Suspect, p.15
Suspect, page 15
I hug him goodbye tonight and we head off, both of us more or less happy to have been together.
“Phone me about what happened when your hearing is over next week,” he calls. When I slide into the Cadillac, I’m as close to crying as I ever come, because it just seems completely terrible that the most exciting thing in his life is me.
17. Frito
Fabian Blanco was called Fito at home. His white schoolmates, being mean or ignorant or just kids, turned that into ‘Frito,’ and I guess it tells you a little about Blanco that he accepted it. Anyway, that’s still what he is called around the Highland Isle Central Station. Frito is a little chubby and is probably headed for a shape like Rik’s or Pops’s in the years ahead, but on the stand, sitting forward in his chair with his hands folded on the blond rail, he has the polish of a TV game show host: calm, good-natured and a little glib. He’s got beautiful glossy black hair, parted on the side, and the sweet round face of a child. After he was sworn, he smiled at his pretty little wife, who came in with him and is seated in the front row. Clearly, she’s here to show that she totally accepts her husband’s story that he was extorted by the Chief, and that all has been forgiven as a result.
Headed to court, Rik was tense. He’s this close to the biggest win of his legal career and is desperate not to blow it. Yet the truth is, we have caught Blanco in a supersized lie, claiming that he went to the Chief’s house with her one afternoon in November 2021 for some porn-movie sex, not long before he was promoted to lieutenant. I asked Dorcas to back me up and double-check the video from the Chief’s, and neither one of us has found a single frame of Blanco during the entire fall so much as waving howdy from the sidewalk.
Despite that, maybe just to psych himself, Rik has been telling the Chief and me that Blanco will still be a tough witness. No question, he’ll look better than the two lying lunkheads the Ritz sent here already. And I admit that none of us can really explain why a good cop would come in and perjure himself, as Frito is about to do. Despite a lot of hunting, I have not identified a connection between him and Vojczek—I can’t find anybody who’s even seen the two of them together. The Chief admits she’s never had an angry word with Blanco. And he’s totally God Squad, a superserious Catholic who takes no part in the raunchy back-and-forth that’s routine in the station. In fact, she says that Blanco shuts that stuff out so completely that she was amazed he understood enough to make up all the kinky shit he’s claimed went on between them. On top of all that, over the years the Chief’s added dozens of positive comments to Blanco’s performance reviews that make him sound like maybe the most dedicated cop since McGruff the Crime Dog.
I’m sure in many ways Blanco reminds the Chief of herself. Also from an immigrant family, he is a former altar boy and Eagle Scout, a straight-A student in high school who immediately after graduation enlisted in the Marines and did a tour in Afghanistan. When he returned, he worked the midnight shift in a FedEx sorting station, going to classes on the GI Bill during the days and finishing his BA at the U in three years. He is one of those guys who said his whole life that he wanted to be in law enforcement and applied in HI because Kindle County, where he grew up, was going through one of its periodic hiring freezes. On the job, he was an instant superstar, with the highest clearance rate in the department both as a patrolman and as a detective. In the meantime, he used his nights to finish a master’s in police science. He has three kids, a solid marriage, and attends Mass every Sunday with his wife and their entire family—brother, sisters and all four parents. He’s never been seen at the Saloon.
Rik is also concerned by the fact that Blanco’s promotion to lieutenant late last year did not go by the book. He had become a sergeant only eighteen months before the Chief encouraged him to take the lieutenant’s exam. She says that was in response to the mayor’s office more or less demanding that she make the command staff more diverse. Lucia Gomez-Barrera was the only BIPOC member of the brass, along with four white men. When Commander Leery, who got the job when Lucy moved up to chief—when Leery retired, the other senior officers were each elevated a rank. That created an opening at lieutenant that Lucy wanted Frito to fill. To do that though, Blanco would have to jump the rank of master sergeant. The Chief regarded that as a technicality. The master sergeants got $500 more a year but had the exact same duties as the other sergeants. Still, nobody on the HIPD had ever made lieutenant without being a master sergeant first. Because of that, P&F was reluctant, and the Chief admits she had to work them for a while to get Blanco the appointment. They will all remember that without being reminded by testimony, which Marc will introduce anyway.
