Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  But every time the investigators head-steered those dealers into a p-van, the U.S. Constitution compelled Sergeant Hart to inform them that they were being arrested for the criminal sale of a controlled substance to an undercover cop.

  And the dealers would say, “The chick?!”

  And Sergeant Hart would say something along the lines of “Shut the fuck up and take a seat toward the back.”

  Now, seventeen months into her Narcotics career, with scorched sidewalks behind her, she had to travel far beyond the Jackson Heights border, all the way into Corona, to find willing dealers who didn’t yet know her face. Dealers like the Martys. And even then she still hadn’t made the buy!

  That same night, when she and Tevis got back to the rumpus—aka the Queens Narcotics Division, a bland three-story office building hiding out on the edge of the borough—Richie the Receptionist asked them if they’d heard. Actually, to be technical about it, Detective First Grade Richard Szoke asked them if they’d heard.

  “Heard what?”

  He smiled with a mouth full of shredded cabbage. Outside of janitorial services, the narco Big Bosses refused to hire civilians, not even in an administrative capacity, and so as far back as anyone could remember the rumpus’s uncles and investigators all rotated two-hour shifts up at the front desk, where they frittered away the time reading the Post and playing Snood. But then one day last November, Richie sat down and the seat became permanently his own. The Big Bosses didn’t dare complain. With the exception of that miserable prick Raymond Gonz, no one complained, for ever since Richie had taken over he made sure that the kitchenette’s water cooler kept glugging, that photocopier jams were quickly fixed and toilet clogs discreetly handled. Invitations to the holiday racket went out on time for once. He kept the vending machines—don’t tell Mayor Bloomberg—consistently well stocked with sugary candy bars and high-fructose sodas. And most important, best of all, rumpus gossip was efficiently disseminated from the lightning-rod top of Richie’s bald head. All this in addition to his crime-fighting responsibilities as an undercover cop. An expert multitasker, he ate an egg roll while transferring a phone call while watching both Tevis and Janice sign themselves into the logbook.

  “The bosses put up a buy board,” he told them. “A cheap shit piece of Taiwanese plastic. Completely gauche, not that anyone even bothered to ask me.”

  “What’s a buy board?” Janice asked. “Like a board with all our buys on it?”

  “See?” Richie asked Tevis. “It’s those kinds of instincts that’ll serve her well when she makes detective.”

  “Har har,” she said, but with only twenty-seven days until her eighteen-month promotion, she knocked her knuckles against his desk.

  They were on the second floor, the Queens narco squad, with phones ringing everywhere. Thick sheets of construction paper covered the windows. At scattered desks, confidential informants described apartment layouts to investigators taking notes. The uncles all sat together in the corner, far from the Big Bosses’ private offices but close to the rumpus lounge, where from three to four every afternoon they watched their girl Rubí on TV. ¡Sacrificarás todo por ella! No kidding, Janice thought. She’d missed today’s episode and had hoped to hear a recap, but she could forget about that now. With the exception of Grimes, who was asleep in the rumpus’s cot room, and that miserable prick Gonz, who was antisocially reading a Planet Fitness magazine, the uncles converged around Tevis the instant he sat down, before he could even begin his post-street ritual of rubbing cocoa butter onto his face and elbows to keep his skin from getting ashy.

  “You seen this buy board?” Morris asked him.

  “How’s he gonna seen the buy board already?” Klondike said. “Come on, man, you just saw him walk in.”

  Morris, the rumpus’s unofficial psychotherapist, told Klondike, “You need to think about where this aggression of yours is coming from and whether or not it deserves to be directed at me, okay?”

  “Fair enough,” Klondike said.

