CHAPTER FORTY
Gus was on that chair for twenty-six minutes.
He was terrible at it. He said um constantly and he answered questions that had not been asked and twice Bell had to bring him back to the question, gently, the way you steer somebody by the shoulder.
But he did not leave anything out.
The eighteenth of September. The phone call.
The training review. He gave the date and the time and what he said and the fact that nobody had told him to say it.
He gave the one in August that I had forgotten about entirely until he said it out loud.
He gave four separate occasions when he had told other members that the lieutenant was in the back or had stepped out, with approximate dates, out of his own memory, none of which were in any document anywhere.
Kepner asked him whether he had been directed by the respondent to make any false statement.
“No, sir.”
“Not on any occasion.”
“No, sir. Not one.”
“Thank you.”
“He didn’t ask me to,” Gus said. “I want that clear. I did it because I knew and I didn’t want to be the one.”
Bell wrote for a moment.
“Thank you, Mr. Kraus. You may step down.”
Gus did not get up.
He sat there with his hands on his knees and his bad tie, and he said, “Chief, can I say one thing that isn’t a question.”
“This isn’t really the format for that.”
“I know it isn’t.”
Bell looked at him for a second, and then at the reporter, and then he took his glasses off and put them on the folder.
“Go ahead.”
And Gus Kraus turned around in that chair, all the way around, so that he was facing out into the rows, and he found me in the third row and he looked right at me and he said it into a microphone in a room with twenty-six people in it.
“Erin. On the eighteenth of September you called the house at nine at night and your kid had a hundred and four and I lied to you. I’ve been trying to say that to you since the thirteenth of November and I couldn’t get down a hallway to do it, and now I’ve gone and said it to a board instead of to you, and that’s the wrong way around. ”
He stopped.
“So. I’m sorry.”
That was it. That was the whole thing.
He did not say he hoped I could understand. He did not say it had been eating him up. He did not put one single thing in there that would have required me to do something with it.
“Mr. Kraus,” Bell said.
“Yes, sir.” He got up. “Sorry.”
He went and sat down in the back row on the far side, by himself, and did not look at anybody for the rest of the morning.
The transcript has all of it.
That woman typed every word of that, including the part where he said so, and it is in a bound volume in a file room downtown with a number on the spine, and that is where it is going to be after all of us are gone.
They called Wes at eleven o’clock.
He was the last one.
He gave it flat and short. The twelfth of November, the afternoon roll call, the medical run at 1826, the lock-out at 2005.
At approximately 2338 the lieutenant came out of the office in his jacket and told him he was wanted at headquarters, ninety minutes at the outside, that Nowak had the company, and to log it as a meeting at headquarters.
“And you made that entry.”
“I made that entry.”
“In your own hand.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you signed it.”
“I signed it.”
“Did you verify it?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a four-digit internal line on the wall of that office,” Wes said. “It takes ten seconds. I didn’t call it because I did not want to be told no.”
Kepner got up and tried two things and got nowhere, because there is nowhere to get to with a man who has already said the worst available sentence about himself before anybody asked him.
“Anything further?” Bell said.
“No further questions.”
“Mr. Nowak, you may step down.”
“Chief, I’ve got something to give the board.”
He picked the manila envelope up off his knee.
“What is it?”
“It’s a copy of the bay camera audio and video from the twelfth. Twenty-three thirty to twenty-three fifty-five.”
The room changed.
Kepner was on his feet before Wes finished the sentence, saying that nothing had been disclosed to him, that this was the first he was hearing of any such item, that he would need time to review it and that this was not the way any of this was done.
He was right about all of that.
Bell asked how the copy was obtained.
“The bay camera runs on a thirty-day loop,” Wes said. “It writes over itself. I pulled that file on the twentieth of November, eight days after, before it would have gone.”
“Why the twentieth?”
“Because it took me eight days to decide to.”
“And you’ve held it since.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did you not provide it to the investigators?”
“Because it isn’t about the fire,” Wes said. “It’s about the log. The log’s this board’s.”
Bell recessed for fifteen minutes. When he came back he said the board would receive the item provisionally and offered Kepner an adjournment to review it.
Kepner declined the adjournment, reserved his objection, and asked that the record remain open for a written response. Bell agreed. Then they played it.
They wheeled in a cart with a monitor on it.
Somebody had to go find a cable.
That is the part nobody puts in the movies.
There were four minutes in the middle of the worst morning of my life where three men in uniform stood around a television cart looking for the right cable, and one of them said something about the conference room on two, and somebody laughed, and then remembered where he was and stopped.
Then it played.
The apparatus bay, from a camera up in the corner by the door, black and white, wide angle, with a timestamp running in the bottom right.
The engine. The concrete. A man’s legs sticking out from under a truck on the far side.
Ordinary.
At 23:38:14 my husband walks into frame from the left, putting on his jacket.
You cannot see faces. The camera is too high and too wide. He is a shape in a jacket and I would know that shape across a stadium.
He crosses to the right, toward the side door, and as he goes he says it, and the audio on those things is not good but it is more than good enough.
“Wes. They want me at headquarters.”
Somewhere off camera: “Now?”
“Now. Ninety minutes tops. You’ve got it.”
“Okay.”
“Put it in the log. Meeting at headquarters.” He is at the door. He has one hand up on the frame. “Call if you need me.”
And then:
“I’ll be quick.”
There is a smile in it.
I need to put this down as exactly as I can, because it is the thing, and because I have had a year to find better words for it and there are none.
It is not a laugh. It is not smug. It is not cruel and if you played it for a stranger they would not hear anything at all.
It is the small lift a man’s voice gets when he is looking forward to something.
That is all it is. Three words, off a cheap microphone in a garage, and my husband’s voice going up about a semitone on the last one because he was pleased.
I have heard that exact sound for fifteen years.
I heard it when he was going out to shovel because it had snowed the right amount. I heard it the night before we took the kids to Door County. He said okay, ready? in that voice at four in the morning with the car packed and Ivy asleep on my shoulder.
He walks out the side door. The door swings shut behind him.
And the recording keeps going.
That is the thing that nobody in that room was prepared for, including, I think, Wes, who had watched it thirty times and had stopped hearing it.
It keeps going. The man under the truck stays under the truck. Somebody walks through with a coffee. Ninety seconds of nothing. Three minutes of nothing.
And at 23:51:07 the tones drop.
You hear them come out of the ceiling speakers in that bay, that flat electronic two-note thing they use, and then a dispatcher’s voice saying a box number and a street, and the whole frame comes apart at once.
Legs come out from under the truck. Men come in from three directions.
The overhead door starts up. Somebody is already shouting a floor number.
Twelve minutes and fifty-three seconds.
Same file. Same camera. Same room. No edit.
I sat in the third row and looked at a television on a cart and thought: it is the same file.
He is on it, and then thirteen minutes later my son’s address is on it, and it is one continuous recording of one Wednesday night in one garage, and there is no place in it where anybody could pretend those were two separate things.
My husband did not watch the monitor.
He sat at that table with his hat squared to the edge in front of him and he looked at the wood the entire time.
When his own voice said I’ll be quick, he closed his eyes.
They stopped it at 23:55 and somebody turned the monitor off, and for a few seconds nobody in that room made any sound at all, and the court reporter’s hands were flat on the table on either side of her machine.
“Mr. Nowak,” Bell said. “One question.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve had this since the twentieth of November. Why did you not bring it forward then?”
Wes looked at the table on the platform.
“Because I wrote the entry,” he said.
Bell did not say anything to that.
He put his glasses back on and said the board would recess.
Everybody stood up.
My husband did not.