by Tracy Kidder
In effect, he had offered his testimony to the district attorney. He’d wrestled with the question of what to do, not for long but intently. He’d asked himself if his father would approve, and he felt sure his father would. He knew that Jean did. So hadn’t he done the only thing he could do?
Soon after the night when Rick showed Tommy the restraining order, the chief called the department together and told them about the allegations, warning them not to let a hint of the news leave the station. That very day someone on the force leaked the story to a reporter. Tommy couldn’t imagine why. Some people disliked Rick. They called him a know-it-all. But he had never injured a fellow cop. Tommy thought of him, banished from his home and family, temporarily suspended from his job, and now publicly accused of the most scandalous kind of crime. Wherever he went in town, he would feel eyes on him, imagine people whispering about him. Tommy remembered a story, famous around the department: serving papers some years ago on a man accused of molesting a child, Rick had taken a bullet from his pistol, placed it on the table in front of the man, and said, “Do the right thing.” Instead, the man had thrown the bullet back at Rick. Would Rick now take his own advice?
Rick was staying at a fellow cop’s house, a small ranch house on the outskirts of town. Tommy sat down facing him in the living room. Naturally, Rick wanted to talk about the case. Tommy wouldn’t let him.
Rick said, “Tom, I want to find out what happened. I’ll do the right thing.”
“Honestly, Rick, I don’t know what happened or if anything happened, and I don’t want to know. But right now I want to get you where you don’t do anything stupid.” Tommy came right out and asked the question. “Are you thinking of killing yourself?”
Rick said the doctor at the hospital had called him suicidal.
“Well, you owe it to your kids not to do anything stupid.”
“Tom, I owe it to my kids to provide a living for them, and how am I gonna do that if it’s true?”
At one point Tommy told him, “If you do it, don’t do it in Northampton.” But Rick saw this as a joke and laughed, though in fact Tommy could imagine the scene, standing over Rick’s corpse, pulling on rubber gloves. Anyway, Rick told him, “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna do anything stupid.”
Tommy visited Rick often over the next few weeks, sometimes not just as a friend but in uniform. One afternoon, the captain in charge of administration handed Tommy a document, an official notification of Rick’s suspension from the city payroll and the police department. “Would you take this to Janacek, Tom?”
“Couldn’t you find someone else?” Tommy blurted out.
“Well, Tom, I can, if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No, if it’s an order, I’ll do it,” Tommy said, thinking maybe it was better that he be the courier. There were a few people on the force who might hand Rick the papers and say, “Here you go, diddler.”
All his talks with Rick followed the same pattern. Rick would want to discuss details and Tommy would refuse to hear them; then he’d ask about Rick’s family or start cracking jokes. Rick had bought a bunch of new police uniforms. Tommy smiled at him and asked what size uniform he wore. Rick got the joke. “Fuck you, Tom.” But he laughed, which was the effect Tommy aimed at. Rick would know that Tommy still considered him a fellow cop if he was still subjecting him to cop humor. And then one day Tommy came into the little ranch house and found Rick red-eyed as if he had been crying, and smiling, as if he were elated.
The state police had finally interviewed his daughter, Rick told him. Rick had taken a course in rape investigation not very long before he’d been accused, and the same female state police detective who’d taught him had conducted the interview. “Tom, I was never so relieved in my life.” He handed Tommy the document and insisted that he read it. Tommy felt he shouldn’t, but he wanted to. He sat at the kitchen table reading silently, bending over the document.
It was five and a half pages of questions and answers—questions from the detective, answers from the six-year-old girl. Tommy had some training and experience in child sexual-abuse investigations, and to his eye the questions followed a proper pattern. They didn’t suggest their own answers. On the face of it, this didn’t seem like the kind of interview calculated to mold a child’s thoughts and words into an accusation.
