THE CITY LIPSTICK & LARCENY

THERE WAS SOMETHING strangely incongruous about the lady as she stood beside the beat-up white Plymouth. She was scarcely taller than the car’s door frame – hardly an overwhelming figure – and yet she dominated the scene.

Her long, red-polished nails tapped on the metal of the car’s window as she talked to the driver. Her hair was swept back in what used to be called a chignon; the scent of Jontue drifted behind her. She wore a tailored blue outfit and shiny black shoes. She also wore a badge, a gun, and a bullet-proof vest. Her name tag read, “C.A. Geiger.”

The lady was a cop, and she was making an arrest.

Some girls are known to their bosses as Friday. They are paid to see that the details of the real world never touch their masters. They feel a satisfaction in making him succeed; it’s their profession. But this life would never appeal to Candy Geiger. She will never be content running somebody else’s errands. Her idea of a good job is one that pumps adrenaline; she must be her own boss during working hours. Candy prefers to spend her nights as car 534 of the Dallas Police Force.

“This was a good night,” she sighs, after eight hours in the Harry Hines/Forest Lane area had streaked into her notebook. “Six calls and a good arrest. The arrest will make the chiefs letter.”

A few female police officers have wanted to be cops all their lives; others took the job as a second choice to professional basketball. Most of the 153 women on the Dallas force (8 per cent of the total force) were nurses or bank tellers or some such, who found police work infinitely more interesting than what they were doing. Candy became a policewoman quite by accident. As a civilian police employee in Delaware, she says, “I would be sitting in my office all day, on the other end of the radio, listening to all this neat stuff going on out there-stuff I couldn’t get involved in.” So she came to Dallas and made all that “neat stuff her own.

“Neat” and “good,” in Candy Geiger’s lexicon, must involve action: A good night is one filled with nonstop activity, hopefully with a good (significant) arrest and a few good calls (burglaries in progress, not alarms set off by the rain), in a good part of town (where a lot is happening), with good contacts with people (the kind that end with a “thank you”).

By that measure, the Friday night we spent together on patrol was only marginally “good” until just into the seventh hour.

Before we even left the headquarters parking lot at 3:30 p.m., a call came from an industrial park on Candy’s beat. An employee had taken a Suzuki 550 with a promise to buy it and had apparently taken it to California. The crime was two weeks old and very routine.

Next, we encountered a lady who was incensed that we had followed her home over something as trivial as an expired registration tag. She had stood in line at the tax office and had paid her money, she huffed with her hands on her hips. She was sure, she protested as she stalked away to the house for her receipt, that “they” had gone out and put the sticker on the car for her.

Candy radioed for an expiration date on the license plate, and the dispatcher replied, “June 1981.”

“In a minute, you are going to see a lady self-destruct,” Candy murmured as she filled the blanks on the traffic ticket.

But the lady in question emerged from the house a different person – smiling, conciliatory, even appreciative. She had probably regarded Candy as a sassy daughter figure at first, but it took only a moment of reflection in the house to transform the young thing outside into a real police officer with a real pad of tickets.

“Very seldom am I treated with disrespect,” Candy says. “Am I treated with respect by men? Especially by men. There is something in the Texas macho attitude that is almost chivalrous. Men will back down in a confrontation with me. It’s probably not macho to beat up on a female, and it sure as heck can’t be macho to beat up on a short little female like me. One guy asked me one time, ’What are you going to do if I want to fight you?’ I said, ’Well, let’s look at it two ways. If you fight me and beat me up, what’s it going to prove? But if you fight me, and I beat you up, boy, are you going to be embarrassed!’ The thing is, they don’t know what we can do. All they know is that Angie Dickinson never loses.”

After a couple of “good” tickets (expired registrations and inspection stickers, where there’s no hassle in court) had been distributed to deserving North Dallasites, a call came on a “41-11,” a burglary in progress in an apartment. The intruder was still upstairs, the caller said. This sounded like it could be a good one.

But James (the complainant) and the intruder were sitting together in the burglarized living room when we arrived. Dorothy -the intruder -had lived with James until a month before and had broken in, she said, to get her things. James wanted her out. He had the lease, and she was somebody else’s legal wife, so she left.

