Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “Amen,” said the AAers. And then, arms raised, they shouted, “Keep coming back! It works if you work it!”

  The circle broke apart, but people still hung around the room to fold up chairs and kill the coffeepot. Young Huxtable hawked religious literature out of his duffel bag. The nurse was telling the drunk guy about an evening meeting over in Astoria. To delay returning to the outside world with its neon-lit bar signs, some of the other members had formed a new circle—a smaller, chattier circle—everybody sipping on coffee except for K-Lo, which made her nervous because he always knew things others didn’t, like maybe he’d seen Young Huxtable cleaning out the pot one time with toilet water. Or maybe Mrs. Lo insisted he drink only decaf. Janice went to go fold chairs in the back of the room, where she knew her father would follow. She felt his hand on her arm, gently turning her around. The fluorescents’ stark lighting tinseled his teary eyes.

  He said, “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to make it seem like Mom was the bad guy, because that’s completely not what—”

  She shushed him. She didn’t tell him—she shouldn’t need to tell him—that she would never consider her mother the bad guy. She couldn’t. No one could. Not if you’d met her. Not if you’d ever seen her, behind a scrim of steam as she poured hot water onto a T-shirt, or sitting big-eyed on the stairs with the tattered end of a bandage between her teeth. Bad guys didn’t look like that. They looked like Korean Marty and Cerebral Pauly. They had the giant sloping forehead of a Ned Shu or an Ed Shu or ex-governor Eliot Spitzer, or they had Commissioner Ray Kelly’s preposterously punchable jaw. Bad guys were married guys who flirted with tipsy women in bars. They had evil cackles and miscolored eyes. White cats on their armrests. They sold drugs. They hit and ran. Hit and retreated cowardly to Viper rooms. They busted through back doors uninvited, wore droopy dandelions in their lapels, and tossed little girls’ book bags onto the roof of the 4 Aces Car Dealership on Atlantic Avenue. They asked their Yankee teammates to inject their ass cheeks full of steroids. They sat behind big desks like Lieutenant Prondzinski. They slept under bigger desks like Inspector Nielsen. They looked like Sergeant Hart. They looked like Gonz. They looked exactly like Gonz. They mocked Rubí like Gonz, avoided A.R.’s Tavern like Gonz, called people pussies and faggots, abandoned their ghost posts, sucked up to investigators, sneered, strutted, snarled, and were despised like Gonz. You want to know what a bad guy looks like? That’s what a bad guy looks like.

  She told her father, “I need a favor. The guy in the glasses, the one who came in last … don’t look. After I leave, I need you to go over to him and say, ‘Hey, how was that crack Sergeant Hart gave you?’ And then walk away. Take a cab back to work and don’t let him follow you, all right?”

  “What?”

  But she was already walking away herself. She knew he’d do it. She also knew an anxious K-Lo, worried about the potential loss of his CI gigs, would call Hart later tonight, probably sooner. That’s why she needed to get out of here straightaway. She had a three-point plan now—sit still long enough, clenching your jaw, and something’s bound to occur to you—but this part here with K-Lo was only the first bullet. Send him to Hart, who’d want to know what the guy at the meeting had looked like, how he acted. And K-Lo would say, I don’t know. Overweight? Sorta sad? Told a story about blacking out, beating on his wife, and didn’t seem to get in too much trouble over it, and Hart would say, A cop, no doubt about it, probably Internal Affairs. Janice knew exactly how he’d think. She knew the catastrophic film festival in his brain would project a silhouetted image of the IA building in Manhattan. Shit, what didn’t she know? How the movie ended, for one, but she had a few guesses. If Internal Affairs jammed up Hart, he’d assume she was the snitch and so he’d snitch on her, not to IA, but to all his department-wide cronies and goons, who’d block every promotion she ever came up for, if they didn’t kill her first, sending her into a drug bust without backup, Serpico-style. Even the uncles would shun her, unless she could cast a more convincing villain to play her part. On her way out of the room, when she heard Young Huxtable’s mini-groan, she knew without having to turn around that the drunk white guy had finally kicked his coffee cup across the floor. She ran, the burka’s dark material billowing around her legs.

