The Last Policeman

4.

Even in the most quiescent policing environments, there is that occasional violent and random incident, where someone is murdered for no good reason in broad daylight on a busy street or in a parking lot.

The entire Concord Police Department was on hand for my mother’s funeral, and they all rose and stood at attention as the coffin was carried in—fourteen staff members and eighty-six officers in their uniform blues, stiff as statues, saluting. Rebecca Forman, the force’s certified public accountant, a sturdy middle-aged lady with salt-and-pepper hair, seventy-four years old, dissolved into sobs and had to be escorted out. The only person who remained seated was Professor Temple Palace, my father; he sat slackly in his pew throughout the short service, dull-eyed, eyes staring straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus, his twelve-year-old son and six-year-old daughter standing wide-eyed on either side of him. He sat there, just sort of slumped against my hip, looking more perplexed than grief-stricken, and you could tell right there—I could tell—he wasn’t going to make it.

I am sure that in retrospect what was hard for my father the English professor was not just the simple fact of her death, but the irony: that his wife, who sat from nine to five Monday through Friday behind bulletproof glass in a police station, should be shot through the heart by a thief in the T.J. Maxx parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

Just to give you a sense of how low the crime rate was in Concord at that time: in the year in question, 1997, according to FBI records, my mother was the only person killed. Which means that, retrospectively, my mother’s odds of falling victim to a murderer in Concord, in that year, came in at one in forty thousand.

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

After the wake, my father looked at the kitchen, his glasses sitting on his nose, his eyes large and confused, and said to his children, “Well, now, what are we going to do for dinner?” and he meant not just tonight but forever. I smiled uneasily at Nico. The clock was ticking. He wasn’t going to make it.

Professor Palace slept on the sofa, unable to go up there and deal with the fact of my mother’s absence from the bed, with going through her closet full of things. I did all that. I packed up her dresses.

The other thing I did was hang around the police station a lot, asked the young detective leading the investigation to please let me know how it was going, and Culverson did: he called me when they had analyzed the footprints lifted from the gravel of the T.J. Maxx parking lot; he called when they located the vehicle identified by witnesses, a silver Toyota Tercel subsequently abandoned in Montpelier. When the suspect was in custody, Detective Culverson stopped by the house, laid out the files for me on the kitchen table and walked me through the case, the chain of evidence. He let me see everything except the photographs of the corpse.

“Thank you, sir,” I said to Culverson, my father leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, pale, tired, mumbling “thank you” also. In my memory Culverson says, “Just doing my job,” but I have my doubts whether he really would have said something so cliché. My memory is cloudy—it was a difficult time.

On June 10 of that same year they found my father’s body in his office at St. Anselm’s, where he had hung himself with the window cord.

I should have told Naomi the whole story, about my parents, the truth of it, but I didn’t, and now she’s dead and I never will.