“It’s dead in the Thirties tonight,” Candy groaned after a report on a shoplifting incident at a Radio Shack store and a few look-ins on houses left vacant by vacationing people on her beat. “Things start to liven up after 10 o’clock,” she promised. “And at two a.m., when they start closing the bars, the calls start increasing tremendously. It’s like they take a thousand drunks and throw them out on the public and say, ’Cope if you can!’ “

The “Thirties” Candy spoke of are beats 532-536, a sector of the Northwest Division based on Bachman Lake. Almost everybody rides without a partner in the Thirties, and Candy is no exception. No distinction is made between men and women officers in this matter-or in any other matter -on the Dallas Police Force. “The dispatcher only sees the number of the car; she doesn’t see the sex of the officer.”

Many Americans would see this as a curious policy. Our society does not raise its women according to this kind of equality. Equality before the law, maybe -but not this equality of being the law. Our world is traditionally too violent for the weaker vessel. One aim of the 17-week police academy training course is to find out who can handle the pressure and the blood and who can’t. No distinctions are made at the academy: Everyone has the same requirements, from push-ups and distance running to academics and shooting skills.

For the first year, all officers are on probation, and trainers (who partner the rookie for three months) separate the men from the boys – but not the men from the women.

“When I was in training,” Candy recalls, “there was an accident on a motorcycle. These guys had been out showing off, and they hit a curb. One guy was thrown off the bike. You could see where his head hit the curb and bounced and then skidded across the ground. There was a rut. His body landed face up, with the whole top of his head gone. My trainer went over and called back to me, ’Hey, come look at this.’ He wanted to see how the kid [Candy] would take it.”

The only times a female officer is specifically called are in rape cases when the victim requests a woman, and when a male officer has a female prisoner. A man is not allowed to frisk a woman. “Which is very funny,” Candy says, “because a woman cop can search a man.”

Captain Johnny Upton, Candy’s boss at Northwest: Division, confirms that “female officers are police officers; they are not treated any differently. And our experience shows that they are as capable as any man in handling any incident that comes up. But like men, some are average and some are exceptional.”

One of those rated by some as exceptional for her time on the force is Mona Martin – the pretty girl-next-door who can bench press 120 pounds. On one occasion, she and Candy and a male officer responded to a call from a topless club on Harry Hines to oust a man who had been causing a disturbance. On the way out, the man took off running. The male officer’s shoe came off almost immediately after the chase began. Candy went to her car to give chase that way. It was Mona, though, who overtook the man- a burly six-footer-before he got to the street, tackled him, and was ready to apply handcuffs when the others arrived.

Candy is not so athletic. Sometimes she wishes she were. On one occasion, she and another officer were called to the scene of a burglary in progress at a Kawasaki motorcycle shop. They had the burglars cornered in a fenced area behind the store … behind a Cyclone fence. Candy climbed it and was just about to go over the top when her bulletproof vest hung on one of the barbs at the top. She was stuck like a fly to flypaper; she could neither go over the fence nor get down. Even the burglars trapped inside were laughing.

A bush pilot once described his job as “hours and hours of tedium broken by moments of terror.” Now I clearly understand what he meant. The first six hours of the third watch (the 3:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift) that night were an introduction to routine -somewhat tedious -police work. Candy projected a calm, caring image at every stop, passing out little cards that told her victimized clients how to get copies of the police report.

Meanwhile, the dispatcher sent other cars to meet the night’s emergencies: “521 … Code 3 … I’ve got 15 Latin males fighting with knives in the 5300 block of Maple, in front of the Dutch Kitchen.” Elsewhere, a man was riding a wheelchair around in the middle of University Boulevard, a black male was being chased on Rupert Street by “a grown woman with a knife; complainant says two families are about to fight,” and some juveniles were sitting on city road equipment, blowing the horns and turning on the lights.

Candy’s moment came at 9:34 p.m., in the 2900 block of Royal Lane.

The red glow of our patrol car’s lights blinked on the shrubbery beside the road, as a white Plymouth stopped in front of us. Candy’s eyes automatically focused on the license plate of the car. “June registration,” she explained, and then: “Aw rats, he’s got a temporary tag. He probably just bought the car. Oh, well, let’s see what the date on the tag is.”

She spent only a few seconds at the car in front of us before she returned.