  She needed to find a bad guy. That was the second bullet. Or rather, she needed to fabricate a bad guy. Make a preexisting bad guy seem even badder. Because K-Lo might spot her if she hung around the building, she drove six blocks away, to a corner pay phone on Roosevelt Avenue, but apparently a frustrated juicehead had recently ripped out the armored cord. Imagine the news he must’ve received. Janice got back in the car, where she tore off her swampy burka. She sped to a pay phone she knew still worked, her pay phone, outside the Corona bodega with the music-making carousel-for-one taxicab. No one was riding it. No Korean Marty across the street, either, or any pigeons perched beneath the el. No snow left on the sidewalks. While the inevitable 7 train shrieked overhead, she found fifty cents at the bottom of her purse. She didn’t think Gonz’s Pure Magic fuck buddy was originally from Long Island, but the accent out there was the whitest one Janice could approximate, and so before dialing she practiced saying, It’d be horrible if I spilled coffee on my new Prada bag. It’d be the worst if chocolate melted in my drawers. Outrageously competent, Richie the Receptionist answered before the first ring had finished ringing.

  “Queens Narcotics,” he said.

  She kept her back to the pay phone so no one across the street could sneak up on her. “Can I talk to Gonz?” she asked, pronouncing it tawk. “Raymond Gonzalez?”

  “I’m sorry,” Richie said, “but I can’t transfer you unless you know the extension.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “Well, can you give him a message, please?”

  “I can’t confirm that anyone by that name even works here.”

  “Can you tell him I’m sorry?” The pay phone shell’s sticker continued to offer fortune-telling services—DON’T GIVE UP HOPE!—at reasonable rates. She said, “I’ve been trying to get ahold of him on his cell, but … can you tell him I was just feeling so pissed off, you know? Like literally crazy. Sir? Hello? Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yeah, of course,” he said, probably with his pen poised above a pad of paper, determined to get every detail correct before broadcasting the story throughout the rumpus. At the top of that pad: the number that had come across his caller ID. “Go ahead,” he told her.

  “If you make a complaint on a cop? Like an official complaint? And it isn’t entirely true … is that like against the law? Can you go to jail for something like that?”

  Click, said the receiver. She might’ve chosen that same moment to hang up on Richie herself, but Korean Marty—who’d come out of the bodega with an open bag of cheese puffs—did it for her, slipped a hand behind her neck to depress the little flap. As usual, he wore his beloved white leather jacket and looked worse than the last time she’d seen him. The hematoma above his eye had faded a bit, but now deep purple scratch marks grooved his cheeks, where some poor woman must’ve raked him open. A dial tone whined in Janice’s ear. He pulled his hand back to lick orange cheese dust off his fingers.

  “Who that you was talking to?” he asked. “El hombre? Siempa de la tango or some shit?”

  She kept the phone in her hand in case she needed to bust up his nose. Her car, her personal car, with her personal license plate, sat parked in a tow-away zone ten feet behind him, with an NYPD plaque faceup on the dash. She said, “You owe me fifty cents.”

  “For what?”

  “For the phone call you just cost me, you fucking moron.”

  “You’re real cool, you know it?” He angled his hip toward her, an invitation to reach into his pocket for the change if she wanted it that bad. “Matter of fact,” he said, “we was just talking about how cool you are.”

  “Who’s that? You and your rapist buddies?”

  “See, but what we can’t figure out is if you’
re a cop? Or one of the snitches on their payroll? I’m thinking cop, personally, the way them DTs beat up on us with like a vengeance.”

  Bells chimed above the bodega’s door as a young, tough-looking Chinese woman came out onto the sidewalk. She had half her head razored bald and a plastic squeeze bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. The dial tone gave way to an apologetic robot operator asking Janice for more money. The Chinese woman ripped off the bottle’s plastic seal with her teeth. She drank while she walked, her head tipped back, and Janice, thirsty now herself, wanted to chase after her—take me with you, so long as we don’t pass any alleyways—but Korean Marty used the distraction to slide himself in front of her. Back her up against the pay phone. If she tried to get past him, she’d clip her shoulder against his, initiating the kind of contact he was surely dying to finish.

  He said, “How much they get paid, them snitches? On average like?”

