Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  But strong first friendships always leave something immutable behind. Rick would forever be Tommy’s oldest friend. He belonged to a precious part of Tommy’s life, a glorious remembered place. When he reminisced about growing up, Rick was almost always there, playing important roles, often in scenes that made Tommy smile. He cared about Rick, and about the idea of Rick.

  About two weeks ago, Rick had asked Tommy out for coffee and told him his marriage was coming apart. Tommy had tried to counsel and console him. He was good at this—notoriously. “Father O’Connor,” his patrol officers called him, partly because he preached to them about the importance of marital fidelity, and partly because so many people, both cops and civilians, seemed drawn to him when they were in trouble.

  On the face of it, this seemed odd. He was famously irreverent. Once when he was a boy, Tommy coaxed a Jewish friend into attending Catholic confession. He himself had often knelt and confessed to venial sins he hadn’t committed, so that, as he put it, the priest could have “his juice.” That side of him endured. As a rule, if he said something serious in public, he took it back right away with a joke or a quip. But in the privacy of his own confessional, Father O’Connor was entirely earnest. “I’d take some time off and work on this,” he’d told Rick over coffee a couple of weeks ago. “Family’s the most important thing.”

  Now on this night in August, Tommy’s face fell into its priestly, whatever’s-wrong-we-can-fix-it mode. He quit the computer at once. He took Rick into a little office off Records, and closed the door.

  During the day a clerk occupied this room. At night it belonged to the sergeants. Tommy sat behind a metal desk, Rick on the edge of a chair. Tommy didn’t think it showed, but he felt a slight discomfort as Rick began to talk. Here they were, two old friends alone again in a room, and yet the atmosphere felt stiff and formal and strained. Maybe because of the setting. He was the sergeant, Rick the patrolman. They weren’t quite equals here.

  In their conversation two weeks ago Rick had declared himself an alcoholic. Surprising news to Tommy. No one had ever seen Rick drunk on duty or smelled alcohol on him then. Many cops were harder drinkers. “It’s not how much you drink, Tom. It’s why,” Rick had explained. Maybe that was true. At any rate, Rick had quit drinking, and had just endured two wretched weeks. His wife had said she wanted him out of the house, and he couldn’t turn to the bottle, and maybe on top of everything else he was suffering symptoms of withdrawal. He couldn’t sleep. Not even sedatives worked. He woke up after sleeping all of two hours, then went for a predawn run, then worked the day shift for eight hours, then spent half the night on a road job at the Coolidge Bridge. Then, on his day off a week ago, he took his four children to an amusement park, worked the job at the bridge, came home, went to bed, and shortly afterward woke up realizing that tomorrow was the birthday of one of his daughters and that he’d forgotten to decorate the house, as he always did. So he got up and strung crepe paper around the living room, and afterward, around two o’clock that morning, he and his wife had a conversation. The next day Rick went to a psychiatric ward in Holyoke Hospital. He stayed there for most of a week. He’d just gotten out today.

  “I checked myself in, Tom.”

  “You were smart to do it, Rick,” said Tommy. “If you felt you needed it.”

  “Yeah.” Rick’s voice was full of irony. The hospital wasn’t all. While he was there, his wife had taken out a restraining order against him, barring him from having any contact with her or his children.

  That would be a blow to anyone, especially a cop, Tommy thought. And to Rick an intolerable one. He was always talking about his children, about the cute things they said, about all he did with them. “Hey, Rick, that’s no big deal,” Tommy told him. Rick knew about restraining orders. He could go to court tomorrow and fight this one and get it changed, so at least he could see his kids.

  “Well, there’s more to it.” Rick leaned farther forward in his chair and slid the official document, the restraining order, across the desk. “Read this.”

  Tommy picked up the sheaf of paper and read for a moment. Then he yelled, “What the hell is this!”

