Uncle Janice (17 page)

“Are you serious?” Klondike said.

“I know, it’s pathetic, but I can’t really think of—”

“No, no, no,” Morris said. “It’s amazing.”

They sent James Chan to go buy a Sunkist from the reception area’s vending machine. Well, not exactly to buy a Sunkist, but to use his weird button-mashing trick to get one for free. Because the uncles had nothing better to do, and because
Rubí
had gone off the air and its replacement—the Mexican telenovela
Amigas y Rivales
—had yet to gain traction for them, they gathered in the lounge to circle around Janice and watch her drink orange soda over a garbage can. She slipped the rubber band off her wrist to tie back her hair. She didn’t want to do this.

“I don’t want to do this,” she told them.

“We appreciate that,” Fiorella said, “but this is really about the greater needs of the group as a whole.”

To encourage her, the uncles got a chug-a-lug chant going. Their fists bobbed in unison. The soda can’s metal tab, after Janice had bent it back and forth a few times, broke off on D, the first and/or last initial of her future husband. Matt Damon? Danny DeVito? She started chugging. She knew if she didn’t puke, she’d disappoint everyone, so she bolted the soda in painful gulps until its orange fizz sprang tears into her eyes. Without her quite noticing, the chanting had stopped. When she paused to take a breath, she saw Sergeant Hart looming over her.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but you do realize I got a deck to get fixed, right?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not yet understanding.

“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t build it. McCarthy and Duckenfield,
they
built it, that’s the problem. Irene’s worried it slopes too much, it’s slipping into the foundation there, and the grandkids are gonna hurt themselves. Okay? Now I gotta get a contractor to level it all out. That’s parts, labor, work permits, the whole thing. Hold on. Then I got Thomasina starting Haverford next fall. Can’t go to SUNY like a normal human
being—she needs a liberal-arts education. If I told you what that costs, Itwaru, you’d call me a liar straight to my face. But what about Irene? Can’t forget about her. What do you think? You think she doesn’t need money? She says she’s worried about empty-nest syndrome. She says she’s gotta get certified for a yoga instructor license. What that costs, you don’t want to know. It’s an investment for our future, she tells me. That’s fine, Irene, that’s great, but you gotta have
money
before you can invest, am I right? You gotta have
money
to send Thomasina to Haverford. You gotta have
money
to fix the deck so the grandkids don’t fall off and crack their heads open. Meanwhile, Itwaru, we don’t even have any grandkids yet. You see what I’m saying?”

“Not really, sir, no.”

“Oh wow,” said Puffy, God bless him. “I thought it was just me.”

“Oh wow, where’s my fucking overtime?” Hart asked. He booted the garbage can across the lounge, the circled-up uncles finally scrambling out of the way. Shredded papers spilled across the carpet for someone else to clean up. “You ain’t making buys, Itwaru, we ain’t making overtime. What does that mean? That means I’m home an extra ten hours a week. No one wants that. You think Irene wants that? Irene doesn’t want that. Where I’m sitting out in the backyard staring at a sloping deck? Fantasizing about the fancy juicer I can’t afford, three hundred bucks, practically cleans itself, not that anybody cares what I want, right? Right?”

“I’m trying to make buys,” she said.

“Oh, obviously!” he said, looking around the room. “Obviously you are working very, very hard here.” He took the Sunkist from her and smelled it before handing it back. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked. “Stop trying and start doing your job, yeah? I don’t care if you’ve suddenly gone incompetent, if you can’t remember how to make buys anymore. I do not care. Figure it out. Because right now? Right now you are fucking with my money and my money is not to be fucked with.”

To be fair, she’d made three buys in the last week, two of which went up on the board next to her name, but none of them had led to an arrest for the 115 investigators. As far as Sergeant Hart and his team were
concerned, she was the girl who missed Tevis’s positive, left drugs up in the Martys’ apartment, and hadn’t been able to find the Elmhurst Hospital meth clinic. Of course none of the uncles had been able to find the Elmhurst Hospital meth clinic, but why not blame only her? Why not! Hart’s pants swished and his Altoids tin rattled as he strode away from her, past the uncles who’d all hung around to witness her humiliation, past Lieutenant Prondzinski who stood in the lounge’s entryway to stare at her over the top of a mug that said
STOP, THINK, GO GREEN
. A grainy tadpole of vomit swam up into Janice’s mouth, but she forced it back down.