  “I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. Cheese dust ringed his mouth. “All the people I know? I could help you clean up the whole neighborhood practically.”

  By which he meant he could help her clean up his competition. “What about Marty?” she asked. “Would you set him up?”

  Another overhead 7 train gave him some time to think it over. He closed up one eye, the hematoma eye, perhaps a tic of his when concentrating especially hard, like her father with his lower lip. After the train passed, Korean Marty said he really didn’t know if he could set up the other Marty, and ridiculously she admired his hesitation, his reluctant sense of loyalty.

  “I guess it would depend,” he continued. “Maybe. I don’t so much mind standing out here all day, but I’m a little tired of him putting his hands on me, know what I mean?”

  Did she know what he meant? Of all the people to ask her this? Oh my God, never mind, forget about that teensy moment of admiration tingling the corners of her mouth. She wanted to bust up his nose after all, but instead she handed him the phone and explained that she had a number he could call if he was really serious about becoming an informant. Then she turned around and dialed it. Even with her back to him, she felt only partly afraid that he’d punch her in the kidney or put her up in a headlock. They were on Roosevelt Avenue, with all its potential witnesses going to work, coming home from work, buying cheap electronics or tacos. Plus the number she dialed was a short one, with only three digits. When she turned back around, he put the phone tentatively to his ear. Strands of his greasy, bowl-cut hair spilled over the receiver. As soon as the 911 operator came on, asking for his emergency, Janice slipped away, left him standing there holding the phone.

  He hung it up in its cradle without saying a word. He wanted to talk to an hombre, not a dispatcher. He wanted to talk to someone like Hart. Rather than risk Korean Marty spotting her parking plaque—or worse, her license plate, which was registered to her address—she decided to leave her car behind in Corona. She’d come back for it later. She’d gone the last few days without it anyhow. She walked east down Roosevelt, past the bodega, past the musical taxicab, past a scrawny Mexican murmuring, social, social, social for counterfeit SSN cards, all the way to the Ninety-First Street el stop. She’d take the 7 to Flushing, then a bus to the rumpus. On her way up the el steps, she did not peek over her shoulder to see if Korean Marty was following. She didn’t have to this time. She heard him munching his cheese puffs two steps behind her.

  She kept climbing. If she had showed her badge to the baldheaded MTA guy in his glass MTA booth, she would’ve gained free admittance through the emergency door, but instead she vaulted the turnstile for the first time in her life, tucked her legs, and hit the ground walking. Korean Marty did the same. There were no patrol cops to ticket them. The baldheaded MTA guy wasn’t paid enough to care. On the Queens side of the tracks, Janice walked to the end of the platform but kept away from the edge. Sharpie horns bedeviled a skinny Latino in a poster for HIV prevention. Korean Marty, whose job required constant standing, dropped into a bench seat behind her.

  With the last 7 passing through just a couple of minutes earlier, there were only a few other passengers waiting with them on the platform. Had she been looking up from the street, she could’ve watched the pigeons to gauge the next train’s arrival; here, above the tracks, she relied on twitchy air currents and ground rumbles. As far as she could tell, Korean Marty had not moved since sitting down. She reached into her purse to turn on her phone’s voice-memo app. IA’s recorder, she assumed, would run on its own. Somewhere in her purse she also had a makeup compact that she could’ve taken out to keep an eye on Korean Marty behind her, a Spy Tech–approved surveillance method. She could’ve done a million things. Two million things. When a 7 train finally did come squealing into the station, she could’ve stepped on at the last second, like in The French Connection, or stepped off at the last second to wave at him from the platform as the train skyjacked him away. But she didn’t. She got on the train and stayed there, holding on to a pole as he sat in a nearby seat, all the way to Main Street, Flushing, the end of the line. Before standing up to follow her off, he threw his empty cheese-puff bag on the floor.

  “You’re just gonna leave that there?” she asked.

  He said, “People get paid to pick that shit up.”

  Down on the street, dark gypsy cabs circled the station while a miserable traffic cop mimed directions to keep them moving. She could’ve gone to him for help. More alternate universes: she could’ve hailed one of the taxis. Told the cabbie to step on it, drive the wrong way down a one-way, make a sudden U-turn, pull over abruptly around a blind corner. She could’ve lost Korean Marty with ease in the raucous Flushing Mall, gone into a dressing room wearing this burka and come back out in her jeans and hoodie. Instead? Instead she led him to the bus stop. And when the Q65 arrived, and when he didn’t have a MetroCard or exact change for the fare, she flashed her badge at the driver to get them both on.

