CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
They came back at twenty past twelve.
I spent the recess in a stairwell on the fourth floor because I could not be in that corridor. Different stairwell from the one in November. Same smell.
Bell read the findings without any preamble at all.
All three charges sustained. Absence from post. Falsification of a department record. Conduct unbecoming.
For Mike, the board’s proposed discipline was termination.
Then he went down the list.
Heavy Equipment Operator Wesley Nowak: sustained on one specification of falsification of a department record. Thirty days without pay, removal from the acting officer list, letter in the file.
Firefighter Augustin Kraus: sustained on one specification of conduct unbecoming.
Five days without pay, letter in the file.
The board noted, on the record, that Mr. Kraus’s statement to the Office of Professional Standards on the fourth of December was made voluntarily and unprompted and that it had been taken into account.
Firefighter Raymond Duarte: no action.
Thirty days.
I sat in the third row and did what I do.
Thirty days without pay for a man on that step is somewhere north of nine thousand dollars.
He is divorced, he has a mortgage on a one-bedroom he bought at the wrong time, and I know that because he told me about it in my kitchen while he was under my sink with a wrench.
Nine thousand dollars, and a letter in his file that will still be in it in twenty years, and off the acting list, which means the promotion he was two years out from is now four or six or never.
For eleven lines of ruled paper he wrote because an officer told him to.
He did not contest it. I found that out later. Kepner offered to grieve it for him and he said no.
Then Bell asked whether the respondent wished to make a statement.
Kepner stood up.
He read for four minutes off a typed page.
Fifteen years of service. Nineteen hundred and twenty-four incident responses.
The Medal of Valor, and the basement on Fenwick Street, and the fact that both occupants of that basement are alive today.
An unblemished disciplinary record. A recommendation that the board consider a lengthy suspension and a demotion in lieu of termination.
It was a good statement. It was well written and every fact in it was true and he read it well.
My husband sat next to him with his hands flat on the table and let another man say it.
He did not stand up. He was never asked to and he did not ask to.
I sat in the third row and watched him let it happen, and I remember thinking, with no charity in it at all: he is going to regret that.
He did. He told me so on a set of steps in March, and by then it was worth nothing, which he also knew.
The order was signed on the twenty-sixth of December.
I found out at nine forty in the morning from a text message.
It’s done. Effective today.
Then, four minutes later:
Insurance runs to the end of the month. I asked. Sorry it took me this long to ask.
I was standing in the shared kitchen at the Fenwick Residence with a pan of eggs and one of the three working burners, and Ivy was at the table doing a word search out of a book somebody had donated, and I read those two messages and put the phone face down on the counter and turned the eggs.
Five days.
The health plan for three people ended on the thirty-first of December and I found that out on the twenty-sixth, standing at a stove that was not mine.
I drove to Station 24 on the twenty-seventh.
I am not going to pretend there was a reason. There was no reason. I did not have anything to return and nobody had asked me to come. I put my coat on at two in the afternoon and told Jess I was going to the pharmacy and I drove across town and parked on the street where wives park.
The bay door was down.
I went in the side door into the lobby, which is eight feet by ten, with a bench and a rack of pamphlets and a water fountain and a window into the watch office.
And the case on the long wall.
The bottom row of that case has eight laminated photographs in it, held on with squares of double-sided tape.
There are seven now.
Second from the left, between a man from two thousand and nine and a woman from last spring, there is a rectangle of wall board.
It is about eight inches by ten and it is a different color from everything around it.
Not much. That is what got me. It is not white and the rest is not brown, it is one shade off, the way the wall behind a picture frame is one shade off, and you would not notice it in a hallway at home. In a lobby with a fluorescent tube in the ceiling and nothing else to look at, you notice it.
Two years of that room’s light went around that photograph and did not get under it.
I stood there in my coat.
It was the second one.
The first one was in a photograph in a blue folder, four inches by six, at chest height on a burnt refrigerator, where a piece of newspaper had been.
Soot shadow, Ostrander called it. Something flat against a surface, and the black goes around it, and then the thing falls off and you are left with the outline.
This one is the same shape and the opposite color and it means exactly the same thing.
Somebody had taken the tape off cleanly. All four corners. There was no torn paper left behind and no adhesive on the wall.
Whoever did it had been careful.
The story ran on the twenty-ninth.
Local news, four hundred words, no names except his.
A veteran Milwaukee fire lieutenant has been terminated following an internal investigation into his absence from duty on the night of an apartment fire on the south side in which no one was killed.
They got the address right. They did not have the report.
Four hundred and eleven comments by New Year’s.
I read all of them. I want to be honest, I read every single one, twice, at eleven o’clock at night in a doorway with a blanket under me.
They sorted into about five piles.
About time. These guys think they’re untouchable.
You people have absolutely no idea what these men do. Not one of you would last a shift.
Wait, they fired him for cheating on his wife?? Since when is that the departments business
That one had ninety reactions and it is wrong in every particular and it was, by a distance, the most common take.
My uncle was in that building. Nobody died. They got everybody out. Why is this a story
And then, forty or so comments down, from a woman with a profile picture of a dog:
sounds like the wife had an axe to grind. that poor man
Eleven reactions.
I looked at that for a long time.
Not because it hurt, although it did, but because it was the first time I understood that there was going to be a version of this in which I am the antagonist, and that the version does not require anybody to be lying, and that it is going to exist in this city for the rest of my life, in some number of houses, at some number of kitchen tables, permanently, without my consent.
I could not get off the platform either.
That is the part that made me laugh out loud in a doorway at midnight. I could not delete the account, because Ivy’s class parent group is on there and that is where they put the field trip forms.
On the second of January somebody knocked on the door of 118 at eight o’clock at night.