Uncle Janice (12 page)

“Second of all,” Judith said, “it’s not like it’s in your face or anything.”

“You understand what I do for a living, right? That I lock people up for smoking weed?”

“That’s totally fascist,” Judith said.

“What’s totally fascist? Having a real job?”

From walking through the back door to now: two minutes, maybe three. It wasn’t even a new record. Still sitting, Judith tried to kick her, but Janice, too fast and too sober, caught her pins-and-needled foot and—in hindsight this was where she might have done things
differently—yanked her off the couch. That newly bony ass of Judith’s struck the ground hard. Her head snapped back. She kicked out again, missing Janice but hitting the coffee table. The apple core—oh duh, the apple core, their improvised pipe—rolled to the edge without falling.

“Girls!” Vita said.

“Where’s
my
Dunder-Mifflin shirt?” Janice asked, standing over her sister.

“I got you a mouse pad!” Judith shouted. “For your fascist desk at your fascist job!”

Janice’s fingers curled on their own, smearing the bloody trembles across her palms. On her way up the stairs to her bedroom, where she intended to slam the door behind her and stick her head under every one of her pillows, she said, “It’s a stupid-ass show anyway,” by which she meant: I’m sorry, I’m a bitch, I miss you, but
come on
.

“You’re a stupid-ass show!” Judith said.

“Girls!!”

From behind his desk at the rumpus, Tevis said, “Sure, I’ve been called a fascist. You kidding? I mean, you do this job long enough, you’ll be called everything under the sun. What you gotta do? You gotta
acknowledge
their arguments. You have to. Should we be
treating
addiction? Well, yeah, of course, someone should be, not us specifically, but someone, yeah. Are we doing more harm than good? Are we busting Colombian cartels so they can be replaced by Mexican cartels so they can be replaced by U.S. cartels once all this kerfuffle goes legal? These are important questions, Itwaru. But they’re also very abstract, you know what I mean? And what we do on a day-to-day basis, that’s the opposite of abstract. So someone calls me a fascist, okay, fine, I’m going to acknowledge that argument, I’m going to take it all in, but when it’s my turn on the high horse I’m going to tell them about George Scheu. That name familiar to you at all? Have I told you this story already?

“He was a cop. One day—this is back in 1987—he gets up at six thirty in the morning to go to a Naval Reserves meeting out in Nassau. It’s his day off, mind you. Think about that. It’s six thirty in the morning and this guy leaves his wife and kids at home to go to a
meeting
. That’s who he was. Vietnam War vet. Medal of Honor recipient. Fourteen commendations with the department. He worked the One Fifteen in Jackson Heights, where they still got his picture up on the wall. You probably
seen it. White guy? Super skinny? Anyway, he’s walking to his car in his pressed navy uniform when he sees some bottom-feeder trying to break into a Mercedes. Guy’s not even trying to steal it. He just wants the radio. Now, Scheu is unarmed. I don’t know why. He’s off duty. It was a different time, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t like wearing the gun with his navy clothes, but he sees the guy breaking into the Mercedes and he decides to intervene.

“A neighbor ends up finding him. A woman out walking her dog. She sees Scheu on the sidewalk—this happened right around here, by the way. Flushing. This neighbor lady sees Scheu on the sidewalk, bleeding out of his eye, and she flags down an ambulance that happens to be passing by. That’s the only break he gets, that ambulance, and it’s not even really a break because he ends up dying anyway. On the ground, near the body, there’s a thirty-eight-caliber pen gun, which is exactly what it sounds like. Looks like a pen, bullet comes out the top. You get one shot, and this bottom-feeder hits him dead in the eye. You give him that shot a thousand times and he couldn’t do that again. But that’s how it is. The guy drops the weapon, goes through Scheu’s pockets—we find the wallet, empty, in the street—and just like that he disappears.

“The guy we like for it is this lowlife named Henry Vega. I keep saying we. I’m not even with the police yet. It’s 1987? Summer? I’m in Ceylon with the Merchant Marines, but that’s a whole other story.

