Uncle Janice (24 page)

The next day, after Tevis brought Janice to work, but before she actually walked out into the rumpus, Richie the Receptionist told her two things. One: he had taken her advice and invited both his girlfriend and her lesbian roommate over for dinner tomorrow night at his place, where he intended to cook penne alla vodka with a whole lotta vodka. Janice wasn’t so sure that was her advice exactly, but okay, good luck.
The second thing Richie told her was that, excluding present company of course, Narcotics seemed almost exclusively to hire small-minded, mean-spirited buffoons who loved nothing better than when their victims got riled, and so it was probably in her best interest if she went with the flow, rolled with the punches, and just sorta tried to play along.

“Play along with what?” she said.

A present lay waiting for her on her desk. At least it looked like a present: a white cardboard box wrapped up in green ribbon. On the drive over here, she had told Tevis that she was dreading having to explain the eggplant on her elbow, but obviously the story had already circulated, no doubt exaggerated, too, its details juiced up on the performance-enhancing devices of cell phone and Nextel. The entire rumpus seemed to stare at her as she came in, everyone except for Puffy, who was over at One Police Plaza finally getting sworn in as a detective. Fiorella sat with one leg crossed over the other and her foot bobbing nervously. Under her desk, where only Janice could see, she tamped down the air with her hands, as if to say,
Be cool, take it easy
. Poker-faced, Janice untied the green ribbon. Inside the box, atop tissue paper, a note—written in a surprisingly elegant, seemingly feminine hand—said
For the girl who has everything
, except
everything
had been crossed out, replaced by
blown her cover
. That she had in fact maintained her cover seemed like a technicality not worth arguing. Beneath the tissue paper, she found a long black burka, headscarf included.

“Who do I thank?” she asked.

Nobody gave her an answer, not that she’d expected one. Back when she worked patrol, a rookie cop got shot at while off duty by some maniac who emptied an entire clip at him but missed every time. The next day his supposed friends papered his locker with pictures of slow-mo bullets zipping past Neo from
The Matrix
. No one asked him if he was all right, because the question would’ve implied that he might not be all right, that one day
they
might not be all right. Still, though. A papered-over locker was one thing, a burka another.

She carried it into the bathroom—the one in the rumpus, not the one on the third floor where she took her secret poops—and came back
out a ghost, her sheet black instead of the more traditional white. Gonz of course wolf-whistled. Under her gaze, visible only through the small viewfinder of her headscarf, his oily smile widened in anticipation of her reaction. She wouldn’t give him one. Nor would she do a little twirl for the investigators, as Sergeant Hart was requesting. Give her a burka and she’d wear it, but that’s all. Let them worry about what she was thinking. Let them invent the expression she wore behind her mask.

