She had used a fictitious name, and we had no photographs at police headquarters to aid in identification. Catherine would probably have got clean away if she hadn’t become careless. In Wanamaker’s store, several weeks afterward, she attempted to pass a ten-dollar check signed by William A. Jones, a well-known New York lawyer who had defended her in a case some years before. Her haste to leave with a pair of corsets she had purchased and the balance of the check in cash attracted the attention of a woman store detective. The police were called and I made the arrest.
Then the complaints. Catherine’s photograph and description appeared in the newspapers and the cat was out of the bag. Siegel & Cooper, Abraham & Straus, Macy’s, O’Neill’s and a dozen more big department stores and hotels turned up with bogus paper.
Judge Cornell and veteran court attendants, accustomed to the queer hodge-podge of characters a police court can produce, were amazed when they saw a well-dressed, composed woman who stood in the dock accused of as many crimes as an expert confidence man. It was hard to believe that she had spent five years in a Massachusetts prison, but she had. The records didn’t lie.
The detectives of my station, were able to perform another service for the department stores about this time.
Mashers hung out in every large department store and women were making complaints in great numbers. Siegel & Cooper, busy all day with throngs of women shoppers, was a particular field for those annoyers. They were bold and free, jostling and handling women who passed them in the crush of the store.
The management appealed to the police, and I went up there with another detective. I don’t like mashers, and never have, and I enjoyed the work we had to do. We provided ourselves with long hat pins with the sharpest possible points, and circulated in the crowds. Every time a man reached out his hand toward a woman, he got his. We’d slip up behind him and jab the hat pins into the tenderest part of his body. As the fellow set up a howl, we’d grab him and rush him out the door. At the station he’d get plenty more. A little of that treatment was enough. Mashers began to behave themselves in the stores.
Yes, things were looking up. Then some one threw a monkey-wrench into the works! My good luck turned to bad. Fourteen detectives, including myself, were transferred by Commissioner Bingham and scattered all over Greater New York. We were accused of taking money from gamblers and poolroom keepers. The Allen, a pool-room and gambling-house keeper, was supposed to be the go-between. Eddie Riordan, a county detective, had supplied the information to the district attorney and police commissioner. We were all marked down for pernicious activity — and were in bad.
They transferred me from the Sixteenth to the Eighth Precinct. Out on patrol, pounding the pavement again! It was harsh. I didn’t even finish my full tour of duty in the Eighth Precinct before I was called back to the station and told that I had been transferred again to the Seventh Precinct, a real “punishment” precinct.
Chapter XXIX
Real Police Dogs
That short stay in the Eighth brought an incident that seems mighty funny now, but then was bitterness piled on bitterness. Shortly after I started out on the tour, a cigar manufacturer on Church Street re-ported a burglary to me. I got busy, called up the station house and asked for detectives.
Just as I finished my report, made from the cigar man’s office, I was told to come into the station. I turned from the phone to be thanked by the owner of the factory for the interest I had taken in his case. He thrust a big box of cigars, hand-made smokers, into my hands. I carried the bundle back with me to the station house. The lieutenant handed me my order to report to the Seventh Precinct station house at Madison Street, and, as I turned to go, he spotted the box.
“What have you got in that bundle?” he demanded.
“Cigars given me by the man that was robbed.”
The lieutenant leaped up from his seat, his face red with sudden fury.
“Get out of here!” he-yelled. “No wonder they have the skids under you. Two hours in the precinct and you come in with a load of cigars from a complainant. Good riddance to bad rubbish. You’ll land in jail yet. Get out!”
I marched into the Seventh Precinct station perhaps the most downhearted and miserable cop in all New York. I knew I was innocent of the complaints against me, but just then it seemed as if no one ever would believe me. Behind the desk I saw Lieutenant William Boettler, who had been my superior in the old Tenderloin. Here was a friend, and I unloaded all my troubles.
The lieutenant listened. When I had finished, he lay back in his chair and laughed.
“Say,” he declared, “do you think I’m down here myself for my health? Take your medicine. It ’ll all straighten out in time.”
He sent me out on patrol in Seward Park, a center of the old East Side, for my first tour. What a difference! From Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, down to the lower East Side!
Even to a man who knew the life of the Bowery district, Seward Park seemed, at first sight, like another world. But by the end of my first tour I found it wasn’t so bad after all. I made acquaintances fast along the sidewalks, for I spoke the tongue of most of its people. I suppose many of them took me for a Jew.
I was assigned to a steady post on Market Street, from Division to South Streets, and it wasn’t long before I was laughing again. One night I was instructed to take a probationary policeman out on post with me. He was acquiring his actual police experience just as I had done, and I gave him what advice I could.
On Monroe Street, between Market and Catharine Streets, revolvers suddenly began to pop. Before we knew it we were in the midst of a battle between the Cherry Hill and Monroe Street mobs, two wicked bands of thugs. I charged forward with the night stick and in a minute there was too much for me to do to keep watch on anything else. The whole district was in a bedlam. I was fighting men of both mobs by the time the reserves arrived. The ambulance carted off several toughs and we made a score of arrests. A wild party all around and it was an hour before I remembered the probationary man. He was nowhere to be found.
It didn’t look good for the youngster, but I kept my mouth shut. When I answered the return roll call at the station later that night, I reported him as being present. On the following day when I returned for duty, Captain Ferris asked me what had happened to my man.
“Oh, nothing,” I answered. “He was with me all night and assisted me very well, indeed.”
“Is that so?” the captain cut in. “Well, it’s no use lying about it. When the shooting party started, your man ran all the way home. His mother was here in the station house this morning telling me that the police job was no work for her boy. She said there were easier ways of making a living. What’ve you got to say about that?”
Nabbed again! I explained that between the fighting, excitement and the arrests I’d been too busy to know where the boy had gone. Captain Ferris smiled.
“Well, you took good care of your case. I’ve got no kick coming, and I think the department will be better off without him.”
The fight and the captain’s words, and the laugh I had after I left him, were good medicine for me. I began to feel something like my old self.
But soon afterward I was in trouble again. This time I had company — two men and a dog. The men hadn’t broken any rules, but the dog had.