The Policewomen's Bureau

by Edward Conlon

  Union Square Park was sad and seedy, three blocks long, one block wide, bordered by old loft buildings and lower-end department stores— Klein’s, Ohrbach’s. Inside were statues of Washington and Lincoln and the Marquis de Lafayette, and dozens of hopheads and winos who didn’t move much more than the statues. The thieves could cop here and shoot up in plain sight on a park bench—the mother-with-stroller crowd didn’t favor the place—but these were men with empty pockets. Marie found a spot on 14th and watched Al move counterclockwise at a sleepwalker’s pace around the park. Marie was starting to get impatient. It wasn’t late—not even two-thirty—but she didn’t want to miss the lieutenant, in case he left early. What was with these junkies? Steal something already, wouldja! She couldn’t believe there was much opportunity in the park, unless they planned to rip off the dealers, and they didn’t seem the roughneck type. She decided to drive ahead, to scout out the prospects, and see what might catch their eye before they did. All of their guardian angels could wrestle to see who’d have the lucky day. She looked at Ed, pale and fretful. Just this once, she wished he wasn’t a Protestant.

  Just off Union Square West, she saw a shiny new silver Pontiac Catalina pull up short and double-park. A woman got out from the passenger side, slamming the door—“If you think I’m gonna go with you now!”—and marched across the street. And then an actual, legit parking space opened up in front of Marie. She moved in to watch the man from the Catalina get out to follow—“Honey, would you listen to reason!”—and leave the door open. A new car, the engine running.

  Too easy? No, she shouldn’t even think it. Too late: the driver raced back, snatched the car keys, and shut the door before resuming his pursuit of his lady friend. Too easy, indeed. But the Catalina wasn’t locked. What was inside? It wouldn’t hurt to look, would it? Marie popped out before Ed could react. “Marie, where the hell are you—”

  “Gimme ten seconds, I just gotta check.”

  And no more than half a minute passed before she was back, preempting Ed’s protest by slapping his shoulder. “Don’t even start! I won’t run after anybody, I won’t fight anybody, I won’t do anything, okay? But the car’s unlocked, with a back seat full of suitcases and a fur coat. This is the last stop for these two characters, believe me. And if I’m wrong, we’ll call it a day. We’ll head back to the office. Okay?”

  Ed didn’t answer, and Marie was afraid to look at him. They’d never even disagreed over where to eat lunch before. Another whirlwind of leaves and newspapers ascended in the sky. She didn’t know how much longer she could avoid talking to Ed. How much longer before she had to go to the bathroom? Luchow’s was nearby. Was she hungry enough for a potato pancake, so soon after lunch? Maybe she was.

  And then she saw the thieves saunter up to the Catalina, and her faith in their criminal abilities was restored. One pushed in a back vent window, while the other tested the driver’s door, but they were both inside at the same time. They left seconds later, suitcases in hand. The small one had a fur coat over his shoulder.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” Ed growled, sounding so much like a stickup man that Marie expected to feel the barrel of his gun against her ribs. He left the car to limp across the street, and she saw Al move from where he lurked behind a statue. Marie saw the point where they’d all meet—Ed from behind the thieves, Al from the side—and the two feeble semi-invalids would collide against two determined professionals. Or vice versa. When Ed came from behind the taller one, he whirled around and flung the coat on Ed’s head, covering it like a sack, and punched and punched away. Ed collapsed, and the man kicked him in the head. The other swung the suitcase at Al—a small, hard plastic valise—knocking the gun out of his hand. Al lurched to the side and seemed to shiver and buckle, as if having a fit, but then he snapped back up like a car antenna and lunged at his perp. They fell to the ground, thrashing and grappling. Ed didn’t move at all. The fur coat covered his face like a shroud. Marie sprinted into the park. Al pinned his perp and looked up at her, jerking his head toward the path where the other one jackrabbited. “Get him!”

  Marie ran back to the car without checking on Ed. He lay so still that her heart misgave her. Al was there, and there was only one thing Marie could do for him, alive or dead—she’d make the perp pay. The car was still there, thank God, its door open, keys dangling in the ignition. She stiff-armed the horn and stamped on the gas pedal, cutting across the street to mount the curb onto the sidewalk. She didn’t bother to yell, “Police!” No one would have believed her, even if they heard.