Nothing that the little girl had said would have sustained the lurid images that terms like rape and sexual assault inspire. She knew what her “private parts” were and clearly knew the difference between “inside” and “outside,” and she told the detective she was sure that her father hadn’t done anything to her on the “inside.” But she also said that she had taken showers with Rick, that he had touched her “private parts,” that she had often touched his penis and at least once had touched it with her mouth.
Tommy read, looking for anything that might clear Rick. This was, after all, the record of an interview of a little child. Naturally enough, a lot of what she was quoted as saying seemed ambiguous and contradictory, to adult ears. The document wasn’t entirely clear, but it suggested enough to leave Tommy feeling slightly queasy. He looked up at Rick, and he tried to assemble a noncommittal face. This time he didn’t feel it was convincing. Rick must have noticed; Rick tried to explain why the interview exonerated him. He said that this daughter was his mischievous child, and that there were perfectly innocent explanations for everything she’d said. Rick also told him that the D.A.’s office was offering a deal—probation and counseling and no jail time if he would plead guilty to a single count of indecent sexual assault. Otherwise they’d charge him with both that and rape of a child. Rick said something about that being the kind of deal they’d offer if they knew their case was weak. Rick wasn’t going to take a plea. If they wanted a trial, so be it. Rick also said something dramatic. “The last few weeks the only thing that kept me from eating the business end of a revolver was not knowing. Now I know.”
Over the following days, Tommy found himself trying to solve the case in his own mind. He knew all the people involved in the investigation, and trusted them. He was part of the prosecutorial system, as Rick had been. “I live by it. I believe in it,” Tommy thought. They wouldn’t be out to get Rick, not a cop with a good record. On the contrary. And they’d also want to spare the child from testifying against her father. You didn’t have to look any further, Tommy figured, for the likeliest reasons that the D.A.’s office was offering him a lenient plea bargain.
He thought about the interview with Rick’s daughter. Of course, small children made up and misinterpreted things. The interview was hardly conclusive. It was just a first interview and the detective hadn’t probed very deeply, or explored an alternative line of questioning that might have exonerated Rick. But Tommy thought that if he were the investigator, what the girl had said would make him very suspicious. And there was also the fact that when Rick had first been accused, he’d checked himself into a psychiatric ward. Rick seemed to think that the interview with his daughter cleared him. But Tommy knew investigations. He knew this one was just beginning.
He stuck to his plan not to ask for information about the case, but every time he saw Jane, his friend from the D.A.’s office, he’d say, “I don’t want to know any facts, but is it a strong case?” Again and again, Jane nodded—maybe a little more emphatically each time.
He tried to imagine innocent explanations. One night Rick’s estranged wife called him at the station. She told him that she thought Rick might have violated the restraining order. She’d found her car’s parking lights on, so she thought Rick must have been lurking around their house. She lived in a neighboring town. Tommy felt very relieved that he could tell her he had no jurisdiction and she should call the state police. Another time she’d called him with a question: Did Tom know anyone who might need size fourteen shoes and boots? Rick had size fourteen feet. She asked the question in such a cheerful, offhand way, and there was so much malice in it that Tommy had to wonder. He had never trusted the woman. Out on
patrol the next evening, he thought aloud, “Whether he’s guilty or not, she’s a horrid bitch.” He pursed his lips. “Or maybe not. If he did it, and I was her, I’d fuck with him all I could.” He’d heard that she was telling perfect strangers about the case. “It’s weird,” Tommy said. “But it’s almost like trying to make somebody laugh before they laugh at you. Your bringing it up before others do makes it more palatable.”
Anyway, Rick’s wife couldn’t have manufactured this case. The allegations hadn’t started with her, but with a neighbor, the mother of a playmate of Rick’s daughter. Apparently Rick’s daughter had said to her friend, “My daddy likes it when I put his penis in my mouth.” And the playmate had repeated the conversation.
Tommy had heard that story around the police station. He couldn’t avoid hearing stories about the case. Supposedly, when he got out of the hospital, Rick had said something to the chief about having been sexually abused himself, by a sibling. Tommy didn’t want to believe that, and he wasn’t going to ask anyone about it.
