Uncle Janice (37 page)

He looked up at her with new interest. “Why’d they go to you?” he asked. “You see what I’m saying? Why weren’t they worried you’d come right to me and tell me all this?”

She hadn’t thought of that. Blame it on the bottomless cup of AA coffee, the nurse who kept refilling it, the eggs Janice hadn’t eaten, her hollowed-out stomach. A sticky, clammy film clung to her unwashed teeth. She said, “I guess they just trusted me.”

“IA? They just trusted you? That’s awfully weird, Itwaru, because it’s their
job
not to trust us.”

To her surprise, she didn’t feel any temptation to start biting her nails or flicking the hair tie off her wrist. She didn’t need to. This was her job, this was what she did. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she told him. “Last year,” she said, making it up as the words left her, “I contacted my union rep about possibly filing a complaint against you. For bullying.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I never really followed through on it or anything, but I guess it got passed onto IA, and so they figured I’d try to help them out. I’m sorry. It was a year ago.
Over
a year ago. I didn’t so much understand the culture around here yet.”

“Seriously, when have I ever bullied you?”

The doorknob jiggled as someone tried to get into the bathroom.

“One sec!” they both called out, then looked at each other, embarrassed.

She reached behind him to reflush the toilet. By now IA’s digital device was floating beneath the city, where it would record only sewer sounds, but she couldn’t have whoever was standing in the hall hear what she had to say next.

“We’ll record a new tape,” she told Hart, whispering. “One that makes it seem like you never did anything wrong. Okay? The whole thing, it’ll be scripted.” Certain he wouldn’t completely trust her until she pressed her advantage, she said, even quieter now, “But if I do this, I’m gonna need you to bring me over into Investigations. Like right away, none of this eighteen more months of waiting around for things to happen. Cash in a favor with Prondzinski, however you do it, but I am
done
with this uncle shit, you understand?”

That last part was the most sincere thing she’d said all day. In response he made no response, instead dumping the contents of his Altoids tin down into the toilet. The crack rocks, the mints, they looked roughly the same. Once the tank had refilled with water, he sent everything irretrievably down the drain. Afterward, surged with relief or hostility, or gratitude, or nervousness, surged with
something
—his neck was turning a splotchy red—he stepped closer to her and nodded his agreement to all her terms and conditions. Even without him opening his mouth, she could smell weak traces of eucalyptus. He turned to leave, the back of his pants spotted with toilet-seat pee dribbles, and she wondered why he couldn’t feel them, or if he could but just didn’t care. She turned around real quick to check her reflection in the mirror.

Who else but a ghost would know about her secret private bathroom?
On the other side of the door, Tevis was hugely grinning, clearly delighted to have caught a twosome in the unisex, but his smile warped into something more strained when he saw who they were: Hart tucking in his shirt as he walked out, Janice looking guilty behind him. What must he have thought of all that flushing? A used condom’s stubborn reluctance to go down the drain? Into his armpit, he had wedged a copy of the
Post
for the shit he’d planned to take. Hillary Clinton was presumably still in trouble for telling lies. Duke basketball was still alive. Tevis let Hart hurry past him, but he reached out and caught Janice by her wrist. Once again—a carpeted hallway, the rubber soles of his boots—a bolt of static electricity forked from his body into hers. Already halfway to the third-floor stairwell, Hart paused to turn around, reluctant to leave behind a coconspirator.

“Give us a sec,” Tevis told him, and on another day, in a sturdier mood, Hart might have resisted on general principle, but for once he simply did as he was asked and retreated down the stairs. The instant they were alone, Tevis said, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m not sure how to even begin with a question like that.”

“He has a wife, you know that, right? And a daughter? Not much younger than you? I mean, I would’ve thought of all people, you’d—”

She put her hands on his shoulders, no spark this time, and went up onto her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. He smelled mildewy, probably from an overused, underwashed towel hanging on a nail in his bathroom. Her mother would have taken such tender care of him. Later, back at Janice’s desk, for both her benefit and their own, the other uncles will describe betrayal-by-betrayal today’s episode of
Amigas y Rivales
, which apparently was just starting to gain momentum. Right now, though, Tevis’s beard prickled Janice. He was a good man, the best one she knew. She should’ve told him that. She should’ve told him that when she grew up, she wanted to be half as good as he was. His cheek on her lips had felt dry and weirdly cold, somehow bloodless. A third-floor office worker, a young white guy with an older man’s beer gut, went around them into the bathroom, not seeming to care who they were or what they were doing here. Her shift started soon, if it hadn’t already.
She knew she would see Tevis again, back at his desk in a few minutes, for plenty more days, if not weeks, if not months after this one, but she also knew that she was saying good-bye here, that she couldn’t continue to taint him as a friend, partner, protégé, or surrogate daughter. She came back down onto her heels. As she walked away, she reached into her purse, dug under her badge and gun to turn off the phone’s voice recorder.

