Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Yeah,” Vita said. “Exactly. Beautiful like mine.”

  The next day at work, Sergeant Hart told her she looked like a lesbian. It was, needless to say, a volunteered admission. It shouldn’t have surprised her—a month earlier, when Gonz started sporting an investigator-like mustache, Hart had asked, With a nose like that, why underline it? and if an uncle ever dared show up to work wearing a tank top, he’d compare their arms to French fries—but, well, Janice had foolishly assumed their post-LeFrak cease-fire might last a little bit longer than a single weekend. You know what happens when you assume, though. He sat on the edge of her desk and asked if she knew what a fool’s mate was.

  She took a chance: “As in like your wife?”

  “Is that supposed to be humorous?” he asked Tevis, who was filling out department softball lineups at the adjoining desk. “Does she think this is standup-comedy time?”

  “I think it was more like a defense mechanism,” Tevis told him. “Against what is clearly going to be another one of your mean-spirited lectures.”

  “Actually,” Janice said, “I was really just trying to build up a kind of jokey rapport.”

  Sergeant Hart held his hands over his alleged heart as if touched. “A fool’s mate,” he explained, “is a thing in chess where you make two moves and all of a sudden the game’s over. White brings out a pair of pawns, exposing the king. Then you move a bishop and a queen, and it’s checkmate. Sayonara. There you go, the fool’s mate, but really you can apply it to any game that’s over before it starts. And who’s the fool? The loser, right? But let me tell you something: you win like this a couple of times, especially when you’re just learning, and it’s the only way you want to do it. The only way. And no offense, but I’ve seen this with plenty of female undercovers in my time here. You come in, shake your ass a little on the street, and it’s a bunch of quick buys. But then a few months fall off the calendar. People start recognizing that ass. Now you’re playing opponents with a little more experience, but guess what? You don’t have the moves. You never learned, you never got a feel for that long middle game, where chess, real chess, is gonna be won or lost. Because you didn’t have to work in the beginning, you’re unwilling to work now.”

  She said, “That’s completely—”

  He sock-puppeted his hand, slapped his fingers and thumb together to go yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. In the last week alone, Fiorella had tricked two separate teenagers into selling her spliffs that the poor bastards had rolled for themselves. A pair of buys for the 112 Precinct. Six-plus hours of department-approved overtime. Morris made a buy off a dealer who’d stashed his stash up his butthole. For the 103 Precinct, three hours of overtime; for Klondike, four hours of crack jokes. Grimes bought a twist of rocks at the homeless shelter where he used to live. A buy for the 113. Over at Zully’s Bubbles Laundromat in Astoria, Puffy bought a dime bag off a moron who’d accidentally washed and dried all his weed. A buy for the 114. According to the rumpus board, James Chan had somehow made three buys for the 108 Precinct, but he kept all the details to himself. Pablo Rivera bought a Xanax off a guy who may or may not have secretly worked for Internal Affairs. Either way, it counted as a buy for the 106. At a Bayside multiplex, while on line for Horton Hears a Who, a big-time Eddie Murphy fan sold Eddie Murphy an eight ball. Mark it up for the 111 Precinct. For the 109 Precinct here in Flushing, Richie the Receptionist—without even having to go outside—bought crack down in the fucking lobby, off a dealer who thought this was an insurance building or something and had only been looking for a warm place to count his cash. Buys across the board, padded paychecks throughout the rumpus for everyone but guess who? Gonz had done nothing for the 115. Tevis had made a buy—thank you, Tevis—but Janice had of course missed his positive signal. Remember that? She’d also jinxed the unjinxable K-Lo, turned down the investigators’ subsequent offer to make it right, spent her off time at a so-called beauty salon, and her rumpus hours guzzling soda over a garbage can and insinuating to her superior officer that she considered him a fool. Today’s schedule would unfortunately provide her with limited opportunities to redeem herself. She was supposed to be the ghost this afternoon while Tevis would be the one making buys. Attempting to make buys. After Sergeant Hart walked away, she knocked her knuckles against her desk, to get a little magic started for her, for Tevis, for Beto and her mother and everyone really except the drug dealers of Queens.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  What do you look for? Men, mostly. Particularly men of a certain age, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-four. Baggy jeans, but not so baggy that whoever’s wearing them couldn’t run away if chased. A lot of people of color unfortunately. A lot of short people of color for whatever reason. Coats or shirts that hung way down past the waist. An overlong belt that dangled between thighs like some sort of Darwinian advertisement. Sensible shoes. People who looked cold but weren’t wearing gloves. Fidgeters and neck-scratchers with candy-caned eyes. High-traffic areas: outside bodegas, a block up from subway exits. The vacant mean-mugs of the chronically bored. Ears without headphone buds. That crocodile-looking motherfucker over there with the beaded eyes and snaggled underbite and arms so short they barely breached his jacket cuffs. To-go coffee cups, especially cups that were never sipped from, without any steam twisting off the rim. The only non-Filipino outside the Philippine National Bank. Two men talking without eye contact, the both of them facing the street. That’s what you looked for when you were the uncle, but Janice the ghost was supposed to watch only Tevis—his unbuttoned coat, his uncovered head—as he struck out with the crocodile, the non-Filipino, the two men who’d talk to each other but not to him.

