Policewoman Read online

  There was no theatrical quality to his words. He spoke them too calmly, too matter-of-factly.

  “Your whole lives are going to change, and the people closest to you are going to be the first ones to suffer from it. You will deal with the vilest and the lowest and the most depraved forms of humanity, and if you think you can walk away from it lily-pure, turn in your shields right now. Because it will touch you and rub off on you and become a part of you, and what shocks you now will become merely routine to you within a very short time. You will learn not to feel another person’s tears; you will learn that you are not your brother’s keeper; you will learn that another man’s troubles are not yours. You had better learn this, and the sooner the better.”

  The deputy inspector glared at us, his jaw jutting out. He was like some minister preaching a new and almost profane doctrine and defying anyone to cross him, to deny him. We sat staring back at him, a strong cord of fascination uniting us with him.

  “When you start working out in the field,” he said, encompassing us all with his quiet, rational voice, “you will find yourself judging the older, more experienced police officer. You will look at him and see that he is unmoved by what is happening around him; that he can examine a butchered or headless piece of a corpse with something like curiosity, and go to his meal an hour later and eat an egg sandwich and drink coffee and laugh and joke, and you will think he is some kind of monster. But you had better go along with him and eat your sandwich and drink your coffee and laugh and joke, and the sooner the better. You had better learn to develop that shell around you. We didn’t teach you about a shell here at the Academy, did we? Well, you have to learn that one for yourself. Develop a rotten, stinking shell, a hard, impenetrable shell against all emotions and all feelings. Your wife will notice it first, and your kids. I could tell you to leave it at the station house or in the squad room, but you won’t. You can’t, because you’re not going to be working with papers and numbers and words and figures. You’re going to be working with human beings, and you will see them at their worst and in their most terrible moments, and if you relax and let that wall around you crack for a moment, it will get hold of you and eat your guts out. Your wife will worry about you and learn to hate your job. There isn’t a policeman’s wife anywhere who likes her husband’s job or what it does to him. Your kids will find out that having a father who’s a cop is not like in the movies or the television stories. You will be quicker to jump on them, quicker to look for the warning signs in them, because you’ve seen what another man’s child has done. You will see what men are capable of doing, and I will tell you this: men are capable of every crime in the book.”

  His words were addressed to the men, but he had seen us, the policewomen, sitting there in the first row before him. He had seen us in one hard, scornful, open glance, and then had dismissed us. If he had his serious doubts and suspicions of the men before him, there was no question of his feelings toward the women present.

  His voice was not monotonous, but it was the words rather than his delivery of them that gave him a kind of blazing life. It was almost as though he were struggling to suppress some strong and urgent emotion which must be controlled with a soft voice, must not be allowed to slip from his lips in an unguarded moment.

  “Every man is capable of every crime, and there is no horrible, unimaginable crime. Every one of them has been committed in the past, and will be committed in the future. Think of that for a moment.” And he actually stopped speaking, and we actually thought about it for a moment, such was his command in that room.

  “Now,” he said, ending our train of thought which he had set in motion, “you are going to find out that the only brother you have in the world is your brother police officer; he is the only man in the world you can talk to who will understand you. Not your blood brother, whom you were raised with and lived with all your growing years. If he isn’t a cop too, you and he will be speaking about the same things to each other in different languages. You will have more in common with a village constable in a town of four hundred people than you will with your own brother because that village constable lives in the same world as the first-grade detective in any city in the world; he has seen people with the same eyes, the cop’s eyes. Most people are aware of the insularity of a police group; they give various interpretations to this insularity, mostly of a derogatory nature. But you will find, as you become police officers, that this is not only a natural development, but an essential one, because only a policeman, a working policeman, can understand the policeman’s language and the policeman’s world and the policeman’s life. It is foreign and incomprehensible to everyone else and it cannot be communicated to them.”

  The deputy inspector did not speak from any papers or cards; he spoke from some deep place within himself, almost from some great need to tell us these things, to communicate them to us, to let us know. That his manner and tone were far from ingratiating did not seem to matter; his rapport with us was complete. His tone never varied, except perhaps that it became softer; we leaned forward, listening harder.

  “You will gradually come to think in terms of two worlds, theirs (the general public’s) and ours, and you will come to recognize and accept the bitter fact that the average law-abiding citizen views us with a certain distaste. He feels it is his constitutional right to abuse us verbally. But you, on the other hand, must not return that hostility. We set you up, in your blue uniform, as a target for every crackpot and nut around. You are identified, you are a public servant, and the public expects service from those on its payroll. Accept this as part of the price you must pay for the job you do. Accept it and the fact that you are alone when you are working and the only guy who will stick his neck out for you is another cop. Don’t expect anything else from anyone else—it will not be forthcoming.

  “I am not going to tell you what your job is; you’ve had three months of the finest instruction of its kind in the world. But I will tell you that your job is not to judge either your fellow officer or the people you will arrest. Your major concern at this point in your career will be to adjust to the world you are about to enter. It is a definite, distinct, strange, terrible world, a familiar world, distorted out of all probability. Little by little, you will learn to focus on things that were invisible to you before. In years to come, you will look back on the time before you were a police officer and wonder how you could have existed in this very same city without seeing all the things you will have learned to see and to know.”

