to the ruin of Manhattan. Mayor Lindsay had campaigned like he was the second coming of Kennedy, a bold visionary who would usher in new age. On his first day in office, a transit strike shut down the city for twelve days. “I still think it’s a fun city,” he said. A teachers’ strike and a sanitation strike followed. In Brooklyn and the Bronx, a plague of arson left some blocks with more rubble-strewn lots and charred foundations than inhabited buildings. Corporation after corporation fled midtown for Houston, Stamford, Los Angeles. Who knew that all the new highways they built were for people to leave? There were plenty of jobs, but a million people were on welfare. Only fools ventured into parks after dark. Seven times as many robberies in four years! As he ran for reelection, Lindsay mostly talked about the war in Vietnam. He gave a city job to a man who’d gone to prison for plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty. A onetime ally said of him that he gave good intentions a bad name.

  Marie didn’t understand police work anymore. The mayor didn’t believe cops could do much about crime, and Commissioner Leary—an odd little man from Philadelphia who went home on weekends—didn’t prove him wrong. The race issue was tied up in everything. The debate about crime seemed to be an endless shouting match between people who didn’t use the word “Negro” in private and people who thought the cities deserved to burn. It was rumored that interrogations would soon be banned altogether. When a lunatic in Chicago slaughtered seven nurses, cops didn’t ask the killer a single question, as they feared it would lead to his release. The Supreme Court didn’t go that far when it reversed the conviction of a rapist in Arizona, but the Miranda decision still shocked the police. The rapist’s confession hadn’t been coerced; detectives had done what they were supposed to do, in the way they were supposed to do it. But the court decided that he should have been warned he didn’t have to talk at all. The new rule only affected the by-the-book types, of course. Why a cop inclined to beat a confession out of a suspect couldn’t beat him into signing a piece of paper escaped Marie. She wasn’t always sorry to be on the sidelines.

  The only time she was frustrated was when she was interviewed for promotion, after one of the second-grade shields became available. When the sergeant asked how many arrests she’d made in the past year, the answer wasn’t difficult: none. She didn’t get the promotion. That was expected. What wasn’t expected was that another girl in the office got it, the mistress of a captain. Marie didn’t dwell on it long. The message that life wasn’t fair had come across the teletype before.

  And Marie wasn’t troubled by the news that a new boss would be arriving, though Lt. Stackett’s reputation was grim. There was always anxiety with a change of management, but more than a few of her colleagues could use some toughening up. Whoever was used to coming in late would have to jump out of bed when they first heard the alarm; whoever favored a liquid lunch would be wise to take the pledge, for the time being. So what?

  On the day before the lieutenant was due, Marie’s phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line slurred, “You guys are getting Stackett, right?”

  “Yeah, so I hear. Who’s this?”

  “Who am I? I won’t say my name, but what I am, is the happiest cop on the Job. Except for everybody else who works with me. Stackett was our boss, and we’re having a party.”

  Marie smiled. Callers to the Missing Persons Bureau were rarely this lighthearted. “Well, he’s not here yet, so I don’t know how I can tell him about the
festivity, but—”

  “Listen.”

  No message followed. Marie cleared her throat.

  She suspected that the conversation wouldn’t be as much fun from here on in. “Hmm . . . you sound nice,” he said.

  “Thanks, buddy. You sound nice, too. But I have to get back to work, so—”

  “The party’s not for him. It’s against him. I mean, because he’s gone. A more vicious son of a bitch, you’ve never met. He had two guys fired, for no reason. One of them killed himself. If there’s anybody you can call to get out, call today. He’s an asshole. He’s an asshole’s asshole. If there was a convention of assholes, you know what they’d do?”

  “What?”

  “They’d wait until he left the room and then they’d say, ‘What’s up with him?’”

  Marie covered the mouthpiece so he wouldn’t hear her laughing. The caller’s sincerity was beyond dispute. “You remember Hitler? Adolf Hitler? The guy who—”

  “The name rings a bell.”

  “Stackett is a million times worse.”

  Still, Marie wasn’t unduly perturbed. She’d had experience with bad bosses. She doubted that the two cops who had been fired hadn’t done anything at all. When the dread lieutenant landed, he looked harmless enough—he had a rabbity look, bucktoothed and jumpy-eyed. He was in his late fifties, thin and atrophied, as if his last time he broke a sweat was doing jumping jacks in the police academy in 1936. After she had worked for Stackett for a few months, she forgot about how terrible he was supposed to be. No one was happy to be called into his office, and more than a few left it, fighting tears. He wasn’t fun to be around, but Marie saw no need to recall any jurors to Nuremberg, just yet. She didn’t think about him much at work, and she didn’t think about him at all after she left.