The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Though Marie told Charlie to just be herself with Gino, what she witnessed set her on edge. Charlie was doe-eyed and doting, and her hands seldom left him, fluttering adoringly from his hair to his hands, his cheek to his shoulders, like songbirds in a cartoon. The about-face from avenging angel to chirping cherub was stomach-churning for Marie, who also had to pretend affection, laughing at his jokes, nodding at his opinions about politics and baseball and whatever else. Gino had an infuriating habit of tossing out a line of conversation for Charlie to run with, then yanking it back after she took her first steps. “I can pick a horse, Marie, I got a sixth sense. Come to the track with me sometime, you’ll go home rich. Tell her, Charlie, tell her about Belmont, last week.”

  “Oh, that’s a sweet one. Last Friday, we went out, and on the racing form, I saw a horse called, of all things—”

  “She saw a horse called ‘Charlie’s Day,’ but it was fifty-to-one. There was another one, ‘Pleasant Dreams,’ and I live on Pleasant Avenue. Besides, I got a friend at the track, and I already know it’s the horse to pick. The funny thing was, what I heard him say was ‘peasant-something,’ ’cause there was all this noise in the background. So when it turns out to be ‘pleasant,’ I figured it had to be. A sixth sense, and a friend at the track, that’s how I do it.”

  Marie nodded, a rapt expression on her face. Gino had to remain a little hopeful, a little hungry for her; without the enticement of sex, there was no reason for him to see her again. The smell of smoke always, but only smoke; never fire.

  When they left the restaurant, Gino stripped a bill from a wad of fifties to pay the check. Marie shook Gino’s hand and kissed Charlie goodbye. After she turned to leave, she heard him remark, “Not a bad caboose, either.”

  Charlie must have pinched or punched him, because he offered a jovial protest: “Hey! Take it easy, baby! You know you’re one of a kind!”

  Charlie was indeed a rare bird. No other gal pal was a partner or even a party to the drug schemes of Gino’s crew. If the couple met another gangster at a nightclub, the men would excuse themselves from the table if business needed to be discussed. She had been with Gino for two years, but it was only in the last few months that she’d joined him with the deliveries. Marie didn’t have that kind of time, and she’d never earn that kind of trust. She really had no idea what she expected to accomplish. She’d show up, shut up, listen, and smile. The project had begun with such ambition, bandying talk about shipments from Marseilles and Beirut, but what they’d gotten their hands on so far hadn’t filled a sugar bowl.

  Ah, the sugar bowl! An interesting afternoon that had been, at Flegenheimer’s. It still smarted that Marie’s part hadn’t just been overlooked; it had been erased. She understood the reasons for her invisibility.

  She couldn’t work a case against Gino if she was in an article about his customer’s arrest. And she couldn’t help but smile when she remembered how one of the papers ran with the story the next day.

  COPS FOIL DOPE-DINER ROBBERY

  Mystery Beauty Sought

  Paddy was quoted extensively: “There was a very pretty girl there. New in town. She asked me about the sights. Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, I told her. She didn’t know I was a cop. I guess I just got one of those faces. Trustworthy.”

  Marie threw the newspaper across the room, and it took some time to put the pages back together. Her hands shook so that she had to leave the paper on the kitchen counter to continue reading: “When these thugs busted in, they came from behind. One with a gun, one with a knife. I hate to admit it, but they got the jump on me. Not on this gal, though. She was fast as a jackrabbit, and she saved my life.”

  The sudden injection of fact into the fable startled Marie. She really had saved him, she supposed. It had happened so quickly, and she’d left so soon afterward. It still felt like he was trying to flatter her, sending her messages in the newspaper as he’d done with the jukebox. As she read on, she realized that she wouldn’t have to recalibrate her assessment of a newly honest Paddy: “What she did, it’ll be with me ’til my dying day. The one guy yells out, ‘Gimme the sugar!’ and this little lady picks up the pot. I’ll never forget what she said—‘How’d you like some coffee with that?!’”

  He never did know when to stop, did he?