“So they bring in Vega and they know he did it, but they can’t get enough on him to bring him to trial. Twelve years later.
Twelve years
. George Scheu’s three kids that he left behind? Twelve years older. His widow, twelve years older. And Henry Vega’s still walking around. Now, what we’re talking about is the second-longest quote-end-quote unsolved cop killing in New York City history. But see, we never stop. I never even met George Scheu. Like I said, I wasn’t with the police then, but to this day I’m still praying for his soul. One of many. And what are you thinking? You’re thinking we got Vega after all these years on DNA. But it doesn’t happen like that. What you gotta understand, a guy like Vega, he’s a fish. And how does a fish get caught? He opens his mouth.

“We pick up somebody for drugs. The investigators say, ‘You’re going
away for a million years. What have you got to barter with?’ He says, ‘I know who killed that cop out in Flushing. The one who got shot in the eye.’ He tells them he was living out there at the time, right on the block where it happened. He says his friend was visiting him that day and ended up killing the cop. And this friend of his is a guy named Henry Vega.

“Now what do you do? Put this guy, this lowlife drug addict, in a witness box, have him tell a jury that he’s pretty sure his friend murdered a cop twelve years ago? Course not. What you want, you want Vega saying it. ‘I, Henry Vega, shot the man George Scheu, and this is how I did it.’ But what, he’s just going to tell us that? Yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly what he’s going to do.

“I complain about the kel-mics never working. I complain because I know what this department is capable of. I understand we’ve got to pursue cop-killers with one hundred percent of our resources, absolutely, because George Scheu? His unavenged ghost? That should haunt the One Fifteen. That should haunt all of us. But a hundred percent of our resources should also go into keeping us as safe as humanly possible, to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future. So let’s get some working kel-mics, know what I mean? That’s another story maybe, but it’s also very much this story, too.

“We go to this two-room storefront on Booth Memorial Avenue and we tell the owner we want to rent the place out now and again for like a day at a time. I don’t know who found the place, but it’s perfect. It’s so far from where Vega’s living at the time that he’d have to take two trains and a bus just to get there on his own. And he can’t drive himself because he’s an f-up with a suspended license.

“We put up a sign out front that says ‘Charlie’s Barbershop.’ I don’t know who thought of that, either, but it’s such a nice touch because no one’s gonna pass a place like that and be like, ‘Oh, I think I maybe need a haircut.’ Because you got your usual barber and if you go anywhere else it’s like cheating, you know? And we didn’t even have any barber chairs anyway. So it was a lie that this place was a barbershop, but it was supposed to be a lie and Vega was supposed to know it was a lie so he’d think
he was in on the joke when in reality the big lie, the real lie, was getting ready to gobble him up.

“We bring in card tables and chairs. We bring in
boxes
of liquor. Snack mix. We got those nice red candles you see at Italian restaurants. The candles aren’t red, but the glass shell is. You know the kind I’m talking about? A candle on every table—and beneath every candle, a listening device. We got the camera buttons. And we fill the place with every Italian-looking undercover in the city. There were more Caucasians back then before … well, there were just more. But we don’t have enough, so we have to throw some Puerto Ricans in there, too, but that’s okay because they’ve already got the crosses and the gel in their hair, it’s not a problem. We fill the place up with these guys and turn the place into a frickin’ Scorsese movie. Charlie’s Barbershop: wiseguy social club.

“And Vega’s friend? Who we’ve got on the hook now? He goes to Vega and he says, ‘I’m swooping by to pick you up. There’s this place I wanna show you, you’re gonna love it.’

“And what happens? He loves it. What you have to understand about guys like Vega is that he’s watching
Goodfellas
, too. He’s watching
The Godfather
, he’s watching
The Sopranos
, like how we’re all in the lounge watching
The French Connection
, or at least we used to before
Rubí
got started. And this guy, this lowlife radio-booster, what’s his ambition? The nice suits. Okay? The free spaghetti dinners. His ambition is to get his foot into the clubhouse, and now here he is. The glass out front of Charlie’s Barbershop is the smoky kind you can’t really see through and the door is locked from the inside, but now it’s opening for him and his friend, and Vega’s looking around, he’s balder than he was in ’87, and he’s got the beard bald guys have to make up for it, and he’s thinking, ‘My goodness, this place is like a
movie
.’

“That’s because it is a movie, Henry. Me and this other black uncle are under the floor, under a trapdoor in this little room that’s used for storage. And we’re watching all this on the CCTVs we got set up down there, making sure everything’s coming in okay, and there’s just sweat pouring off us. We see Vega pressing his hands flat against the card table, like he isn’t certain the place is real. He’s looking around trying not to look around. He’s buzzing, man.