Soon the D.A.’s office called. As he’d expected, they wanted him to give a formal statement about his conversation with Rick that night in the police station. Tommy wrote his statement as accurately as he could. He described himself as “shocked” when Rick had told him he was being accused of sexually abusing his daughter. And if a defense attorney should later ask him what he meant by that, Tommy would say that although they’d drifted apart the last few years, he’d known Rick all his life and never come across any reason to think that Rick could commit a crime like that. He’d say what was true: that they talked a lot about sex as boys, back when Tommy imagined that intercourse had something to do with urination, and if Rick had ever mentioned carnal relations with a sibling he’d never have forgotten it.
Tommy submitted his statement. The plodding ways of the criminal justice system guaranteed a long delay. He figured it would take months, maybe even a year, for Rick’s case to reach trial. Maybe he wouldn’t have to testify. If he did, he’d probably have company. The night Rick had left the hospital he’d gone all around the station telling other cops essentially what he’d told Tommy: “The only way anything could have happened with me is if I was in a blackout.”
A crowd of about thirty, a large crowd by local standards, was gathering behind city hall, outside the Wallace E. Puchalski Building. It was Thursday, September 21, the first day of fall. The evening was balmy. Tommy and Jean and Bill O’Connor felt reluctant to leave it. They lingered outside. Thursday night was city council night, and a ceremony was scheduled as well. Tommy wore his gray court suit. Jean straightened his tie. She wore a dress. Bill, in shirtsleeves, gazed at the plaque outside the building. It bore the name of his old rival Wally Puchalski. Bill smiled, shaking his head. Recollection was obvious on his face.
One time back in the 1970s, the Northampton School Committee spent two hours arguing about the color of the shoelaces the high school football team should wear. In 1969, the local police ordered the high school to burn all its copies of Manchild in the Promised Land, because the book had obscene words in it. “Chitlins” was one of the bad words, the police brass had thought. Those days were gone. The good old days of kidnapped city councillors, when local politicos went by monikers like “Tunker” Hogan, “Black Jack” Kern, “Big Jim” Cahillane. The days of widespread patronage, when nearly all the public-school principals were related to one another. The days when a mayoral candidate could dust an opponent by revealing that he drove a foreign car—one of Wally Puchalski’s successful campaign strategies. Gone were the councillor who had wanted to put a quota on the number of newcomers Northampton would admit, and the councillor who used to drop to the chamber floor and do push-ups during heated debates. Gone, too, were more recent spectacles, from Mayor Mary Ford’s first term, which many used to watch with delight on cable TV—the mayor chasing after a councillor, scolding him for his intemperate remarks as he retreated toward the men’s room, yelling bravely back at her.
Two years ago the voters had returned Mayor Ford to office by a wide margin, and had thrown out her bitterest opponents. Some citizens complained that city council meetings weren’t worth watching anymore, they were just so dull. Nowadays when a city councillor aired strong feelings, the subject was apt to be the clear “gender bias” in the wording of ancient city ordinances. Mayor Ford would sit at the head of the rectangle of tables, gazing studiously over her reading glasses and smiling warmly at her colleagues in Northampton government, her hands folded before her, the city’s matriarch, presiding over a peaceful feast of issues. What to do about the crumbling cafeteria wall at the high school? Could the city afford to buy the fire chief a new car? Should they take out snow insurance this year? And did the council agree with the mayor and wish to issue proclamations: that Northampton stood firm against the Nazi Holocaust, revered the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., supported National Homeless Animals Week? Indeed, the council did.
Of course, in politics some things never change. A few years back the mayor got into a battle with the DPW and tried to force the chairman of its board to resign. The mayor often talked about openness in government, but when the chairman refused, she went behind the scenes and threatened privately not to reappoint one of his friends. The DPW got even. It snowed a fair amount that winter, and the mayor and her neighbors often found their street unplowed. About half the present council, and the mayor herself, had come to Northampton as adults, as sophisticated people, bringing new ideas to town, ideas formed out in the wider world. But they brought them to a stage that hadn’t really changed. It was still very small.
