Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  He pushed the report toward her, its front side streaked with gray from God knows how many photocopyings. Worried her hands might start trembling, she didn’t reach for it but instead read it right there off the table, hunched forward in her chair and sitting on her fingers. What’d she remember? All the perfumes. The lady saying everything was pay-what-you-will, like at the Natural History Museum. When Janice finished reading, she looked up to see Lieutenant Lenox still smiling. He filed her report back into his folder.

  “Do I need my union rep here, Johno?”

  “How’s the coffee in Narcotics? Is it terrible? It’s terrible here, let me tell you, but I got one of those French presses. It’s pretty decent. Gotta lock it up in my desk so no one steals it, but that’s life in Internal Affairs.” His chair legs scraped across the floor as he stood up. “I’m going to make a pot, you want some? I’ll put it in a clean mug and everything.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “See, that’s how deep you undercovers go! Turning down a cup of coffee? It’s amazing! It’s like you’re not even cops anymore. How about a soda? A bottle of malt liquor? Ha-ha, just kidding. But seriously, we got Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke …”

  She pulled her hands out from under her thighs. “Listen, I really don’t mean to be rude—”

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “But I sort of have to leave pretty quick here. It’s my day off, you know. And if this is going to take all afternoon, maybe I could just come back another time or—”

  “How about this?” he said. He opened the laptop and turned it toward her. Somewhere inside its thin casing a fan blade started whirring. On-screen a black-and-white video waited for his pointer finger to press play. When he came around to her side of the table, she could smell the aftershave on him, even though gunpowder stubble still darkened his cheeks. It was typical of a certain class of investigator: putting on aftershave without actually shaving, deodorant applied under shirts, suit jackets sprayed with Febreze. He probably hadn’t gone home in days, the kind of detective she hoped to one day become. “I’m going to get some refreshments,” he said. “In the meantime? While you’re just sitting here? Take a look at this video. It’s security footage from the club. The night you were there, the twelfth. And the camera, it was directly above the booth where the DJ sold your partner Detective Tevis … let’s see if I can remember this exactly … three-point-five grams of powdered cocaine. In a small manila envelope. That sound about right?”

  Flushed with heat, she unzipped her jacket and hung it on the back of her chair. She crossed her legs at the knees, as if to make herself smaller, more invisible, while Lenox loomed behind her, presumably still grinning. The happy former football player who got to call his own plays.

  “Now the problem,” he said, “is not the quality of the footage. It’s actually pretty excellent for once. The problem is that I don’t know what this Detective Tevis looks like. Not like you do. So what would be great is if you could just watch this video, you follow? And hit pause as soon as Tevis shows up to make his cocaine buy.”

  He patted her on the shoulder before leaving. The chair she was sitting in was stupidly uncomfortable, but at least it didn’t keep scooting her forward like the one in Prondzinski’s office. At least there was that. She hit play on the video, which as promised was of an impressively high quality. No audio, though, not that anything would’ve been heard over the house music’s hard bass. Positioned—hidden?—behind the DJ booth, the camera clearly showed the white kid from behind, with enough light and definition for her to see a record wobbling on his turntable. Apparently money launderers spared little expense when it came to internal surveillance. Or maybe the camera belonged to the government. Maybe they had another one outside the club’s bathrooms where Janice had given Tevis the coke. Lieutenant Lenox, or some Internal Affairs IT guy, had cued up the video so that she saw herself come on-screen fairly quickly, after only a couple of minutes. The Janice on the laptop wore that stupidly shimmering shirt. A black-and-white face, unmistakably her own, leaned into the DJ booth to say something. She didn’t know if lipreading was admissible in court. She didn’t know if, when Lenox returned, she should ask for a lawyer or if outside involvement would only make this more official than it necessarily had to be. More real, even. What had seemed at the time to last only an instant took forever on tape. A hand with raggedy fingernails swapped forty dollars for a little manila envelope of reasonably priced cocaine. For him, it would’ve been a criminal sale of a controlled substance, a class B felony. For her, she didn’t know.