  “She sure knew how to handle herself. I wish she stuck around, so I could thank her. Somehow I don’t think I’ll see her again.”

  And why was that, pray tell?

  “She was a stewardess, here on a layover.”

  Marie threw the paper across the room again. She had the house to herself, now that Sandy had left for school. Friday was not her usual day off. She had briefed Mrs. M. after she’d left Flegenheimer’s, rushing back to headquarters from the Village. Marie would be home until Tuesday, at least; Mrs. M. had conferred with Inspector Carey at Narcotics, and they had decided that she should make herself scarce for a while, so she wouldn’t be associated with the arrest. Carey had sent someone to deliver her uniform to the Policewomen’s Bureau, in case a cagey reporter decided to stake out the office for the “mystery beauty.”

  “Whatever you say, Mrs. M., but I don’t like to burn up my vacation. I don’t have plans to go to Paris. It’s just in case Sandy gets sick or something.”

  Marie had enough time banked to stay home the rest of the year, but she was as thrifty with her minutes as her father was with his nickels, especially since she wasn’t paid for half the overtime she worked.

  “I understand. Inspector Carey will have you signed in, on ‘special assignment’ for those days. Call on Tuesday morning, to see if he wants you then.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. They work in mysterious ways in that office.”

  Marie had become accustomed to increasing degrees of freedom at work. The kindergarten regimentation of matron duty was behind her—so it seemed, and so she prayed—and she was able to make her own hours as she saw fit. Some pickpockets worked the morning rush, and some degenerates didn’t get out of bed before the afternoon matinees. She worked all over the city, calling in to report on duty or off from where she had to be, rather than making extra trips downtown to sign the attendance ledger. That was the adult way to handle things, of course, but it wasn’t how the department managed its men, its patrolmen especially. From what Marie had picked up in her precinct travels, there was a fair amount of hide-and-seek by beat cops and their sergeants—at least with the lazier cops, and the stiffer bosses, who tended to bring out the worst in one another. Still, to be told to stay at home while being paid to work seemed thrillingly criminal. “If you say so, Mrs. M.”

  “Also, I’d like you to take down my home telephone number. Call me at any time. Good news or bad, I’d rather hear it from you first.”

  That confidence was heady as well. Before, Marie had always reached the inspector through the switchboard at headquarters when there was some urgent matter to be discussed. She was touched by the trust, and suddenly alarmed as well; was this a kind of farewell? Marie had always hoped—was determined—that the day would come when she’d leave the Policewomen’s Bureau. But the notion that the day had already arrived, that it was already over, felt unwelcome, even unfair. Was she saying goodbye, here and now? And then Marie realized that she might be getting ahead of herself.

  “Thank you, Mrs. M. I can’t thank you enough. All of this is so sudden. What do you think? Do you think I might wind up staying at Narcotics?”

  Mrs. M. looked down and then away, toward the window. It almost seemed as if she were grieving.

  “Do you want me to stay? I’ll stay if you need me here.”

  That brought a smile to Mrs. M.’s face. “Of course I want you to stay, dear! And, of course, you won’t. Not forever. What happens in Narcotics is out of my hands, and likely out of yours. I don’t doubt your work will be exemplary. They’ve routinely borrowed my girls, just like the other commands that need undercovers. You’ve done a number of gambling cases, haven’t you? But you’v
e always come back after a week or two. Frankly, I’d refuse the requests if I could. I’m tired of them calling me like they’d call the Automobile Club if their car battery died. These commands need women. And women deserve to be assigned to them.

  “My dream for the Policewomen’s Bureau is for it to go away. Matrons could be assigned to precincts, and many women will gravitate naturally to more motherly areas, such as working with juveniles. But there are no women in any of the precinct detective squads. None in Robbery, none in Homicide. One of my predecessors, Mary Sullivan, spent three weeks in jail befriending a female murder suspect. That was in the 1920s. No other woman has been assigned to Homicide since! That will change, and I hope you’ll be part of that change. As things are, however, I have to look out for my girls, and to speak up for them. I’m not as irrelevant as I aspire to be.