Curious how Northampton drew some people in, like the people who settled here because the place seemed bohemian, and ten years later realized they’d become soccer moms and dads. Some people came here after years of living in great cities and decided to attend a city council meeting, out of curiosity and expecting to be amused. They usually were. Amused at the little council chamber in the Wallace E. Puchalski Building, with its all-over-brown decor; at the folding metal chairs for the audience; at the framed photographs of bygone mayors and councillors that seemed to be sinking into the walls. Amused, especially, at the tone of the proceedings, earnest out of all proportion to what was being discussed. But Northampton still had an adequate supply of citizens, both sophisticated settlers and natives, who had discovered the dignity of proceedings in here, and also the pleasures that came from having their voices heard, from dealing with matters both tangible and near.
Tonight uniformed cops and their families filled the chairs in the audience. Tommy, Jean, and Bill sat down among them. As the mayor discussed preliminary business, Tommy leaned forward over his knees. “We have to sit through this crap,” he whispered, smiling at Jean.
“And,” said Mayor Ford. “The first but probably not the last transfer of free cash for this year. The new litter baskets for downtown.” She looked around. “Any discussion? ”
“Hallelujah!” cried one of the councillors. Then the councillor from Leeds declared that she wanted some trash barrels too, for her ward’s swimming hole. The first councillor said that Leeds could have downtown’s old litter barrels. The other councillor glared. “We don’t want your leftovers.” The two rival newspaper reporters from the Gazette and the Springfield Union-News looked up from their notebooks and smiled, grateful for anything that resembled an argument.
“Next item,” said Mayor Ford. “Chief Sienkiewicz.”
Chief Russ Sienkiewicz, a tall man, came forward and stood at military attention before the council. He wore gold stars on his epaulets. He looked like a general. “I think it’s important that the officers who have done these deeds be recognized in the appropriate fashion,” he said. The chief called the name of a cop and the cop marched forward and stood at attention as the chief read out the citation. “While on patrol on January 27, 1995, you, Officer Dombroski, heard an explosion at the Smith Vocational High School.…” The officer had found a homemade bomb and done the rig
ht things. The ceremony went on, each uniformed officer coming stiffly forward to receive a citation, applause, and handshakes from the councillors and the mayor for his good deed—saving an infant who had stopped breathing; preventing a distraught man from jumping out his apartment window. Then the chief intoned, “And last but not least: Sergeant Thomas O’Connor, please come forward.”
Tommy walked to the center of the room. He placed a hand on top of his shiny shaved head, and said, “Dim the lights.” Which got a laugh, the councillors looking at each other and shaking their heads.
Mayor Ford aimed one of her motherly smiles at Tommy. She remembered, without warmth, another little joke of O’Connor’s, made at a heated city council meeting in 1993, during a debate about special pay for local police who got college degrees. It had been a warm night like this one, and through the open windows had come the sound of someone beating a bongo drum on Main Street. The drum had ended up playing a small part in the defeat she’d suffered that night, at the hands of young O’Connor, a dreadful defeat, it had seemed at the time.
When Mayor Ford first took office, in 1991, the city had a deficit of between two and three million dollars. The causes were complex, her first attempt at a solution simple. She’d asked the voters to agree to an increase in property taxes. They’d turned her down. So she and her budget director had devised a long-term plan to cut the city’s expenditures, and they had stuck to it—ruthlessly, some felt. For her part, the mayor hadn’t gone into politics to lay off public employees, or to promote what she believed were regressive forms of taxation—increasing the fees people paid for necessities such as water—or, God knows, to cut the budget for schools. But she’d felt compelled to do some of all of those. In the circumstances, granting pay raises to cops seemed absurd.