  The affidavit accused Rick of sexually abusing one of his daughters. Tommy looked at Rick. He felt very angry. Some wives nowadays took out restraining orders full of trumped-up allegations in order to gain the advantage in divorces. The strategy was shabby. But this was evil. Tommy knew Rick. He wasn’t what was known contemptuously around here as a “diddler.” Tommy felt ready to explode. He still felt as if he knew Rick so well that he could read his thoughts. In a moment Rick was going to say that his wife, or someone, had made up this slander. And Tommy was going to tell him that whoever it was wouldn’t get away with it, not if he could help it.

  But the conversation didn’t go that way.

  Rick said that he knew from his rape investigation course that his daughter might actually have been abused by someone. “Tom, my daughter needs to get interviewed. Possibly the others.” It was true that he’d been drinking a lot up until a couple of weeks ago. But he had no memory, none at all, of assaulting any of his kids. “The only way anything could have happened with me is if I was in a blackout,” Rick said.

  He was still talking. He was saying that the only time he’d had a blackout while his children were at home was on the night of October 22, 1994, the day Tommy had been promoted to sergeant instead of him. Tommy listened, but his thoughts were traveling. The only way anything could have happened with me is if I was in a blackout. The moment he’d heard Rick say those words he’d felt a tingling in his extremities and free fall in his chest. He’d felt those sensations as acutely only once before, when he’d heard his mother was lying on a gurney in the emergency room. But now, as the tingling subsided, he felt a more usual kind of alertness. He had composed his face, into what he thought of as his “game face.” He had put it on so often in his years on the job that the act had become all but reflexive. He suddenly felt like a cop. He was thinking, “If I were investigating this, I’d want to know he said that.” Tommy looked at Rick appraisingly for a moment. Rick looked haggard and distraught. He looked ripe for interrogation. Tommy thought, “I could work him now.”

  Tommy had questioned thousands of people on patrol and hundreds as a detective. Sometimes all it took to make a suspect crack was to stare at him and yell, “You’re lying!” But most interrogations called for subtler techniques. The classic one, far from infallible, was to conjure up a ruthless sympathy, sympathy that seemed real enough to Tommy to seem real to the suspect, even if he loathed the person.

  In one of his early cases, a girl out for a walk with a friend had been run over and killed by a car on the edge of a cornfield in Northampton’s Meadows. A suspect was brought in. Tommy had sat alone with him for a long time, in an interrogation room at the state police barracks. Tommy felt certain that this was the hit-and-run driver. Tommy figured he was drunk and had chased the girl into the corn for fun. But he wouldn’t even admit that he’d been at the scene, in spite of all the cornstalks they’d found stuck in his car’s chassis, in spite of other evidence. Tommy started telling the man that he and his buddies used to drive through those cornfields—“field-beating,” it was called. Actually, Tommy had never joined in the sport. “Jesus, that must have been scary when you saw her hit the windshield. Christ, I’d get the hell out of there, too. Hey, I understand. Things happen. That’s why we call them accidents. I know you didn’t mean to hit her.” The man still wouldn’t admit he’d even been in the Meadows. He seemed to be weakening, though. He seemed to be trying to hold himself back. The signs of this effort were classic—he uncrossed and recrossed his legs, he covered his mouth with a hand, he kept making little yawns. In a while, Tommy moved his chair closer to the man. Saying again, “I know you didn’t mean to hit her,” he touched him on the leg. He’d been taught that trick at interrogation school. And this time it actually worked.

  “Yeah, all right, I was there.”

  “Gotcha
!” Tommy had thought. He’d known that the rest of the confession would follow. He had felt exuberant in the stomach.

  A veteran Northampton detective named Rusty Luce had helped to train Tommy. Luce often said, “Everybody lies.” This was Tommy’s first working assumption. The second was that guilt tends to reveal itself, signaling its presence in movements and gestures, in tones of voice, in the lies themselves. All honest detectives know that they sometimes misread the signals. Every so often Tommy brought a suspect right up to what seemed like the brink of a confession and the suspect didn’t crack and Tommy tried another route to no avail, and then another, and then he went away for a while to think and something would tell him, “This guy didn’t do it.” But in his experience, when suspects conceded that they could have committed a crime—“Yeah, I was there, but you got the wrong guy,” or “Yeah, I had sex with her, but like you said, it was consensual”—they were usually three-quarters of the way to confessing everything. The only way anything could have happened with me is if I was in a blackout. That certainly sounded like a first concession. He could build an interrogation on it, Tommy thought.

