looking at the Chief but at the Sergeant. Somehow he had the feeling—only that, a feeling—that the Sergeant would give him a straighter answer.
The Sergeant was looking at the Chief with an almost impudent little smile.
“No, you won’t be doing any work,” said the Chief. Same stony expression. “And you won’t be coming in. You’ll have to be available for calls at home from eight a.m. to six p.m. every day.”
“Calls to do…” Nestor couldn’t pull himself together long enough to complete the question.
“Not to do anything,” said the Chief. “You just have to be available for the calls.”
Nestor looked at him blankly, catatonically.
“And you surrender your badge and your service revolver.”
::::::Surrender?… my badge and my service revolver?… and do nothing?::::::
“You might as well hand them over to me… now.”
Nestor looked at the Sergeant, who was looking at the Chief with a resigned twist to his lips. He had known all along, hadn’t he? Nestor was worse than stunned. He was frightened all over again.
Barely an hour after Camacho and Hernandez had left his office, Cat Posada brought the Chief a hand-delivered letter and arched her eyebrows in a way that says, “Oh ho! What do we have here?!”
The Chief had the same reaction, but he didn’t show it until she had left the room. ::::::God, she is some kinda hot, Miss Cat Posada—and I’m not gonna take one step down that road.:::::: He looked at the letter again and shook his head and sighed. The return address was in the upper left-hand corner written in ballpoint pen, and the name was Nestor Camacho. He had never seen an officer relieved of duty begin his appeal barely one hour later. ::::::Bad move, Camacho. There’s nothing you can say that won’t make it worse.::::::
He sliced open the envelope and read,
Dear Chief Booker,
Respectfully, can an officer relieved of duty give information he got before he was relieved of duty? Hoping that he can, please respectfully accept the following in the case of the teacher José Estevez who was arrested after an altercation at Lee de Forest Senior High School.
::::::The kid’s respectfulling me half-to-death, and he’s totally offing English grammar.:::::: But as the kid blundered on, he began to make sense. He was saying that the student whom Estevez had supposedly attacked, François Dubois, was the leader of a gang and that he and the gang had intimidated at least four students into giving false information to the investigating officers. He gave their names and said, “Two of them are sixteen years old, and two of them are seventeen years old. They are not ‘tough guys,’ they are not gang members”—he put tough guys in quotes, because he couldn’t come up with a more dignified term, no doubt—“they are only ‘boys.’ They are already afraid they are getting into serious trouble by false testimony. Our Department will get them to tell the truth quickly.” The grammar was getting bloodier and bloodier, but the potential of this information the Chief liked… a lot.
He didn’t even bother to summon Cat Posada over the intercom. He just yelled out the door, “Miss Posada! Get me Lieutenant Verjillo!”
Thank God he had Camacho figured wrong. He wasn’t making an appeal. He was just being a cop.
Magdalena kept her dressy clothes at her official address, the little apartment she rented with Amélia Lopez on Drexel Avenue. Her declarations about turning her back on Hialeah and the Hialeah Cuban life had been many and open… and loud anytime she could shove them in her mother’s face. Yet there was still enough Catholic upbringing in her to want to keep up appearances. Suppose some old friend or relative… or her mother or father, although they wouldn’t dare… happened to use some outrageous sob story to prevail upon Amélia to let her into the apartment. She wanted it to look like she actually lived there. At Norman’s she mainly kept her white I’m-a-nurse dresses and some weekend-type clothes, jeans, matelot shirts, bikinis, tank tops, shorts, sundresses, cotton cardigan sweaters, and the like.
It so happened that on Friday she was inside her bedroom closet—inside her closet in the moral apartment—trying to get dressed in a furiously great hurry, clad so far in nothing but a thong, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, panic-driven, among two closet rods’ worth of hanging garments, muttering louder and louder… “Oh, my God… I don’t believe this… it was hanging right next to that.” Thrash thrash thrash “Oh, shit… not even one… Chez Toi… What’s my—”
“Dios mío, qué pasa, Magdalena?” And