  The deputy inspector had dismissed my presence, but he was speaking directly to me; his words were formed and shaped and spoken to me, accepted by me, understood by me. It was as though, finally, finally, through all these weeks and days and hours of touching lightly on the fringes, finally, someone had stood up and spoken out, honestly, truly, told us. The deputy inspector hunched over the lectern; his voice for the first time seemed to grow weary. He cleared his throat, started out a little louder, then lowered his voice.

  “Tomorrow you will have a graduation day and the police commissioner and the mayor will come here and congratulate you and give out the various awards, and your families will be proud of you in your new navy blue uniforms with your shields shining as bright as they will ever be, and you will take pictures of each other.

  “And then, from your first tour on, you will begin, just begin, to learn what it is to be a policeman. Don’t think you know anything at all about it now. You’ve read the assignments and memorized the laws and procedures and rules and regulations and seen the exhibits and motion pictures and demonstrations and heard the lectures. You will find they translate very differently when put into action.

  “I don’t know how many of you here present today will continue on this job, or will advance through the ranks, take the tests, get the promotions, but get one thing straight, whatever your aims or goals may be: this is not a job, it is a whole way of life, and if you decide to live it, you will have to live it twenty-four hours a day for as long as yo
u are a police officer!”

  And then, Deputy Inspector George J. Harrington was done with us. With a cold look over the room, and one glimpse of unmistakable contempt in our direction—a look which must have caught poor Mary Leary right in the eyes, for she shuddered—he marched off the platform and exited through some door from whence he had come.

  There was an almost stunned silence in the room, a kind of unwillingness to begin, and even after the captain with the loud voice dismissed us, most of us just sat quietly, thinking or absorbing the words that had surrounded us like so many soft, quiet threats.

  “Jesus Christ,” a voice from the middle of the room rang out, “what a real sweet man that was!”

  There was a burst of relieved laughter, for this, now, could be handled, put in its proper place, laughed about. The remarks began flowing now, but underneath the crisp, fast, bright humor there was a certain, definite uneasiness. He had put it on the line, he had told us the way it was, and that could not be laughed or cursed or joked away. He had the look of a man who knew, and he had, for some reasons of his own, tried to tell us.

  2

  “Start to know it; start to live it”

  I WILL SAY THIS about the Police Department: they don’t fool around. You finish the training they allot to you and then you get down to work. You are placed where you are needed, and if you don’t feel adequately prepared for the assignment given, you prepare yourself adequately on the job.

  At the Academy, the 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. workday and the Monday through Friday work week were taken for granted. My first assignment was matron duty, midnight tour: you arrive on the job at 11:30 P.M., relieving the policewoman on the 4 to midnight shift a half-hour early, a traditional courtesy from which you benefit at 7:30 the next morning when the next girl comes on duty. The adjustments you have to make in your living arrangements are solely your concern. If you find it difficult to go to bed when you arrive home at 8:30 in the morning, that is a shame, but there you are. If you do manage to get to sleep and miraculously sleep until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, you begin to wonder what meal you are supposed to be eating, and then settle for a cup of tea to hold you until suppertime. I ate supper with Tony when he came home at 6 o’clock. I showered at 8 and prepared for my evening as he relaxed for his. He went to bed at 10:30 as I left for work, carrying a sandwich in my pocketbook, wondering what ever happened to breakfast.

  The duty chart had been explained to us and re-explained to us, but it still didn’t make much sense. It was impossible to figure how many actual days you worked when a day began at 12 midnight (wasn’t that “tomorrow”?) and ended when most people were beginning their workday. All I really knew was that Saturdays and Sundays were out, so forget about them. Sooner or later, as I advanced along the duty chart, I would find that I had week ends off—maybe even around Christmas, which would be nice, in a way.

  The precinct in Harlem to which I was assigned had only one resemblance to the 46th Precinct of my childhood: there were two green lanterns flanking the entrance. For the rest, it fitted in perfectly with its neighboring buildings: it was ancient, gray, musty, in dangerous repair, ugly, depressing and uncomfortable.

  My office, a dreary cubicle on the second floor, up an iron staircase screened with mesh, was fitted out with a battered couch—the kind psychiatrists use when relaxing people into a talking fit, a “captain’s chair,” scarred and yellow with chipping shellac, two nondescript wooden chairs, one regulation gray desk with a blackish rubber-like top and one small electric hot plate with a pot for boiling water. The policewoman whom I was relieving had sleep lines creased deep along her cheeks and the corners of her eyes, which she rubbed briskly. She stretched and then told me that the “guests” were sleeping; there were three women prisoners being detained for the night. I shouldn’t anticipate any problems with them: two were drunks and one was a prostitute—nothing very important. She indicated the couch, opened the bottom desk drawer and pulled out some ragged paperback books and told me to take life easy.

