It's Never Simple With A Lady Involved

It’s always the women that are the hardest. No one cares to see a man dragged out of a building in the middle of the night but word gets out it’s a lady and suddenly half the city’s out on the street, jumping to see, news crews flashing their cameras in my face, all the people yelling, and all the while she’s got to find her bag ‘cause no lady can go anywhere without her bag, not even jail, and I’ve got husbands and doormen crawling up my neck trying to tell me what’s gone and happened, and she’s always crying, for herself or for her bag or for the man she’s just killed. Then it’s my job to get her out of the building and through the crowd, and it’s near impossible to handle an arrested woman and all the people come pouring out to see me trying.

And I have to be gentle, you know, ‘cause I’m holding a lady, and if I’m too rough with her or the crowd they’ll all call me a brute and it’ll be in the paper and I’ll be crucified just for doing my job, and next I know my boss is suggesting I take a few weeks off, unpaid of course, until it all goes over. But I can’t be too gentle, no, ‘cause she is a criminal, or most likely, I mean I’m there for a reason, right, and the crowd’ll be yelling and pushing and if I go too soft on account of the lady they’ll roll me over on my back and then I’ll get it even harder in the papers. They’ll be saying I knew her in an unseemly way, or I’m a bumbling cop too weak to deal with girls. And then my boss isn’t suggesting I go, and it’s not just for a few weeks.

I hate arresting women, really, ‘cause they either have such good reasons to do it you can hardly blame them or they’ve got no reason at all. Men, it’s always the same. I was drunk. She ran out on me. He hit me first. And I say Sir don’t be telling me excuses, that was no good reason, we all get mad, we all get left, you can’t be killing folks. But the women, it’s different. Stories that’ll break your heart and make you want to kill the bastard over again for her. He hit me so I couldn’t see from my left eye and then he hit me so I lost the baby so I used my one good eye to aim. Or stories that make you want to kill the lady herself. Kid wouldn’t quit crying and all the gin was gone. Won’t be an easy one, I always know, when the call’s for one of the fairer sex.

Same case with this one. Stabbed her sister and threw her over the railing. A neighbor called when the body landed on her fire escape. Smashed up this ceramic bull statue he had on the balcony. Pieces everywhere, two yellow painted horns and a sloppy pink nose all sharp edged and scattered round the body. Guy starts telling us we’ve gotta pay to replace it, sure has more to say about this broken bull than the deceased woman flat out on his balcony.

I say sir the police are not in the business of antique ceramic cows. From the look of all the shards, it was a pretty ugly thing too, but no more ugly than the body all broken up right beside it.

Not my job to judge a person’s decor tastes, though. Just to go talk to the upstairs neighbor, the one who threw her sister over the balcony and onto the damn bull thing in the first place. She says My sister was crazy, never right in the head, she lives with us, she took a knife to my youngest, I had to do it. But the neighbors say the sister had some hanky panky up with the husband and the craziest lady in the house is the one that done the stabbing.

When we leave the place the neighbor who found the body is still there, saying that damned bull was irreplaceable, that someone ought to pay for it, that his grandmama brought it over from the old country. He’s screaming at us, saying how he’ll never be the same and how can such a thing happen to the citizens we’re supposed to be protecting, and all I can think is the babe I saw last week, only two days into this world, his neck snapped like a chicken’s by his mama, ‘cause she’s young and scared and she’s got nobody but herself and that’s no one that can help her.

And here’s this man telling me he’s never going to recover from the loss of a cockeyed cow figurine, and then this lady I got coming out the door who says she killed her sister to protect her babies, and still in my head I see the corpse of that little one, soft with bruising and his head rolled back, and I’m thinking, it’s never simple with a lady involved, no it ain’t.