  “Wow,” he said, sitting down in a seat reserved for the handicapped. “That’s a real badge, man? For real? You’re really a cop?”

  “Do you even know why you’re following me?”

  Happy to have an answer for her, he smiled. “I was told to!”

  “Well, you’re doing a great job.”

  “That’s really nice of you to say.”

  Twenty minutes later she let him push the yellow tape strip to call for their stop. She wanted to believe that had she arrived for work alone, Richie would’ve immediately hit her up with the latest Gonz gossip—have you heard, have you heard?—but as it was, given the nature of his gatekeeping responsibilities, he had to keep quiet and glare at the interloper, Korean Marty, who hung back to read the words on the rumpus’s pebbled glass door. QUEENS NARCOTICS. He looked like he couldn’t believe it. His hand was inches away from the letters, as if he were afraid to touch them. After signing in at the front desk, she dragged him out into the rumpus by the sleeve of his leather jacket. It was half past three. Every on-duty uncle was in the lounge watching the Rubí replacement, Amigas y Rivales, except for Gonz, who sat at his desk with a work phone cradled against his ear and a cell phone in front of him. She doubted he even would’ve recognized Korean Marty, but the investigators surely would. She pushed him into the chair reserved for visitors, off to the side of Hart’s desk. The 115 boys were all there: Cataroni next to Hart, across from the indistinguishable Irishers, McCarthy and Duckenfield.

  “Remember this ugly face?” she asked them. She put a hand on Korean Marty’s shoulder, its metal zipper still cold from outside. “He wants to sign up as a confidential informant.”

  “Now hold on,” Korean Marty said.

  Hart blew his nose into an ancient handkerchief that had seemingly never been washed. “What’s next?” he asked, his eyes cast toward the ceiling.

  Janice pulled Internal Affairs’ voice-activated recorder out of her purse. “See this?” she asked Korean Marty. “This little bad boy? This has got you clear as crystal, my friend, saying you’d he
lp us set up your pal Marty.”

  “I said I’d think about it!”

  “Well, we can play the tape for Marty, see how he interprets all your soul-searching.”

  “My what?”

  “What are you doing?” Hart asked her. His usually rancid breath smelled like a eucalyptus cough drop. “This isn’t even your job. We recruit CIs, not you.”

  “I’m thinking about a career change,” she said. Part three of her three-point plan: she tossed him IA’s recorder. “Nice, huh? It’s running right now, you can’t even hear it. I’m telling you, Sarge: one hundred percent, top-of-the-line equipment. You don’t even have to push any buttons to turn it on. Now ask me where I got it.”

  Because if they left the rumpus they’d have to sign themselves out, because the Queens Narcotics Division by its very nature teemed with big-eared busybodies, because Grimes was probably sleeping on a cot in the only other relatively private area, she brought Sergeant Hart up to her secret third-floor bathroom to tell him the whole story. Sort of the whole story. She made sure to lock the door behind them. Downstairs, the investigators grilled Korean Marty. Up here, she sat on the edge of the sink without putting her full weight on it, composed, or pretending to be composed, the purse in her lap, while Hart stalked the few square feet of bathroom tiles available to him. Swishing and rattling. The recorder in his hands looked as small as a wafer.

  “When did you meet with them?” he asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? And you’re just telling me now?”

  Quietly, to keep her voice from echoing, she said, “What? I was supposed to call you? I wasn’t sure they hadn’t tapped your phones already.”

  He began rubbing the top of his head. Shorter, heavier breaths came sputtering out of his nose. He couldn’t think all this through fast enough, but surely now the catastrophic film projector was flickering on with images of his wife in yoga pants, Thomasina’s Haverford tuition bill, a possible trial, foreclosure, a voided pension. Sick with the flu, or rather convinced he was sick with the flu, he untucked his white Polo shirt to ruffle the hem, to work up a little cool air for himself. Before his legs could buckle, he sat down on the toilet seat.