  The perp had made for the parking lot in the north end of the park, and in seconds Marie was within fifty yards of him, forty. She steered with her left hand and held her gun in her right, looking for her shot. When she was almost on top of him—thirty yards, twenty—he doubled back, using the row of parked cars as a barrier. She sped fifty yards in reverse and stopped the car short. This was it. She raised her revolver and gripped it with both hands. She breathed in and out, to steady herself, and aligned her target in the sights. She aimed for the space between cars where the perp would pass her, in a second, for less than a second. She’d have him, she could—No. The space was too small, the time too short. What then? She got out of the car, pointed the gun in the air, and fired a warning shot.

  The perp skidded to a halt, staggering, unsure where to run, if he could run, if he’d been hit. He was in the space where Marie knew he’d pass, and he stayed there. She saw his knees shake and his rib cage heave, desperate for air. He looked at her, watching the gun in her hand descend to aim at him. She saw his face then. His hair was just long enough to show the softness of the curl, and his moustache was trimmed, two dashes above his lip. With his high, wide cheeks and long, aquiline nose, he was darkly glamorous, like a Sheik of Araby. He looked at her with heartbreak in his eyes. And then Marie saw his leg dip, to push off the pavement to run. If a felon ran, a cop could shoot. Marie shot at him. She shot again.

  The windshield of a Buick Rivera shattered behind him, but he was gone, cutting east, and Marie jumped back in the car, gunning it in reverse to block his exit into the street. Now he ran west, in a low, loping crouch, head down. Again, she almost had him when he darted between cars and bolted onto Broadway, running uptown, against traffic. Waving her gun out the window, she managed to clear a lane of oncoming cars, provoking a resounding cacophony of horns and screams.

  “Wrong way!”

  “She’s got a gun!”

  “Wrong way, you crazy lady!”

  “You’re going the goddamn wrong way, you stupid b—”

  When she saw him turn on 18th, against traffic again, she forced her way into the intersection. The sight that met her was so unexpected, so welcome, that she almost cried: an empty street. No cars were coming! All the angry noises faded from her ears, and her mind became still as a chapel. The man hid behind a parked truck, and then he dashed along the building line. Marie floored it to speed past him, bouncing up onto the sidewalk and cutting him off with three thousand pounds of battered steel. He stumbled over the hood and tried to scramble over it, but his sweat-slicked hands found no purchase on the hot metal. Marie jumped out, seized a fistful of his shirt, and began to pound on his head with the butt of her gun: Thuk! Thuk! Thuk! The fabric began to tear, but she could feel the strength leave his body with each blow. When he collapsed on the hood of the car, holding his hands up, she stopped hitting him. “Move and I’ll put one in you.”

  His head shook. It could have been a nod. After Marie cuffed him, she could barely stand. She hopped up on the hood and sat beside him as he lay prone, panting.

  “I think you already did,” he said, his voice weak but level.

  “What?”

  “You shot me.”

  “Where?”

  “On the arm, the shoulder.”

  Marie looked down at his right side, the nearer one. She didn’t see any blood, aside from where she’d wiped off her gun. “Get out of here. You’re fine.”

  �
�No, the other side,” he persisted. For the first time, there was the slightest note of complaint in his tone. Marie didn’t get up to check. It couldn’t have been too bad. It hadn’t slowed him down. “What’s your name?”

  “Oliver. Theodore Oliver. What’s yours?”

  “Marie.”

  That was enough small talk for now. She closed her eyes for a moment—just for a moment—and thought about Ed. It saddened her that her last words with him might have been quarrelsome. It sickened her that they might have been last words. She heard sirens in the distance. Would she have to tell his wife? Marie had never met Mrs. Lennon. She and Al should tell her together, she supposed. She kept her eyes shut, just for a moment more.

  When she opened them, she saw Ed staggering toward her. Sweat streamed down his pallid face, and he seemed to have aged twenty years in the last twenty minutes. Had it been twenty minutes or two since she’d seen him? He opened his mouth, but he was out of breath. His face was too wasted for her to see any emotion, whether anger or relief. He climbed up on the hood of the car with her. Marie remembered Moriarty’s jibe when they’d arrived at his squad room with Mickey Burns, on their first day: I heard you were dead, Eddie. Is it true? She was so happy it wasn’t. One day, they’d joke about it. Not just yet, though. She fanned herself with her leopard-print fedora.