  This line of speculation lasted only a moment. How could he have imagined interrogating Rick? He didn’t want any part of this case. He thought about Rick’s mother, an old woman now, probably sitting on her porch looking out at the night. This was all she needed.

  “Rick.” Tommy made his voice emphatic. “I don’t want you to tell me anything more.”

  “Tom.” Rick opened his hands. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “I’ll be there to help you as a friend,” Tommy told him. “But I don’t want you to tell me anything more about this. Anything, Rick.” He took Rick through the likely scenario. The D.A.’s office must already have begun an investigation. Suppose Rick told him something, as a friend, that sounded incriminating. Then Tommy would end up in court testifying against him.

  Tommy said all this sincerely. On his drive home after the end of the shift, he realized that he’d issued his warning too late.

  Many of the people Tommy helped send to jail came from rooming-house and housing-project Hamp. Many never had much chance in life, he figured. And it often seemed as if the criminals and their victims were merely swapping roles, the one doing to the other what the other would do to him tomorrow. Recently, a case like that had come to court. Watching the defendant being sentenced to state prison, Tommy wondered if justice really was being served. A few days later, out on his rounds, he started thinking about that case again. He wondered aloud, “If you commit a crime in hell, is it still a crime?” But doubts like those came rarely. His moral code and the penal code were not identical, but they weren’t often inconsistent.

  Tommy once hunted a woman who had taken up with a young teenage boy, and he’d expressed no qualms about helping to send her to jail. “If it’d been a man, everybody would have wanted him fried. I thought what she did was just as wrong as if a man had done it.”

  Tommy said, “Pet peeves. I have a lot. You could call it a zoo.” Fellow cops cheating on their spouses, for instance. “Most people don’t take that vow very seriously. You stand up in front of your church and your family and make a promise, and then you break it. Why should I trust such a person one iota? If you’ll destroy that institution, then who am I? You’d have no problem lying to me.”

  One time an old friend back in Hamp for a visit remarked that Tommy didn’t recognize much of the “gray” in the world. He told Tommy, “You like things black and white.” Tommy ruminated about this for a couple of weeks, and then, heading out on patrol one evening, declared, “That gray is just the thing that boggles you. It isn’t worth anything.”

  The world was full of confusing situations. All the more reason to choose a clear path. Now and then cops from other jurisdictions would call to say they’d gotten parking tickets while eating out in Hamp, and to keep up good relations Tommy would tell them he’d fix the tickets. And he would—by paying the fines himself. Small detours were permissible, but you had to know where you were headed. “Do the right thing” and “Do your job”: those were his categorical imperatives. He had another, though, which was infused with sentiment, with the feelings of the boy who had visited Rick in his sickbed nearly every day for six months.

  Tommy had a favorite movie, Stand by Me. He’d first seen it years ago at the old Calvin Theatre downtown, a place of sticky floors, redolent with ancient popcorn fumes. He’d sat down in one of the old plush seats, and listened as the voice-over described a town in Oregon: “There were only twelve hundred and eighty-one people, but to me it was the whole world.” Four boys on the brink of adolescence appeared. They had a clubhouse, too, and one of them had breathtaking news. There was a body by the river, a person killed in a car wreck, some miles away. Why the boys should hunger to be the first to find the body might not have been clear to everyone, but it was very clear to Tommy. By then all his attention was fastened on the screen, and he was worrying his right thumbnail. The gang of friends set off down the railroad tracks. They met adversity. They bickered and they teased one another, but they also talked heart to heart out in the woods by their campfire, and when the chips were down, they were there for one another.