“Eventually, after a nice long while, Charlie comes over with drinks. Charlie of Charlie’s Barbershop. Not his real name. Now, let me tell you something: this is the greatest uncle in the history of the department. The best ever. And I know what I’m saying when I tell you that. Not to toot my own horn. And not to blow up your head, but if you continue to work hard and if you cool it on the unnecessary risks, then you have an opportunity to be right up at his level.

“So Charlie comes over with the drinks for introductions. ‘Who’s your friend?’ ‘This is that guy Henry I was telling you about.’ And Vega goes, ‘Call me Mr. Clean.’

“Now, that’s not any of the known aliases we got on this guy. Dollars to donuts? It’s a nickname he made up on the spot. Me and the brother under the trapdoor, we look at each other and now we
know
we got him. Mr. Clean? You kidding?

“Still, though, it takes five months, January to May. The friend will call us, tell us Vega wants to come by the set, we tell him Tuesday, then go down there and set everything up. Every time he’s there he’s getting a little more comfortable. He’s not testing the tables anymore to see if they disappear. The other guys? They’re starting to pay attention to him, busting his balls a little and he’s busting them back. When he leaves it’s understood he can only come back with his buddy. But he doesn’t want to have to come with his buddy anymore. He wants the door to open for Mr. Clean and Mr. Clean alone. So now he’s gotta show these mafia guys that he’s down, right? He’s one of them, a good guy to have around. He tells Charlie he’s got a cousin with the Bronx District Attorney’s office. He can get his hands on the NYPD’s secret radio frequencies for undercover operations. ‘That way,’ Vega says, ‘you’d be able to tell if anyone in your club is a rat.’ We look into it and find out he doesn’t have any cousin working with the DA, but the next time Vega comes around he’s got a list of random-frequency numbers that had nothing to do with anything. We loved that. But we’re like: is he such a moron, he’s not worried Charlie might test the numbers? Because then what, right? What’s Vega gonna do? Just shrug his shoulders and say the numbers must’ve gotten changed or something?

“Who the heck knows? Guys like Vega, they’re so f-ing stupid, you’d
drive yourself crazy trying to rationalize the crap that comes out of their mouth. Charlie, meanwhile, he gets these frequency numbers and says, ‘Okay, Mr. Clean. What else you got?’ Vega comes back with some coke, sells it to Charlie. ‘Okay, Mr. Clean. What else you got? Drugs? I can go down to I.S. Two Fifty, get coke off an eighth-grader. What else, what else?’ So Vega’s looking around at all these smiling wiseguys and he knows they’re thinking he’s small-time, he’s nobody, but see what they don’t know is that he’s secretly the baddest of the bad. What else has he got? He’s got a story.

“Now, this is why Charlie was the best ever. The department has since betrayed him, but that’s something else for another time and it doesn’t change the fact that he was the very best I’ve ever seen. He starts a fight with one of the other uncles in the room. It gets physical pretty quick, and Charlie ends up tossing the guy out of there. Then he sits back down at Vega’s table, breathing heavy, annoyed, and he says if he could get rid of that guy he would, the implication being that if the guy wasn’t a made man he’d take him out in a second.

“ ‘I’ll do it for you,’ Vega says. ‘You ever need a piece of work done just ask for Mr. Clean. I’ll take care of it.’

“Now, I’m watching all this down on the closed-circuit TVs. I can’t see Charlie’s reaction. I don’t know if he’s making like a skeptical face or if Vega just can’t stop talking now that he’s opened his mouth, but he turns to his friend and says, ‘In the summer of ’87, what happened on your block?’

“You never know what you’re gonna get with these CIs. They’re professional hustlers. They hustle their friends, their family. They think they’re hustling us. They’re addicts, everything that comes out of their mouth is either smoke or a lie. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be good at
this
, right? We can coach them up, but what’s coaching? I know you get mad that I don’t give you more direction, but seriously, how do you teach this? You see new uncles come in here, they’ve got their month of Narco training, and they’re completely clueless once they hit the street. You’ve got actors, professionals … and don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about Eddie here, he’s a genius … but you see some of
these doofs on TV and they’re terrible, right?
Completely
unconvincing. Professional actors. With do-overs. Multiple takes and blanks in the guns. And that’s with someone telling them what to
say
.