  Sirens sounded all around, and patrol cars began to fill the block, from both directions. Ed unclipped his gold shield from his belt and held it up like a lantern, so that they’d know what he was, even if he still couldn’t talk. When Marie didn’t take out hers, Ed cocked his head at her—Why don’t you? You should! Marie shrugged. What’s the point?

  She smiled at the notion that she and Ed still weren’t talking. There was no need. They were good again. She felt an irritation in her chest and reached inside her dress to pull out a handkerchief from one bra cup, then the other. Ed watched her, shaking his head, and then he started to laugh. What the—? Sweat dripped from his brow. Marie offered him one of the handkerchiefs, and he mopped his forehead. This wasn’t the time to explain the trick she’d learned from Frau von Trapp. One less secret to keep, anyway. She felt better already. The hills are alive, with the sound of music . . . Marie took out her shield and held it up. Ed took it from her hand and switched it with his, so he’d have the silver, and she’d have the gold.

  FIVE

  BREAKS IN THE ACTION

  17 YOUR WORLD IS NOT THE WORLD

  Tutto a posto, niente in ordine.

  —Italian adage

  JULY 18 1964

  1430 HOURS

  While Marie was confined to her home, from that last, lunatic day in October through the spring, it seemed as if an age had passed. The world had begun to seem unsafe, unsound, in ways she had never felt before.

  The president had been murdered. Marie was so proud to have met him. To have shaken his hand, to have seen his green eyes. She was glad to have helped protect him, in some small way, for a few hours. It made her feel less futile, less alone. And there was comfort in how one-hearted the nation became, resolute throughout the ordeal. Young and old, black and white, were equal in grief. You could almost believe people would try to make sense of the senselessness by trying to put things right, to make the world fairer, safer. Maybe it was stupid to believe that, but it wasn’t wrong to hope.

  A few months later, in March, there was another murder, much closer to home, that seemed to put the lie to that hope. A twenty-eight-year-old girl named Kitty Genovese came home from her job managing a bar, late at night, to her apartment in Queens. The neighborhood was middle-class, the houses prettily built in English styles, safe and stable, even dull. After she parked her car, a hundred feet from her door, Kitty was set upon by a man named Winston Mosely, who chased her down the street and stabbed her in the back. She screamed, “Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me!” Mosely fled when a man in a seventh-story apartment yelled out the window, “Leave that girl alone!” She staggered toward home, but she couldn’t get inside the locked lobby door. Ten minutes later, Mosely found her where she had fallen. He stabbed her again—seventeen times in all—and raped her as she was dying. When Mosely was arrested, he confessed to other burglaries and rapes, and two more murders. He’d never been in trouble with the law before. He had a good job, a wife and two kids. When asked if he feared being seen by neighbors, he replied, “Oh, I knew they wouldn’t do anything. People never do.”

  Marie couldn’t remember reading a single bit of good news all those months when she was home. No one seemed to be in charge in the city, and it seemed to be a meaner place by the day, angrier, colder, more crowded. They tore down Penn Station, turning a palace of pink marble into a pile of rubble, but they couldn’t fill a pothole. Crime was going up. Schools, subways, and just about everything else was breaking down. In the spring, no one cared about the World’s Fair in Queens, aside from the civil rights protesters who blocked the entrance. There were five days of riots in Harlem after a white cop killed a black teenager who came at him with a knife. More and more people talked about leaving.

  Still, Marie knew better than to believe everything in the papers. Her pursuit in Union Square was splashed in all of them. The Daily News had a page-one banner, LADY COP CLUBS DOWN LOOTER. MOM-TO-BE LEADS GUN CHASE. The photo showed her with Theodore Oliver in the precinct, standing behind him as he sat in a chair. She’d looked at it often—too often, maybe. She was glad she’d worn her fedora. The leopard pattern popped, even in the shadowy newsprint. Her dress was a bit dressier than her usual undercover attire, as she hadn’t planned on getting her hands dirty. Her gun and holster had been shifted from her right hip to the left. The picture was staged, and a captain from headquarters told her to do what the photographers wanted. It was her face that perplexed her, its waxen blankness. Was it the image of intrepid resolve? More like a KO’d prizefighter, flat on his back after the bell rang, smelling salts shoved under his nose: How’d I do, Coach? Did I win?

