Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Tommy had a copy of Frankie’s printed criminal record. Fanned out, it would have stretched across the floor like a wedding dress’s train. Parts of the record, the story of Frankie’s criminal career, were puzzling, at least superficially. Frankie had served only seven months of his five-year sentence for blowing up the bakery. When he saw this, Tommy thought, “He’s a rat.” To Frankie, he said, “You did some work for someone, huh?”

  “Yeah, but check this out.” There was this Colombian drug lord Frankie met at the state prison in Concord. He took a shine to Frankie: “I’m lucky, I guess. Wherever I go, people like me.” The authorities noticed. They offered to let Frankie out early, and also Frankie’s father—Frankie bargained for his father, too—and in return, Frankie agreed to traduce the Colombian and help bring down his cocaine operation in Boston. He made controlled buys for the cops, and did some drug dealing himself on the side. After a while he asked the cops for a finder’s fee, 10 percent of the loot they would confiscate when they finally busted the Colombians. “They say, ‘We got you out of jail.’ I says, ‘Enh-enh. The Colombians are gonna make me look like cheese.’ ” (He meant Swiss cheese, of course.) “ ‘You do this or I quit.’ ” A prosecutor told Frankie he must like jail because he was going back there. At this point in the story, Frankie drew his head down to his shoulders, and his eyes grew furtive. “That’s when the chase began.”

  Frankie bought a well-forged birth certificate from a Venezuelan he met on the docks in Boston, and in no time at all there were two of him again. The rest was fairly ordinary—a common-law wife, a child he didn’t get to see very often, a lot of different jobs, a lot of crack, and Carmen. As for the most serious outstanding charges on his record, threat to murder and intimidation of a witness, he’d acquired those because a cabbie in Springfield had helped the cops convict his father of cocaine trafficking. Frankie didn’t shoot the cabbie, but he tried.

  “It’s like a movie, Sammy. Or should I call you Frankie?” There were five different dates of birth listed on Frankie’s rap sheet. “So how old are you now?”

  “Frankie’s forty. Sammy’s only thirty-six.”

  “He thinks Samson is real,” thought Tommy. It made a certain kind of sense. A false identity wasn’t much good if you didn’t believe in it. Frankie clearly thought that Samson was his better self, and he wanted Tommy to know that. True, Samson was Puerto Rican, and Frankie said of Puerto Ricans, “They give us Latins a bad name.” But Samson was one of the good ones, better than Frankie, anyway. Frankie had been violent. Samson had never hurt anyone. Frankie had dealt large quantities of drugs. Samson just used them.

  Tricks of the drug-dealing trade were mainly what Tommy wanted to hear about, of course, and Frankie was a wealth of information. They talked for two hours in Tommy’s office that night.

  Frankie savored the conversation for a long time. It may be that only a criminal can truly appreciate an honest cop. The fact that there were crooked ones, who would arrest drug dealers while dealing drugs themselves, the injustice of that, was enough to bring tears to Frankie’s eyes. Later, Frankie would say of Tommy, “Oakie’s, like, a Boy Scout. They only got like one Oakie in the whole New York department who’s honest.” Of course, he didn’t know Tommy back on that night of his arrest. But he had an intuition that this was a cop he could trust. “He seemed, like, a reliable person,” Frankie later explained. And the cop was interested in him, very interested. So Frankie talked freely. What did he have to lose? He withheld a few stories, but he told the detective all the details about how he’d managed to live so long as Samson and a great deal about his days of running cocaine from New York to Springfield. And he imparted some professional secrets. How, for example, he’d prepared large quantities of cocaine for transport in the bakery truck so that even police dogs couldn’t find it—wrapping the drugs inside a plastic bag, putting that inside another filled with powdered detergent, then placing the whole inside a box of cookies. And the more he told, the more the cop wanted to hear. For Frankie, it was like being a teacher, like talking professional to professional. The detective clearly understood the real meaning of the stories. Frankie could tell that he appreciated the way he’d duped both the federal agents and the Colombians. “I played double agent, heh heh.” Later, remembering that conversation, Frankie would say, “Oakie was happy, happy. It was like he caught a special kind offish.”

