Uncle Janice (22 page)

She bounced off a dumpster and landed in the alleyway, blood filling her mouth. She couldn’t tell yet if she’d bitten into her cheek or her
tongue. A cold spike of pain deadened her arm. On the other side of the alleyway, atop the adjacent apartment building, blocky graffiti letters spelled out
TORCH
. She rolled over onto her good arm, onto her stomach, with her face turned toward the rubbery smell of a construction cone. The straps of her purse entangled her wrist, but it didn’t seem as if anything had fallen out. She still had her gun. As she was trying to get up off the ground, Pauly kicked her in the shoulder and spun her onto her back. He straddled her, all his weight on her chest. A long-bladed knife materialized in his hand and he cut through her purse straps cleanly, easily, as if they were merely baker’s string. He tossed the bag behind him so that she’d understand his disinterest in her money. When she turned away from the knife, she saw Korean Marty pushing a dumpster into the alleyway’s mouth.

“Marty thinks you’re a cop,” Pauly said. “But you’re just a snitch, correct? Just a tough-cookie snitch?” He eased the cold knifepoint between her lips until it pressed against her teeth. A small white scar interrupted the goatee beneath his jaw. “Listen,” he whispered. “You gotta stop squirming here.”

Because the alley terminated in a dead end, Korean Marty, who saw them first, had nowhere to run. Duckenfield and McCarthy pinned him to the dumpster as Hart and Cataroni came running toward Pauly. Before they could reach him, he chucked his knife onto Terraza’s rooftop, where a startled crew of pigeons fluttered up into the air. And then he, too, was flying away from her. His arms were outstretched, his twisted face in Cataroni’s hands.

She sat up to watch him slam Pauly into the concrete. She didn’t yet have the breath with which to speak, but everyone else seemed to be shouting: Korean Marty, receiving kicks in his fat stomach; the investigators, doing the kicking. Two older white women streamed out of the house across the street to ogle and accuse. They looked like sisters, spinster twins, although one dyed her hair brown and the other had left it gray. Above everyone’s heads, the dark cloud of pigeons beat its wings toward a safer rooftop.

“You okay?” Sergeant Hart asked her.

He offered a hand, but she stood up on her own. Her elbow throbbed like a heartbeat. Behind a window in the
TORCH
building a tiny Asian girl peered out at her. Without thinking Janice waved, as she always did when she caught children staring at her, and the girl’s face immediately vanished behind a crooked set of window blinds. The investigators were putting cuffs on Pauly and Korean Marty. Janice moved her arm to see if it was broken. She stomped around the alleyway in one shoe to pick up all the things that had spilled out of her purse, which she supposed was now technically her clutch: the Nextel, a compact, her cell phone (broken now), an earring she thought she’d lost, a granola bar, and a tube of red lipstick. Her badge was back at the rumpus, in the top drawer of her desk. Her gun had thankfully remained nestled at the bottom of the bag. Without taking it out, she released the magazine and chamber bullet so she couldn’t accidentally kill anyone. She zipped the bag shut and tested its weight, which felt just heavy enough. Was she okay, Hart wanted to know.

It took three pairs of cuffs—one on each wrist, and a third linking them together—to restrain Korean Marty without dislocating his shoulders. He sat on the curb next to Pauly, who also had his hands braceleted behind his back, albeit in only one pair. He looked considerably more comfortable. He had his head thrown back and his legs stretched out into the street, as if he were sunbathing. He was smiling. His eyes were closed.

Duckenfield, who was about to search him, said, “You got any needles in your pockets, you better tell me now.”

When Pauly shrugged, Janice swung her handbag by its tattered straps into his face.

“Shit,” said Sergeant Hart.

Pauly lay turtled on the sidewalk, either unwilling to get back up or unable to with his hands cuffed. She tried to kick him dead in the dick, but for the second time that afternoon she felt a pair of arms encircle her from behind. They belonged to Cataroni, who also had his chin hooked over her shoulder. He kept asking her to take it easy. Easy, easy. Take it easy. She spat blood on Korean Marty, not much—turned out she’d
bitten her cheek, not her tongue—but enough to mist his pant leg with flecks. He screamed at her in what must’ve been Korean. Probably cast a hex on her of some sort. Yeah well, get on line. She tried to kick Korean Marty in the dick as well, but Cataroni was dragging her into the street, where the two old ladies stood invoking civil rights. The Impala still had three of its four doors open from the roll-up on the alleyway. Even the engine was still running. Unwilling to lash out at the old ladies, she kicked a dent into the car’s body that she immediately regretted. Honest to God, she’d only meant to make some noise. Gonz drove the uncle car slowly past her down the street without stopping. When Cataroni brought his mouth back to her ear, to beg her to relax, she writhed and cursed until at last he seemed to understand. To protect her cover, she needed to get herself arrested.