  Tommy wished the movie would never end. The figures on the screen dissolved, like childhood itself. At the close, the narrator wrote down these words: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Tommy left transported. He’d seen that movie half a dozen times since, feeling every time that he’d just seen the truth of his childhood retold.

  “Stand by your friends” and “Do your job”—he’d never imagined that those commandments could be at odds. Now, as he drove home on this August night, he replayed the conversation with Rick in his mind. Rick hadn’t confessed, but in essence he had said, “I could have done it.” That kind of admission could be crucial in an investigation. Tommy had no use for people who betrayed friends, and little use for cops who withheld information in order to protect a colleague. Though he mocked himself for it, Tommy believed in omens, and in a Fate that designed his life. Right now it seemed as if a trap had been laid for him. He had only two options, and neither one seemed exactly right. But he knew what to do first. He’d talk to Jean.

  Tommy had various terms of endearment for his wife, such as “my little shorty.” She was small, though not tiny, and gracefully proportioned, with thick, sandy hair. Jean had grown up on a hill farm outside Northampton. She descended on both sides from some of the first English settlers of the Connecticut River Valley, and her face had an heirloom quality that kept it from being merely cute. She had a beautiful downturning nose and her eyes had what seemed like an ancestral steadiness. They looked grave, even when she smiled. Jean was a good shot with a pistol, and Tommy often thought it was a good thing they lived in a peaceful town, because he didn’t want her to have to kill anyone. He thought she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot an intruder in their house, if she was there alone, as she often was in the evenings. Jean managed their marriage. She had moved him, literally, out of his parents’ house, and also out of town on trips. She picked out his clothes, which was why, in court, he didn’t look like most other cops, like a kid at his first dress-up occasion. His court suits fit him, thanks to Jean. Tommy couldn’t balance a checkbook. Jean was the head auditor at Florence Savings Bank, and she handled their household finances.

  Eleven years ago, when he was a minor-league cop at Look Park, taking his job very seriously, Tommy caught some friends of his drinking and smoking dope. He was courting Jean then, and they went downtown for ice cream. He told her he was having second thoughts about becoming a Northampton cop, because he now realized it would mean arresting friends. She said, “Maybe they aren’t very good friends, if they put you in that position.” Tommy had held on to that thought ever since. Over the years, out of his high school class of about three hundred, he’d arrested about 10 percent. As a rule he acted kindly when locking people up an
d harsh when giving them a break.

  Jean thought things through, listened carefully, and measured her words. Tommy counted on her for advice on ethical matters as well as all practical ones. Usually they agreed. They often talked about the cruel irony of child abuse, that some of the people with the luck to have kids should neglect and mistreat them. In the abstract, general case, Tommy had no sympathy for those kinds of criminals. In particular cases, he thought, “I’m sure something was done to them when they were kids, but that’s no excuse for wrecking someone else’s life.” Child abusers deserved punishment, Jean believed. Tommy felt the same way.

  She was still up when he got home. He told her about the charges against Rick, and her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding!” She looked at him warily. “Tom, this isn’t a joke, is it?” Then he told her what Rick had said to him. He told her he felt that he had to do the right thing, and the right thing was to report the conversation to the D.A.’s office. Jean agreed, which came as no surprise. In her own professional career, Jean had often chosen probity over self-interest. Maybe the charges were true. If so, she said, Tommy had to think of the interests of the innocent victim.

  He didn’t wait long to act. He and Jean had a dinner date with some close friends the next night. The husband, Steve Gawron, was a state trooper whom Tommy had worked with. Steve’s wife, Jane Mulqueen, was a local prosecutor who specialized in rape cases. Tommy once said of her, “If she told me green was blue, I’d get my eyes checked.” In the restaurant over dinner, Tommy asked Jane if Rick was being investigated. She nodded. Then Tommy recited the gist of his conversation with Rick. He asked her if she thought Rick’s words seemed significant, and she said she did. Jane also said she would report what Tommy had told her, which was what he’d expected.