Two days later she vomited for real, no Sunkist required, in an apartment building stairwell. This was over in LeFrak City, municipally speaking not an actual city but a twenty-tower cluster of affordable housing at the southern edge of Corona, within the 115’s jurisdiction. The original developer, Monsieur LeFrak—like Janice, prudently superstitious—had designed the buildings without thirteenth floors, and so it was somewhere in that negative zone between twelve and fourteen that she threw up her dinner. But hold on. A little backtracking: the day before, she’d spent her entire shift sort of ghosting Gonz. Unlike Janice and Tevis, who worked almost exclusively with the 115 investigators, Gonz got passed around from team to team, always on temporary assignment, as if he were the gun in Russian roulette. Yesterday it had been Janice’s turn to ghost him, but—without any of the investigators knowing—he’d decided to play hooky with his chubby redhead, the poor Pure Magic girl who apparently lived nearby in a Jackson Heights co-op. Lucky for Gonz, awful for Janice. Awful for the redhead probably, too. To cover for him, Janice had sat in a bar across from the co-op, sipping on Dos Equis and telling stories into the Nextel. Uncle is approaching a homeless black guy. Uncle is approaching an Asian bag lady. When their shift ended without any positive signals, the investigators all blamed her. Reasonably, of course, because what wasn’t her fault? So she couldn’t fuck up two consecutive fishing trips, Sergeant Hart paired her with
Narco’s best confidential informant, a guy named Kevin Loquaio, but please call him K-Lo. A civilian snitch in the department’s employ, he stood upwind from Janice in the LeFrak stairwell, two steps above her, his fingers overdramatically pinching his nose. Vomit had splattered her sneakers.

“Yuck,” he said. With skin the color of whiskey, he was of an indeterminate race, even more so than Janice. He wore glasses covered in scratches. A deep dimple collapsed his chin. Normally he worked cases with Puffy in Astoria, but he’d told the investigators about an apartment in LeFrak that’d sell crack to anybody, no problem, something Hart assured her even she couldn’t botch. “You pregnant?” K-Lo asked her. “Because Mrs. Lo? When she’s carrying, God bless her? She’s liable to get sick all times of day, don’t have to be morning exclusive.”

“I’m not pregnant, you jackass.”

He grinned, thrilled to have goaded that out of her. He trafficked in information; spent his nights collecting data, secrets, confessions, and accidental admissions; his days splicing it together until all the angles revealed themselves. “You think it was maybe them carnitas you scarfed?” he asked. “Can I tell you something? Street carts, restaurants, I don’t trust any of them. You hear they gonna start putting sanitation grades in the windows? Now, why they wanna do that unless there be something nasty going on behind doors?”

“Can you please stop talking?” she said, hunched over, her hands on her knees.

“What’s the matter? You nervous? Because my tummy, it’ll get upset when I’m nervous. Puffy says it’s okay to be a little nervous. You’d be weird if you weren’t, he says. Hey, how come you all call him Puffy? You ask me, he don’t look like a Puffy.” He touched the skin on his face, as if testing his own puffiness. “Mrs. Lo, she met him. She thinks he’s sort of a handsome devil. I can see that, I guess. How long you known him for? He’s a pretty nice guy, yeah? How come—”

“I’m not nervous,” she said.

“You don’t got the flu, do you?” he asked, backing up another two steps.

Truth be told, she was sort of nervous—she hadn’t stepped inside
an apartment to make a buy since the Marty incident—but that had nothing to do with the vomit between her shoes. Blame that on physical exhaustion. She had insisted they skip the coffin-like closeness of the elevator and instead walk up the stairs. Fourteen stories? Shouldn’t have been a problem. On vertical patrols as a Housing cop, she had climbed project stairwells all day every day, but now, seventeen months later, she felt as if she’d swallowed a box of needles. Blame it on all those hours of rumpus inactivity. Blame it on A.R.’s Tavern, their cheap drink specials, the six pounds she’d gained since the holidays, the Planet Fitness membership card that perpetually languished in her wallet, and yeah, sure, blame it on the two carnitas she’d gobbled down and the spicy aji verde sauce that tasted like flames as they came up. She wiped her mouth with the back of her coat sleeve.

“You know,” K-Lo said, “there’s no shame in taking the elevator the rest of the way.”