  She minimized the video player. Digital file folders covered the computer desktop with incomprehensible labels of seemingly random letters and numbers. She found one, though, with a Q and an I, maybe for Queens and Itwaru. She could’ve clicked it open, or she could’ve gone through any of Lenox’s actual folders piled on the table, but she knew she was under surveillance. Get with it, Janice. You have always been under surveillance. She closed the laptop and pushed it away from her. She had a better idea, or at least better than flipping through folders looking for her name: she could turn on the iPhone’s voice-memo app so she’d have her own digital record of whatever happened next. She reached into her purse, but Lenox—who this whole time had probably been watching her watch herself—was hurrying back into the room, as if afraid she might try to contact Tevis, or worse: her union rep.

  “I know you told me you were all right,” he said, “but I brought you some coffee anyway. Just in case.” He’d also brought a bag of popcorn for their movie date. Again he carried everything in one hand: the creamer packets, the sugar packets, and the two mugs, all in his calloused palm, with a corner of the popcorn bag pinched between his fingers. He dragged his chair over to her side of the table. The popcorn went between them and he opened the bag as if it were a book so they could both reach in at the same time. Steam carried buttery smells toward the ceiling. When he noticed—or rather when he pretended to first notice the closed laptop—he said, “You found him? It’s done?”

  She didn’t bother looking at him. Dark burn marks dotted the inside of the bag, but the kernels themselves looked perfectly popped. He grabbed himself a fistful, yet ate them only one at a time.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Did you see yourself? The pretty lady buying drugs?”

  “You thought that was me?”

  He shook his head. “Wrong question. Will a grand jury think it was you?”

  She had never taken illegal drugs, not once in her life, but she imagined that when a trip went bad it felt something like this. To slow things down, to try to seem cooler than she actually felt, she poured some creamer into her coffee. She had nothing to stir it with, though. Lenox’s mug displayed the IA logo, its stern westward-facing eagle, but her own mug had dialogue balloons superimposed over an inky-black backdrop. DO YOU KNOW HOW I FIND YOU IN THE DARK? it asked. OOH BABY, said a smaller balloon. KEEP GOING, LIKE THAT. DON’T STOP, DON’T STOP.

  “The first time I watched the video,” he said, “I thought maybe Detective Tevis had made his buy off the DJ when the kid was on break or something. Not in the booth, you follow? Off camera. But then you watch the whole thing and you see the kid never leaves the booth. Doesn’t even start packing up his records until the place is already closed, bar-backs or whatnot putting the joint’s chairs up on tables. And by that time, you and Detective Tevis had signed yourselves back into the Narco logbook. All the way back in Flushing. Weird, right? So then I’m wondering, well, maybe they got their paperwork switched up. You bought off the DJ. He bought off the bathroom attendant. And you just accidentally put the wrong names on the wrong reports, which is bad, don’t get me wrong, but it’s maybe not criminally wrong.”

  She watched his fat, wet mouth chew up another popcorn kernel.

  “But I’m a dumb fuck,” he told her. “I forgot the bathroom attendant was a lady. In the ladies’ room, obviously. Unless I’ve been mistaken this whole time, and Detective Chester Tevis is actuall
y a woman. Is that the story here? Because that would clear a lot of this up.”

  “Is he going to be in trouble?”

  “What about Janice Itwaru?” he asked. “Is she going to go to prison? Because right now? What it looks like? It looks like a falsified buy report. Misdemeanor perjury is what it looks like. And we’re not even talking yet about what you did with the DJ’s drugs.”

  “I’m not a dirty cop,” she told him.

  “Glad to hear it. Because that’s the alternative theory. You’ve gotten yourself jammed up here, but you are for the most part an honorable cop, so honorable—the theory goes—that you’re willing to help open up an investigation into your boy, Sergeant Hart.”

  “Hart?” she said. “That’s what this is all about? You’re gunning after Hart?”

