Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Tommy grabbed his binoculars from their place beside his seat. He focused them on the boy in the window. The kid was holding what looked like a black automatic, the size and shape of a Lüger. He was moving it from side to side as if it were a paintbrush, over the strolling crowd below.

  Tommy put down his binoculars. He glanced at the traffic, waiting for an opening, then gunned the cruiser through it, driving with one hand. With the other he unfastened the safety strap on his holster. He slammed the cruiser into park at the foot of the sidewalk, and jumped out. The boy in the window couldn’t have noticed him yet. The boy had his pistol hand extended and was sighting at the back of a man walking on the sidewalk below. It was hard to believe that what this looked like could really be happening on Main Street.

  Several weeks ago Tommy had dreamed that he was on a staircase and a suspect pulled a gun on him. It was a familiar dream, one that he believed his mind brought up for a purpose. When he had it, he always dodged the bullet. This time he got shot. “That’s telling me I’m getting careless,” he’d thought. So he’d reviewed street tactics in his mind and done some target shooting. On the perimeter of sleep, he had often warned himself against doing the wrong thing at a time like this. Then in his imagination, and in his jail dreams, came lawyers, court, a liberal judge who disliked cops, the view from the inside of a cell, and a funereal empty feeling that he deserved what he was getting, for killing someone he didn’t have to kill.

  He would give the young man in the window one chance. He’d draw the kid’s attention away from the people on the street and toward himself. If the kid in the window turned the pistol Tommy’s way, Tommy might have time to duck behind the cruiser and then shoot. He had one hand on his pistol. It was still holstered, but he had his finger on the trigger guard. He put two fingers of his left hand into the corners of his mouth and whistled, a piercing sound he’d learned to make long ago as boss of the O’Connor Detective Agency. Then he bellowed, “You!” Up and down the street, startled faces turned. The young man turned, too. He looked surprised. His mouth fell open. Then, very quickly, he lowered the pistol and pulled his head and torso back inside.

  “You get down here now!” Tommy yelled toward the window.

  The door at street level let into an old wooden staircase. At the top, a door opened, and the young man appeared, no longer carrying the gun. “Show me your hands!” yelled Tommy. His face was bright. He bounded up the stairs two steps at a time, grabbed the young man by the arm, and took him back inside the apartment. “Where’s the gun?” It lay under a pillow on the sofa. Tommy turned the black pistol over in his hands. A pellet gun. Tommy checked the chamber. It wasn’t loaded. He made very sure of that. By now a couple of his patrol officers had arrived. Tommy held the pellet gun in his right hand, by his side. He’d bring it back to the station as evidence.

  The kid told the other cops that he was a student from UMass. He said, “I was just having some fun.”

  Tommy’s face got redder. “What kind of a moron are you?” he said through his teeth.

  “It’s just a toy.”

  In one swift, leather-creaking movement Tommy backed him against the wall. He pressed the barrel of the empty pellet gun against the young man’s forehead. “Does this look real to you? Does this look real to you?”

  He lowered the pistol and took a deep breath. The patrolmen led the boy down the stairs in handcuffs, the make-believe Raskolnikov saying, “I’m a moron. I admit it.”

  By the time Tommy got back to the station, half a dozen people had come in to report that a man with a gun in a window had threatened to shoot them. Tommy sat down to write his report. He regretted the aftermath then. He shouldn’t have put the gun to the student’s forehead. It wasn’t smart. It wasn’t professional. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so angry. But it was over. It would never happen again.

  He went back out in the cruiser. There were no bodies on Main Street, no young student slumped over the windowsill above the cleaners, no ice cream cone melting on the pavement beside a corpse. He wasn’t facing an investigation. His world had reassembled. On the corner of Old South and Main a crowd surrounded a belly dancer. A little farther down the block, the steel drummer played “Danny Boy.” Tommy smiled. “Summertime!” he said.

  Tommy had the next night off. He unfolded his pop-up trailer in the driveway at home, so that he and Jean could pretend that they were camping out. He often proposed that they spend summer nights in the trailer. Life with Tommy could be exhausting, but it was rarely boring. Jean went along with her pillow, amused.

  The air was cooler out there, behind walls of mosquito netting. They lay awake in the trailer talking for a long time that night. Jury selection would begin the day after tomorrow. Rick was an inescapable subject now.

  “He’s such a jerk,” Jean said once again. “I’m so angry at him.”

  “I’m angry at him, too,” said Tommy. But this time he went on.

  Anger was only part of what he felt, he told her. All this past year, when old memories had surfaced, he’d tried to make repairs in them by omitting Rick. It never worked. Every little reverie was still intact, but every one now had another ending. He couldn’t shake the feeling that, through Rick, his childhood was now accused of harboring a dirty secret. “It’s like everything is poisoned,” Tommy said. And when Jean spoke in an icy way about Rick, she wasn’t just denouncing an old friend of his, but something else that he cared about, something that seemed like part of who he was, like his religion or his Irish blood.

