CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The commission hearing Mike’s appeal was made up of civilians who did not work for the fire department.
That was the whole point of it and I did not know the body existed until the middle of December. Appointed civilians, sitting on a board that heard certain hiring, discipline, and discharge matters involving the fire and police departments, in public meetings anybody could walk into.
There were nine people in the gallery.
Two of them were reporters and one of them was a man who I am fairly sure comes to every public meeting in this city.
There is no third row in that room. The gallery is four rows of stacking chairs and I sat in the back one on the aisle, which is where I have sat in every room since.
The department’s lawyer went first and took twenty minutes.
Charges, findings, the order, the standard.
He read paragraph 7.4.1 into the record and then the two entries out of the company journal, times and all, and hearing those two lines read out loud in a flat voice in a room with a water pitcher on the table was a different thing than reading them on a photocopy in a parking lot.
Then the chair said, “Mr. Kepner.”
Kepner stood up and picked up a page.
And my husband put his hand flat on the table and slid it away from him, about six inches, across the wood, toward the middle.
Kepner looked down at him.
Mike said something to him that I could not hear. Two words, maybe three.
Kepner stood there for a second with his hand still out, and then he put the page down and sat back in his chair and folded his hands, and I have thought since that whatever it cost that man professionally to sit down in that room, he did it without one flicker of anything on his face.
“Mr. Halloran?” the chair said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re aware you have counsel.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go ahead.”
He stood up.
He did not have anything in his hands. He put them at his sides and then he put them on the back of the chair in front of him, and then he took them off it again, and I watched a man who has spoken at press conferences and stood in front of rooms for fifteen years not know what to do with his own hands.
“The findings are correct,” he said.
The chair waited.
“All three of them. I left my post, the entry in the journal was false, and I told the man who wrote it to write it. I’m not disputing any of that and I’m not going to waste your morning on it.”
He stopped.
“There’s a piece that isn’t in the record and I want to put it in.”
The court reporter, or whatever they call the person at that table in that room, started typing.
“At about eleven thirty on the twelfth of November I turned my phone off.”
Nobody in that room moved.
“Not silent. Off. I want to be specific about it because I’ve had four months to think about the difference and it turns out to be the whole thing.
” He was looking at the table. “You can’t do that by accident.
It asks you first. It puts it up on the screen and you have to drag it across, and then it takes another second or two to go dark, and the whole time it’s lit up in your hand telling you what you’re doing. It takes about four seconds.”
I sat in the back row.
“I did that on purpose, at a specific minute, with my hand.”
“Mr. Halloran,” the chair said. “Why?”
“So nobody could reach me.”
“Your wife?”
“Everybody,” he said. “That’s the part I want on the record. It wasn’t about hiding from one person. I wanted ninety minutes where the phone didn’t go. Not the station, not the district, not the chief, not my wife, not my kids’ school. Everybody.”
He put his hands on the back of the chair again.
“I’ve been in this department fifteen years and the phone is the job.
That’s the whole job. You’re reachable. That’s what they’re paying for.
And that night I decided I’d earned ninety minutes of not being reachable, and I turned it off, and I want it in the transcript that I knew exactly what I was doing when I did it, because I’ve read the file and there’s language in there about the phone being off and it reads like a condition. Like weather.”
“It was not weather,” the chair said.
“No, ma’am.”
He never said her name.
Not once, in eleven minutes, in front of two reporters.
He said ninety minutes and somewhere else and I was not where I said I was, and he did not put that woman’s name into a public record where anybody could have gone and gotten it, and I sat in the back row and noticed it and I have never decided what to do with the fact that I noticed.
“The other thing is Nowak,” he said.
“Heavy Equipment Operator Nowak’s discipline is not before this body.”
“I understand that. I’d like to say it anyway.”
The chair looked at the commissioner on her left, who shrugged one shoulder.
“Go ahead.”
“He wrote what I told him to write. He should have made a call and he didn’t, and he’d tell you that himself, he’s told everybody that himself, he told a board that before anybody asked him to.
” Mike was looking at the wood. “But there are two sentences and the order matters. The first one is I told him to write it. The second one is he wrote it. He’s got thirty days gone and he’s off the acting list and he’s got a letter in his file that’s going to be in there when he’s sixty, and I’ve got the whole first sentence. ”
“And Firefighter Kraus?”
“Five days for telling the truth in December about a phone call he made in September that nobody would ever have found.” He stopped. “I don’t have a legal argument. I just don’t want to be the only person in this room who doesn’t say it.”
The chair let a second go by.
“Mr. Halloran, what are you asking this body to do?”
“Nothing for me.”
“That isn’t how this works,” she said, not unkindly. “You filed an appeal. It’s on our agenda. You’re in front of us because you asked to be.”
“Then I withdraw it.”
Kepner did not move.
“I want to be sure I understand you,” the chair said. “You’re withdrawing your appeal of your termination.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You understand this body will not hear it again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And that a termination for falsification of a department record is going to follow you to every fire department in this state.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know what it does.”
They took eight minutes.
When they came back the chair read it out. The appeal was withdrawn and the termination stood as ordered, effective the twenty-sixth of December.
And then she said the other part, and she said it carefully, and I could hear that somebody had gone and checked something during those eight minutes.
The discipline of Nowak and Kraus was not before the commission.
Neither man had filed an appeal. The commission’s authority in a disciplinary matter runs to appeals brought by the member disciplined, and where no appeal has been brought there is nothing for the commission to reduce, modify, or review.
They had no jurisdiction.
Not no inclination. No jurisdiction. There was no version of that morning in which anything my husband said about Wes Nowak or Gus Kraus could have moved one day of anybody’s suspension, because the men in question had accepted their discipline and not appealed it, and by accepting it they had closed the only door through which anybody could have helped them.
He gave up his job for it.
He stood up in a public meeting and threw away the only proceeding he had left, in front of two reporters, on the record, in a city he is going to live in for the rest of his life, in order to say two sentences about another man’s suspension.
And it was procedurally impossible before he opened his mouth.
I found out in the hallway afterward that he knew.
Kepner told me. He was putting his laptop in his bag by the elevators and I was standing there because my legs were not entirely available yet, and he said, without my asking him anything:
“I told him this morning. In the car. I said the Nowak thing has nowhere to land, it’s not on the agenda, they can’t touch it.”
“And?”
“And he said okay,” Kepner said. “And then he did it anyway.”
He put the bag on his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth, ma’am. In thirty-one years I have had exactly two clients push a statement away from themselves in a hearing room.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“He was right,” Kepner said, and got in the elevator.
I went down the stairs.
He was on the steps out front with his hat in both hands.