  Tommy walked Frankie to his cell. As he shut the clanging door, the sound echoing in the tiny lockup, he said, “All right, Frankie. Come and see me when you get out.”

  Frankie returned much sooner than Tommy had expected. Frankie had faced eight separate charges, but for some reason all the serious ones were dropped. Tommy never learned the reason; Frankie didn’t explain and Tommy thought it best not to inquire.

  Frankie had ambled up to the side door of the station and asked to see O’Connor. He soon became Tommy’s favorite rat. Listening to Frankie’s stories really was like going to the movies, and so was skulking around with Frankie in backyards and parking lots, Frankie playing what he liked to call “double oh seven” just like James Bond.

  Drug work by its nature encourages both corruption of the old familiar kind, and also violations of the Bill of Rights. Even conscientious cops sometimes cross the boundaries that the Supreme Court sets. Some lawyers specializing in drug work despised Tommy, but probably in part because his cases usually survived their motions to suppress the evidence. Tommy didn’t find it hard to keep on the right side of current Fifth Amendment rules. “You have a right not to be scammed? I don’t think that’s what the Fifth Amendment says. You have a right not to be stupid? I don’t think that’s what it says. It does say you have a right to remain silent. But who’s gonna remain silent with his friend?” Getting inside drug lairs without breaching the Fourth Amendment was trickier, but rarely impossible. He’d part ways with Frankie in backstage Northampton, in an alley or a parking lot; if they ran into each other on a sidewalk, they wouldn’t even make eye contact. Then Tommy would walk up to the locked entry door of a rooming house and press four different doorbells at once. Invariably, one of the four would buzz him in. Then he’d go to the door of the apartment that Frankie had identified, and he’d knock as if he were a friend—“Dump-dump-dedump-dump. Dunt-dunt.” Then he’d put his finger over the peephole.

  One time Tommy put his ear against an apartment door and heard, just as Frankie had said he would, people smoking crack inside. It makes a distinctive chuffing sound. He couldn’t remember who had taught him that. Probably Frankie. Tommy knocked on the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  Tommy made a series of loud, unintelligible cries.

  “Who the fuck is it?”

  He made the same weird cries more loudly, and eventually the people inside got curious and opened up. He arrested all of them.

  When the stakes were larger, and they were chasing substantial dealers, Frankie would make several controlled buys; Tommy, and the state detectives he worked with on large cases, would get a search warrant, then raid the dealer’s home. Sometimes they staged the arrests in parking lots. Behind the bowling alley was a favorite site. Time and again, Tommy stood beside Frankie at pay phones downtown, listening in as Frankie talked to cocaine dealers. Making gigantic winks to Tommy, Frankie spoke into the phone in his normal tones, low and secretive: “Hey, you wanta come and meet me? My car ain’t workin’. Alley Oops, the bowling alley. Yeah, it’s just across the line.” Frankie made a convincing buyer of drugs, naturally enough. He knew the region’s dealers—not the most exalted, but bigger ones than Tommy had managed to find without him. He was remarkably daring and usually reliable. Tommy paid him small stipends and, what was always more difficult and never fully possible, tried to keep him out of trouble.

  Frankie said his wife, Carmen, had three different personalities. One was kind and spiritual. Another, Frankie told Tommy, was quite lascivious. “She’s into, like, neurotic dancing.”

  “Frankie, you’re a b
eauty.”

  The third personality was the problem, Frankie said. She disliked men, and when the money for crack was gone she’d throw him out and make up lies about him. Frankie swore he never beat up any of the three, and Tommy came to believe that Carmen was at least an equal partner in their battles. These often concluded with Frankie in court.

  One time she accused him of forcing her to have “kinky sex” on a wet mattress for eleven hours. The judge was an elderly man, one of the last, still-standing pillars of the local Yankee aristocracy, and he seemed a bit puzzled by Carmen’s charges. Then he turned to Frankie, who denied everything.

  “No wet mattress? No eleven hours?” asked the judge.

  “I can’t last that long, Your Honor,” said Frankie earnestly. That time the judge dismissed the matter.