  They parked their bubble-butts on opposite ends of Tevis’s desk. Fiorella, a single mother and chronically fatigued, had wheeled herself over in a rolly chair. The full-namers—Eddie Murphy, Pablo Rivera, and James Chan—all stood together, hovering, James Chan at near military attention. Puffy, who’d thrown his back out a week earlier, lay himself down across Janice’s desk, atop her manila folders stuffed full of blank pages, which were carefully arranged into a tableau of busyness. He’d chosen Janice’s desk either because it was next to Tevis’s or because—another knuckle-knock here—he wanted to get as close to her as possible. The same reason he came over every morning to pluck the crossword puzzle out of her copy of the Post. Two words, eleven letters, starts with off, ends with ush—“work desire or crowd.” He smiled at her. A little embarrassed, a little nervous, she tried focusing on the uncles’ bitchfest by waiting for the inevitable It is what it is.

  Offensive, Eddie Murphy said. Immoral. Almost criminal. Morris considered it the latest example of this corporate police department’s CompStat-crazed disregard for the people risking their lives on the street. Klondike, who was always threatening to quit, threatened to quit. James Chan never spoke, but even he looked sort of agitated. Pablo Rivera asked that no one get him wrong, he hated this buy board as much as the next uncle, but he worried it might distract them from the previous crisis: their suspicion, Pablo Rivera’s certainty, that Internal Affairs was keeping them all under surveillance. Tevis thought the two might be linked. He had a story about buy boards and IA, but because his stories tended to last forty minutes minimum, the uncles asked him to please table it for another time. Still lying on his back, Puffy wanted to know how the department could afford fancy new buy boards but not functioning kel-mics.

  “Fancy?!” said Richie the Receptionist over speakerphone.

  “Did y’all ever consider that you’re just a bunch of pussies?”

  “Who was that?” Richie asked. “Was that Gonz?”

  Of course! Who else could’ve been such a miserable prick. He went past them on his way to the bathroom, with his Planet Fitness tucked under his hypertrophied arm. “A bunch of pussies,” he repeated, “afraid of a little competish.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk!” Puffy said.

  Morris attributed Gonz’s latest burst of antisocial behavior to a deep-rooted identity crisis, for Gonz was pretty much born to be one of the other guys, an investigator, somebody who came out of the womb with one of those grip-strengthening doodads, but because of the color of his skin the NYPD and hence the rest of the world refused to accept him as anything but an uncle, and so the hatred he directed toward the group was really a sublimated reaction to—

  “You know over two hundred people work in the rumpus?” Klondike said.

  “I’m sorry, but I thought I was talking,” Morris said.

  “Two hundred people, but it’s only our names that go up on the buy board,” Klondike said. “We’re the only ones that get slid under the microscope?”

  “Yeah, well,” Fiorella said. “It is what it is.”

  That was Janice’s cue to leave, to go check out the blight for herself. For the walk over she took an important-looking folder, a real thick one, in case she ran into any of the Big Bosses. Although quite a bit bigger, in a frame made out of aluminum instead of plastic, the rumpus’s buy board looked not unlike the dry-erase board she had at home, except instead of take pills and buy flaxseed, this one had all the uncles’ initials in a column. The next three months were written across the top. Under that, nothing but empty white space. She didn’t yet know if she considered the buy board offensive, as the others had, or immoral, practically criminal—part of Narcotics’ appeal was the opportunity to be judged objectively on performance instead of connections—but she did think it unfair that the uncles’ previous buys weren’t included. So as to acknowledge and better contextualize their hard work throughout the year. She found her initials toward the bottom, a less than encouraging sign. She knew that
if she touched the ink, it would come off on her fingers.

  By the time she got back to her desk, all the other uncles had scattered, probably chased away by the macho presence of Vincent Hart sitting in her chair. A sergeant in Narcotics Investigations, where Janice hoped to land in nineteen months, he wore what he always seemed to wear: a tight-fitting Polo tucked into a pair of nylon exercise pants that swished when he walked. The spare-tire cover on his Hummer said, THE VIN-MAN!

  “It’s called the vending-machine challenge,” he was telling Tevis. “Pretty self-explanatory. You gotta eat one of everything in the machine. Obviously. But with like the Starbursts? You can’t eat just the one thing of it. You gotta do the whole package. Obviously.”

  Tevis tilted his head back, unsure if Hart was fucking with him about his weight. He said, “What about the breath mints? I’d have to eat all the different brands of those, too?”