Lucy has said several times that when her days as Chief end—assuming she gets to leave the job voluntarily—the leading internal candidate to replace her will be Blanco. That is as close as Rik will come to developing a motive for Blanco to cook all this up. In final argument, he’ll claim that Blanco, knowing that DeGrassi and Cornish were going to do the Chief dirty, decided to pile on, bettering the chance of a vacancy at the top he’d be a natural to fill. But the Chief has warned us that Blanco won’t come off as a schemer, so this could be a pretty hard sell.
Blanco’s testimony goes exactly as expected to start, covering his background and his rise in the department. He admits that he was excited when the Chief asked him to apply for lieutenant. And it appeared that P&F was getting ready to accept the promotion when, shortly before Thanksgiving, Lucy called Frito into her office and told him she wanted him to come home with her and party one night that week. Stunned and utterly confused, he told her no thanks, hoping it was just some half-baked romantic overture, but she quickly set him straight. If that was his choice, she supposedly said, he would never get beyond the rank of sergeant and would be permanently assigned to the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, with a lot of weekends thrown in. The Chief told him to think it over.
When he did, he could see she had him completely boxed. If he refused, he’d become an absentee father while his career remained on permanent spin cycle. If he quit and tried to catch on in another department, the Chief would trash him when they called her for a reference.
For a day or two, Blanco considered whether he could turn over on the Chief, but he realized no one would believe him. She’d already told him, supposedly, that she’d claim he was the one who’d come on to her, saying that explained why she did a one-eighty on his promotion. Blanco says he agonized another day about breaking his vows to his wife but ultimately decided that his choice was between being a bad husband for a night or a bad father for years.
“Did you tell her yes, then?” Marc Hess asks. He looks more confident than I’d expect, given the clubbing his witnesses got in the prior sessions.
“I did.”
“Where?”
“In her office in the station.”
“And how did she respond?”
“She got this kind of superior smile and said she knew I’d come around. And then she told me to get down on my knees and—” His eyes sink to the carpeting. “She wanted me to give her oral pleasure,” he says.
This is completely new. Rik gives me a look like, ‘Can you believe this shit?’ smiling faintly. It will be easy to gut Blanco on this point, since he mentioned nothing like this in his prior statement.
“Right there in her office?” Marc asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you?”
“I hoped if I did it, that would be the end of it.”
But it wasn’t. They went from her office to the Chief’s home, where, in his state of torment, he couldn’t get it up. After about an hour of trying to talk sense to his dick, she said she’d be the man and pegged him. (When Lucy read that part of the complaint in our office, she laughed out loud, saying that she wouldn’t know how to mount a strap-on without watching several YouTube videos. Rik and her didn’t find it funny when I offered to demonstrate.)
Blanco says he was so traumatized by these events, he decided nothing could be worse. He went to the Chief and told her that if she ever approached him again, he’d go straight to the mayor. For whatever reason, his promotion went through. Since then, his dealings with the Chief in the station are as if the sexual insanity had never happened.
After Marc tenders Blanco for cross, Rik asks for a five-minute break. He chats with the Chief for a minute, who is pretty bubbly. Blanco has sort of tightroped out over the abyss on a really shaky wire. But as soon as she departs for the Ladies, Rik turns a dark face toward me and shepherds me to the far corner of the courtroom behind the bench and next to the wooden staffs that hold the US, State and Highland Isle flags.
“I don’t understand this,” he whispers. “Marc’s not Johnnie Cochran but he knows better than to let this guy make something up at the last minute like that goofy story about oral sex.”
“Well, what’s Marc supposed to do if Blanco shows up talking crazy?”