  Frankie wouldn’t give up Carmen, in spite of Tommy’s arguments. Frankie would shake his head, describing the three of her. Then he’d say, “I’m not complaining. It’s very exciting.”

  Crack and Carmen. Those two habits made Frankie what was called a high-maintenance rat. There was Frankie’s mother, too—“Moms,” Frankie called her. She often dialed Tommy’s beeper number. She called Tommy “Toms.” Over the phone, she seemed like a very nice and worried mother. One time Tommy sent Frankie into 96 Pleasant Street to buy some crack, and Frankie never came out. It turned out he’d bought some crack, all right, but had run into Carmen inside the building and they’d simply absconded with the drugs. A few nights later Moms called Tommy. She wanted to go on vacation, but Frankie was back on drugs and he had a key to her house. She had just bought a new TV and VCR and didn’t want to lose them. Tommy told her, “Don’t you worry. You go on your vacation. I have a place for Frankie to stay.” There was an old outstanding warrant for Frankie’s arrest, on a minor charge. Tommy hadn’t bothered to execute it. A few days after Frankie’s absconding and Moms’s worried call, Tommy and the state drug cop he often worked with, his old friend Steve, spotted Frankie downtown and invited him into the cruiser. They were driving along chatting pleasantly as if nothing had happened, and then Tommy pulled out a set of handcuffs and held them out toward Frankie in the backseat. “Oh, by the way, Frankie, put these on.” That was to teach Frankie a lesson, which never took entirely. Tommy recited the gist of it as Frankie obediently cuffed himself: “You don’t fuck with us, Frankie.”

  Once—around Thanksgiving—Tommy was playing in the annual Turkey Day touch football game with a group of old high school friends, some who still lived in town, others who were home to visit family. He was rolling around on the muddy field by the Clarke School for the Deaf when his beeper went off. The screen read, “88. 911,” which meant Frankie had to talk to him at once. Frankie wept over the phone. He was supposed to see his son today but he was in the courthouse lockup, about to be arraigned for supposedly kidnapping Carmen. He swore he hadn’t done it.

  Tommy left the game and headed for the courthouse. He felt a little embarrassed, walking up the stairs in a muddy sweat suit, a bandanna wrapped around his head, and, more than that, about to ask a judge to spring someone charged with a truly serious crime. He’d never done this before. It was crossing a line. But he just knew that Frankie hadn’t kidnapped Carmen.

  He walked in through the swinging doors of District Court and saw up on the judge’s bench the familiar, small, black-robed, gray-bearded figure of Mike Ryan. This was a relief. Usually, it wasn’t. Usually, when Tommy walked in to testify in a minor drug case and found Judge Ryan presiding, he could expect not rough, but disappointing treatment. Ryan would reduce the charges, invariably. Sometimes he’d declare Tommy’s search illegal and throw the whole thing out. Tommy found ways to complain. He ran into Ryan on the street now and then. The judge would ask him what he was up to, and Tommy would smile and say, for instance, “Oh, not much, Your Honor. Haven’t violated any constitutional rights yet. It’s early, though.” But Ryan would laugh. Tommy had to give him that. The judge had a good sense of humor. Tommy thought a judge ought to be more careful about the company he kept—a judge shouldn’t be drinking in bars with defense attorneys, let alone a few stools away from ex-cons. But Tommy’s father and Judge Ryan’s had been friends. And Ryan was still Mike, approachable even in his robe, in a whispered conversation at the sidebar. Ryan didn’t ask too many questions. He took Tommy’s word and turned Frankie loose.

  Tommy tried to rehabilitate Frankie. Countless times he tried to talk him into leaving Carmen. He helped to get Frankie enrolled in drug programs. He got him real day jobs in Northampton. And many times, after those efforts had failed again, he sprung Frankie from jail or got the charges against him reduced.