  Hart tilted his head back, unsure if Tevis was fucking with him about his terribly rancid, protein-shake breath, about which Hart was so self-conscious that he went everywhere with an Altoids tin clattering in the pocket of his swishy pants, the man as quiet as a rattlesnake. “Itwaru!” he said when he saw her standing there. “I ever tell you about the time I’m lovemaking my wife and she asks me to get awesome?”

  “Lieutenant Prondzinski was just here looking for you,” Tevis told her.

  “For me?”

  “Ask us what she wanted,” Hart told her.

  Janice caught herself biting the cuticle around her thumb. “What’d she want?”

  “How should we know?” Hart said. “She did seem pretty mad though that you weren’t at your desk, but don’t worry. We told her you were late for your shift and hadn’t come into work yet.”

  “No we didn’t,” Tevis said. “We told her you got here on time but then left to run a personal errand.”

  Janice tilted her head back, unsure of everything. These guys, all of them, they lied recreationally, professionally, to stay sharp, to stay alive. Habituated to misdirection and subterfuge, they kept mistresses and backup mistresses, until it got to the point where Janice couldn’t expect an honest answer if she asked about the weather.

  For instance. On her first day in Narcotics, as Tevis led her around the rumpus on her introductory tour, he pointed out a handsome, expensively dressed, somber-looking black man reading Variety and said, “And that guy over there? That’s Eddie Murphy.”

  “No kidding,” Janice said. “Wow, he looks just like him. Seriously. He could be like his body double.”

  “No,” Tevis said. “That’s him. That’s Eddie Murphy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The movie star.”

  “Well, yeah, movie star, comedian. He’s like an amazing musician, too. And an undercover, obviously. Full-time and everything. Here, you wanna meet him? He’s really down-to-earth …”

  A genuine gentleman, the guy who looked like Eddie Murphy stood up from his desk to shake her hand. He even made sure he was pronouncing her name correctly—It-wah-roo?—before offering his own: “Eddie Murphy, nice to meet ya.” She looked back at Tevis, who gave her what appeared to be an encouraging nod.

  “Okay,” she said, playing along. “What are you doing here? Researching a role?”

  “He was,” Tevis said. “But then what happened, Eddie? The financing fell through or something?”

  “Well, it’s never one thing, of course. The producer, I don’t even want to say his name, but there was that big kerfuffle when he made some … indelicate comments? On a certain radio program? Anyway, so then he’s gone, poof, see you later, so they approach me, ask if I could finance the whole thing on my own, and it really was a neat little picture, but—”

  “He was gonna play a guy from Brooklyn,” Tevis said. “Which is where Eddie’s actually from. Originally.”

  “Good memory!”

  “Thanks, Eddie.”

  “The story took place in the sixties,” he said, “with the whole Black Panther thing? And my character had grown up in Brooklyn, like Tevis was saying, under the tutelage of this kind of Huey Newton–type figure, who gets my character to enlist in the police department as a way of spying on cops. But at the same time—and here’s the interesting bit—at the same time the cops have someone infiltrating the Panthers.”

  “Like The Departed,” Janice said.

  “Well, yeah. Yeah. Except this one was first. And I’d be playing both characters, the guy who infiltrates the cops and the guy in the Panthers. But yeah. Like The Departed. That was the other problem. We hear Scorsese’s developing a similar project, and it’s like, well, how many undercover-cop stories can the market sustain, right? And if one’s going to Shelf City, it’s gonna be the one with a little less mass-market appeal, if you know what I mean.”

  “It was going to be Eddie’s Oscar role,” Tevis said. “Roles, I should say. Then we all thought he’d finally win it last year with Dreamgirls, but of course he gets frickin’ robbed again.”

  “Alan Arkin was excellent in Little Miss Sunshine,” he said humbly, but behind his eyes all the houselights had dimmed. “Anyhoo, long story short, I was researching one of the roles, shadowing Tevis here—stick with him, you’ll learn a lot—”

  “Oh, come on.” Tevis beamed.