  Her hands were full of flyers. ¡Enderece su pelo! Straighten your hair! ¡Enderece sus dientes! Straighten your teeth! She threw them all away in a KEEP NEW YORK CLEAN trash can. At the intersection she turned around and saw an old Chinese lady picking recyclables out of the garbage. “When trying to determine if he’s being followed, the experienced agent will fold an unimportant piece of paper, leave it atop a rubbish bin, and then glance back after a few strides to see if a tail has taken the bait and reached for the paper,” from the Top Secret Spy Tech Official Training Manual, a small binder she’d sent away for as a kid and obsessively internalized. Over the course of three Christmases, her father spoiled her with the Spy Tech fingerprint kit, a motion detector, walkie-talkies, a periscope that could peer around corners, a pair of sunglasses with mirrors on the outer edges, and a camera hiding inside a Good & Plenty candy box, everything but the high-quality long-range microphone. In hindsight the microphone’s omission seemed deliberate. When she’d exhausted the full line of Spy Tech toys—or at least the line of Spy Tech toys her father was willing to bring into the house—she told anyone who asked that she wanted the Clue Master Detective Edition board game next Christmas. Then felt stupidly surprised and weirdly guilty when she unwrapped six Clue Master Detective Edition board games.

  The Nextel said, “Any buys?”

  Later the Nextel asked, “How about now?”

  Tevis eventually expanded his purview to include men over the age of twenty-five, tall people, white people, tight pants, the Filipinos outside the Philippine National Bank, women and children, and a Mexican guy selling roasted peanuts. Forget about steam escaping or not escaping from coffee cups. If you had ears, Tevis had questions: You holding? You got twenty? A little help? Hey, can I ask you something real quick? You seen the guy? The guy who’s always out here?

  “No,” the dealers answered when they bothered to say anything at all.

  It took Tevis two hours to walk one mile down Roosevelt, from Sixtieth Street to Seventy-Ninth, where he ducked into a corner bodega for some cigarettes. Closer to Corona now, the streets were turning increasingly Latin, with the ubiquitous travel agencies beginning to advertise South American vacations only. The curried chicken puffs on Sixty-Fourth Street, the soy garlic Korean fried chicken wings on Seventy-Second, and the flavorless grilled-chicken deli s
andwiches on Seventy-Sixth all became chicken mole tamale carts, Argentinean chicken empanada stands, the famous Pollos a la Brasa Mario with whole birds roasting in the windows. Jesus Christ, Janice was fucking starving. From across the street she watched Tevis limp out of the bodega, slapping a pack of menthols against his palm, all his tricks going at once, the cigarettes serving as a pasaporte universal. A block later, outside a bar called La Escuelita, he found a pair of smokers, one of whom was, no joke, wearing a rainbow flag tied around his neck. Dark papers covered the bar’s windows, just like at the rumpus. A blinking neon sign above the door requested PRIDE. The other smoker, the one without the cape, apparently didn’t have any matches, so he offered Tevis a monkeyfuck, lighting up his cigarette with the cherry at the end of his own. Please, oh please, Janice thought. Be holding something, anything, a crinkled joint, a tab of Ecstasy turning to dust in your wallet. She wondered if Tevis was flirting, a possibility more likely with his kel on the fritz. A possibility even likelier now as he followed the two guys into the bar.

