right,” said the Mayor, “I’ll accept that. And therefore…?”
“We now know it was the other way around. The student assaulted the teacher. The student is a Haitian gang leader with a juvenile record for violence, and the other students are afraid of him. As a matter of fact, they’re scared shitless, if you want to know the truth. He ordered five of his hangers-on to lie to the officers and say the teacher assaulted him.”
“Okay, what about the other students?”
“Everyone else the officers interviewed said they didn’t know. Said they couldn’t see what happened, or they were distracted by something else, or—the long and short of it was, this punk and his gang would do something to them if they came even close to telling what happened.”
“And now…?”
“And now we have confessions from all five of the ‘witnesses.’ They all admit they lied to the officers. What this means is, the DA has no case. Mr. Estevez—that’s the teacher—will be spared what could have been a very stiff sentence.”
“That’s good work, Chief, but I thought this was a School Police case.”
“It was, but now it’s under the jurisdiction of the court and the District Attorney’s office.”
“Well, then, we have a happy ending, don’t we, Chief,” said the Mayor, putting his elbows up and clasping his hands behind his neck and lying back to about as laid-back as a man could get in a swivel chair. “Thank you for going to the trouble to bring me this happy news of justice served, Chief. And that’s why you had to see me in person and make this appointment at the busiest time of my day?”
The irony, the snottiness, the belittling and disdainful way he wrote him off as a pest—eating up his precious time—the full-bore contempt and blatant disrespect… that did it. That pulled the trigger… No more holding back… He was doing it… risking all… even the house in Kendall so beloved by his beloved wife, whose beautiful face blipped through his corpus callosum at the very moment he said, “Actually… there’s one other element to it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It’s the officer who broke the case. He prevented a terrible miscarriage of justice. Mr. Estevez’s career, maybe his life, would have been destroyed. He owes a lot to this officer. We all do. I’m sure you’ll recall his name… Nestor Camacho.”
That name did terrible things to the Mayor’s ultra-supine posture. His hands descended from behind his neck, his elbows hit the top of the desk, and his head tilted forward. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I thought he was relieved of duty!”
“He was. He still is. But right after he handed over his badge and his gun—must not have been sixty minutes—he gave me the names of all five boys. He had done this all on his own. One of them he had already had a long talk with, and the kid had recanted what he had told the School Police. By now, Camacho was relieved of duty, and so I told the Detective Bureau to interrogate the other four. They didn’t stick to their story very long. As soon as they knew there’d been a break in their ranks and they might be arrested and prosecuted for perjury, that was it. They all folded. They’re only kids, after all. Tomorrow the DA’s gonna announce they’re dropping the case.”
“And they’re gonna release Camacho’s name?”
“Oh yes, of course,” said the Chief. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, Dio… I’m restoring him to duty… the badge, the gun, the whole thing.”
With that, the Mayor bolted forward in his chair as if the springs themselves had launched him.
“You can’t do that, Cy! Camacho just got relieved of duty—for being a goddamned racial bigot! We’ll lose all the credibility we gained with the African American community when we put that little sonofabitch on ice. I should have made you fire him outright. All of a sudden—what’s it been, three weeks?—all of a sudden, he’s back in the picture, bigger than ever, and he’s a fucking hero. Every African American in Miami’s gonna be up in arms all over again—except for one, the goddamn Chief of Police! It seems like yesterday, they all saw your little bigot in action and heard him spew out all that racist shit of his, live, in the raw, on YouTube. And now he’ll have the fucking Haitian community in a fucking uproar. They were out in the streets for two days raising holy hell before. Now they’ll really be