  He shrugged. He sat facing her in a power position, leaned way back in the chair with his hands laced behind his head. Of course he wanted Hart. The man was guilty of excessive force, harassment, quota pressures, possession, paying off CIs with drugs, conspiracy to embezzle funds from the department, building a deck without a permit, possible flaking, possible steroid injections, criminal misconduct, and that snazzy catch-all: actions detrimental to the integrity of the police force. How much of all that Lenox was aware of, she had no idea. But he surely knew Hart made eighty-five K a year, with imminent pension benefits that would pay him half that annually for the rest of his fit and trim life.

  “We’d need you to wear a wire,” Lenox said. “Do a little acting. Nothing you’re not used to.”

  Her first sip of coffee tasted terribly tepid. She considered spilling it onto the laptop, but copies of that video were surely backed up on servers, easily downloadable and waiting on a subpoena. “I don’t know,” she said. It was the most honest thing she could’ve told him. “What you’re asking, you’re asking me to be a rat. I don’t know. That’s not something I’m used to. Not at all.” She rubbed her face, her hands smelling like her sister’s chamomile. “I need some time to think about it.”

  He reopened the laptop, which had apparently kept playing the security footage this whole time. When he pulled up the video player, though, Janice was no longer in the frame. The DJ was still spinning his records and the dancers in the distance were still bouncing, but without any audio they all seemed weirdly staged, stiff somehow, as if they were extras on a film set. So as not to smear it with butter, Lenox tapped his knuckles against the screen.

  “Here was the time for thinking,” he said. “But you didn’t. There was no thinking. So now you’re in a spot where if you don’t want to pitch in, help us get an actual bad guy, you’re going to be suspended. As in right now you’re going to be suspended.” He sucked at his gums, perhaps to loosen a stuck popcorn hull. “And if you talk to Tevis?” he said. “If, God help you, you talk to Sergeant Hart about this, well, now you’re impeding an investigation. And then what happens? We show up at that house of yours in Richmond Hill. Put the cuffs on you. Scare the bejeezus out of your mother and—”

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it, I get it. But I’m going to need you to take Tevis off the hook, too. The both of us. For any and all wrongdoing.” Lenox’s smile returned. “You’re not exactly in a position, Officer Itwaru, to be calling the shots here.”