That expression, by the way, was a determined one. She made a list of corners to visit the next time she went out to make buys. She finished her photocopied chapters of
Sway: The Art of Gentle Persuasion
. “Persuasion’s efficacy,” Dr. Rearsman writes, “increases tenfold when the active participant moves beyond objective observation into a more empathic engagement with the Other’s subjectivity.” Janice put a penciled checkmark in the margin. Slowly, deprived of a reaction to satiate them, the men in the rumpus turned away from her, bored, as per the burka-makers’ intent. In a last-gasp effort to rile her, however, Sergeant Hart bought her a BLT sandwich, which sat untouched in her out tray. She wanted to call her sister to let her know that the hair-tie idea had pretty much saved her life, but Janice’s phone was still broken and she didn’t know Judith’s number by heart. Although she probably wouldn’t have gotten ahold of her anyway.
Hey, it’s Judith, you must’ve missed me.…
 She went online to research assisted-living facilities for the inevitable. She googled “Jimmy Gellar.” No romantic intent here, just simple curiosity. He had, after all, tried to contact her first, either by phone or at the house, possibly to pass along the name of a drug dealer he wanted to point her toward, or maybe the old black guy who snapped her picture outside the meth clinic was Scotch-taping flyers of her overwrought face to telephone poles, or maybe, whatever, shut up, it didn’t matter. As per last night’s bathroom treaty, for the next fifteen or so hours she had permission to do any sort of pathetic shit she wanted, including but not limited to looking for her eighth-grade crush on the Internet. Google came back at her with twenty million irrelevant hits. On the White Pages site, as she dragged the mouse across its
DUNDER-MIFFLIN
pad, she looked for “James Gellar,” “J. Gellar,” and just “Gellar.” She tried a
Facebook search, but as a nonmember could click through only the first few results. Of course she could have easily found him on DECS or one of the other intradepartmental databases, could’ve pulled his driver’s license even and looked up his address, but that would’ve carried her far outside the bell curve of ordinary human craziness, and so instead she created a temporary Facebook profile under the harmless pseudonym “Gabby Guyana.” She maybe found him. She couldn’t be sure—the name said “Jim Gellar,” but the personal info came up as private and the profile picture was of a horse—but she sent a friend request anyway. Her very first. While she waited for him to get back to her, she liked both the
Harriet the Spy
and Alzheimer’s Association pages. She made an official request for her sister’s friendship, debated searching for Fiorella’s and Puffy’s pseudonymous profiles but ultimately decided against it so as to keep some segment of her life separate from the NYPD, and spent a shamefully long time flipping through the public photo albums of two cunts who in the ninth grade tossed Janice’s brand-new Jansport book bag onto the roof of the 4 Aces Car Dealership on Atlantic Avenue. For long pockets of time she forgot she was even wearing the burka at all, remembering only when she tried to bite her nails, or when the fabric caught itself under the wheels of her chair, or when Detective Puffy Okazaki surprised everyone by showing up at the rumpus to water the potted philodendron on his desk.

“What did I miss?” he asked, picking up her sleeve with two fingers as if the fabric were radioactive.

“Nuthin’,” she said.

He dragged her away from the public computers and over to her desk. Apparently no one had called to tell him about her alleyway incident, or if they did call, they didn’t get through. He’d kept his phone off all week, afraid to hear a lieutenant on a voice mail telling him the Big Bosses had changed their minds and he was to report back to patrol, effective immediately.

“You wouldn’t get a call,” Tevis explained. “If you got new orders, they’d come in through the—”

Puffy said, “Can somebody please just tell me why Janice is in a goddamned burka? That is Janice in there, right?”

The other uncles deferred to her. It was her story; she got to tell it. “You go first,” she said. “The whole promotion ceremony. Start to finish. Don’t leave anything out.”

“It was fine,” he said. When she kept staring at him through her headscarf’s viewfinder, he said, “It was nice.”

Janice, who expected her own promotion—knuckles rapping desk—would be the climax of her entire life, said, “It was
nice
?”

He lay down across her desk. What’d she want him to tell her? It was fine. It was nice. It is what it is. Whereas other detectives received a grand coronation of flashing photo bulbs, uncles got rinky-dinked with a secret reception in a tiny office, behind a closed door. Due to space limitations, they were supposed to invite only one guest, usually a long-suffering spouse, but Puffy said he’d brought along an entire entourage—sisters, brothers, parents, stepparents, high school principal, even a priest—as if he were collecting potential witnesses to testify on his behalf in case the department ever tried to short him on his detective-grade paychecks. When the ceremony ended, he skipped the usual congratulatory family dinner and drove here instead, to surround himself with people who appreciated exactly what it meant to alchemize a silver shield into gold. And to water that philodendron.

“Your turn,” he said. “Why you in a burka?”

She insisted on holding his badge while she told her story. The shield’s surprising lightness must have distracted her; she opened with finding the burka on her desk, then had to loop back to the alleyway, then had to loop even further back to Marty’s apartment, then had to jump forward to the taco-cart line. Insignificant details, like the kung fu dummy, she described in relentless detail, but she forgot about Gonz driving by in the uncle car. Puffy, as befitted his new detective status, poked holes in her story. Why wasn’t she working with Tevis? She looked over at him before answering: because the rotation had paired her with Gonz for the day. All right, but how come the investigators put her in the p-van when they could’ve easily held her outside Terraza under the pretense of waiting for somebody from Warrants? Because, well, she didn’t know why they didn’t do that. They didn’t think of it? They weren’t as practiced at lying as Detective Puffy Okazaki?

