The Fence - Dick Lehr [82]
The taped interview ended at 5:15 P.M. It had not lasted even thirty minutes. Mike still suffered from huge gaps in his memory. But even if he could not identify any of his assailants, he felt he had provided investigators with some good leads about one of the men who’d beaten him and about another officer who then tried to arrest him. Mike promised to pass along any other details—if and when they came back to him. The short interview left him feeling exhausted. Mike headed home to rest.
The next week, Mike ventured out to attend the ceremony honoring the eighty-nine newly promoted officers. During the event, Police Commissioner Paul Evans spoke to Mike for the first time since the beating. The private conversation amounted to a pep talk. Evans asked how Mike was feeling and encouraged him to get better so he could return to work soon. He told Mike not to worry about the “incident” and that “he would take care of it.” They were encouraging words that Mike wanted to believe.
But it wasn’t so clear whether the case was a high priority to Evans yet—or ever would be. Three weeks had now passed, and Evans had still not spoken out publicly about the beating. He’d certainly had the chance. The ceremony itself presented the latest opportunity. It coincided with Evans’s first anniversary as “Boston’s top cop,” and the local newspapers used the occasion to write stories recapping his first year. In interviews with the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, the commissioner talked about the highs and lows. On the positive side, he noted the streets were safer as a result in a sharp drop in the city’s crime rate, a decline he credited to putting more cops on patrol and forging alliances with neighborhood and religious leaders. The low point, he then said, was the death of the retired minister Accelyne Williams during a botched drug raid in Dorchester—a senseless tragedy that had been a headline story throughout the year.
Noticeable by its absence was any mention of Mike Cox. The Cox beating—one of the worst cases of police brutality in modern times—was a senseless assault that so far had only barely made the news, and the commissioner wasn’t drawing attention to it.
It was important for Mike to attend the ceremony, but it wasn’t easy. He didn’t want to talk to anyone about the beating, and he felt people were staring at him. Some even seemed to be avoiding him. But Mike was proud of making sergeant, a rank he’d earned. The police world was still his world. And he knew others who’d won promotions. Mike was glad for them too. Diana Green, for one, also made sergeant. Mike had gotten to know “Dee” Green on the job working in Roxbury and Mattapan. She was originally from the South and had overcome a lot—childhood scoliosis as well as her father’s accidental death—to become one of the top performers on the anti-crime unit. Like Mike’s anti-gang unit, the assignment was elite, high-powered, and high-pressured. Dee Green was popular, a big-hearted cop who, following the beating, sought Mike out and suggested, gingerly, that talking with a therapist might be helpful. “I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff,” Mike said. But Mike appreciated her interest and considered Green a trusted friend on the force. Going to the ceremony was a chance to see her and others whose police work he respected.
The February 14 ceremony actually turned out to be one of the few times Mike had left his house for something other than an appointment with either his primary care physicians or any number of specialists. Mike continued to see a battery of doctors for his headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and unsteady gait. He saw a neurologist for his “post-traumatic amnesia,” and his doctors had another MRI done of his brain that, fortunately, “did not suggest intracranial bleeding or contusion.” Concern about his “left flank discomfort” and “persistent hematuria,” or blood