  “I’m not sure if I told you, but I have decided to return to school, for a master’s degree at City College. My subject will be, perhaps unsurprisingly, our profession. Much as I wish this might be our last day together, my dear, I’m afraid we may be seeing more of each other.”

  When Marie arrived back in Yonkers that night, her evening threatened to be eventful as well. It was past six when she pulled into the driveway, prettily littered with leaves from the oaks and elms that canopied the streets. She’d rake them over the weekend and play campfire with Sandy when they burned the piles. The driveway was behind the house, which was on an odd piece of property, sharply sloping in the front, with steep slate steps cutting down through a tangle of pachysandra; the backyard didn’t back up against another yard, as others did in the neighborhood, but a street. Marie loved the place, though the house had been sold to her as “Tudor moderne,” and she’d since found out that it was a Craftsman.

  Sid’s car was there. The sight dismayed her, as if it were an ambulance in the driveway. Why wasn’t he out celebrating? Two or three nights a week, he was home late, if he was home at all. She reproached herself for being alarmed. She’d become more adept at managing him lately—Show up, shut up, listen, smile—and there shouldn’t be any reason to fear; his day had been one of accolades and applause. No act of valor had occurred on Depot Place, but he didn’t know that she knew. Still, the loss of the esteem in which she briefly held him left her with less than when she began, as if she’d bounced a check. She remained on guard.

  When Marie opened the back door, Sid was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a can of beer. She noted the ashtray with six or seven crushed butts piling up inside. He’d been there for some time. His fedora was on the table. He was in his midnight-blue silk suit, the jacket on the back of the seat beside him, so it wouldn’t wrinkle. He looked dashing, and he looked dangerous. Marie smiled. “Hey, honey!”

  Beyond that, she wouldn’t venture any comment or question, no matter how innocuous. Not, “What a wonderful ceremony!” Not, “What was the commissioner’s office like?” Not even, “Go out and have fun, you deserve it!”

  Sid looked at her steadily, his gaze varying between the appraising and accusatory. He was using the silence to his advantage: You know what you did. If you didn’t, you’re even stupider than I thought. There was no audience here, no one for whom they needed to maintain any appearance of civility, although the sound of the TV in the living room suggested that Sandy wasn’t far away. That sometimes helped.

  Marie laid her uniform over the back of a kitchen chair and sat down across from her husband. The table was circular, white Formica with gold flecks. She noted the salt and pepper shakers in the center of the table, white ceramic with a pale blue windmill design. It had become a habit to evaluate her surroundings for potential weaponry. She wasn’t sure if the tactic was something she’d picked up at work and brought home, or the reverse, but it had become second nature. A coffeepot had served nicely, hours before. She put it out of her mind that both she and her husband carried guns.

  Marie smiled again and took a breath. If Sid had something to tell her, she’d wait for him to say it. In the meantime, she put her mind to work: Sid had come home to change, obviously, and he might have had a nap as well. Had he sent the babysitter home? Yes, most likely. She smiled again and looked at Sid. He was getting ready to speak.

  “You got a call.”

  “Really? From who?”

  “A guy.”

  Sid seemed more sullen than angry. Though Marie was curious about what he’d say next, she stuck to the program and kept her mouth shut.

  “Were you expecting any calls?”

  “No. Who was it?”

  Sid went on, “Guy named Paulie.”

  Marie nodded. And? At least it hadn’t been Paddy who had telephoned. Sid might not have appreciated his sense of humor. But where was this going? She hadn’t known Sid to be jealous before. Controlling and demeaning, yes, but both knew that Marie was as likely to be unfaithful as she was to be a Soviet spy. And yet the nature of these arguments had never been matters of logic.

  “He said he has your shoes.”

  Marie was at a loss. What was Sid trying to make of this? She thought of Cinderella and her missing glass slipper. Except Marie had lost two flat-soled clodhoppers of petrified horsehide. Such was her version of the fairy tale. Marie replied in a soft, even tone. “I must have left them at the First, after matron duty.”

  “Is that what happened? Unbelievable. It’s just unbelievable! You really think you’re something special, don’t you?”