  She wanted to run across the street and sneak in behind him. Sit on a faraway stool and sip a hot toddy … but of course she could not. With the possible exception of her father’s Long Island monstrosity, there wasn’t a place in the world where she’d be more blatantly conspicuous than a Latino gay bar on a weekday afternoon. To get out of the wind, she stepped inside the glass diorama of a sidewalk bus shelter, where she waited with a small crowd of people who all looked exhausted. Their work shifts over, they at least would be going home soon. The Q32 came then left, immediately followed by another that had no one to pick up except Janice, who wasn’t allowed to leave. Through the Nextel, Sergeant Hart asked for an update. She told him the uncle had gone into a bar; he told her to keep up the hard work. Her feet were freezing in her boots. She imagined that when she got home—if she got home—she’d flick her pinkie toe and see it snap off, go skipping across the kitchen tiles. For the first time since morning she remembered her dream from the night before, about a bat that flew into the house through a poorly screened bathroom vent. The bus shelter began to slowly refill. Claustrophobia shoved her out onto the street. Another Q32 pulled in to gobble up everyone but her. When Sergeant Hart asked for another update, Janice—cold and crabby, with an image of Tevis drinking from a piña colada—let it spitefully slip that uncle was still in the gay bar. Hart thanked her with genuine gratitude, the happiest she’d ever heard him. The old stoop-backed Chinese lady, the one who’d picked through the trash can earlier, pushed a shopping cart full of bagged recyclables past La Escuelita’s front door. Janice was actually only assuming it was the same Chinese lady. Was that racist? Was she racist? Was it profiling to pay particular attention to a well-dressed Arab man double-parking a Taurus on the corner? He ran across the street, up the block, and beyond the avenue, where she couldn’t see him anymore. Less than a minute later, he came jogging back with both hands in his coat pockets.

  She moved without thinking. He already had the car door open, but before he could get behind the wheel she had grabbed his arm. She told him her name was Janice.

  “And you must be Mohammad, right?”

  “Ayad,” he said, somewhere between disappointed and confused.

  “Oh. Sorry. I was supposed to meet a Mohammad.”

  He leaned against the car, folded his arms across his chest. “I can be Mohammad.”

  “You’re Ayad with the pretty wife, right?”

  “What?”

  See you later. She hurried across the street in the direction he’d come jogging from, toward the traffic signal’s blinking orange hand. The expression on his face may have been bewildered or annoyed, worried about his hypothetical wife; Janice didn’t know because she didn’t bother to turn around and look. Instead, as she went past the avenue, she turned to see if La Escuelita’s front door had swung open, afraid she might lose Tevis, afraid he might come out and catch her. She reached into her purse to put the Nextel on silent. Up the block, in a lonely spot away from Roosevelt’s foot traffic, a bored-looking Mexican man leaned against the plywood wall of a construction site. He was over six feet tall, over two hundred pounds, with a giant dark birthmark fuzzing his fat cheek.

  “You seen Ayad?” she asked him.

  He bent forward at the waist to look past her down the block. Paper flyers covered the plywood wall, which was low enough that he could scramble over it if ever necessary. She saw hair- and teeth-straightening offers like the ones she’d thrown away earlier. The psychic with the reasonable rates—DON’T GIVE UP HOPE, SEE MADAM SANDRA—had her sticker beneath a section of the wall that said NO FLYERS in small letters. The guy, Janice. Pay attention to the guy. His bubble jacket extended far enough past his waist to conceal any gun bulges. His arms were big enough to crush the breath from her lungs. All the neighborhood dealers lately seemed to be huge. When he leaned back against the wall, the paper flyers crinkled behind him.

  “You know Ayad?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “I was supposed to meet him here.”

  “That a fact?” The guy’s lips barely moved when he spoke, as if it pained him to talk to her. “You like literally just missed him.”

  “You’re messing with me.”

  “Not yet I’m not,” he said. “What you thinking you need?”

  She opened her purse, careful not to let him see the handgun sitting at the bottom. With a steady hand she passed him a twenty. He held it up to the sun, like an outdoor bank clerk, and then smiled or maybe grimaced, she couldn’t tell. Maybe, upset, he was chewing on the insides of his cheeks. She looked behind her to see if Tevis was crossing the intersection—no, thank God—and when she turned back around the guy was spitting a baggie of crack rocks into his palm. They looked real, with a dawnish discoloration around the edges, not that she cared. She shoved the saliva-wet baggie into her pocket, not her purse, which would’ve been harder to clean.

