The Fence - Dick Lehr [78]
Then the telephone rang again—and again. Each time Mike picked up the receiver to hear the same animallike scream. Then the caller hung up. Toward dawn, Mike picked up the receiver, bracing for the scream, but it didn’t come. Mike said, Hello? The caller asked for someone by name, but uttered a name that made no sense. “It was a nonsense name,” Mike said. “It was a name I couldn’t even pronounce.”
Mike asked the caller, Who?
“You asshole,” the caller yelled. “Fuck you!”
The line went dead, and that was it. The calls ended. They didn’t belong to one of Mike’s nightmares. The telephone calls had been real, and they left Mike and Kimberly bleary-eyed. But they weren’t going to puzzle too much over a wrong number or sick prank, not with all they had going on in the family, given Mike’s condition.
It was Friday, February 3, nine days since Mike’s beating.
Later in the morning a friend of Mike’s called to tell him about a story he should read in that morning’s Herald. The story was on page 16, and it carried the headline “Alleged Beating of Undercover Cop Probed.” It was a brief account—289 words long—reporting that the department was looking into the possibility that “an undercover police officer was beaten by other officers at the height of a chase following a shooting last week.”
Mike read the story carefully. He noticed a mistake right away; he worked in plainclothes and wasn’t an “undercover” cop. The mistake didn’t matter at this point. What mattered was this was the first public disclosure that Mike had been a casualty in what so far had been heralded in the media coverage as a night of sterling police work.
Mike read on: “Officer Michael Cox, 29, a member of the Anti–Gang Violence Unit, suffered kidney damage and head wounds in the Jan. 25 incident, which occurred as police pursued four suspects for a shooting at a Roxbury eatery, sources said.”
The department’s spokesman was quoted as saying, “This is serious.”
Mike found himself thinking about the crank calls. He could hear the caller’s voice in his head and it made him feel queasy. The calls were clearly connected to the story. He might be reading the story for the first time at midmorning, but Mike knew that cops working the overnight shift often grabbed the two morning papers, the Herald and the Boston Globe.
The caller, Mike decided, was not random, a nobody—he was a cop who’d read in the Herald that the department had started looking into the beating and that Mike was talking. He would never be able to prove it, but he knew it in his bones. Mike felt a panic. The newspaper story followed by the middle-of-the-night “Fuck you.” Juxtapose the two, and Mike knew the call was a warning: Keep your mouth shut.
The story itself presented another puzzle for Mike. In it, police sources were quoted saying they were trying to sort out what happened. One was quoted saying Mike “remembers being in pursuit, he remembers being struck, and that’s all he remembers. Obviously something happened. But if he doesn’t tell us, how are we going to know?”
If he doesn’t tell us, how are we going to know? Mike reread the quotation. It was absurd, he thought, flat-out absurd—the notion only he had the key to the truth.
Then came this: “We have no official complaint yet. Michael has not come in and said he was beaten up.”
No official complaint? thought Mike. The notion that police investigated violent assaults only after the victim filed a formal complaint was flat-out absurd. “Hogwash,” Mike said. The department was making it sound like the ball was in his court—to both pursue the case and solve it.
None of this sounded good to Mike. The story in the city’s other daily newspaper, the Boston Globe, only added to his anxiety. Like the Herald, the story reported police officials were “trying to determine how plainclothes officer Michael Cox was injured in the line of duty last week.” But comments by the spokesman were, once again, misleading if not outright false. “We’re not sure—he’s not sure—how he was injured.”
Mike was confounded.