“Mr. Ronald Cartwright is a biker, a real motor meanie,” she whispered, holding his laminated driver’s license in the intense glare of the patrol car’s reading light. She read the dispatcher the routine information about the driver.

After a few seconds, a woman’s voice replied: “34 … uh … you’ve got a Ronald L. Cartwright, 9-19-49. He’s wanted out of county. A felony charge from St. Louis County, Clayton, Missouri, since 3-11-81.”

A man’s voice interrupted and asked for Candy’s location. At least Candy knew another car was en route.

She replaced her microphone and sat back in her seat. After a moment, she sighed. “Right about now he knows there’s something wrong. I’m not going up there until my cover gets here.” She watched the car ahead in silence; if Cartwright’s head disappeared, it might mean he was reaching under the seat for a gun.

The next four minutes passed slowly. The girl in the passenger’s seat beside Cart-wright looked back repeatedly into the headlights of the police car. Although Candy said nothing more, she glanced frequently into her rearview mirror, hoping to somehow hurry car 535, her cover.

That night, 535 was Mike Rose. He pulled his car in behind Candy’s, and immediately they leapt into the street and strode to the car in front of them. Candy went to the driver’s side; Rose took the passenger side.

“Mr. Cartwright,” she said to the bearded man at the wheel. “Would you please step out of your car and move to the rear. Put your hands on the trunk, back up your feet, and spread your legs.”

The short, once muscular 31-year-old man obeyed without protest. In front of the headlights of her car, Candy searched him from shoulder to shoes and cuffed his hands behind his back.

At Mike Rose’s command, Cartwright’s female companion stepped out of the car. She was very, very pregnant. She was also ordered into the headlights at the rear of the automobile, but was not searched. She had a valid driver’s license, so she was allowed to drive the Plymouth away. (Later Rose commented, “When I saw her get out, I thought, ’Oh no, don’t do anything to excite her. Take it easy. She could have the baby right here!’ “)

Ronald Cartwright (we were to learn later that his nickname is “Hoss”) slid across the back seat of Candy’s car ahead of Mike Rose. The car immediately reeked of whiskey. Candy switched on the reading light over the radio and informed the prisoner of his legal rights.

During the arrest, Candy had not taken out her gun. “I only take out my weapon when I’m really scared,” she had said earlier in the evening, “when I think somebody is going to hurt me. I had to do it once when an armed man had climbed to a rooftop above me, and another time when two burglary suspects had tried to escape down a creek bed on a dark night, and I had to get them out. And then there was the time when a man had taken a hammer and bashed in all the windshields in a parking lot and was hiding behind a dumpster. But I don’t have to take it out very often.”

When we entered the city jail building, all guns were checked away in lockers. Upstairs -after an hour of forms and teletypes to Missouri and general family reunion banter among the officers herding the dozens of standing, manacled prisoners – Hoss Cartwright was locked away.

Candy’s final call of the night involved two Mexicans on Denton Drive. Three cars responded to that call. The officers had to disarm a man wielding a cocked pistol, make an arrest (for having the gun on the car’s front seat), and check out a bleeding screwdriver wound in the apparent loser’s left arm.

The anticipated highlight of the evening never materialized -Hoss Cartwright took care of that. Around eight o’clock, a blue Camaro, engine roaring and cab stuffed with high school hotshots, had passed close by the squad car on the driver’s side, and one of the teenagers had leaned out and screamed into Candy’s ear.

She gave a brief, startled jerk, but kept her eyes fixed on the road in front of her. “What can I do about it?” she shrugged. “A police officer’s peace cannot be disturbed like the ordinary citizen’s can. We are allowed to react only when the law is broken. They’ll be cruising Forest Lane after 10 o’clock. We’ll drop in on the police contingent patroling Forest Lane later on.” But we didn’t. We had been forced to deal with Hoss instead.

The fine points of the police officer’s trade are Candy’s from training and experience. She knows, almost by heart, the Code of Conduct and the General Orders – those lists of musts and no-nos that regulate everything from hair length to the handling of an airplane crash. She has experienced two nights as a vice squad decoy arrests in two nights). She has learned to respond with sadness as her primary emotion at the scene of a suicide, where a man has “blasted his brains all over the ceiling, and they’re dripping down the wall.”

“Would I do it again?” she says, with aslight tired rasp in her voice. “Of course Iwould. I could never be this happy doinganything else.”