  Jean said, “I understand.”

  He thought he did too, finally.

  The next day Rick’s prosecutor asked Tommy to come to his office so they could review his testimony. The prosecutor—David Angier, a dark-haired man with a quiet, confident manner—asked him how he felt about being a witness.

  “If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be involved,” Tommy said. “And I tried to avoid it. But I don’t have a problem with it. I wouldn’t lie for him, or anybody.”

  They talked for about an hour. Angier described a lot of the case against Rick. Among other things, the child. After months of psychotherapy, she had said much more than in her first interview, and apparently would testify without ambiguity now, if there was a trial.

  Tommy had worked with Angier before. He trusted him. He trusted the state police officer who had led the investigation. Sitting there in the D.A.’s office, he thought the case looked strong. His own statement seemed relatively unimportant, but, in context, damning.

  Angier also said there was a fifty-fifty chance that Rick would accept a plea bargain. Tommy thought he hoped Rick would.

  He felt nervous out on patrol that evening. If Rick was going to kill himself, he thought, he’d probably do it tonight. “Now’s the most critical time. And I can’t reach out to him. It wouldn’t be appropriate.” But no call for a suicide came in.

  Jean was asleep when he got home. He was very tired, and he quickly dozed off. He woke up in the middle of the night and lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for his dream to leave him. It had been another jail dream. This time he was a guard in a decrepit jail, like Northampton’s former county jail. He’d just walked up to the door of a cell and was standing outside looking through the bars at Rick, when he woke up.

  He stared at the ceiling. The dream lingered, like something interfering with his breathing. He must have sighed, because Jean stirred beside him.

  “You all right?”

  He could tell from her voice she was still half asleep. “I just did a cell check on Janacek,” he said.

  She rolled over and was gone again. He turned on the light and read until the words began to blur. As soon as he turned the light off, he felt wide awake. He heard himself sigh. So he coughed to cover the sound.

  “You all right?” said Jean’s voice thickly. “Something in your throat?”

  “No. Same thing.”

  Rick had a lawyer, of course. A reputable, experienced trial lawyer from Sp
ringfield. On August 6, he had written a letter to Rick. “After our several meetings and conferences, I thought it appropriate to make my recommendations in writing,” the letter began.

  First the lawyer laid out the prosecution’s case. Rick’s wife would testify that he often drank to the point of insensibility and that he had “allowed for the possibility” that he could have abused his daughter while in a blackout. A host of other witnesses—fellow cops, including the police chief himself, and doctors and social workers and psychiatrists—would all testify that Rick had allowed for that possibility. His wife would also testify as to what their daughter had told her over the past year about the alleged abuse, and this would amount to a more detailed description than the girl had given the state police investigator in her initial interview. The investigator herself would take the stand, of course, and describe the interview. And the girl would take the stand as well. “Your daughter … by all accounts, is able and willing to testify to acts that constitute the crimes of rape and indecent assault and battery against her by you,” Rick’s lawyer wrote. “Your daughter will be confronting you in open court with the most serious allegations of sexual misconduct.” She was an articulate child. It would be hard to make the jury doubt her, especially since she had “no apparent motive” for making up the charges. “This, in substance, is the Commonwealth’s case,” Rick’s lawyer wrote. “It is formidable.”

  Then he turned to the strategies he’d considered using in Rick’s defense. He had consulted an expert on cases like these, and the expert had examined the evidence. The expert could point out to the jury that Rick’s repeated, voluntary concession about blacking out might well have been nothing more than a confession, innocent and honest, about his alcoholism. But the expert had found no reason to attack the substance of the prosecution’s case, no evidence to suggest that the charges against Rick had arisen from “undue or extraneous influence.” The lawyer thought that the expert probably wouldn’t help Rick’s case, and might even harm it. He felt the same about the other possible defense witnesses. All hope for a successful defense would rest on Rick’s own testimony. But if Rick took the stand, he’d be subjected to tough cross-examination on “vulnerable issues”—the fact that he himself had said he thought his daughter might well have been molested, the fact that he’d made those repeated, if limited, concessions about possibly being the culprit himself, the fact that he couldn’t explain why his daughter would make up the allegations, except to say she was “confused” or was blaming him for what someone else had done.

  The prosecution’s long-standing offer remained on the table, Rick’s lawyer wrote—a suspended sentence, probation, and mandatory counseling, if Rick would plead guilty to a single count of indecent sexual assault and battery. And the prosecution might be willing to accept another kind of guilty plea, one that would allow Rick to stand firm in his insistence that he couldn’t remember abusing his child, even while accepting the weight of the evidence against him. A trial was the alternative. In his opinion, the lawyer wrote, they were likely to lose. If they did, Rick would almost certainly be sentenced to jail. The judge who would preside had a reputation for meting out stiff sentences. A former law-enforcement officer convicted of abusing his own child was a perfect candidate for one of those. “If the conviction were on the rape charge, a state prison sentence is likely.”