From the backseat of an Impala outside Marty’s apartment building, Detective Federico Cataroni said he wanted to be the ram. Detective Mark Duckenfield turned around to say no way. Not a chance. He had always been the ram and he would continue to always be the ram. Okay? Got it? Safe to assume Conor McCarthy
also
wanted to be the ram, but as the 115’s new sergeant, he had to be the last one through the door on no-knock raids. Correction: the 115’s
relatively
new sergeant. Almost half a year had passed since Internal Affairs had put Hart on modified assignment in the Queensbridge projects, where he sat in a basement watching live-feed security footage, Monday through Friday, from nine a.m. to five p.m., forty hours of weekly reality TV. Even there, in that basement torture chamber, he probably still had more legroom than Detective Itwaru in this Impala’s backseat.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about your calves. Don’t think about your knees. Don’t think about your belt cutting into your stomach. Alone among the investigators, she had no interest in being the ram, not that the others would have even let her. The ram was the guy—and it was always a guy—who on no-knock raids swung the actual battering ram, an all-steel cylinder two and a half feet long and more than thirty-five pounds. It required a low center of gravity and stupidly strong arms.

“I’m just saying, how come I never get to do it?” Cataroni asked.

“I keep telling you,” Duckenfield said. “
Historical precedent
. What about that don’t you understand?”

While they continued to argue, Detective Itwaru filled out paperwork. By hand, in ink, even though she’d have to type it all up back at the rumpus. But better to get a head start at least, to try to keep pace with the endless gush of mostly bogus Narco complaints stuffing the folders on her desk. Got a neighbor you don’t like? Call 911 and say he deals weed. Patrol will go out to take a look, but because they can’t really do anything, they send the complaint back to the dispatcher, who sends it on to One Police Plaza, which sends it on to the Narcotics Division investigators, who have to physically eyeball the location before closing that file just to reopen the next one. A stack of manila folders sat in her lap. The Impala’s dashboard vents were lousy with air conditioning, dialed up way too high. It was hot out but not that hot; she was cold but didn’t complain. On the seat between her and Cataroni a plastic bag of banana peels rotted. Apparently the potassium kept the boys’ stomachs from cramping after weight lifting. She wouldn’t know. In a car all day, or at a desk, without the daily anxiety of going undercover, she’d gained seven pounds since joining Investigations. She hadn’t read the
Post
cover to cover in all that time, either, not even on her days off, especially not on her days off, when she refused to
look
at type print, but driving to work this morning she’d heard the Mets had won last night, 5–4, to extend their first-place lead in the division. After the September collapses of the previous seasons, it really looked like this might be their year. More magical thinking: soon, maybe within the next few months, she’d snag a transfer out of Investigations and into Special Victims, the next rung on her ladder.

“Here we go,” said Sergeant McCarthy.

Korean Marty and Gonz were rounding the corner toward the apartment building. They both knew the Impala was there, but didn’t look in its direction. The plan: they were to go up into the apartment, make the final buy in the NYPD’s case against Martin Nils Snyder, come back outside, prop the lobby entrance open, verify Marty was indeed alone and unarmed, and give the investigators the go-ahead to knock down
his mezuzah-protected door. Simple. Old friends, on their fifth assignment together, Korean Marty and Gonz chatted all the way to the building’s entrance, Gonz probably thrilled to have someone in this world left who’d talk to him. With his kel-mic broken, she couldn’t hear what he was saying, nor could she see Tevis, the ghost, who might’ve been hiding behind that idling van or inside the bodega or the hair salon or the Laundromat or the Peruvian
picantería
or maybe even inside the apartment building already, anywhere really but inside this car next to her. Cataroni passed her a plastic container of dry granola and Grape-Nuts. She passed it back to him without sampling.

