The name on the tape was Captain Francis Dolan, and I knew his voice before the second sentence ended. I sat in the front seat of the black sedan in a garage in Gary, Indiana, with the box of tapes on my knees and a tape player I had bought that morning at a pharmacy, and I heard a young Frank Dolan, laughing, say words that made my blood stop. He had been at our house every Christmas for thirty years. He had brought a ham and a bottle of Irish whiskey. He had given the eulogy at the funeral of my husband, with his hand on my shoulder, and said that Jack was the best man he ever knew.
I played the tape three times. On it were four men in a car, at night, on 79th Street. Two of them I did not recognize. One was Frank Dolan. The fourth voice, which spoke only once, was a young man begging, in a Chicago accent, for his life. Then there was the sound of three gunshots, close together, and a laugh, and a voice that said, quite calmly, “Let the two kids from Narcotics take the weight.” I turned off the player. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the cassette on the floor of the car.
I knew what Jack had wanted. He had written it plainly in the letter. Do not call the department. Do not call anybody at the department. I thought about the thirty years I had spent typing the stories of people who had been framed, forgotten, or lied about. I thought about Tyrell Gaines, whose name I had never heard until that morning. I put the cassettes back in the box and the box in the trunk. I paid the landlord another year of rent in cash. Then I drove home, and sat on the edge of my bed, and called my son Patrick.
The truth that is kept safe long enough will always find a hand strong enough to carry it home.
Patrick drove down from Chicago that night, a tall careful man of forty with the jaw of his father, and listened to all three tapes at my kitchen table with his eyes closed. When the last gunshot sounded he opened them. “Mom, do you understand what this is?” he asked. “Two young officers, Walsh and Reyes, were charged with this killing. The case fell apart when the evidence disappeared, and they have carried the name of murderers for thirty years.” I said, “Your father took it the night before the trial.” He said, “To keep it from being destroyed. And then he could not find anyone he trusted.”
Patrick was a lawyer, and he did what a lawyer does. He did not go to the department. He took a copy of everything to the Illinois Attorney General, to a prosecutor named Denise Okafor, a quiet woman who had spent twenty years undoing wrongful convictions. She sent the tapes to a laboratory in Virginia. Within three weeks the report came back: the recording was genuine, the voices matched, and the evidence bags carried the signature of Jack Rourke and the seal of March 1993. The gun still bore a clear thumbprint.
Before anything else happened, I asked to see the mother of Tyrell Gaines. Her name was Loretta, and she was eighty four years old, and she lived in the same brick house on South Calumet where she had raised him. I sat on her porch swing with the box on my knees and told her what my husband had done and what I had heard. She did not interrupt. When I finished she closed her eyes and said, “Thirty one years I have prayed to know who. I did not once think the answer would come from a police wife.”
In December, Dolan telephoned, the way he did each year. “Maureen, I will be there Sunday with the ham,” he said, and his voice was warm and easy. I told him to come at four. Two agents of the FBI sat in my back bedroom, and two more waited in a van at the end of the block. At four oclock he came up my walk with the ham in a foil pan and the whiskey under his arm, and I opened the door. He saw my face and stopped smiling. Behind him, the van doors slid open.
The trial lasted three weeks. Dolan was seventy eight, white haired and frail in a wheelchair, and he never once looked at me. The jury heard the tape in a silent courtroom. Loretta Gaines sat in the front row in a purple hat, and when the voice of her son cried out, she did not move. The verdict came in two hours: guilty on every count. The judge sentenced him to life. The other two men on the tape were dead, but their names were read aloud, and the record was corrected at last.
Walsh and Reyes were cleared in a hearing that took twenty minutes. Walsh was sixty six, selling insurance in Orland Park. Reyes was sixty four, driving a delivery truck. They came to my house on a cold afternoon and stood in my living room, two old men in their best coats, and I gave each of them a copy of the letter that Jack had left. Reyes read it twice. Then he took off his glasses and said, very quietly, “Mrs. Rourke, tell your husband thank you.” I told him that I had been telling him for thirty days.
On Christmas Day there was no ham on my table. There was a turkey, and sweet potatoes, and a pound cake from the bakery on Calumet, and in the chair that used to be taken by Frank Dolan sat Loretta Gaines, in her purple hat, holding a photograph of her son. Patrick said grace. Before we ate, I took the key to garage number nine from my pocket and laid it on the mantel beside the picture of Jack. I thought he would have understood. A man can carry a hard truth for thirty one years, and it can still be set down gently, among people who are ready to hold it.