  It was a long letter. It had qualities not always present in the arguments of lawyers—calm yet insistent, measured yet relentless. It ended, “We have explored all of these matters and others previously in great detail. You have indicated your preference is a trial. I remain most concerned for you. I urge you to re-evaluate your position. Time is short. I will be available for further discussion at your convenience.”

  But Rick wasn’t about to give in, evidently. The preliminaries began as scheduled, on the morning of the fourteenth. All the potential witnesses were barred from the courtroom that first day. By noon a jury had been selected. For most of the rest of the session the lawyers argued over defense motions. What seemed like the most important of these had to do with a card that Rick had sent his wife, some days after she’d confronted him with the allegations. The D.A. described the card to the judge: “It’s a picture of a penguin in a prison outfit that basically says—the gist of it is, I’m sorry for what I did. I’m guilty. Can I get early parole?”

  Rick’s lawyer stood and argued in a forceful voice: “The problem is, Your Honor, is it makes no reference to the complainant. It was sent to the mother. She had separated from him, indicated and actually begun the process of filing a divorce. They had attempted a therapy session. A letter was sent with the intent to attempt to apologize for the effect of alcohol on their personal relationship.… And it depicts someone in garb that just sends an erroneous—totally prejudicial and erroneous message to the jury. This had nothing to do with the minor child.… This is not directed at any conduct involving the child.”

  “Well, that’s what he says now,” Judge Ford replied, “but couldn’t the jury draw the inference that it came within a week after the allegations were made, that it was a response to those allegations?” The judge said he’d let the jury come to their own conclusions. “I think it’s a direct admission, or it’s very close to being a direct admission.”

  The day’s last event was a hearing on the question of whether Rick’s young daughter was competent to testify. Rick’s lawyer had requested that this be done. Probably he hoped the girl would perform badly or be moved to recant once she saw her father—for the first time in almost a year, seated at the defense table. If so, it was a sound and proper strategy, but it didn’t work.

  She was a beautiful blond child, in a dress. As she walked across the carpeted floor of the courtroom, Rick turned in his chair to gaze at her. His face was alight. He seemed to be chuckling, noiselessly. Then he simply grinned. But his wife—a thin woman with delicate features—was escorting the girl, and she whisked her up to the witness box, keeping herself between Rick and his daughter. The girl didn’t even look at Rick.

  “Hello there,” said the judge. “Hi. What’s your name?” He leaned toward her, his hands clasped on top of the bench.

  She told him her name and she said he could call her by her nickname. She said she knew he was a judge, and that she was seven.

  “Seven years old. You’re a big girl. Do you go to school?”

  She did. She told him her teacher’s name and last year’s teacher’s name, that she could read and do figures. She proved it by adding three plus three, then four plus five.

  “Very good. You’re very smart,” said the judge. “What’s your favorite play thing, your favorite game?”

  “My favorite board game is Parcheesi.”

  “Parcheesi? That’s a tough one.”

  “Uh-uh, not to me.”

  “It’s tough for me,” said the judge. “Is that where you roll the dice?”

  “And then you have like little circle things that are that big.” She made a circle with her hands. “And you get to pick a color …” She explained the game to the judge as though he were the child, or perhaps a potential playmate. And she told him she watched only a little television and had just had a birthday and had received “tons” of presents. “I got a really, really soft stuffed animal.” Also an ice cream cake. “I only had a half a piece because they were like that big.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” said the judge. “Now, do you know why I’m asking you all these questions?”

  “Because you never met me and you just want to, I don’t know, like get to know me or something?”

  “I just want to know something about you. You know what I want to know?”

  “What?”

  “I want to know if you know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. Do you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s the difference? Can you explain it to me?”

  Angier had told the judge that he’d already questioned the girl, to determine her comp
etency. Clearly, she’d already learned her answer to this question, but it seemed like hers alone. “If someone has a red shirt on, and the guy in the blue shirt said to the guy in the red shirt, ‘You’re wearing a blue shirt.’ That’s like a little lie, and a big huge lie is when you did something really bad, and then you say you didn’t do it.”

  “Now,” said the judge, “if you talk to some people in this courtroom tomorrow about things that may have happened to you, do you promise me that you’ll tell the truth?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you know what happens to people who don’t tell the truth? ”

  “No.”

  “All right. What happens to you around the house, like with your mom even, if you tell lies?”

  “When—if she knows about it, she sends me up to my room for a time out or something.”

  “That’s how she punishes you for telling lies?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right. Well, in the courtroom, I’m in charge of dealing with those types of issues. And I punish people who lie. Do you understand that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So it’s really, really important that if you testify in this case, that you not tell any lies. Do you understand that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you promise me you won’t tell any lies?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now, you know the difference between real and pretend, is that right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you tell me something that you know about that would be a pretend thing?”

  “When like little girls give a pretend tea party with their dolls.”

  “Okay. Now, you say that you don’t watch Sesame Street, but do you know who the people are on Sesame Street?”

  “Uh-huh.”