  “And after the movie fell through, I just sorta stuck around, I guess.” He laughed a sad little laugh, slow and deep and no louder than a murmur. “The department needs undercovers pretty bad right now, and it truly is a kind of guerrilla theater out there, the purest form of acting in my opinion—”

  “Let me see your driver’s license,” she said.

  “Itwaru,” Tevis scolded.

  “No, that’s fine,” he said. “I get it.” He flipped open a gator-skin wallet to show her an authentic-looking New York State driver’s license that said Edward Regan Murphy, and then a homemade-looking—although how would she really know?—Screen Actors Guild card. He said, “Sometimes I wake up in the morning before work and I can hardly believe it myself.”

  “You guys are good,” she told them. “Seriously. Very good. This is … thorough, that is for sure. But what exactly am I supposed to be buying here? That the reason Eddie Murphy hasn’t made a movie in forever is because he’s—”

  “What do you mean, haven’t made a movie in forever?” he asked.

  “I haven’t shown you the copy room!” Tevis told her. “We should probably go check that out. You can scan, you can check email—”

  “Shrek?” Eddie Murphy said. “Is that not a movie? I’m pretty sure it is, because it made four hundred and eighty-four million dollars in worldwide grosses. And it’s my understanding they only track those numbers for actual movies. Shrek 2? Dr. Doolittle 2? Shrek the Third? Do these ring a bell? How about Norbit? You heard of Norbit? Hundred fifty million dollars right there, in domestic tickets alone.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, unable to ever resist an argument, no matter how absurd. “I’m talking about like old Eddie Murphy movies. You know. Like … you know …”

  “Like funny?” he said. “Like funny Eddie Murphy movies? Because over a billion dollars in worldwide grosses these last couple of years, that sounds pretty hilarious to me,” he said, and as if to prove it he laughed his quiet little laugh.

  “See,” she said, pointing at him. “That’s not the Eddie Murphy laugh. Heh heh heh heh, that’s the Eddie Murphy laugh. You really wanted to get me, that’s the laugh you shoulda done.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really laugh like that anymore,” he said. He gestured to the rumpus all around them, the wrinkled clothes and hovering bosses, the purple bags under everyone’s eyes, the shocks of gray hair, the mildewy smell coming out of the cot room, the pukey coffee, and the beer guts. “The job,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you.”

  After leaving Tevis and Sergeant Hart, Janice went looking for Lieutenant Prondzinski, but she wasn’t in her office. She had, though, hung a picture of a clock on the doorknob. WILL RETURN, it promised,
its movable hands pointed to three minutes from now. Janice could either wait here with nothing to do except tap her foot and roll her folder into a telescope, or she could try to look busy. She scanned the rumpus for the silvered top of Prondzinski’s head. Nothing. She wasn’t next door in Inspector Nielsen’s office, either. No one was. It was empty, or at least it appeared empty, but Janice couldn’t be certain because the department’s rumormongers—which is to say everyone—claimed the inspector’s vicious migraines forced him to sleep all day under his desk. His office lights were off, his windows papered over. She peeked into the kitchenette, where dirty mugs filled a sink under a sign that said DO NOT LEAVE DIRTY MUGS IN THE SINK. She rescanned the rumpus. Preposterously—preposterous because the overcaffeinated Prondzinski seemed incapable of sleep—Janice opened the door to the cot room, but the only one inside was of course Grimes, snoring, a long white nightcap snug around his head. She thought maybe three minutes had passed. Hustling back to the lieutenant’s office, she at last found Prondzinski by almost tripping over her.

  The lieutenant lay facedown on the floor, half in and half out of the copy room. Long, jagged runs split her dark stockings. Usually there’d be a line of investigators waiting to Xerox the serial numbers on their buy money, but not now, not with Prondzinski flat on the ground, one ear pressed against the carpet as if she were snooping on the first-floor office workers. Her arm snaked under the copy machine, her tongue poking out between her teeth.

  “Uh?” Janice said.

  One of Prondzinski’s giant blue eyeballs rolled in its socket to consider her. “Itwaru,” she said. “How long are your arms?”

  Janice held them out in front of her. “I don’t know. Average, I guess?”