“You mean, you like ‘Big Brother’s’ connections.” I point at her expensive purse. “By the way, it’s pronounced Loo-ey Vee-tawn.” Her face twists, and she looks like she’s going to cry. I’ve pressed her button. Her dad didn’t always own his restaurant; he started out in the business as a dishwasher. “I’m really sorry. It’s just—”
“It’s just that you’re jealous,” she states flatly. “They chased your little boyfriend away and now you don’t want me to have any fun. Well, I’m sorry if they want me at the party and not you. Maybe we’re just too different. Maybe you’re not my best friend after all. Maybe you’re nothing.” She steels herself for a fight. The defiant set of her chin makes me think of her mah-jongg partners.
It’s the liquor talking, I tell myself. I imagine what would happen if she were to go with them to the Tulip. Peter Wong and the drunk, sexy, teenaged daughter of his business associate. Algebra shooting invisible bullets with his thumb and forefinger. I imagine her beautiful hair splayed out across a dirty, beer-soaked stage.
With a grace worthy of a professional athlete, I reach under her arms and tickle her. At first she looks at me as if I’ve gone crazy, but as she begins to giggle she realizes what I’m doing, and her laughter turns intense, and then furious. She tries to fend me off but she’s too drunk and I’m too quick, having trained myself since childhood to know her weak spot. Laughing and sputtering uncontrollably, she can’t even turn away from Peter when a stream of vomit erupts from her mouth and all over his Bruno Magli shoes. The look on Peter’s face as he studies his sopping shoes, before he turns and walks away, says it all.
The party is over.
Crazy Jill saves the slinky
by Stephen Solomita
College Point
When the over-muscled hulk in the studded leather jeans smacks the fat guy in the polka dot sundress, the eight patrol officers gathered around the small TV in the muster room cheer loudly. The body builder is a prostitute, the fat guy a prominent New York politician. The video is evidence discovered in the apartment of an extortionist.
Groans and cat calls greet the white guy’s flabby thighs and flaccid penis when the hulk tears off his dress. When the fat guy turns to reveal a cotton-white ass the size of a watermelon, the boys nearly fall off their chairs.
I’m the only woman in the room, Officer Jill Kelly, and I feel sorry for the fat slob in the dress. I wonder what it’s like to be a City Councilman, a Catholic, a husband, a father, a transvestite in a hotel room with a leather boy. The truth is that I can smell his desperation. The truth is that some cop’s gonna leak the tape and the fat guy’s life is gonna drop out from under him like a body through the trap door of a gallows.
“Jill? The captain wants to see you.”
“Thanks, Crowley. I need to get away from this.”
Bushy enough to conceal small game, Sergeant Crowley’s eyebrows rise to form lush semicircles as he jerks his chin at the TV. “I woulda predicted this was right up your alley.”
Captain McMullen’s office is another world altogether, a quiet, clean world-unto-itself. Instead of peeling green paint, the captain’s walls are lined with expensive paneling. Instead of scuffed linoleum, his floor is covered by a Berber carpet flecked with beige and gold. His walnut desk is big enough to land helicopter gunships.
I close the door behind me, shut out the squeals of the fat politician, the mindless comments of my peers. Captain McMullen is nowhere to be found, but the man seated behind his desk is very familiar.
“Whadaya say, Uncle Mike?”
Deputy Chief Michael Xavier Kelly offers a thin smile. He has a very narrow face with a prominent jaw that dominates veal-thin lips, a button of a nose, and blue glittery eyes that rarely blink. Uncle Mike is Deputy Chief of Detectives and heads the Commissioner’s Special Investigations Unit, an attack-dog bureau far more terrifying to ranking officers than Internal Affairs.
“Jill Kelly,” Uncle Mike squawks, “in the flesh.” Thirty-one years ago, as a rookie on foot patrol, Uncle Mike took a bullet that passed from left to right through his neck. Now he can’t raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. “Take a seat, Jill. Please.”
I do as I’m told. “So, how’s Aunt Rose? And Sean?”
“Fine, fine.” Uncle Mike walks his fingers across the desk and over a bulging file. “I hear the boys have taken to calling you Crazy Jill.”
“I consider it a compliment.”
My admission evokes a raspy laugh, immediately followed by the most somber expression in his repertoire. “I came here for a reason,” he announces. “Tell me, do you believe in redemption?”
Ah, right to the point. I was a naughty girl, a girl in need of punishment, but now I can make it up. Just do Uncle Mike this unnamed little favor — which will not turn out to be little — and retrieve my working life. Uncle Mike will pluck me out of the 75th Precinct in the asshole of Brooklyn. He’ll restore me to the Fugitive Apprehension Squad and the SWAT team. I only have to do this one little favor.
It was last August and blazing hot. I was in an uninsulated attic, looking out through a window at the house across the way. The man in the house, George Musgrove, had butchered his ex-wife, then taken his three children hostage, naturally threatening to kill them as well. At the time, I was part of a SWAT team assigned to eastern Queens, a sniper, and my orders were to acquire a target a.s.a.p., then notify the boss. The first part wasn’t a problem. When I came into the attic, George was standing in a bedroom window, completely exposed. He wanted out by then, but didn’t have the balls to kill himself. That’s what I figured, anyway. Just another suicide-by-cop.
I had my partner call down to the CO and explain that I was thirty yards away with a clear target, and that I couldn’t miss. But Captain Ed McMullan — known to his troops as Egg McMuffin — turned me down flat. The hostage negotiator, he told my partner, was confident. Musgrove would be talked out eventually. There would be no further loss of life.
All through this back-and-forth, Musgrove stayed right there, right in front of the window with a cordless phone pressed to his ear. And I started thinking, Yeah, most likely he’ll give it up without hurting the kids. Maybe even nine out of ten times he’ll surrender. But when you consider what happens if he ends up in the wrong ten percent, a hundred percent is a lot better than ninety. I was in a position to guarantee those kids would survive and I exercised my options.
If Uncle Mike hadn’t intervened, I would have been charged with disobeying a direct order, and might have faced criminal charges. But that was Uncle Mike’s way. Clan Kelly first became prominent in the NYPD a hundred years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt was Acting Commissioner. Clan Kelly is still prominent today. This was especially relevant to Uncle Mike, who fully expected to become the next Chief of Detectives. Obviously, the Kelly name could not be besmirched. We were a self-policing family and a Kelly could be punished only by another Kelly. Thus, at Uncle Mike’s behest, my gold shield was taken away and I was exiled to the Seven-Five, there to languish until he needed a favor.
As for me, I want back on the SWAT team and the Fugitive Apprehension Squad. I want both of those things and I want them bad enough to play along.
“Anything I can do for you, I’m ready,” I finally say. “You know that.”
“It’s about your cousin, Joanna.”
“The Slinky?”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what I call her, Uncle Mike. The Slinky.”
He bursts out laughing. “Yes, I can understand why you’d say that.”