“Gimme my shield back,” he said. That the Big Bosses had stupidly switched out her everyday partner and that the investigators had failed to make the very best decision didn’t seem to surprise him too much. They were the Big Bosses and investigators. He expected them to bungle their jobs. They were outside
la familia de los tíos
. But Gonz? “I still don’t understand why he’d leave,” Puffy said. “He was the
ghost
.”

Over at the next desk, an eavesdropping Tevis nodded with enthusiasm.

She said, “I
told
Gonz he could go. Well, actually, I sorta like waved him along.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Puffy said, still lying on his back. “That’s not
Gonz’s
decision to make. Man, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who sent the investigators to the kid’s corner in the first place. Just to screw you over.”

“Not even Gonz would do that,” she said, surprised she was defending him.

Puffy made her tell the story all over again, from the beginning, and this second turn through she felt strangely distant from the Janice who got tossed into the alleyway, as if her current burka-wearing self really were a ghost. Or a superhero without any resemblance to their puny alter ego. By the time she’d finished, Puffy had sat up in his agitation and eaten her BLT without seeming to realize it. He rolled off her empty folders and went over to Gonz’s far cleaner desk.

“Stand up,” Puffy said.

“What for?” Gonz asked.

“Just stand up, all right?”

Gonz had his feet up and was reading
The Sporting News’
s twenty-four-page baseball preview pullout, which he had actually pulled out, as if he felt compelled to follow orders, just not Puffy’s orders. “What for?” Gonz said again.

“I wanna see who’s taller.”

“I’m taller.”

“I wanna see.”

“That’s ridiculous. Just because you get promoted doesn’t make you suddenly any taller.”

“Jesus Christ,” Puffy said. “Are you gonna stand up or not?”

“What
for
?”

And so Gonz was still sitting when Puffy punched him in the head. Clearly he’d hoped to stand him up to knock him down, sucker-jab him right in the chin: what her Academy instructor had called the bigger man’s knockout button. But when Gonz refused to rise, Puffy had to settle for an awkward downward blow. He was a liar, not a fighter. Gonz was both. Like a ram, he had protected himself in plenty of time, tucked his jaw to his chest, and Puffy ended up drilling the top of his skull, the very worst place to hit someone. She couldn’t hear it from where she was sitting, but she saw in Puffy’s face that his knuckles had shattered.

“Now look at what you’ve done,” Tevis told her.

Gonz was already out of his chair and pinning the howling Puffy against the buy board. His bad back smeared the numbers. The board itself crashed to the floor. With reaction times dulled by alcohol and neglect, the uncles reached Gonz only after he’d driven his arm into Puffy’s throat. Big Bosses staggered out of their private offices like moles into the light. Prondzinski had one of her precious paper clips in her hands, absently untwisting it as if she intended to pierce someone through the heart. Investigators craned their necks. They pressed their phones against their chests, their oblivious callers jabbering into wrinkled ties. A baby-faced confidential informant, brought into the rumpus for a debriefing, climbed onto his rolling chair for a better view. Everyone, it seemed, was standing, except for Inspector Nielsen, who was presumably sleeping off a migraine under his desk, and Janice, who felt too stunned to rise.

“That nigga bought me a soda one time!” said the chair-surfing CI.

Nobody asked him which one he was talking about, Puffy or Gonz (odds went to Puffy), but Sergeant Hart did tell him to sit the fuck down.

Uncles pulled Puffy toward the stairwell. They kept telling him to calm down, but of course he couldn’t calm down with all their hands on him, of course he only became further envenomed, pushing them away one by one. His delegation thinned as he neared the stairwell until it was just him and Fiorella, an experienced tantrum-manager. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t tell him what to do. According to the text she later
sent, she drove him to the Emergency Department at Flushing Hospital, only twenty minutes away, where a nurse put his broken hand in a cast. He’d be off active duty for months. After that, when it came time for his disciplinary hearing, Tevis speculated that Puffy would cry temporary insanity. Mental breakdown as a result of too many job stressors. Or something like that. The Big Bosses would have to transfer him to the rubber-gun squad, a departmental purgatory where he’d sit in a cramped room listening to wiretaps, doing his crosswords, and drawing a detective-grade salary.