  Theodore Oliver was posed like a hunting trophy. There was no ambiguity to his expression—he seemed to be in agony, clutching his wounded shoulder, the left sleeve of his white T-shirt torn. But his suffering was just as phony as Marie’s stoicism. The medics had cut the sleeve, and the wound was a scratch. Oliver had been arrested a dozen times before, and he knew the routine. He’d be in jail for a couple of months, at most. All the hubbub was a welcome distraction, and he was a better sport about sitting this way or that, making faces for the cameras, than she had been.

  When she got home that night, Marie went into the living room and sat down heavily on the couch. She knew Mrs. M. would have been proud of her at the press conference: “Yes, I get scared sometimes, but I know the boys are always there to back me up.” That was sticking to the script, wasn’t it? No need to dance for detectives at the Hotel Astor to prove her real cop-real lady bona fides if she could pop out a baby after pistol-whipping a man. She was ready for a good long rest, but she worried she’d be forgotten by the time she got back to work. Until the papers came out, she wasn’t sure she’d be the hero of the story. Maybe people would be angry she’d worked through her seventh month. Ed hadn’t been happy with her. Maybe she’d be lucky if people forgot her.

  Katie greeted her warily. “Is everything all right?”

  Some time passed before Marie realized she hadn’t answered. “Sorry, Katie. It’s been a day.”

  “The radio said a lady police shot someone. I figured it was you.”

  “Yeah, that was me. Did I tell you I was pregnant, Katie?”

  “No, but I overheard a few . . . conversations.”

  “Does Sandy know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you think she’ll be happy about it?”

  “Of course! Nothing could make her happier.”

  “Today was my last day at work. I’ll be home for the next eight months.”

  Katie nodded. “I don’t know what’s customary, Marie—”

  “‘Congratulation
s’ is what people say here,” Marie replied absently. “What do you say in England?”

  “We say that if service has been satisfactory, two weeks’ notice and references upon request are . . .”

  Marie flinched. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Marie, but it’s Friday, and I won’t be able to contact an agency, or put a notice in the paper. It only seems fair—”

  Katie began to sob, and Marie began to laugh, leaping up to hug her. How could she ever think she was being fired?

  “Why would you ever—”

  You say things—maybe to yourself, I never know—things like, ‘We’ll just have to make do with less.’ And the other day, you said, ‘Some big changes have to be made.’”

  “I must have been talking to myself. Of course I want you to stay! I need you!”

  Marie couldn’t blame the papers for why Katie got this story wrong. This was what happened in a house full of half-secrets. The clamor drew Sandy downstairs. “What is it? What happened?”

  Marie was laughing and crying when she looked up. “Come on down here, honey.”

  Sandy stopped, trembling. “Is somebody dead?”

  Marie was so overwhelmed by the silliness and the seriousness of it all that she jumbled the answer badly. “No, honey, Mommy only shot him in the shoulder.”

  There followed a scream from the stairs. “It wasn’t Daddy, was it?”

  Poor everybody! After all the tears were dried, Marie sat Sandy down on the couch to explain that everything was fine. Really, better than fine! Mommy would be in a lot of newspapers tomorrow, and everything was wonderful. At the end, Marie had comforted herself as much as she had Sandy. And then Sid burst in, with roses and champagne.

  “Honey! I heard about what happened. Are you okay?”

  Sandy rushed to grab him, squealing with enthusiasm, and Marie met his look of bafflement with a smile and a stage-whispered Tell-you-later. She pointed to her stomach and mouthed, “They know.” Katie giggled, and Sid smiled, and Marie felt a rush of warmth as she saw them all together, a real family. Better than a real family, a TV one, bumbling through conspiracies that were all the funnier when they failed. Sid took them out to a diner by the raceway. He snuck in the champagne and made everyone have a sip, even Sandy, because it was such a special night. And it was. They weren’t pretending, and they weren’t not-pretending. Marie could live like this for a while, she thought. And she did.