“Marc can’t tell him to lie, but he didn’t need to ask the questions to bring that crap out. He elicited that deliberately.” Rik takes a long pause, chewing on his lower lip while he thinks, biting it so hard I’m afraid he may draw blood. By now, we’ve entered Rik’s sweating season, where the change in humidity keeps him dripping whether he’s inside or out. As usual, the perspiration sits in glistening little half domes across his brow and on his scalp, and with his jacket open, I can see the dark circles under his armpits.
Looking at him, I have one of those occasional moments that make my heart stall out with panic, because it seems like I am growing up, whether I want to or not. I have two kind of revelations that are as clear as a trumpet blast. Number one is Rik’s in the wrong line of work. A guy who stresses this much in court is going to blow out his fuses pretty soon. He needs to find something else to do—house closings or regulatory filings. Which means that the notoriety and the accompanying burst of business that the Chief’s case is bringing through the door may end up killing him.
That brings on revelation number two: People’s big dreams for themselves often are erected on the total fantasy that they are going to turn into someone else.
“There are two possibilities here,” Rik tells me. “One is very good and one is very bad.”
“Okay. What’s bad?”
“The bad one is that Marc knows something big that we don’t. But that would mean Marc shorted us in discovery, and I can’t imagine him doing that.”
“So that leaves the good one, right?”
“I guess.”
“And what’s the good one?”
“The good one is that when Blanco decided to start telling a new story, Marc said to himself, ‘Okay, you want to spin lies like the first two guys, knock yourself out. When you get cut up like a cadaver on cross, nobody will be able to ask why, or accuse me of political motivations when we dismiss the case.’”
“That sounds right to me.”
Rik is clearly not convinced, but the Rev comes out of the door directly behind the bench and we quickly push our way out from between the flags—all of them with the stiff feel of rayon—to return to our seats.
Rik goes for the kill as soon as the hearing resumes.
“Now, you told Mr. Hess on your direct examination about the Chief taking you to her house to perform various sex acts, is that right?”
“To her home, yes.”
Rik approaches him with the same photo he used with DeGrassi.
“And when you went to the Chief’s house at 1412 Summit, shown here in Respondent’s Exhibit 4, did you notice these security cameras?”
“I’ve heard about them recently. I’ve never seen them.”
“Does it surprise you to learn, Lieutenant, that there are no images of you at any time in late 2021 coming or going from 1412 Summit?”
“No,” he says. “But there’s a reason for that.”
“You had taken an invisibility potion?”
The laughter rockets off the walls of the small courtroom. I even see the Rev draw a hand to his face to mask his smirk. Marc stands up to object and Rik withdraws the question.
Blanco then says, “As I said, there’s a reason for that.”
I saw Pops at this point many times, badly jamming up a witness who then thought they’d come up with some smart-ass way to sidestep the problem. Pops just wouldn’t play. He’d raise a hand and smile patiently and say, ‘I’ll let opposing counsel ask you for the reason. I imagine I shall have some questions after that.’ It was like saying, ‘No one needs to be in a hurry to hear your bullshit.’ He basically dismissed the explanation as worthless before the witness offered it.
Rik is a good lawyer, but he’s not the equal of Pops, who sort of took over the courtroom the way a conductor commands a concert hall. Blanco manages to get out, “This place in your pictures, that wasn’t where she took me. I thought she lived in an apartment.”
Rik comes to our table. I’m ready and hand him the sworn statement from Blanco that accompanied the complaint in the case.
Rik goes through the foundational questioning, then asks, “Didn’t you use the word ‘house’ in this statement you gave under oath?”
“Well, house, yeah, meaning where she lived. I didn’t mean an actual house house. She lived in an apartment. It was nice, too.”
Up on the bench, Mrs. L is nudging a document toward the Reverend, which has got to be Blanco’s sworn declaration.
“And where was this apartment?”
“On the east side somewhere.”