  “So, listen,” the guy said. He scratched at his ear, but really he was just trying to cover up his leech of a birthmark. “Are you and Ayad like—”

  “Thanks a lot!” she said over her shoulder.

  Back on the avenue, a 7 train roared across the el tracks. The pigeons had long ago scattered, but Roosevelt’s more sensitive children were just now plugging their ears. She paced outside La Escuelita, its windows too sturdy to rattle, too dark for her to see through. After the train had passed, in the relative quiet it had left behind, she whispered into her Nextel. I made a buy? Hello? Do you copy? I made a buy.

  Three down, one to go.

  She told the investigators that she had maintained her post outside the bar. The whole time. Never left it. The Mexican dude? He had approached her. Understand? He was the one who’d initiated the sale, practically forcing the rocks on her. What was she supposed to do? Say no? Just because she was ghosting? Tell him to fuck off and sell his drugs to someone else: a child, a nun, a recovering addict? After making the buy—outside La Escuelita, mind you—she watched the Mexican wander around the corner, the dude so fat and so slow that she bet the investigators could catch up to him easy. Because Sergeant Hart needed the overtime, he chose to believe her. Detective First Grade Chester Tevis, however, was as always a whole other story. While McCarthy and Duckenfield were head-steering the birthmarked Mexican into a p-van, Tevis met her three blocks south of Roosevelt, at the investigator car, away from any potential witnesses except for Cataroni and Hart in the front seat. She sat on the warm hood and tried to rub the chill out of her arms. She was afraid to look into his face. She stared at his throat instead, his coat buttoned to the top even though he hadn’t made any buys. He had been close, though, he told her. He had been just about to make a buy when he got this mother-f’ing call on his Nextel. Cataroni and Hart, with the dashboard heat blasting their faces, could see Tevis standing over her but probably not hear what he was saying.

  “Fourteen years I’ve been doing this,” Tevis told her. “Fourteen years and I’ve never had a ghost leave
me. Not once.”

  “You’re not listening,” she said. “The whole time, I’m telling you, I was outside the—”

  “No,” he said. “This is to my face now. You’re peddling this nonsense to my face, Itwaru.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “You’re not listening. Tell them whatever,” he said, gesturing to the investigators, “but you gotta understand I’m not falling for this, Itwaru. It doesn’t work on me. I’m the one who taught you how to lie.”

  Wrong. Her father taught her how to lie—don’t hesitate, don’t overdetail, don’t change stories, because no matter how angry people seem, they really do want to believe you—but she didn’t tell Tevis that. “I swear to God,” she said. “I never had the bar out of my sight.”

  “My life’s at stake with this shit,” he whispered, cursing for the first time in front of her. “I can’t … I have daughters, understand? I can’t be playing this game.” He reached into his pocket for the Kangol cap, as if to signal the end of their transaction. “I know your eighteen months is coming up. Just so you don’t get in any trouble with that, it should probably be you and not me to ask Prondzinski for a partner switch. She’ll give it to you, I’m sure. Tell her … I don’t know. Tell her whatever you want. You’ll think of something, I can guarantee that.”

  “What is this?” she said and hopped off the Impala’s hood. “You’re breaking up with me? Over this?”

  “I can’t work with somebody I don’t trust,” he told her calmly. “Those are the rules. Those are my rules. And I don’t give out second chances, ever. It’s why I’m still alive.”

  “But I didn’t even do anything wrong!”

  “Oh man, it’s convincing, Itwaru. I gotta congratulate you, I really do. You know what you sound like? You sound just like a drug fiend. Like an actual frickin’ drug fiend.”

  Hart rolled down the Impala’s window to hurry them along. It was time to go, time for him to go at least. With the Mexican officially in a p-van headed to the 115 Precinct, McCarthy and Duckenfield needed the Impala to come scoop them up. But—feeling magnanimous, high on the anticipatory pleasures of time-and-a-half—Hart offered to drop the uncles off at their car first. It was over a mile away in Woodside, parked where they always parked it for drug runs, across from the Himalayan Yak, but Tevis said he’d rather walk.