Uncle Janice (31 page)

He wore a clean white button-down tucked into brown corduroys, with a short cable-knit cardigan, all of it totally nerdy and grown-up, his transformation from Jimmy to James complete, except around his waist, where he had—she smiled to see it—a nylon belt with a brass Superman buckle. Also suddenly around his waist: Vita’s arm as she corralled him into one of the chairs. The sole benefit of her mother’s illness seemed to be the loss of every white-cloaked neuron afraid of black people.

“Can I get you something to eat?” she asked now that she had him trapped in a chair. “While Jan puts on something a little nicer, maybe? I picked up the most beautiful roast beef from the Italian market.”

“Actually I’m going to need a rain check,” Janice told him. “I’m really sorry, but I just got called into work last minute. To do this thing.”

“You don’t have work today,” Vita said. “Go on upstairs and get changed.”

“That’s what I’m saying, I got called in. Last minute.”

“I understand,” Jimmy said, not understanding at all, probably assuming she was just brushing him off; she couldn’t even tell the truth persuasively anymore. He stood out of his chair. “Why don’t you just hit me up on Facebook when you’re—”

“Don’t be silly!” Vita said, pushing him back into the chair. “Just call them back,” she told Janice. “Tell them you had plans already. They’ll understand if you explain the situation.”

“I’m really sorry,” Janice told him. “Maybe next week? If you’re free?”

“Is it your period?” Vita asked. “Because I’m sure I’ve got a pill around here somewhere.”

“Mom!”

Jimmy stood up again.

“You don’t ever go out!” Vita cried. “If you made more of a social effort now and again, maybe you’d be able to—”

“Hey, Jimmy,” Janice said. “Can we try talking about this upstairs, please?”

“Great idea,” Vita told them both. “I’ll get started on those sandwiches.”

Unlike old times, they did not hold hands on the walk up the stairs,
but once inside her room they did retreat to their usual positions: Janice cross-legged on the rumpled bedspread, Jimmy at the old wooden desk, half turned in the chair to face her. Through his eyes she saw her room as embarrassingly unchanged, a life-size diorama exhibit in the Janice Itwaru Museum of Standing Still. The same carpet, the same window blinds, the same girl in shorts and a T-shirt, the same Teddy Ruse-ah-velt quote tacked to the wall. Take a Polaroid of this room now in 2008 and line it up next to a Polaroid from 1997, and you can play the Photo Hunt game, just like on the Megatouch screens at A.R.’s Tavern. Spot the differences: a gun safe, an iPhone charger, bras of a larger cup size hanging off the doorknob, the Ruse-uh-velt poster-board a few inches to the left to cover up the dent in the wall.

“I could do next Sunday,” Jimmy said. “If that works for you.”

She might be in jail next Sunday. She pulled a goose-down pillow into her lap, the sharp end of a tiny feather poking up through its seams. She of course plucked it out, but another feather came right up into the seams to take its place. She plucked that one out, too. She should keep going until there wasn’t any pillow left so she’d have an excuse to buy something new for this amber trap of a bedroom. Her meeting started in less than ninety minutes. Her father had long ago taught her that the harder she worked now, the easier things would be later on. He also taught her how to snake quarters out of a pay phone, how to find pennies on the street, not to listen to music on the walk home, not to look over your shoulder more than once, that the biggest guest star was almost always the killer, that pigeon shit led to good luck, and Jimmy Gellar was bad. With the sharp end of the feather she scratched at a spot on her arm that wasn’t even itchy.

“You got a car?” she asked.

“I do,” he said. “I mean, today I do.” Without any goose feathers in front of him, he dragged a hand across her desk, as if looking for a pencil, something to futz with, but there wasn’t anything there for him to hold on to. A much cleaner desk since he’d last been here: another hundred points for the Photo Hunt game. “I borrowed my brother’s Volvo,” he told her. “For our big date that got canceled.”

“Date?” she said. “I thought we were just—”

“You’re ignoring my dig about you canceling on me.”

She went to tuck her hair behind her ears, but it was still too short to stay back there. “Are you guilt-tripping me?” she asked.

“A little. Don’t you think you deserve it?”

“Rarely,” she said, “but I think that might be my problem.”

“Well, you’re lucky you only got one.”

On the way into Manhattan, between bites of his roast beef, he said, “Nah, not really. That was a time in my life where I wasn’t really finishing much of anything except blunts. But it’s funny, you know? Since running into you again? I’ve been giving it a stupid amount of thought. Do you remember where we left off? We had to get her into a death trap? So I’m thinking we set the final scene on Halloween. Earlier that day, Ned Shu is campaigning for Queens borough president, saying the current president, his opponent, is responsible for the recent spike in crime. And while he’s saying all this, a ninja pops out of nowhere and runs a kitana sword through Shu’s shoulder. He survives, but Gabby Guyana, who was working security for the press conference—cops do that, right?—she shoots the ninja dead.

“Later that night, she’s undercover, dressed up like this defenseless woman in Richmond Hill, when two more ninjas pop out of nowhere. But you don’t mess with Captain Richmond Hill, right? She ghettotouches their nunchucks. One of the ninjas gets wrapped up in barbed wire. The other she hangs upside down from a lamppost. When she searches the ninja’s pockets, she finds these grainy black-and-white surveillance photos of Ned Shu going in and out of his campaign office. She assumes another attack on his life is like moments away, so she rushes over to his office to warn him. Here we can have a funny little scene of her riding the 7 train. Holding the pole or whatever. And when she gets to Shu’s office, she sits down in a chair across from his desk and tells him everything she knows.