  “Well, I’m calling that one,” she said. “So what’s it gonna be?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When she came into the rumpus early Tuesday morning, her first shift back at work since leaving Internal Affairs, Tevis asked her if she’d had a nice weekend. She tilted her head back, unsure of what he knew. Did he know that in her purse she carried a gift from IA? A super-fancy digital recorder, smaller than a cigarette lighter, with a voice-activated microphone that had automatically turned on as soon as he started talking? According to her new best friends at Internal Affairs, he did not know about any of that. He knew nothing. He knew nothing and will continue to know nothing, you follow? They hadn’t gone to Tevis, she imagined, because they figured he would’ve turned down any deal they tried to offer him. Not only that, he would’ve tipped off Hart and squashed the investigation before it could even get started. With a stoic grace, he would’ve submitted to a punishment of dead-end desk jobs for the rest of his career. Janice, on the other hand. Janice, they could trust to act the rat. Really, though, a comparison between them wasn’t fair at all. Tevis had only three years left before he could cash in his pension. Three years. Go ahead and bury him. Even in the most dead-end of dead-end desk jobs, he couldn’t run out of oxygen before the end of three years. Janice had three years on the job, seventeen to go. You couldn’t compare their situations at all. The question then became, if Tevis found himself in her position, would he jam up Sergeant Hart? Probably not. Probably Tevis would quit the department before backstabbing a fellow cop. Unless of course that fellow cop was truly doing the dirty. That was the question then. If Hart had flaked someone, planting drugs on an innocent person, she’d no doubt feel a moral obligation to jam him up. But if, like James Chan, he had jiggered the vending machine to dispense free soda cans, she wouldn’t. For that matter she shouldn’t. So where does paying a CI off with drugs fall in the spectrum of obligatory action? Should she even care that K-Lo volunteered to walk away with crack instead of cash? Should IA? Well, yes, IA should certainly care, but it was their job to police the police. Not hers. But then again, hadn’t she sworn an oath, an oath she actually took seriously and still remembered verbatim, to faithfully discharge her duties as a police officer in the New York City Police Department to the best of her ability, so help her God? And—she could hear her sister’s condescending voice now—wasn’t it the Narcotics Division’s responsibility to subtract the amount of drugs from the street, not add to it? Okay, fair enough, but Hart hadn’t exactly flown down to Colombia to strip and alkalize any coca leaves. Not at all. Instead, without personally profiting or otherwise receiving any monetary compensation, he had given drugs that Janice had bought off the street back to the street. It was a zerosum transaction, as any cigar-chomping banker could’ve told you. Plus, investigators had to fill out a heap of paperwork for every orphaned quantity of drugs, and another heap for compensating a CI through the official channels, so really, by allowing those two problems to dissolve each other, Hart had freed up the man-hours to subtract even more drugs off the street. That kind of big-picture thinking could be extended to ask the more utilitarian question, was the world a better place with Sergeant Hart or Officer Itwaru working for the NYPD? Because that was the choice here. One or the other, and to her the answer seemed obvious. Unfortunately, only a psychopath, or maybe a sociopath—Janice had never been able to figure out the difference—would use that sort of math to justify ruining someone else’s career. She should ask her father what he’d do and just do the opposite. She should call K-Lo. Because what if he had sold the drugs to some honor-roll student who would’ve one day grown up to cure AIDS but had OD’d instead? But that of course was entirely speculative, and perhaps it didn’t matter what K-Lo did with the drugs, perhaps it mattered only that Hart had hoped to avoid some paperwork, which hardly seems like a crime worth prosecuting. The question then became, was this a crime so undeserving of prosecution that she was willing to lose her job over it, to effectively render meaningless the last three years of her life, and to enter a historically bad job market without a college degree? Should mitigating economic factors bear any weight on her decision? Was it irresponsible of her not to consider them? What about her mother eventually needing twenty-four-hour nursing care? What about Tevis’s pension? His alimony payments? Should she even consider the near certainty that if the positions were reversed, Hart wouldn’t hesitate to fuck her over? Or the near impossibility that IA would be able to keep her cooperation a secret? That for the rest of her career she’d be under suspicion, which in the hermetic universe of the NYPD amounted to factual certainty. That a verminous stench would cling to her wherever she went in the department? But was her fear of others’ disapproval so st
rong that she’d forsake her own hopes for the future: to do substantive police work in an elite unit like Homicide or Counterterrorism? Was that fear not childish, not cowardice? Wouldn’t ratting out Hart, therefore, be the adult, brave thing to do? But wouldn’t it be braver, more adult, to accept sole responsibility for her mistake? The question then became, shouldn’t she just man up? Accept IA’s outrageous punishment—seventeen years of desk work, potential expulsion from the police force, potential (although unlikely) jail time—shouldn’t she shoulder all that without dragging anyone else into the muck with her? But could she accept that punishment without dragging anyone else down into the muck? Because, again, what about her mother? And Tevis? But shouldn’t he at least have a say in whatever sacrifice she made on his behalf? Or would that invalidate the very nature of sacrifice, i.e., that it is a voluntary, independent decision? Was that even accurate? Better question: what sort of woman, dressed in a ritual toga, balanced on the lip of a volcano, and what sort of idiot woman wouldn’t grab the nearest douchebag sergeant by his overtight Polo shirt and toss him into the lava instead? There! There you go, unappeasable Earth Spirit, Zule, Waponi Woo God, what have you—there’s your fucking sacrifice. But no, no, that wasn’t the answer, either. That wasn’t even the question. The question now was—was what? Forget the moral imperative, the utilitarian argument. The question now was, did she have a nice weekend?

  With IA’s digital recorder silently running in her purse, she said, “It was fine. How about you?”