“I’m going to have to restrain her,” he told Hart.

“Fuck you,” she said, relieved.

Without raising any objections—that dent in the Impala would be a paperwork disaster—the investigators watched Cataroni cuff her hands behind her back. He eased her onto the curb next to Pauly, where brown water from the dumpster raced down a canal between sidewalk panels. To keep herself from crying, she tried not to blink.

The problem, which had necessarily gone unspoken among the investigators, was that if charged with felony attempted assault, Korean Marty and Pauly would have to go to court, and if they went to court, they’d have a constitutional right to know the identity of their accuser. The real identity, not the fake one. Janice Itwaru, not Singh, the name on her department-issued bogus driver’s license. Local parasites finding out she was a cop would obviously be problematic, but it was equally problematic—tactically, legally, morally—to just cut them loose, an act of leniency so unprecedented that it would’ve only cast more suspicion on Janice and her relationship to the police.

Cataroni took her purse. He brought it into the Impala under the pretense of dumping its contents onto the backseat, the better to search through them, but really—she assumed, she hoped—he was stashing her baby Glock and bullets on the car floor, next to all the investigators’
empty Jamba Juice cups. When he came back out onto the street he had the Janice Singh driver’s license pinched between his fingers.

“I know her,” he said.

“You know her,” Hart said.

“I picked her up a little while ago. Right around here. For solicitation.”

“Solicitation?” Hart said.

“Prostitution. What did I say? Solicitation? No, no. Prostitution.”

McCarthy, catching on, kicked the treaded bottom of Pauly’s boot. “You her pimp or something?”

“I knew I knew her,” Cataroni said. He lied easily; if not for his granite chest and freckled nose, he might’ve made a good uncle. He handed Sergeant Hart the fake license. “I just couldn’t place her till I saw the name. I picked her up for prossing maybe two months ago, but you know what? She never showed for her court date. I got the whole rest of that day off.”

The investigators left the knife where it lay, on Terraza’s rooftop, protected by a perimeter of razor wire. Without a weapon, the overburdened ADA would dilute the charge down to a misdemeanor, and if Pauly and Korean Marty both pled no contest, then they’d most likely receive some jackoff punishment along the lines of anger counseling. But to guarantee—and this was where Cataroni really impressed her—to guarantee that they all avoided court, it would probably be best if the complainant herself was a criminal. Even better, what if she, too, was arrested on the day of the incident, for failing to report to an earlier court date? There wasn’t a wrinkle-shirted ADA who’d even touch that one. Not only would Korean Marty and Pauly expect to avoid trial, but an arrest would have the bonus benefit of boosting her cover’s credibility throughout the neighborhood. Assuming, of course, she avoided getting kicked back to patrol.

McCarthy was ordering the two old ladies to disperse under penalty of an obstructing government administration summons. Sprinters stuck in the blocks for too long, the other investigators went to work: Duckenfield searched the perps’ pockets, where he found their wallets and IDs, and Sergeant Hart called his homies in the Warrants Division,
or maybe he only pretended to call his homies in the Warrants Division. Maybe he really called 1-800-Mattress and talked to what must have been a very confused operator. After he hung up, he announced that Ki Soon Paek and Paul Miley Tejada were both clean, sheet-wise, without any records attached to their names, but the chorus girl, Little Miss Rockette Janice Singh, had, as predicted, an open warrant for her arrest.

“For guess what?” Hart said as he returned the phone to its belt cradle. “No one wants to guess? For failure to report to a court-mandated appointment following an arrest for … for what? No one? Really? No one wants to guess? For prostitution, ladies and germs, just like our boy called it.”

McCarthy, overdoing it, shook Cataroni’s hand.

“Ain’t that impressive?” Hart said. He stared down at his audience on the curb, as if legitimately waiting for an answer, but Janice couldn’t think of anything to say and both Korean Marty and Pauly had withdrawn into their inalienable right to silence. “Well,
I’m
impressed,” Hart said. “The kid, he’s got a sharp eye. Brain like a trap. Would you believe he’s Italian? With the red hair on him? How about this? Would you believe he’s not even a detective yet? But his day is coming, let me tell you, and no wonder, am I right? A kid like this? Some people just get it, you know what I’m saying?”

“Congratulations,” Pauly said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Hart said.

While they all waited for the prisoner transport van to arrive, Cataroni retrieved her fallen shoe from outside Terraza’s door. A silver tack had gone through the sole. Maybe today, maybe months ago. Anal, a corrector, truly a detective—if not in rank yet then in temperament—he tried pulling out the tack, but his fingernails, like hers, weren’t long enough. Giving up sooner than she would’ve, he crouched down at the curb and wedged her foot roughly into the shoe, her fairy-tale moment, not at all how she’d imagined it.