“But see, what she doesn’t know is that Shu’s been behind all this from the start. He’s a crime boss, ordering extra robberies and stuff to
discredit the current borough president. He planned his own assassination attempt. He sent the ninjas after her and put the photos in their pockets, knowing she’d come over to warn him, and when she did she’d sit down in his chair and trigger a pressure-activated device synced to a bunch of TNT beneath his desk. The desk, that’s the death trap. And the bomb will explode if she stands back up.

“It’s sort of ripped off from
Lethal Weapon 2
. The toilet scene? But there are no new ideas, so whatever. I’m thinking I could use some really cool Chris Ware–like arrows and caption boxes to direct the reader’s eye from the chair to the desk, maybe even the bomb’s wire could serve as panel borders, I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve been giving this a stupid amount of thought.

“So because Shu’s the villain he has to explain his whole plan obviously, and he tells her that a similar explosive device is about to derail a 7 train, probably killing a bunch of trick-or-treaters in the process. I haven’t really figured out all the wrinkles on that one yet, to tell you the truth. But there’s gotta be some sort of ticking clock, otherwise she’d just be able to sit there till morning.

“Okay, so he’s about to walk out of the room. He’s on his way to where the train’s gonna crash, right? So he can like pull some maimed kids out of the wreckage for the photo op? But before he leaves, she says, ‘How do you know I won’t just stand up now and kill us both?’

“And he goes, ‘You may be an A-rab, but you don’t seem like the suicide-bombing type.’

“Final panel. Her teeth are clenched. Her eyes narrowed behind the domino mask. She says, ‘I’m Guyanese, you son of a bitch.’

“And that’s all I got. ‘To be continued in next month’s thrilling issue of
Captain Richmond Hill
.’ So what do you think? I’m open to feedback as long as it’s glowing.”

Because Internal Affairs’ Caribbean Richie the Receptionist equivalent couldn’t abandon her front desk, she asked a heavyset white guy waddling out of the commode to please deposit Officer Itwaru in the
nearest informational meeting room. It was set up exactly as Janice had expected: a gray table, gray chairs, gray walls, and a security camera rolling in the corner above the gray door. An hour early for her meeting, her interview, her interrogation, whatever the fuck they wanted to call it, she assumed she’d have to wait here alone for at least that long, plus the requisite extra fifteen minutes of sweating-out time, but almost immediately after the heavyset white guy left the room another heavyset white guy came breezing in. He looked too young for the gray in his hair, too wide for his suit. He looked, actually, like a former football player, with paperwork folders and a three-ring binder and a laptop all tucked under one arm as if he needed the other to shed tacklers. He wouldn’t stop smiling. In a thick Lawn Guyland accent—its origin farther east than Great Neck, more like Syosset or even Montauk—he introduced himself as Lieutenant John Lenox, but go ahead and call him Johno. His hand, when she shook it, felt calloused from weight lifting.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Your help!” He set his things in a neat pile on the table and sat in the chair across from hers. “I know it’s a pain to be calling you in like this. And I wouldn’t even be asking for your help if, well, it’s ironic actually. The feds? Homeland Security? A little while back, they opened a money-laundering investigation on this joint in Queens. To make sure there are no other claims on the place, they punch the address into DECS and what do they see? They see we’ve been running our own investigation there for a while now. Of course that doesn’t stop
them
. It’s full steam ahead as far as they’re concerned. We’re talking about cash money, and the feds aren’t going to let a little NYPD investigation get in the way of their cash money, you follow? But then what happens? They run into a bit of a confuzzlement. On
their
end of the investigation. Something they can’t sort out on their own. So they go, ‘Hey, no problem! Let’s get that dumb fuck Johno at IA to do our jobs for us!’ Interdepartment cooperation, right? Osama bin Laden with his dick in my ass all the way from Timbuktu, pardon my French. But the problem, the problem on my end, is that for the life of me I can’t untangle this little confuzzlement either. So now I’ve got to reach out for your help. Because it was a Narcotics investigation. On our end, I’m saying. And maybe, the way
this thing’s going, you’ll have to reach out for someone else’s help, and they’ll have to reach out for someone else’s help, all the way down the line, but I really don’t think so. I really think you’re our guy on this because the joint, the establishment, it’s the Pure Magic Dance Hall. On Roosevelt Avenue? You been there, correct?”

On the ear end of a never-ending monologue for what seemed like the last three weeks, she had at first assumed the question was rhetorical. “I’m not sure,” she said finally, trying not to move in her seat.

“Really?” He made a show of searching through his paperwork folders for something. “Because I’m pretty positive I’ve got a file here saying you made a buy at the joint just a couple weeks ago.”

“I make a lot of buys.”

“Oh I bet!” He pulled out the sheet of paper he’d pretended he hadn’t been able to find. “See, right here. March twelfth. Two weeks ago. Not even.” He began to read off the page: “ ‘Undercover …’ That’s you, your name’s down at the bottom here … ‘Undercover purchased a fifteen-milligram pill of the controlled substance OxyContin from the bathroom attendant, Latina, mid-forties, dark hair, brown eyes, five foot three, approximately a hundred and sixty pounds.’ ”

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?”