  He helped Frankie, and Frankie helped him. The first time Tommy applied to be a sergeant, he was passed over, had a tantrum that lasted about a week, then went back to work. Shortly afterward, in the summer of 1994, he started the small case that eventually led to the seizure of two and a half tons of Colombian marijuana in New Hampshire. Big stuff for any drug cop, let alone a local one. Frankie had nothing to do with that case but a lot to do with Tommy’s schooling and many smaller cases that were big by local standards. And it was partly because of those that Tommy had received two prizes in 1994: the Major John Regan Award as one of New England’s most effective narcotics officers, and his promotion to sergeant.

  Sometimes while working as the town’s drug detective Tommy had felt cornered by futility, and wondered if he was doing anything besides creating statistics. According to the latest study, drug use in Northampton’s schools was still rising. But then again, the study didn’t say what the rate would be if no one were trying to enforce the drug laws. And once in a while someone he had busted stopped him on the street and thanked him. More often, he was thanked by wives of former addicts. They all seemed sincere. He’d never imagined that he could put a stop to drugs in town. But most of the time he’d been able to work wholeheartedly, just as if he could.

  Anyway, he’d enjoyed the work, and, usually, Frankie. Tommy had left drug work now, and he hadn’t seen Frankie in a while. Sometimes out on patrol on these late fall evenings, Tommy thought about him, and realized he missed him a little. The instructors at drug school had recited the maxim “A rat is a rat is a rat.” Tommy figured that if worse came to worst, Frankie would turn on him, but he liked to imagine otherwise. “I take a liking to Frankie,” he said. “Mind you, I wouldn’t give him my home address.” Frankie had been worth all the trouble. For him professionally, and for Northampton, Tommy thought. Frankie had helped him set up the arrests of dozens of users and small-time pushers and of at least eight substantial dealers with records full of mayhem, who had been sent away to state prison. Frankie was, certifiably, what Tommy called a bad guy. But he’d helped to rid the town of many who were worse.

  “Frankie’s done more for the drug wars in Northampton than anyone,” Tommy said one night, telling old stories at the police station. “On both sides.”

  Laura Baumeister was a Smithie, an Ada Comstock Scholar, one of the students who matriculated as undergraduates in the midst of adult lives. Some were elderly and looked like grandmothers, carrying green bookbags instead of pocketbooks. Laura was in her twenties, slim, with strawberry-blond hair. Her good looks had unfortunately attracted the attention of a local stalker. A respectable-seeming man. She’d thought of him as just a friend. But soon he started calling her, more and more often. One day he called her thirty times. He said some terrible things. She called Smith College security. They called the local cops. As it happened, Tommy O’Connor was supervising patrol that afternoon.

  These days when he went to a house or apartment it wasn’t usually to look for drugs, but to sort out an argument. On an average of four out of every five days, domestic life somewhere in town turned into a “domestic.” Once in a great while Tommy went to the apartment of a battered husband and maybe once every two years to the home of a battered lesbian. Recently, it was the house of a father and son, battered by each other—they sat bleeding
quietly in the living room; they agreed they needed counseling. Usually, of course, the call came from a woman asking for protection from a man.

  Domestics came in many varieties. There was the young woman with a bruised cheek, wet with tears. Tommy examined her face, then stared into her kitchen sink, and his eyes grew wide. “Who stabbed all these condoms?”

  “I did.”

  “How come?”

  “ ’Cause I was mad at him.”

  “So you stabbed all the condoms?”

  “Yeah! I’m not gonna go and cut someone.…”

  “Yeah, good! That’s good. Good for you.”

  If she’d swear out a complaint, he told her, they’d find her boyfriend and lock him up. Tommy looked at the condoms again, and he blushed, smiling. “Hang them on the wall.”

  She began to smile.

  “We’ll call this spermicide.”

  There was the weeping woman with a blackening eye and a baby in her arms. When her boyfriend saw handcuffs, he began to fight. Some boyfriends went on fighting even after having pepper spray squirted in their faces. Then bodies lurched around living rooms. That was the kind of domestic during which Tommy heard the sound of jangling hardware and creaking leather, like the sounds of wind and water to a sailor.

  Some domestics were false alarms—a young couple sitting on a sofa in a book-lined living room, with tears streaming down their faces, the young woman explaining through her sobs, “We called a friend to come over, so we can stop yelling at each other.”