  Marie still didn’t know what she’d done. But even if she offered abject and absolute contrition, if she pled guilty to this offense and whatever might offend him in the future, her apology would resound in his ears as shouted obscenities. He translated what she said into a language she didn’t recognize.

  “I didn’t ask for you to be there today. I didn’t want you there.”

  Marie didn’t have to tell him that Inspector Melchionne had orchestrated her attendance; he already knew that. And for her to say that she’d have been just as happy to skip the ceremony would not have been well received.

  “What made you bring your goddamned sister, with her wise remarks? The mouth on her! ‘It’s in Brooklyn, there’s a bridge, so you don’t have to swim.’ If her husband was a man, he’d have cracked her in the mouth, a long time ago. A woman won’t open her trap to show how smart she is if she’s missing teeth.”

  Marie tried not to cringe at the recollection. Dee should have known better, even if the jibe had come across as casual cattiness, rather than a threat of exposure. Sid had laughed at the time, as did his friends. None knew that Marie knew that the Medal of Valor should have been a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And she still couldn’t guess what it had to do with Paulie and the missing shoes.

  “Your sister, I don’t expect much of her. She’s not my problem. Thank God.”

  Marie could imagine Dee’s response to that. “Thank God” would not have sufficed as a prayer of gratitude; novenas would have been offered, night and day. Marie needed to get Dee’s voice out of her head. It would only make things worse. She supposed she should be grateful that he seemed to be arriving at his point of contention. Her curiosity, at least, would soon be satisfied.

  “But you? My own wife? One day I get as a cop, when they want to make a big deal about something I did. Did I ask for it? No. Me, I go about my business. I do what I can. Day by day. Not looking for attention, not looking for a pat on the back or my name in the papers. Just a paycheck. That’s good enough for me.”

  Marie tentatively dipped her head. A nod, barely—agreeing with him, but only if he wanted to see it that way.

  “So, I decide to do the right thing. Even when your boss swoops in to take charge of everything. She’s a nice lady, nice to you—I don’t argue with that, she means well—but she sticks her nose where it don’t belong. Why is she getting involved with me? Did she ask me? Do I want to get marched upstairs to stand next to that prick Kennedy, who hates cops? Who wakes up every morning and asks, ‘Who do I eat for breakfast today?’ Stand
ing next to him, for the picture, I smiled like I had a gun to my head. Why did you let her do that to me?”

  Nothing, nothing, nothing. There was nothing Marie could say.

  “And I thought that was the worst part. That the rest of the day, it would be good, it would be fun. Nope. Not with my wife! Can she let it alone? Can she let this one goddamned day just finish, so it’s mine—one day for me in the police department? When I get the goddamned Medal of Valor? No, she can’t let it go. She can’t. It isn’t in her, to let it go. To just let it be a nice, simple, happy day for me.”

  Here it was, it was coming. It was new for Sid to talk about her as if she weren’t there, to call her “she” as if he were telling the story later, to someone else. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  “No! That’s not enough for her! Nothing’s ever good enough for my wife. She has to go out and call attention to herself. Today, of all days, she has to volunteer for Narcotics. Today, of all days, she finds guys there who—all of a sudden!—want to work with a broad. Today, she sets up a stickup, and a dope bust. Guns going off and hot coffee for everybody! And how your new boyfriend goes on about you—‘She handled herself like she’s in gunfights every day, takes care of business and disappears out the back door.’ That’s what he says. ‘There’s gonna be a big deal in the press, but she don’t mind being left out of the story.’ That’s what he says to me! ‘Getting the job done, that’s all a real cop cares about.’ Like I was looking for attention with my goddamned Medal of Valor!”

  Now Sid was shouting, and Marie was trembling. What pained her was that she was able to follow the thread of reason in his tirade. It made so much more sense than most of them. She really wished Paulie hadn’t called, to let her know that her shoes were safe.

  “I don’t know how you can stand yourself. You ought to be ashamed. Don’t think I don’t see right through you.”

  And then Sandy came running in from the living room, calling out, “Mommy? Mommy, are you home? Daddy, is Mommy home?”