  Sitting alone in the room now, feeling the silence of the place, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I had made the entry in my memorandum book: on duty such and such a place, such and such a time, et cetera. And now, here I was: on duty. I fluttered through the pocket books. All stories about private detectives and beautiful but criminally inclined blondes or red-haired creatures of fantastic physical attainments. I decided to take a look at my charges, but worried that they might hear me and wake up. Finally, walking softly, feeling somehow an intruder, I unlocked the outer door and glanced in at the row of detention cells, counted three sleeping forms in the cells, then closed the door. I boiled a pot of water, then found there was only instant coffee, and made a mental note to bring in some tea bags. I looked out the window through the wiremesh guard, but the building faced on a brick wall. I walked to the doorway. The hall was deserted and soundless. There was a familiar smell in the building, reminiscent of all public buildings—a smell of people and shoes and old cigarettes and stale cigars and clothing and time. I walked quietly, feeling a vague sense of guilty invasion, toward the Detective Squad Room. There was a light on, a small fluorescent lamp glowing bluely on the surface of an empty desk; there was a hat on the rack and a small light shining from the inner office. I entered the room far enough to see a pair of feet on a cot in the inner office; then I turned and exited to the hall, nearly colliding with a big man, a Negro, whose hat was set back off his forehead. I caught my breath in a kind of embarrassment, intimidated by his face. He was regarding me without surprise, but with a certain narrowing of his dark, glinting eyes.

  “Looking for something?”

  “Yes,” I said, “the ... er, the ladies room.”

  He lifted one of the paper bags he was holding, clutched in a large hand the way a child holds a parcel. “We all use that one.” He indicated a room down the hall. “Just close the door and it’s a ladies room.”

  “I’m on duty here, I’m on matron duty,” I said, feeling some explanation, some excuse for my presence was indicated.

  “Yeah,” he said with a warm, rich amusement not touching his eyes, just playing around his mouth. My uniform, new, spotless, testified for me. “You want some coffee? We’ve got an extra container.”

  I shook my head and he went into the Detective Squad Room. That was all that happened my first night. I sat, I walked around, I read a few pages of each of the pocket books, I tried not to fall asleep, and then, finally, finally, it was morning and another policewoman relieved me. I had never even seen the faces of my prisoners.

  I arrived for my second tour, a Friday night—a Saturday morning, really, one minute after midnight changes the day—armed with a novel I’d been meaning to read for a long time, a box of tea bags and an extra pack of cigarettes. I had spotted a manicure set in the bottom drawer and intended to do a little grooming. The second floor was alive with sound: there were heavy male voices from the Detectives’ room, typing sounds, moving-around sounds. The policewoman on duty was battering away on an old typewriter, and she ground a cigarette into a loaded ash tray.

  “Boy, what a madhouse! Can you type?”

  I said that I could, and she stood up, pushing the chair away from the desk. “Boy, they expect you to be a secretary. I’m a hunt-and-find-and-hope-for-the-best kind of typist myself.” She looked like a hunt-and-find-and-hope-for-the-best type: her make-up curled up her lips unevenly, her hair was slightly lopsided and the little dabs of eyeliner were haphazard. She flexed her fingers, then rubbed them with quick, annoyed motions. “Listen, I’m typing up a report for Detective Harris. I just started, so maybe you’d take over, if you can read his handwriting. Also, if you can interpret. If this is English, then I’m Dutch, and my name is O’Leary, and I’m not Dutch.”

  “What’s all the commotion?” I asked, trying to be casual, but looking toward the door.

  Policewoman O’Leary bent heavily over her shoes, made some adjustment, then grunted as she sat upright “Oh, just a
Friday night in Harlem. You’ll get used to it. They got some kids in there—a knifing. Gang stuff, you know. Oh, and there’s some girls in there, but the J.A.B.’ll probably send someone around, they look pretty young.”

  About twenty minutes after she left, I was squinting over the remarkable wordings of Detective LeRoy Harris, wondering just how far I should go in my translation. There was no one in the detention cells, and the noises from down the hall were getting louder, though they were still incomprehensible. Detective Harris’ story was anything but vivid. “On information” they had picked up five boys, ages 17 to 20, on suspicion of knifing one Maceo Littlejohn Johnson, Jr., who was now confined to Harlem Hospital with seven knife wounds inflicted by person(s) unknown at approximately 8:30 P.M. on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 118th Street. The suspects were members of the Black Kings. Three girls, ages 16 to 18, were also picked up on suspicion. I was wondering what the author looked like when he appeared in the doorway. He resembled his handwriting: small, cramped, secretive. His voice was hollow, but at the same time had a harshness. He looked and sounded like a bookie.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, without any preliminaries, “you got that ready yet? The lieutenant is chewing my head off in there.”

  He didn’t seem to notice that I was not Policewoman O’Leary. “Just about ready. Are you Detective Harris?”

  He took the paper from my hand, nodded absently, then stopped at the door. “Oh, hey, thanks,” he whispered, without looking at me.

  And then I was left alone again, and an hour went by and the noise became louder. I felt very restless and resentful. It was all happening down the hall and somehow I felt I should know what was going on. At least someone should say something to me: I was a policewoman.