A rainbow forest of scented cardboard trees dangled from the p-van’s rearview mirror. With the windows rolled down, the heater was cranked as high as it would go. The two uniformed cops up front were probably chewing multiple sticks of mint-flavored gum, too, and wore thick VapoRub mustaches, but nothing was going to mask the van’s more persistent odors of unwashed clothes, unwashed bodies, urine, diarrhea, vomit from too much to drink or too little, and the rank dread sweat of men and women on their way out to jail. In the second-to-last row, Janice breathed with her mouth open. A gash in the seatback in front of her hemorrhaged brown-yellow foam. Normally she would’ve picked at it, but her hands were still cuffed behind her back. Her shoulders burned. Her elbow had gone numb. She had to pee so badly she worried she’d catch a UTI. At frequent intervals, Pauly Tejada, who was sitting behind her, leaned forward and took deep-gusto whiffs of her hair.

In the middle of the van, a white crackhead shouted toward the front, “Hey, I got heart pills I need to take, man. I’m serious!” Someone else said, “I got a shit I need to take!” Someone else, not as loud, said, “I think I need to go to a hospital, for real. I got like a subdural hemorrhage from where you motherfuckers busted up my skull piece.”

Four hours of this, with the cops up front never once turning around.

When the van finally reached max capacity—Wednesdays were slow days—the uniforms up front disgorged all their passengers into the 115 Precinct. Once inside, the men went one way; the women, another. For the purposes of decorum, each female inmate was ushered separately into a claustrophobically small room by a pair of lady cops, one to conduct the searches, the other to protect the department against sexual harassment accusations. Fingers in latex gloves picked through Janice’s hair. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. She allowed a strange pair of hands to cup the underwires of her bra. Needle-nervous, the cop checked her pockets in a cursory way, but lingered along the inseam of her crotch. Outside the room, a barely audible radio played what sounded like classical music, but Janice could hear only cymbal crashes and the occasional whale groan of a tuba. Ordered to strip out of her jeans and underwear, she squatted over the concrete floor so that any potential contraband stashed up her asshole would plop to the ground.

Even with all those precautions, however, someone, somehow, had managed to smuggle into the female holding unit a small pile of cheap paperbacks. Or, more likely, the 115’s CO allowed his officers to slip books through the bars. They were all romance novels—all with
QUEENSBORO PUBLIC LIBRARY
stamped along their tops—and before sitting down she chose the one with the most straightforward title,
Ruthless Magnate and His Virgin Mistress
. Her fingerprinted fingertips left ink smudges on every page.

A white woman dozed in the corner of the cell, waking herself up every time her chin crashed into her chest. Another white woman wept into her hands. Her ear looked cauliflowered, like a wrestler’s. A pretty black girl was rubbing circles onto the woman’s back to console her; maybe they knew each other, maybe they’d just met. Far more upbeat was the clique of hookers, who all seemed to be legitimately enjoying themselves, as if jail provided a much-needed vacation from their corners and alleyways and mattress-equipped carpet-cleaning vans. Two of the girls pantomimed loading a giant invisible bazooka. With impressive attention to
detail, the trigger girl dipped her shoulder under the bazooka’s weight while her friend loaded it from behind. Ready to go, fire in the hole, they both fell back from the recoil as an invisible rocket flew across the width of the corridor and landed in the boys’ holding cell. Janice would’ve clapped, but her elbow felt too stiff to move. And in different circumstances, the boys might’ve played along, scrambling for cover, but with a population six times as large as the female cell, they had neither the room nor the inclination. Bare-chested, over a dozen men lay on the floor with their balled-up T-shirts serving as pillows. The rest sat on benches along the walls. They called out for lawyers, doctors, phone calls, cigarettes, and sandwiches, but were entirely ignored. Janice couldn’t see Korean Marty, who may have been obscured by the rules-and-regulations sign posted to the bars, but she did see Pauly. He sat in a primo spot in the middle of the bench, swaddled in a blue wool blanket. He stared across the corridor at her, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of staring back. She kept her head down to her novel, its spine bent backward so he couldn’t see the title. Something—his staring, the dust bunnies beneath her own bench, the countless midges floating about—made her skin itchy. With nails barely adequate for the job, she scratched her face, her neck, her arms, the tops of her hands, and she was still scratching, seventy-something pages later, when the handsome magnate, more idiotic than ruthless, spurned the tremendously horny mistress from his bed, and when, in real life, an even handsomer detective arrived outside the female holding unit to tap a pair of handcuffs against the bars.