“What’s the matter? You’re tired?”

Two flights of stairs later, they were walking down a poorly lit hallway toward apartment 16–. Toys covered the floor: Smurf dolls, a wooden elephant, plastic fruits and plastic veggies, a Baby’s First laptop lying open as if some child had been called in to dinner in the middle of data entry. The closer she and K-Lo got to the apartment, the more shit they had to step around. No rush, though: a cock diesel black guy stood in front of 16–’s open door. Another customer, she thought. Ahead of them on line. Just as the stereotypes would have indicated, cocaine seemed to attract a far nattier dresser than the weed- and crack-buyers she was accustomed to seeing. The guy wore a dark suit with black shoes most likely made in a non-Asian country and a bright-red Fruit of Islam bowtie. He spoke to the tired-looking Latina inside the apartment with the aggressive patience—which is to say no patience at all—of a man who, wherever he went, was almost always bigger than everyone else.

“Yeah, okay, but I’m her
father
,” he was saying. “I’ve got custody rights.”

“Yes, but your name’s not on the pickup list,” the woman said.

“You keep telling me about this list. This list? I don’t
need
to be on your list. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I’m her
father
. I’m on the legal custody rights list.
That’s
the list I’m on.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to please keep your voice down out of consideration for my neighbors,” the woman told him, as if it were a well-rehearsed line.

“Excuuuse us,” K-Lo said and squirted himself through the doorway with weaselly ease.

On behalf of the New York City Police Department, Sergeant Hart would pay him a flat fee for his CI services, and the faster K-Lo got in, the faster he got out, the faster he got his palm laid with cash, the faster he got to move onto his next up-the-block hustle. Impressed with how easily he’d insinuated himself into the apartment, Janice decided that when they finished here she’d let him take the elevator down without her. But first, apologizing, squeezing past both the black guy and the Latina, she followed him inside, where more toys, hundreds of them, overstuffed the living room. A little black girl sat still and quiet on the carpet with her back to the door. Plastic beads covered the tips of her cornrows. She drew purple weblike lines on her arm with a Magic Marker, presumably nontoxic, for the whole apartment had been marshaled to protect her. Duct tape covered the electrical sockets. A waist-high plastic gate kept her out of the kitchen; another gate prevented her from reaching a glass door that opened onto a balcony. Somehow, even with all these precautions, a flesh-colored patch—flesh-colored for white people—covered one eye.

“Hiya, sweetie,” Janice said as she crouched down in front of her. The girl didn’t look up, wouldn’t look up, but Janice pressed on: “What happened to your eye?”

“Who the hell are you?” asked the man in the entryway.

The Latina, her own voice rising now, hollered out for somebody named Rose Marie. It must’ve been her sister. The woman who came out of the kitchen—unlatching the safety gate, holding a wooden spoon coated in red sauce—looked exactly like her, a little younger and thinner maybe, but with the same burst-capillary expression more commonly
found on the faces of new parents and combat soldiers. Her slumped shoulders asked the world what impossible weight it expected her to burden now; as if in response, K-Lo held up eight of his fingers. She waved him toward the balcony with her spoon. Red sauce dripped onto the carpet, which seemed to bother her less than it did Janice. Everything about this place, but perhaps especially its disorder, Janice found frightening.

“What the hell?” said the black guy.

Puffed up now, he filled the entryway in its entirety, his hand braced against the door to keep Rose Marie’s sister from slamming it in his face. He wanted to know what list
those
people was on. They continued to argue, he and the Latina, until a neighbor lady came into the hall to complain. Pots and pans, or at least what sounded like pots and pans, clattered across the kitchen floor, followed by Rose Marie crying out for Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the whole gang. The little girl, though, continued to quietly tattoo her arm. Without any hope of getting her to look up, Janice followed K-Lo onto the balcony, but she left the sliding-glass door open a bit just in case.

Fifteen stories above the ground, she thought the moon seemed almost snatchable. A whirling wind stung her face. Typically for her, whenever she found herself at these great heights, she imagined leaping over the edge. She didn’t want to—leap or imagine it—but there it was, an image of her tumbling off the balcony with her arms outstretched and the dark ground rising to swallow her. Down in the street, cars as small as armored insects made a slow circuit of the block, the investigators’ Impala somewhere among them. Her hands gripped the icy railing.