Beauty Queen

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    Then, one night, as Mary Ellen and Danny drove down a street in their patrol sector, they saw a young woman in jeans standing on the corner, frantically flagging them down. Something about the woman told them "lesbian." With a screech of tires, they pulled over.
    The young woman pointed into the narrower cross-town street, to a small neon sign.
    "The bar there," she panted. "Some guys trashing it..."
    Just then, on their radio, the two cops heard the dispatcher assigning a run to a bar address on that street to two of Mary Ellen's squad, PO Stewart and PO Mooney. She could see the flashing red light of their car three blocks away, coming from the west along the cross-town street.
    "Cruiser two-oh-four responding," she said into her radio.
    Three men came sprinting out of the bar, saw her and headed west. She wheeled around the corner, parked with a screech near the bar. She and Danny got out running, hands on their guns. The scout car coming east cut the fugitives off neatly. The men were drunk and didn't resist much. It all happened with much noise of feet pounding on the sidewalk, and not a shot fired. The four officers collared the three fugitives.
    The bar's modest green neon sign, PORTHOLE, hung over a neat basement entrance. It was a new bar on this quiet residential street. The brick and brownstone fronts had been painted, and flower boxes installed by a block association.
    But inside the bar, chairs and tables were hurled around, broken bottles everywhere, and the mirror behind the bar was broken. The jukebox was still playing. Balloons and crepe streamers from the opening still decorated the glittery ceiling. A few stunned women were standing around.
    On the floor in front of the jukebox was a scene of the purest horror that Maiy Ellen had ever witnessed since she had become a cop.
    An older heavyset woman with a butch haircut knelt there, holding a younger woman in her arms. The young woman's face was a mask of blood, and her little cotton madras shirt was soaked with blood. She had been assaulted with a broken bottle, which now lay on the floor. Most of her nose and part of one cheek were sliced away, baring her teeth and her nasal passages. She was holding her head dropped down, so that the bubbling blood would not run back down her nasal passages into her lungs.
    Mary Ellen wanted to cry out, to cradle the young woman in her arms, to say, "my sister, my sister."
    Beside her, Danny was blanched, silent, staring at the scene.
    So Mary Ellen just said, "Good God," and sent Danny out to radio for an ambulance.
    The owner of the bar was a woman named Leslie Forbes. Looking over the wreckage she said bitterly: "We opened a month ago. The building owner leased to us. But the block association has given us nothing but trouble, saying we ruined their neighborhood and so on. It was a mistake. Those three guys ... neighborhood types, hanging around, insulting the women. Tonight they came in here drunk and talking about Jeannie Colter . .
    The screaming ambulance came and took away the mutilated girl. The three men were brought in, handcuffed, and identified on the spot as the perpetrators. The women witnesses willingly made statements. The men were white middle-class, had families in the block and would certainly suffer some of the consequences, at least, of their drunken rampage. In a few minutes the wagon took them off to headquarters for booking.
    And the moment came when Mary Ellen and Danny had to wrap things up, get in their car and leave the scene, all without daring to identify themselves as a sister and a brother to the women there.
    Later that night, as they continued their patrol, neither of them could shake away the memory of the mutilated face of that lovely young woman—a living skull, a mask of blood. They couldn't even talk about it.
    Mary Ellen wished that she had already known what the three men had done when she saw them running so she could have shot at least one of them. But shooting people wasn't so simple, if you were a cop. TV series to the contrary, you were temporarily suspended if you fired your gun, until it was determined if you had really needed to fire. Her father wouldn't have fired, even out of anger. But then her father had never known oppression.
    As she and Danny drove the empty streets, lined by gloomy warehouses, the bars closing up, the gas stations darkened, even the East Side Highway only lightly traveled, she passed the hour of the wolf mulling over a dull and