“‘Somewhere?’ You’ve been a police officer in Highland Isle for fourteen years now. Are you telling us that there’s so much as a block in this city you don’t recognize?”
“Normally. But I was shook, Mr. Dudek. I mean, I was on my way to hell, as far as I was concerned. I probably couldn’t have told you my name at that point. I can go out and look around if it would help.”
Rik stares down Blanco, who’s made this offer with a straight face.
“Maybe she borrowed somebody’s place,” Blanco volunteers, unruffled by Rik’s stink eye. “Where do her daughters live?”
Rik moves to strike that remark, which is granted. But Frito’s done his homework. The Chief’s older daughter lives in town. It’s obvious now. Blanco came to court ready to rumble.
“And aren’t there security concerns about the Chief’s house? Concerns that have been borne out from time to time that she could be the target of vandals or confronted by unhappy arrestees?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“You ‘suppose’? As a patrol officer, were you assigned in earlier years to the Central District that includes 1412 Summit?”
“Years ago, yeah.”
“And you’re telling this commission that even though you patrolled that area regularly, no one ever pointed out the Chief’s house as a place to pay attention to?”
Blanco looks up and sighs. “Now that you say that, I think it’s true. But I had no memory of it. That had to be maybe ten years before this thing happened with the Chief.”
“And did you tell Mr. Hess about this apartment?”
“Yes.”
Rik is getting very wary, and visibly taking time to think.
“When was that?”
“He called me right after the last hearing session and told me that there weren’t any videos of me at 1412 Summit, and I explained right then that I’d gone with her to an apartment.”
“But you didn’t mention this on your direct?”
“Mr. Hess told me you were going to ask about it.”
Marc at this point raises his head like a dog that’s just heard his name and looks straight at Rik. There’s just a vapor of a smile that’s gone almost before I can see it. He might as well have said, ‘Fuck you, Smarty Pants. How you likin trial by ambush now?’
Rik comes back to the defense table. He whispers to me, “Now what?” I don’t get it, and when I look at him blankly, Rik murmurs, “Marc’s getting even with us. There’s probably more.”
“You can’t sit down, Boss. The Chief might as well resign.”
He gives a quick nod. He’s too shell-shocked to have gotten that far ahead in his thinking. He adjusts his suit coat as he turns to face Blanco again, like he’s changing out of his dirtied uniform.
“Now, prior to going to the Chief’s ‘house,’ you claim you and she engaged in certain sex acts in her office.”
“Yes.”
“Did you mention this interlude in the Chief’s office in the written statement that you gave the commission in March of this year?”
“No, but there’s a reason.”
“Please answer my questions. Did you understand when you first talked to Mr. Hess and prepared this statement to the commission, did you understand that you were supposed to include all significant information?”
“Of course.”
“And did you also understand that in the big picture the proceeding that would result from your statement would be aimed at determining Chief Gomez’s fitness to serve as Chief?”
“I wasn’t trying to get her fired, if that’s what you mean.”
“What I mean is that you understood that the Chief forcing you to have sex in her office would be highly significant in a proceeding to determine her fitness to serve? Yes?”
“Yeah, I thought about that. But I was too embarrassed to mention it.”
“You weren’t too embarrassed to mention being anally penetrated by a sex toy, but you were too embarrassed to talk about oral sex?”
“I was too embarrassed to show the picture,” says Blanco.
Rik suddenly might as well be a dead man. He can’t move. I don’t even see any sign he’s breathing.
At that point, Marc stands up with a manila folder in his hand and opens it to Rik, who stares for several seconds and then does something I don’t expect. He screams.
“This is an outrage!” It’s truly the loudest I’ve ever heard him in court. Even he’s shocked by the way he’s bellowed. He takes a breath, then asks to be heard at the sidebar. But the courtroom is so small, the commissioners decide to ask Blanco to wait outside while the two lawyers move up to the bench. Rik is going at high speed as soon as Blanco closes the door.
