The Fence - Dick Lehr [81]
Mike’s interview marked his first formal talk with investigators. His appearance actually may have surprised those in the department hoping Mike’s fifteen days of silence signified he was going to do nothing. Indeed, Mike had been fielding regularly what he interpreted as messages to go this route. Some were crude—the crank telephone calls at night, for example. Others seemed more subtle. More than once, Mike listened while someone he knew on the force shared a story about being mistakenly roughed up by other cops. One was a fellow officer in the gang unit named Fred Waggett. “He had been hit with a baton before,” Mike said. “The guy apologized and he let it go.” Mike liked Waggett and was not offended by what he took as the theme to Waggett’s first-person tale: Silence is golden. “He was giving advice he thought was legitimate,” Mike said, “and he was sincere in how he thought I should handle the situation.”
The truth was no one really knew what to expect from Mike Cox in the aftermath of the beating. He was a quiet man who guarded his privacy. Few on the force knew him besides his partner, Craig. Mike might have liked it that way, but the privacy came with a price. Indeed, going back to when he was a boy, his reticence was often misinterpreted. When Mike sat mute while his adviser at Milton Academy accused him of smoking pot, the adviser confidently took Mike’s failure to speak up as confirmation. Now fifteen years later, Mike’s silent ways were still being misconstrued. Colleagues who came to see him thought his low profile meant he was going to sit tight.
The week before the sit-down, for example, the department had issued a press release announcing Mike’s promotion to sergeant—along with sixty other new sergeants, twenty lieutenants, and eight captains. Even though the promotion was long in the works, Mike immediately heard talk that the promotion was his payoff for not being pushy. “The rumor was they’re gonna take care of me, not to worry.” Mike should not have been surprised by rumors based on false interpretations of his silence, but he was.
“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
In fact, Mike’s showing up at headquarters to see Sergeant Detective Cruz did not constitute a turnabout of any kind. He’d always wanted accountability—and nothing less. If he’d said little to anyone about his expectations, it was due to his nature and his injuries; headaches, for one, plagued him. The start of the Internal Affairs probe—however belated—was a good sign to him. Two weeks had gone by, and the offenders had had their chance to come clean. It was time for Internal Affairs to turn up the heat. “I had family members telling me nothing would happen, but I was sure they would get to the bottom of it,” Mike said. “I believed that wholeheartedly.”
The interview with Cruz was taped. Mike’s recollection about what happened to him at the fence was still scant, but he tried his best to be helpful. He was adamant about some points and wrong about others. In the report he wrote for the interview, for example, he asserted clearly the ice-fall story was fiction. “I did not slip on ice or any other substance.” But he incorrectly told Cruz that when he first ran from his cruiser toward the fence, he was chasing Smut Brown and a second suspect. The mistake was one Mike was never able to resolve; a faulty memory told him he’d run after two suspects.
Mike provided other new information—bits and pieces of the night’s events that were slowly returning to him in the two weeks since he’d been home recuperating. He recalled that before he lost consciousness a white man wearing black boots kicked him in the face. He couldn’t describe the man’s features, however, or recall whether he was in uniform. “It’s possible that I might later on remember.” For now, that was it.
Mike offered one other new lead—another moment that had come back to him. He described standing, blood-soaked, behind a police cruiser, when “I see a black officer.” The