Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,116
to the airport, Diego Beltrán asked the ex-police chief about the cloth jewelry bag sitting on the console in the car.
“Have a look,” said Jerry Crosby. “It’s for my wife. Tomorrow is her birthday.”
Diego took a slender box from the bag. Inside was a thin gold necklace with a cream-pink conch pearl—the one Crosby had plucked from the sooty gravel in the train tracks on that day with Diego.
“That’s pretty cool, Chief,” Diego said. “She’ll love it.”
He didn’t ask about the other railroad pearl, the unlucky one that had turned him into a hated homicide suspect. It had been released to the heirs of Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons in a sealed baggie indelicately stamped EVIDENCE.
When Diego thanked Crosby for the lift to the airport, the ex-chief said, “It’s the least I can do. Can I ask why New Jersey?”
“Lots of other Diegos up there. Easy to blend in.”
Crosby didn’t bring up the young man’s suicide attempt at the jail. He considered it a minor miracle that someone was on duty who knew how to pump a stomach.
“You got a job lined up?” he asked.
“I’m going to work for the Census Bureau,” Diego said.
“Perfect.”
“Now that I’m legal, right?”
“Welcome to the American dream,” said Crosby.
The county had freed Diego Beltrán thirty-two minutes after prosecutors received a call from Homeland Security, which had received a call from the Justice Department, which had received a call from the White House. Deputies had hidden Diego in the back of a Stanley Steemer van and smuggled him out through a rear gate; the demonstrators, not knowing he was gone, continued chanting themselves hoarse.
Diego never returned to the ICE detention center where the other boat migrants were being held; instead he was transported directly from the jail to a Holiday Inn Express in Delray Beach. The next morning his lawyers informed him not only that the State Attorney’s Office had dropped the stolen-pearl charge, but also that immigration officials had pre-approved his yet-to-be-completed request for asylum, due to the political violence in Honduras that had claimed the lives of his uncles.
A short statement buried on the Department of Homeland Security website said Diego Mateo Beltrán was released from custody after “a thorough investigation produced evidence indicating he was not involved in the abduction or homicide of Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons, nor is he a founder or member of an organized criminal enterprise referenced variously as the DBC-88, DBC-77 or DBC-69.”
Dumbfounded by his sudden release, Diego feared it was either a mistake or a government trap. He’d remained hunkered in his darkened motel room half-expecting ICE agents to come crashing through the door any moment.
The next morning he turned on CNN just as the President of the United States began addressing a convention of Christian firearms manufacturers. Diego’s stomach roiled as he waited for the President’s version of how the sensational murder case against him had dissolved. He didn’t expect a public apology for how he was demonized, but he figured the President owed some sort of explanation to his restless, impressionable base.
Yet Diego’s name, and what had happened to him, was never mentioned. Instead the commander-in-chief launched a rant about a new villain that he referred to, variously, as Bang Lo Sinh, Li Sonh Bang, or Lee Roy Bangston—a “diabolical Chinese espionage agent and self-infected virus carrier” who’d allegedly snuck across the Texas border, traveling with a vaccinated mob of Asian gang members.
“These ruthless foreign invaders have come here to rape our great nation, but our great nation stands prepared to rape them first,” proclaimed the President, distractingly caked with apricot-colored makeup. “I promise you, folks, we will track down Bang Lo, we will capture Bang Lo, and we will send Señor Lo down below!”
The convention erupted in cheers. Diego turned off the television. From the phone in his room he called Angie Armstrong and thanked her for getting him out of jail—saving his life, actually—and told her he was leaving nuthouse Florida as soon as possible. He had a second cousin in Union City who’d said he could sleep on her couch until he got his own place.
Jerry Crosby had bought him a one-way ticket from West Palm to Newark. As they drove down Congress Avenue toward the main terminal, Diego asked the ex-chief if he planned to stay in law enforcement. Crosby said he already had interviews scheduled with the police departments in Coral Springs and Key Biscayne.
“There’s also an opening up at The Villages,” he added, “but who wants to drive a golf cart