The Fence - Dick Lehr [100]
July was also looking to be a big month for Mike. It was when he was scheduled to return to the force. Physically, he’d been coming around. He no longer wore the splint to stabilize the damaged ligament in his right thumb. With therapy, the thumb was feeling stronger. He could hold his service revolver okay. The thumb still swelled easily if he used it a lot, so he quit playing for the gang unit’s basketball team in the police league. He usually began playing tennis at least once a week during the spring, but at this point he didn’t give playing even a passing thought. His urine was still brownish in color, and the severe headaches dogged him. Taking Advil or Motrin was part of his daily diet. But his amnesia was wearing off, along with his dizziness and occasional disorientation. He’d not had another freaky episode like the one when he was driving home from a doctor’s appointment and “I just drove by my house. I don’t know where I was driving, but I had gone past my house, way past my house, and I realized, you know, Where am I going?” In five months, he’d had more than thirty visits with a dozen or more doctors.
Mike wasn’t going to be rejoining the gang unit. He had a new assignment—and of all places, the newly promoted Sergeant Mike Cox was headed to the Internal Affairs Division. It seemed surreal: joining the division that had failed to solve his own beating. But the transfer had been in the pipeline well before the night of January 25. It was generally believed career-minded officers—officers who aspired to high-ranking positions on the force—needed to rotate through Internal Affairs or Anti-Corruption. With that in mind, Mike had actually sought the assignment. But now Mike no longer felt so ambitious. He no longer knew what to think about his career. He wasn’t ready to quit, which was what Kimberly and others in his family wanted. But his career seemed in shambles to him. His mind was preoccupied around the clock with the case. He didn’t know what to do, except to go ahead and report to work in July and see what happened.
The couple had all this and more on their minds as they were making their way through the park. Then they heard someone calling out Mike’s name.
Mike looked and recognized Dave Williams.
Hey, Mike. How you doin’?
Mike was surprised to see Williams, but Franklin Park was also a familiar destination for him. He jogged in the park if he skipped his early morning workouts in the gym. Mike realized it had been a couple of months since he and Williams had talked. Kimberly strolled ahead and left the two men alone on the path.
Williams took the lead by asking a question: I hope you don’t believe that stuff that they’re saying in the paper? Mike didn’t answer. He listened. Mike, I know you, Williams said, I know you . Williams repeated the line, or a variation of it, more than once: You know I know you, Mike. You know I wouldn’t hit you.
The refrain had the sound of a talking point. Then he delivered a second line: He switched subjects from himself to Jimmy Burgio, and when he did Mike noticed something. “He was talking to me face to face,” Mike said, “and then when he got to that part—‘And as far as Burgio, ah, well, ah’—he wouldn’t look at me.” To Mike, Williams was not acting like the guy he’d known for almost four years: confident, direct, up tempo. “He said, ‘As far as Burgio, well, I don’t know how they, you know, could say that because, ah, well, he was kind of…You know, he was right behind me.’”
The gist of the halfhearted rambling was to back up Burgio, and Mike couldn’t stomach listening to any more