The Fence - Dick Lehr [101]
he interrupted.
Williams stopped. Mike continued. “This thing is not going to go away,” he said. “It’s not going to end any time soon. It’s only going to get worse.” Mike then began his own talking point, telling Williams several times, “Just tell the truth.”
When Mike finished, Williams didn’t try to pick up where he’d left off. Nor did he respond to Mike’s challenge by insisting he was telling the truth, as he had to Jim Hussey during the interview with Internal Affairs. Williams just didn’t say anything more about that night at the dead end, and the accidental meeting between the two ended there.
Mike turned the exchange over and over in his head, looking for meaning beneath the surface of the word choices and elliptical sentence constructions, the repeated You know I know you, Mike, and so forth—all part of a haunting puzzle to him. It seemed more fitting for a code breaker working intelligence in the world of international espionage. By his interpretation, Mike decided the faint defense of Burgio—delivered in a stutter and humility uncharacteristic of Dave Williams—was his former friend’s way of signaling Burgio was culpable but that he was bound to cover for him.
It all left Mike feeling empty.
Two months later Mike again unexpectedly ran into Williams. The occasion was the funeral in July of a fellow officer, Sergeant Diana Green. Dee Green had committed suicide. The news came as a blow. The last time Mike had seen Dee was when they’d stood proudly together on the stage during their promotions to sergeant. She was a friend, and Mike had always respected her accomplishments. When she did not show for work, her captain had gone to her condo in Roxbury. He got in and discovered her body on the floor. Her dog, a German shepherd named Buddy, stood by. There were no signs of forced entry. In the Boston Herald, columnist Peter Gelzinis wrote a tribute. He quoted one of Green’s former supervisors. “Her courage was a given,” the supervisor said. “I watched Diana make a stop of two guys in a car with machine guns. Held them at gunpoint. But it wasn’t her guts I admired most. It was her heart. Her wisdom. The life she lived…She survived KKK attacks as a child in the South. She endured the sight of her father’s accidental death. She conquered scoliosis to become a runner. Diana taught me a helluva lot more about life than I ever taught her about police work.”
Mike usually tried to avoid large gatherings of police officers, but nothing was going to keep him from the funeral. He did, however, manage to get a seat without really talking to anyone else. Then, during the service, he found himself feeling raw and vulnerable. The feelings caught him off guard; he wasn’t usually the emotional type. He had to work to keep from choking up. Once the service ended, he was hoping to leave as unobtrusively as he’d arrived, but he bumped into Williams on his way out.
“He came up and asked me how I was doing.” Mike, on automatic pilot, summoned what had become his stock answer. “What I always say. ‘Fine, thank you.’” They were making only small talk, but Mike felt weird. “I didn’t feel like I normally felt.” He couldn’t put his finger on the feeling—a little bit of anger, maybe, but more like his mind could not stay focused on Williams’s chatter and was instead trying to land on a thought just beyond his mental reach. It was most like the experience everyone has had at one time or another—when you see someone you know but for an instant you can’t recall the person’s name. There’s a gap, a space in time, before the click of recognition. That’s how it felt to Mike, although he was grasping not for a name but for a memory.
Mike took the feeling home with him. He had little to say to Kimberly or the boys. He was brooding, trying to make a connection to the nagging but unconscious thought. “I was up most of the night. I really wasn’t sleeping.” Then, without warning, it came. It gushed out in a rush of sounds and flashing lights. “I heard sirens blaring and people yelling.” He was reliving the beating. He remembered