When Marty buzzed open the lobby door, she texted Jimmy Gellar, whom she paid a Brother-subsidized ten dollars an hour to sit on the couch with her mother and watch the Game Show Network.
EVERYTHING OK?
she wrote.
PROB GOING TO BE HOME LATE
. Once they got Marty to the 115 Precinct, they’d spend hours pressing him to give up his connect, whom they’d eventually use as bait to catch the guy above him, then the guy above that guy, then the guy above that other guy. A yellow taxi drove past her window. A sound like wind howled through her head. She opened one of the folders in her lap, a narco complaint on an address five blocks away, near the Thirty-Seventh Avenue Starbucks that had finally opened.
I’m observing a regular amount of foot traffic for the area
, she wrote.
Based on the available firsthand evidence I see no reason to keep the complaint open
. She reached for another folder, on a Jackson Heights garden co-op where she imagined all the residents were white.
I’m observing two teenage Caucasian males lingering near the building doorway but after twenty minutes I have observed no hand-to-hands or other suspicious behavior to indicate this is a narcotics hot spot. Based on the available firsthand evidence I see no reason to keep the complaint open
. Already her wrist had cramped up, with hours of typing still waiting for her. On her drive to work this morning, before she heard the Mets score, she saw an ad for LaGuardia Community College on the side of a bus.
TOO BUSY?
it said.
GOOD
. It was worth remembering: in these times, in this city, she at least had a job. A pudgy black kid, who may have had a job of his own, pedaled out of the Laundromat on a wobbly blue bicycle. If
still an uncle, she would’ve stepped in front of him, grabbed ahold of his handlebars. Dealers frequently used kids as couriers because they could ride through projects and on sidewalks without patrol officers stopping them. Ass in air, elbows out, he turned the corner heading south, but she transported him a mile away in the opposite direction, over to a single-family house, an alleged narco hub near Northern Boulevard. The block’s resident grouch had probably smelled pot smoke coming out of their windows one time, or had maybe tired of their outdoor cat climbing up his bird feeder.
I’m observing a little kid on a bike in front of the location but no apparent drug activity. Based on the available firsthand evidence …
 Was Tevis in that Peruvian
picantería
right now sipping on a pisco sour? Did Gonz’s feet reach the floor from Marty’s wicker Papasan chair? Outside the bodega, a bearded homeless man—she squinted to make sure it wasn’t Tevis—tried to beg some change or cigs or both off a pretty Latina with a baby in her arms. Detective Itwaru couldn’t find a use for the woman or the child, but she did send the homeless guy to a pool hall near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
I’m observing a transient near the entrance, but on the sidewalk I see no visible drug paraphernalia
, by which she meant needles, blunt guts, or sandwich baggies with their corners twisted off.
Based on the available firsthand evidence …
 She closed that folder and opened a new one.
I’m observing
, she wrote without knowing what to say next. A complaint lay waiting for her in every file beneath this one. The scenes changed at random, just as they did for uncles, but here in Investigations she always had to be the same person.

“Here we go,” Sergeant McCarthy said again.

Together Korean Marty and Gonz came walking out of the apartment building. Not talking this time. A few minutes later, Tevis’s voice came over the Nextel to report that the target was indeed alone in his apartment, unarmed but with four pit bulls.

Detective Itwaru got out of the car first and stretched her creaky body. She heard Cataroni radioing the van—not the p-van, but the idling white van across the street, where Lieutenant Prondzinski and Captain Morse sat with eight other investigators and all the equipment they’d need to raid Marty’s apartment. The TAC plan back at the rumpus
had already assigned everyone roles. Duckenfield rams the door, Cataroni goes in first behind a crazy-heavy bulletproof body shield, followed by another strongman behind another bulletproof shield. They were the fury, the cue to Marty’s sphincter to release the shit into his drawers. Two other investigators would cuff him, two more would search his house, and two more would stand outside, below his window in case he tried to run down the fire escape. Obviously Morse and Prondzinski would remain in the van. Detective Itwaru and another newbie investigator were on animal control. She hefted a fire extinguisher out of the van. Three of the four pit bulls were still puppies, she assumed, and a high-powered blast of ammonium phosphate should chill them the fuck out. Her animal-control partner—a baby-faced white guy with a perpetual perspiration mustache—would then swoop in to apply the nooses. That was the plan. On paper, at least. First things first, the uncle was supposed to prop open the lobby door on his way out, which he had of course forgotten to do.