The Other Typist Read Free

the eye of a hurricane. She was the dark epicenter of something we didn’t quite understand yet, the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously, and around her everything would change.
    Perhaps it’s a misnomer to refer to her as “the other typist,” as there were other typists all along. I was one of three. There was a forty-year-old woman named Iris with a gaunt face, sharp jaw, and gray, birdlike eyes. Every day Iris wore a different colored ladies’ necktie. Iris was always complaisant to do extra typing when it was needed, and this was much appreciated. (
Crime does not take weekends or observe bank holidays,
the Sergeant is fond of saying.) As far as social particulars went, Iris had never been married, and it was difficult to imagine marriage had ever been one of her aspirations.
    Then there was Marie, who was in many ways an opposite composite of Iris. Marie was rotund and always merry and walked with a slightly hobbled step from where an omnibus had run over her left foot when she was just a child. Marie was barely thirty but had already married twice—the first of her husbands had run off with a chorus girl. Without being able to locate him to secure a proper divorce, Marie had simply shrugged away the legal contract and married her second husband, a man named Horace, who was kind to her but was sick all the time with gout. Marie worked at the precinct because she was under no illusion that Horace would be able to provide for her. She was a sentimental woman who had married for love, despite the fact the gout was bound to get worse and keep him off his feet more and more. The crude remark was often made behind Marie’s back that between her mangled left foot and Horace’s gout-swollen feet, they probably danced one “helluva” waltz together. People never said these things while she was in the room, but Marie was no fool and she was aware this joke was often bandied about. She had decided long ago to pretend ignorance. She was generally for anything that facilitated greater camaraderie, and in consequence everybody seemed to like working with her.
    And then there was me, of course. I’d worked at the precinct for a little over two years and had already garnered a reputation for being the fastest and most accurate typist. Among the three of us we were able to keep up with all the precinct’s needs, typing the paperwork for all the bookings, confessions, and correspondence. We were able to keep up, that is, until the Volstead Act triggered a serious boost in our business, so to speak.
    In the beginning, the Volstead Act wasn’t very popular among the officers at the precinct, and for a while enforcement of the act was distinctly halfhearted. The patrolmen grumbled and only offered minimal assistance as the Anti-Saloon League closed down one watering hole after another. Officers who happened upon flasks of bathtub gin often let the perpetrators off with a warning, taking care, of course, to confiscate the evidence. Despite the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s best efforts to make the nation think so, not everyone believed the devil was really in the drink. There were even judges who couldn’t seem to muster the appropriate amount of outrage to earnestly punish the bootleggers who very fully and flagrantly flouted the law.
Seems only natural after a hard day
’
s work a man should want a tall drink of something,
the Lieutenant Detective once said quite loudly for everyone to hear, shrugging his shoulders.
    Things went on like this for a time. Periodically an assortment of men from the neighborhood—many of them husbands and fathers—were hauled in for selling moonshine and allowed to go with a simple rap on the knuckles. No one cared to do much more than this.
    But they say it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and in our case the squeaky wheel was Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt and the grease was us. I can’t claim to be an expert on her legal career, but from what